Lucy and Teiji Matsuda

Lucy and Teiji’s relationship joins physical tenderness to persistent uncertainty: Lucy longs for closeness, while Teiji’s feelings remain difficult for her to read. Its decisive rupture comes when she discovers him kissing Lily, transforming the relationship from a private attachment into a source of betrayal, loss, and unresolved suspicion.

Intimacy and uncertainty

When Lucy tells Teiji the story of her earlier encounter with Brian Church, he holds her head with one arm and brushes his nose against her cheek. His touch is gentle and close, but his response changes when her account reaches Brian Church’s suicide: he pulls away, and Lucy’s face turns cold. She wonders if she has said too much, then falls asleep before she can know what he thinks. The moment makes intimacy inseparable from disclosure. Lucy has allowed the past into their shared space, but Teiji’s silence leaves her to interpret its effect alone.

The following day, the distance between them becomes visible in an act that had once seemed ordinary. Teiji photographs Lucy on the walk to the station, but his camera no longer appears to move as naturally with him. He peers through the viewfinder, shifts around preoccupied, frowns, and finally takes the picture with resignation. Lucy cannot tell whether he is troubled by her age when she met Brian Church, by the difference in their ages, by her having slept with another man, or by her belief that she drove Brian Church to suicide. She also wonders whether Teiji sees Brian Church as she once saw Sachi: someone from the past who should not have been brought back. The photograph registers a change in their ease, while its meaning remains inaccessible to Lucy.

The journey to Sado Island

Lucy expects Teiji not to join her and Lily on their trip to Sado Island. She understands him as a person bound to Tokyo: since arriving there at fourteen, he has followed its streets and waterways as though the city were an endless spiral. In that understanding, travelling beyond the city’s edge would contradict the world he has made for himself. His unexpected appearance at Tokyo Station overturns her expectation. When she sees him at the ticket barrier, waving, she jumps with joy; Lily squeezes her arm. Lucy hugs him, carefully limiting the pressure because he does not return an embrace in the familiar way. He neither hugs her back nor stands coldly apart, and she cannot fathom the difference.

Teiji explains that he misses the sea, which he used to love, and did not want Lucy to go without him. His words accompany Lucy through the journey from Tokyo towards Niigata, then on to the island. His presence gives her a brief sense of being chosen, but the trip also places her desire for him beside the closeness developing between him and Lily. After swimming, Lucy returns to shore and finds Lily and Teiji together, naked and dressing in the cold. She treasures the swim as a happiness she hopes to preserve in memory, then imagines moving her futon nearer to Teiji’s and making love to him after Lily falls asleep. Instead, Lily lies on the middle futon, between Lucy and Teiji. Lucy accepts that she cannot reach him without stepping over Lily and settles near the open window, listening to the waves. Her longing is concrete, domestic, and thwarted: the arrangement of three beds makes the emotional distance in the group impossible to ignore.

Discovery and rupture

On Sado Island, Lucy comes upon Teiji and Lily seated close together on a street bench. They do not look at each other, yet their casual exchange of an ice-cream cone and a handkerchief tells Lucy more than an open declaration might. Teiji takes Lily’s half-eaten cone while she wipes her fingers; he licks the ice cream as she uses his handkerchief. Lucy reads the ease of these small gestures as proof of an intimacy she had not wanted to recognize. She waits for a sign that could show she is mistaken, even as she believes she is right.

Lucy later returns to the station barriers where she and Lily had said goodbye to Teiji. From beside a newspaper kiosk, she sees Teiji and Lily standing face to face, Lily’s foot between his, their thighs nearly touching. They kiss. Lucy cries out involuntarily, startling them, drops her newspaper, and runs. The kiss confirms what the ice cream had suggested: Teiji and Lily are lovers. The discovery turns Lucy’s prior uncertainty into a witnessed betrayal, but it does not give her an explanation. She has seen what they are to each other, not what Teiji believes he is leaving behind.

Separation and unresolved knowledge

After Teiji leaves, Lucy is struck by how little she knew about him, including his surname. She recognizes that in Japan, where family names are used before given names, she somehow never learned that he was Matsuda Teiji. She wonders whether she might have seen the name on an envelope, in his apartment, or heard a regular customer use it, but cannot recall doing so. The missing name becomes more than an overlooked detail: it sharpens her sense that Teiji has both fooled and eluded her. Their intimacy had not given her access to his whole identity.

Later, when Lucy is disoriented and told that a visitor is waiting, she imagines that Teiji might have come. Her imagined question is why he abandoned her for Lily; the answer she wishes for would let them forget Lily and return to their earlier life together. But Lucy knows Teiji is in Hokkaido and has disappeared from the city. The imagined reunion is therefore immediately contradicted by what she knows. Her attachment persists as a wish to undo the rupture, not as evidence that reconciliation is possible.

Photographs associated with Lily’s death renew Lucy’s suspicions without resolving them. She wonders whether Lily had ended her relationship with Teiji because she wanted to be Lucy’s friend, whether Teiji then feared losing them both, and whether that could have given him a reason to kill Lily. She also connects the possibility to her unanswered questions about Sachi and Teiji’s past. Yet Lucy acknowledges that the evidence is circumstantial and cautions against judging too hastily. The relationship’s ending is thus more than separation: Teiji’s affair and disappearance leave Lucy unable to distinguish what she knew from what she had imagined, while the photographs deepen suspicion without proving that he killed Lily.