Yuriko

Yuriko, Kyoichiro Kaga’s mother, is understood largely through the distance left by her departure and the accounts others preserve after her death. The investigation into a recent victim’s possible connection to her becomes personal for Kaga: beneath the case lies his wish to learn what his mother was feeling when she left her family. A final letter from Shunichi Watabe gives that absence a painful shape, revealing how guilt and depression distorted Yuriko’s view of herself, while her son remained the thought that could hold her back from suicide.

Identity and Background

Yuriko left her husband and young son and later lived in Sendai. Her story reaches Kaga indirectly, through people who knew her there and through the letter Watabe wrote to him near the end of Watabe’s life. For more than a year after they met, Yuriko did not mention her family to Watabe; when she eventually did, she told him the story of her marriage and the burdens she believed she had caused.

In Yuriko’s own account, she had been a burden to her husband from the beginning of their marriage. She believed that her quarrels with her in-laws had forced him to sever ties with his family. She also felt guilty that, despite making demands on him so she could spend more time caring for her sickly mother, her mother died relatively soon. These losses accumulated into a conviction that she was of no use to anyone and a growing doubt that she could raise a child.

Life and Emotional Struggle

Watabe’s letter describes a prolonged decline rather than a single moment of crisis. Yuriko carried her sense of failure for years, and her despair deepened into an unhealthy obsession with killing herself. Watabe believed she likely had clinical depression, though at the time the condition was not understood by those around her. Without a name or explanation for what she was experiencing, she interpreted her suffering as proof of personal inadequacy.

The account also identifies what repeatedly interrupted that suicidal pull: the sight of Kaga asleep. Yuriko worried about who would care for her little boy if she died. Her son was therefore not merely a remembered part of the family she had left; the thought of his vulnerability could bring her back from the brink. That fact complicates any simple reading of her departure as evidence that she did not care for him.

Relationships and Separation

Yuriko’s departure is the central rupture in her relationship with Kaga, but the evidence does not present it as a settled rejection. Kaga’s father, Takamasa Kaga, believed Yuriko had done nothing wrong and supposed that, before she died, she must have wanted to see her only child, even briefly. The thought caused him physical pain. He did not pursue her, apparently believing that not setting out after her might be better for both of them; he also blamed himself for failing to help her work through her mental-health problems.

Kaga’s aunt Katsuko Matsumiya remembered Yuriko as kind and responsible. Though the two women had not been close, Katsuko insisted that Yuriko must have agonized over the decision to leave and urged Kaga to forgive and forget. Kaga acknowledged that he had heard this appeal many times, but his investigation shows that understanding his mother remained unfinished business. When he learned of a possible link between a recent victim and Yuriko, he openly recognized that solving the case might also teach him something about her.

Death, Memory, and the Letter

After Yuriko died in Sendai, Yasuyo Miyamoto arranged a modest funeral, held the next day in the smallest room of the local funeral hall. A few regulars from Seven attended. Once the cremation was complete, Yasuyo took Yuriko’s ashes home, knowing she could not keep them indefinitely and that, as guarantor, she was responsible for clearing Yuriko’s apartment. The practical burden of the ashes and belongings persisted alongside the unanswered questions about Yuriko’s life.

Watabe had given Yasuyo his number and promised to be in touch, but after the funeral he did not answer her repeated calls. She came to believe he had run out on her and would never make contact. His eventual account reaches Kaga by a different route: Hiromi Asai sends Kaga Watabe’s letter, explaining that her father had made it clear in his last message that he wanted it delivered. Watabe identifies himself as Yuriko’s long-term partner in Sendai and as the person who had supplied Yasuyo with Kaga’s contact details. Writing as he approached the end of his own life, he explains that he had spent much of it trying not to draw attention or interfere in others’ lives, but had begun to question whether silence was fair to Yuriko’s son.

The letter changes the meaning of the investigation without undoing the years of separation. Yuriko is no longer only the mother who left, or the dead woman connected to a case; she is also a person whose guilt and untreated suffering had shaped how she saw herself. For Kaga, learning about her state of mind is a form of belated contact: not a reunion, but a chance to read her departure alongside the love and fear that the people around her believe remained.