Watanabe visited Amemori to visit Naoko

Toru Watanabe’s journey from Tokyo to Ami Hostel is an act of care made tangible: after receiving a letter from Naoko, he arranges a visit, leaves the dormitory under a cover story, and travels into the mountains to reach her. The trip joins the ordinary mechanics of permission, tickets, buses, and a footpath to the emotional distance between the two young people. Read alongside Watanabe’s later reflections, it also belongs to a larger pattern: memory can keep the dead vividly present, but no philosophy can remove the grief of losing them.

The letter and the decision to go

After reading Naoko’s seven-page letter, Watanabe put it away in his desk drawer and left the dormitory rather than stay beside it and reread it endlessly. He walked through Tokyo on a Sunday without a destination, recalling the letter line by line, as he had once walked with Naoko. The wandering does not resolve what the letter has stirred in him; it gives him a way to carry its words while deciding what to do.

That evening he called Ami Hostel and asked whether he could visit Naoko the next afternoon. The receptionist told him to call back, then confirmed the visit after dinner. Watanabe thanked her, packed a change of clothes and toiletries into his rucksack, and spent the night reading The Magic Mountain with brandy, unable to fall asleep before one in the morning. His preparations are modest, but they turn concern into a plan: he can go to Naoko, and he acts as soon as permission is granted.

A journey made under a pretext

On Monday, Watanabe woke at seven, washed and shaved, and went to the dormitory Head to say he would be away for two days hiking in the hills. He did not tell him that he was going to visit Naoko. The Head, accustomed to Watanabe’s short trips, accepted the explanation without surprise. Watanabe skipped breakfast, took a crowded commuter train to Tokyo Station, bought a bullet-train ticket to Kyoto, and jumped aboard the first Hikari express to leave. Coffee and a sandwich stood in for breakfast; he dozed for an hour on the train.

He reached Kyoto shortly before eleven and followed Naoko’s directions to a bus terminal serving the northern suburbs. The next bus would leave at 11:35 and take a little over an hour, so he bought a ticket and crossed the street to a bookshop for a map. In the waiting room he traced the route and discovered that Ami Hostel lay much deeper in the mountains than he had imagined. The bus would cross several hills, turn around where the canyon road ended, and return to the city; he was to get off just before the end of the line, then walk about twenty minutes along a footpath.

The approach lengthens the visit into a passage through changing terrain. The bus followed the Kamo River out of Kyoto, past thinning housing, fields, and vacant land, then entered a canyon whose sharp bends made Watanabe queasy. After the curves eased, it plunged into a cedar forest that blocked the sun and brought a cold, damp breeze through the open windows. On the other side of a mountain pass, the road narrowed so much that two buses could not pass; the villages shrank and cultivated ground narrowed, while dogs set up a howling competition as the bus arrived. The journey’s remoteness is not abstract: the road itself constricts, turns, and forces vehicles to wait for one another.

The final walk to Ami Hostel

At Watanabe’s stop there were no houses or fields, only a bus-stop sign, a stream, and the opening of a trail. He shouldered his rucksack and climbed with the stream to his left and deciduous woods to his right. After about fifteen minutes he reached a narrow road leading into the trees. A sign identified it as private property belonging to Ami Hostel and prohibited trespassing. Beyond the woods stood a white stone wall about as high as Watanabe, and a black iron gate that was wide open; the guardhouse was unattended.

The route’s last details make the destination feel secluded but reachable. Watanabe has followed Naoko’s directions through a landscape of difficult roads and quiet woods, and the open gate marks the threshold of the place where she is staying. The evidence establishes his arrival at the hostel entrance; it does not, in this journey’s account, supply the subsequent conversation or the outcome of the visit. Keeping that boundary clear matters: the force of the episode lies here in the effort to reach Naoko, not in an invented resolution.

Memory, death, and the meaning of reaching out

The journey acquires a deeper resonance from Watanabe’s later account of loss. After Kizuki’s death, he came to understand death not as life’s opposite but as something that exists within life. The idea first took shape for him as an inward “knot of air,” then as a way to understand how the dead remain entangled with the living. That recognition does not mean that grief can be reasoned away. After Naoko’s death, Watanabe reflects that no truth, sincerity, strength, or kindness can cure the sorrow of losing someone; one can only see that sadness through to its end and learn from it, without expecting that lesson to prevent the next grief.

His later mourning shows memory moving between consolation and pain. On the coast, memories of Naoko arrive as a flood: her yellow raincape in the aviary, the collapsed birthday cake and tears soaking his shirt, her camel-hair coat, familiar hairslide, clear eyes, and blue nightdress. In the imagined place reached by those memories, he can speak with and hold her, and death is one element of life rather than a boundary that ends it. But the tide recedes, leaving him alone with sadness. When he returns to Tokyo, he shuts himself in his room for days and spends much of his time in the rooms he has set aside in memory for Naoko, with furniture draped in white and dusty windowsills. These later scenes do not alter what the visit was: they show why the earlier journey matters as an act of presence, and why presence cannot guarantee protection from loss.

Watanabe’s trip is therefore both practical and emotionally charged. A phone call leads to a confirmed appointment; a concealed explanation makes the departure possible; train, bus, and footpath carry him from the dormitory to the open gate of Ami Hostel. The later narrative does not offer travel as a cure for grief. Instead, it places the effort to reach Naoko within a story in which love persists through acts of attention and the memory of a shared life, even as death remains inseparable from living and sorrow cannot be dispelled by insight.