Naoko’s suicide is the loss that deepens Toru Watanabe’s grief into prolonged withdrawal and wandering, while exposing the limits of the philosophy he formed after Kizuki’s death. The novel does not provide a motive; instead, it follows the discovery of her absence, the search through the sanatorium grounds, and the ways her death continues to occupy the living.

Background and the Unanswered Question

Naoko’s death echoes Kizuki’s: both died by suicide at seventeen, without leaving a note or giving an apparent warning. Earlier, Watanabe had been unable to find a reason for Kizuki’s death, and he carried the fact that he was the last person to see his friend before being questioned by police. The repetition does not solve either death. It establishes a pattern of loss whose circumstances can be recounted, but whose cause remains beyond the survivors’ knowledge.

Naoko herself had described her sister’s suicide in the same terms. Her sister, also seventeen, had given no indication of what she intended and left no note. Naoko recalled that people offered explanations about her sister’s intelligence and reading, but those explanations did not settle the mystery for her. The parallel among Kizuki, Naoko’s sister, and Naoko makes the absence of an explanation part of the event’s significance, without establishing a shared motive or a definite cause.

Discovery at the Sanatorium

The account of Naoko’s final night reaches Watanabe through Reiko’s later recollection. Naoko had asked Reiko to hold her, and Reiko stayed with her until she settled and appeared to be asleep. In the morning, Naoko was gone. Her nightdress remained, but she had taken her clothes, trainers, and a torch kept by Watanabe’s pillow. Reiko understood from the torch that Naoko had left in darkness.

A note on Naoko’s desk asked that her clothes be given to Reiko. The residents searched the dormitories and surrounding woods, taking different paths; the search lasted five hours. Reiko then disclosed that Naoko had brought a rope. An ambulance took Naoko away, and police questioned Reiko. Because a note was present and the circumstances were treated as clear, the questioning was formal rather than an inquiry into an unknown outcome. Reiko telegraphed Watanabe as soon as the police had left.

Funeral and Immediate Aftermath

Watanabe describes Naoko’s funeral in Kobe as quiet and deeply painful. He believed her family was troubled that he knew she had died and suspected they did not want the suicide made public. His sense that he perhaps should not have attended intensified his distress. After returning, he went back on the road rather than resuming his life in Tokyo.

Reiko later wrote to him several times, insisting that Naoko’s death was not his fault and was nobody’s fault. Watanabe did not answer. He could not see what a reply might accomplish: Naoko was gone, and reassurance could not restore her. The silence leaves Reiko’s attempt at consolation unanswered, showing how even compassionate contact fails to bridge the distance created by the death.

Watanabe’s Grief and the Limits of Philosophy

During his travels, Watanabe moved along the coast, sleeping on the sand, making fires from driftwood, and listening to the waves while thinking about Naoko. He could not absorb that she was dead. Memories returned with such force that, in his imagination, he entered a place where Naoko remained present and death was one element of life rather than a final boundary. Those moments of imagined closeness brought temporary ease, but the feeling receded; he was left alone with grief.

Kizuki’s death had led Watanabe to understand death as part of life, a realization that had once seemed to give shape to his experience. Naoko’s death does not simply disprove that thought; it shows that recognizing death’s place in life cannot make bereavement bearable. Watanabe concludes that no truth, sincerity, strength, or kindness can cure the sorrow of losing a loved one. Grief must be lived through, and what is learned from one loss offers no protection against the next.

Withdrawal and Continuing Significance

After returning to Tokyo, Watanabe shut himself in his room for days. His attention remained with the dead rather than the living, and he spent much of his time in rooms he had set aside for Naoko, kept shuttered with the furniture covered and the windowsills dusty. Inwardly, he addressed Kizuki and imagined surrendering Naoko to him, as though the two deaths had drawn them together beyond the world of the living. This imagined exchange expresses Watanabe’s inability to reconcile his attachment to Naoko with her absence; it is not a resolution of his grief.

The event’s consequences therefore extend well beyond the discovery and funeral. Naoko’s death renews Watanabe’s earlier bereavement, interrupts his capacity to rejoin everyday life, and leaves his relationships with the dead more immediate than his connection to the living. The narrative gives no final explanation that would make the loss comprehensible. Its emphasis falls instead on the difference between accepting that death belongs to life and finding any consolation in that knowledge.

Narrative Frame

Naoko’s final departure is presented retrospectively within Watanabe’s first-person account, through what Reiko tells him after leaving the sanatorium. The search, note, and police questioning are thus relayed as remembered testimony rather than shown directly as an uninterrupted scene. This framing places the reader alongside Watanabe in learning what happened, while preserving the same central uncertainty: the details of Naoko’s disappearance and death are known, but her motive is not.