Naoko and Watanabe resume walking together

Naoko and Toru Watanabe resume walking together after an accidental meeting on the Chuo commuter line, turning a hesitant request for another Sunday together into a recurring practice of moving through Tokyo side by side. The walks gradually soften the distance between them, yet their silences and Naoko’s struggle to find words make the connection both intimate and incomplete; in the larger story, the routine becomes a fragile form of companionship set against grief that neither conversation nor closeness can resolve.

The Unplanned Reunion

Nearly a year had passed since Watanabe last saw Naoko. They encountered each other by chance on the Chuo commuter line: she was on her way to see a film alone, while he was headed for the bookshops in Kanda. Neither had an urgent destination. Naoko suggested they get off the train at Yotsuya, where the green embankment beside the old castle moat offered a place to walk. Their renewed contact began not with a planned reunion or an explanation of their separation, but with the simple decision to leave the train together.

Watanabe notices how much Naoko has changed. She has lost weight; her cheeks, once plump, are nearly gone, and her neck looks delicate and slender. He finds her prettier than he remembers, but cannot find a way to tell her. The change is visible, while its meaning remains beyond what he can confidently say. That gap between noticing and speaking accompanies the walk from its beginning.

Naoko sets off as soon as they reach the street, and Watanabe follows a few paces behind. He watches her shoulders, straight black hair, and large brown hairslide, catching a glimpse of her small white ear when she turns her head. She sometimes looks back to say something, but the remarks may be hard to answer or too quiet for him to hear. She does not appear to mind his silence; after speaking, she faces forward and continues. Watanabe does not close the distance between them, even though he could. Their first walk back together is thus defined by proximity without ease: they share a route, but not yet a fluent conversation.

A Walk That Becomes a Ritual

The route grows into an unexpectedly long arc through the city. From Yotsuya, Naoko turns at Iidabashi, reaches the moat, crosses the intersection at Jinbocho, climbs the hill at Ochanomizu, and comes out at Hongo. They follow the tram tracks to Komagome. By the time they arrive, the sun is sinking into a soft spring evening. Naoko seems only then to notice their surroundings and asks where they are. Watanabe tells her they have made a big arc. The distance covered gives their meeting a shape even when the conversation does not.

At the end of that first outing, Watanabe tries to say that he is glad they had a chance to talk, although he cannot recall what they talked about. Naoko toys with the ashtray and asks, with hesitation, whether he would mind seeing her again. She says she knows she has no right to ask. Her request gives the chance encounter a possible future, but her qualification also suggests that asking for continued company feels to her like an imposition. Watanabe questions what she means by having no right, and later agrees that he would be glad to see her again, adding that he is free on Sundays and that walking would be good for him.

Naoko describes a difficulty that makes their halting exchanges more than simple awkwardness. She says she cannot say what she wants: attempts to express herself produce the wrong words, or even the opposite of what she means, and efforts to correct herself make her lose track of the thought. She imagines two versions of herself circling a post, one possessing the right words and the other unable to catch her. When Watanabe answers that everyone has some trouble expressing themselves, Naoko is disappointed; he has not understood what she is trying to describe. Still, he does not withdraw his agreement to meet again. As they part, Naoko asks whether anything about the way she talks has changed. The question leaves their renewed contact suspended between her wish to be understood and the limits of his understanding.

Sundays Across Tokyo

Naoko calls the following Saturday, and they meet on Sunday. Watanabe calls it a date because he cannot think of a better word, but the outing remains modest: they walk, stop for coffee, walk again, have dinner, and say goodbye. Naoko continues to speak only in snatches. They discuss daily routines and their colleges in fragments that lead nowhere, while neither raises the past. They mainly walk, and Tokyo’s size means they can continue without covering the whole city.

The pattern repeats almost every weekend. Naoko leads and Watanabe follows close behind. She wears different hairslides, always leaving her right ear exposed, and touches the slide when embarrassed. She often dabs at her mouth with a handkerchief when she has something to say. Watanabe remembers these small gestures, and observing them makes him like her more. His attention to her habits becomes one way of sustaining closeness when words fail: the relationship advances through repeated presence and careful observation rather than confessions or a shared account of the past.

Their spacing changes as the routine continues. After the summer holidays, Naoko begins walking next to Watanabe as naturally as if they had always done so. He concludes that she now sees him as a friend, and the side-by-side walk is no longer painful to him. They continue to meander across Tokyo, climbing hills and crossing rivers and railway lines without a destination. Watanabe likens their walking to a religious ritual intended to heal wounded spirits. Rain does not stop them; they use umbrellas and keep going. The image of following at a distance gives way to one of moving together, while the repeated act itself carries what their conversations leave unspoken.

The season turns alongside the developing habit. Autumn arrives; zelkova leaves cover the dormitory grounds, and Watanabe puts on his first pullover and replaces a worn pair of shoes with suede ones. He cannot recall what he and Naoko discussed during those walks. They continue to avoid the past and rarely speak about Kizuki, yet they can sit facing each other over coffee in complete silence. The lack of remembered conversation is not proof that nothing has changed: the regular meetings have made silence something they can share.

Companionship and the Limits of Healing

Watanabe’s account places the walks against his attempt to keep emotional distance from everything after beginning a new life in the dormitory. He tries to forget, but an indistinct knot remains inside him and gradually takes a clear form: death exists not as life’s opposite but as part of life. He describes the idea not simply as an abstract statement but as something he feels within himself, as though death were present in ordinary objects and breathed in like fine dust. During the spring in which the idea takes shape, he says that everything in the midst of life seemed to revolve around death.

Against this inward fixation, the walks provide a regular, bodily practice of being with another person. They do not require Naoko to explain the past, and Watanabe does not force the conversation toward Kizuki. Their route through a city too large to exhaust allows the meetings to recur without needing a destination or a resolution. The ritual offers companionship and, in Watanabe’s description, an image of healing; it does not establish that grief has been cured. His earlier attempt to normalize Naoko’s account of her speech fails to reach her, and their continuing silence preserves the limits as well as the tenderness of their connection.

The recurrence is interrupted by a later period of estrangement and by Watanabe’s increasing discomfort in the dormitory after a fight with a third-year student. That fight ends with a warning from the dormitory head, while Naoko completes the credits she needs to begin her second year. These circumstances mark the fragile routine against a changing life rather than guaranteeing its continuation. The walks matter because they are repeatedly chosen, not because they settle what either person carries.

After Naoko’s death, Watanabe travels far from Tokyo, moving down the coast and sleeping on the sand. He makes fires from driftwood, roasts dried fish bought from a local fisherman, drinks whisky, and thinks of Naoko, unable to absorb that she is dead. His memories return as a flood of specific images, among them Naoko walking beside him in winter and touching her familiar hairslide. In his imagined place among the dead, she seems present and speaks to him; when that experience recedes, he is left alone with grief. He concludes that no truth, sincerity, strength, or kindness can cure the sadness of losing someone loved: it must be lived through, and what is learned from one loss cannot protect against the next.

When Watanabe returns to Tokyo, he shuts himself in his room for days, his attention fixed on the dead rather than the living. He imagines rooms set aside for Naoko, shuttered, their furniture draped in white and their windowsills dusty, and thinks about Kizuki as he tries to make sense of Naoko’s death. The walks cannot be revived as a cure or a promise; what remains is their place in memory, together with the hard distinction between remembering the dead and continuing among the living.