Lucy faints by a cliff on Sado Island and is left behind

Lucy faints by a cliff on Sado Island and is left behind when, during the trip to Senkaku Bay, a collapse leaves her alone near the sea and exposes a fracture in her trust in Lily and Teiji. What begins as an exhilarating ride becomes a test of bodily limits, then a scene of abandonment whose disputed explanation sharpens Lucy’s suspicion that the other two have formed a pair from which she is excluded.

The ride and the collapse

Teiji puts a new roll of film into his camera and takes a quick photograph of Lucy and Lily as they mount their mopeds. The group rides toward Senkaku Bay to see its celebrated cliffs. On the way, Lucy is seized by an unexpected excitement and accelerates, although she knows she might lose control and cannot remember the last time she rode a moped. Her knuckles turn white on the clear, hard gray road as she pulls far ahead of Lily and Teiji. At Senkaku Bay she stops so abruptly that she nearly goes over the handlebars.

After leaving the bike, Lucy starts toward the cliffs but becomes dizzy. She considers several possible causes rather than settling on one: the fast ride, the fish’s eye she ate at breakfast, or the cartwheels of the previous night. She tries to ignore the feeling and take in the view, but her nausea worsens and her knees seem to give way. Unable to continue, she apologizes to Lily and Teiji, falls, shuts her eyes, and loses consciousness. As she goes down, she is dimly aware of the two watching her.

Lucy later recalls, uncertainly, that Lily may have cooled her forehead, rolled her onto her side, and placed something soft beneath her head. A voice tells her to sleep and reassures her that what happened is not her fault. At first Lucy assigns the voice to Lily, but, thinking back, she recognizes that it spoke Japanese; with nobody else nearby, she wonders whether it might instead have been Teiji’s voice, made unfamiliar. The memory offers no firm resolution about who cared for her in that moment, even as its uncertainty anticipates the mistrust that follows.

Waking alone

When Lucy opens her eyes, the world initially comes into focus as painful dots and lines. She sits up and sees that the cliffs drop steeply to the sea only a few yards away. Lily and Teiji are nowhere in sight. Their two mopeds are gone as well, while Lucy’s remains. The landscape that the group had set out to admire now frames her isolation: she is left beside a dangerous coast without knowing where they have gone.

Lucy discovers that the soft object under her head was Teiji’s T-shirt. She presses it to her face and finds warmth there, but experiences it as lonely rather than comforting. In her account, the shirt’s warmth belongs to her, not to Teiji. She connects his absence to a change she believes has already taken place: since he decided she was strange, and since she told him about Brian Church, she fears he no longer wants to be with her. Her fear turns the missing pair from a practical problem into a personal rejection.

She waits on the clifftop, alternating between tears and anger. She reasons that if Lily and Teiji had gone for help, they ought to have returned; campsites and hostels are only five minutes away. With nobody coming back, she decides to ride farther along the coast and uphill through a narrow, winding mountain road to Kinzan and its mining museum, the only place she can think to search.

The museum and the disputed note

At the museum Lucy finds Lily and Teiji coming out together. They are laughing, and Teiji is wearing a new shirt marked Sado in large blue and black letters. They take several moments to notice Lucy. She stands in their way and addresses their apparent good time with bitterness. Teiji looks sheepish when she returns his crumpled shirt; his reaction suggests that he knows he has done something wrong, though it does not explain why he left.

Lily says that she and Teiji left a note under a stone telling Lucy they had gone to the museum and would come back if she did not meet them. Lucy answers that she never saw one. She concludes that no note existed: neither Lily nor Teiji had been carrying pen or paper, and Teiji had borrowed those very things from her on the train to write the kanji for mori, then returned them. The missing note therefore becomes the concrete center of the dispute. Lily presents it as evidence that they had tried to guide Lucy to them; Lucy’s recollection of the borrowed writing materials makes that account impossible to believe.

Lily says she checked Lucy and found her exhausted after riding too fast, and argues that letting her sleep was safer than putting her back on a moped. She also suggests that Lucy may have had a virus making her weak. Lucy does not accept the reassurance as an answer to the danger she experienced alone beside the cliff. She points out that she could have been dying or blown into the sea, and remarks that she has missed the visit to the gold mine. Instead of reopening the museum visit together, she rejects Teiji’s offer to go back in with her.

A break in the relationship

Lucy regrets snapping at Teiji, whose manner, as she understands it, is unlike hers: anger is not part of his language, and she imagines that he would have cycled through the paddy fields to let anger fall away rather than shout. She cannot know that he was never shouted at, but her speculation shows how she has built an image of his gentleness. In that moment she feels that she has damaged what they had—or, more precisely, her illusion of it—and hears herself as one half of an ordinary bickering couple.

The apology deepens the wound. Teiji and Lily apologize together, and Lucy asks herself when they began speaking as a duet. Lily takes the role of conciliator, explaining that Lucy had not sounded keen on the museum that morning, so they thought she would not mind if they went on without her. The contrast between Lily’s bright confidence in the note and Lucy’s detailed memory of the borrowed pen and paper leaves their accounts unreconciled. The episode does not establish exactly what Lily and Teiji intended; it does establish the effect of their decision on Lucy. A physical collapse has become a relational reversal: the companions who were meant to share the journey are, for a time, together without her, and she leaves the encounter more conscious of the distance between her attachment to Teiji and the couple-like alliance she perceives between him and Lily.