Kei’s suicide

Kei’s suicide is disclosed only after Hideo Harada has encountered her as a companion, making the news a belated explanation of events he has been unable to reconcile. Mamiya’s account identifies Kei as Katsura Fujino, a former resident of Apartment 305 who died in late July. The revelation links her chosen reading of her name and the burn scars Hideo had known to her death, and reveals that she killed herself on the very night Hideo refused to let her in. It does not establish that his refusal caused her death, but it makes that remembered encounter newly painful.

Circumstances and delayed discovery

Mamiya begins investigating after seeing Hideo with a woman who resembles the former tenant of Apartment 305. The building manager tells him that the woman died by suicide near the end of July. The information makes Mamiya reconsider Hideo’s strikingly rapid recovery: he worries that something about Hideo’s recent experience may be unreal, and asks the manager to let him wait in the lobby until Hideo returns.

While Mamiya waits, the manager supplies further details. According to what the police told him, the tenant stabbed herself seven times in the chest. Her family came, and the matter was handled quietly and in an orderly fashion. The account gives no direct view of the death itself; it reaches Hideo, and the reader, secondhand, through the manager and Mamiya. That distance is part of the revelation’s force: ordinary records and a building employee’s account impose a concrete history on an experience Hideo has been trying not to question.

The former apartment does not remain empty. It is remodeled soon after the death and rented to a health-food company for its Tokyo office. The alteration helps explain why Mamiya proposes returning to Apartment 305: he hopes that seeing its present condition will help Hideo resist the implications of what he has heard. Hideo declines. By then, the address has become more than a place to verify; it is the point where the woman he knew and the dead tenant are made to coincide.

Identity, scars, and isolation

Mamiya’s account gives the woman’s name as Katsura Fujino. On her lease, she had supplied Kei as the reading for the character katsura, explaining how the name by which Hideo knew her was connected to the tenant’s formal identity. The lease detail turns what might seem like a resemblance or coincidence into a documentary link between the two women Hideo has been holding apart in his mind.

The manager also attributes the tenant’s isolation to a severe burn scar on her chest. She had undergone several plastic-surgery operations, but, as Mamiya understands the report, they had not helped much. She kept almost entirely to herself, and the people discussing her death believed loneliness may have become unbearable. This explanation is presented as an inference, not as a statement from Katsura Fujino herself. The narrative supplies neither her account of her life nor a definitive motive for the suicide; it shows how a visible injury, unsuccessful attempts to alter it, and social withdrawal shaped the explanation others could give.

The information about the scar also connects the tenant to Kei as Hideo knew her. For Hideo, the overlap is difficult to accept: Apartment 305 had been Kei’s home for years, and the suggestion that its tenant died seems to make a claim about Kei herself. Mamiya, meanwhile, has a chain of circumstantial evidence—the resemblance, the lease name, and the manager’s account—that turns his concern into an urgent question about where Hideo has been and whom he has been seeing.

The night Hideo turned Kei away

The disclosure acquires a more personal meaning when Hideo recalls the night he brusquely refused Kei at his door. He had regretted his coldness almost immediately. Although he did not truly believe she would take her own life, the possibility had crossed his mind; on a rainy night, he even looked for a light in her window. At the time, these gestures remained attached to worry and remorse, not knowledge of what had happened.

Mamiya’s report allows Hideo to recognize that the suicide occurred on that very night. The coincidence makes his remembered refusal the emotional center of the revelation, but the evidence does not say that Kei acted because he turned her away. Her isolation and the history of her scar form the explanation Mamiya has been given; Hideo’s part is a painful, immediate memory that he can no longer separate from the date of her death. The distinction matters: guilt enters the scene through Hideo’s recollection, while the cause of Kei’s suicide remains uncertain.

Consequences and narrative significance

Hideo initially tries to withhold any response, not simply from Mamiya but from himself. He asks why the woman killed herself, and Mamiya answers with the account of the scar, the operations, and her loneliness. Once Mamiya names Katsura Fujino and connects that name to Kei, Hideo closes his eyes. His refusal to inspect Apartment 305 does not undo what he has learned; it marks how fully the identification has already unsettled him.

The suicide disclosure changes the meaning of Hideo’s recent experience without resolving every question about it. The manager’s account places Kei’s death in a recognizably ordinary history of tenancy, family notification, and a remodeled apartment, while Hideo’s encounter with her resists those explanations. The two accounts meet in specific details—the address, the name on the lease, the chest scar, and the late-July timing—rather than in a complete explanation of how the dead woman could appear to him.

As a result, Kei’s death functions both as a confirmed loss and as a rupture in Hideo’s understanding of his relationship with her. The recalled night gives that loss a private point of contact: he had turned her away, felt regret, and wondered whether she was safe, but did not know that she had died. The revelation makes those earlier moments legible in retrospect while preserving the difference between remorse and responsibility. Mamiya can report what the manager and police said; Hideo must confront what those facts mean for the woman he believed was still beside him.