Reiko Ishida

Reiko Ishida is a musician and resident of the Ami Hostel whose bonds with Naoko and Toru Watanabe place her at the crossing of care, grief, and renewed responsibility. She does not offer a cure for loss: after Naoko dies, she tells Watanabe that sorrow must be lived through, while insisting that he still has a responsibility to build a life with Midori. Her final journey from the sanatorium to Tokyo turns the advice she has given at a distance into a face-to-face farewell.

Identity and Life at the Sanatorium

Reiko lives in the women’s residential area of the Ami Hostel, a remote community organized around daily routines and mutual support. Its residents cannot ordinarily go into town, and anyone who leaves cannot return. Within this bounded life, residents make individual schedules that can include exercise, gardening, group therapy, gathering wild plants, and practical work. Naoko is assigned to paint and wallpaper; Reiko, by contrast, has special permission to move freely around the grounds. Her life there is not simply defined by restriction: the community supplies food, books, records, exercise facilities, a shop, visiting barbers and beauticians, and weekend films, while residents can request that staff buy special necessities in town.

The sanatorium’s limits give particular weight to Reiko’s later departure. She explains that leaving means burning one’s bridges, not taking a short trip and returning when convenient. Yet the ties formed there continue beyond its gates. In a letter, she says that she enjoys Watanabe’s frequent letters and that Naoko enjoys them too; she also asks whether he minds her reading them. Her openness makes her a participant in the correspondence that sustains the connection between the distant residents and Watanabe.

A Friend and Correspondent

Reiko’s relationship with Naoko is made tangible through shared daily life and remembered details. Watanabe recalls the two women tending the aviary in yellow raincapes, with their hoods up in the rain. In a letter to Naoko, he imagines her and Reiko among the birds and rabbits, and remembers the peacock, pigeons, parrots, and turkeys. The aviary is not merely a setting in this correspondence: it gives Watanabe a concrete scene through which to picture the women together while he tries to keep living far away.

Reiko also becomes an intermediary between Naoko and Watanabe without replacing either relationship. She receives his letters, knows that Naoko struggles to write one through to the end, and lets him know that his writing matters to both of them. When Reiko later writes again after Naoko’s death, she says she is playing guitar every day for no one in particular and hopes there may be another chance to play and eat grapes with Watanabe and Naoko in the room. The imagined gathering cannot be restored, but her letter preserves its ordinary, intimate details as an expression of what has been lost.

Naoko’s Death and Reiko’s Departure

After Naoko dies, Reiko writes several times to Watanabe, telling him that the death was not his fault and that nobody was to blame, no more than someone could be blamed for rain. He does not answer. He cannot see what a reply could accomplish when Naoko has become, in his words, a handful of ashes. His silence and subsequent withdrawal show the limits of Reiko’s reassurance: she can offer a way of understanding responsibility, but she cannot make the death less real or grief less consuming.

Reiko eventually leaves the sanatorium and meets Watanabe at Tokyo Station. He recognizes her in the crowd by her short, unruly hair and distinctive luggage: a brown leather suitcase and a black guitar case. Wearing a man’s tweed jacket, white trousers, and red trainers, she greets him with a broad, wrinkled smile. The familiar warmth of the reunion stands against Watanabe’s exhausted appearance after his travels. Reiko explains that Naoko and Watanabe are the reason she could not remain at the sanatorium without Naoko and had to come to Tokyo to talk to him; otherwise, she thinks, she might have spent the rest of her life there.

Her next destination is Asahikawa, far north in Hokkaido. An old college friend who runs a music school has been asking her for two or three years to help there. Reiko admits that the prospect does not excite her: after finally regaining her freedom, she is expected to go to a place she considers a remote hole in the ground. Nevertheless, she has chosen a concrete future beyond the sanatorium, one linked to music and to an existing friendship rather than to a promise that grief has ended.

Counsel, Responsibility, and Farewell

In Tokyo, Reiko distinguishes Watanabe’s grief for Naoko from his choice to be with Midori. She argues that he had made that choice before Naoko died, and that Naoko’s death neither created nor absolved it. Watanabe tells her that he cannot forget Naoko and feels that he turned his back on her; to him, their bond was tied to the border between life and death. Reiko does not ask him to erase that bond. Instead, she advises him to keep feeling the pain for the rest of his life and to learn from it, while warning that his suffering does not excuse further hurt to Midori. If he wounds her again, Reiko says, the damage may be too deep to repair.

This counsel extends the book’s distinction between understanding death and surviving bereavement. Watanabe has learned from Kizuki’s death that death is part of life, but Naoko’s death teaches him that no truth, sincerity, strength, or kindness can cure the sadness of losing someone loved. Reiko’s advice does not contradict that recognition: it asks him to endure grief without making grief a reason to refuse the living. She has travelled to Tokyo specifically to tell him this, presenting the difficult return to responsibility not as a cure or an erasure, but as something he must choose and sustain.

At the station, Reiko’s final words gather her farewells to Watanabe and Naoko into one appeal: he should take her share of happiness and Naoko’s and combine them for himself. She and Watanabe hold hands briefly before she boards the train. Their meeting does not undo Naoko’s absence, and Reiko does not promise to remain in Watanabe’s life; she says they may never meet again, while affirming that she will remember both him and Naoko wherever she goes. The farewell leaves Watanabe with a demand rather than a resolution: continue living, keep faith with the dead through memory, and do not let that fidelity destroy his chance to care for someone still alive.