1970

1970 is a threshold in Toru Watanabe’s account: the year his teenage life ends, but not the year uncertainty does. It brings practical movement toward independence—exams passed, a dangerous dormitory left behind, a house found—while Naoko’s worsening illness makes the words between them increasingly difficult to reach.

A year of transition

Watanabe remembers 1970 as having “a whole new sound to it.” The turn of the calendar gives shape to a personal transition: his teenage years are over, and he imagines himself stepping into a “whole new swamp.” The image offers no promise of solid ground. Rather, it makes adulthood feel like entry into another uncertain landscape.

The shift is also material. Watanabe passes his end-of-year examinations with relative ease, explaining that attending lectures and having little else to do had made success undemanding. The understated account contrasts the symbolic weight of leaving adolescence with the ordinary mechanics of passing exams.

The dormitory grows dangerous

The dormitory’s political tensions become physical. Several men active in political factions keep helmets and iron pipes in their rooms, then clash with baseball players associated with the dormitory head. Two men are injured and six expelled. The incident does not end with the immediate confrontation: its aftershocks produce minor fights almost daily, leaving the atmosphere oppressive and residents’ nerves strained.

Watanabe himself nearly gets knocked out by one of the baseball players. Nagasawa intervenes and smooths things over, helping him avoid a beating. The episode makes leaving the dormitory more than a search for convenience or privacy: Watanabe is trying to get out of a place where recurring violence has made ordinary life unsafe.

A secluded house in Kichijoji

After most of his exams are finished, Watanabe searches seriously for a flat. A week later he finds one far out in Kichijoji. It is inconveniently situated but unusually independent: a former gardener’s cottage at the corner of a sizable property, separated from the main house by a broad, neglected garden.

The arrangement affords privacy. The elderly landlords use the front gate and Watanabe the back; the cottage has a large room, a small kitchen and bathroom, an enormous closet, and a veranda facing the garden. The couple rent it well below market value, on the condition that he will leave the following year if their grandson comes to Tokyo. They tell him he can live as he pleases and will face no demands from them. His new independence is therefore real but provisional, like the year itself: a separate space secured for now, with its continuation left open.

Communication under strain

The year’s movement toward a new life runs alongside Naoko’s increasing difficulty finding and using words. Earlier, she describes feeling divided against herself: she knows that the right words exist, but cannot reach them, and her attempts to correct herself only deepen the confusion. Watanabe answers that everyone struggles to express themselves, but Naoko rejects the comparison; her experience is not eased by treating it as ordinary difficulty.

A later account from the sanatorium makes the worsening explicit. Naoko first loses the ability to write letters, and then begins hearing voices that interrupt her attempts to choose words. The voices make letter-writing impossible; speaking becomes difficult too, and her inability to find the right words leaves her confused and frightened. The symptoms grow more serious after Watanabe’s visit, turning the ordinary forms of contact between them into a source of distress.

Naoko refuses to have Watanabe join a daily session with her and a specialist. She wants her body to be clean of her illness when she meets him. The refusal sets a limit on his wish to help: even as the people around her seek ways to understand and treat her condition, she retains a boundary around the meeting she imagines with him. Thus 1970’s promise of personal departure and independence is shadowed by a relationship in which communication is becoming harder, not easier.