Reiko’s second mental breakdown, recalled in her account to Toru Watanabe, is the return of a crisis she had struggled to outrun: after losing her hoped-for future as a concert pianist, she again descended into what she calls “the jumble, the darkness.” The episode marks the distance between outward recovery and inward loss, and helps explain why her later life at Ami Hostel is organized around patience and accommodation rather than a simple promise of cure.

Causes and Circumstances

After an earlier hospitalization, movement returned to Reiko’s finger, allowing her to resume conservatoire studies and graduate. But the physical recovery did not restore the inner energy she associated with becoming a professional pianist. A doctor told her she lacked the mental strength for that career and advised her to give up the ambition. The loss was not merely a change of occupation: Reiko felt that a jewel of energy had evaporated from her, leaving the life she had imagined inaccessible.

She began teaching piano pupils at home, including neighborhood children working through Beyer exercises and sonatinas. The everyday routine sharpened rather than softened her sense of deprivation. Hearing of less talented musicians winning competition places or giving recitals brought her to tears; each report measured the public recognition she believed she had lost against the smallness of her new life.

The crisis also unfolded within her family and neighborhood. Reiko felt her parents moving carefully around her for fear of causing pain, yet believed she could sense their disappointment that their once-prized daughter had become a former mental patient. She feared that neighbors were talking about her and became afraid to go outside. The pressure of living among people whose feelings she thought she could read fed the isolation from which the second breakdown emerged.

Breakdown and Hospitalization

Reiko locates the return of the crisis in a brief, abrupt phrase: “So then, snap!” At twenty-four, the jumble and darkness came back. The contrast with her first hospitalization is explicit: this time she spent seven months in a different institution, a conventional asylum with high walls and locked gates, rather than the open convalescent community where she later lived.

She describes that asylum as filthy and without pianos. With no instrument and little sense of what to do, her overriding aim was to get out as soon as possible, and she struggled desperately to recover. Seven months felt long; Reiko also remembers that this period was when her wrinkles began. The details make the institution not an abstract stage of treatment but a restrictive setting sharply unlike the later life she would describe at Ami Hostel.

Aftermath and Later Context

The breakdown did not end Reiko’s connection to music, but it changed its place in her life. After leaving the hospital, she taught pupils at home; later, at Ami Hostel, she taught music as a form of therapy and helped in the office. She had lived there for seven years by the time Toru visited. Though residents sometimes called her “Doctor Ishida,” she explained that she was another patient, and that the blurred distinction between helping and being helped was part of her daily role.

Reiko describes Ami Hostel as a place for convalescence rather than ordinary hospital treatment: residents enter and leave voluntarily, and people who need specialized therapy may be transferred to a specialist hospital. Its quiet, open setting and shared activities do not erase distress. Instead, the community’s account of recovery emphasizes learning to recognize and accept personal differences rather than trying to correct them by force. Against the locked gates of the asylum in Reiko’s memory, this approach gives her second breakdown a lasting context: it is part of a history in which recovery has limits, may require different institutions, and depends on patience rather than a single decisive cure.