Atsuko Asai abandons her family through a departure that is both personal rupture and practical catastrophe: she leaves Tadao and Hiromi, removes money and valuables, and secretly borrows against Tadao’s registered seal. Her absence exposes Hiromi to danger and deprivation, and is later described by a school vice principal as neglect. The episode also helps frame the family history that Hiromi recounts as an adult, with its lasting consequences for her sense of safety and belonging.

The Departure and Its Discovery

Hiromi first senses the family’s instability in the adults’ talk about her parents. She hopes that their difficulties will pass, but grows increasingly distressed as she hears suggestions that Atsuko may not want to remain married to Tadao. Not long afterward, Atsuko goes out for the evening dressed up and does not return. She eventually calls the family home; Tadao answers, and Hiromi hears her father’s desperation as he tries to establish whether Atsuko is coming back and where she is. Atsuko ends the call without giving him an answer he can use to find her.

Tadao is left holding the receiver, initially stunned. When he searches Atsuko’s dressing table and chest, he finds that her silver and gold jewelry is gone. Nearly all the money has been withdrawn from his savings account, and Atsuko has also cashed out his investments and taken the proceeds. The loss is therefore not simply her absence: the household’s financial resources have been depleted as she leaves.

Tadao contacts Atsuko’s parents, who already know she has left. They tell him that Atsuko had said she was tired of married life and intended to live as she wished. She has not told her mother where she is, and refuses to return to live with her parents. Tadao waits for a time, expecting Atsuko to come back, but has no knowledge of her whereabouts or associates and no practical lead to pursue.

The separation is formalized without Tadao’s knowledge. Suspecting that Atsuko may have changed her address, he goes to the city office to look for her through a change-of-address notification. Instead, he discovers that she has filed for divorce without consulting him and that the divorce is already official. He could have sought to invalidate the divorce, since it had been filed without his consent, but decides he has had enough and does not challenge it. He tells Hiromi that she will have to forget her mother and pretend she never existed, giving the child a stark instruction in place of an explanation or reconciliation.

Debt and Danger to Hiromi

Atsuko’s departure is followed by another revelation: debt collectors arrive looking for Tadao. He insists the borrowing was not his, but learns that Atsuko had obtained his registered seal a few days before leaving and used it to take out a sizable loan. The debt is legally and practically directed at the household even though Tadao says he did not incur it, compounding the financial losses he has already discovered.

The collectors begin coming around daily. Their threat extends beyond Tadao: they say they will take Hiromi if the debt is not repaid. One day, as she walks home from school, a car pulls alongside her and a man invites her to get in. Hiromi recognizes that she is in danger and runs. The men do not pursue her, but the encounter makes the threat immediate to her rather than merely something overheard between adults.

The family’s attempt to manage the danger later leads to a different hardship. Hiromi is placed in an orphanage, where overcrowding and understaffing mean little individualized care or privacy. As a newcomer, she is bullied by other children. She bears this in part because she has support from Seizo Naemura and Motoko Yoshino, and because she believes her father’s actions made her life possible. The departure is thus one link in a chain that carries Hiromi from her home into institutional care, without itself accounting for all that follows.

A Family History Reconsidered

Years later, a vice principal characterizes Atsuko’s decision to leave as neglect, placing it alongside Tadao’s later suicide and his failure of care. Her judgment distinguishes the harm of abandonment from the subsequent harm of a parent’s death: Hiromi was left without the care she needed, though the vice principal notes that Tadao did not take her with him. The retrospective framing makes the departure more than a private marital break; it becomes part of the circumstances under which Hiromi grew up without her parents.

The episode also belongs to a wider pattern of family rupture in the novel. In a separate conversation, Kyoichiro Kaga describes how his own mother’s emotional state worsened after losing her principal source of support, and recalls her calling herself a failure as a wife and mother. That account is not evidence about Atsuko’s motives, but it sets the departure beside another family’s unspoken distress and the damage that can follow when emotional suffering is not understood. The story does not establish that Atsuko left for the same reasons or under the same circumstances.

Atsuko’s later absence is felt in the practical aftermath as well as in Hiromi’s childhood recollections. When Yuriko Tajima dies, Yasuyo Miyamoto is left with the cremated remains and responsibility for clearing Yuriko’s apartment; she also makes repeated calls to Shunichi Watabe, who does not answer. This is a distinct loss, not a consequence of Atsuko’s departure, but it echoes the novel’s recurring problem of what survivors are left to manage when a person is gone and communication fails.

Significance and Limits of the Account

The departure’s decisive turn is from Hiromi’s hope that her parents will reconcile to the reality of a mother who does not return, followed by financial betrayal, debt, and threats to the child. Its effects accumulate: Tadao gives up on restoring the marriage, Hiromi loses her home life, and her childhood becomes bound to institutional care and vulnerability. The episode explains a concrete source of Hiromi’s abandonment without reducing her later life to a single cause.

The account also leaves important limits intact. It reports Atsuko’s actions and the family’s consequences, but does not provide her own later perspective or an explanation for every choice she made. Nor does it state that she was responsible for Tadao’s eventual suicide. The novel’s retrospective descriptions invite attention to neglect and parental responsibility while preserving the distinction between what is known about Atsuko’s departure and what remains unresolved about the family’s history.