Watanabe’s final call to Midori

Watanabe’s final call to Midori brings the novel to a fragile threshold: after withdrawing into grief for Naoko, he reaches toward a living relationship and asks for a new beginning, only to find that he cannot say where he is. The call makes his choice to seek connection audible, while its unanswered spatial and emotional question refuses to present that choice as a completed recovery.

The Call After Parting

The call follows Watanabe’s parting from Reiko, who has urged him to be happy and to take her share and Naoko’s and combine them for himself. They hold hands briefly before separating. In the immediate aftermath, Watanabe phones Midori. The sequence links a farewell shaped by Naoko’s absence to an attempt to return to someone who remains alive; it is a movement toward the future, but one begun amid loss rather than after grief has ended.

Watanabe’s request is direct and expansive. He says that he has a million things to talk about with Midori, that all he wants in the world is her, and that he wants them to begin everything from the beginning. His words are not merely a report of feeling: by asking to start again, he tries to make a renewed relationship possible. The call gives voice to a decision to turn toward Midori, but it does not establish what their life together will be or resolve what has come before.

Midori’s Silence and Question

Midori does not answer immediately. Her long silence is figured as misty rain falling on newly mown lawns throughout the world. Watanabe presses his forehead against the glass, closes his eyes, and waits. The pause makes the exchange a scene of uncertainty rather than a swift reconciliation: his declaration reaches her, but the narrative withholds her response long enough for his appeal to hang without assurance.

At last, Midori asks, “Where are you now?” The question can be heard as a practical request for his location, but its position after his declaration also gives it emotional force. Watanabe has said what he wants; Midori’s reply turns attention to where he is, and whether he can locate himself at all. The exchange therefore stops short of confirming a reunion or an answer to his request.

The Unlocated Ending

Watanabe grips the receiver, raises his head, and looks beyond the phone box. Asked where he is, he has no idea. People pass before his eyes, walking toward nowhere, while he repeatedly calls out to Midori from what he experiences as the dead center of a place that is no place. The ending keeps two conditions in tension: he has reached out to another person, yet remains profoundly disoriented in the world around him.

That uncertainty resonates with the novel’s account of grief. Watanabe had understood death as part of life, but after Naoko’s death he learned that no truth, sincerity, strength, or kindness can cure the sorrow of losing someone. During his travels along the coast, memories of Naoko repeatedly returned with the force of waves, carrying him into an imagined place where she lived with death inside her; when that tide receded, he was left alone with sadness. On returning to Tokyo, he shut himself in his room, with his memory fixed on the dead rather than the living. The final call marks a movement out of that enclosure, not proof that its hold has vanished.

Significance

The call gathers the novel’s conflict between continuing to live and remaining bound to the dead into one exchange. Watanabe does not claim that choosing Midori will repair his grief; he asks instead to begin again while still unable to orient himself. His appeal is thus both a concrete attempt at connection and an uncertain one. Midori’s question remains the closing pressure on that attempt: Watanabe calls to her, but the narrative ends with him unable to say where he stands.