Reiko’s letter to Watanabe

Reiko’s letter to Watanabe is a dated reply that turns his confusion over Naoko and Midori into a set of humane, practical choices. It conveys welcome news about Naoko’s improving condition, but its central purpose is to release Watanabe from the demand to make love and responsibility fit a perfectly controlled plan: he should be honest about his attraction to Midori, decide with her how to proceed, and remember that his support for Naoko still matters. The advice offers a way forward, not a cure for the grief that later makes Watanabe unable to answer Reiko.

The Reply and Its News

Reiko’s answer arrived five days after Watanabe sent his letter by special delivery, and was dated 17 June. Her opening news is that Naoko has been improving much faster than expected. Reiko has spoken with her by telephone and found her lucid; she even thinks Naoko may soon be able to return to the sanatorium. This report places Watanabe’s private dilemma alongside a change in Naoko’s condition: the person whose wellbeing he has been trying to protect may be recovering, even as his own feelings are shifting.

The reply addresses Watanabe directly after this update. His letter had described his enduring love for Naoko and his powerful, distinct feelings for Midori, along with his confusion about what to do. Reiko does not dismiss either attachment or claim that the situation has an easy solution. Instead, she challenges his habit of taking everything too seriously and asks him to have more faith in himself. Her counsel treats uncertainty not as proof of failure but as part of making a sincere choice.

Counsel About Midori

Reiko’s first recommendation is that Watanabe accept the possibility that he has fallen in love with Midori. If he is strongly drawn to her, Reiko considers that response natural; whether the relationship succeeds is a separate uncertainty. Her advice is not that he can guarantee a happy outcome, but that love should not be rejected simply because its consequences cannot be controlled in advance.

She makes the next step explicitly Watanabe’s and Midori’s to determine together. Reiko refuses to decide for him whether he should have sex with Midori, telling him to talk it over with Midori and reach a conclusion that makes sense to them. The distinction matters: she supports his capacity to act without pretending that affection alone settles every question of intimacy or responsibility.

Reiko also tells him not to tell Naoko about his feelings for now. If events reach a point where disclosure becomes unavoidable, Reiko offers to work out a plan with him. This is advice about timing and care, not a claim that the question can be erased. Her practical discretion sits beside her encouragement to follow his feelings toward Midori, preserving the tension between moving forward and avoiding unnecessary hurt to Naoko.

Continuing Responsibility and Imperfect Life

The letter does not equate a change in Watanabe’s romantic feelings with an end to his obligations to Naoko. Reiko reminds him that he has been a great source of strength for Naoko and can continue to do a great deal for her even if he no longer feels like her lover. The counsel widens his choices: he need not decide between romantic devotion and total withdrawal, because care can persist in another form.

Reiko’s broader argument is against treating life as if it could be managed with mechanical precision. She describes people as imperfect and life as imperfect, rejecting the expectation that every feeling and consequence can be measured, arranged, and made painless. She urges Watanabe to open himself to life’s natural flow, and even exhorts him to work at making himself happy. Her tone is intimate and emphatic, but the point is not that happiness is effortless: it is that excessive self-reproach cannot make human relationships obey a flawless design.

She acknowledges that she is sorry Watanabe and Naoko could not reach a happy ending, then refuses to claim certainty about what would have been best. From her own experience, she warns that people may have only a few chances at happiness and may regret letting them pass. That conviction grounds her advice to take the possibility with Midori seriously. It does not erase Naoko or declare Watanabe free of care for her; it asks him not to sacrifice every opening toward happiness to the hope of preventing all pain.

The Letter’s Afterlife

Reiko’s answer belongs to a sequence of correspondence through which she remains a confidante to Watanabe. Its immediate response to his uncertainty is followed, after Naoko’s death, by further letters in which Reiko tells him that Naoko’s death was not his fault and that no one was to blame. Watanabe does not answer. He cannot see what a reply could accomplish when, as he understands it, Naoko has become ashes and no longer exists in the world.

His silence exposes the boundary of the letter’s counsel. Reiko had urged him to stop brooding, trust himself, and accept the chances for happiness that life offers; after the loss, however, his grief does not yield to advice or explanation. While traveling far from Tokyo, he reflects that no truth, sincerity, strength, or kindness can cure the sadness caused by losing someone loved. He can only endure that sadness, and what he learns from one loss cannot protect him from the next.

When Watanabe returns to Tokyo, he shuts himself in his room for days, with his memory fixed on the dead rather than the living. The contrast gives Reiko’s letter its lasting significance: it offered a compassionate route toward choice and continued connection, but the novel does not present counsel as a remedy capable of mastering bereavement. Its hope remains real, yet Watanabe’s response to Naoko’s death shows how far hope and action can be separated by grief.