Kumiko's older sister dies of food poisoning

Kumiko’s older sister dies of food poisoning the year after Kumiko returns from Niigata. Her death removes the family member who had worked patiently to reach Kumiko, and its aftermath binds grief to guilt, comparison, and a lasting aversion to the piano.

Circumstances and Family Bond

After returning from Niigata, Kumiko shuts herself off from the outside world for months, recalling nothing from that period. Though reunited with her parents, brother, and sister in the home where she had been expected to live, she does not experience it as home. She becomes taciturn and distrustful, unable to feel wholly at ease even with her parents.

Her older sister is the exception. She recognizes the loneliness beneath Kumiko’s difficult moods and makes sustained efforts to comfort and include her: they share a room, talk and read together, walk to school, and work on homework. When Kumiko retreats to her room in tears, her sister stays beside her. The account presents the sister not merely as a sibling but as the household’s principal source of understanding for Kumiko.

Death and Its Immediate Aftermath

The sister dies of food poisoning the year after Kumiko’s return from Niigata. Kumiko later says that the household might have been different had her sister lived, describing her as the heart of the family despite being only a sixth grader. In Kumiko’s view, her sister’s presence might have helped the family become more normal and might have spared Kumiko some of her own sense of hopelessness.

Instead, Kumiko responds to the loss with survivor’s guilt, wondering why she had not died in her sister’s place. Her parents and brother know how she feels but do not comfort her. They repeatedly praise the dead girl’s beauty, intelligence, kindness, popularity, and piano playing, making the loss a continuing point of comparison rather than a grief the family helps Kumiko bear.

The Piano as a Consequence of Loss

After the sister’s death, the family expects Kumiko to take piano lessons so that someone will use the large grand piano. Kumiko has no interest in playing and believes she could never equal her sister; the lessons therefore feel like another demand that she demonstrate her inferiority. She says she cannot take her sister’s place and does not want to try, but the family does not listen.

Kumiko’s resulting hatred of the piano persists into adulthood: she says she still hates both the sight of one and hearing anyone play. The instrument links ordinary family life to the dead sister’s remembered excellence and to Kumiko’s sense that her own grief and refusal were disregarded.

Later Recollection and Significance

Kumiko recounts the loss to Toru Okada before their marriage, when they have known each other for only a little over two months. During a quiet Sunday morning in bed, she tells him more about her childhood and family than she had previously shared. Toru listens, feels anger toward her family for what they did and failed to do, and holds her as she cries.

The recollection makes the sister’s death consequential beyond the event itself: it illuminates the isolation Kumiko carried from childhood and the absence of comfort that followed her sister’s death. Kumiko’s final description of her sister as someone everybody loved preserves both the force of the attachment and the painful contrast between the affection her sister inspired and the loneliness Kumiko experienced afterward.