Wataya reveals Tooru’s past to Maori in a café, after Maori’s recovery from anterograde amnesia has made it possible to tell her the truth without the same risk that shaped the earlier concealment. The revelation begins not with a confession but with a sketchbook Maori has found hidden behind her bookcase: its drawings identify a person she cannot remember, and her direct question forces Wataya to choose between maintaining the silence and restoring the story of their relationship.

Background and the hidden record

During the months when Maori’s memories reset each night, her life is sustained by written and digital records. She reads notes and journal entries to learn her own circumstances anew, and her binder preserves important information beyond the phone notes she usually makes. Her daily routine, supported by her parents and Wataya, also enables her to graduate from high school and resume art classes. The records are not merely a chronicle: they are the means through which each new day’s Maori can understand what came before.

Tooru’s relationship with Maori had first been recorded in that system. The binder contained a section about her boyfriend, and the journal began entries about him on May 27. A phone folder labeled “My Boyfriend” held photographs and videos of Tooru Kamiya, including a shaky video from a bicycle ride in which he pedals through twilight and looks back at her. These records captured a daily happiness that her next-day self could not retain unaided. Tooru wanted the journal to give future versions of Maori something to anticipate, and his companionship helped her become more optimistic and take up drawing again.

After Tooru died, he asked Wataya to erase him from Maori’s journal. Wataya brought the dilemma to Keiko Nishikawa, Tooru’s sister. Keiko offered to type the records into a computer and repair the passages from which Tooru was removed. She did not claim there was an objectively certain answer: preserving the truth might expose Maori to suffering, while erasing it might spare her pain but burden the people who knew what had been removed. Wataya ultimately acted on Tooru’s request with Keiko’s help. Three days after the funeral, Wataya collected Maori’s binder and journals, transferred revised digital records to her laptop, and replaced her phone so that photographs, videos, and messages referring to Tooru would no longer be accessible. The revelation therefore arrives after a deliberate, practical erasure, not a simple failure to tell Maori.

The sketchbook and Wataya’s choice

A little less than a year later, Maori has recovered from her amnesia, enrolled in prep school, and reached autumn. At a café she sits across from Wataya with a sketchbook full of pictures of Tooru and asks whether Wataya knows who the person is. Wataya realizes that she must have missed this sketchbook while gathering the drawings. The object has escaped the carefully managed archive: unlike the altered journal and new phone, it has survived intact and now gives Maori a question the edited record cannot answer.

Maori explains that she found the book behind her bookcase, a hiding place she had used as a child after her father secretly read the group journal she kept with friends. She had forgotten the hiding place and the sketchbook stored there. Its accidental rediscovery makes the old concealment newly consequential: a place once used to keep private writing from her father has preserved images that her friends and family later tried to remove from her accessible history.

Maori asks Wataya whether she is hiding something. Wataya considers laughing the question off or inventing an explanation, but tears blur her vision before she can do either. She begins to speak of the man in the drawings, then tells Maori plainly that he was her boyfriend. She follows this with the fact that he has died. The disclosure joins two truths that the altered records had separated: the unknown person in Maori’s sketchbook was not a casual acquaintance but someone she loved, and the absence in her present life is permanent.

What Wataya tells her

Wataya recounts the shape of the relationship: Maori and Tooru’s strange first encounter led them into a pretend relationship; they saw each other every day; and the daily Maori became more hopeful through him. He also helped her return to drawing. Wataya explains that Tooru died suddenly from a heart complication and that his final request was to erase every trace of himself from Maori’s journal. Thus the explanation includes not just who the drawn man was, but why Maori’s written account had been altered and why Wataya had withheld the truth after recovery.

The narrative lets the disclosure unfold against Maori’s inability to remember. She is shocked, but she is not angry at Wataya or Keiko. She recognizes that they acted while she was vulnerable and that they had been trying to honor Tooru’s last request. Yet the absence is not emotionally neutral: looking through the drawings, Maori cannot summon the memories of the person who had mattered so much to her. She wonders whether her body and heart may remember him even when her conscious recollection does not. The sketchbook can identify what she once felt without restoring the feeling as a clear autobiographical memory.

Consequences and significance

Wataya gives Maori the original journals and notes, more pictures of Tooru, and a folder of drawings. She apologizes for keeping the truth from Maori during the months after recovery and for depriving her of important memories. Maori stops her from carrying the blame alone, telling her that she has nothing to apologize for and expressing gratitude. The moment does not undo the erasure; it changes the friends’ relation to it. Wataya’s care had meant protecting Maori from a painful truth, while Maori’s response acknowledges both that intention and the cost of deciding on her behalf.

The scene also closes a gap between records and lived memory without pretending they are the same. The restored documents can tell Maori what happened, and the drawings preserve Tooru’s likeness, but neither immediately makes him familiar to her. The book found behind the bookcase becomes a surviving counter-record to the rewritten journal and replaced phone. Its existence makes concealment incomplete, while Maori’s inability to recognize Tooru keeps the revelation from becoming a simple return of the past.

The episode prepares the distinction between seeing evidence of Tooru and remembering him. Later, in the cherry-blossom park where Maori and Tooru had their first date and where the three friends once picnicked, the surviving drawings and the place belong to a wider network of memory cues. By the novel’s closing movement, Maori’s own new drawings portray Tooru as she remembers him, not merely as he appeared in the earlier sketches. Wataya’s disclosure is therefore a hinge: it gives Maori the facts she has been denied, but leaves the work of making those facts her own to memory, place, and art.