Midori and Momo

Midori and Momo are sisters whose closeness is forged through caregiving and loss, then made visible in the practical choices they face after their father dies. Midori’s account complicates conventional displays of mourning: the sisters can be exhausted by a long illness, refuse to perform grief for visitors, and still remain deeply bound to one another. Their relationship is at once emotional and material, sustained by shared responsibility for a sick parent, a family business, and the uncertain next stage of their lives.

A Bond Formed Through Care

Midori describes a family life repeatedly organized around illness and care. By the time her father is hospitalized, she has already helped care for her grandfather, grandmother, and mother. She knows from experience that a hospital visit is not the same as tending to a patient: relatives may arrive to show sympathy, but a family member must take up the work the staff cannot cover. Midori says that she and Momo divide that work, with Momo coming three days a week and Midori four. The arrangement gives the sisters distinct turns but a common obligation, and Midori’s account makes clear that the schedule competes with her studies and other demands.

That burden has consequences beyond time. Midori describes the relatives who leave food uneaten because they are upset, while she eats because caregiving requires her to keep going. She objects to being praised for having an appetite as if her presence in the hospital were merely a matter of sympathetic feeling. The work includes cleaning and attending to her father, and seeing repeated medical procedures without hope of recovery; meanwhile, the family’s savings dwindle. Her anger is directed at the gap between those who express concern and those who actually shoulder care. Momo is not a visitor at the edge of that experience: she is the other daughter sharing its recurring demands.

Their Mother’s Death and Its Aftermath

The sisters’ earlier experience of illness helps explain the unsentimental candor with which Midori talks about their mother. Their mother died of cancer after a year and a half in hospital. Midori recalls that the illness brought suffering, intensive care, and substantial expense, and that she had to postpone university for a year because she was occupied with her mother’s care. She also says that her mother’s death brought a sense of relief: afterward, Midori could manage the household budget herself and buy what she wanted. That admission does not erase her mother’s suffering or the family’s ordeal; it reveals how grief and relief can coexist after a protracted illness.

The sisters’ shared history of care also shapes their response to the funeral after their father’s death. Midori contrasts the ceremony’s familiar public arrangements—wearing formal black clothes, receiving visitors, and letting relatives and neighbors manage practical matters—with the exhausting work of nursing someone day after day. She and Momo are so drained that they cannot cry. When other people interpret their lack of tears as coldness, the sisters refuse to fake grief to satisfy them. Midori emphasizes that they are different kinds of people, but in this refusal they are completely in accord: their unity appears as a private understanding against public judgment.

Bereavement Without Performance

After the funeral, the sisters make space for their own response rather than adopting the mourning their visitors expect. They drink sake together until sunset, sharing a large bottle and part of another while criticizing the people around them. Midori presents the release as pleasurable and relieving. The episode is not evidence that they do not care; in the context of their exhaustion and the pressure to display sorrow correctly, it shows them recovering a measure of control over how they speak and react. Their shared irreverence becomes a form of intimacy, allowing them to be frank with one another when the expected public script offers no room for their actual fatigue.

That frankness also distinguishes the sisters’ relationship from the performance of sympathy Midori resents at the hospital. She does not claim that distress has disappeared; rather, she insists that being worn out and being hurt are compatible with eating, continuing to act, and refusing to give an audience the tears it demands. Her account gives Momo a place in that resistance. The sisters’ connection is expressed through synchronized behavior and shared judgment, not through a claim that they feel or grieve in exactly the same way.

Making a Life After the Funeral

After their father’s death, the sisters face decisions about the family’s future as well as their grief. When Midori and Watanabe return to the closed Kobayashi Bookshop, she explains that she and Momo intend to sell it and divide the proceeds. They hope to live independently for a time without relying on anyone’s protection. The sale is tied to concrete plans: Momo expects to marry the following year, while Midori has three years of university remaining and intends to keep her part-time job. Midori expects the money to support them through that period, and says she will live with Momo in a flat until her sister marries.

The bookshop’s closure marks a change in the sisters’ circumstances. Its shutter is up, a sign announces that it is temporarily closed, the shelves are partly empty, and magazines have been bundled for return. The space no longer functions as the center of their family livelihood; selling it becomes a means of dividing resources and arranging separate futures. The decision does not dissolve their relationship. Instead, their shared residence offers a practical interval in which each can continue toward a different next step.

By autumn and winter, the sale has gone through and the sisters have moved into a two-bedroom flat near Myogadani, a more upmarket neighborhood than their former home above the shop. Midori invites Watanabe to lunch there and seems to enjoy living in the new place more than she did above the bookshop. She expects to move out and rent a flat of her own when Momo marries. The arrangement is therefore both close and temporary: the sisters make a home together after bereavement while acknowledging that Momo’s marriage and Midori’s independent plans will alter it.

Significance of Their Relationship

The sisters’ relationship is defined by a recurring contrast between visible emotion and sustained responsibility. Midori’s relatives may display sympathy, and funeral guests may expect tears, but the account measures care by presence and work: who returns to the hospital, who keeps going, and who shares the consequences when money and time run short. Momo’s repeated participation in caring for their father and her solidarity with Midori at the funeral place their bond inside this practical ethic, rather than making it a decorative background to Midori’s story.

Their closeness also survives changes in the family structure. They are aligned in resisting the demand to perform grief, share the burden of closing the bookshop, and live together as they prepare for different futures. The narrative does not present bereavement as a single, publicly legible feeling or suggest that the sisters’ bluntness makes loss simple. Instead, it shows them negotiating what comes after long care: exhaustion, relief, financial decisions, and plans that must be made even while mourning remains unresolved.