Watanabe meets Midori Kobayashi

Watanabe meets Midori Kobayashi over lunch in a small restaurant off a quiet backstreet, beginning a relationship built less on ceremony than on her matter-of-fact initiative. She recognizes him before he recognizes her, then turns an accidental encounter into repeated meetings: she borrows his lecture notes, arranges to return them over lunch, and takes him to a place she has treasured since school. The scene introduces Midori as an energetic presence in Watanabe’s university life and lays the groundwork for a bond that later becomes inseparable from his struggle to remain among the living after Naoko’s death.

The First Encounter

The meeting takes place at 11:30 on a Monday, after Watanabe’s lecture on Euripides in History of Drama. He has walked ten minutes to a little restaurant where an older married couple and a part-time waitress serve a menu that includes omelette and salad. The place is quieter and slightly more expensive than the student dining hall, but its relaxed atmosphere and good cooking have made it a refuge for him.

Four neatly dressed students enter and sit near the door. One of the women, wearing extremely short hair, dark sunglasses, and a white cotton minidress, keeps glancing toward Watanabe. She crosses to his table and identifies him by name. Her certainty unsettles him: he cannot remember meeting her, and assumes he would have recognized her if they had. Yet the restaurant encounter is not a matter of mistaken identity; Midori has noticed him, while he has not yet placed her.

Watanabe asks whether they know each other and mentions that he does not recall her. Midori answers with the name of the course’s playwright, Euripides, prompting Watanabe to supply the title Electra. The exchange locates their connection in a shared class rather than a prior intimacy. It also makes the first conversation a small exercise in recognition: Midori already knows who he is, while Watanabe must catch up.

Midori Turns an Encounter into a Connection

Midori introduces herself by name and jokes that green looks terrible on her, despite the meaning of her name. She adds that her sister is named Momoko, or “Peach girl,” making her own name part of her frank, playful self-presentation. The conversation moves easily from names to the practical matter of the class: she has missed two lectures, knows nobody there, and asks to borrow Watanabe’s notes.

Watanabe agrees and checks that he has not written anything personal before handing over his notebook. Midori asks him to meet her at the restaurant at noon two days later, when she will return it and buy him lunch. Her suggestion is both specific and disarming. She treats eating alone as something that can simply be interrupted by company, and insists that buying lunch is something she likes doing rather than a debt incurred by borrowing the notes.

The arrangement gives their acquaintance a concrete next step. Midori does not leave their meeting to chance: she sets a time, offers a meal, and reminds Watanabe to write it down so he will not forget. This directness defines the relationship’s early rhythm. Watanabe supplies the notes; Midori supplies the invitation and the momentum.

A Shared Classroom, a Different Kind of Conversation

When Midori returns Watanabe’s notebook during a later lecture, she slips him a note asking whether he is angry about Wednesday. Her apology shows that their arrangement has already acquired enough continuity for a missed meeting to require acknowledgment. The exchange takes place amid a lecture on Euripides, where a professor explains the use of the deus ex machina before two helmeted students enter and commandeer the second half for political debate.

The students’ handbills call for a university strike and denounce the university’s political and educational structures. Watanabe objects less to their stated causes than to the flatness of their slogans and speech. Midori cuts through the interruption with a simple suggestion that they leave. Outside, she jokes about whether that makes them counter-revolutionaries and whether revolutionaries would string them up if their side won.

Their departure distinguishes the connection forming between them from the political performance inside the lecture hall. Midori does not ask Watanabe to adopt a position or defend his exit; she shares his escape from a discussion she finds tiresome and turns it into an occasion for humor. Their companionship emerges through an ordinary choice made together: they walk out, leaving the slogans behind.

Lunch at Yotsuya

Midori has somewhere else in mind, and takes Watanabe by bus to Yotsuya, to a boxed-lunch shop tucked behind the station. The meal arrives in square red-lacquered boxes with soup. Watanabe finds it worth the bus ride; Midori knows the place from her schooldays and explains that her old school was nearby.

Her story gives the restaurant a history that predates Watanabe. The school was so strict that students had to sneak out to eat there, and could be suspended if caught. Midori’s invitation therefore brings him not just to a good, inexpensive meal but to a place tied to her own earlier life. In the brief interval between university classes, she shares a personal landmark, and their growing acquaintance takes on a geography of its own: lecture room, street-side restaurant, bus ride, and the hidden shop behind the station.

Significance and Later Contrast

The first meeting is modest in scale, but its pattern matters. Watanabe is a solitary diner; Midori notices him, approaches him, and turns a borrowed notebook into a promised lunch. Their early contact depends on concrete acts of attention rather than grand declarations: recognizing a name, lending class notes, apologizing by note, leaving a lecture together, and sharing a meal in a place Midori remembers from school.

That emerging connection acquires deeper significance in retrospect. After Naoko dies, Watanabe travels along the coast, haunted by memories of her and unable to reconcile her vivid presence in his mind with her absence from the world. He comes to understand that accepting death as part of life does not cure the grief caused by losing someone. When he returns to Tokyo, Midori is alive, but Watanabe is so fixed on the dead that he shuts himself in his room for days. The contrast does not erase the particularity of their first meeting; it reveals why Midori’s initial, practical invitation to share lunch belongs to the novel’s larger concern with the difficult movement from isolation toward living connection.