Watanabe’s depression and isolation

Watanabe’s depression and isolation are presented not as a single crisis but as a condition that gathers around bereavement, separation, and the effort to keep moving through ordinary days. The novel gives this state a recurring shape: first a knot of unresolved feeling, then the swamp of a year in which progress seems laborious, and finally a withdrawal in which Watanabe cannot reach others or be reached. Naoko’s death intensifies that isolation, while his reflections on grief make clear that insight can accompany sorrow without curing it.

The Swamp and the Pace of 1969

Looking back on 1969, Watanabe describes the year as a deep, sticky swamp. Each step seems liable to pull off his shoe, and darkness stretches before and behind him. The image makes his depression a problem of duration as well as mood: he is exhausted by continuing, but stopping does not offer a way out. Time itself seems to move at the pace of his faltering steps, while people around him have gone ahead.

That private slowness contrasts with the public language of imminent transformation. The world appears to be on the verge of great change, and people proclaim revolutionary upheaval; to Watanabe, however, the changes that arrive seem like insubstantial stage sets. The contrast does not make his distress merely a judgment about politics. It shows how little the promise of a transformed world alters his experience of being stuck, uncertain of his direction, and able only to take the next step.

The daily routine continues around this inner stagnation. Watanabe attends lectures without enthusiasm, works three nights a week at a record shop, rereads The Great Gatsby, does laundry on Sundays, and writes long letters to Naoko. He sometimes shares a meal or an outing with Midori, while she and her sister move from the Kobayashi Bookshop to a two-bedroom flat near Myogadani. Yet the prospect of joining Nagasawa’s excursions feels like too much effort. Even the idea of casual company does not outweigh the work of going out, meeting people, and sustaining an encounter. Watanabe suspects that what Hatsumi told him has affected him: thinking about Naoko can make him happier than sleeping with an anonymous stranger. The memory of Naoko remains vivid, and ordinary activity coexists with an attachment to the absent.

Isolation Before the Bereavement

Watanabe’s distance from others has an earlier, more abstract form. When he begins a new life in the dorm, he tries to stop taking everything so seriously and to establish a proper distance from the world. The attempted adjustment seems at first to work, but an indistinct knot remains inside him. It gradually takes the form of a conviction: death exists not as life’s opposite but as part of life. What had once seemed to him a clean separation between life and death no longer holds. The recognition supplies language for what he carries, but it does not resolve the feeling.

His discomfort with dormitory life also becomes concrete. Near the end of February, after a fight with a third-year student on his floor, Watanabe is summoned to the dorm head’s office and given a warning. Nagasawa has intervened to straighten things out, but the reprimand leaves Watanabe increasingly uncomfortable in the dorm. The academic year ends with him short of the credits needed; his exam results are mostly Cs and Ds, with a few Bs. These facts do not alone explain his isolation, but they place it in an unsettled daily life marked by conflict, poor academic results, and a growing sense of not fitting where he lives.

The estrangement sharpens in April, when Watanabe feels everyone important to him has gone away from where he stands. Naoko and Nagasawa are absent, and Midori refuses to speak to him. He sees her with a girl wearing glasses or with a tall, short-haired young man in white basketball shoes. Around him, other people seem to enjoy the spring sunshine together; he has no one to greet him, and even misses Storm Trooper. Midori’s repeated refusal is not a vague misunderstanding to him: he hears that she means it, and the month passes under a sense of hopeless isolation.

May brings a bodily rhythm to that loneliness. As the sun goes down, Watanabe’s heart can swell, tremble, and lurch with pain; he tries to endure the episodes until they pass, left with a dull ache. At those times he writes to Naoko, describing only things he finds touching, pleasant, or beautiful: grasses, a spring breeze, moonlight, a film, a song, or a book. Rereading the letters comforts him and briefly restores a sense that his world is wonderful. Yet neither Naoko nor Reiko replies. Writing thus becomes both a way to sustain a bond and a private means of consolation in the absence of an answer.

Spring, Memory, and Withdrawal

The spring garden later becomes difficult for Watanabe to look at. Sitting outside after reading a letter dated 31 March, he knows he ought to think seriously about what to do, but cannot yet face that work. He spends the day looking at the garden and stroking Seagull. As twilight deepens, the cherry blossoms call up an image of illness and decay, and his thoughts turn to Naoko’s body and the question of why she is so ill. Spring, usually associated with renewal, becomes for him an unwelcome season carrying pain and dread.

Closing the curtains does not offer relief. Watanabe feels that the spring he cannot escape brings only an ache, and he describes an intensity of hatred he has never experienced before. For three days afterward he feels cut off behind a membrane: he can barely hear what others say, and they have difficulty understanding him. He sits against a wall, stares at the ceiling, eats whatever is within reach when hungry, drinks water, and uses whisky to knock himself out when sadness becomes too much. He does not bathe or shave. The account makes isolation more than solitude: it is a temporary failure of contact, in which other people cannot reach him and he cannot answer them.

After Naoko’s Death

After Naoko dies, Watanabe travels away from Tokyo, moving down the coast and sleeping on the sand when he can. He makes a fire from driftwood, cooks dried fish bought from a local fisherman, drinks whisky, and thinks about her. The distance he travels does not make the death comprehensible. He has heard the coffin being closed, but cannot adjust to the fact that Naoko is gone. At night, memories return in a stream: her yellow raincape, the birthday cake, her winter coat, the hairslide she always wore, and her quiet presence on a sofa. Their accumulating vividness makes the dead feel near even as Watanabe knows she is no longer present in the world.

In these memories he enters an imagined place where he can speak with and hold Naoko. Death there is not a decisive boundary ending life, but one element within it; the dreamlike closeness briefly soothes him. When the experience recedes, however, he is left alone, overcome by sadness. The return of grief shows the limit of memory’s consolation: it can make the absent feel present for a time, but it cannot restore her or protect him from the pain of losing her.

Watanabe connects this understanding to the lesson he had drawn from Kizuki’s death: death is part of life. But Naoko’s death teaches him something different and more difficult. No truth, sincerity, strength, or kindness can cure the sadness of losing someone loved. A person can only see that sadness through to its end and learn from it; what is learned will not prevent the next unexpected sorrow. As he travels west with a knapsack, surviving on whisky, bread, and water, this reflection accompanies rather than resolves his mourning.

Return and Continuing Grief

When Watanabe returns to Tokyo, he shuts himself in his room for days. His attention remains fixed on the dead rather than the living. He spends much of his time in rooms set aside in his memory for Naoko, imagining their furniture covered and the windowsills dusty. He also thinks of Kizuki, mentally acknowledging that Naoko was bound to him and that Watanabe had tried to establish a new life with her in the world of the living. His recollection turns against the hope that a new beginning could undo the older attachment: he imagines giving Naoko back to Kizuki, whom she had chosen, and recognizes that both deaths have pulled parts of him toward the world of the dead.

The state remains unresolved rather than ending in a clean passage from grief to recovery. Earlier, letters and daily routines offered intermittent points of contact; after Naoko’s death, memory and self-seclusion dominate. The novel’s movement from the year-long swamp to the three-day barrier of withdrawal and then to the prolonged journey and return shows isolation changing form, not disappearing. Watanabe can articulate what loss has taught him, but the story refuses to equate understanding with relief: continuing to live means carrying sorrow that no general truth can remove.