Watanabe's mourning for Tsukiko's death

Toru Watanabe’s mourning for Naoko is not a passage from grief to consolation but a repeated confrontation with absence. He leaves Tokyo and walks west along the coast, where memories make Naoko feel vividly present, only to leave him alone again when they ebb. The journey lasts a month and does not ease his loss. Back in Tokyo, he shuts himself away among rooms set aside for Naoko, caught between his bond with the dead and the living relationship he cannot yet resume with Midori. His hard-won distinction is that death may be part of life, but no truth can cure the sorrow of losing someone loved.

A grief that resists explanation

Earlier, after Kizuki’s death, Watanabe had tried to establish distance from everything and forget the objects and scenes associated with loss. Instead, he felt an indistinct inner knot that gradually took shape as the understanding that death exists not as life’s opposite but as part of it. This idea had once seemed to revise his simple division between the living and the dead: death was not elsewhere, sealed off until the moment it claimed someone. Yet Naoko’s death tests what that philosophy can actually do. Knowing that the dead remain bound up with life does not enable him to accept that her body is gone.

During his journey, Watanabe moves down the coast, perhaps in Tottori or on the hidden side of Hyogo, sleeping on the sand, making fires from driftwood, and roasting dried fish bought from local fishermen. At night he drinks whisky and listens to the waves while thinking of Naoko. The ordinary physical details of this life on the road stand against the fact he cannot absorb: she has died and is no longer part of this world. Even hearing the nails driven into her coffin has not made her return to nothingness imaginable to him.

Memory and the imagined presence of Naoko

The memories that come back are not abstract recollections but sharply particular scenes. On sleepless nights he sees Naoko in her yellow raincape, cleaning the aviary with a feed bag; remembers the birthday cake that caved in and her tears soaking his shirt; and pictures her walking beside him in a camel-hair coat, touching her familiar hairslide, or sitting on a sofa in a blue nightdress with her knees drawn up. Their recurrence makes grief a physical and sensory experience: he can recall her warmth and breath so clearly that he feels she is still beside him and within reach, although her flesh no longer exists in the world.

The memories surge like an incoming tide and carry Watanabe into a strange imagined place where he can speak with Naoko and hold her. There death does not simply end life; it is one of the elements comprising it, and Naoko seems to live with death inside her. She tells him, “Don't worry, it's only death. Don't let it bother you.” In that interval he feels no sadness and is soothed by her familiar gestures. But the refuge is temporary. When the tide pulls back, he is left alone on the beach, unable to move beyond the darkness that envelops him; tears come as involuntarily as perspiration. The structure of this return—presence, reprieve, and renewed absence—shows why remembering her cannot be mistaken for recovering her.

The limit of philosophy

Watanabe draws a distinction between what Kizuki’s death taught him and what Naoko’s death teaches. From Kizuki’s death, he had made a philosophy of the proposition that death is part of life. From Naoko’s death, he learns that this proposition does not repair bereavement: no truth, sincerity, strength, or kindness can cure the sadness of losing a loved one. Grief must be seen through to its end, and something may be learned from it, but what is learned cannot protect anyone from the next sorrow that arrives without warning.

This is not a claim that reflection is useless. Watanabe spends days listening to waves and wind and thinking about what loss has taught him, while continuing west with a knapsack, sand in his hair, and a diet of whisky, bread, and water. The movement of his body through a landscape does not produce emotional progress in step with it. The sea can hold his attention and the road can carry him farther from Tokyo, but neither makes Naoko’s absence comprehensible. His account of grief insists on the difference between recognizing a truth and being relieved by it.

The month on the road and return to Tokyo

One windy evening, Watanabe weeps beside an abandoned ship. A young fisherman offers him a cigarette, and Watanabe, who has not smoked in over a year, accepts it. Asked why he is crying, he says almost reflexively that his mother has died and that he is on the road because he cannot bear the sadness. The fisherman responds with sympathy, brings sake and two glasses, and tells him about losing his own mother. Watanabe can barely listen; in his rage, he resents the story because it cannot match the loss he feels. His lie and his anger expose how sealed inside his grief he remains, even when another person offers companionship.

Afterward, Watanabe is overcome by nausea and vomits beside the old ship. He feels guilty about lying to the fisherman and taking his money, and decides he cannot continue the journey indefinitely. At a local railway station he asks for the quickest route to Tokyo. The clerk explains that he can reach Osaka by morning by changing night trains and continue by bullet train. While waiting, Watanabe checks a newspaper and sees the date: 2 October 1970. He has been travelling for a full month and recognizes that he must return to the real world.

The return does not resolve his mourning. The journey has neither lifted his spirits nor softened the blow, and he arrives back in Tokyo in much the same state as when he left. Though Naoko is dead and Midori is alive, he cannot bring himself to telephone Midori. The contrast sharpens rather than settles his conflict: one is irretrievably lost, while the other remains present, but Watanabe is not yet able to speak to her as someone ready to build a future.

Withdrawal, guilt, and the living

For days after returning, Watanabe shuts himself in his room, overcome by a sense of defilement. His attention remains fixed on the dead rather than the living. The rooms he has set aside for Naoko are shuttered; the furniture is draped in white, and dust gathers on the windowsills. He spends much of each day there, maintaining a space that resembles an inward memorial rather than an inhabited home. The image of himself as the caretaker of a huge, empty museum makes his isolation more than simple solitude: he watches over a collection of memories for no one but himself.

In those rooms, Watanabe thinks about Kizuki and imagines telling him that Naoko is now where she belongs, because Kizuki was the one she had chosen. He also recalls his effort, in the imperfect world of the living, to establish a new life with her. His imagined address to Kizuki makes mourning inseparable from self-reproach and from the feeling that Naoko and Kizuki belong to a world from which part of Watanabe himself has been drawn away. It does not settle whether his efforts could have changed what happened; it records his struggle to place his own love alongside Naoko’s earlier bond and death.

Later, Watanabe tells Reiko that he cannot forget Naoko and cannot forgive himself for having promised to wait for her and then turning away. He believes she might have chosen death regardless, but says that this possibility does not remove his sense of responsibility: their relationship, he feels, was bound to the border between life and death from the beginning. Reiko urges him not to suppress the pain but to keep feeling it for the rest of his life and learn what he can from it. At the same time, she insists that his grief must not become a reason to wound Midori again: Naoko’s death and his relationship with the living are separate responsibilities. Watanabe understands her counsel but is not prepared to follow through, still troubled that Naoko had such a sad funeral. His mourning therefore remains active and unfinished, held between a loss he cannot undo and a demand to answer for the choices that remain.