Maori attends Tooru’s wake and funeral

Maori attends Tooru Kamiya’s wake and funeral while living with daily memory loss, and the visit becomes the moment when her relationship to his death is physically present even as others try to erase its traces from her records. At the open casket, she shakes as she looks at his face; her attendance binds private grief to the choices her friends and family are making about what she should remember.

Background and Preparation

After her accident, Maori cannot retain the events of the previous day. Each morning she reads notes and journal entries to understand her situation, and her mother has adjusted her schedule to support that routine. Izumi Wataya also remains closely involved: Maori recognizes that Izumi’s help with her memory loss is an act of care freely given, not a burden imposed on her.

The written record has become a practical lifeline. Maori’s binder preserves important information, while her journal tracks the daily experiences she cannot carry forward unaided. It tells her that she has a boyfriend and directs her to entries beginning on May 27. When she reviews the boyfriend section and opens a folder on her phone, she finds photographs and videos of Tooru. One recording, made as they ride together at twilight, preserves her own flirtatious voice and their shared enjoyment. These ordinary traces establish what the later attempt to remove him from her records will cost.

From Daily Support to Bereavement

Before Tooru’s death, he tries to make the days ahead feel less forbidding for Maori. He proposes working through a long list of shared activities, including a library date and studying together, so that the next day’s Maori might find happiness waiting in the journal. The idea responds directly to her condition: experiences disappear from her conscious memory each night, but written accounts can offer tomorrow a reason to face the day.

After Tooru dies, Izumi and Keiko Nishikawa discuss whether to remove him from Maori’s journal and binder. Izumi worries that leaving the entries could make Maori suffer repeatedly, while deleting them could make Tooru vanish from her life and burden the people who carry out his request with guilt. Keiko offers to retype the records and repair the passages around any removals, but she does not decide for Izumi. The unresolved ethical choice forms the immediate context for the funeral: Maori is brought into the ritual of mourning even as her companions plan to conceal the loss from her daily account of herself.

The Wake and Funeral

At the wake, Izumi gives Keiko envelopes containing copies of Maori’s records. She also meets Tooru’s father for the first time. He appears more composed than Izumi had expected from Tooru’s descriptions, holding back his sorrow to fulfill the role of a resolute father. When he sees Maori, he bows deeply, apparently recognizing her from their earlier meeting at the summer fireworks show. He tells her that Tooru would be happy she came; Izumi notices tears falling to his feet.

When the time comes to offer incense, Maori stands before the open casket and shakes as she stares at Tooru’s face. The scene supplies no explanation of what she understands or remembers in that moment. Its force lies instead in the contrast between her visible bodily distress and the effort underway around her to keep her from learning that her boyfriend has died.

Tooru’s funeral takes place within several days. By then, Izumi has finished checking the altered diary with Keiko, while Tooru’s parents and sister have discussed how to proceed. Maori’s parents had known about Tooru before his death and are grateful for what he did for their daughter, as well as saddened by his absence. The funeral is therefore not only a farewell to Tooru: it is also part of a family and friendship network’s attempt to manage the consequences of a loss Maori cannot retain as an ordinary memory.

Aftermath and Significance

The day after the wake, Maori appears deeply depressed after reading an account of Tooru’s death in her binder and diary. Izumi had chosen not to stop her from recording what happened, wanting to see how she would react without interference. Keiko then works through the records, substituting Izumi for Tooru rather than merely deleting his name. The change extends beyond paper: Tooru remains in Maori’s old phone in photographs, videos, and messages, so the group arranges a replacement phone and a false explanation for the missing data.

On the third morning after the funeral, Izumi transfers Keiko’s digital versions of the journal and notes onto Maori’s computer and gathers the physical binder and journal volumes. Keiko has also created entries for the days since Tooru’s death and falsified the files’ timestamps. The plan is to make the altered digital record Maori’s guide to her daily life from then on. Yet an earlier note, hidden on the back of one of Maori’s reminders, declares that even if she recovers she must remember Tooru, and that important things will always be in an important place. The funeral’s significance thus reaches beyond the ceremony: it sits at the center of a conflict between protection through forgetting and the persistence of attachment in records, objects, and bodily response.