Yuriko Tajima leaves her family for Sendai after walking out on her husband and their twelve-year-old son, an estrangement that shapes both her life afterward and Kyoichiro Kaga’s belated search to understand her. The departure is first framed through Yuriko’s own harsh judgment of herself; only later do accounts of her grief and depression reveal that separation did not mean she had ceased to care for her son.

The Departure and Its Immediate Meaning

Yuriko eventually confided to Yasuyo Miyamoto that she had a son, something she had not previously disclosed. When she left her husband, the boy was twelve. She took responsibility for the family’s breakdown upon herself, describing her failure as both a wife and a mother. Her account was not an accusation against her husband: when Yasuyo wondered whether he had been unfaithful, Yuriko made clear that this was not the reason for their separation.

Yuriko said that she wanted to see her son but did not feel she deserved to. She tried not to think about him and described there as having been no emotional bond between herself and either her husband or her child. When Yasuyo asked whether she had a photograph of the boy, Yuriko had none. She explained that keeping such a reminder would make it impossible to forget him. The absence of a photograph thus gives tangible form to a separation maintained not by indifference alone, but by Yuriko’s effort to suppress painful attachment.

A New Life in Sendai

Sixteen years after Yuriko began working in Sendai, Yasuyo recalled that she had started there in early September. Kyoichiro recognized the timing as shortly after his mother had left the family. Yuriko had told Yasuyo that she first took a liking to Sendai during an earlier holiday. Once she was on her own after leaving her husband, seeking work there was the first course that came to mind. Her move therefore joined an existing attraction to the city with the practical need to establish herself elsewhere.

Yuriko built a life in Sendai without telling Yasuyo the full story of her family. Their conversations covered many subjects, but Yasuyo sensed that Yuriko remained guarded. Yuriko’s later disclosure of her son did not resolve the mystery of her departure; it exposed how much of her past she had kept apart from her life in the city. The distance between those two lives persisted until after Yuriko’s death, when Kyoichiro began asking what had happened to his mother and what emotional state she had been in.

What Yuriko Believed About Herself

Yasuyo could offer Kyoichiro no detailed explanation for the departure. She recalled only that Yuriko had called it her fault and said she had failed as a wife and mother. Kyoichiro reacted with dismay to the word “Failed.” His response signals the gap between the severe verdict Yuriko had passed on herself and the fuller account he was still trying to discover.

In a later family recollection, Kyoichiro connected his mother’s changed mental state to the death of his grandmother, who had been Yuriko’s closest source of emotional support. His father, Takamasa Kaga, later came to understand that losing this support had left Yuriko alone with her troubles; at the time, he had not recognized the change. Kyoichiro recalled an episode at the family dinner table when his mother unexpectedly began crying and called herself a failure as a person, wife, and mother. She said she would never make her husband or son happy, then returned to herself and apologized. Kyoichiro remembered the episode only dimly and allowed that the memory might be uncertain, but it echoes the self-condemnation Yasuyo would hear from Yuriko years later.

The novel also places the departure in the context of family abandonment and its effects on a child. A vice principal later described Hiromi Asai’s mother leaving the family as neglect and her father’s suicide as an abandonment of his duty of care. Hiromi was placed in an understaffed orphanage, where she had little privacy, no sense of family, and faced bullying from other children. Support from Seizo Naemura and Motoko Yoshino helped her endure, while her knowledge that her father had acted for her sake gave her strength. This account illuminates the consequences of parental absence without making Yuriko’s circumstances identical to Hiromi’s: the story repeatedly distinguishes an adult’s private suffering from the harm a child experiences when a family breaks apart.

Separation, Love, and Late Understanding

Takamasa did not pursue Yuriko after she left. Kyoichiro believed his father thought that not chasing her might be better for both of them, and that he blamed himself for failing to help her through her mental-health difficulties. Takamasa insisted that Yuriko had done nothing wrong. He was also convinced that, before she died, she must have wanted to see her little boy, even briefly; imagining that possibility caused him acute pain. His response complicates the meaning of the separation: the family’s distance continued, but his understanding of Yuriko’s possible feelings endured.

Kyoichiro’s investigation into his mother’s emotional life remained important to him long after reunion was impossible. He told Tokiko Kanamori that he wanted to learn whatever he could about the place his mother had been in emotionally, while joking that he might be too old to be such a devoted son. Tokiko answered that she knew Yuriko had been thinking of her only child when she died, drawing on something a patient had once told her about facing death. Her certainty offers Kyoichiro an interpretation of the bond Yuriko had denied to Yasuyo, but it does not erase the years of separation or turn her departure into a simple story of concealed affection.

That interpretation gains substantial support from a letter Shunichi Watabe wrote to Kyoichiro. Watabe identified himself as Yuriko’s long-term partner in Sendai and explained that she had not spoken of her family for more than a year after they met. When she finally told him the story, she described feeling like a burden to her husband from the beginning of the marriage, blaming herself for conflict with her in-laws and for her mother’s death despite her efforts to care for her. Watabe believed she had developed clinical depression, although he noted that depression was not understood in the same way at the time and that Yuriko instead persuaded herself she was a complete failure.

Watabe’s account also revises Yuriko’s claim that she felt no bond with her son. He wrote that she had for years become preoccupied with suicide, and that the sight of her only child asleep was what could bring her back from the brink: she worried about who would care for him if she were gone. The absence of a photograph and her insistence that she must not remember him are therefore set against evidence that thoughts of him had mattered profoundly. Yuriko’s departure remains a real and consequential break, but the later testimony reveals the anguish and attachment that her own self-condemnation had obscured.