Watanabe’s month-long journey

Watanabe’s month-long journey is an attempt to live at a distance from the world after Naoko’s death, but it does not deliver him from grief. He leaves Tokyo without a destination, moving through towns whose names and order he later cannot recall. The month ends with a return prompted not by healing but by exhaustion and the recognition that he cannot continue indefinitely on the road. Its deeper consequence is a hard distinction: the philosophy he formed around death can explain loss, but it cannot lessen the sorrow of losing Naoko.

Departure and Aimlessness

At the end of a quiet funeral for Naoko in Kobe, Watanabe returns to Tokyo, tells his landlord he will be away and his restaurant boss that he will not be coming to work, and writes Midori a short note asking her to wait a little longer. He spends three days in cinemas, then packs a rucksack, withdraws his savings, and boards the first express train out of Shinjuku Station. His departure is deliberate, but it has no chosen destination: when he later tries to recall the journey, the towns have lost their names and the route its order.

He travels by train, bus, and rides in lorries, sleeping wherever he can remain out of people’s way—in empty car parks, stations, parks, riverbanks, and on the seashore. Once he persuades people to let him sleep in a police station; another night he sleeps beside a graveyard. He wants to sleep as long as he can inside his sleeping bag. When exhaustion drives him to bed, he drinks cheap whisky and falls asleep; how strangers respond varies, from bringing food and mosquito coils to calling the police to have him chased from a park. Their welcome or rejection makes little difference to him: the point is to stay in unfamiliar towns and put himself to sleep.

The journey is not sustained by money he already has. When his funds run low, Watanabe takes labouring work for a few days, then moves on once he has what he needs. His wandering therefore alternates between short periods of work and renewed flight, without a destination or plan for a settled life. The world seems large and filled with strange people, but its variety does not draw him into a new attachment. At one point he calls Midori because he needs to hear her voice; when she points out that term has begun, assignments are due, and he has been out of touch for three weeks, he says he cannot yet return to Tokyo.

The Coast and the Persistence of Memory

By the time he is travelling down the coast, as far from Tokyo as he can get, Watanabe may be in Tottori or on the hidden side of Hyogo. The uncertainty of the location matches the looseness of his itinerary. Walking along the seashore gives him somewhere to sleep in the sand; he makes fires from driftwood, roasts dried fish bought from local fishermen, drinks whisky, and listens to the waves while thinking of Naoko. The coast offers a place to remain alone, not a setting in which her death becomes comprehensible.

Watanabe cannot reconcile the vividness of his memories with the fact that Naoko’s body no longer exists. At night, recollections arrive without his choosing them: Naoko in a yellow raincape tending the aviary, the collapsed birthday cake and her tears soaking his shirt, her camel-hair coat on a winter walk, her familiar hairslide, and her blue nightdress. In these memories, she seems present enough to speak to and hold. Their force briefly creates a world in which death is part of life and Naoko still lives within it; then that imagined nearness recedes, leaving him alone with sorrow. Memory sustains a bond, but it cannot restore her.

Grief, Kindness, and Return

As he continues west, Watanabe arrives at a painful limit to the philosophy he had formed after Kizuki’s death: death exists not as the opposite of life but as part of it. He now recognizes that this truth does not cure grief for a particular person. No truth, sincerity, strength, or kindness can remove the sorrow of losing someone loved; it must be lived through, and what is learned from one loss cannot protect the bereaved from the next. The month on the road makes this distinction concrete: understanding death in general does not enable him to accept Naoko’s absence.

One windy evening, wrapped in his sleeping bag beside an abandoned hulk and weeping, he accepts a cigarette from a young fisherman. Asked why he is crying, Watanabe says almost by reflex that his mother has died and that he took to the road because he could not bear the sadness. The fisherman, whose own mother died when he was sixteen, responds with sympathy and brings sake and glasses. Watanabe half-listens to the account of the fisherman’s loss, then feels sudden anger: to him, the other man’s grief seems unable to match the death of Naoko. The anger passes, but the encounter shows how loss has narrowed his capacity to attend to another person even as he depends on that person’s company.

The fisherman later returns with two boxes of sushi and a fresh bottle of sake. He explains which box should be eaten first, offers Watanabe a place to sleep, and, when Watanabe declines, presses a 5,000-yen note into his shirt pocket, insisting that it is his feelings rather than merely money. Watanabe accepts it. The gesture does not resolve his grief, but it becomes part of the chain of circumstances that makes departure possible: after vomiting beside the old ship and feeling guilty about having lied about his mother and taken the money, he decides he cannot continue this way forever. At the railway station, he uses the fisherman’s note to buy a ticket back to Tokyo.

The date in the newspaper is 2 October 1970. Watanabe has been travelling for a full month. He arranges a night-train connection as far as Osaka and plans to take the bullet train from there. The return is a decision to re-enter what he calls the real world, not evidence that the journey has restored him. He reaches Tokyo in almost the same condition in which he left and cannot bring himself to phone Midori. Naoko is dead, Midori is alive, but that fact alone offers no ready-made transition from mourning to a new relationship.

Aftermath and Narrative Significance

Back in Tokyo, Watanabe withdraws into his room for days, overcome by a sense of defilement and unable to redirect his attention from the dead to the living. He spends much of each day in rooms he had set aside for Naoko: their windowsills are dusty, the furniture is draped in white, and the rooms remain shuttered. The journey has carried him through unfamiliar towns but not out of his attachment to the dead. Rather than concluding his mourning, the return exposes how little physical movement has changed its hold on him.

The episode sets two stages of Watanabe’s understanding of death against one another. After Kizuki’s death, he came to see death as already present within life; after Naoko’s, he learns that this insight is no remedy for the singular pain of losing someone loved. The road, with its sleeping bag, whisky, shore fires, and repeated movement west, gives that difference a physical shape: he can keep moving, yet cannot leave Naoko behind. The fisherman’s unexpected generosity briefly connects him to another living person and gives him a practical means of returning, but neither kindness nor the return itself resolves his grief. He comes back to Tokyo alive, while his attention remains fixed on the dead.