Reiko’s visit to Watanabe after leaving the sanatorium

Reiko’s visit to Watanabe after leaving the sanatorium is both a reunion and an intervention. Having spent eight years at the institution, she comes to Tokyo after Naoko’s death not to offer a cure for grief but to face Watanabe directly. Their meeting makes her own uncertain freedom inseparable from his unfinished mourning: she urges him to keep feeling the pain of loss while refusing to let it injure Midori further.

The decision to leave

Four days after returning to Tokyo, Watanabe receives a special-delivery note from Reiko. She has been unable to reach him for weeks and is worried; she asks him to call, saying she will wait by the telephone at nine in the morning and nine at night. He calls at nine that evening, and Reiko answers immediately. When she asks to visit him two days later, he initially checks that she means Tokyo. Her answer is practical as well as emotional: she cannot see him without leaving the sanatorium.

Reiko explains that it is time to get out after eight years. The duration gives the visit a threshold quality: she is not simply making a short trip from a familiar place, but beginning to imagine a life beyond a long institutional stay. She says that if she remains much longer she will start to rot. Her blunt phrasing registers both the cost of remaining and the urgency of leaving, without suggesting that departure has made her unafraid or certain about what comes next.

She arranges to arrive on the 3:20 bullet train and asks Watanabe to meet her at Tokyo Station. Her joke that she will be easy to recognize as the old lady with a guitar case briefly turns the journey into a concrete reunion, marked by an ordinary object rather than a grand announcement. Beneath the humor, the request tests whether he will still recognize and receive her after Naoko’s death. He reassures her that he will be there.

A return marked by fear

Leaving the sanatorium does not feel like a simple liberation. Reiko tells Watanabe that she is scared and fears she could go crazy, cast out on her own without knowing what she is supposed to do. The candor makes clear that the journey to Tokyo is a beginning, not proof that her uncertainty has ended. Even as she gives voice to that fear, she catches herself on the expression “Go crazy just like that,” finding it cool. The self-conscious turn of humor does not erase the fear; it shows her trying to hold it in language and remain present with it.

Watanabe takes her hand and tells her that her own strength has brought her this far. His response is an act of reassurance between people whose lives have both been shaped by Naoko and the sanatorium, but it does not solve the practical question Reiko faces. When he asks what she will do, she says she is going to Asahikawa, far north in Hokkaido. An old college friend who runs a music school has been asking her for two or three years to help there. Reiko had resisted because she thought it too cold; freedom, she wryly observes, has brought with it the prospect of going to a place she calls a hole in the ground.

She has already sent her belongings to Asahikawa and says she has nowhere else to go. She asks Watanabe to promise that he will visit her there, turning their reunion into a continuing connection rather than a final farewell. He promises, then asks whether she has to leave Tokyo immediately or could stay for a while. The exchange preserves both sides of her departure: she has a destination and a friend’s invitation, but the future still feels exposed enough that she seeks a promise from him.

Grief, choice, and responsibility

The visit also brings Watanabe’s unresolved mourning into direct conversation. When Reiko asks whether he has slept with Midori, he says they have not had sex because they agreed to wait until things were settled. Reiko challenges the premise that Naoko’s death is what settled them. In her view, Watanabe had made his choice before Naoko died: he could not leave Midori, regardless of whether Naoko lived or died. She insists that he must take responsibility for that choice now, rather than treating his relationship with Midori as a consequence of bereavement alone.

Watanabe does not answer as someone who has achieved emotional resolution. He says he cannot forget Naoko and cannot forgive himself for turning away from her after telling her he would wait. He believes Naoko had been choosing death all along, but says that does not settle his own responsibility. He describes their bond as having been joined from the beginning at the border between life and death. His account holds together two claims that cannot be made interchangeable: Naoko’s death was not simply caused by his decision, yet he still experiences his failure to keep waiting as a personal wound.

