The first meeting between Toru Watanabe and Midori Kobayashi turns an ordinary solitary lunch into the beginning of a new connection. Midori recognizes Watanabe from a university drama class, but he does not recognize her until she supplies the clue that links them; after a short, playful conversation, she proposes another meeting and offers to buy him lunch. The scene’s movement is small but decisive: an unknown student becomes someone Watanabe expects to see again.

The encounter at lunch

At 11:30 on a Monday, after a lecture on Euripides in History of Drama, Watanabe walks ten minutes to a quiet backstreet restaurant. He has an omelette and salad by the window. The restaurant is slightly more expensive than the student dining hall, but he chooses it for its relaxed atmosphere and its good omelettes. Its owners are a married couple who rarely speak to each other, and a part-time waitress helps serve the customers. These unremarkable details establish the scene’s private, unhurried setting before anyone interrupts it.

A group of four neatly dressed students enters and takes the table near the door. As the group studies the menu and places its order, one of the women keeps glancing toward Watanabe. She has extremely short hair, dark sunglasses, and a white cotton mini-dress. Watanabe does not know who she is and continues eating; she leaves her seat, comes to his table, and asks whether he is Watanabe. He is struck by the mismatch between her certainty and his inability to place her: few people at the university know him by name, and he thinks he would remember someone so noticeable.

Midori asks if she may sit down or whether Watanabe is expecting somebody. Their initial exchange is not a formal introduction so much as a test of recognition. When Watanabe asks whether they know each other, she answers with a reference to Euripides and then to Electra, pointing back to the lecture that has just ended. The allusion supplies the missing context: she has seen him in History of Drama, while he has not yet connected the strikingly changed woman at his table with the student from class.

Recognition and first impressions

Watanabe looks at Midori more closely and recognizes her only after she removes her sunglasses. He remembers her as a first-year student in the class, but her new hairstyle has altered his impression of her so completely that he failed to identify her. He recalls that, before the summer holidays, her hair reached several inches below her shoulder. Midori explains that she had a perm over the summer and that it turned out badly. The alteration is a concrete cause of the missed recognition, not a mystery about how they know one another.

The scene gives their first contact a gentle asymmetry. Midori has noticed Watanabe and knows his name; he needs her theatrical prompt and the removal of her sunglasses before he can place her. She is willing to cross the restaurant and initiate conversation, while he responds cautiously, trying to reconstruct the connection. Her remark about Electra makes their shared classroom the bridge between unfamiliarity and recognition, and the quick exchange lets a lecture become the unlikely pretext for a personal acquaintance.

A conversation becomes an invitation

The two discuss the restaurant’s food. Midori orders macaroni and cheese, and Watanabe says that the restaurant makes it reasonably well. The talk then shifts from the menu to Watanabe himself. Midori comments on the smooth quality of his speech and asks whether anyone has ever mentioned it. He says no and adds that he has never noticed anything unusual about the way he talks. The exchange shows Midori attending to small, individual details, while Watanabe receives her observation without turning it into a performance.

When Midori introduces herself, she says that her name means green, though she thinks green looks terrible on her and jokes that this makes her feel cursed. She adds that her sister’s name is Momoko, or Peach girl, prompting Watanabe to ask whether her sister looks good in pink. The wordplay makes the introduction more personal than simply exchanging names: Midori offers a brief, amused account of the mismatch between her name and her sense of how the color suits her.

Before leaving, Midori asks whether Watanabe will be at lectures two days later. He says that he will. She proposes that they meet at the restaurant at noon, promising to return his notebook and buy him lunch. Her invitation is practical as well as social: she frames eating together as an easy alternative to eating alone. The conversation thus gives the meeting a clear next step, one initiated by Midori rather than left to chance.

The missed second meeting

Midori leaves the table and returns to the other students, waving to Watanabe as he passes them. The three others barely look in his direction. That small contrast preserves the individuality of the encounter: Midori has chosen to approach him, and the invitation belongs to her rather than to the group she arrived with.

At noon on Wednesday, Watanabe returns to the restaurant, but Midori is absent. He waits, first over a beer and then through lunch, finishing at 12:35. He crosses to a small shrine and sits on its stone steps, hoping to clear his head and give her more time to arrive. At one o’clock he gives up and goes to read in the library before attending his two o’clock German lecture. The planned follow-up therefore turns into an unanswered appointment; the opening of the relationship is marked not by immediate continuity but by a promise that is briefly left hanging.

After the lecture, Watanabe goes to the student affairs office and checks the History of Drama class list. The only Midori listed is Midori Kobayashi. He then searches the student files for her address and telephone number, finding a record for a student who entered the university in 1969 and lived with her family in Toshima, a north-western suburb. He slips into a telephone box and dials the number. His response to her absence extends the first meeting beyond the restaurant: a chance encounter has become important enough for him to seek her out rather than simply let the missed lunch pass.

Significance of the first meeting

The scene establishes the beginning of Watanabe and Midori’s connection through ordinary acts of attention: a glance from across a restaurant, a walk to another person’s table, a classroom reference, a remembered hairstyle, and an invitation to share lunch. Its significance lies not in a grand declaration but in the shift from Watanabe’s solitary routine to an emerging expectation of company. Midori’s initiative opens that possibility, while Watanabe’s later wait and search show that the encounter has registered with him.

Recognition is the scene’s small reversal. Watanabe initially sees Midori as a stranger, although she knows who he is; one line about Euripides and the removal of her sunglasses redraw the scene as a reunion of classmates who had not yet become acquaintances. The missed Wednesday appointment complicates that beginning without undoing it. Instead of making their first conversation self-contained, the narrative carries its consequence forward into Watanabe’s decision to find Midori’s name and call her.