Naoko leaves Tokyo and goes to a sanatorium to recuperate after withdrawing from college, returning to her family home in Kobe and seeking treatment for her nerves. Her departure is both a deliberate retreat and a rupture in her relationship with Toru Watanabe: she needs quiet and distance, but does not reject him, and asks him to wait until she is ready to meet again. The letters that frame this separation make it a suspended interval of care, uncertainty, and attempted honesty rather than a clean parting.

Decision and departure

After Naoko fails to respond to Watanabe’s birthday note, he travels to Kokubunji and discovers that she has already left her flat. Her name has been taken off the door, the windows and storm shutters are closed, and the manager says she moved out three days earlier without leaving an address. Watanabe writes to her family home in Kobe, hoping the letter will reach her wherever she is. He tells her he wants a long conversation, but refuses to offer promises or polished assurances: he does not yet understand what has happened between them, or where he himself will stand after time has passed.

At the beginning of July, Naoko answers. She says that she has decided to take a year away from college, officially as a leave of absence, though she suspects she will not return. The decision is not a sudden response to Watanabe or to one recent encounter; she says she had been considering it for a long time and had repeatedly been unable to bring herself to say so. Her letter shifts the departure from a mystery Watanabe must solve to a choice Naoko has struggled to articulate.

Naoko asks him not to blame himself for what happened to her. She says the outcome would have been the same and describes her condition as something she must take on herself, adding that she had put off the decision for more than a year. This does not make the consequences less painful for Watanabe, but it establishes her account of the move: she recognizes the strain her silence has caused while insisting that he is not responsible for her illness or retreat.

Treatment and separation

After leaving her flat, Naoko returns to her family home in Kobe and sees a doctor. The doctor recommends a place in the hills outside Kyoto, described not as a conventional hospital but as a sanatorium with a freer style of treatment. Naoko is considering spending time there because she needs to rest her nerves in a quiet place cut off from the world. The letter leaves the details open for a later communication, so the destination is presented through her immediate need for rest rather than through a full account of treatment.

The move therefore creates a specific boundary in the relationship. Naoko is grateful for the companionship Watanabe gave her, but says she is not prepared to see him. She distinguishes unreadiness from unwillingness: she does not say that she never wants to meet, only that she cannot meet now. She promises to write when she feels ready, and allows that they may then get to know each other better. Her departure interrupts their contact without declaring the bond finished.

Watanabe had already tried to meet this uncertainty with candor. In his letter he says the two of them knew too little about one another for him to make promises or demands, but that he would make an effort if she granted him time. He links their need for each other to their shared loss of Kizuki, the person to whom each had been able to speak honestly about feelings. He understands their relationship as having taken a major detour and become warped; Naoko’s reply does not resolve that difficulty, but confirms that she has received his appeal and values the year of companionship.

Letters across distance

The letters make separation the condition of the pair’s communication. Watanabe writes because Naoko has disappeared from her former address; Naoko replies only after a long delay, explaining that writing itself is painful and that she has started the letter many times. Her account of the move is thus not delivered in a face-to-face scene. It reaches Watanabe as a carefully composed statement, one that gives him important facts while preserving Naoko’s need to remain apart.

Several months later, Naoko writes again from the place where she is staying, saying that nearly four months have passed since she arrived. In retrospect, she has thought about Watanabe and come to feel that she treated him unfairly and should have been a fairer person. She reflects that fairness, rather than beauty or happiness, has become a standard she can still hold onto. This later letter gives the separation a continuing emotional life: distance has not erased her concern for him, but has enabled a new way of naming it.

Her reflection does not amount to a promise of recovery or reunion. Naoko says that ideas of beauty and happiness have become difficult and convoluted for her, and that she is clinging instead to fairness, honesty, and what is universally true. The change is modest but consequential: where her first letter emphasizes unreadiness and the need to withdraw, the later one looks back at the relationship and considers its moral balance. The correspondence records thought developing across an interval whose outcome remains uncertain.

Meaning and aftermath

For Watanabe, Naoko’s letters bring relief and pain together. When he reads a later letter, the ordinary world seems to lose its color, and he must pause to gather himself before continuing. Earlier, after reading her first explanation, sadness returns with the force of her gaze; he cannot give it a shape or find a place to hide it. The physical distance between them therefore does not contain his feelings. It makes communication possible, but each message also renews the absence it describes.

The episode belongs to the novel’s recurring tension between knowing what death means and living through loss. Watanabe comes to understand that death is part of life rather than its opposite, but that formulation does not spare him from grief. Much later, after Naoko dies, his memories of her surge back as vivid scenes and seem to draw him into a place where the dead remain part of life. Yet he also recognizes that no truth, sincerity, strength, or kindness can cure the sadness of losing someone. The departure and the later bereavement are distinct events, but the first establishes a pattern: explanation and understanding can preserve a bond without making pain disappear.

When Watanabe returns to Tokyo after Naoko’s death, he shuts himself in his room and spends much of his time in rooms set aside in memory of her, their furniture draped in white and the windowsills dusty. His attention remains fixed on the dead rather than the living. This later withdrawal gives the earlier departure an added resonance, but does not turn Naoko’s move to the sanatorium into a foretelling or a cure. At the time of her letters, the immediate fact is narrower and more difficult: she is alive, away from Tokyo, seeking rest, and not yet ready to see him.