Watanabe and Naoko's first sexual encounter

Watanabe and Naoko’s first sexual encounter occurs on Naoko’s twentieth birthday, during an evening that moves from an improvised celebration to an emotional crisis. Watanabe understands the intimacy as something he could offer while Naoko was overwhelmed, but he remains unsure whether it was the right thing to do. The encounter neither settles their past nor relieves Naoko’s distress; its unanswered questions and remembered details become part of Watanabe’s later grief.

Birthday Evening and Naoko’s Stories

Naoko’s birthday arrives in mid-April, seven months before Watanabe’s. The milestone unsettles her: she says she is not ready to be twenty and feels as though someone is pushing her forward. Watanabe brings a cake to her flat after lectures, though the crowded tram leaves it badly misshapen. He and Naoko set twenty candles upright, light them, and make a simple celebration with wine, cake, and dinner. The birthday gives the encounter its immediate setting, while Naoko’s discomfort with age and forward motion makes the occasion feel less like an uncomplicated beginning than a passage she does not know how to face.

After dinner they listen to music and finish the wine. Naoko talks unusually much, recounting childhood, school, and family episodes in painstaking detail. Watanabe is struck by her memory, but also by the way each story seems to contain another, so that the connections keep shifting and the sequence appears to have no end. He eventually stops trying to respond and plays the six records in a loop, from Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band to Bill Evans' Waltz for Debbie. The repetition gives the evening a fixed structure while Naoko’s narration wanders; the music continues as the rainy night gathers around them.

From Distress to Intimacy

When Watanabe tries to bring the evening to a close, Naoko begins crying. The crying becomes prolonged and physically overwhelming. He reaches out, holds her, and waits for it to stop, but it does not. The scene’s movement toward intimacy begins not with a clear conversation or an explanation, but with Naoko’s distress and Watanabe’s effort to remain beside her.

Watanabe says that he slept with Naoko that night, while acknowledging that even nearly twenty years later he cannot determine whether it was the right thing to do. As he understood the moment, Naoko was in a heightened state of tension and confusion and made clear that she wanted him to give her release. He recalls trying to proceed gently. His uncertainty is central to how he tells the episode: he presents the decision as something he could do in that moment, not as an answer to the larger pain or confusion between them.

The encounter also reveals something Watanabe had not understood about Naoko’s earlier relationship. He had assumed she had been sleeping with Kizuki, but when he asks whether this was her first time, she nods. Watanabe is confused by the discovery. Naoko becomes calmer during the encounter, but its emotional outcome remains unsettled; the closeness does not remove the distress that brought the night to this point.

The Question and Its Aftermath

Afterward, Watanabe asks Naoko why she had never slept with Kizuki. He immediately recognizes that asking was a mistake: she withdraws her arms and begins crying silently again. He gets bedding from the closet and settles her beneath the covers, then remains awake smoking and watching the April rain. The question opens a subject that the encounter has not made easier to approach, and Naoko’s renewed withdrawal leaves the history of her relationship with Kizuki unexplained.

By morning, Naoko does not answer or move when Watanabe tries to speak to her. The room retains the signs of the birthday evening: record jackets, glasses, wine bottles, an ashtray, and half the damaged cake. On Naoko’s desk are a dictionary and a French verb chart; the calendar on the wall has no notes or marks beside its dates. Watanabe eventually gives up trying to elicit a response and leaves after putting the room in order. The scene ends without a reassuring conversation or a shared account of what happened.

Memory, Death, and the Encounter’s Return

The episode remains part of Watanabe’s larger understanding of death and life. After Kizuki’s death, he had begun to grasp that death was not separate from life but existed within it. Naoko’s birthday night gives that idea an intimate, unresolved form: a moment of closeness occurs within a relationship already shadowed by loss, and neither tenderness nor physical presence can supply a simple resolution.

After Naoko dies, Watanabe’s memories of her return in involuntary waves. Among them are the collapsed birthday cake and the memory of her tears soaking through his shirt. The birthday encounter is thus preserved not as a self-contained romantic turning point, but as one of the scenes through which grief repeatedly brings Naoko into the present of his memory. Watanabe later concludes that no truth, sincerity, strength, or kindness can cure the sorrow of losing someone; the episode’s lasting significance lies in how its closeness survives as memory without overcoming loss.