“I failed—as a wife and as a mother.”

“I failed—as a wife and as a mother” is Yuriko Tajima’s defining expression of guilt: a verdict she passed on herself, not an objective account of her worth. First heard as she began to disclose that she had left her husband and twelve-year-old son, the words recur years later in recollection and testimony. Their repetition gives Kyoichiro Kaga’s effort to understand his mother a painful focus: he is not only seeking the reasons she left, but trying to comprehend the despair that made her see herself as a failure.

First Disclosure

When Yasuyo Miyamoto and Yuriko began spending time together, Yasuyo sensed that Yuriko kept much of herself hidden. The mystery was part of Yuriko’s appeal, and had helped make her bar, Seven, successful, but it also left Yasuyo unsure how much of her friend she really knew. Yuriko would not discuss the details of her divorce. When Yasuyo wondered whether her husband had been unfaithful, Yuriko made clear that he had not.

Instead, Yuriko took responsibility herself. She said it was all her fault and that she had failed as a wife and mother. This confession also disclosed something Yasuyo had not known: Yuriko had a son, who was twelve when she left her husband. The phrase therefore first emerges alongside two linked revelations—the existence of the child and Yuriko’s conviction that she had failed him.

The Words Recalled

Years later, Kaga asked Yasuyo whether his mother had ever explained why she left home or what had made her unhappy in the marriage. Yasuyo could offer no specific reason. Yuriko had never gone into details; she had only said it was all her fault, that she had failed as a wife and as a mother. Kaga paused over the word failed and looked down in dismay. What Yasuyo remembered as a sparse answer became, for him, a charged clue to the emotional life he had never been able to ask his mother about.

A later account from Kaga gives the phrase a broader context. After his grandmother died, his mother lost the person who had been her principal source of emotional support. Kaga was still too young to offer meaningful comfort, and his father did not understand the change in her condition at the time. One evening, at the dinner table, Yuriko abruptly broke down in tears and called herself a failure as a human being, a bad wife, and a bad mother. Afterward she returned to herself and apologized, asking her family to forget what she had said. Kaga retained only a dim memory of the episode and even allowed that he might have imagined it; the uncertainty underscores how little he could understand as a child.

Guilt and Depression

Kaga agrees that Yuriko’s changed mental state may have been depression. The later letter from Shunichi Watabe, who had been Yuriko’s long-term partner in Sendai, supplies further context for the way she came to judge herself. Yuriko believed she had burdened her husband from the beginning of their marriage, blamed herself for the serious quarrel with her in-laws that led her husband to break with his family, and felt guilty that her sickly mother died despite the demands she had made on her husband so she could care for her. Watabe writes that, convinced she was of no use to anyone, Yuriko became seriously depressed and doubted her ability to raise a child. In the period when depression was little understood, he says, she persuaded herself that she was a complete failure.

Watabe’s account also makes the phrase more than a retrospective explanation of the marriage. He says Yuriko’s despair developed into an unhealthy obsession with suicide, and that the sight of her sleeping son was what could bring her back from the brink: she feared that no one would care for him if she were gone. Her declaration of maternal failure thus coexists with evidence of an intense concern for her child. The words name the harsh judgment she made about herself; they do not erase the attachment that, according to Watabe, helped keep her alive.

A Son’s Search

Yuriko’s self-condemnation reaches Kaga through other people’s memories rather than through a conversation with his mother. Yasuyo remembers the few words Yuriko entrusted to her; Kaga recalls the dinner-table collapse imperfectly; and Watabe’s letter, delivered to Kaga through Hiromi Asai, offers a fuller account of Yuriko’s emotional state after she left her family. The phrase changes significance as these accounts accumulate: what first sounds like an explanation for a divorce becomes evidence of a much deeper and longer-lasting distress.

Kaga says he wants to discover what kind of emotional place his mother was in. His father, Takamasa Kaga, believed Yuriko had done nothing wrong and thought she must have wanted, even briefly, to see her son before she died. The repeated language of failure therefore stands in sharp contrast to the understanding others reach too late: Yuriko’s words tell how she saw herself, while the testimony surrounding them reveals the depression and attachment that her self-judgment concealed. The phrase remains both a confession and an unresolved inheritance, giving Kaga a way to approach a mother whose own explanations were brief and whose life he must reconstruct from what others remember.