Watanabe

Watanabe is the first-person narrator whose story turns on a difficult distinction: understanding death is not the same as overcoming grief. After Kizuki’s death, he comes to see death as part of life rather than its opposite; after Naoko’s death, he learns that no truth can cure the pain of losing someone he loves. His struggle is not to replace the dead with the living, but to carry his attachment to Naoko while accepting responsibility for his relationship with Midori.

Identity and the Meaning of Death

Watanabe narrates the events retrospectively, tracing how loss alters his understanding of ordinary life. At first, he tries to create distance between himself and everything around him, hoping to forget the images associated with death. What remains, he describes as a vague knot within him. Over time, that knot takes a clear form: death exists not as life’s opposite, but as part of life. The idea is more than a philosophical conclusion for him; he experiences it as something already present in the things and memories he carries.

This understanding develops through successive losses. Watanabe says he had learned from Kizuki’s death that life and death were not separate realms. But Naoko’s death forces him to recognize the limits of that lesson. A principle can make sense of death without easing the bereaved person’s sorrow. His reflections therefore hold two truths together: the dead remain bound up in the lives of those who survive them, and the living must nonetheless continue without expecting insight to make grief disappear.

Anger, Withdrawal, and Grief

After learning that Naoko is dead, Watanabe travels west along the coast, trying to get as far from Tokyo as he can. He walks by the sea, sleeps on the sand, makes fires from driftwood, and subsists on simple food and whisky. The movement of the journey does not bring emotional distance. At night, memories of Naoko return in a rush, including moments from their time together and images from the sanatorium. In his imagination, she can still speak and be held; then the memory recedes, and he is left alone with the fact of her death.

The sea gives his grief a recurring shape. Memories arrive like an incoming tide, carrying him into an inner place where Naoko exists alongside death; when the tide pulls back, he is stranded in sorrow. Watanabe concludes that no truth, sincerity, strength, or kindness can cure the pain of losing a loved one. Grief must be endured to its end, and whatever is learned from one loss cannot protect a person from the next. The thought is not a resolution but a limit he has had to discover.

His grief also separates him from other people. On the road, a young fisherman offers him a cigarette and shares his own account of losing his mother. Watanabe cannot receive the story as comfort: in his anger, he feels that the man’s bereavement cannot measure up to his loss of Naoko. The encounter shows how sorrow narrows his attention even when another person is trying to reach him. His recognition that grief cannot be cured does not immediately make him more available to the living.

Love and Responsibility

Watanabe’s attachment to Naoko persists even as he recognizes his love for Midori. He acknowledges that he loves Midori and is happy when she returns to him, but says that an inward space remains reserved for Naoko. His feelings are not neatly transferred from one woman to another: love for Midori and love for Naoko coexist, leaving him unable to explain his changed relationship to Naoko while she is in a fragile condition.

After becoming intimate with Midori, Watanabe admits in a letter to Reiko that he has fallen in love with her. His account of the day makes clear that he had been avoiding a conclusion he already knew. Yet the new relationship does not erase his earlier bond. The conflict is sharpened by the fact that he had told Naoko he would wait for her. He blames himself for turning away, while also believing that her choice of death had preceded that decision. He refuses to make the question of blame simple, describing their connection as one formed at the border between life and death.

Reiko later tells him that his choice of Midori had been made before Naoko died, and that he must take responsibility for it. Her distinction matters: his decision to love Midori is not caused by Naoko’s death, and his continuing pain over Naoko need not invalidate his relationship with Midori. Reiko urges him to keep feeling the pain and learn from it, while warning that further hurt could damage his relationship with Midori beyond repair. Watanabe’s task is thus not to prove that he has forgotten Naoko, but to stop using grief as a reason to avoid responsibility to someone who is alive.

Withdrawal and Return to the Living

After returning to Tokyo, Watanabe shuts himself away for days, overwhelmed by a sense of having defiled the dead. His memory remains fixed on them rather than on the living. He spends much of his time in rooms set aside for Naoko, imagining her in a conversation with Kizuki and conceding that he is giving her back to the person to whom she had belonged. This inward scene gives form to his guilt and to the way Kizuki’s death continues to shape his understanding of Naoko’s life and death.

Reiko’s visit brings the conflict into the present. She tells Watanabe that he must accept the choices already made and grow up enough to live with their consequences. Before leaving, she asks him to take her share and Naoko’s and combine them for himself. They hold hands briefly and part. Her words do not offer a cure for his grief; they place an obligation beside it: he must try to be happy without pretending the dead do not matter.

Watanabe then phones Midori. He tells her he has much to discuss and wants the two of them to begin again. Midori answers only after a long silence, asking where he is. The ending leaves their reunion unresolved, but Watanabe’s call is a decisive movement away from isolation. He does not claim that grief is over or that his love for Naoko has vanished. Instead, he reaches toward Midori while acknowledging that a shared future requires conversation, choice, and responsibility.

Narrative Role

Because Watanabe tells the story in the first person, the reader encounters loss not only as an event but as a recurring pressure on memory, desire, and attention. His account returns to concrete recollections of Naoko, then sets those recollections against present encounters with Midori and Reiko. This structure makes his central conflict difficult to settle: memory keeps the dead close, while the living ask for a response in the present.

Watanabe’s trajectory also complicates the idea that insight produces recovery. He can formulate a philosophy of death, and he can recognize that grief has no cure, but neither understanding prevents his anger, withdrawal, or self-reproach. Change appears instead in his willingness to act despite those unresolved feelings. His final call does not close the past; it marks a tentative choice to re-enter a relationship with the living while continuing to carry what he has lost.