Watanabe stayed overnight at Kobayashi Bookstore to accompany Midori

Toru Watanabe’s night at the shuttered Kobayashi Bookshop becomes a quiet scene of intimacy between him and Midori Kobayashi: she asks him to stay beside her and hold her until sleep, and he answers with affection and a promise to care for her. The encounter joins a closed family business, a memorial to Midori’s father, and a makeshift bed in the altar room to a small but consequential gesture of comfort. Its warmth is real, though the later narrative of Watanabe’s mourning makes clear how difficult it is for him to turn from the dead toward the living.

The Closed Shop and a Changed Household

After deciding against a love hotel, Watanabe and Midori travel on the Yamanote Line to Otsuka and raise the metal shutter of the Kobayashi Bookshop. The paper sign announces that it is temporarily closed. Inside, the old-paper smell hangs over empty shelves and bundled magazines awaiting return; what had felt hollow on Watanabe’s first visit now seems like an abandoned hulk. The depleted shop is not just a place to sleep but evidence of a household at a turning point.

Midori tells Watanabe that the family intends to sell the shop and divide the proceeds, allowing her and her sister to live independently rather than under anyone’s protection. Her sister plans to marry the next year, while Midori still has three years of university ahead. The decision gives the overnight visit a practical backdrop: the shop and home are about to change, and Midori is preparing for a less protected life. Her invitation to Watanabe unfolds inside that unsettled domestic space.

The Altar and Her Father’s Presence

Upstairs, Midori sends Watanabe to the kitchen table while she warms the bath. He puts the kettle on, and the two drink tea as midnight approaches, with only the clock and refrigerator audible. The stillness gives their conversation room to deepen. Midori asks him to burn incense for her father; Watanabe follows her to the Buddhist altar, lights a stick before her father’s photograph, and brings his hands together.

The memorial setting is intimate rather than solemnly distant. Midori tells Watanabe that she had recently undressed in front of her father’s photograph and posed for him, describing the act with deliberately blunt, irreverent language. The disclosure places grief, the body, and the awkwardness of family affection in the same room. Watanabe does not turn the moment into a judgment; the scene moves from the altar back toward the practical care of preparing for bed.

A Request for Comfort

After they bathe and change into pyjamas, Midori spreads a mattress for Watanabe on the floor of the altar room. He borrows a nearly new pair of her father’s pyjamas, a little too small but usable. Then Midori asks him to stay with her and hold her until she falls asleep. He agrees, and the arrangement places them close together on her small bed, his arm around her back and his other hand gripping the bed frame so he will not fall.

The bodily closeness is affectionate, but the awkward position is explicitly not conducive to sexual excitement. Watanabe’s nose rests against Midori’s short hair as she presses her face to his chest and places her hands on his hips. The scene’s emphasis is not seduction but the precise, unglamorous work of staying beside someone: their comfort is cramped, improvised, and physical.

Midori asks him to say something nicer. Watanabe tells her he likes her a lot and compares the feeling to a spring bear. She calls it the best thing she has ever heard, then asks whether he would do anything she told him to do, would avoid getting angry, and would take care of her always. He answers that he will, stroking her short, soft hair and reassuring her that everything will be fine. Her fear remains audible even as she settles against him; soon her breathing becomes regular and she falls asleep.

Before Dawn

Watanabe does not sleep beside Midori for the rest of the night. He slips away to the kitchen, drinks a beer, and, unable to find anything nearby to read, eventually reads Beneath the Wheel by the light of the quiet bookshop. A bottle of brandy stands in the kitchen; he pours some into a coffee cup. Shortly before three he checks on Midori. She remains asleep, her stillness and breathing reminding him of her father. Her suitcase, white coat, neatly arranged desk, and Snoopy calendar make the room feel lived-in even as the surrounding shops lie closed beneath their shutters.

When the sky begins to lighten, Watanabe makes instant coffee and writes Midori a note on notepaper. He says he drank some of her brandy, bought a copy of the book, and is going home because it is light outside. After hesitating, he adds that she looks cute when she is asleep. He washes the cup, turns off the kitchen light, lifts the shutter quietly, and steps into the street at about 5:50 in the morning. He worries a neighbor might find him suspicious, but the street is empty; he walks to the tram stop and returns to his dorm after breakfast.

A Brief Opening Toward the Living

The encounter gives Watanabe and Midori a form of closeness built out of ordinary acts: tea, incense, bathing, borrowed pyjamas, a promise, and a handwritten note. Midori asks for reassurance directly, and Watanabe responds with tenderness rather than evasion. Yet his departure before dawn preserves the scene’s limits. He has offered presence for one night, not resolved what his attachment to Midori will become.

That uncertainty acquires force in the later account of Watanabe’s grief for Naoko. After her death, memories return in vivid detail, and he describes being swept into a place where the dead seem to remain part of life. He concludes that no truth, sincerity, strength, or kindness can cure the sorrow of losing someone; grief must be lived through, and a later loss cannot be met with the lesson learned from an earlier one. When he returns to Tokyo, he shuts himself away for days, his memory fixed on the dead rather than the living. Against that withdrawal, the night with Midori stands as a brief, concrete instance of care and contact—not a cure for grief, but a fragile connection that the larger story places under pressure.