The three-women theory and countdown

The three-women theory and countdown is a pronouncement by Junpei’s father that becomes an organizing rule in Junpei’s emotional life. Its number sounds definite—three, no more and no less—but its meaning is never explained; Junpei’s attempt to live by it turns romantic possibility into a dwindling supply of chances. Only after he recognizes the depth of his feeling for Kirie does he decide that the arithmetic is not what matters.

The Father’s Rule

When Junpei was sixteen, his father declared that among all the women a man meets, only three can have real meaning for him. He presented the claim coolly and with complete certainty, as though stating a fact about the earth’s revolution around the sun. He added that becoming involved with many women was no use if a man chose the wrong one, and urged Junpei to remember this.

The pronouncement was striking partly because the two men were not close. Although father and son, they rarely spoke heart-to-heart, and Junpei’s father seldom offered philosophical views. Junpei listened in silence, then privately wondered whether his mother was one of the three and whether his father had already met the others. He could not bring himself to ask. The theory thus entered Junpei’s life as a categorical rule whose basis and application remained obscure.

A Countdown Takes Hold

After leaving home at eighteen to attend college in Tokyo, Junpei became involved with several women. He believed one had real meaning for him, but before he could express his feelings, she married his best friend and later became a mother. He therefore set her aside as a possibility, reducing the number of women who might still matter to him to two, if he accepted his father’s theory at face value.

From then on, meeting a woman prompted Junpei to ask whether she was one of the meaningful three. The question created a double bind: he hoped to meet someone important, yet feared using up his remaining chances too soon. His failure to express love at the right time weakened his confidence in that ability, and he repeatedly imagined that he could seize what was pointless while letting the important things slip away. The countdown converted a past missed opportunity into a forecast of future loss.

Relationships as Safe Bets

The theory’s effect was not simply that Junpei counted potential partners. After spending several months with a woman, he might notice a small trait or behavior that displeased him; rather than confront the possibility of intimacy, he felt a private relief. Relationships became pale and indecisive. He stayed with a woman while assessing the situation, then allowed the connection to dissolve without argument or raised voices. He developed, the narration observes, a kind of instinct for convenient partners.

Junpei could not tell whether this habit came from his own character or from his circumstances. If it had been formed by his environment, he suspected it might be the fruit of his father’s curse. Around the time he graduated from college, he had a violent argument with his father and cut off contact, but the theory survived the rupture: its unexplained premise clung to him as an obsession. At one point he half-jokingly considered whether attraction to men might free him from the countdown, then recognized that women remained the only objects of his sexual interest. The joke does not release him; it reveals how thoroughly the inherited rule has narrowed his sense of possibility.

Kirie and the End of the Arithmetic

After Kirie stopped contacting him, Junpei waited months, hoping to see her and speak about many things, including the kidney-shaped stone. His calls did not connect, and by summer he gave up hope that she intended to meet him again. Their relationship ended quietly, in the same manner as his earlier relationships. But this apparent repetition left him with a question he could not settle: should Kirie count among the three women who had real meaning for him?

Junpei gave himself another six months to decide. During that time he wrote a large number of short stories and often thought of Kirie alone in a high place with the wind, recalling her words, “Just me and the wind.” He came to understand that his feeling for her had a depth and weight unlike anything he had felt for another woman, even though he still did not know what to call it and might never see her again. At the end of the year, he counted her as number two. The decision leaves one place in the count, but no longer makes Junpei afraid: numbers, he realizes, are not the important thing. What matters is deciding in one’s heart to accept another person completely, and doing so as both a first and a last time.

Meaning and Narrative Function

The theory begins as the father’s unexplained certainty and becomes Junpei’s private system for interpreting love. Its fixed limit encourages him to treat relationships as scarce chances, while his fear of choosing wrongly helps produce the indecisive relationships that keep genuine commitment at a distance. In that sense, the countdown does not merely describe Junpei’s romantic life; it shapes the evasions through which he lives it.

The ending does not prove whether the father’s claim is objectively true. Instead, Junpei’s change lies in recognizing that the count cannot decide what another person means to him. His choice to accept Kirie as the second important woman does not erase the earlier loss or restore the relationship. It changes the rule’s force: what had been a calculation of remaining chances becomes an occasion to choose wholehearted acceptance, without letting the numbers dictate its value.