Naoko

Naoko is a quiet, inward young woman whose early bond with Kizuki and his suicide become inseparable from her later relationship with Toru Watanabe. Her efforts to connect with Watanabe, withdraw for treatment, and imagine a shared future reveal both her desire for life and the limits of what love and care can repair. Her death leaves Watanabe to confront a grief that no consoling truth can resolve.

Identity and Early Relationships

Naoko first meets Watanabe while both are in the sixth form: she attends a refined girls’ school run by a Christian mission, while he attends a state school. She is already Kizuki’s girlfriend. Their families live less than two hundred yards apart, and the childhood sweethearts have been close since early life, sharing ordinary family visits and activities with an ease that makes their relationship seem almost part of the household routine. Watanabe often joins them, sometimes on double dates, but the most comfortable arrangement becomes the three of them together.

That closeness does not immediately make Naoko and Watanabe intimate. When Kizuki leaves a room, they struggle to find anything to say; she is not especially talkative, and Watanabe tends to listen. Their silence is not described as hostility so much as an absence of shared conversational ground. It makes the emotional transformation after Kizuki’s death more difficult: the two are bound by loss, but have not yet learned how to speak to one another outside the relationship that included him.

Grief, Separation, and Return

After Kizuki’s funeral, Naoko and Watanabe meet only once, at a café two weeks later, to settle a minor matter. The conversation falters, and Naoko’s voice seems edged with anger. Watanabe suspects she may resent that he was the last person to see Kizuki, though he cannot know whether that is the reason. He wishes he could exchange places with her, but understands that the past cannot be changed. They do not meet again until they happen to encounter each other on the Chuo Line in Tokyo a year later.

Their renewed connection develops in the shadow of that unresolved loss. During a walk in the woods, Naoko asks Watanabe whether he loves her and whether he will do her two favors. The question places their relationship on explicitly intimate terms, but their closeness remains complicated by her enduring attachment to Kizuki and by a painful uncertainty about her own feelings. She later tells Watanabe that on the night of her twentieth birthday she wanted him to hold and touch her, although she loved Kizuki. She emphasizes that she and Kizuki had been together since they were three and had grown up in a relationship of unusual mutual understanding. Her disclosure does not offer Watanabe a simple answer; it makes visible the distance between sexual desire, love, and the bond she associates with her childhood.

Withdrawal and Treatment

In a letter received at the beginning of July, Naoko says she has decided to take a year away from college and suspects she may never return. She explains that the decision had been in her thoughts for a long time, but that she had been afraid even to say it aloud. She asks Watanabe not to blame himself for what has happened to her, describing it as something she must take on herself. After leaving her flat, she returns to her family home in Kobe, sees a doctor, and considers a freer-style sanatorium in the hills outside Kyoto, where she can rest in a quiet place apart from the world.

At the sanatorium, her doctor believes that contact with people outside the institution is becoming important. Naoko says that Watanabe is the face she thinks of, while explaining that she does not want to see her parents because their distress worsens her mood. She has things she needs to explain to Watanabe, although she doubts she can explain them well. At the same time, she worries about becoming a burden and says his affection makes her happy. Her wish to meet him is therefore both an appeal for connection and an effort to approach an explanation she has long avoided.

Her condition later deteriorates. Reiko reports that Naoko first loses the ability to write letters: when she tries, she hears voices that interrupt her choice of words. The voices worsen after Watanabe’s second visit, and Naoko also struggles to hold an ordinary conversation, unable to find words and becoming confused and frightened. Although Reiko and a specialist meet with her daily, Naoko opposes adding Watanabe to a session. She wants to meet him only when her body is clean of what she is experiencing. The refusal shows how strongly she wishes to control the terms of their meeting even as her illness makes communication increasingly difficult.

Visits and an Imagined Future

Watanabe visits Naoko and Reiko in the winter, travelling to Kyoto with a rucksack and snow boots. The visit retains the rhythms of their earlier stay together, but the season changes the shared activities: instead of a picnic, they go cross-country skiing, help clear snow, and spend evenings listening to Reiko play guitar. Naoko is quieter than before, sitting on the sofa and smiling while Reiko carries much of the conversation. She reassures Watanabe that this is one of her periods of withdrawal and that listening is more enjoyable than speaking. Their companionship continues, but it depends increasingly on patience and on accepting that she cannot always participate in the same way.

Even after these visits, Watanabe’s memories of Naoko become unstable. While helping Midori’s sick father, he recalls a previous night when he remembers Naoko appearing unclothed except for her hairslide, but wonders whether the event happened or was a fantasy. Its detail seems too clear for invention and too beautiful for reality. The uncertainty is part of Naoko’s place in his inner life: she is remembered not only through shared conversations and visits, but through scenes whose emotional force exceeds his confidence in their factual boundaries.

On 25 August, Naoko visits Watanabe at the sanatorium with her mother to collect her belongings. She appears healthier than he expected, jokes, talks more normally, and shows him her new hairstyle. She says she intends to let the hospital doctors cure her and speaks with him about the future; what she would really like, she says, is for them to leave the sanatorium and live together somewhere. Her mother leaves after Naoko says she will be fine. The apparent improvement and the future they discuss make the visit seem hopeful, but that hope is overturned by what happens after nightfall.

Death, Memory, and Narrative Significance

The next morning Watanabe wakes at six to find Naoko gone. Her nightdress is left behind, while her clothes, trainers, and the torch kept by his pillow are missing. A note asks that her clothes be given to Reiko. The residents and staff search the buildings and surrounding woods for five hours before finding her; she has brought a rope. An ambulance takes her away, and police question Watanabe. The note makes the death evidently a suicide, and the police treat the investigation as routine. Naoko’s family is upset that Watanabe knows she died by suicide, leaving him feeling that he should not have been at the funeral. He soon sets out on the road.

In his travels along the coast, Watanabe cannot absorb that Naoko is dead. Her image returns in a stream of concrete memories: her yellow raincape as she tends the aviary, the damaged birthday cake and her tears, her winter coat, the hairslide she habitually touches, and her posture on the sofa in a blue nightdress. The memories seem to carry him into a place where he can still speak with and hold her, where death exists within life rather than decisively ending it. Yet the imaginative return cannot hold. When it recedes, he is left alone, and grief comes with it.

Watanabe’s understanding of death changes across his losses. After Kizuki’s death he comes to think that death is not the opposite of life but part of it, a presence carried through ordinary living. Naoko’s death teaches him that this insight does not cure bereavement: no truth, sincerity, strength, or kindness can remove the sorrow of losing someone loved. The distinction gives Naoko’s story its lasting significance. She remains present in Watanabe’s memories, but memory neither reverses her death nor provides a clean release from guilt and grief. When he returns to Tokyo, he shuts himself away and fixes his attention on the dead rather than the living; later, he tells Reiko that he cannot forgive himself for failing to keep waiting for Naoko, even while recognizing that her choices and illness cannot be reduced to his responsibility. Her story leaves love, responsibility, and loss bound together without making any one of them an adequate explanation for her death.