The monkey steals Mizuki and Yuko’s name tags

The monkey steals Mizuki and Yuko’s name tags, taking the small objects that connect both women to their names and, for Mizuki, providing an uncanny explanation for a year of increasingly frequent memory failures. The theft is not ordinary pilfering: the Shinagawa monkey describes it as an uncontrollable sickness, and confesses that his desire for Yuko’s name arose from an unrequited love he could not satisfy in any other way. His taking of Mizuki’s tag, which he says also moved his heart, extends the damage to a woman he had never intended to harm.

The Names and the Theft

Mizuki has been unable to recall her own name for roughly a year. The lapse first occurred only about once a month but eventually came at least weekly; when someone suddenly asks her who she is, she can be left with a blank mind. She retains other people’s names and her own address, telephone number, birthday, and passport number. The problem is sharply bounded: it is her own name, not her memory as a whole, that vanishes.

The names at stake are complicated by the difference between marriage and everyday use. Mizuki’s married name is Mizuki Ando, which she acquired when she married Takashi Ando three years earlier. At work, however, she continued to use her maiden name, Mizuki Ozawa: changing the company’s records would mean doing the paperwork herself, so she kept the name on her business cards, name tag, and time card. Her husband knew and accepted this as a matter of convenience. The theft therefore reaches into a life in which two names already occupy different practical settings, even though Mizuki’s episodes concern her own identity rather than confusion between those names.

Mrs. Sakaki explains that the stolen tags are why Mizuki has trouble remembering her name and says that retrieving them will let her recover it. She leads Mizuki to a small, unfurnished room, where a large, gray-flecked monkey sits tied to a chair. The discovery turns the abstract puzzle of Mizuki’s blank spells into a material crime: the name tags from her apartment closet have been taken and are now bound up with the captive monkey’s explanation.

The Monkey’s Compulsion and Its Object

Asked why he steals names, the monkey says that this is what he does: when a name attracts him, especially a person’s name, he cannot stop himself from wanting it. He sneaks into people’s homes to take such names, knows the act is wrong, and nonetheless describes his impulse as beyond his control. His explanation does not make the theft harmless; it makes the boundary crossed by the theft stranger, because the monkey treats a name as something he can possess.

Yuko Matsunaka’s tag was his original object of desire. The monkey admits that he had fallen deeply in love with Yuko but could not make her his. Being a monkey, he says, made that desire impossible to bear, and possessing her name seemed like a substitute: if he could have the name, he would be satisfied. Before he could carry out his plan, Yuko died. He denies causing her suicide and says that she was overwhelmed by an inner darkness that nobody could have prevented. The denial separates his attempted theft from her death, even as his confession makes clear that Yuko’s name had become the focus of his longing.

The monkey’s later theft of Mizuki’s tag came after he guessed that Yuko might have left her own tag with her friend. He tracked Mizuki down, learned that she had married, taken the name Ando, and moved to a condominium in Shinagawa, then sneaked into her apartment. Asked why he took Mizuki’s tag too, rather than only Yuko’s, he apologizes and says that her name moved his heart as well. He acknowledges the suffering he caused, but attributes the additional theft to the same urge he claims not to control.

Discovery and Consequences

The theft began around the time Mizuki’s name started to disappear from her memory, a timing she confirms when asked. Mrs. Sakaki’s account links the two events directly: the monkey entered the apartment and stole both tags, and their recovery is presented as the means by which Mizuki can recover her name. The explanation changes the apparent nature of her problem. What had seemed like a private, unsettling lapse is connected to an external object removed from her home.

The theft also creates a chain of consequences beyond Mizuki’s forgetfulness. The monkey’s pursuit of Yuko’s name survived the chance to possess it before her death; his attempt to recover it led him to Mizuki, whose own tag became a second target. Mizuki’s repeated loss of her name thus becomes the unintended cost of a desire directed first toward someone else. The name tag is both an everyday possession and the physical link around which these different attachments and harms converge.

The monkey was found hiding in the sewers of Shinagawa. Mrs. Sakaki says she asked her husband to have young colleagues catch him because her husband headed Public Works, whose staff were responsible for the sewers; Mr. Sakaki credits the young Sakurada with doing most of the work. Their account explains how the theft ends in capture and interrogation, rather than leaving the monkey’s confession as an unexplained appearance.

Names, Identity, and the Story’s Reversal

Before the theft is uncovered, Mizuki’s fear is that losing the ability to say her name might leave her a nobody. She can still identify herself through her purse and license, and she knows that forgetting her name does not erase her existence, but the episodes remain distressing. The monkey’s explanation gives that fear an extraordinary external counterpart: her name has not merely become inaccessible in her mind; the tag bearing it has been stolen from her home.

The revelation also complicates the meanings of names already established in Mizuki’s life. She became accustomed to Mizuki Ando only gradually after marriage, while at work she retained Mizuki Ozawa for the practical reason that changing the records was too much trouble. The monkey, by contrast, treats names not as administrative details or ordinary forms of address but as objects of desire that can be taken and kept. His theft makes the name tag’s mundane function carry an unnerving weight, binding recognition of the self to an object that another person—or, here, a monkey—can remove.

The episode’s reversal is both explanatory and incomplete: it identifies the monkey as the thief and connects the stolen tags to Mizuki’s memory trouble, but the monkey’s own account offers compulsion and longing rather than a rational justification. Yuko’s name was coveted because the monkey could not have Yuko; Mizuki’s was taken because it appealed to him, with consequences he admits and regrets. In that asymmetry lies the story’s unsettling force: a private act of attempted possession turns another woman’s name into the price of someone else’s desire.