Watanabe’s wanderings after Naoko’s death are a month-long flight from ordinary life that fails to soften his loss. He leaves Tokyo after Naoko’s funeral, moves west without a destination, and eventually returns on 2 October 1970. The journey’s defining contradiction is that physical distance cannot loosen his bond with the dead: memory keeps bringing Naoko close, while grief makes contact with the living difficult.

Departure and aimless movement

At the end of August, a quiet funeral for Naoko is held in Kobe. Watanabe returns to Tokyo, tells his landlord he will be away and his employer at the Italian restaurant that he will not come to work, and sends Midori a short note asking her to wait because he cannot yet explain himself. After spending three days in cinemas, he packs a rucksack, withdraws his savings, goes to Shinjuku Station, and takes the first express train out of town. The sequence carries him from a private farewell into a deliberately unstructured departure: he leaves obligations behind, but does not know what he is going toward.

His recollection of the route is fractured. He remembers sights, sounds, and smells, but not the towns’ names or the order in which he passed through them. Trains, buses, and lifts in lorries take him from place to place; he sleeps in empty car parks, stations, parks, riverbanks, and on the seashore. Once he persuades people to let him sleep in a local police station, and another time he beds down beside a graveyard. He wants a place where he can stay inside his sleeping bag as long as he likes, out of other people’s way. The changing locations matter less than the repeated act of moving on.

The road is sustained by improvised work and bare necessities. When his money runs low, Watanabe works as a labourer for a few days, then continues once he has enough to travel. He sleeps in his bag, sometimes drinks cheap whisky before falling asleep, and accepts the difference between towns where people offer food and mosquito coils and those where residents call the police to chase him from parks. Neither welcome nor rejection alters his purpose: he wants to fall asleep in places he does not know. His wandering is not a tour or a search with a clear destination, but a suspension of ordinary attachments and plans.

Naoko’s persistence in memory

As he travels down the coast, perhaps in Tottori or on the hidden side of Hyogo, the landscape gives Watanabe a temporary routine rather than relief. Walking beside the sea is easy; he finds sand to sleep on, makes fires from driftwood, roasts dried fish bought from a local fisherman, drinks whisky, and listens to the waves while thinking of Naoko. The simple repetition of fire, food, drink, and surf sets the bodily rhythm of the journey against the fact he cannot absorb: Naoko is dead and no longer part of the world.

At night, memories arrive not as a controlled act of remembrance but as a flood. Watanabe recalls Naoko in her yellow raincape cleaning the aviary with a feed bag, the birthday cake that caved in and her tears soaking his shirt, her camel-hair coat on a winter walk, the hairslide she touched, her clear eyes, and her blue nightdress as she sat with her knees drawn up on a sofa. The specificity of these scenes makes absence more palpable: the memories preserve gestures and appearances, but cannot restore Naoko’s living body.

In the inward place created by these memories, Naoko seems present. Watanabe imagines speaking to and holding her, and experiences death there not as the force that ends life but as one of the elements within it. In that imagined encounter, Naoko tells him, "Don't worry, it's only death. Don't let it bother you." Her familiar gestures soothe him, and for a moment he feels no sadness. But this reprieve depends on the memory-world in which she can still answer him; when it recedes, he is left alone on the beach, overcome by darkness and tears. The return of grief reveals the limit of consolation: vivid remembrance sustains a bond, yet cannot undo the loss.

Grief, other people, and the limits of consolation

The journey sharpens a distinction Watanabe had formed after Kizuki’s death: death exists not as life’s opposite but as part of life. Naoko’s death teaches him a different, harder lesson. No truth, sincerity, strength, or kindness can cure the sadness of losing someone loved. Grief must be lived through to its end, but what is learned from one loss offers no protection against the next. The thought accompanies him as he walks farther west with sand in his hair and a knapsack on his back, surviving on whisky, bread, and water. The philosophy does not resolve his mourning; it names what mourning cannot be made to surrender.

One windy evening beside an abandoned hulk, a young fisherman finds Watanabe weeping in his sleeping bag and offers him a cigarette. Watanabe has not smoked for more than a year. When asked why he is crying, he almost reflexively says that his mother has died and that he is on the road because he cannot bear the sadness. The fisherman offers sympathy, brings sake and two glasses, and tells him about losing his own mother at sixteen, after she wore herself out working despite her poor health. Watanabe can barely listen. His private anguish makes another person’s account seem intolerably remote, and his unspoken rage at the comparison shows how grief has narrowed his capacity to meet another person’s sorrow.

After the fisherman leaves, Watanabe thinks of an old girlfriend from his last year of school and recognizes that he had taken her sweetness for granted, scarcely considering her feelings or the pain he caused. This recollection turns his attention, however briefly, from what has been done to him toward harm he may have done to someone else. Then nausea, a headache, and guilt over lying to the fisherman and taking his money converge. He decides that he cannot continue this way forever and walks to a railway station to find a route home. His departure from the road follows not a cure but an encounter with the costs of remaining shut inside his own grief.

Return without recovery

At the ticket office, Watanabe learns that he can reach Osaka by morning by changing night trains, then take the bullet train to Tokyo. He buys his ticket with the 5,000-yen note the fisherman gave him and checks a newspaper while waiting: it is 2 October 1970, and he has been travelling for a full month. He understands that he has to return to the real world. The date gives a precise endpoint to a journey whose towns and sequence he cannot recall, but the passage of time has not made its central loss more bearable.

The month away neither lifts Watanabe’s spirits nor softens the blow of Naoko’s death. Back in Tokyo, he cannot bring himself to telephone Midori. He cannot tell her that it is all over and that they can be happy together; Naoko is dead, while Midori remains alive, and that difference makes an easy transition into a new relationship feel impossible. Instead, he shuts himself in his room for days, overcome by a sense of defilement, his attention still fixed on the dead rather than the living. The journey ends geographically, but not in restored participation in ordinary life.

The rooms he had set aside for Naoko remain shuttered, their furniture draped in white and their windowsills dusty. Watanabe spends much of each day in them, thinking of Kizuki and imagining that he has finally given Naoko back to him: she had been Kizuki’s to begin with, Watanabe reflects, and in the imperfect world of the living he had tried to establish a new life for the two of them. He now feels that Kizuki drew part of him into the world of the dead and that Naoko has drawn another part there. This ending gives the wanderings their full measure: they take Watanabe away from Tokyo, but do not free him from the dead or return him ready to join the living. The trip records a passage through grief, not its completion.