Tooru and Maori begin dating

Tooru and Maori begin dating in a relationship that starts as a pretend arrangement but becomes real through repeated acts of companionship. Its significance lies in the mismatch between Maori’s courageous decision to try something new and her inability, because of anterograde amnesia, to retain the days they share. Tooru responds not by demanding that she remember him, but by helping make each day worth recording and anticipating.

Identity and Background

The relationship begins at the end of May, after Tooru, a boy Maori had not known, stops her at school and tells her that he likes her. Maori later tells Izumi Wataya that she decided to go out with him because he had confessed his feelings and she wanted to try dating. Her decision is deliberately modest: she does not claim to know what the relationship will become, only that trying something new appeals to her.

The risk is unusually clear to everyone around her. Maori cannot retain new memories from one day to the next; after meeting a stranger, she may wake the following morning unable to recognize that person. She does not tell Tooru about her condition and says she does not plan to. The choice to date therefore begins with an important asymmetry: Maori elects to enter the relationship without sharing the fact that will most shape its everyday conditions.

Izumi is startled by the decision and questions why Maori would attempt a relationship under those circumstances. Maori’s answer—that Tooru said he liked her, and she wanted to try—sets the emotional terms more clearly than any promise of a conventional future. Dating is a new experience she chooses for herself, even though its memories will not accumulate normally.

From Pretend Couple to Dating

The relationship has an unusual prehistory. Tooru and Maori’s first encounter leads to a pretend couple arrangement, and they begin seeing each other every day. Later, Izumi recounts that their strange meeting turned them into a fake couple; the narrative thus presents the real romance as growing out of a relationship that initially had a different name and purpose.

Izumi’s first impression of Tooru is skeptical. When she speaks to him after learning that Maori is dating him, he seems to have no especially distinguishing feature and little to say about Maori. She expects the relationship to end quickly, reasoning that he does not appear to act like someone in love. The fact that Tooru and Maori remain together far longer than she anticipates overturns that judgment: the depth of their bond is not legible to an outside observer at the outset.

Tooru, for his part, accepts that the relationship may remain pretend. He explains that his life before meeting Maori had been boring and that he is content to keep spending time with her even if he is only her fake boyfriend. He would rather act as though the painful events of that day had not happened than make his feelings an added burden. The sentiment is not a demand for recognition; it is a willingness to stay close without insisting that Maori respond in a particular way.

The Work of Sharing Each Day

Maori’s memory loss makes ordinary shared time fragile. When Tooru hears the length of the list of things she hopes they might do, he understands that she cannot build up experiences day by day in the usual way. He imagines how isolating it would feel to be left behind by time and to have the future taken away. In response, he wants to fill her journal with happy memories that the next day’s Maori can read and use as a reason to face everyday life with more courage.

His intention turns companionship into an ongoing practice rather than a single declaration. Tooru proposes that they work through her list of activities one at a time, beginning with riding two to a bicycle. The point is not merely to create an enjoyable date: the experience can become part of a written record for a future self who will not remember living it. Maori’s journal and the relationship’s repeated activities therefore connect a fleeting present to the next morning.

Tooru describes the limits and generosity of his approach in practical terms. He says he does not do what is impossible; if something can be done with a little extra effort, or is something he wants to do, he is happy to do it. That distinction frames his care as neither limitless rescue nor a demand for repayment. He recognizes what he cannot change about Maori’s condition, while choosing to spend effort where he can make her days better.

The support around Maori also extends beyond the couple. Her mother adjusts her schedule to hers, and Izumi tells Maori that she helps because it is what she can and wants to do. Later, Maori’s journal records that her parents’ and Izumi’s devotion and self-sacrifice helped her graduate from high school and return to art classes. Tooru’s everyday companionship belongs to this wider network of care, but its distinctive contribution is his effort to give the next day’s Maori something to anticipate.

Unequal Knowledge and Mutual Care

Maori keeps her amnesia secret from Tooru, but Tooru learns of it and pretends not to know. This concealed knowledge shapes the relationship: he understands a condition that Maori believes she has hidden, yet chooses not to confront her with that knowledge. His response allows their shared time to continue without making her secret the explicit subject of every encounter.

Izumi later learns that Tooru’s first confession to Maori was made to protect a friend, and that the relationship came with specific conditions. She also comes to understand that, despite this complicated beginning, Tooru truly fell in love with Maori. The movement from a confession made for another purpose, through a pretend arrangement, to genuine love is central to the relationship’s development. Its sincerity does not depend on having begun in an uncomplicated or fully disclosed way.

The relationship is not only a matter of Tooru caring for Maori. Izumi tells him that Maori’s condition and his response to it have changed him. Tooru recalls that his life had felt dull before he met her, and that he had not believed much in himself. His willingness to do what he can is thus also a change in his own life: being with Maori gives him reasons to make an effort and to discover capacities he had not exercised.

Izumi, too, is bound up in the relationship’s emotional consequences. She cares deeply for Maori but feels powerless to help her, and initially understands her own continued involvement as partly selfish curiosity about what is unusual. Tooru challenges that narrow account, suggesting that it does not explain the whole of her care. The exchange places the romance within a friendship and support network whose members each struggle to define what they can offer.

The Relationship’s Afterlife

The dating period lasts into the fall semester: when summer vacation ends, three months have passed since Maori and Tooru began going out. That span matters against the expectations of those around them. Izumi had assumed that a relationship involving Maori’s daily memory reset and a boyfriend she could forget would end quickly; instead, the couple’s life together outlasts her prediction.

The relationship’s later end is shaped by Tooru’s sudden death from a heart complication. Before his death, he entrusts Izumi with a request to erase all trace of him from Maori’s journal. The request turns the means that had helped sustain their relationship—written records of shared days—into a difficult question. Preserving Tooru in Maori’s records might expose her to repeated grief; removing him might help her while also erasing the account of a love she cannot remember unaided.

Izumi ultimately erases Tooru from Maori’s records, but the loss remains visible in the story’s details. Maori notices that messages from a failed transfer of her messaging app had reminded her how much fun she and Izumi had, and now she cannot look at them. Izumi hugs her and promises that they will make new happy memories together. The gesture echoes Tooru’s earlier effort to make tomorrow easier: care continues, but it cannot simply restore the person who is gone.

When Izumi later tells Maori about the boy in the sketchbook, she explains that their first odd encounter made them a fake couple, that they saw one another every day, and that each day’s Maori became stronger and more optimistic because of him. She also tells her that he helped her take up drawing again, and that he died suddenly. The disclosure gives Maori the outline of a relationship whose daily memories have been removed from her records. The romance’s beginning therefore carries its lasting consequence: even when its continuity cannot be secured by memory, the choices and changes produced by shared days remain consequential in the lives of Maori and the people who care for her.