Naoko’s suicide note

Naoko’s suicide note is the brief handwritten instruction Naoko left on a memo pad: “Please give all my clothes to Reiko.” Its plain request directs what should happen to her belongings, but says nothing about her reasons for dying. Found after Naoko vanished from the sanatorium dorm, it became part of the evidence by which her death was recognized as suicide; later, the clothes and the note’s unexplained specificity remained with Reiko and Watanabe as a poignant fragment of Naoko’s last hours.

Discovery and Immediate Significance

Naoko had spent the previous evening with Reiko, asking to be held one last time. Reiko held her with a bath towel between them, dried her afterward, and helped her dress for bed. Naoko seemed peaceful enough that Reiko fell asleep believing she could do the same. In the morning, Naoko’s nightdress lay where she had dropped it, but her clothes, trainers, and the torch Reiko kept by her pillow were gone. The torch suggested that Naoko had left in darkness.

Reiko checked Naoko’s desk and found the note. Its instruction about the clothes was the only message she had left there. Reiko immediately woke the others, and they searched the dormitories and surrounding woods along different paths. The search lasted five hours; Naoko had brought a rope. In the aftermath, an ambulance took her away and the police questioned Reiko. As Reiko later explained, the note and the circumstances made suicide apparent to the authorities, who treated the death as a pro forma matter.

The Message and the Clothes

The note contains no farewell, account of motive, or explanation. Its single request concerns Naoko’s clothes, an everyday possession rather than an account of the crisis that led to her death. Reiko later described this contrast to Watanabe: Naoko had left no will or anything similar, only that line on the memo pad. Reiko wondered why clothes had mattered to her when she was preparing to die, and what else she might have wanted to say. The text leaves that question unanswered; the note records a decision about her belongings without making her final intentions fully legible.

The request did, however, give the clothes a specific destination. When Watanabe visited Reiko after she left the sanatorium, she was wearing Naoko’s jacket and trousers. She asked whether seeing her in Naoko’s things bothered him. Watanabe said he thought Naoko would be glad that someone—especially Reiko—was wearing them. The clothes thus passed from the bare instruction into a visible, intimate reminder of Naoko, while the note itself remained a thin record of what she chose to leave behind.

Aftermath and Meaning

For Watanabe, the note could establish that Naoko’s death was suicide, but it could not reconcile him to her absence. He had heard the nails driven into her coffin and still could not absorb that she had returned to nothingness. As he travelled west along the coast, memories of Naoko came in overwhelming waves; the conviction that death was part of life did not relieve the sorrow of losing her. He later concluded that no truth, sincerity, strength, or kindness could cure that grief.

After returning to Tokyo, Watanabe shut himself away, his memory fixed on the dead rather than the living. He imagined speaking to Kizuki and relinquishing Naoko to him, describing her as someone Kizuki had chosen first; this inward address shows how the note’s practical finality could not settle the emotional bonds left behind. The note’s starkly limited message holds the same tension: it confirms a concrete act and carries out one last wish, yet cannot supply the explanation that the living seek. Its request gives Reiko the clothes; it gives Watanabe no way to turn loss into an answer.