Watanabe’s withdrawal after returning to Tokyo

Watanabe’s withdrawal after returning to Tokyo is the aftermath of a month spent trying to outrun Naoko’s death and the beginning of a new enclosure: back in the city, he shuts himself away, unable to speak to Midori or re-enter ordinary life. Its decisive significance lies in the distance between what he understands and what he can bear. He has learned that death is part of life, yet that truth offers no remedy for grief, and his attention remains fixed on the dead rather than the living.

Return Without Recovery

The journey had taken Watanabe down the coast, as far from Tokyo as he could get. He slept on the sand, made fires from driftwood, roasted dried fish bought from a fisherman, and drank whisky while thinking about Naoko. The sea and the open road provided somewhere to continue moving, but they did not make her death comprehensible. Memories kept returning with an almost physical force, carrying him into an imagined place where Naoko still lived and he could speak with and hold her. When that inward tide receded, he was alone again with his grief.

The month away neither lifted his spirits nor softened the loss. On 2 October 1970, after realizing that he had been travelling for a full month, Watanabe decided to return to Tokyo. He arrived in much the same state as when he had left. The journey had changed his location, not his capacity to live with what had happened; even the decision to go back did not amount to a recovery.

The Living and the Dead

Back in Tokyo, Watanabe cannot bring himself to phone Midori. He cannot begin by telling her that everything is over and that the two of them can now be happy together. Such a declaration would turn Naoko’s death into a convenient prelude to a new relationship, precisely the simplification he cannot accept. The facts, as he recognizes them, remain starkly unequal: Naoko is dead, while Midori is still a living, breathing person. His awareness of that difference does not yet enable him to respond to Midori; instead, it intensifies his sense that he has been defiled by the circumstances of returning to life.

That shame takes the form of seclusion. For days he does nothing but shut himself up in his room, with his memory fixed on the dead rather than the living. His withdrawal is not a declared rejection of Midori, nor does the account show him resolving what their relationship will become. It is an inability to approach her while the loss still occupies the center of his attention. The novel leaves the imagined future of the pair suspended against the undeniable present of Naoko’s death.

The Rooms Set Aside for Naoko

Within himself, Watanabe has made rooms for Naoko. He imagines them shuttered, with furniture draped in white and dust gathering on the windowsills, and spends much of each day there. The details turn grief into a place he can inhabit: shut away from the living, he keeps watch over a world preserved for the dead. He speaks inwardly to Kizuki as if Naoko has finally returned to the person she belonged with, and tells him that, in the imperfect world of the living, he had tried to establish a new life for himself and Naoko. Now, he says, he is giving her back to Kizuki.

This inward conversation joins two losses in Watanabe’s memory. Kizuki’s death had already drawn part of him into the world of the dead; now he feels that Naoko has taken another part. His imagined surrender of her does not resolve the attachment or make the loss less painful. Rather, it gives form to a divided allegiance: he recognizes that Naoko is gone, yet continues to live among memories in which she remains present.

Death, Memory, and Grief

Watanabe’s retreat revisits an idea he had first struggled to put into words: death exists not as the opposite of life but as part of it. At the time, the idea had felt less like an abstract maxim than like a knot inside him, the recognition that death was already present in the objects and lives around him. After Naoko’s death, memory makes that proposition intimate. In the imagined place where she still lives, death is one element among others, not a decisive boundary that ends her presence. But the comfort of that vision lasts only while he can remain within it; when it passes, grief returns.

His later understanding is harder and less consoling. Living, he reflects, means nurturing death, but this truth does not prepare anyone for the next bereavement. No truth, sincerity, strength, or kindness can cure the sorrow of losing a loved one. Watanabe can only endure the sadness and learn from it, without expecting that what he learns will protect him from another unexpected loss. The novel therefore distinguishes recognition from healing: a philosophy may describe death accurately without restoring the person who grieves to the living world.

Watanabe gives his isolation its starkest image by likening himself to the caretaker of a huge, empty museum that no one ever visits, watched over for no one but himself. The image brings together the rooms reserved for Naoko and his own condition in Tokyo: he maintains a space full of absences, preserving what memory can hold while remaining cut off from ordinary contact. The withdrawal is a consequence of grief that has not been mastered, not proof that it has ended. At this point, the dead still command his attention, and returning to Tokyo has not yet brought him back to the living.