Watanabe begins writing his account of Naoko

At 37, Toru Watanabe begins writing his account of Naoko because memory has become both his remaining bond with her and a source of fear: it is fading, and he cannot know whether its most important parts are already lost. The act begins in response to grief stirred by “Norwegian Wood” at Hamburg Airport, and becomes his way of keeping a promise to Naoko. But writing offers no restoration or cure. Its imperfect record lets him understand her more deeply even as it confirms that remembering cannot undo her death.

The song and the return of memory

The book’s frame opens with Watanabe at 37, strapped into a huge 747 descending through dense cloud toward Hamburg Airport on a cold, rainy November day. Germany returns him to the past before he has chosen to revisit it. After the plane lands, a sweet orchestral cover of the Beatles’ “Norwegian Wood” plays through the cabin speakers. The melody has always sent a shudder through him; this time it strikes harder than ever. The scene makes the impulse to write less like a detached decision than a response to a memory that has forced itself into the present.

Watanabe says the kicks of memory do not hurt, though they leave a hollow echo that will eventually fade. At Hamburg Airport, they are longer and harder than usual, which is why he is writing the book: to think and understand. Writing things down is, for him, a way to feel that he has fully comprehended them. The narrative therefore begins not with certainty about the past, but with an attempt to follow a disturbance toward what it might mean.

Memory as an imperfect record

Watanabe writes from recollection, and recognizes that his memory has grown dim. He fears forgetting something essential, imagining important memories collected in a dark inner limbo and slowly turning to mud. Yet faded, imperfect memories are all he has to work with. The image of the book as an imperfect vessel defines its limits: the account can hold fragments and thoughts, not recover the past in pristine form.

He had tried to write about Naoko when he was younger, while the memories were much sharper, but could not produce a first line. Their very clarity obstructed him; he could not tell where to begin, as though a map showing too much detail had become useless. With time, he understands that imperfect memories and imperfect thoughts are the only materials writing can contain. Paradoxically, as his memories of Naoko fade, he becomes better able to understand her. The narrative’s delayed beginning is thus part of its meaning: distance does not restore the past, but changes how he can approach it.

Keeping a promise to Naoko

Watanabe identifies writing as the only way he knows to keep his promise to Naoko. She had asked him not to forget her, and he comes to understand that she knew his memories would fade. Her request is not a demand that recollection remain unchanged; it is a plea that he remember she existed. The book answers by making her existence its subject, even while acknowledging that any account of her is shaped by the limits of the person who remembers.

That promise carries pain rather than resolution. Watanabe says the thought fills him with almost unbearable sorrow, and his recollection reaches a devastating conclusion: Naoko never loved him. The retrospective act does not convert intimacy into a comforting story or make the past answer to his desire. Instead, writing preserves both the promise and the knowledge that it cannot change the relationship or recover Naoko.

From philosophy to grief

Earlier, after beginning a new life in the dormitory, Watanabe tried to stop taking everything so seriously and to establish distance from the world. The effort seemed to work at first, but an indistinct knot remained inside him. Over time it took the clear form of the understanding that death exists not as life’s opposite but as part of life. Death, he realized, was not safely separate, waiting beyond the boundary of the living: it was present in ordinary things and breathed in like fine dust. This idea supplies a framework for the book’s meditation, but not a protection against what follows.

After Naoko dies, Watanabe leaves Tokyo and moves down the coast, sleeping on the sand, making fires from driftwood, and roasting dried fish bought from local fishermen. He drinks whisky and listens to the waves while thinking about her. Her death remains impossible to absorb. Even after hearing the nails driven into her coffin, he cannot adjust to the thought that she has returned to nothingness; his memories make her seem present, and then return him to the fact that her body no longer exists in the world.

The memories arrive as a flood: Naoko in a yellow raincape cleaning the aviary, the collapsed birthday cake and tears soaking through his shirt, her camel-hair coat, the hairslide she touched, her clear eyes, and her blue nightdress. In this inner place, he can speak with and hold her; death is one element of life rather than the force that ends it. But the consoling vision recedes, leaving him alone on the beach, overtaken by sadness and tears. The book distinguishes the felt presence of the dead in memory from their absence in the world, refusing to treat one as a solution to the other.

Watanabe comes to see that the philosophy he had drawn from Kizuki’s death is only one truth among others. From Naoko’s death he learns that no truth, sincerity, strength, or kindness can cure the sorrow of losing someone loved. Grief must be lived through; whatever it teaches cannot prepare the bereaved for the next sorrow that arrives without warning. His journey west, sustained by whisky, bread, and water, gives this understanding a bodily and temporal form: he keeps moving, but the movement does not amount to release.

Writing after return

When Watanabe returns to Tokyo, his awareness that Naoko is dead and Midori is alive does not immediately redirect him toward the living. He feels defiled and shuts himself in his room for days, with his memory fixed on the dead. In his mind he enters rooms reserved for Naoko, shuttered, their furniture draped in white and windowsills dusty; he spends much of each day there. He also thinks of Kizuki, imagining that he is giving Naoko back to the person she chose. These inward scenes show why the writing frame matters: Watanabe must encounter how grief has organized his inner life before he can make a record of it.

The account does not claim that putting this experience into words resolves it. Instead, its frame holds together two changes in understanding: memories of Naoko grow less vivid while his understanding of her deepens, and a philosophy of death proves incapable of curing bereavement. The book is Watanabe’s answer to Naoko’s request, but also a record of the answer’s limits. He can write that she existed and carry his promise forward; he cannot make memory permanent, bring her back, or turn sorrow into a lesson that will spare him future loss.