Reiko does not demand that he stop grieving or replace Naoko in his memory. She advises him to keep feeling the pain of Naoko’s death for the rest of his life, and to learn from it if he can. But she distinguishes that continuing sorrow from his obligations to Midori: the pain has nothing to do with their relationship, she says, and further hurt could leave a wound too deep to repair. Her appeal is not that grief should disappear, but that it must not become a reason to damage someone who is still alive and has already been hurt.

She frames the advice as the reason she has made the journey. She has left the sanatorium and come all the way to Tokyo, riding a train she calls a coffin, to tell Watanabe that he must become more adult and strong enough to follow through on his choices. The image of the coffin makes the trip’s purpose deliberately severe: the train carries a woman leaving a place associated with illness to confront a man who remains psychologically enclosed with the dead. Reiko’s counsel is care expressed as a demand, not a promise that either of them can escape loss.

The living and the dead

Reiko’s insistence that Watanabe accept responsibility gains force from the way the novel presents his return to Tokyo. He is overwhelmed by a sense of defilement and shuts himself in his room for days, his memory fixed on the dead rather than the living. He imagines the rooms reserved in his memory for Naoko as shuttered spaces, furniture draped in white and dust gathering on the windowsills. The image of a huge, empty museum gives grief a physical form: he has become the caretaker of a collection that no one else visits, preserving the past while withdrawing from the present.

That withdrawal follows a period of wandering far from Tokyo, perhaps as far as Tottori or the hidden side of Hyogo. Along the coast, Watanabe sleeps on sand, makes fires from driftwood, roasts dried fish bought from a fisherman, and drinks whisky while thinking about Naoko. He cannot absorb that she is dead. Memories return with bodily vividness and in an uncontrolled sequence: Naoko in a yellow raincape cleaning the aviary, the collapsed birthday cake and her tears soaking his shirt, her camel-hair coat in winter, the hairslide she touched, and her blue nightdress. The past feels near enough to touch even as he knows that her flesh no longer exists in the world.

The remembered Naoko seems, for a time, to inhabit a place where death is not the decisive boundary between life and its end. In that inner landscape, she is present with death inside her, and her familiar gestures soothe him. Yet the tide of memory eventually recedes, leaving him alone on the beach, overtaken by darkness and tears. The relief of feeling close to her cannot last; the return to absence is part of the same experience. This pattern gives Reiko’s advice its emotional precision: Watanabe need not deny the dead to resume living, but the intensity of memory cannot itself restore Naoko or settle what he owes the living.

The distinction continues the understanding Watanabe drew from Kizuki’s death: death is not the opposite of life but part of it, and living people nurture death as they live. Naoko’s death teaches him something different and more painful: no truth, sincerity, strength, or kindness can cure the sorrow of losing a loved one. He can only see that sorrow through to its end and learn from it, without expecting what he learns to protect him from the next grief. Reiko’s counsel is consistent with that limit. She offers neither a cure nor absolution; she asks him to carry the pain and still act responsibly toward Midori.

The visit’s unresolved outcome

Watanabe understands what Reiko is telling him but says he is not ready to follow through. He returns to the smallness of Naoko’s funeral and protests that no one should have to die like that. Reiko strokes his head and answers that everyone will die that way sometime, including her and him. Her gesture is tender, but her answer does not undo the loss or make his decision for him. It places Naoko’s death within the mortality they share rather than treating it as an exception that can be made harmless by explanation.

The visit therefore ends without a neat reconciliation between grief and renewed life. Reiko is preparing to go to Asahikawa, carrying uncertainty with her and asking Watanabe to remain part of her future through a visit. Watanabe, meanwhile, has heard the distinction she insists upon: his pain over Naoko must be allowed to endure, while his choice to stay with Midori requires care and responsibility in the present. Her departure from the sanatorium and her journey to Tokyo make that demand an act of personal commitment. She leaves not with a cure for Watanabe’s sorrow, but having refused to let sorrow stand in for the choices he still has to make.