Teiji Matsuda

Teiji Matsuda is a photographer and noodle-shop worker whose relationship with Lucy Fly shapes her experience of intimacy, betrayal, and loss. He first appears to her through a camera lens in the rain; later, as Lucy revisits their shared places and learns how little she knew about him, that image becomes inseparable from uncertainty. His departure from Tokyo and the camera sounds Lucy hears afterward keep him present in the story even when his whereabouts are unknown.

Identity and Background

Teiji works in his uncle Soutaro’s noodle shop, doing practical tasks such as mopping floors, throwing out old food, and ordering ingredients. Soutaro, who has never married, expects the shop eventually to pass to his nephew. He remembers Teiji as a spindly, brooding boy who grew into a strong and hardworking young man, though one prone to sudden bursts of laughter. Teiji’s habitual photography, solitary evenings, and friendship with a foreign woman trouble his uncle, who does not understand what he is doing with his camera or why he has so few friends.

Teiji’s family name is a revelation to Lucy, not something she knew during their relationship. When police questioning brings up Matsuda, she initially denies knowing anyone by that name. The officer identifies him as the man who works in a noodle shop and says his uncle reported that he had gone to Hokkaido. Lucy then recognizes that the name belongs to the Teiji she knew. Her shock is not merely that she had missed a piece of biographical information: she realizes she may have seen or heard his surname before and still failed to connect it to him. The discovery deepens her sense that he had remained partly hidden from her.

The First Encounter and Their Life Together

Lucy meets Teiji in central Tokyo after the string quartet associated with Mrs. Yamamoto has disbanded, leaving her without her Sunday-evening routine. Wandering in steady rain, she reaches the skyscrapers of Nishi-Shinjuku. Outside the Keio Plaza Hotel, she notices a young man leaning over a puddle and taking photographs while streams of people pass with umbrellas. He appears indifferent to the water running over his hair and face. Lucy is arrested by his delicate fingers, sharp shoulder blades, and transparent brown eyes, and imagines him as made of water and ice.

The puddle is the first point of contact between them. Its reflection splits the hotel into illuminated windows and darkness, with cigarette butts floating in the dirty water. Lucy steps close enough for the tips of her shoes to enter the reflection. Teiji includes her feet in a photograph, then looks up and studies her face before returning to the viewfinder. The encounter establishes the way she first apprehends him: not through conversation or explanation, but through a composition he makes and the enigmatic attention he gives her.

Their early relationship develops through quiet routines. They walk the streets together, spend time in his uncle’s noodle shop, and pass weekends in bed. When Teiji is serving customers or taking out rubbish, Lucy reads Japanese literature and practices kanji in a notebook. They also go out in warm rain, and Teiji teaches her words for different kinds of rainfall. In Lucy’s memory, the time with him repeatedly takes on the atmosphere of the rainy season. Their closeness is expressed less through explicit explanation than through shared movement, gestures, and a vocabulary of weather.

Photography, Attachment, and Rupture

Photography is central to Teiji’s habits and to Lucy’s efforts to understand him. On the night they meet, he photographs a puddle and inadvertently frames her feet within its reflection. Later, Lucy remembers visiting camera shops with him, although he never bought a camera there. The camera is therefore both a practical object in his life and a means through which Lucy encounters his way of looking: he attends to surfaces and scenes that she cannot fully interpret.

That gap becomes more painful as Lucy considers the other people in his life. During an all-night walk around Tokyo, memories of a handkerchief and an ice cream passed between Teiji and Lily Bridges return alongside the memory of their leaving Lucy on the cliffs. Lucy wonders whether Teiji moved from Sachi to her and then from her to Lily, like three stations along a track. This is her conjecture, not a confirmed account of his relationships. The possibility unsettles her because it makes their intimacy seem less singular and his emotional history less accessible than she had believed.

The police disclose that Teiji left Lucy for Lily, and Lucy’s response is bound up with the fact that Lily had been her friend. She also speculates that Teiji may have killed Lily, asking herself whether jealousy or a desire to preserve an image could have motivated him. But the photographs associated with the case do not establish that he killed Lily. They have no fingerprints, the police do not know Teiji took them, and Lucy acknowledges that the evidence is circumstantial. Her interpretation remains divided: the photographs support her belief that she did not kill Lily, while giving her no certainty about what Teiji did.

Departure and Afterlife

After a weekend on Sado Island, Teiji returns to Tokyo jumpy and nervous. A couple of weeks later, he leaves a note on the counter of the shop, held down by a roll of undeveloped film, saying that he is going north to Hokkaido to try his luck. His departure offers Soutaro no explanation beyond the note and the film. Hoping the developed pictures might provide a clue, Soutaro finds images of deserted beaches, empty railway tracks, boarded-up buildings, and abandoned trash cans. He studies them from different angles and even through old three-dimensional glasses, but they yield no answer. He eventually throws them away, sells the shop, and accepts that he will not see Teiji again.

For Lucy, the departure remains open-ended. She learns that Teiji is in Hokkaido through the police, but has no direct contact with him in the evidence presented. In the final scene, as rain begins, she hears the unmistakable click of a camera and the whirr of film winding on. She looks for Teiji among the trees and bushes but sees no one, and the clicking seems to echo from every direction. The scene presents his presence as something Lucy fears and hopes may be real without confirming that he is there.

Narrative Role

Teiji is defined partly by the distance between the person Lucy loves and the person she can actually know. Their life together is conveyed through specific shared practices—walking in rain, reading in the noodle shop, and spending weekends together—while significant parts of his history remain outside her knowledge. The revelation of his surname makes that distance concrete, and his unexplained photographs turn absence into a recurring visual subject.

Lucy’s circular walk around Tokyo gives this uncertainty a geography. Returning to Shinjuku, she thinks of Sachi and wonders how one relationship followed another; the route connects remembered places without resolving what Teiji felt or did. His camera and the sound of its shutter extend that pattern to the ending: Lucy cannot see him, but cannot dismiss the possibility that he is watching. Teiji’s narrative significance lies in this unstable boundary between remembered intimacy and imagined presence, and in the unanswered questions his departure leaves behind.