Watanabe and Reiko’s sexual encounter

Watanabe and Reiko’s sexual encounter follows Reiko’s private farewell to Naoko: after playing her fifty-first piece, her favourite Bach fugue, Reiko asks Watanabe to sleep with her, and he admits he had been thinking the same thing. The encounter brings physical intimacy into a night otherwise shaped by remembrance, yet its ending refuses to turn intimacy into certainty. Reiko asks to believe she has done enough for a lifetime; Watanabe cannot promise that she has.

The invitation after the music

Reiko’s request comes after she tells Watanabe to forget the sad funeral he witnessed and remember the marvellous one they have made for Naoko. She then plays one more piece, her favourite Bach fugue, bringing the total to fifty-one. In a voice just above a whisper, she asks whether he will do it with her. His answer—that he was thinking the same thing—makes the invitation mutual rather than a request met with reluctant acquiescence.

They go inside and draw the curtains. The darkened room sets the encounter apart from the music and memorial outside it, but does not erase that context: Reiko’s instruction to remember their funeral for Naoko remains the immediate lead-in. The scene follows an act of remembrance with a new form of closeness between the two survivors.

Hesitation and humor

Reiko describes the situation as strange, joking that she never expected a man nineteen years younger to undress her. Her humor gives voice to the age difference and her unfamiliarity with sex after a long interval. Watanabe responds in kind, and the exchange keeps their awkwardness in view rather than presenting the encounter as effortless.

Reiko admits that she is scared and feels like a seventeen-year-old girl who has visited a man in his room and suddenly found herself naked. Watanabe says he feels as if he is violating a seventeen-year-old girl. Their comparison registers his awareness of the age gap, while Reiko’s own description conveys her vulnerability and anxiety. The moment is therefore not simply a confident initiation: both speak about the unease accompanying it, and humor helps them meet that unease together.

Intimacy and conversation

The narrative describes their sexual intimacy in direct terms, but also emphasizes the way they remain in contact through conversation. A little later, they are close again; Reiko holds her breath and twists beneath him as he moves slowly. They talk while embracing, and Watanabe says that talking in this way feels wonderful. When something he says makes Reiko laugh, her laughter is felt by him as tremors. Speech and laughter become part of the physical closeness, not an interruption of it.

The scene develops through repeated intimacy rather than a single decisive moment. They join their bodies four times during the night. After each time, Reiko lies in Watanabe’s arms with her eyes closed, trembling slightly and releasing a long sigh. The repetition gives the encounter its shape: closeness returns, but each return leads back to the question of whether Reiko can regard this night as a completed exception.

A request no one can guarantee

At the end, Reiko asks Watanabe to tell her that she will never have to do this again and can now relax, having done enough to last a lifetime. Her request converts the encounter into a plea for reassurance about what comes next. Watanabe refuses to offer certainty: nobody can tell her, he says, and there is no way of knowing.

That answer is the encounter’s decisive limit. Reiko’s hope is for an ending she can rely on, but Watanabe does not pretend that one night can settle the rest of her life. The scene grants them tenderness, humor, and mutual willingness without making them a promise of permanent resolution. Set after their memorial for Naoko, their intimacy marks a movement back toward the living, while its unresolved final exchange preserves the uncertainty both of them must continue to inhabit.