Reiko’s third mental breakdown and suicide attempt marks the point at which a renewed crisis overwhelmed the life she had tried to preserve with her husband and daughter. She had recognized that the pressure of staying in her neighborhood was making her mind falter again; when her husband asked her to hold on for a month while he arranged a move, she could not wait. She took sleeping pills and turned on the gas, then woke in a hospital. The attempt led not to a shared new beginning but to divorce, and Reiko’s later fear of the outside world reveals how the crisis continued to govern what she felt able to risk.

Causes and the decision to leave

Reiko recounts the crisis while explaining the circumstances surrounding her separation from her husband. She believed that the girl at the center of the earlier conflict had manipulated the adults around her, and that others would believe what they wanted regardless of what Reiko and her husband said. Continuing to struggle in the same neighborhood, she feared, would make her vulnerable to another breakdown. Her conclusion was practical and urgent: they had to move somewhere far away where nobody knew her.

The proposed move collided with her husband’s circumstances. He loved his work, they had only recently settled into their own small prefab house, and their daughter was comfortable at kindergarten. He thought the arrangements would take at least two months. Reiko said she could not endure that long: her ears were already ringing, she was hearing things, and she could not sleep. Her husband suggested that she leave first on her own while he managed the practical details, but she refused. She needed him with her and feared that, without him, she would fall apart.

Her husband then asked for just one month, promising to leave his job, sell the house, arrange a new kindergarten, and find work elsewhere; he mentioned a possible position in Australia. Reiko understood that objecting might isolate her further, but the promised interval did not feel survivable. The breakdown came before the month was over. In the sequence she tells, the request to wait is not merely a logistical delay: it is the interval in which her already returning symptoms become an immediate emergency.

The attempt and its aftermath

Reiko describes the moment of collapse as happening again, with the abruptness of a snap. She took sleeping pills and turned on the gas. She woke in a hospital bed; the account does not describe the mechanics of her rescue or the medical treatment, but makes clear that she survived and needed months before she had calmed enough to think through what had happened.

Afterward, Reiko asked her husband for a divorce, saying it would be better for him and their daughter. He refused at first, proposing that the three of them move somewhere new and begin again. Reiko answered that, for her, the decisive break had already occurred when he asked her to wait a month. She feared that moving would not erase the pattern: she might again ask him for help, and make him suffer again. She therefore rejected the prospect of another attempt at family life, however far away they went.

Marriage, care, and separation

Reiko does not present the divorce as the result of a loveless marriage. She describes her husband as faithful, strong, patient, and someone she trusted completely. He had done everything he could to help her recover, while she had tried to recover for his sake and their daughter’s. She recalls being happy for six years after their marriage and believed she was recovering. In her image, her husband brought her 99 percent of the way there, but the remaining one percent went crazy. That contrast makes the breakdown more than a rejection of his care: his devotion was real, yet it could not guarantee her safety from another crisis.

Reiko says that she ended the marriage because she believed she would remain ill and did not want to drag others down or make them live in constant fear that she might lose her mind. She later learned that her former husband had remarried, and says she was still glad she had made him leave her. Her decision is narrated as an attempt to spare her family the continuing consequences of a condition she did not believe she could control, not as proof that recovery had been wholly absent or that her husband had failed to care for her.

Continuing fear and the significance of the recollection

The crisis remains present in Reiko’s later life as fear of renewed involvement. She tells Watanabe that she cannot leave the sanatorium because she is afraid of the outside world, of meeting new people, and of feeling new feelings. Her fear gives the earlier crisis a continuing consequence: the attempt did not only end her marriage but also shaped her sense of whether ordinary contact and emotional attachment were safe. When Watanabe tells her he thinks she can go outside and make it, she smiles without answering; the exchange offers encouragement, not evidence that the fear has already disappeared.

Set against the book’s wider account of death, the episode also complicates any simple idea that understanding a crisis can resolve its pain. Watanabe comes to believe that death is part of life, yet later recognizes that no truth, sincerity, strength, or kindness can cure the sorrow of losing someone. Reiko’s account presents a related limit in the realm of illness and care: her husband’s love and her own efforts to recover carried her far, but they could not prevent the one percent she describes as going crazy. The recollection matters because it preserves both sides of that limit—the seriousness of her collapse and the genuine care that preceded it—without turning survival into a complete or certain recovery.