Old lover's reunion, then a restrained farewell

Yoshiko Fujisawa and her former high-school boyfriend meet again after she calls him and recalls a promise she made before their relationship ended: that she would sleep with him after she got married. He goes to see her, but the encounter stops short of sex. Their restrained intimacy makes the reunion a farewell rather than a renewed relationship, and leaves him confronting how completely the future they once imagined has passed.

The Call and the Promise

The conversation begins with an unusual candor. After the two have said everything they can think of, they fall into a deep silence. He later tells the narrator that he wanted to end the call then, thank her for talking, and leave the exchange as a meaningful but finished moment. Instead, Yoshiko Fujisawa invites him to her home: her husband is away on a business trip, she is alone, and she is bored.

When he cannot immediately answer, she reminds him of the promise she made long ago. At first, he does not understand what she means. Then he remembers that, after they had married other people, she had said she would sleep with him. He had taken those words for a passing thought, spoken in confusion, rather than a binding agreement. For Yoshiko Fujisawa, however, the promise had been serious and lasting.

The promise turns an old memory into an immediate choice. He wants to see her, but recognizes that acting on the invitation could be destructive and incompatible with the person he has become. He also knows that he had never truly put their old relationship behind him: even in later relationships, he had imagined being with her. Against that caution, the invitation has the force of a rare, almost fairy-tale possibility—the beautiful former girlfriend from his youth is asking him to come to her nearby home.

The Visit

He cannot remain suspended between accepting and refusing. He goes to Yoshiko Fujisawa’s apartment, although, as he approaches the door, he hopes she might not be home. She is there. They have drinks, talk, and listen to old records, returning for a time to the familiarity of their earlier relationship.

They hold each other, but do not have sex. He does not undress her; he touches her as he had when they were young. The two appear to arrive at the same decision. They spend a long time in this limited closeness, which, he says, is the only way they can understand what the moment requires of them. The difference between the present and the past is decisive: when they were younger, sex might have brought them closer and perhaps led to a shared happiness. Now that possibility has been sealed off, and cannot be reopened.

He remains at her apartment for about an hour. He believes that staying longer might have overwhelmed him, and leaves knowing that both of them understand this as their final farewell. At the doorway, Yoshiko Fujisawa stands with her arms folded and seems about to say something, but does not. He nevertheless understands what she would have said. Their silence, which began the encounter, closes it as well: what remains between them needs no final declaration.

Aftermath and Meaning

After leaving, he feels empty and disoriented. Sounds seem strange, his surroundings look distorted, and he wonders whether his life has been pointless. He wants to turn back and be with her, but understands that he cannot. That night, he sleeps with a prostitute, the first time he has paid for sex and, he expects, the last. The account presents this as part of the unsettled aftermath, not as a continuation of the reunion.

The episode turns on the gap between a promise preserved and a relationship that can no longer be restored. Yoshiko Fujisawa treated her youthful words as an agreement that remained binding; he had dismissed them as confusion, yet had carried the relationship forward in his imagination. When the promise is finally recalled, fulfilling its literal terms would not recover their earlier future. Their choice to stop short of sex acknowledges that the relationship belongs to the past, even as their restrained touch briefly makes that past present again.

The fairy-tale image he remembers gives the scene a deliberately unresolved frame. He recalls only the strange last line of a childhood story, in which a king and his retainers burst out laughing when everything was over, and wonders what kind of story could end that way. The reunion itself offers no simple romantic resolution: it concludes in silence, separation, and a sense of possibility permanently closed. The old promise brings the former lovers together, but its fulfillment takes the form of recognizing that they cannot return to who they were.