Red wool sweater

The wine-coloured pullover is a birthday gift that carries the shared handiwork of Naoko and Reiko into Toru Watanabe’s life outside the sanatorium. It first appears as a practical garment and a sign of care: the two women knit it together and send it to him. Later, when Midori recognizes it as his girlfriend’s work, the pullover becomes an unspoken disclosure of intimacy. In the aftermath of Naoko’s death, its place among Watanabe’s memories shows how an ordinary object can keep affection present without resolving grief.

Gift and Making

Three days after his twentieth birthday, Watanabe receives a package from Naoko. It contains the wine-coloured crew-neck pullover and a letter wishing him happiness in his twentieth year. Naoko contrasts his hoped-for happiness with her own continued misery, then says she would like him to have his share of happiness combined with hers. The garment thus arrives not as a solitary present but as an expression of Naoko’s wish that he might receive something of the happiness she cannot claim for herself.

The letter explains that Naoko and Reiko each knitted half. Naoko jokes that, if she had made the entire pullover alone, she would not have finished it until the following Valentine’s Day. She assigns the good half to Reiko and the bad half to herself, turning the uneven division of work into a modest, self-deprecating joke. The detail makes the gift a collaboration: Reiko’s participation is woven into an object sent in Naoko’s name, and Naoko’s teasing account gives Watanabe a glimpse of their shared life.

Naoko’s letter also says that she sometimes hates herself while watching Reiko, because Reiko seems good at everything and Naoko feels she has no particular skill. Beside that admission, the jointly knitted pullover is more than a token of Naoko’s individual affection. It records an act of making in which she takes part with Reiko, while her own account of the garment leaves room for both closeness and self-doubt.

Recognition by Midori

When Watanabe meets Midori in spring, she remarks that he is wearing the cool pullover his girlfriend knitted for him. He glances down at the wine-coloured garment in sudden shock and asks how she knew. Midori says she is only guessing and calls him honest. The exchange makes the pullover legible to someone outside the relationship before Watanabe has explained it: what he wears gives away a connection he has left unspoken.

Midori’s recognition also turns the garment into a point of tension between Watanabe’s attachments. The pullover is a present from Naoko, but Midori is the person beside him who notices it and asks what is wrong with him. Her observation does not erase the gift’s original meaning; instead, it brings that meaning into the living conversation between them. The sudden glance downward registers Watanabe’s surprise at being read through an object he has simply put on.

A Material Link Across Absence

The pullover’s significance is intensified by the novel’s account of how Watanabe experiences death. He comes to understand death not as a realm wholly separate from life but as something present within it, a recognition first associated with Kizuki’s death. Later, after Naoko dies, the remembered warmth of their past and the knowledge that her body no longer exists remain painfully side by side. In this narrative, an object made by Naoko can carry her care into Watanabe’s present without making her physically present or making his loss easier.

During the weeks after Naoko’s death, Watanabe travels far from Tokyo, moving down the coast and thinking about her as he sleeps on the beach, makes fires from driftwood, and listens to the waves. His memories return in involuntary sequences, including Naoko in her yellow raincape cleaning the aviary, the birthday cake that had caved in, her winter camel-hair coat, and her familiar hairslide. The pullover belongs to the same world of concrete remembered things: it can be worn and seen in the present, yet points back to the person who made it and the life they shared.

The contrast between the pullover’s tangible persistence and Naoko’s absence is not a cure for grief. Watanabe concludes that no truth, sincerity, strength, or kindness can remove the sorrow of losing a loved one; grief must be lived through, and what is learned from one loss cannot protect against the next. The garment therefore holds a limited but important meaning. It preserves evidence of Naoko’s care, and of Reiko’s participation in that care, while leaving Watanabe to face the loss the object cannot undo.