Watanabe calls Green for the last time

Watanabe’s final call to Midori is an attempted return to the living after Naoko’s death, but it ends not with reunion or reassurance: Midori asks where he is, and he cannot answer. The telephone conversation gathers the novel’s central tension between remembering the dead and choosing life into one unresolved image—a man calling out from a place he cannot name.

Background: Grief and Withdrawal

After Naoko’s death, Watanabe travels west along the coast, as far from Tokyo as he can get. He sleeps on the sand, makes fires from driftwood, roasts fish bought from a local fisherman, and drinks whisky while thinking about Naoko. Her death remains almost impossible for him to absorb; memories of her return with such force that he feels she is still beside him, even as he knows that her body no longer exists in the world.

These memories do not offer a stable refuge. Watanabe imagines a place in which he can speak with Naoko and hold her, where death is one element of life rather than its decisive opposite. But the imagined closeness gives way: the tide withdraws, leaving him alone and overwhelmed by sadness. He understands that the philosophy he had formed after Kizuki’s death—that death exists as part of life—cannot cure the sorrow of losing someone he loves. No truth, sincerity, strength, or kindness can remove it; grief has to be lived through, and what he learns cannot protect him from the next loss.

When Watanabe returns to Tokyo, he is still unable to turn toward the living. He shuts himself in his room for days, his memory fixed on the dead. In his imagination, the rooms reserved for Naoko are shuttered, their furniture covered in white and their windowsills dusty. He thinks of Kizuki and speaks inwardly of giving Naoko back to him, as though the dead still claim a part of the living. This withdrawal is the immediate emotional background to the call: Watanabe’s words to Midori express a desire to begin again, but they come from someone who has not yet found his way back to the present.

The Call and Its Appeal

Before the telephone conversation, Watanabe and Reiko part at a station. He tells her he will remember her and Naoko wherever he goes, and, seeing Reiko cry, kisses her. The kiss is framed by a recognition of their shared condition: they are alive, and must continue living. Reiko’s farewell turns that recognition into an appeal, urging him to be happy and to combine her share and Naoko’s with his own. Her counsel does not erase either woman’s place in his life; it asks him to carry their presence forward by living.

Watanabe then phones Midori. He says he has a million things to talk about and wants to see her; more decisively, he tells her that all he wants in the world is her and that he wants them to begin everything from the beginning. His language makes the call both a confession and a proposal to resume their relationship. It also sets the living Midori against the dead Naoko without treating the two as interchangeable: Naoko remains the focus of his mourning, while Midori is the person to whom he now tries to reach out.

Midori’s Question and the Unresolved Ending

Midori does not answer at once. Her long silence is described through an image of misty rain falling on newly mown lawns. Watanabe presses his forehead against the glass and shuts his eyes as he waits. The pause stretches the call beyond a simple exchange of confession and reply: after his urgent declaration, he has no control over whether or how Midori will respond.

At last, Midori asks, “Where are you now?” The question has an immediate physical meaning, but Watanabe cannot supply even that. Still gripping the receiver, he raises his head and looks beyond the phone box. He sees countless people walking past, apparently going nowhere, and recognizes that he has no idea where he is. He calls out for Midori again and again from what he describes as the dead centre of a place that is no place. The book ends at this moment, before Midori gives any further answer and before the pair’s proposed new beginning can be confirmed.

Significance: Choosing Life Without Resolution

The call brings Watanabe to the threshold of renewed connection, not to a completed recovery. Reiko’s parting words and his own declaration to Midori affirm that the living must go on, yet his disorientation shows that accepting this principle is not the same as knowing how to live. The novel refuses to make grief yield neatly to insight: Watanabe can recognize that he wants Midori and still be unable to locate himself in the world to which he is trying to return.

That unresolved ending also gives Midori’s question its full force. It asks for a location, but the answer exposes Watanabe’s emotional and existential displacement. His call is a real movement toward another person, while his inability to say where he is shows how much remains unsettled. The final scene holds those facts together: he is reaching for life, but the reach does not yet tell him where he stands.