Midori's father leaves for Uruguay

Midori Kobayashi’s father leaves Tokyo for Uruguay in June, a year before she recounts the story, turning his wife’s death into a second rupture for their family. He says he may settle on an old army friend’s farm, but his departure is sudden, his contact with his daughters scant, and his promise to send for them never followed up. The episode explains why Midori’s family history holds both a fierce, almost unbearable love for the dead and the hurt of being left behind by the living.

Background and Departure

Midori tells Toru Watanabe about her father while they wash and dry dishes. Her sister is out with her fiancé, whose enthusiasm for cars contrasts with Midori’s own lack of interest; then the conversation turns to their absent father. He went to Uruguay in June of the previous year and had remained there ever since. The departure was not presented as a carefully prepared family move: he announced that he was going, boarded a plane, and left.

The father’s stated plan was to settle in Uruguay, where an old army friend had a farm. He imagined that there was no limit to what he might do there. His daughters tried to dissuade him, pointing out that he could not speak the language and had hardly ever left Tokyo, but he would not listen. The distance and unfamiliarity of the destination sharpen the sense of an impulsive break: he did not first establish a settled life there or make a practical arrangement for the family to follow.

Grief and the Rupture at Home

Midori connects the journey to the death of her mother. Her father’s loss, she says, shocked him so profoundly that it seemed to unsteady his mind; the extremity of his grief was evidence, to her, of how much he had loved his wife. But the words he addressed to his daughters after the death made that love injurious as well as moving: he said he would much rather have lost them than their mother. Midori recognizes the pain of losing a life partner, yet insists that a father cannot tell his daughters that they should have died in their mother’s place without wounding them.

His departure compounds that wound. After telling the girls how strongly he preferred their mother’s survival, he leaves the two of them behind and goes to Uruguay. Midori does not deny his bereavement or the depth of his attachment; rather, she holds that attachment beside the consequences of what he said and did. The scene’s force comes from that contradiction: his grief makes his love legible, but it does not excuse the harm his daughters must live with.

The Postcard and the Unkept Promise

The father sends one postcard, in March. Its contents are mundane reports that the weather is hot and the fruit is not as good as he expected, accompanied by a picture of a donkey. He does not say whether he has met the friend whose farm prompted the journey. Near the end, he adds that once he is settled he will send for Midori and her sister, but there is no further word, and he never replies to their letters.

The postcard reduces a potentially life-changing departure to disconnected travel observations. Its sparse, impersonal detail stands against the daughters’ unanswered letters and the promise that they might join him. Midori says she would at least go and look around if he invited her; her sister, who cannot stand dirty things and dirty places, would refuse. The sisters are therefore not simply given the same response to the possibility of reunion: Midori remains open to seeing Uruguay, while her sister rejects it. Yet neither has received a definite invitation or a reliable account of the life their father is building there.

Significance in Midori’s Story

The departure helps define the family circumstances from which Midori speaks. Her mother is dead, her sister is elsewhere with her fiancé, and her father has crossed an ocean while communicating only through a single postcard. Midori can describe his love for her mother with sympathy and still name the abandonment that followed. Her account does not turn the father into a simple villain or make his grief a remedy for his daughters’ hurt; it keeps both truths in view.

That tension resonates with the novel’s larger distinction between understanding loss and being able to overcome its consequences. Elsewhere, Toru Watanabe arrives at the recognition that death is part of life, but later learns that no truth, sincerity, strength, or kindness can cure the sorrow of losing someone loved. Midori’s family story gives that problem a different shape: her father’s grief is real, yet it cannot repair the injury of his words, the distance of his departure, or his silence. The episode’s ending remains unresolved, with the promised invitation still only a line on a postcard.