Natsuki masturbates on the grass for Ueda

The meadow encounter is a moment of physical intimacy between Naoko and Toru Watanabe during a visit to the sanatorium, where tenderness and sexual desire meet without becoming intercourse. Naoko initiates their closeness: she asks Watanabe to hold her, embraces him on the dry grass, and later offers to relieve his discomfort with her hand. The encounter brings their bodies near, but its limits remain part of the scene; afterward they dress, kiss, and continue speaking rather than treating intimacy as a cure for the pain surrounding them.

The Embrace in the Meadow

Naoko first describes how, when she suffers, she wakes Reiko and crawls into her bed to be held while she cries. Watanabe says he wishes he could hold her instead. Naoko answers by asking him to do so then and there. They sit on the meadow’s dry grass, surrounded by tall growth beneath an open view of sky and clouds. Watanabe lays her down gently and takes her in his arms; she reaches for him, and they kiss with genuine feeling. The movement from her account of seeking comfort from Reiko to her request for Watanabe’s embrace makes physical closeness an answer to an expressed need, not simply a sudden advance.

Desire, Care, and the Encounter’s Limits

The embrace turns into a candid exchange about sexual desire and discomfort. Naoko asks Watanabe whether he wants to sleep with her; he answers that he does, but asks whether she can wait, and she agrees. Later, when she asks whether he is suffering, she offers to help him get rid of the discomfort. Her offer is direct, but it is also framed through her own bodily pain: she says that his erection has been pressing against her since they lay down and hurting her. Watanabe pulls his hips away and asks whether that is better. The scene holds desire alongside attention to pain, making the small adjustment as important as the invitation.

The Hand Gesture and Its Aftermath

Naoko then unzips Watanabe’s trousers and takes his penis in her hand, remarking on its warmth. She begins to move her hand, while he unbuttons her blouse and bra, kisses her nipples, and she continues touching him with her eyes closed. Their exchange retains a conversational, responsive quality: Watanabe praises her, and Naoko tells him to be quiet. The encounter remains a hand-held act of sexual relief rather than intercourse. After he comes, he holds and kisses her; Naoko fastens her bra and blouse, and Watanabe zips his trousers. She asks whether this will make walking easier for him, a practical question that returns the scene from sexual intensity to their shared visit and its immediate bodily circumstances.

Intimacy Within a Larger Grief

The encounter’s significance is sharpened by the narrative’s later return to its physical details. After Naoko’s death, Watanabe remembers her body and breath with painful vividness, among the memories that make her seem still within reach even though she is gone. The meadow’s warmth and touch thus acquire a tragic afterlife: what was once shared intimacy becomes part of the irretrievable bodily past he carries with him. His memories arrive in an overwhelming succession, while the truth of her death remains impossible to absorb.

That return also complicates the earlier idea Watanabe had formed after Kizuki’s death—that death exists not as life’s opposite but as part of it. After Naoko dies, he recognizes that a philosophy, however true, cannot cure the sorrow of losing someone; grief must be endured, and what is learned cannot protect anyone from the next loss. The meadow scene is not presented as healing or as a resolution of Naoko’s suffering. Its tenderness is real, but it cannot prevent the later separation, and its sensual immediacy becomes one strand in Watanabe’s continuing bond with the dead.

When Watanabe returns to Tokyo, he withdraws into his room for days, his memory fixed on the dead rather than the living. The intimacy that once brought Naoko near therefore belongs to a relationship Watanabe cannot simply resume or replace: its recollection accompanies his retreat, while Naoko’s death makes the limits of physical closeness newly stark. The scene’s emotional arc runs from a requested embrace, through attentive bodily contact, to a remembered presence that grief cannot restore.