The poor aunt leaving the narrator is the quiet, unresolved culmination of his strange attachment to a figure who has clung to his back. It happens not in a dramatic confrontation but on the way home from a suburban train journey: after witnessing a mother send her daughter away, the narrator steps off the train and realizes the aunt is gone. The disappearance releases him from her physical presence without restoring certainty about who he is.

The journey into late autumn

The episode begins in late autumn, when the narrator remembers work he must finish before winter and boards a suburban train with the poor aunt. The afternoon train is nearly empty. For someone who has not been out of the city for some time, the passing landscape offers a temporary change of scale: crisp, clear air, unusually green hills, and trees bearing bright red berries along the tracks. This unremarkable outing supplies the setting for the event’s decisive encounter, linking the aunt’s eventual departure to an ordinary trip rather than to any deliberate attempt to cast her off.

On the return journey, a tired-looking mother sits opposite the narrator with her two children. Her daughter, in a kindergarten uniform, wears a new gray felt hat trimmed with a red ribbon; her younger brother takes it and begins pulling at the ribbon while their mother reads. The girl protests that he will ruin the hat. The mother’s response is to let him play with it, and the narrator finds himself angered by her indifference. The hat becomes the small, concrete object around which the children’s conflict—and the narrator’s helpless sympathy—gathers.

The girl is sent away

The girl eventually stands and slaps her brother, then retrieves the hat and returns to her seat. Her quick action briefly settles the immediate dispute, but the mother turns her anger on her daughter: after slapping her bare knee, she comforts the boy and tells the girl that she no longer belongs to the family. She points to the empty seat beside the narrator and orders her daughter to move there, repeating that the girl is no longer part of the family. The train’s ordinary seating arrangement is transformed into a scene of rejection: the child is made to cross the aisle and sit beside a stranger while still clutching the hat she had tried to protect.

The narrator does not intervene. He closes his book and studies his hands, which look grimy in the dim yellow light. He wants to reassure the girl that she was right to take back her hat, but believes that touching or speaking to her would only confuse and frighten her further. His imagined comfort meets a conviction of incapacity: these hands, he thinks, will never make anyone happy or save anyone. The episode thus places the aunt’s eventual disappearance beside an encounter with abandonment, while leaving the narrator on the boundary between wanting to help and remaining silent.

The aunt’s disappearance

By the time the narrator leaves the train, a cold winter wind is blowing. His attention turns briefly to the approaching season and whether he ought to buy himself a new coat. Only after descending the stairs and passing through the gate does he notice that the poor aunt has vanished from his back. He cannot tell when she left. As in her arrival, her departure occurs without anyone noticing; she has returned to wherever she originally existed.

This absence is not presented as a clear restoration. The narrator says he is his original self again, then immediately doubts what that means: the self he has become may be another self, one that merely resembles the original. The poor aunt’s departure ends the visible attachment but does not neatly undo its effect. Instead, the narrator is left alone and directionless, like a blank signpost in a desert, uncertain whether the person who remains is the one who existed before.

A call after the loss

The narrator responds to this disorientation by emptying every coin in his pocket into a pay phone. He lets it ring eight times, then nine, before a woman answers, apparently having been asleep. The call does not explain the aunt’s departure, and the excerpt leaves the conversation open; its immediate importance is that the narrator reaches toward another person just after recognizing his isolation. The transition from the silent disappearance to the effort to make contact gives the ending its shape: the aunt is gone, but the narrator’s need for connection remains, sharpened rather than settled by the loss.