Enryakuji Temple is a place recalled rather than visited in the novel, but its name carries a decisive association: the prospect of being burned alive. Hiromi remembers her father invoking the monks of Enryakuji Temple when they first ran away from home, and that old conversation returns at the point when she is about to end his life. The temple’s narrative importance lies in this stark passage from remembered fear to present action.

Identity and Narrative Appearance

Enryakuji Temple appears in Hiromi’s final conversation with Tadao, not as a setting for action. She brings up what he had said during their first flight from home: the monks’ manner of dying might be accepted in principle, he had argued, but he would never choose it himself. The specific image that stayed with her was his horror at being burned alive. The reference supplies no further description of the temple or its religious life; its meaning here is concentrated in Tadao’s remembered words.

The temple is therefore introduced through memory and through Hiromi’s account of that memory. Tadao initially seems not to recall having said it. Hiromi nonetheless treats the remark as significant, setting it against what is happening between them now. The distance between the original conversation and this final exchange makes the recollection more than background: it becomes the language through which she explains what she is about to do.

The First Flight and the Remembered Conversation

Hiromi dates the remark to the time when she and Tadao first ran away from home. Their flight is the circumstance that binds the temple reference to their shared past. She recalls that he had distinguished between accepting death as an idea and choosing a particular manner of dying. In her recollection, his fear was not abstract: he had found the thought of being burned alive unbearable.

That distinction becomes crucial later. Hiromi does not simply tell Tadao that she intends to kill him; she connects her decision to the particular form of suffering he once feared. The old statement gives her a reason, in her own words, to prevent him from enduring something so awful. Enryakuji Temple thus marks a remembered boundary in Tadao’s attitude toward death, one that Hiromi invokes as she approaches an irreversible act.

The Recollection at the Final Crisis

At the final encounter, Hiromi asks Tadao whether he remembers what he said about the monks of Enryakuji Temple. Tadao responds uncertainly, asking whether he really said it. Hiromi continues, repeating the contrast between accepting death and choosing it, then recalls his horror of being burned alive. The scene turns on a past remark that Tadao can barely retrieve but Hiromi has preserved.

She begins to say that she cannot let him put himself through something so terrible. Tadao understands what she means, smiles, closes his eyes, and thanks her. Hiromi closes her own eyes and presses her fingers into his throat. The temple reference stands at the threshold between speech and action: a memory of the death Tadao feared becomes the stated reason for the killing that follows. The narrative does not make Enryakuji Temple the cause of the act; rather, Hiromi’s recollection of Tadao’s words gives the act its immediate emotional and moral framing.

Significance and Limits

The reference links an earlier escape from home with the final crisis of father and daughter. What began as a conversation about a feared way to die returns when Hiromi believes she must spare Tadao that suffering. Its force comes from the mismatch between the modest form of the memory—something he may not even remember saying—and the consequence Hiromi attaches to it.

Elsewhere, death in the novel is surrounded by concrete acts of care and memorial obligation: Yuriko’s ashes require a decision, a modest funeral is held, and Kaga later offers incense before her household altar. Those scenes establish a contrast between practices that acknowledge the dead and Hiromi’s intimate, violent action toward Tadao. Enryakuji Temple belongs to neither a funeral nor a ritual scene; it enters as the remembered image through which Hiromi interprets his fear. Its role remains narrow but consequential: it makes the past present at the moment their relationship reaches its end.