Hideo Harada and Kei (Fujino Katsura)’s romantic relationship

Hideo Harada and Kei’s romantic relationship begins amid the isolation of an apartment building that seems to empty out after dark. Their connection develops through candid disclosures and requests for trust, but remains shadowed by Hideo’s return to Asakusa and his visits to his deceased parents. When Mamiya later reveals that Kei had died before their relationship began, the intimacy between them takes on a tragic supernatural dimension: Hideo’s longing for companionship has drawn him into a bond with someone already lost.

An encounter in the emptied building

Hideo notices the building’s nighttime silence soon after his divorce. The seven-story block stands directly on Tokyo Route 8, where heavy traffic once kept him awake, yet late at night the parking lot is nearly empty and only his own apartment window appears lit. The contrast between the road’s ceaseless movement and the building’s stillness makes ordinary urban isolation feel uncanny.

The woman who approaches him is someone he remembers seeing pass through the lobby. She tells him that, by this hour on most nights, the two of them are the only people left in the building. Her matter-of-fact observation confirms what he has begun to suspect: their encounter is enabled by a place that is busy by day but nearly vacant at night. The following morning, office workers’ footsteps, doors, telephones, and voices gradually restore the building to ordinary life, while Hideo remains too weary to check on her.

After he has invited the woman from the third floor to visit, Hideo realizes he does not know her phone number. He searches the directory for Fujino at their address and finds the name Katsura Fujino, which he assumes belongs to his neighbor. She answers his call. The small practical act of finding her name and reaching her turns a passing nighttime encounter into a deliberate connection.

Vulnerability and the terms of intimacy

When they spend time together, Kei tells Hideo that she has a severe burn scar on her chest. Skin grafts have not made the scar disappear, and she explains that intrusive questions about being single made life at her previous apartment suffocating. Her disclosure gives context to both her solitude and her guardedness: she has learned that neighbors may treat a private aspect of her body as an invitation to pry.

Hideo responds by describing the run-down building as the unlikely condition that brought them together and by praising her directness. Kei challenges the implication that his kindness is simply sympathy for her scar. Hideo clarifies that he did not mean to suggest sexual interest, while Kei makes clear that she would welcome intimacy. Their exchange exposes a tension that persists in the relationship: care can feel like pity to the person receiving it, and reassurance is not enough unless it recognizes her as a desired equal.

Kei asks Hideo to kiss her. He agrees, but worries that a kiss offered out of charity would put them on unequal footing, so he first tells her that he finds her beautiful. Later, when she appears with a towel held against her chest, she asks him to promise not to pull it away. Hideo promises that her scars will not change how he feels about her. Her comparison to old myths about a forbidden look reveals the importance she places on the promise: seeing is not a neutral act if it violates a boundary she has explicitly set. Their developing intimacy therefore depends not only on attraction, but on whether Hideo can honor the conditions under which Kei feels safe.

A relationship tested by Hideo’s return to Asakusa

Kei tells Hideo that she has thought of the two of them as being together, and he acknowledges that he has thought the same. The relationship has moved beyond a single evening’s closeness into mutual recognition, even as Hideo struggles to speak plainly about what follows from it. A later outing offers a glimpse of ordinary companionship: they walk toward a small Spanish restaurant about a kilometer away along Route 8 in the heat. Kei complains that he does not have a car; Hideo explains that he gave his to his son and expects to be able to afford another after finishing his new series.

A more serious strain follows when Hideo tells Kei about the events in Asakusa. She pleads with him never to go there again. He understands the reason for her fear: his parents are dead, and contact with the dead threatens the boundary that orders the lives of the living. Yet he cannot treat his own mother and father as an evil to be resisted. His attachment to them leaves him unable to accept Kei’s request, even though he shares its underlying conviction.

Hideo breaks his promise and visits his parents again. When Kei confronts him, she wraps her arms around his waist as he adjusts the air conditioner and asks why he had to go. He does not try to lie; he explains that he wanted to say goodbye rather than vanish from his parents’ lives without warning. The exchange makes their disagreement intimate and concrete. Kei’s request is not an abstract rule to him, but a promise between partners; for Hideo, keeping it would mean abandoning the farewell he feels compelled to make.

The revelation of Kei’s death

The relationship is transformed when Mamiya tells Hideo that the tenant of apartment 305 died by suicide near the end of July. Hideo recognizes the implication because apartment 305 is the home he has associated with Kei. Mamiya says the woman had an ugly burn scar on her chest, that several operations had not helped much, and that she had withdrawn almost entirely from other people; loneliness was thought to have become unbearable. The details echo the vulnerabilities Kei had disclosed to Hideo, but now belong to the account of a woman who died before the relationship’s apparent beginning.

Mamiya identifies the woman as Kei Fujino and explains that her lease used Kei as the reading associated with her name. This links the neighbor Hideo met to the deceased tenant rather than leaving the resemblance as a coincidence. His relationship with Kei is thus recast as a supernatural encounter with a dead woman whose isolation and scar had shaped her life. The building’s nighttime emptiness, initially the circumstance that allowed two neighbors to meet, becomes part of the story’s larger uncertainty about who remains among the living.

The bond’s significance lies in the way tenderness and boundary-crossing coexist. Hideo tries to answer Kei’s fear with reassurance and to honor her request concerning her scar, yet he cannot keep his promise about Asakusa. Meanwhile, the later revelation exposes a more fundamental crossing: the relationship itself joined a living man to a woman already dead. Kei’s need for connection and Hideo’s unresolved longing—for companionship as well as for his parents—make their intimacy emotionally real without making it safe from loss.