Teiji Matsuda and Lily Bridges

Teiji Matsuda and Lily Bridges’s relationship begins as an intimacy Lucy Fly notices before she can prove it, then becomes an explicit romantic attachment whose abrupt end is bound up with Lily’s disappearance. Its discovery fractures Lucy’s friendship with Lily and her relationship with Teiji; later photographs deepen suspicion of Teiji without establishing what happened to Lily.

An Intimacy Lucy Recognizes

During the trip to Sado Island, Lucy comes upon Lily and Teiji sitting together on a street bench, apart from the pavement and close without touching. Each has an ice cream. They do not look at one another, but when Lily needs to wipe her fingers, Teiji gives her his handkerchief. She hands him her partly eaten cone as she wipes her other hand; he takes it without looking and licks it while she finishes. The ease of this exchange strikes Lucy as evidence of a closeness that has already crossed into sexual intimacy.

At first, Lucy reads the moment as a prediction: she believes Lily and Teiji are going to sleep together. Then the same ordinary gestures lead her to a more painful correction. Their silence, the unselfconscious use of the handkerchief, and Teiji’s casual acceptance of Lily’s ice cream suggest to Lucy that they have already slept together. The relationship is disclosed not through a confession but through habitual familiarity, visible to Lucy in an exchange that neither Lily nor Teiji treats as remarkable.

Lucy walks away and tries, unsuccessfully, to cry. The uncertainty of when the relationship began becomes its own torment: she imagines it could have happened at several points during the trip, including while she was unconscious near a cliff. The narrative does not resolve that timing. Lucy’s guesses register both her exclusion from the couple’s private life and the limits of what she can know from watching them.

The Kiss at Tokyo Station

After the group returns to Tokyo, Lucy and Lily say goodbye to Teiji at Tokyo Station. He has work that night and early the next morning, so Lucy does not return with him. Lucy and Lily take the Yamanote Line in opposite directions: Lucy travels clockwise and Lily counterclockwise. From her platform, Lucy notices that Lily is missing from the place she expects her to be and runs across the station to check the other platform. Lily is not there.

Lucy goes back toward the barriers for the shinkansen tracks, where she last saw Teiji and Lily together. Looking from behind a newspaper kiosk, she finds them face to face. Lily’s foot is between Teiji’s, their thighs almost touching; Teiji whispers to her and they kiss. This sight confirms the affair more plainly than the ice-cream exchange. Lucy cries out, sees the two turn toward her, drops her newspaper, and runs. The intimate scene she had suspected becomes a witnessed fact, and the discovery turns her fear of exclusion into an open rupture.

Refusal and Separation

Afterward, Lucy has no intention of speaking to Lily or Teiji again. On the fourth day, Lily calls repeatedly, but Lucy lets the phone ring. She wants to know that Lily is trying to reach her even as she refuses the conversation. Unable to stay in the apartment with the ringing, Lucy walks through the night, following the railway from Gotanda toward Osaki and onward along the Yamanote Line. The route carries her through places associated with earlier parts of her life in Tokyo, while her thoughts return to the handkerchief, the shared ice cream, and the couple’s apparent abandonment of her on the cliffs.

When Lily eventually comes to Lucy’s door, she is visibly nervous, repeatedly raising a hand to her cheek. Lily says she had not intended to hurt Lucy and had been caught up in the excitement of the weekend. She thinks she may have acted partly to hurt Andy, though he would never know. She is unsure whether she and Teiji have a future together and offers to give him up if Lucy still wants their friendship; she says she will go tell Teiji that the relationship is over. Lucy refuses the offer of reconciliation and tells Lily that they are no longer friends. The exchange closes off Lily’s proposed choice without clarifying what Lily and Teiji had meant to each other or what would have happened had Lucy accepted.

Photographs and Unresolved Suspicion

After Lily disappears and Lucy is questioned in connection with her death, new evidence comes to the police in an envelope containing two photographs. One shows Lily at a McDonald’s near Lucy’s home on the night of the murder, two hours after Lily had been at Lucy’s front door. A cashier recalls Lily with a Japanese man; the pair seemed distressed and had difficulty communicating. Lily left her cheeseburger untouched but drank her Coke. The photograph places her in contact with a man later that night, but it does not identify the encounter as a meeting with Teiji.

The second photograph shows a woman confined by close brown walls, her head lolling and her eyes empty. The police find no fingerprints on either image. Lucy believes Teiji took the photographs, but recognizes that they do not prove he killed Lily. Their evidentiary force is narrower: they show that Lucy did not kill her. The distinction matters because Lucy’s suspicion of Teiji grows as the case against her collapses, yet suspicion remains distinct from proof.

Lucy wonders whether Lily told Teiji in the McDonald’s that their relationship was over because she wanted to remain friends with Lucy. She imagines that Teiji might then have feared losing both women and asks whether that could have been a reason to kill Lily. She also wonders whether the photographs connect violence with his practice of collecting images, and whether the unanswered history of Sachi belongs to the same pattern. These are Lucy’s questions, not established motives or findings. The relationship’s narrative consequence is therefore double: it decisively reveals the betrayal Lucy experiences, while the circumstances of Lily’s death leave Teiji’s actions—and the meaning of the photographs—uncertain.