wind my spring

“Wind my spring” names Watanabe’s daily practice of gathering the energy to go on. The phrase makes perseverance neither a cure for grief nor a grand resolution: it is a small, repeated act of self-maintenance, measured in the ordinary movements of a morning and shadowed by the days when the mechanism is deliberately left unwound.

Meaning and Daily Practice

In a letter to Naoko, Watanabe explains the expression through a precise inventory of his morning. By the time he has risen, brushed his teeth, shaved, eaten breakfast, changed clothes, left the dormitory, and reached the university, he has given himself some thirty-six good twists. He tells himself that the day should be another good one. The metaphor converts an abstract intention to keep living into something countable and repeatable: not a sudden recovery, but energy accumulated through successive, familiar actions.

The habit is audible as well as physical. Other people have told Watanabe that he talks to himself a lot, and he suspects he is mumbling while winding his spring. The imagined winding thus becomes a private instruction carried into public life. Its smallness matters: he does not claim to have overcome sorrow, only to have found a way to prepare for a day that must still be lived.

Connection, Memory, and Obligation

The morning practice is sustained by attachment. Watanabe says that imagining Naoko beside him in bed helps him wind his spring and tell himself that he must live another good day. He connects his effort to hers: just as she cares for the birds and fields each morning, he must do his best where he is. His routine therefore links two separated lives without confusing their circumstances. Remembering Naoko is not a reason to withdraw from the day; in this letter, it helps make the day possible.

Reiko is also present in the letter’s remembered world. Watanabe thinks of her and Naoko, the aviary and its peacock, pigeons, parrots, and turkeys, as well as the rabbits. He recalls the yellow raincapes they wore with their hoods up on a rainy morning, and says he misses Reiko’s guitar at night. These particular images give the practice an intimate texture: his morning resolve is connected to people, sounds, and routines he cannot share with them at that moment.

The Exception of Sunday

Sunday marks a clear limit. Watanabe says it is the one day he does not wind his spring. He has done his laundry and written his letter, but once it is stamped and posted there is nothing he needs to do until sunset. He does not study that day either; weekday hours in the library between lectures have left him with no work to make Sunday a continuation of the week.

The quiet that follows is both peaceful and lonely. Watanabe reads or listens to music and remembers the routes he and Naoko used to take on their Sunday walks around Tokyo. He can picture what she wore on particular walks. The memory is detailed, but it does not eliminate the absence: Sunday’s unwound spring leaves room for recollection and for the loneliness that the weekday routine keeps at a distance. On another Sunday, he says aloud that the day is quiet, peaceful, and lonely, again noting that he has not wound his spring. The repetition makes the exception part of the expression’s meaning, not a contradiction of it.

A Habit Projected into a New Life

After moving away from the dormitory, Watanabe writes that the new setting may give him time to read on the train and that he needs to find easy work for three or four days a week. He describes the practical arrangement he hopes to build as a return to his spring-winding life. The phrase now looks ahead: a changed home, university routine, and search for work are imagined as conditions under which he can re-establish daily steadiness.

That letter also makes clear that the proposed future is relational. Watanabe says that the most important thing is for him and Naoko to be near each other, and suggests that they might begin living together in April, or later if summer suits her better. Spring-winding is thus not simply solitary self-discipline. He imagines it alongside a possible shared life, while leaving the timing to Naoko rather than treating the plan as settled.

The Habit’s Limits and Significance

The metaphor resonates with Watanabe’s earlier understanding that death is not separate from life but part of it. That recognition gives him a way to think about continuing, but it does not make loss painless. After Naoko’s death, he remembers her vividly while travelling far from Tokyo, and the memories can draw him into an imagined place where she is still present. When that tide recedes, he is left alone with sorrow. He concludes that no truth, sincerity, strength, or kindness can cure the sadness of losing someone; it must be lived through, and what is learned will not protect anyone from the next grief.

On returning to Tokyo, Watanabe shuts himself in his room for days, his attention fixed on the dead rather than the living. That withdrawal makes the earlier phrase newly poignant. Winding the spring describes an effort to maintain life, not proof that the effort always succeeds or that grief has been resolved. Its force lies in its modest scale: the morning’s thirty-six twists, the self-addressed instruction to make the day a good one, and the quiet Sunday when the winding stops. The expression holds together persistence and interruption, showing how a routine can help someone live while leaving the sorrow that makes living difficult intact.