Watanabe–Midori relationship

The Watanabe–Midori relationship is the novel’s fraught movement from connection toward commitment: Toru Watanabe comes to recognize that he loves Midori Kobayashi, even as his attachment to Naoko and grief at her death remain real. The relationship does not resolve that grief or replace the dead with the living. Instead, it asks Watanabe to acknowledge both his divided feelings and his responsibility to the person still beside him, ending with his call to Midori and her unanswered question about where he is.

Acknowledging Love

Watanabe’s recognition of his love for Midori comes into focus after they reunite. He looks back on their closeness and understands that he had already known what he felt, while avoiding the conclusion for a long time. His certainty that he would choose the same day again makes the realization more than a passing response: he accepts the intimacy they shared and the love that had been developing between them.

The decision is not presented as a clean emotional transfer. Watanabe says that he still loves Naoko, and describes an inner space reserved for her alone. His love for Midori and his continuing attachment to Naoko coexist; neither cancels the other. The tension makes his choice difficult not because he has ceased to care for Naoko, but because commitment to Midori must be made in the presence of grief and unresolved feeling.

Honesty, Counsel, and Responsibility

Watanabe responds to the conflict by writing to Reiko with what he calls total honesty. He explains his relationship with Midori and what has happened between them, looking for counsel rather than concealing his change of heart from everyone. Reiko’s reply frames love as something that may or may not work out, but says that sincere attraction naturally leads to falling in love and that giving oneself to it is a form of sincerity. On the question of what to do next, she tells him to reach his own conclusion with Midori.

Reiko also advises him not to tell Naoko about the relationship at that point, offering to help devise a plan if circumstances make disclosure necessary. Her advice distinguishes private honesty with a confidante from a disclosure she judges Watanabe should not make to Naoko in her current condition. Later, she confronts him directly about whether he and Midori have slept together, and responds that the crucial decision had already been made: he could not leave Midori. In her view, Naoko’s being alive or dead does not create that choice; Watanabe had chosen Midori before Naoko’s death.

That distinction does not excuse Watanabe from the pain of what he has promised or failed to do. He tells Reiko that he cannot forget Naoko and feels unable to forgive himself for turning away after saying he would wait. He describes his bond with Naoko as having existed at the border between life and death. Reiko does not tell him to stop grieving. She urges him to continue feeling the pain and to learn from it, while warning that his suffering must not become a reason to wound Midori further. For her, growing up means taking responsibility for his choices and for their consequences.

Grief and the Limits of Resolution

The relationship develops against the novel’s account of death as part of life. Watanabe had earlier come to understand death not as life’s opposite, but as something present within it. Naoko’s death makes that idea more intimate and more painful: on his travels along the coast, he thinks about her, and memories arrive with a force that takes him imaginatively into a place where he can still speak to and hold the dead. When that sense of closeness recedes, he is left alone with grief.

Watanabe’s reflections draw a limit around what any new relationship can accomplish. He concludes that no truth, sincerity, strength, or kindness can cure the sadness of losing someone loved. Grief must be lived through, and what a person learns from it cannot prevent the next sorrow. This does not make his love for Midori meaningless; it means that a future with her cannot be purchased by declaring the past finished. His return to Tokyo underscores the difficulty: overwhelmed by a sense of defilement, he shuts himself away for days and remains mentally fixed on the dead rather than the living.

Choosing a Future Without Erasing the Past

Reiko’s visit helps Watanabe face the difference between enduring grief and abandoning the living. She tells him that he should be happy with Midori, while insisting that his pain over Naoko is separate from his relationship with her. The advice does not demand that he forget Naoko or declare himself healed. It asks him not to let guilt and sorrow damage a bond that is still capable of being lived.

After Reiko parts from him, Watanabe telephones Midori. He says that he has a great deal to tell her, that all he wants is her, and that he wants them to begin everything again from the beginning. The call is a direct act of commitment, but its ending remains open: Midori is silent for a long time before asking where he is. The novel closes the relationship on that question rather than on a stated reconciliation. Watanabe has chosen to reach toward Midori; whether they can begin again is left suspended, with the past still present and the future not yet answered.