Watanabe visited and took care of Midori's father

Watanabe’s visit to Midori’s hospitalized father turns a brief offer of help into an act of hands-on care, and a cucumber into a lasting memory. Midori has been spending the day at the hospital, taking her turn staying with her father; when Watanabe offers to watch him so she can leave for a couple of hours, the father’s silence and frailty make the work seem at once practical and emotionally uncertain. The visit later acquires its deepest significance when Watanabe learns that the man died five days afterward: what remains with him is the tiny crunch of the cucumber they shared, a modest sound that bears the weight of a life’s ending.

The visit and its purpose

Midori tells Watanabe that they are going to the hospital because her father is there and it is her turn to stay with him all day. Watanabe is surprised: he thought the father had gone to Uruguay. Midori matter-of-factly admits that this was a lie. Her father had talked for years about going, but could never do it. The explanation places the visit within the difficult, ongoing reality of Midori’s family life, rather than the imagined departure she had described.

At the hospital, Watanabe suggests that Midori go out for a walk and clear her mind while he takes over. She hesitates over whether he knows how to care for her father. Watanabe says he has been watching and has learned the routine: check the intravenous drip, give him water, wipe away sweat, help him spit phlegm, use the bedpan, and offer the remainder of his lunch if he is hungry. Anything he cannot manage, he will ask a nurse about. The offer is not abstract sympathy; he has noticed the ordinary tasks and is willing to perform them.

Midori also warns him that her father is beginning to act strangely and may say things that make no sense. When she tells her father that she has business to attend to and Watanabe will stay with him, the man gives no discernible reply. He lies on his back looking at the ceiling, almost motionless; his eyes are bloodshot, and his nostrils flare with each deep breath. Watanabe cannot tell what he is thinking or feeling. The gap between the visible demands of care and the inaccessible inner life of the patient shapes the quiet tension of the scene.

Care through food and attention

Once Midori has left, Watanabe does not know what to say to her father, so he keeps quiet. Later, hungry himself, he finds little in the room beyond a can of nori, cough drops, soy sauce, and the cucumbers and grapefruit Midori had brought. He washes three cucumbers, wraps one in nori, dips it in soy sauce, and eats. He praises their fresh, simple taste, then eats another as the sickroom fills with the sound of his chewing.

The father responds to that ordinary display of appetite. When Watanabe asks whether he would like something to drink, the man answers with a request for cucumber. Watanabe raises the bed, cuts a small piece, wraps it in nori, dips it in soy sauce, and feeds it to him with a toothpick. The father chews and swallows with little change in expression. When Watanabe asks whether he would like nori with it, the father gives a small nod. The exchange is spare, but it marks a shift: a man who had not replied to Midori now communicates a preference and accepts food.

Watanabe tells him that food tasting good is like proof of being alive. The father eats the entire cucumber, asks for water, and later needs to urinate. Watanabe gets the urine jar from under the bed, helps him use it, empties it into the toilet, and washes it. He then returns to his tea. This sequence makes the visit a full act of intimate physical assistance, from feeding to bodily care, without turning the father’s condition into a dramatic recovery. The immediate change is smaller and more tangible: he eats, drinks, and makes his needs known.

Midori’s respite and Watanabe’s role

When the father falls asleep, Watanabe and Midori buy coffee from a vending machine and sit in the television room. He reports what happened while she was away: her father slept, woke to eat some of his leftover lunch, noticed Watanabe eating a cucumber, asked for one, ate it all, and urinated. Midori tells Watanabe that the family had been struggling to get her father to eat anything, and is astonished that he finished a whole cucumber. Watanabe credits the father with seeing him enjoy his own food; Midori suggests that Watanabe has a knack for putting people at ease.

The episode gives Midori a short break from the responsibility she has been carrying at the hospital. Her relief is bodily as well as emotional: afterward she says she feels much better, though still tired, and that her body feels lighter than before. Watanabe’s offer allows her to leave without abandoning her father’s care, while his willingness to learn the routine makes him useful in a way that conversation alone could not. Their closeness is expressed through shared responsibility and trust rather than a declaration.

The memory after death

Five days after the visit, Midori’s father dies. Watanabe later recalls the hospital scene in a letter to Naoko: he had gone to visit the father of a girl in one of his lectures, eaten cucumbers in the room, and heard the man ask for some after listening to him crunch. The father made the same small crunching sound as he ate. Watanabe says he still remembers it vividly, and reflects that people leave strange, little memories of themselves behind when they die.

That recollection gives the cucumber its force beyond the immediate scene. During the visit, it is simple food that prompts a response from a nearly silent patient and provides a moment of shared, ordinary life. In retrospect, the sound of chewing becomes a specific remnant of someone who is gone. The event’s emotional weight rests not on a grand farewell or a final revelation, but on the contrast between the father’s near-immobility and the small acts he could still perform: asking, chewing, swallowing, and asking for water.

Place in the novel’s treatment of loss

The episode is a compact instance of care in a novel where death remains close to the lives of the living. Watanabe has learned that death is part of life, but that understanding does not make individual losses abstract or painless. Here, the approach of death is encountered through the concrete work of looking after someone: watching his breathing, offering food, handling a urine jar, and reporting his appetite to Midori. The ordinary details do not resolve grief; they give it a particular shape that can be remembered.

The scene also connects Watanabe and Midori through an act that neither of them can treat as merely symbolic. Midori must take her turn at the hospital; Watanabe steps in, watches carefully, and gives her time away. Her father’s response to the cucumber is no cure and no reversal of his decline, but it creates a brief, shared exchange in a room otherwise marked by silence. After his death, Watanabe carries that exchange forward as a memory of the man—not as a complete account of him, but as one small, unmistakable trace.