Rie

Rie is the four-month-old daughter of Kawashima Masayuki and Yoko, and the infant at the center of her father’s escalating fear that he might stab her with an ice pick. She is shown through a striking contrast: an ordinary, carefully tended baby whose small physical details draw tenderness from her father, and the person he repeatedly watches while trying to reassure himself that he will not hurt her.

Identity and Family

Rie’s name was suggested by Yoko’s mother. At four months old, she is still an infant, dependent on her parents’ care. Yoko manages her care while maintaining a busy schedule of bread and pastry classes in the couple’s one-bedroom apartment. The household’s daily life is therefore organized around both the baby and Yoko’s teaching: students come to the apartment, and many of them are willing to help with Rie.

The account presents her as part of a domestic world shaped by Yoko’s work and care. Yoko had left a job with a major baked-goods manufacturer when she married and built a popular teaching practice from home. She teaches almost every day, while looking after Rie; the students’ help makes that demanding arrangement more manageable. These details place Rie within an active household rather than an isolated nursery, even though her father’s nighttime attention makes the crib the focus of the opening crisis.

Care and Everyday Presence

Rie is cared for by both parents in the scenes described. After bathing her, Kawashima Masayuki hands her to Yoko, who is waiting with a fluffy towel and murmuring to the baby as she dries her. He leans back in the bath and watches them, smiling. The moment is peaceful until an intrusive thought about stabbing Rie with an ice pick abruptly interrupts it. Yoko notices that something is wrong and calls to him several times before he responds, but the account gives no indication that Rie understands the change in her father.

Her presence is rendered through precise, delicate physical details. In the crib, her lips move almost imperceptibly; the narrator compares their minute appearance to larvae or a chrysalis. Fine red vessels show beneath the peach fuzz on her cheeks. Her skin is described as soft and pale, and her cheek is downy beneath her father’s touch. The attention to her smallness makes her vulnerability concrete, while avoiding any suggestion that the infant can grasp the danger surrounding her.

The Crib and Her Father’s Fear

The bath marks the beginning of a recurring crisis. From that moment, Kawashima Masayuki cannot dismiss the image of the ice pick. Though he repeatedly tells himself he would never stab Rie, an opposing thought persists. Each night he finds himself unable to go to bed until he has stood over her crib with the ice pick, checking that he will not harm her. By the time of the scene in the bedroom, this has happened for ten nights in a row.

During the nighttime vigil, Yoko is asleep nearby while Kawashima Masayuki checks on Rie. He switches on a penlight and examines her in the narrow beam that falls across the crib. He draws back her blanket, exposing her neck and upper chest, then holds the ice pick close to her cheek. His actions are alarming, but the scene also distinguishes the feared possibility from what he does: he does not stab her. He touches her fine cheek fuzz, first with a fingertip and then with the instrument’s tip. The distinction does not remove the danger of the moment; it makes his effort to manage his fear part of the same scene as the threatened violence.

Reassurance and Significance

Kawashima Masayuki’s attention to Rie is divided between fear and care. He watches over her night after night because he is afraid of what he might do, yet the vigil is also an attempt to confirm that he will not do it. His self-reassurance that everything will be all right is tested against the physical presence of the baby and the ice pick he has brought to her crib. Rie herself does not speak or act in response; the passage makes her the vulnerable focus of her father’s thoughts and behavior, not a participant who can explain them.

Before leaving, Kawashima Masayuki bends over the crib and lightly touches Rie’s downy cheek. He whispers reassurance so that Yoko will not hear. The gesture returns to the gentle contact established in the bathing scene, but its secrecy and the preceding nightly ritual give it a different weight. Rie’s role in these scenes is consequently decisive without depending on any action of her own: her presence exposes the gap between her father’s ordinary tenderness toward her and his terrifying fear that he could become a danger to her.