Jealousy and possessiveness

Jealousy and possessiveness are presented both as outward control and as inward fear: Lily Bridges escapes a relationship in which Andy restricts her freedom, while Lucy Fly privately struggles with the possibility that Teiji may replace her. Sachi, absent from the present but preserved in Teiji’s photographs, becomes the focus of Lucy’s uncertainty. The contrast is not simply between a possessive man and a jealous woman; it shows how love can be experienced as either surveillance of another person or anxiety about one’s own disappearance.

Possessiveness as a reason for departure

Lily tells Lucy that she left Andy, her boyfriend, after a relationship that had been headed toward marriage ended badly. Her account makes possessiveness concrete: Andy sometimes followed her to make sure she was not having fun with anyone else. Lily says she wanted to escape him, but also describes leaving as an attempt to begin again and see the world. Her departure for Japan is therefore both a response to a controlling relationship and a larger effort to remake her life.

The circumstances sharpen the difference between possessiveness and ordinary attachment. Andy’s behavior, as Lily describes it, is not merely a fear that the relationship will end: it restricts where she can go and whom she can enjoy herself with. Lily’s account also carries uncertainty about his feelings; she says she did not think he liked her very much, even as he kept watch over her. The resulting contradiction—being monitored by someone who may not even value her—makes escape seem more urgent, not less.

Sachi in the photographic record

Lucy encounters the problem of a former lover through Teiji’s photographs. She goes to his apartment and searches the boxes for images from the years in Tokyo before he met her, selecting the period she most wants to understand. Among pictures of water, pavement, stations, and tunnels, she finds a young woman looking through a bus window. Lucy wonders whether this woman was Teiji’s lover before her; at this point, the image prompts a question rather than providing a full account of their relationship.

Following the photographs backward, Lucy finds an image of the woman onstage in a soldier’s uniform, carrying a gun and shouting silently beneath the theater lights. Further pictures place her in theaters, coffee shops, parks, by a river, and at parties. Across the sequence, she appears less often as an actress and more often at parties; her clothes become crumpled and stained, and Lucy reads her expression as increasingly sad. The final photograph Lucy sees shows the woman lying face-down on pavement, her expression impossible to distinguish as a grimace or a smile. The pictures do not explain what happened to her, but their progression gives Lucy an unsettling visual history to interpret—and makes Sachi’s absence feel like a story with consequences.

An absent rival who remains present

When Lucy asks about the woman, Teiji identifies her as Sachi. He says he does not know where she is, that she left after their relationship ended, and that he has not tried to find her. He also tells Lucy that he found her and no longer thinks about Sachi. His words offer a clear account of the breakup, but they do not make Sachi disappear from Lucy’s thoughts. Lucy finds it difficult to believe that Teiji has forgotten someone whose photographs have become so vivid to her.

The asymmetry is central: for Teiji, Sachi belongs to a finished relationship; for Lucy, she is newly present through the images and through the knowledge that she once occupied an intimate place in his life. Lucy cannot verify the stories she imagines from the photographs. Instead, their gaps invite her to invent connections, turning a woman she never knew into a rival she feels she must understand. Sachi’s absence thus intensifies rather than resolves Lucy’s uncertainty.

The fear of being replaced

Lucy explicitly resists calling herself jealous in the sense that she believes Teiji still loves Sachi. Yet she cannot stop thinking about her. In Teiji’s photograph box, Sachi is in the middle and Lucy is at the top; Lucy takes comfort in having what she considers the better position, even as the arrangement makes her status seem measurable. The box becomes an image of intimacy arranged in layers—and of the possibility that those layers could change.

What frightens Lucy is the thought that her own photographs might eventually be replaced by pictures of the next person or object. She imagines herself spinning away into darkness and nothingness, as she imagines Sachi has done. Her fear is therefore not just that Teiji might prefer a former lover; it is that a person can become an image in an old layer and then vanish from the life being recorded. Lucy begins to imagine Sachi as someone she has always known, even as a sister. That imagined kinship does not erase the rivalry: it shows how closely Lucy’s curiosity, identification, and fear of displacement have become entangled.

Intimacy as a claim

Sachi returns to Lucy’s mind in moments of closeness with Teiji. When he puts an arm around Lucy, hands her a beer, and kisses the side of her neck, she thinks of Sachi’s long, soft neck. Even tenderness cannot keep the former lover outside the present; Lucy’s physical intimacy with Teiji becomes a point of comparison, as though Sachi’s remembered body were still there beside them.

At a jazz club, Lucy and Teiji become physically intimate in a dark corner where the other patrons do not notice them. Lucy admits that she partly hopes they will be caught: she has finally begun to feel that Sachi is gone and wants the world to know that Teiji is hers. The wish to be seen contradicts the privacy of the encounter. Their corner conceals them, but Lucy wants the intimacy to function as a public declaration of possession. Set against Lily’s account of Andy following her to control her freedom, Lucy’s wish is different in form and consequence; it is an expression of her fear of losing her place, not evidence that she controls Teiji as Andy controlled Lily. Together, the episodes distinguish coercive possessiveness from anxious attachment while showing how both make intimacy a question of who may leave, who may be remembered, and who risks being replaced.