May illness

May sickness is a name for the languor that follows spring’s bustle, first explained by Tooru Kamiya through a story from his sister and later recalled by Maori as she searches for memories of him. The phrase’s return binds the calendar’s familiar transition to a less familiar one: recovery does not restore the past all at once, but proceeds through fragments that can be remembered, written down, and made one’s own.

The phrase and its first telling

Tooru explains that once busy spring ends, people become lazy in May, and his sister called this “May sickness.” He tells the story beneath the cherry blossoms while Maori looks up through the branches. The conversation joins two seasonal images: the petals as “snow that never knew the sky,” and May as the quieter interval after spring’s demands. The phrase is at first a light, memorable story passed from his sister to Tooru and then to his friends.

The explanation also belongs to a moment of change in their school lives. As the third year of high school begins, Maori is no longer in the advanced class, and the head teacher has arranged for her to be in Tooru’s class. Izumi watches the two of them talk happily at school, where previously they could see each other only after class. Against this shift, her question about what the three of them will be doing in May carries an undertone of uncertainty: the season’s apparent lull coincides with a changing pattern of closeness.

Remembering the story

Years later, Maori reads her old journal and recalls that Tooru taught them another meaning for May sickness. She remembers that the entry had called it funny, but at first she cannot retrieve the details. She continues to avoid the photographs and videos of Tooru on her phone, insisting that what matters is already within her. Her effort is not simply to acquire information about him; she wants to recover memories as her own rather than substitute images for them.

With a sketchbook open between them, Maori eventually remembers the point of the story: everyone is busy while the cherry blossoms fall, but things settle down in May. The recollection emerges in the park among the blossoms, as Izumi turns the sketchbook pages and stops at a drawing. The phrase returns not as a detached fact but as a small piece of Tooru’s way of speaking, recovered through Maori’s journal, conversation, and attention to the drawings.

Seasonal lull and the work of grief

The story’s meaning changes through repetition. For Tooru, May sickness is a playful name for post-spring sluggishness; for Maori, remembering it becomes evidence that her past with him is not wholly inaccessible. Her recovery is gradual: three years after she declared that she would remember, she is still revisiting places and activities with the help of her journal and Izumi’s stories. The attempts do not work as simply as the Lady Grey tea did, yet fragments return little by little.

That incompleteness matters because remembering Tooru cannot undo his death. Maori says she loved him and that he is gone, but that their memories remain within her body and heart; remembering lets them continue to live together in a changed form. She cries as she draws, acknowledging both hurt and warmth, and believes she will love again and reach for happiness. May sickness thus becomes a quiet counter-image to the pressure of constant activity: a pause in which feeling and memory can surface, without requiring grief to be either erased or allowed to govern the rest of life.