Chiyo learns of her parents’ deaths

Chiyo learns of her parents’ deaths when a package from Mr. Tanaka arrives at the Nitta okiya carrying the family’s mortuary tablets and a letter that also reports Satsu’s latest disappearance. The revelation ends Chiyo’s lingering hope that her family might be restored, but it also precipitates a turn: as a moth she had preserved crumbles into ash, she recognizes that the past cannot be recovered and begins to face the future.

The Package and Its Promise

The package arrives at Gion Tominaga-cho, addressed to Chiyo beneath a patch of stamps. Seeing Mr. Tanaka’s name, she imagines that he may have recognized his mistake in sending her to the okiya and might somehow be sending something that could free her. She knows she cannot picture what such a rescue would look like, yet the package makes her feel that her life will change when it is opened. Her expectation gives the delivery its first, painful irony: the change it brings is not a way out of her present circumstances, but knowledge of losses she can no longer undo.

Auntie comes downstairs and sends Chiyo away from the box despite Chiyo’s name on it. She cuts the twine, unwraps coarse paper and stitched canvas sacking, and frees an envelope sewn onto the wrapping. Beneath it is a dark wooden box. Inside, among folds of white linen, lie the small mortuary tablets that once stood before the altar in Chiyo’s childhood home. Two tablets are newer than the others and bear Buddhist names Chiyo does not recognize. The tablets are tangible evidence of a family history continuing without her, but at first they offer no explanation; she is afraid even to ask why Mr. Tanaka sent them.

The Letter’s Revelations

Auntie leaves the box open on the floor and reads the letter in the reception room. Chiyo kneels at the table with trembling hands, trying to keep her fears from rising. Before the letter is read, she invents hopeful explanations: perhaps her family will move to Kyoto and set the tablets on a new altar, or perhaps Satsu has arranged for them to be sent because she is coming back. The letter makes both hopes impossible. Its formal, measured language contrasts with the suddenness of the news Chiyo must absorb.

Mr. Tanaka writes that Chiyo’s mother died six weeks after Chiyo left Yoroido, and that her father died only a few weeks later. Their remains are enshrined in the village cemetery; services were held at Hoko-ji Temple in Senzuru, and women in Yoroido chanted sutras for them. The new tablets in the box belong to this mourning and remembrance. The letter’s account of the funeral rites establishes that the deaths have been acknowledged by the community, while Chiyo, far away in Kyoto, receives the news only after both parents are gone.

The letter also says that Satsu passed through Yoroido late in the preceding fall and immediately ran away again with the son of Mr. Sugi. Mr. Sugi hopes to see his son again and asks to be notified if Chiyo hears from her sister. This detail does not simply confirm that Satsu is absent: it places her in motion, but beyond Chiyo’s reach, and leaves no promise of a reunion. The two losses arrive together—the deaths of Chiyo’s parents and the renewed separation from the sister who might have remained her last family connection.

Grief and the Tablets

Chiyo’s response is not a gradual realization but a collapse under several facts disclosed at once. She says her mind feels like a broken vase that will not stand and that she is lost even within the room around her. Her grief is sharpened by the hope she had sustained for months that her mother might still be alive. With so few sources of hope, she had clung to that possibility; now the letter removes it along with the possibility of her father’s return and any immediate recovery of Satsu.

Auntie stays with her and repeatedly urges her to bear up, acknowledging that nothing more can be done. When Chiyo can speak, she asks Auntie to put the tablets somewhere she will not see them and to pray on her behalf, because doing so herself would cause too much pain. Auntie refuses, telling her she should be ashamed to turn away from her ancestors. Instead, she helps Chiyo set the tablets on a shelf near the base of the stairwell, where Chiyo must pray before them every morning. Their placement makes remembrance part of the household’s daily routine, even when Chiyo would rather avoid the pain it brings. Auntie tells her not to forget them: they are all that remain of her childhood.

From the Past Toward the Future

The news becomes a turning point in Chiyo’s understanding of change, later expressed through an incident with a moth she had hidden beneath the house. After being separated from Satsu, she had wrapped the fallen insect in a rag and buried it under the foundation. On finding it again, she is struck by how unchanged and beautiful it appears beside her own life, which has altered in almost every way. The contrast briefly makes the moth seem like a piece of stone, fixed while Chiyo is as unstable as a stream.

When Chiyo touches the moth, it turns instantly to ash. The fragile remains make visible what the letter has already made unavoidable: apparent preservation is not permanence, and no object can return the past intact. Chiyo understands that her parents are dead and that Satsu is gone, but also distinguishes her own survival from those losses. For a year, she feels, she had been dead in a way too; now she turns from facing backward toward the past and asks what the future will be. The movement does not answer that question, but it changes the direction in which she can look.

Narrative Significance

The episode is structured around a reversal of expectation. A parcel first appears to offer rescue; its contents instead make death materially present. The mortuary tablets, at first an unexplained and almost hopeful object, become both the proof of Chiyo’s bereavement and the daily focus of a remembrance she initially cannot bear. The letter’s restrained report of dates, rites, and family news meets Chiyo’s vivid physical and emotional disorientation, making the distance between official confirmation and lived grief part of the scene’s force.

The moth extends that reversal beyond the package. Chiyo’s attempt to preserve a tiny creature beneath the house cannot preserve it from time, just as the tablets can commemorate her family without restoring it. Yet the scene does not end in loss alone: the moth’s ash clears Chiyo’s attention from the past, and she recognizes that, unlike her parents and sister, she is not gone. The event therefore marks both the confirmation of her orphanhood and the first explicit turn toward a future whose shape remains unknown.