Kizuki’s death is the loss that first unsettles Toru Watanabe’s belief that life and death occupy separate worlds. Its significance unfolds through recurring memories: a perfectly made pool shot, the cue Watanabe does not pick up for nearly two and a half years, and the later recognition that remembering the dead cannot prevent life from changing. The death becomes the starting point for Watanabe’s philosophy of mortality, but not a truth capable of ending grief.

The Last Game

Watanabe recalls that he and Kizuki played pool on the day Kizuki died. Kizuki’s final shot was a difficult cushion shot that Watanabe did not expect him to make. It landed perfectly; the white and red balls barely made a sound as they brushed across the green baize for the game’s last score. The beauty and precision of the shot persist in Watanabe’s memory, bound to the day’s fatal outcome.

For nearly two and a half years afterward, Watanabe never touched a cue. When he later plays pool with Hatsumi, he is startled that Kizuki does not come to mind during the game. The memory returns only after the first game, as Watanabe buys a Pepsi from a vending machine. The pool hall is the one where he and Kizuki used to play, often betting drinks on the outcome. An ordinary pause after play therefore becomes the occasion for belated remembrance.

Watanabe feels guilty that he did not think of Kizuki immediately, as if the lapse meant he had abandoned him. Yet he also recognizes that memory has not simply faded. Kizuki remains seventeen, while Watanabe is approaching twenty; what the two shared at sixteen and seventeen has partly disappeared because Watanabe has continued to grow. The dead friend’s age is fixed, but the living friend’s relation to the past changes.

From Loss to a View of Death

After beginning a new life in the dorm, Watanabe tries to create distance from everything and forget the objects and scenes associated with loss. At first the effort seems to work, but a vague inner knot remains. Over time it takes a clear form: “Death exists, not as the opposite but as a part of life.” He comes to understand that death is not a separate force that leaves the living untouched until the moment it claims them. It is already present in the world of the living, like fine dust breathed into the lungs.

That understanding does not make Kizuki’s death abstract. Watanabe later tells someone he has not played pool for two years and five months, explaining that his friend died the night after their last game together. The interval itself measures how the loss has entered ordinary experience: not through a declared act of mourning, but through the absence of a familiar activity.

Grief’s Return

The death’s meaning recurs after Naoko dies. During a month of travel far from Tokyo, Watanabe walks down the coast, sleeps on the sand, makes fires from driftwood, and listens to the waves while thinking about her. Memories of Naoko arrive with vivid physical detail, and he imagines a place where he can speak with and hold the dead. In that inward landscape, death is one element of life rather than its decisive end. The idea echoes the lesson he had drawn from Kizuki, now returned in a more intimate and painful form.

But the imagined nearness cannot last. The tide of memory withdraws, leaving Watanabe alone on the beach, unable to escape his sadness. He concludes that what Kizuki’s death taught him—that living also means nurturing death—is only one truth among others. Naoko’s death teaches him that no truth, sincerity, strength, or kindness can cure the sorrow of losing someone loved. Grief has to be lived through; what is learned from one loss cannot protect the bereaved from the next.

Lasting Consequences

When Watanabe returns to Tokyo, he shuts himself in his room for days, his memory fixed on the dead rather than the living. He spends much of his time in rooms set aside in his mind for Naoko, with their imagined furniture draped in white and their windowsills dusty. There he thinks of Kizuki too, addressing him as if Naoko has finally returned to the person to whom she belonged. He recognizes that Kizuki had already drawn part of him into the world of the dead, and that Naoko has drawn another part after her.

The novel thus presents Kizuki’s death not as a grief Watanabe completes and leaves behind, but as the first loss through which later losses become legible. Its memory changes with the living: the last shot remains bright, the shared adolescence recedes, and the long absence from the pool ends without erasing the friend. The distinction between remembering and being able to keep living remains unresolved; Watanabe’s understanding of death grows, but it does not spare him the recurring force of grief.