Seizo Naemura’s departure from his wife and move to Tokyo converts a concealed relationship into a rupture that neither of the people closest to it can make secure. He leaves his marriage without openly identifying the woman he loves, then quits his school job and relocates with one suitcase to a temporary apartment under an unregistered address. The move grants him distance from his former life, but the secrecy and emotional cost that accompany it leave his future with Hiromi unsettled.

Causes and Background

Naemura’s marriage had entered a prolonged emotional freeze. As Kayoko Imai later explained, her sister knew that her husband was serious about another woman, not merely involved in an affair, but he refused to identify her. He offered only the same formula: “I’m sorry, but we’ve got to separate.” The refusal left his wife without an explanation she could answer or a name to make the betrayal concrete.

Their domestic life made the separation visible well before it was formal. Naemura would not eat the food his wife prepared; he ate out each night, came home late, slept in a separate bedroom, and left early in the morning. His wife did not confide in Kayoko while she still believed there might be some chance of reconciliation. Only after the divorce did Kayoko learn how much had been happening, a silence that helps explain why Naemura’s eventual departure reached the family as a fait accompli rather than a decision discussed together.

The Marriage Ends

The decisive break came after Naemura quit his job at the school without telling his wife. He moved out of their apartment, leaving a short note and a divorce notification behind. His wife finally concluded that she had no choice: she filed her own divorce papers and moved out as well. The sequence matters. Her departure was not the first move but the answer to his, made after the possibility of repairing the marriage had been narrowed by his unilateral actions.

A year or more earlier, Naemura had told Hiromi that he hoped they would live together. She loved him, but had already decided not to indulge in sentimental hopes; unable to say so directly, she thanked him for the idea instead. The subject then went unspoken for a long time. When he later announced that he intended to quit at the end of the school year, he said that the principal and vice principal had agreed. Hiromi’s question about his wife exposed the unresolved cost behind the plan: Naemura was moving toward the life he had once proposed, but not through a clean or mutual transition.

Relocation and Concealment

Naemura moved to Tokyo in April the next year, carrying only a single large suitcase. He quickly found a small, furnished apartment rented by the week, complete with appliances. The compact, ready-made room offered him somewhere to live without the ordinary permanence of a settled household.

He also chose not to update his residence certificate to show the new address because he did not want people to know where he was. He expected to stay in the apartment for a while, but his concealment made the move more than a change of city: he deliberately kept his whereabouts inaccessible. After surveying the tiny room, he smiled as though a heavy burden had lifted from him. The relief was real, but its terms were isolation and evasion rather than a publicly acknowledged new beginning.

Consequences for Hiromi

For Hiromi, Naemura’s relocation shifts their relationship out of the fragile balance it had maintained. Their unusual attachment had endured while it remained partly separate from ordinary domestic life; now his move made their shared future more immediate. Although she cared for him and could imagine living together, she had long restrained herself from sentimental expectation, and she could not bring herself to tell him that she had done so.

When she was with him in the Tokyo apartment, Hiromi felt an inexpressible unease. She understood that the structure holding their relationship had begun to shake, without knowing what the upheaval would do to either of them. The image of the burden lifting from Naemura is therefore set against her uncertainty: his escape from the strain of his former life does not resolve the strain he has brought into their relationship. His relocation promises proximity while making its emotional consequences harder to control.

Retrospective Significance

The departure is later reconstructed through other people’s accounts rather than presented as a fully explained, mutual decision. Kayoko can describe the marriage’s cold routines and the note that ended it, but she never knew the identity of the other woman while her sister was still hoping for reconciliation. Naemura’s life after leaving likewise begins in concealment: a furnished weekly room and an address he refuses to register. These details make the move legible as both an escape and a withdrawal from accountability.

The story’s later disclosures about Yuriko Tajima and her son Kyoichiro Kaga place Naemura’s departure within a wider history of separation and belated understanding. Shunichi Watabe’s letter to Kaga identifies Watabe as Yuriko’s long-term partner and explains that she did not speak about her family until more than a year into their relationship. That later revelation does not make Naemura’s move a direct cause of Yuriko’s history; rather, it gives the novel another concealed relationship whose meaning is recovered only after the people involved can no longer explain it face to face. Naemura’s departure similarly leaves behind an account assembled from silence, domestic details, and delayed testimony.