Hatsumi’s suicide

Hatsumi’s suicide, disclosed years after her death, turns an early, subdued encounter into a lasting measure of what Toru Watanabe could not understand or save. The novel offers no explanation for her decision: after marrying two years after Nagasawa left for Germany, Hatsumi died by suicide two years later. Her death belongs to the book’s recurring pattern of losses without clear causes, but its delayed narration gives it a further force. Only when Watanabe remembers her in a sunset many years later does he recognize what she had awakened in him—and how permanently that possibility had gone unfulfilled.

The Encounter and Its Delayed Meaning

Watanabe’s memory of Hatsumi begins with a quiet evening rather than with her death. After the two share drinks at a small bar, they walk through the night; they speak little, and Watanabe finds the silence reminiscent of walking with Naoko. He notices Hatsumi’s subtle emotional effect on him but cannot name it. The recognition arrives only some dozen years later, while he is in Santa Fe interviewing a painter. As he sits in a pizza parlour watching the sunset, the image of Hatsumi returns, and he understands that what she stirred was a childhood longing that had remained unfulfilled. The vividness of this later realization makes the suicide more than a biographical endpoint: Watanabe recognizes the depth of a connection only after it is irretrievably past.

The recognition is accompanied by sorrow rather than resolution. Watanabe understands Hatsumi as a special woman and feels that something in himself had lain dormant until she brought it back into view. The memory does not offer a way to repair what happened. Instead, it makes the distance between belated understanding and effective action unmistakable: he can now name what her presence meant to him, but he could not have used that knowledge to change her fate.

Marriage, Death, and the Limits of Explanation

The chronology Watanabe recalls is spare. Two years after Nagasawa left for Germany, Hatsumi married; two years after her marriage, she died by suicide. The narrative identifies the means, but gives no account of a motive or of events leading to her decision. It does not establish that her marriage, Nagasawa’s departure, or any other specific circumstance caused her death. The absence of an explanation is part of the event’s meaning, not a gap the reader is invited to fill with certainty.

Watanabe’s response is a stark counterfactual wish: someone should have done something, anything, to save her. Yet he immediately acknowledges that neither he nor Nagasawa could have managed it. The contrast between the wish to intervene and the recognition of helplessness keeps the narration from turning grief into a claim of blame or an account of preventable cause. Hatsumi’s decision remains singular and unexplained, even as its consequences reach beyond her death into the lives and memories of those who knew her.

Nagasawa’s Letter and Watanabe’s Severance

Watanabe learns what happened from Nagasawa, who writes from Bonn. In his letter, Nagasawa says that Hatsumi’s death has extinguished something and that the loss is unbearably sad and painful even for him. The message is a rare direct measure of Nagasawa’s grief, but it does not explain Hatsumi’s decision. It records the devastation left behind rather than offering a cause.

Watanabe tears the letter to shreds and throws it away, then never writes to Nagasawa again. The action marks a break in their relationship at the point when news of Hatsumi’s death reaches him. The narrative does not spell out a single motive for Watanabe’s response; it presents the destruction of the letter and the end of correspondence as concrete consequences of the news. The letter cannot make the loss intelligible or undo it, and Watanabe’s refusal of further contact leaves his reaction unresolved.

A Recurring Pattern of Unexplained Death

Hatsumi’s death echoes losses elsewhere in the story without making their circumstances identical. Watanabe recalls that Kizuki, like Hatsumi, died at seventeen, left no note, and gave no apparent warning; Naoko’s sister also died by suicide without anyone knowing why. These parallels sharpen the recurrence of deaths whose motives remain inaccessible, rather than forming a reliable explanation for any one person’s decision. The novel presents the pattern as an unsettling limit on what the living can know.

That limit is connected to Watanabe’s understanding of death as part of life. After Kizuki’s death, he comes to feel that death is not wholly separate from the lives of those who remain. After Naoko dies, he learns a different and harsher truth: no principle, sincerity, strength, or kindness can cure the sorrow of losing someone. Hatsumi’s suicide belongs to this widening knowledge of bereavement. It gives Watanabe another death to remember, but no formula that would make the next loss comprehensible or easier to bear.

Belated Grief and the Living

The later memory of Hatsumi sits beside Watanabe’s extended mourning for Naoko, whose death leaves him travelling far from Tokyo and unable to return at once to ordinary life. On the coast, memories of Naoko repeatedly draw him into an imagined nearness to the dead, before the tide of memory recedes and leaves him alone with grief. The novel does not equate Watanabe’s response to Naoko with his response to Hatsumi; rather, the two recollections show how death continues to shape the living in different forms and at different times.

After returning to Tokyo, Watanabe shuts himself in his room, his memory fixed on the dead rather than the living. He recognizes the contradiction between Naoko’s death and Midori’s continued presence, but recognition alone does not immediately restore his capacity to turn toward life. In this broader arc, Hatsumi’s suicide stands as a belatedly understood loss: Watanabe can finally identify the longing her presence awakened, yet his insight arrives as mourning, not rescue. The event thus intensifies the novel’s distinction between learning something from grief and being able to use that knowledge to prevent another grief.