“I have nothing”

“I have nothing” is a short song Midori Kobayashi performs while she and Toru Watanabe watch a nearby fire. Its list of things she would like to make for someone but cannot—stew without a pot, a scarf without wool, a poem without a pen—ends in a plain statement of lack. The song is funny, conspicuously bad, and unmistakably Midori’s own; its improvised performance turns a precarious moment into an act of companionship without pretending that music can make the danger or the losses in their lives disappear.

The Fire and the Performance

Midori brings two floor pillows, four cans of beer, and a guitar upstairs to the laundry deck. Smoke rises from the fire as she and Watanabe settle in to watch. Watanabe worries that drinking and singing beside a local fire might anger the neighbors; Midori dismisses the concern, saying, “We never worry about what the neighbours might think.” Her refusal to submit their evening to imagined judgment establishes the song’s tone: casual, irreverent, and guided by her own impulses.

The scene is not insulated from the emergency. The fire flares and dies down; people yell and give orders, a newspaper helicopter circles overhead, a police officer uses a loudspeaker to push bystanders back, and a child cries for his mother. Glass shatters somewhere nearby. As the wind shifts unpredictably, white ash begins falling around the pair. Midori nevertheless keeps sipping beer and singing. The song arrives not in a calm recital but amid signs that the fire could worsen, making her persistence both a comic refusal to behave solemnly and a distinctive way of staying present with Watanabe.

A Deliberately Makeshift Song

After working through familiar folk standards, Midori sings an odd song she says she wrote herself. Its three stanzas repeat the same structure: she would like to cook stew for the person addressed, knit them a scarf, and write them a poem, but lacks, respectively, a pot, wool, and a pen. The repeated “I'd love to” makes the impulse to give clear; each missing object blocks its expression. The little catalogue is concrete and domestic, while its final absence of a pen turns the song itself into a playful contradiction: Midori has made a poem-like performance out of having no means to write one.

She announces the title as “I Have Nothing.” Watanabe judges both the words and music truly terrible, and his attempted participation in her earlier singing has already ended when his bass harmony proves so bad that Midori gives up trying to recruit him. He listens instead, watches the fire, and drinks his beer. The song’s value does not depend on musical skill. Its awkwardness is part of its character: it refuses polish, and its blunt refrain makes the lack it names an occasion for performance rather than concealment.

Midori’s Explanation and Watanabe’s Response

When Midori asks what he thought of the song, Watanabe answers cautiously that it was unique, original, and expressive of her personality. His compliment carefully avoids claiming that it was good. Midori accepts it and clarifies the theme: she has nothing. Her explanation gives the song a direct personal point without spelling out every circumstance behind that statement. The scene then moves toward her recollection of her mother’s death, linking the playful performance to loss without turning the song into a cure or an uncomplicated confession.

The physical gesture that follows also matters: tired of singing, Midori puts down her guitar and slumps against Watanabe’s shoulder “like a cat in the sun.” The performance has made a small space for ease and closeness, but it does not erase the unease around them. Watanabe has been imagining the possibility of an explosion if a nearby petrol station catches fire; Midori continues to sing under falling ash. Their different responses coexist in the scene, and the song becomes one of the ways they share the moment without having to resolve that difference.

Lack, Memory, and the Novel’s Wider Losses

The song’s title can be heard beside the novel’s larger language of death and deprivation, but the connection is not an equation. Watanabe comes to understand that death is part of life, not its opposite; after Naoko’s death, he discovers that this insight cannot cure the sorrow of losing someone. “I Have Nothing” is far smaller in scale: a comic song about missing everyday materials, sung during an evening with another living person. Its importance lies partly in that contrast. The song offers an immediate, limited kind of expression and companionship, not a philosophy capable of mastering grief.

That distinction becomes sharper when set against Watanabe’s later withdrawal. After returning to Tokyo, he shuts himself in his room for days, with his memory fixed on the dead rather than the living. During his travels, memories of Naoko return with such force that he imagines speaking with and holding her, before the tide of recollection recedes and leaves him alone with sadness. In that landscape, the dead remain bound to the living through memory, but memory offers no power to reverse loss. The fire-deck song belongs to an earlier, more companionable register: Midori names lack in an absurd little creation, while Watanabe listens beside her. It does not promise that nothing can be lost; it shows how a makeshift expression can briefly be shared while life continues around it.