Winding One’s Spring

Winding One’s Spring is Toru Watanabe’s metaphor for deliberately gathering the energy to live through an ordinary day. It begins as a morning routine sustained by thoughts of Naoko and Reiko, but its recurrence beside Watanabe’s grief gives it a harder meaning: daily effort can help him continue, without curing the sadness that loss leaves behind.

The Morning Routine

In a letter to Naoko, Watanabe explains that each morning he winds his own spring while completing the steps between waking and reaching the university: getting up, brushing his teeth, shaving, eating breakfast, changing his clothes, and leaving the dormitory. By the time he arrives, he has given the spring some thirty-six turns. He then tells himself, “OK, let's make this day another good one.” The metaphor makes perseverance bodily and incremental: not a revelation that changes his circumstances, but an act repeated through familiar tasks.

The practice is linked to Naoko’s life at the sanatorium. Watanabe thinks of her and Reiko, and of their morning care for the birds and fields; he imagines their work as a counterpart to his own effort in Tokyo. He says that remembering Naoko when he lies in bed helps him wind his spring and that he must do his best where he is, just as she is doing where she is. The distance between them remains, but the image gives that distance a daily point of contact.

Letters, Memory, and Ordinary Time

Writing to Naoko is itself part of Watanabe’s effort to maintain a life. On Sunday, after doing his laundry, he describes the quiet hours ahead: he does not study, and instead reads, listens to music, or remembers the routes they once walked around Tokyo. Sunday is also the day he does not wind his spring. The pause exposes the routine’s emotional cost: weekdays provide a sequence of tasks, while an unoccupied afternoon brings loneliness and memory to the surface.

His letter gathers intimate particulars rather than offering an abstract account of longing. He remembers the yellow raincapes Naoko and Reiko wore while caring for the aviary, and says that he misses Reiko’s guitar at night. Even a small memory of the father of a girl from one of his lectures—a shared crunch of cucumber before the man’s death—makes Watanabe reflect on the little traces people leave behind. The novel places the spring-winding metaphor within this world of concrete recollection, where continuing to live does not require forgetting.

From Routine to a New Life

After moving out of the dormitory, Watanabe tells Naoko that he hopes to return to his spring-winding life. He expects that, in his third year, fewer morning lectures may make the long journey to university manageable, perhaps even leave time to read on the train. He is also looking for easy work three or four days a week. The phrase now points toward rebuilding the material conditions of daily life, not merely enduring a morning.

In the same letter, he proposes that they might begin living together in April, while allowing that summer would suit her better if she preferred it. He suggests that Naoko could return to university if living together worked out, or that he could find her a nearby flat; what matters most to him is that they be near each other. This plan gives the metaphor a relational horizon: the routine he hopes to resume is bound to the possibility of sharing life with Naoko, although the letter does not resolve what she will choose.

Effort Without a Cure

The novel’s earlier reflection on death supplies a deeper context for Watanabe’s daily discipline. He comes to understand death not as the opposite of life but as something life already contains, like fine dust breathed into the lungs. The spring does not defeat that condition; it names the labor of continuing within it. Watanabe’s later writing makes the distinction explicit: life may nurture death, but no truth, sincerity, strength, or kindness can cure the sorrow of losing someone loved.

After Naoko dies, Watanabe travels west along the coast, sleeping on sand, making fires from driftwood, eating dried fish, and listening to the waves while thinking about her. Memories return in a flood, and he describes entering a strange place where the dead remain part of life. Yet the consolation is temporary: when the imagined presence recedes, he is left alone, overwhelmed by sadness. His account insists on both realities—the continuing inner presence of the dead and the pain of their absence.

When Watanabe returns to Tokyo, he shuts himself in his room for days, his memory fixed on the dead rather than the living. Set against this withdrawal, winding one’s spring is not a cure or a completed recovery. It is a modest practice of renewed effort, sustained in part by connection and memory, whose meaning lies precisely in the fact that grief remains even as life must go on.