Harada and Kei begin an intimate relationship through a small sequence of disclosures, negotiated boundaries, and returns. Kei’s first visit brings her into Harada’s apartment with cheese and an account of the burn scars on her chest; their first kiss stops short of the intimacy he initially anticipates. When she later comes back, relief gives way to a passionate embrace, but she again prohibits him from touching or seeing her chest. The relationship advances, then becomes explicit when Kei says she has thought of them as being together and Harada confirms that he has felt the same.

First Visit and Disclosure

Kei introduces herself by explaining that her family register gives her the name Katsura, but that she chose Kei as a name to use. She jokes about the oddity of combining the names of two trees and offers other possible ways to understand her choice, including the letter K. The explanation is more than a label: she presents herself on her own terms, making the name she uses part of the first exchange between them.

She arrives with a plastic container holding a knife and small pieces of cheese. The casual food and her cheerful manner run against Harada’s expectation that he would be comforting a lonely woman weighed down by the night. Their conversation turns to why she is alone. Kei responds without hesitation that she has an ugly burn on her chest. She has undergone skin grafts, she explains, but the skin remains badly scarred and its colors do not match. At her previous apartment, neighbors repeatedly pressed her about being single, until their questions became suffocating. Her disclosure gives the encounter a history of unwanted scrutiny, while the comparative ease of speaking to Harada marks his apartment as a place where she can say what she has avoided discussing with neighbors.

The First Kiss and Its Limit

Kei asks Harada to kiss her, keeping her eyes averted. He agrees quickly, conscious that a kiss offered as charity would put them on unequal footing. Rather than treat the request as an obligation to pity her, he tells her that he finds her beautiful. They kiss at length, and the kiss seems to lead toward lovemaking. But when Harada puts a hand to her breast, Kei pulls free and turns her back to him. He tells her that the burn is not her fault.

The scene establishes both attraction and a boundary that attraction does not erase. Kei initiates the kiss, but she does not thereby consent to having the scar touched or seen. Harada’s reassurance answers the shame implied in their conversation, yet the physical interruption makes clear that reassurance alone does not dissolve her discomfort. Their intimacy begins not as an uncomplicated progression, but as a negotiation in which Kei’s control over what remains private is central.

Return and Growing Closeness

Later, when Harada is frightened by the sound of the intercom and imagines that his father or mother may be at the door, Kei identifies herself. His relief is immediate. She stands outside in a pale green blouse and yellow skirt; an exchange of teasing about whether she is an apparition ends in shared laughter and a passionate embrace. The movement from his terror to their laughter gives her arrival a particular emotional force: she is not a frightening presence from his past, but the person whose return reassures him.

They make love, but Kei again insists that Harada must neither touch nor see her chest. He respects the boundary, beginning their intimacy with his arms around her instead. The encounter thus deepens their physical relationship without making her scar available for inspection. In the same evening, Harada learns that Kei works in the accounting department of a packinghouse and grew up in a small farming village about an hour by bus from Toyama, on the Sea of Japan coast. Such ordinary particulars add a life beyond the guarded fact of her injury, allowing their relationship to take shape through both bodily closeness and knowledge of one another’s circumstances.

Naming the Relationship

At a later point, Kei hesitates briefly and averts her eyes before telling Harada that she has thought of them as being together. Harada replies that he has thought so too, though he begins to qualify his answer. Kei asks what he means, leaving the complication unresolved in the available exchange. Even so, her statement changes the status of what had until then been expressed in visits, kisses, and shared physical intimacy: she names the relationship, and Harada acknowledges that the feeling is mutual.

Their growing closeness unfolds alongside Harada’s encounters with his parents. At their apartment, a table is prepared with edamame, garnished tofu, and beer glasses; his mother pours him a drink as he sits between his parents. On another visit, he proposes ordering food despite his mother having bought groceries, recognizing that the groceries are a charade for his benefit. These domestic scenes offer a distinct form of familial welcome beside the intimacy developing with Kei. Later, Harada sits facing his parents over an expensive sukiyaki dinner. When they vanish, they leave the bowls, beer glasses, and barely eaten meal behind. The contrast between these scenes and Kei’s repeated return does not resolve the relationship’s difficulties, but places its emergence within a story where closeness is bound up with vulnerability, care, and the possibility of loss.

Significance

The beginning of the relationship is defined as much by limits as by physical union. Kei is candid about her burn, but candidness does not mean she surrenders privacy; she initiates a kiss, withdraws when Harada touches her breast, and later repeats her prohibition even as they become lovers. Harada’s response is to continue the relationship within that boundary. The later admission that both have thought of themselves as together gives language to a bond first established through these actions, while its hesitant phrasing preserves the sense that mutual attachment does not make every obstacle disappear.