Yuko Matsunaka's intense jealousy

Yuko Matsunaka’s intense jealousy is presented not as a response that can be inferred from a person’s advantages or hardships, but as a private torment whose cause and depth remain largely inaccessible to others. In a conversation with Mizuki, Yuko gives jealousy the language of an inward affliction; after Yuko’s suicide, that account returns as a possible, but never confirmed, clue to what she had been carrying.

The conversation with Mizuki

Yuko asks Mizuki whether she has ever felt jealous, describing situations in which someone loves a person who loves someone else, another person takes something deeply desired, or a seemingly difficult ability comes easily to someone else. Mizuki says she does not think she has felt that way. She is puzzled by the question, particularly because she does not regard herself as exceptionally confident or as someone who gets everything she wants.

Yuko does not explain what has prompted her question. She says she would rather not list personal details, and that she has wanted for some time to know whether Mizuki has experienced jealousy. The restraint matters: Yuko speaks unusually at length, yet keeps the particulars of her own experience undisclosed. The conversation reveals her effort to put the feeling into words without revealing exactly whom or what she envies.

Jealousy as an inward condition

Yuko rejects the idea that jealousy follows a simple division between the fortunate and the unfortunate. She likens it to a tumor that grows secretly and beyond reason, arguing that favorable circumstances do not make a person immune to it. Her comparison separates the emotion from any straightforward accounting of social advantage: a person may appear to have everything and still suffer from jealousy.

She then describes the feeling as a small version of hell carried day after day, and tells Mizuki that she should be thankful not to know it. The image makes jealousy less a passing reaction than an enduring burden. Yet Mizuki’s lack of envy persists even while she notices Yuko’s beauty, clothes, and apparent advantages; she wonders what it would be like to live as Yuko, but does not feel jealous of her. Their different responses prevent outward comparison from serving as a reliable measure of either woman’s inner life.

Yuko’s death and the meaning of her disclosure

Yuko leaves Mizuki’s room after entrusting her with her name tag. She has also made a false explanation for her absence, and then disappears from the dormitory. Her body is found the following week. She has died by suicide, without leaving a note or any clear motive; her roommate had not noticed that she seemed troubled. The lack of an explanation turns the earlier conversation into something Mizuki must reconsider without being able to resolve it.

When Mizuki recounts what happened to Mrs. Sakaki, her counselor asks whether Yuko had been trying to tell her something by visiting, leaving the name tag, and speaking about jealousy. Mizuki agrees that Yuko may have wanted to tell someone before she died, though she says she did not understand the conversation’s significance at the time. Mrs. Sakaki asks whether jealousy might have been the reason for the suicide. The possibility is raised, not established: the story supplies no definitive motive.

Silence, uncertainty, and the name tag

Mizuki had not told anyone at the time that Yuko visited her just before her death. She explains that speaking up might have created confusion and that others would not understand. In the tense atmosphere of a girls’ school dormitory, she feared that saying Yuko had been jealous could make people suspect something was wrong with Mizuki herself. Her silence therefore protects her from a potentially damaging interpretation, but also leaves Yuko’s attempt at disclosure without a wider witness.

The name tag remains with Mizuki, stored in a box at the back of her closet beside her own. It is a concrete remnant of Yuko’s last visit and a quiet counterpoint to the absence of a note or an explained motive. The episode preserves both the possible significance of Yuko’s words and the limits of what anyone can know: jealousy may have been part of her suffering, but neither Mizuki nor her counselor can turn that possibility into certainty.