Midori

Midori is the living relationship Toru Watanabe reaches toward after Naoko’s death, but she is not presented as a cure for his grief. Her openness and insistence that she can be accepted as she is allow Watanabe to acknowledge his love for her; at the same time, he recognizes that his love for Naoko remains. The novel’s closing movement therefore places a possible new beginning beside an unresolved bond with the dead.

Identity and relationship with Watanabe

In their reunion, Midori makes acceptance an explicit subject between them. She tells Watanabe that her former boyfriend objected to her short skirts, smoking, drinking, remarks, and criticism of his friends. If Watanabe dislikes anything about her, she says, he should tell her, and she will change if she can. He cannot think of anything he wants her to change. When she asks whether she is all right as she is, he answers that he does not know how she could change, so she must be fine as she is. Their exchange gives Midori room to speak directly about how she is treated in a relationship, and Watanabe responds without setting conditions for her acceptance.

Midori then asks how much Watanabe loves her. He answers that his love is enough to melt all the tigers in the world to butter. She is satisfied enough to ask him to hold her. They embrace and kiss while rain sounds outside, then talk about subjects ranging from the formation of the universe to their preferred hardness of boiled eggs. The movement between declarations of love and ordinary conversation makes their closeness feel both intimate and companionable.

Watanabe recognizes his love

After the reunion, Watanabe reflects that he has no regret about the day and would live it the same way again. He understands that he loves Midori and has probably known it for some time, while also recognizing that he had avoided reaching that conclusion. His certainty does not erase the complication of Naoko: he says he cannot explain his love for Midori to her in her present condition, and that he still loves her too. He describes the love as twisted, yet insists that a broad, untouched space within him remains for Naoko alone.

This divided attachment is central to Midori’s place in Watanabe’s story. She is not made to stand for a simple replacement of Naoko. Watanabe’s recognition of a future with her coexists with his continuing emotional bond to the dead, making love and mourning simultaneous rather than neatly successive states.

Midori amid grief and return

Watanabe’s response to Naoko’s death is prolonged withdrawal. During his travels he moves down the coast, far from Tokyo, and spends nights thinking about her. Memories arrive in overwhelming succession; in his inward life, he imagines a place where Naoko remains present and death is one element of life rather than the end of it. Yet those moments give way to isolation and sadness. He concludes that no truth, sincerity, strength, or kindness can cure the sorrow of losing a loved one; grief has to be lived through, and what is learned from one loss cannot prepare a person for the next.

When Watanabe returns to Tokyo, he shuts himself in his room for days, his memory fixed more on the dead than on the living. In his mind, Naoko is dead while Midori remains alive. That contrast makes contact with Midori consequential but difficult: his turn toward her does not mean he has finished mourning or found a way to explain his feelings. The account instead shows him trying to re-enter a living relationship while still enclosed by loss.

The final call

After Reiko says goodbye to Watanabe and urges him to take her share and Naoko’s share of happiness for himself, they part. Watanabe then phones Midori. He tells her he has a million things to discuss, that all he wants is her, and that he wants them to begin everything from the beginning. Midori answers only after a long silence, asking where he is now. Her question does not settle what will happen between them, but it answers his appeal with an opening: the novel ends not with a declared resolution, but with the possibility that the two can find one another again.