Tooru Kamiya dies suddenly from heart failure the night after tests at the hospital reveal no obvious abnormality. The abrupt death overturns the ordinary promise of their plans and makes the limits of preparation painfully clear: Maori Hino, whose anterograde amnesia means that sleep erases her recent memories, had been looking forward to seeing him, while Izumi Wataya must carry both the news and the decision Tooru entrusted to her about what Maori should remember.

Causes and Background

Tooru’s death follows a hospital visit that offered grounds for reassurance, not warning. Keiko Nishikawa had gone with her brother for examinations. The hospital staff explained the tests early that morning, and the examinations continued until the afternoon. The formal results were not yet available, but staff said they had found no obvious abnormalities in Tooru’s heart. Keiko had made time to accompany him despite her public commitments after winning the Akutagawa Prize and the positive reception of her latest novel, a sign of how seriously she took his health.

Back home, their father returned from work earlier than usual. Keiko told him the hospital had found nothing, and he was relieved. Tooru relaxed in the bath after skipping one the previous day. When he came into the living room, his father and sister were cooking dinner together. He watched them smiling; Keiko asked why, and he said, “It’s nothing, really. I just thought it was nice.” The scene’s domestic ease makes what follows more stark: the family is together, dinner is being prepared, and the test results have offered no clear indication of imminent danger.

The Death and Its Discovery

After telling Tooru to rest, Keiko returned to cooking. She suddenly heard something fall behind her. She and their father turned and found Tooru on the floor. Keiko called an ambulance and performed CPR, but he did not respond. The ambulance crew also tried to resuscitate him. He never regained consciousness, and twenty or thirty minutes later he was pronounced dead at the hospital. The account identifies the cause as heart failure, but gives no more specific medical explanation for why the examinations had shown no obvious abnormality.

Izumi learned of the death that same night. Wanting to ask about Tooru’s tests, she called his mobile phone and, when he did not answer, gave up. About half an hour later, a call came from his number. Relieved, Izumi spoke as though Tooru had returned her call and asked how the tests had gone. The voice instead belonged to Keiko. She first told Izumi that the tests had revealed no abnormalities, then explained that her brother had died suddenly from complications with his heart. He had collapsed at home roughly two hours earlier. The ordinary interval between Izumi’s first call and the return call becomes the channel through which the news arrives: the number is Tooru’s, but the person answering is his sister.

The revelation leaves Izumi disoriented. It is just after nine at night; she experiences the room as expanding and the ground as swallowing her feet. Keiko says she will tell her more the following day, and they arrange to meet at three in the afternoon. Izumi’s sorrow becomes bodily and overwhelming, while her thought turns to the day before, when Tooru had still been close enough to touch. His recent loss of his own mother makes his familiarity with bereavement newly significant, but it does not prepare Izumi for the fact of his death.

Telling Maori and Recounting the Final Day

The next afternoon Izumi goes to Maori’s home. Maori’s anterograde amnesia shapes the difficulty of telling her: after the accident, she has avoided socializing with friends other than Izumi, partly because keeping up with many messages would be hard and partly because seeing others steadily move toward their futures might hurt each new version of her. Her teachers know about her condition, so Izumi thinks she is unlikely to learn of Tooru’s death from school. But Tooru is recorded in her journal, and sooner or later his absence would become noticeable. Because Izumi was friends with both of them, she feels responsible for telling her.

Maori asks, “Kamiya…Tooru Kamiya is my boyfriend, right?” She has read only the journal’s summary so far, but had been looking forward to seeing him that day. The written record lets her know that he matters even when her own day-to-day recollection cannot supply their shared past. Izumi tells her how much Tooru cared for her, what they were like together, and where they spent time. Each detail makes the account more difficult for Izumi to bear, but she continues, and they decide to visit Keiko together.

At the Kamiya family home, Keiko receives them at the kitchen table where they had often had tea with Tooru. Their father is away taking care of arrangements; Tooru’s body is still at the hospital as the family prepares for the wake and funeral. Keiko recounts the day’s sequence—the reassuring report, the return home, Tooru’s smile, and his sudden collapse—and the three sit in silence as the clock sounds. Her account does not resolve the shock. It gives the loss a concrete domestic setting, showing how little separated a normal evening from the emergency that ended in Tooru’s death.

Aftermath and the Problem of Memory

Tooru’s death brings an earlier decision into the foreground. He had entrusted Izumi with a last request concerning Maori’s records: if he died, he wanted her to erase him from them. Izumi understands the competing consequences. If she leaves Tooru in Maori’s journal, Maori may suffer; Izumi herself may also suffer later, wishing she had acted as he asked. If she erases him, it might spare Maori pain, but leave Izumi with a guilty conscience. Keiko refuses to declare one choice simply right and the other wrong, because the outcome is uncertain. She tells Izumi that Tooru entrusted the decision to her and that she should decide whether she wants to carry it out; Keiko will follow her decision and wants to fulfill her brother’s final wish.

The dilemma is sharpened by the way Maori’s memory works. Her binder preserves essential information, while her diary records experiences and is organized with weekly summaries; she reads these records each morning because the previous day disappears from memory when she sleeps. Her parents and Izumi help maintain the routine, and the school’s arrangements allow her to graduate if she attends for the required number of days. Yet the journal is not merely an archive of facts: it holds the account of a relationship Maori cannot independently recall. Erasing Tooru would alter the story available to her, not undo the relationship itself.

After the change to Maori’s records, Izumi visits her the next day. Maori does not know that Tooru has died, but she is distressed because a messaging-app data transfer seems to have failed. The messages had reminded her how much fun she and Izumi had together, and now she cannot look at them. Izumi hugs her and promises, “It’ll be okay. We’ll do even more fun stuff starting now. Not just in texts; in real life. I…I’ll make sure your tomorrows are fun, okay?” Maori is puzzled by the unusually emphatic response, then accepts it and rests her face on Izumi’s shoulder. The consolation is sincere, but it also shows the cost of the choice: Izumi tries to give Maori good tomorrows while carrying knowledge that Maori cannot share.

Narrative Significance

The event joins the novel’s two central pressures: death cannot be anticipated with certainty, and memory can be preserved, managed, or withheld, but not made simple. Tooru’s hospital tests appear reassuring, his family’s dinner offers a moment of ordinary closeness, and then a fall changes everything. The contrast makes his death not a consequence that the characters can explain away, but a sudden break in the life they expected to continue.

Maori’s condition gives that break a further consequence. Her journal makes it possible to learn about a past she cannot recall, while Tooru’s request asks Izumi to decide whether the written record should preserve him. Thus his death becomes an event not only in the lives of those who remember it, but in the future shape of Maori’s account of herself. The story leaves the ethical weight with Izumi: protecting Maori from pain and honoring the truth of her relationship with Tooru cannot be cleanly separated.