Parents sacrifice for their children

Parental sacrifice for a child is a recurring moral idea in the novel, expressed not as a single heroic act but through choices made under guilt, danger, and separation. Tadao Asai’s effort to protect Hiromi gives the idea its starkest form; Kaga’s search for his mother’s emotional history reveals a quieter, inward version of the same devotion. Their stories test both the power and the cost of a parent’s love: sacrifice can preserve a child’s future, yet leave that child carrying grief and obligation long afterward.

The idea of sacrifice

The novel gives the concept an explicit formulation through Tokiko Kanamori, who recounts a nurse’s story about a dying patient. The patient found comfort in imagining that she could watch her children’s lives unfold after her death, and regarded that prospect as a worthwhile exchange for losing her earthly life. Tokiko presents this as evidence that parents may be prepared to sacrifice themselves for their children. The story is not an abstract maxim alone: it reaches Kaga while he is trying to understand what his own mother felt, and it later echoes the choices made by Tadao and Hiromi.

That framing places sacrifice in tension with possession. A parent’s devotion may mean protecting a child, but it may also mean accepting separation, refusing to demand comfort, or relinquishing the right to shape the child’s life. Across the novel, the parent’s intention and the child’s experience do not simply coincide. Love may sustain a child through hardship, while the knowledge of what a parent gave up can become a burden of its own.

Yuriko’s attachment to Kaga

Kaga’s investigation into his mother Yuriko’s past is driven by a question about her emotional state, not merely by the fact that she left him and his father. His father, Takamasa Kaga, believed that Yuriko had wanted to see her only child at least once before she died, and that possibility caused him deep pain. He did not pursue her, reasoning that he had failed to help her through her mental-health difficulties and that leaving her alone might be better for both of them. His restraint was therefore bound to guilt as well as concern.

The account later provided by Shunichi Watabe complicates the apparent abandonment. Yuriko had blamed herself for straining her marriage, for the conflict with her in-laws, and for failing to care for her sick mother as she wished. She came to see herself as useless and doubted her ability to raise a child. Watabe believed she had suffered from clinical depression, though at the time she had no language for it and instead understood herself as a failure. Her son’s sleeping face was described as the one thing that could pull her back from suicidal thoughts: she worried about who would care for him if she were gone. The story thus connects maternal love to survival, while showing how shame and illness can prevent that love from appearing as uncomplicated care.

The novel also marks the limits of what Kaga can know. He wants to understand what kind of emotional world his mother inhabited, but he cannot recover a direct conversation with her. Her feelings reach him through other people’s memories and testimony, including Watabe’s letter. The delayed account changes the meaning of her absence without erasing its consequences; devotion and separation remain bound together.

Tadao’s protection of Hiromi

Tadao’s sacrifice takes the form of a deliberate effort to keep Hiromi alive and give her a future, even when that requires them to separate. After their escape, Hiromi enters a large, understaffed orphanage, where care is impersonal, privacy is scarce, and she is bullied by other children. Support from Seizo Naemura and Motoko Yoshino helps her endure. She also draws strength from believing that her father’s actions made it possible for her to have a life at all, despite crying herself to sleep and knowing that Tadao’s circumstances are harder than her own.

Their contact continues by letter under assumed identities. Tadao’s first letter arrives a month after Hiromi reaches the orphanage. He writes under the name Kyoko Kondo and tells her to address her replies to Kazutoshi Yokoyama, the identity he has adopted. He says he is living in Fukushima Prefecture and working at a nuclear power plant, cleaning up radiation. Hiromi is relieved that he is safe and continuing his life, although the borrowed name is associated with a man she killed. The correspondence preserves their relationship while requiring them to live with secrecy and distance.

When Tadao later insists that Hiromi follow his plan and be happy, his demand expresses the self-denying logic of his protection: he says that her happiness is all he wants. Hiromi struggles to accept that arrangement and asks whether she will see him again if the plan succeeds. His words make clear that the future he seeks for her may not include his continued presence in it. The sacrifice is therefore not only the danger he faces, but the separation he accepts as the price of protecting his daughter.

The inheritance of sacrifice

Hiromi’s own understanding of family is shaped by Tadao’s devotion and by the truth of her past. As she watches the final performance of a play she has staged, she feels content with her work and has no regrets about giving herself to the theater. Yet she recognizes that pleasing her father was a central motive: failure would have felt like letting him down. Her artistic achievement is thus linked to an inherited obligation, even as she has made a vocation of her own.

Her thoughts about motherhood expose the cost of that inheritance. Hiromi does not simply lack a desire for children; she believes her history disqualifies her from claiming the ordinary warmth of family life. She fears that a child would be condemned by her past and questions whether she could offer maternal love. She concludes that expecting familial love for herself would be wrong because the love she receives from her father is already, to her, of the highest order. Sacrifice has become an ethical debt in her mind: Tadao gave up so much for her that she feels she must not ask for more from life.

The novel leaves this belief in tension with the very principle that inspired it. If a parent sacrifices so that a child may be happy, the child’s happiness cannot be reduced to lifelong repayment. Tadao tells Hiromi to live happily, while Hiromi interprets his love as a reason to deny herself a family. The gap between those positions gives the theme its poignancy: the parent’s sacrifice may create freedom, but the child must still be able to accept that freedom.

A final exchange

Near the end of their story together, Tadao tells Hiromi that their life together had difficult periods but that he has no regrets, and thanks her for their good times. Hiromi responds by urging him not to die and offering to find another way. Tadao answers that capture would expose his identity and make everything they had endured seem for nothing; he says he wants to die and asks her to let him. The exchange shows how differently sacrifice is understood at the point of parting: Tadao sees his own death as the end of a life lived for Hiromi’s protection, while Hiromi wants to preserve the person whose devotion has sustained her.

The concept therefore joins two distinct kinds of loss. Yuriko’s love for Kaga survives in the testimony that eventually reaches him, while Tadao’s love is embodied in the identity, distance, and danger he accepts for Hiromi. Neither story makes sacrifice simple or wholly consoling. Instead, both show how parental care can endure beyond direct presence—and how the child left behind must decide whether that love is a reason to remain bound to loss or a reason to keep living.