Watanabe and Reiko’s private funeral for Naoko is an improvised memorial in which music, drink, and a counted row of matches transform mourning into a shared ritual. Held after Naoko’s death, it gives Watanabe a vivid alternative to the funeral he found unbearably sad: Reiko asks him to remember their ceremony instead, and the two mark Naoko’s life through songs she loved and songs that speak to the sadness of living.

Circumstances and Purpose

After walking with Reiko to the local public baths, Watanabe returns with her to the house, refreshed, and they sit drinking wine on the veranda. Reiko proposes that they hold a funeral for Naoko themselves, just the two of them, and specifies that it should not be so sad as the funeral Watanabe has already witnessed. The proposal is not a denial of death or an attempt to replace the earlier ceremony with a formal one. It makes room for a different kind of remembrance, shaped by the two people who knew Naoko through their lives together.

Reiko’s suggestion answers Watanabe’s difficulty in accepting the funeral he has seen. He says that he is not prepared to follow through on what she is telling him because it had been such a sad little funeral, and that no one should have to die like that. Reiko strokes his head and reminds him that everyone will die like that sometime. Their private rite follows this exchange: rather than argue away the sadness, it gives the two survivors a way to sit with death and remember Naoko together.

The Ceremony and Its Music

Reiko asks Watanabe for another glass, fills it to the brim, and sets it on the garden’s stone lantern. Sitting against a veranda pillar with her guitar and a cigarette, she asks for the largest box of matches he can find. The procedure is simple and deliberate: Watanabe is to lay down one match each time she plays a song. The accumulating line turns the length of the memorial into something visible, measured one performance at a time.

Reiko begins with Henry Mancini’s “Dear Heart,” a song Watanabe had given Naoko for Christmas the year before last. He confirms that Naoko liked it. Reiko says she likes it too, calling it sweet and beautiful, and plays a few bars again. The choice makes the memorial personal rather than generic: a piece associated with Naoko’s pleasure becomes part of the ceremony, shared by the two people who remember her.

She then plays Beatles songs including “Norwegian Wood,” “Yesterday,” “Michelle,” and “Something,” sings and plays “Here Comes the Sun,” and follows it with “The Fool on the Hill.” Watanabe lays seven matches in a row. Reiko reflects that the Beatles understood something about the sadness of life and gentleness. The sequence connects Naoko’s remembrance to a wider repertoire of songs without losing its intimate focus: each piece is played and counted by the two people gathered in her memory.

After a short pause, Reiko continues through “Penny Lane,” “Blackbird,” “Julia,” “When I’m 64,” “Nowhere Man,” “And I Love Her,” and “Hey Jude.” She later moves among bossa novas, songs by Rogers and Hart, Gershwin, Bob Dylan, Ray Charles, Carole King, The Beach Boys, and Stevie Wonder, as well as Kyu Sakamoto’s “Sukiyaki Song,” “Blue Velvet,” and “Green Fields.” Sometimes she closes her eyes, nods, or hums. The memorial unfolds through a succession of familiar melodies rather than speeches: Reiko plays, Watanabe listens and counts, and the evening gathers duration through the music.

Counting and Remembrance

When the wine runs out, Watanabe pours it from the garden glass over the stone lantern and replaces it with whisky. Reiko asks how many songs they have reached; Watanabe answers that the count is forty-eight. Reiko plays “Eleanor Rigby” as number forty-nine and performs “Norwegian Wood” again as number fifty. After resting and drinking whisky, she says that may be enough. The repeated song gives the ceremony a return rather than a straight line: “Norwegian Wood,” heard earlier in the Beatles sequence, comes back at the threshold of its ending.

Reiko looks Watanabe in the eye and asks him to forget the sad little funeral he saw and remember this marvelous one instead. Her request defines the ceremony’s purpose. It does not claim that one memorial cancels the other or that music can resolve grief; it asks Watanabe to retain this evening as another, more sustaining memory of Naoko. He nods, accepting Reiko’s invitation to remember the shared rite alongside the earlier funeral.

For one more piece, Reiko plays her favorite Bach fugue, bringing the count to fifty-one. When she finishes, she asks Watanabe whether he would like to have sex with her. He says he had been thinking the same thing. They go inside, draw the curtains, and seek each other’s bodies in the dark. The sexual encounter follows the memorial’s intimate, private character, but it is distinct from the songs themselves: the scene moves from shared remembrance toward a physical encounter between the two living participants.

Significance

The funeral’s central contrast is between public, conventional mourning and a private ceremony made from remembered attachments. Its objects are modest and specific: a full glass on a stone lantern, a guitar, cigarettes, wine replaced by whisky, a large box of matches, and a row that reaches fifty-one. These details make the ritual countable without making grief manageable. The matches register the passage of the songs; the songs, in turn, keep the ceremony anchored in Naoko’s tastes and in the survivors’ memories of her.

The event also answers the novel’s continuing tension between death as part of life and sorrow that cannot be reasoned away. Watanabe has understood death as something inseparable from living, yet Naoko’s death leaves him unable to absorb her absence. Reiko does not offer a comforting explanation or declare the loss overcome. Instead, she creates a shared act of remembrance and asks him to carry it forward. The private funeral’s significance lies in this limited but consequential gesture: it does not end mourning, but gives the living a memory of Naoko that they have made together.