Tooru Kamiya’s Last Request

Tooru Kamiya’s Last Request asks Izumi Wataya to erase him from Maori Hino’s records if he dies. Because Maori’s amnesia makes her depend on those records to learn her own recent past, the request is not simply to remove a name: it would reshape the life she can access and the story she can tell herself. Its eventual fulfillment—through altered journals, a replaced phone, and drawings removed from sketchbooks—turns an intimate plea into a contested act of care, concealment, and archival control.

The Request and Its Rationale

Tooru asks Izumi to remove him from Maori’s journal in the event of his death. He explains that he had scarcely interacted with Maori before her memory loss; if his presence is absent from her records, their relationship might be made to seem never to have happened. The request rests on the particular way Maori lives with amnesia: each morning she reads what she has written to learn about her circumstances and the preceding days. A boyfriend who has died would therefore not remain a single loss in the past. The records could repeatedly tell her that she has a boyfriend and that he is dead, even though she cannot retain the relationship as lived memory.

Tooru considers presenting the absence as a breakup, but fears that Maori might search for him. He believes learning of his death could harm her mental health, and therefore asks that the records make it seem they never dated. The request is pointedly self-erasing: he accepts that fulfilling it would remove him from Maori’s account of her life, because he judges the alternative potentially worse for her. The request is conditional on his death, but it anticipates the practical work in unusually specific terms. Maori keeps a paper journal and a separate binder of important information; Izumi would have to transfer both into a laptop, preserving their contents while removing references to him.

A Decision Shared, but Not Settled

After Tooru dies, Izumi tells Tooru’s sister about his request and the risk that Maori might develop depression. Tooru’s sister offers to type the journal and binder into a computer and says she can repair the passages where he is removed. Her practical ability makes the proposed erasure possible, but it does not resolve whether it should be done. Izumi remains uncertain: acting would make Tooru vanish from Maori’s accessible past, while refusing might expose Maori to recurring distress and leave Izumi wishing she had honored his instructions.

Tooru’s sister refuses to declare the choice simply right or wrong. Either course may cause suffering: Maori might suffer if Tooru remains in the records; Izumi might suffer if he is removed and her conscience troubles her. The outcome cannot be known in advance. She tells Izumi that Tooru entrusted the decision to her and that the basis should be whether she wants to carry it out; she will follow Izumi’s choice and is willing to help fulfill Tooru’s last wish. The request thus distributes responsibility rather than eliminating it. Tooru initiates the plan, his sister supplies the means, and Izumi must decide whether to make the archive conform to his wishes.

Rewriting the Archive

Several days after Tooru’s funeral, Izumi carries out the erasure with help from Tooru’s sister and Maori’s parents. The old phone contains Tooru in photographs, videos, messages, and even text exchanges between Maori and Izumi. The group buys a replacement phone and plans to tell Maori that the old one broke; the failed transfer of messaging data will account for the missing conversations. They also intend to give the same explanation in the digital version of her journal and notes.

On the morning of the third day after the funeral, Izumi enters Maori’s room while Maori is sleeping in her parents’ room because she is still weak. Izumi gathers the binder and the many volumes of the paper journal, then transfers the digital journal and notes prepared by Tooru’s sister to Maori’s laptop. The sister has also written entries covering the days since Tooru’s death and falsified the files’ timestamps. From then on, Maori is to use the digital records to learn about her life and to add new entries, making the edited archive the working account of her daily experience.

Izumi completes the removal across several kinds of media rather than treating the journal as the only record. She registers Maori on a new messaging app and deliberately disrupts the data transfer, so the old messages referring to Tooru cannot be viewed. She takes the old phone away, intending to keep it. She also removes the pages bearing drawings of Tooru from Maori’s sketchbooks, puts them in a large folder, and cuts away the remaining torn edges. To make the change to the wall notes less conspicuous, she replaces all of them with typed and printed sheets, not just the one that needed revision. The instruction to read the notes and journal now points to the laptop rather than the desk.

Protection, Concealment, and the Cost of Care

The altered archive is designed to prevent Maori from encountering Tooru as a dead boyfriend in the course of her daily rereading. It does not merely omit a fact from a single account: it coordinates the journal, binder, laptop, phone, messaging history, wall notes, and sketchbooks so that several routes back to him are closed. The replacement explanations turn that absence into an ordinary technical or household mishap—a broken phone and a failed data transfer—rather than disclosing the deliberate intervention.

The action takes place within a wider network of care. During Maori’s amnesia, her parents and Izumi devote themselves to helping her finish high school and attend art classes; Izumi has also promised to make her tomorrows enjoyable. Tooru’s own relationship with Maori had been organized around leaving her happy memories to read the next day, so his request reverses the purpose of those records: what once helped her look forward to ordinary life could now repeatedly confront her with an unremembered bereavement. Yet the solution also substitutes other people’s judgment for Maori’s ability to know and decide what her past means. Its protective intention and its concealment are inseparable.

The removal is not perfectly equivalent to destroying every trace. Izumi keeps Maori’s old phone, and the drawings of Tooru are gathered into a folder rather than described as discarded. These acts leave the erased material in other people’s custody, even as Maori loses access to it in her everyday records. The distinction between deletion and preservation matters: the archive is made unavailable to Maori, not rendered nonexistent. The request’s fulfillment therefore creates an asymmetry between the story she is given and the objects her friends and family continue to hold.

Consequence and Narrative Significance

The morning after the changes, Maori notices that the messaging-app transfer failed. She remembers that the messages had reminded her how much fun she and Izumi had, and feels disappointed that she can no longer look at them. She does not know that the missing exchanges contained traces of Tooru. Izumi embraces her and promises that they will make more good memories together, not only in text but in real life. Maori is puzzled by the unusual response, then rests her face on Izumi’s shoulder. The immediate consequence is both tender and uneasy: Izumi offers new companionship while withholding the reason the old messages disappeared.

The request gathers the story’s recurring dependence on written records into a consequential ethical choice. Maori’s binder, journals, notes, and phone help her bridge the daily gap left by amnesia; Tooru’s request asks that these same tools be edited to protect her from a truth that would recur without the memory of how it arose. The operation succeeds as concealment in her immediate environment, but it cannot settle the moral question raised by the sister: whether sparing Maori this repeated knowledge is worth the suffering and responsibility imposed on those who perform the erasure. Tooru’s last request is therefore both an act of care and an attempt to determine which parts of a shared life will remain available to the person who lived it.