Life’s Natural Course

Life’s Natural Course is the idea that love and loss cannot be forced into a perfect, painless order: people must give themselves to sincere feeling, accept that change and hurt are unavoidable, and still take responsibility for how they treat one another. Reiko first presents this principle as reassurance to Toru Watanabe, who is tormenting himself over his love for both Midori and Naoko. After Naoko dies, Reiko makes its demands more exacting: grief should endure, but it must not become an excuse to injure Midori or evade responsibility for a choice already made.

Reiko’s Counsel on Love and Imperfection

In her letter, Reiko tells Watanabe that sincere love does not send a person into a labyrinth and asks him to have more faith in himself. His attraction to Midori, she argues, naturally means he has fallen in love with her; the relationship may succeed or fail, because love offers no guarantee of a particular outcome. The proper response is not endless calculation but the willingness to give himself to what he feels, which Reiko identifies as a form of sincerity.

Reiko does not pretend to decide every practical question for him. Whether he should have sex with Midori is something he must discuss with Midori and resolve with her; Reiko declines to supply the answer. She does, however, tell him not to tell Naoko about these feelings for now, offering to help devise a plan if disclosure later becomes unavoidable. The advice holds privacy and responsibility together: he should not turn uncertainty into an impulsive confession, but neither should he mistake Reiko’s guidance for permission to avoid making his own decisions.

The letter also resists the idea that Watanabe’s care for Naoko counts only if he remains her lover. Reiko says that he has been a great source of strength to Naoko and can continue to help her even if his romantic feelings have changed. In this account, a relationship can alter without becoming worthless; a changed form of attachment does not cancel past care or every obligation that grew from it.

A World That Cannot Be Measured into Order

Reiko sets Watanabe’s seriousness against the world’s imperfection. People, whether considered normal or not, are imperfect, and life does not operate with the mechanical precision of a bank account or the exact lines and angles drawn with rulers and protractors. Her images give the advice a concrete point: emotional life cannot be reconciled like arithmetic, and trying to force every feeling into an exact, consistent arrangement only compounds distress.

To explain why Watanabe need not condemn himself for being drawn to both women, Reiko compares the experience to taking a boat onto a beautiful lake and finding both the sky and the water beautiful. The comparison does not erase the consequences of love or promise that nobody will suffer. Instead, it separates the existence of complicated feeling from the claim that feeling is itself sinful. Reiko says that such conflicts occur in the large world, and counsels Watanabe to let events take their natural course rather than consume himself with blame.

Her counsel is not a claim that natural change is harmless. Despite a person’s best efforts, others may be hurt when the time comes, and life may not conform to that person’s preferred way of doing things. Reiko therefore joins acceptance to a demand for openness: Watanabe must loosen his effort to control the shape and timing of life. She warns that refusing to do so risks driving him toward an insane asylum, a warning rooted in the account’s continuing concern with mental suffering rather than a guarantee that simply yielding will make pain disappear.

Happiness as a Chance and a Practice

Reiko’s appeal to happiness is both urgent and limited. She describes herself as powerless and imperfect, yet says that there are times when life seems wonderful; she tells Watanabe to stop what he is doing and work at making himself happy. Happiness is not presented as a reward for resolving every moral ambiguity first. It is something he must actively pursue in an imperfect life, even when sorrow and uncertainty remain.

She acknowledges that she is sorry Watanabe and Naoko could not reach a happy ending, but refuses to claim that she can determine what would have been best. Drawing on her own experience, she says people may receive only two or three chances at happiness in a lifetime and may regret letting them pass. That finite estimate gives her advice an edge: waiting for certainty can itself become a consequential choice. In the same letter she imagines another chance to play guitar and eat grapes in a room with Watanabe and Naoko, tying her abstract confidence in life to a modest scene of shared companionship she hopes may recur.

After Naoko’s Death: Grief and Responsibility

After Naoko’s death, Reiko revisits the earlier principle in a conversation with Watanabe. She rejects the idea that the deaths have now sorted out his relationships: he had decided long before Naoko died that he could never leave Midori. Whether Naoko was alive or dead, Reiko says, does not alter that earlier choice. She distinguishes the decision Watanabe made from Naoko’s decision to die, and tells him that he is grown up and must take responsibility for his own choices or risk ruining everything.

Watanabe cannot accept this cleanly. He says that he cannot forget Naoko and reproaches himself for having promised to wait before turning away from her. He also believes events might have ended the same way even if he had not turned away, but that possibility does not relieve his self-blame. He describes his bond with Naoko as having been joined to the boundary between life and death from the beginning. His response exposes the painful limit of Reiko’s principle: accepting change does not make a profound attachment simple, nor does it settle the survivor’s sense of guilt.

Reiko does not tell him to stop hurting. She advises him to keep feeling the pain of Naoko’s death for the rest of his life and to learn from it if he can. At the same time, she insists that his grief is separate from his relationship with Midori. If he hurts Midori further, she warns, the wound could become too deep to repair. Reiko has left the sanatorium and traveled all the way to Tokyo, on what she calls a coffin of a train, to deliver this difficult counsel in person: sorrow must be borne, but it cannot excuse neglect of the living.

Change Without Evasion

The principle therefore changes emphasis across the novel’s two moments of counsel. In the letter, Reiko tries to release Watanabe from obsessive self-judgment: mixed feelings are not automatically sinful, love requires a sincere response, and life cannot be made perfectly predictable. In Tokyo, after Naoko’s death, that acceptance becomes an ethical obligation. Watanabe must continue to feel the loss without using it to deny his prior choice or wound Midori again.

Reiko’s insistence that life takes its natural course is not passive fatalism. She acknowledges that people are hurt and that outcomes cannot always be controlled, yet asks Watanabe to choose how he responds: to be open to love, to make decisions with Midori rather than outsource them, to preserve the care he can offer Naoko, and eventually to act responsibly toward the person who remains. The idea offers no painless reconciliation between grief and happiness. Its measure of maturity is instead the ability to carry both, without pretending that the dead can be restored or that the living can be spared every wound.