Watanabe and Midori reunite in the rain and confess their feelings

Watanabe and Midori reunite in the rain and confess their feelings after two months apart, turning a period of silence and misunderstanding into an explicit declaration of love. The scene brings them physically close and makes their attachment unmistakable, yet Watanabe’s continuing sense of responsibility toward Naoko prevents the reunion from becoming a simple romantic resolution: Midori agrees to wait, but insists that if he chooses her, he must choose her fully.

The Reunion After Two Months

The conversation takes place on the roof of a department store on a rainy day. The place is nearly deserted: the kiosks and children’s rides are shut, and rain covers the wooden horses and garden chairs. After lunch, Watanabe and Midori wander beneath their umbrellas; she looks through a telescope while he holds the umbrella over her. They sit beside the rides and watch the rain, a pause that gives way to Midori’s direct invitation for him to say what he has come to say.

Before reaching the rooftop, the two have eaten together from lacquered lunch boxes. Midori smokes after the meal, then stands and takes her umbrella without speaking. The quiet movement into the rain precedes the directness of the conversation: the encounter begins not with a declaration but with an empty, wet public space and a silence both of them have to break.

Watanabe explains that he had been deeply depressed and unable to register much around him. Only after he could no longer see Midori did he recognize that having her in his life had been essential to his ability to survive. He tells her that losing her brought home the pain and loneliness he had been avoiding. Midori answers that she, too, has been lonely during the two months apart, and points out that she had already told him about it in her letters.

The Separation and Midori’s Choice

The separation had not meant that Midori stopped caring for Watanabe. She had wanted to see him, but became angry when, during their time together, he was so absorbed in thoughts of another woman that he did not even look at her. At the same time, she had been trying to understand her own relationship with her boyfriend. She explains that being with Watanabe had begun to give her more pleasure than being with him, a situation she found emotionally confusing.

Midori had asked her boyfriend what she should do. He told her to stop seeing Watanabe, or to break up with him if she wanted to keep seeing Watanabe. She chose to end the relationship. When Watanabe asks why, she responds that she loves Watanabe more, even while acknowledging that she might have wished to fall for someone more handsome. Her confession is deliberately plain: her feelings, rather than a tidy comparison of the two men, are the reason for her decision.

That choice gives the reunion a consequential reversal. Midori has already acted on her attachment before Watanabe can promise her a shared future. She tells him she is not expecting him to reciprocate while he loves someone else, but asks him at least to embrace her; the two months have been difficult for her. She throws her cigarette into a puddle, and they move behind the game area, where they hold each other and kiss beneath Watanabe’s umbrella.

Love and Responsibility

The embrace does not remove the conflict. Watanabe tells Midori that he loves her from the bottom of his heart and does not want to lose her again, but says he cannot make a move. When she asks whether the obstacle is the other woman, he confirms it. He describes his connection to Naoko as complicated and long-standing, and says he feels a human responsibility that he cannot simply abandon, even though he does not know whether she loves him.

Midori answers from the immediacy of the present. Pressing her cheek against Watanabe’s neck, she stresses that she is a living person in his arms, offering affection, honesty, hard work, and a willingness to do what he asks. Her self-description mixes emotional insistence with a deliberately comic inventory of practical and physical attractions. Beneath the humor is a serious demand: she will not be treated as an abstraction or kept indefinitely as a possibility while Watanabe remains turned toward someone absent.

Watanabe asks for time to think and make decisions. Midori accepts the request because she believes him and says she will wait, but sets a condition for whatever may follow: when he chooses her, he must choose only her, and when he holds her, he must think only about her. The exchange gives the reunion a provisional ending rather than a resolution. Mutual love is spoken aloud, but Watanabe’s divided loyalties remain in place.

The Rain as Physical Reconciliation

After Midori agrees to wait, she tells Watanabe to drop the umbrella and hold her with both arms. She has been waiting two months for this closeness and does not want him to keep thinking instead of embracing her. Watanabe sets the umbrella down; the two are soaked as traffic rushes along the highway. Rain darkens Midori’s denim jacket and Watanabe’s yellow nylon windcheater and runs down their faces like tears.

The scene’s physical contact answers, without settling, the distance created by Watanabe’s withdrawal. Their earlier kiss makes the reunion bodily as well as verbal, while the later rain-soaked embrace extends that contact and makes Midori’s request for presence concrete. Watanabe asks whether they should return under the roof, but Midori suggests going to her home, where no one is there. The encounter thus moves toward private intimacy even as its central decision remains deferred.

Place in the Novel’s Emotional Arc

The reunion stages a clash between the living relationship Watanabe can reach for and his sense that he remains accountable to Naoko. Midori makes that contrast explicit by insisting on her reality as a living woman, while Watanabe’s declaration of love is immediately qualified by his inability to choose. The scene gives Midori agency: she names her feelings, ends her existing relationship, challenges Watanabe’s assumptions about her anger, and sets terms for the future rather than waiting passively for him to decide.

The storm also places the confession within the novel’s larger pattern of grief and continuing attachment to the dead. Watanabe has previously come to understand death as part of life, but that insight does not erase the sorrow or responsibility associated with losing someone. Here, the emotional force of Midori’s presence does not cure or replace that grief. Instead, the rain-soaked embrace holds two truths together: Watanabe loves Midori, and he remains unable to act as if his bond with Naoko has ended. The scene is therefore a major opening toward renewed intimacy, not the end of his conflict.