Naoko's butterfly hairslide

Naoko’s butterfly hairslide is a recurring personal object that makes Naoko’s presence recognizable across changing moments in her life and in Watanabe’s memory. It holds her hair in place, but its narrative significance exceeds its practical use: its repeated appearance connects an attempt to become reacquainted, a disclosure about her relationship with Kizuki, a silent nighttime encounter, and Watanabe’s later recollection of the dead. The hairslide becomes one of the concrete details through which absence remains intimate rather than abstract.

Appearance and First Reappearance

During Watanabe’s visit, Naoko has her hair in a simple schoolgirl style, with one side secured by the hairslide. He tells her that the style suits her; she explains that Reiko cuts her hair and asks whether he really thinks it looks cute. Naoko then says her mother hates it, opens the slide, lets her hair down, smooths it with her fingers, and closes it again. The exchange makes the object part of a tentative effort to see Watanabe alone and become accustomed to his presence before the three of them meet. Its small, ordinary action accompanies Naoko’s uncertainty about being known again.

The scene also gives the hairslide its defining shape. Naoko’s hair falls free when she opens it, and she handles the butterfly-shaped piece before fastening her hair once more. The gesture is repeated rather than explained: the object is visible, touched, opened, and closed, while the feelings surrounding the reunion remain difficult to articulate. That contrast allows a material detail to carry the scene’s hesitation without assigning the hairslide a meaning Naoko herself never states.

An Object in Naoko’s Disclosure

Later, while Reiko plays the same difficult passage repeatedly, Naoko speaks about her attempts to have sex with Kizuki. She says they loved each other and tried many times, but could not make it work; she did not understand why then and still does not. As she talks, she unclaspes the hairslide, lets her hair down, and toys with the butterfly shape in her hands. After explaining that the attempts were painful, she lifts her hair and fastens it again.

The slide does not cause or explain the difficulty Naoko describes. Its significance lies in accompanying the disclosure: as Naoko recounts a private part of her past, the hairslide gives her hands a familiar object to handle, and its opening and refastening frame the account. The recurrence also connects two scenes in which she loosens and gathers her hair while trying to establish what she can share with Watanabe. The object marks continuity between their present conversation and the earlier relationship she is describing, without resolving the pain or uncertainty in that history.

The Nighttime Encounter

After Watanabe dreams of birds turning into metal objects, he wakes in the moonlit room and sees Naoko sitting alone by the window. She is wearing her blue nightdress, and the hairslide holds one side of her hair in place. He remembers that she had removed it before going to bed, which makes its reappearance a quiet source of unease. In this scene the object is not merely part of her daytime appearance: its presence changes how Watanabe understands what he sees, because it seems to repeat a familiar arrangement in an unfamiliar, nocturnal moment.

Naoko approaches the bed, and Watanabe reaches toward her; she draws back. She then removes her gown, remains with him briefly, and eventually dresses again, buttons the gown, and leaves the room. The hairslide is the only accessory she is described as wearing during this encounter, and it remains associated with her as the scene ends. The account does not explain why she had put it back in after removing it for sleep. That unexplained detail preserves the scene’s distance between Watanabe’s close attention and his inability to know what Naoko is thinking.

The episode follows a dream whose objects resist ordinary use: birds cling to willow branches, then become metal weights when Watanabe tries to dislodge them. Waking does not dispel the dreamlike uncertainty; instead, the hairslide helps carry it into the room. An everyday object appears in a moment that Watanabe experiences as strange and difficult to interpret. Its familiarity gives the encounter a point of recognition, while the circumstances around it remain unresolved.

Memory and Loss

After Naoko dies, Watanabe travels along the coast, keeping as far from Tokyo as he can. In sleepless nights, memories of her return in a flood: among them, he remembers Naoko touching the hairslide she always wore. The detail sits alongside scenes of her carrying feed in a yellow raincape, crying over a damaged birthday cake, walking beside him in a camel-hair coat, and sitting in her blue nightdress. The hairslide is therefore not a token introduced only at the moment of loss. It is one element in a remembered life, recalled among many gestures and circumstances that make Naoko particular to him.

Watanabe describes these memories as carrying him into a place where he can live with the dead and hold Naoko again. But the relief is temporary: when that inward tide recedes, he is left alone with grief. He recognizes that the philosophy he had formed after Kizuki’s death—that death is part of life—cannot cure the sorrow of losing Naoko. The remembered hairslide belongs to this tension. It keeps a precise image of Naoko available to memory, but cannot restore her presence or make bereavement manageable.

Back in Tokyo, Watanabe shuts himself in his room, and his attention remains fixed on the dead rather than the living. His account of the hairslide’s recurrence helps show how memory works in the novel: not as a single, settled recollection, but as a return of small details that preserve the texture of the absent person. The butterfly shape moves through scenes of renewed contact, painful disclosure, uncertainty, and bereavement. Its modest scale is central to its force; the object cannot explain Naoko, yet its return makes the bond with her tangible even when Watanabe must confront that she is gone.