Kyoichiro Kaga and Yuriko Tajima

This thread follows Kyoichiro Kaga from the hurt of his mother’s departure toward a fuller understanding of the love and despair that shaped her life.

increasingBearing stren­gth in each eventdecreasing

A Child Left Behind

A Child Left Behind Separation Yuriko Tajima leaves her husband and young son without giving Kyoichiro Kaga a chance to understand what has happened. He finds her note after returning from kendo practice, but its meaning is beyond him. Her absence becomes an unresolved fact around which his childhood must reorganize itself. A Son’s Explanation As he grows older, Kaga forms a story that makes the separation intelligible: his father’s devotion to work and the burdens of family life drove Yuriko away. He carries that judgment into adulthood, even as he recognizes that his mother’s departure wounded him. The explanation lets him live with the loss, but it is not the same as knowing what she felt.

Ashes in Sendai

Ashes in Sendai An Unexpected Reunion After Yuriko dies alone in Sendai, Yasuyo Miyamoto contacts Kaga so that he can take responsibility for his mother’s ashes and belongings. He travels there promptly, offers incense, and faces the sparse apartment where Yuriko spent the years after leaving him. The physical modesty of her life contrasts with the emotional weight of the visit. A Question Reopened Kaga asks why she left, but Yasuyo can only repeat Yuriko’s belief that she had failed as a wife and mother. The phrase unsettles him because it does not fit neatly with his long-held account of his father’s neglect. He takes the apartment key and her effects back to Tokyo, determined to imagine the life he had never witnessed.

Learning Her Despair

Learning Her Despair The Family Pressures Kaga tells Shuhei Matsumiya that Yuriko faced hostility from his extended family, cared for her bedridden mother, and raised a young child while Takamasa Kaga was often absent for work. When her mother died, Yuriko lost the person who had offered her emotional support. The account shifts the focus from blame to the pressures she had endured. A Note Reinterpreted Kaga recalls Yuriko’s sudden declaration that she was a failure, followed years later by the note saying she no longer had confidence in herself as a wife or mother. He suspects she suffered from depression, though no one recognized it at the time. Understanding this does not erase the pain of her leaving, but it gives her decision a tragic human context.

A Mother’s Hidden Love

A Mother’s Hidden Love The Account at Last A letter from Shunichi Watabe describes Yuriko’s years of remorse and gratitude after leaving her family. It reveals that the sight of her sleeping son once kept her from suicide, and that she later asked Watabe to find out how Kaga and Takamasa were doing. Her silence had never meant that she had stopped thinking about them. Pride and Release Yuriko once saw Kaga’s photograph in a kendo magazine and was relieved to learn he had become a police officer. She declined to keep the magazine, fearing that holding on to images of him would somehow hold him back. Through Watabe’s account, Kaga can finally understand that her distance was bound up with love, shame, and fear rather than indifference.

A Memorial Still Possible

A Memorial Still Possible A Promise Deferred Katsuko Matsumiya urges Kaga to recognize that Yuriko remains his mother and that she deserves a proper memorial service. Kaga hesitates, still carrying the weight of her absence and of his father’s decision to die without him present. He says he will think about it after making progress on the investigation. A Different Inheritance Watabe’s letter offers Kaga a more intimate inheritance than the ashes and few possessions he collected in Sendai: knowledge of the love Yuriko could not bring herself to express directly. The letter does not undo their separation, but it gives Kaga a way to remember her beyond the label of a mother who left. His promised memorial becomes a possible act of understanding rather than a simple obligation.

When Kyoichiro Kaga is in primary school

When Kaga travels to Sendai after Yuriko’s death

During Kaga’s early conversations with Matsumiya about his parents

After Watabe’s letter reaches Tokiko Kanamori

Near the end, after the case is solved