Reiko’s attempted suicide

Reiko’s attempted suicide is the turning point in her account of a second severe mental-health crisis: unable to endure a month-long delay before leaving a neighborhood she experienced as unbearable, she took sleeping pills and turned on the gas. She survived, but afterward asked for a divorce, convinced that staying in the marriage would reproduce the same crisis rather than offer a genuine new start.

Background to the Crisis

Reiko explains that she believed her daughter had been manipulated by a thirteen-year-old girl, but that the adults around the girl would not accept Reiko’s account. She feared that remaining in the neighborhood would bring on another breakdown, and felt that her family had no way to prove what she believed had happened. The conflict therefore combined her conviction that the situation was dangerous with her sense that she could not make others recognize it.

Moving away seemed necessary, but her husband was not ready to leave. He had only recently established the family in a house, loved his work, and wanted to make arrangements for their daughter’s kindergarten and his own employment before moving. He proposed that Reiko go ahead alone or wait a month while he organized the move. Reiko said she could not wait and did not want to be left by herself; the symptoms she described included ringing ears, hearing things, and sleeplessness. Her husband’s request for more time, intended as a practical plan for a family move, became for her evidence that her urgency was not understood.

The Attempt and Survival

Reiko says that she could not hold on for the month her husband asked for. During the renewed crisis, she took sleeping pills and turned on the gas. She woke in a hospital bed; the account does not provide further medical details about her treatment or recovery. The attempt is recounted as the culmination of an escalating impasse, not as an event with a simple, confidently established explanation.

Divorce and Aftermath

After several months, when she had calmed enough to think, Reiko asked her husband for a divorce, saying it would be best for him and their daughter. He resisted and proposed that the family start over somewhere new. Reiko refused that possibility. In her view, the decisive break had already occurred when he asked her to wait: another move, however far away, would not change the pattern she feared would recur, with her once again needing to ask for something he could not give in time.

Reiko says that she was the one who ended the marriage, and that her husband remarried two years later. She remains glad she made him leave her. This outcome distinguishes the attempted suicide from a lasting reconciliation: survival is followed not by the restoration of the marriage, but by Reiko’s decision to separate so that, as she saw it, her suffering would not continue to injure her husband and daughter.

Place in the Novel’s Pattern of Loss

The episode is related retrospectively by Reiko and belongs to a broader pattern in which the novel records deaths and attempts without claiming access to a complete or definitive motive. Reiko’s account gives specific relational and practical pressures, but does not reduce her crisis to a diagnosis or imply that one circumstance alone explains it. Her story also contrasts with deaths in the novel that leave no note or clear explanation: here the reader hears Reiko’s own account of the breakdown, the failed wait, and the separation that followed.

The crisis is narrated within a novel attentive to how death remains part of the lives of survivors, while refusing the idea that a general truth can remove grief. Reiko’s survival and later account do not make the event easy to explain or erase its consequences. Instead, the episode shows a life-altering decision emerging from a situation in which Reiko felt that the people closest to her could not respond to the urgency she expressed.