Midori and Watanabe watch a neighborhood fire and kiss

During an afternoon fire near Midori’s house, Midori and Watanabe climb to a laundry deck to watch smoke rise over the neighborhood. They spend the hours there drinking beer, singing, and sharing a gentle kiss after the blaze is extinguished. The scene briefly turns their companionship into physical intimacy, but its meaning remains unsettled: Midori tells Watanabe she is seeing someone, and he acknowledges that he likes someone too. The fire does not resolve their divided attachments; it gives them a charged, temporary space in which closeness becomes possible.

The Fire and the Laundry Deck

After hearing sirens while they were drinking coffee and talking about the university, Midori went upstairs to look toward the street, then urged Watanabe to follow her. They climbed a steep, narrow stairway to a wooden deck above the surrounding rooftops, where bamboo poles were used for laundry. From there they could see huge clouds of black smoke from a building three or four houses away. Midori identified it as Sakamoto’s former traditional door-fitting workshop. A three-storey building obstructed the direct view of the flames, but several fire engines were working nearby; the narrow lane allowed only two to approach the blaze, while the others waited on the high street.

Watanabe responded to the danger by suggesting that Midori gather valuables and prepare to evacuate. The wind was blowing away from them, he reasoned, but it might change, and a petrol station stood nearby; he offered to help her pack. Midori’s answer—that there was nothing she wanted to save—deflected his practical concern. Rather than prepare to leave, she proposed staying to watch and singing songs, postponing any decision until a real danger arose. The exchange sets Watanabe’s impulse to anticipate risk against Midori’s more immediate willingness to remain in the moment.

Watching, Drinking, and Singing

Midori brought two floor pillows, four cans of beer, and a guitar from downstairs. They drank while the black smoke rose, and she played and sang folk songs. Watanabe wondered whether the neighbors would disapprove of drinking and singing while a local building burned; Midori dismissed concern for what the neighbors might think. Her refusal to make the scene respectable or solemn shaped the afternoon’s peculiar intimacy: a serious emergency unfolded nearby while the two of them occupied the deck with music and beer.

The fire repeatedly flared and subsided as people shouted instructions below. A newspaper helicopter passed overhead to take photographs, a policeman used a loudspeaker to order onlookers back, a child cried for his mother, and glass broke somewhere nearby. The wind eventually shifted, recalling the possibility that the fire might spread toward Midori’s home and the petrol station. About half an hour later, the blaze was out; firefighters had prevented it from spreading, and no one was injured. Most of the fire engines left, the crowd dispersed, and a police car remained to direct traffic. Two crows watched from nearby lamp-posts as the emergency gave way to the ordinary neighborhood again.

The Kiss and Its Limits

After the fire was over, Midori seemed drained and spoke little. She explained that she had let herself go limp and space out, something she had not done for a long time. When she looked into Watanabe’s eyes, he put his arm around her and kissed her. Her shoulders first tightened slightly, then relaxed; she closed her eyes for several seconds. The kiss was soft and gentle, and it was not intended to lead beyond itself.

The scene’s intimacy grows from its particular circumstances rather than from a declared decision. They had spent a sunny afternoon on the laundry deck drinking beer and watching the fire, with rooftops, smoke, and red dragonflies around them. Watanabe understood the kiss as an attempt, half-conscious on both sides, to preserve the warmth and closeness they had felt. Yet the moment also carried danger: physical tenderness could deepen an attachment that neither of them was free to treat as uncomplicated. The kiss therefore marks both a real approach and a boundary, a small act of connection that does not promise a shared future.

Conflicting Attachments

Midori spoke first afterward. Holding Watanabe’s hand, she told him, with apparent difficulty, that she was seeing someone. Watanabe said he had sensed this already. When she asked whether he had a girl he liked, he answered that he did. The disclosure places the kiss between existing attachments rather than outside them: the two are drawn toward each other, but neither presents the other as an uncomplicated choice.

This candor gives the scene its unresolved ending. The kiss has briefly transformed their relationship from companionship into bodily closeness, yet the conversation immediately names the distance that remains. Midori’s admission and Watanabe’s reply do not cancel the tenderness; they reveal its limits. Their shared afternoon is neither a formal beginning nor a rejection, but a moment in which they recognize mutual warmth without disguising the competing ties around it.

Narrative Significance

The fire supplies the scene with a visible danger that contrasts with the quiet, tentative danger of intimacy. Watanabe thinks in terms of evacuation and property; Midori chooses to watch, sing, and respond only if the threat becomes immediate. After the blaze is contained, the kiss makes the afternoon’s accumulated closeness legible in a gesture, while the ensuing disclosures prevent that gesture from being mistaken for resolution.

The episode also gives concrete form to the book’s recurring coexistence of life and death. The fire threatens nearby homes but causes no injuries; the couple watches a destructive force from a position of temporary safety, then shares a tender moment amid its smoke and aftermath. Unlike Watanabe’s later reflections on loss, this scene does not explain grief or overcome it. Its significance is smaller and more fragile: for a few hours, two people share an improvised refuge above the street, and their closeness survives as a kiss even though their lives remain divided.