Midori’s breakup with her boyfriend is the moment she turns a confused attachment to Watanabe into a decision: when her boyfriend makes continued contact with Watanabe incompatible with their relationship, she chooses Watanabe and ends the romance. Her frank declaration of love makes the choice explicit, but it does not produce an easy beginning. Watanabe remains absorbed in Naoko’s death, and Midori acknowledges that he is in love with someone else even as she asks him to respond to her after two difficult months.

The Distance Behind the Decision

Midori explains that her anger at Watanabe was only part of why she had stayed away. During their absence from one another, he had seemed so lost in thoughts of Naoko that he scarcely looked at her when they met again. She had wanted to reprimand him, but she had also concluded that she needed distance to understand her own feelings. The separation was therefore both a response to feeling neglected and an attempt to clarify what the relationship with Watanabe meant to her.

That clarification brought an uncomfortable comparison into focus. Midori says she had reached the point where she enjoyed being with Watanabe more than being with her boyfriend. She still liked her boyfriend and regarded him as her first serious romantic attachment; she describes him as self-centred, narrow-minded, and somewhat fascist, while also recognizing his good qualities. Her feelings for Watanabe were different: she considered him special, said she felt that something was right when they were together, and told him she believed in him and did not want to let him go. The breakup grows out of that conflict rather than from a simple claim that she had ceased to care for her boyfriend.

The Ultimatum and Breakup

Unable to settle the question alone, Midori asked her boyfriend what she should do. He told her to stop seeing Watanabe, or to break up with him if she intended to keep seeing Watanabe. His answer turned her private uncertainty into a direct choice between the relationship she already had and the connection she wanted to preserve. Midori says she broke up with him, presenting the decision as immediate rather than as the outcome of a protracted negotiation.

As she explains what she has done, she puts a Marlboro to her mouth, shields it with her hand while lighting it, and inhales. The small, controlled gesture accompanies an unusually exposed conversation. When Watanabe asks why she chose to break up, Midori reacts with disbelief: to her, the answer should be obvious from what she has already said. She tells him that she likes him more than her boyfriend and that she has fallen in love with him. Her admission converts the breakup from a reported change in status into an explicit declaration of what she hopes the choice means.

The Declaration and Its Limits

Midori’s confession does not erase the circumstances that make Watanabe unavailable. She knows that he is in love with someone else, and she tells him she is not expecting anything from him. At the same time, she asks him not to make her spell out her feelings and asks for a hug, saying that the preceding two months have been difficult. Her request makes the scene intimate without implying that the relationship has been settled: she has made her choice, but she cannot decide for Watanabe.

The contrast becomes especially stark against the loss shaping Watanabe’s life. In his account of the months after Naoko’s death, he reflects that death is part of life, but that no truth, sincerity, strength, or kindness can cure the sorrow of losing a loved one. He describes memories returning with the force of a tide, carrying him into an inner world where Naoko seems present, before the tide recedes and leaves him alone with grief. Midori’s decision takes place within this unresolved mourning, not after it has ended.

Significance in the Larger Arc

The breakup is a change in the terms of Midori and Watanabe’s relationship: she has chosen him over a boyfriend she still values, and has directly named her love. Yet the scene withholds the reciprocal answer. Watanabe struggles to speak when she confesses, and later, after returning to Tokyo, shuts himself away for days, his memory fixed on the dead rather than the living. The decision therefore establishes both a possibility of renewed connection and the grief that obstructs it.

In this episode, love is not presented as a feeling that automatically resolves competing loyalties or makes sorrow disappear. Midori acts on what she has come to understand about her feelings, even though Watanabe cannot immediately meet her choice. Her clarity stands beside his inability to turn from the dead toward the living: the breakup opens a path between them, but it cannot compel him to walk it.