Teiji's Disappearance

Teiji’s disappearance is an unresolved absence that reorganizes Lucy Fly’s life: it turns remembered intimacy into grief, makes ordinary disturbances feel newly threatening, and deepens her doubts about what she has done and what she can still claim to know. The account establishes that Teiji is gone, but supplies no destination, explanation, or confirmation of his fate. What remains is the force of his absence in Lucy’s routines, memories, and invented confession.

The Absence and Its Immediate Effects

Lucy connects her changed state of mind to the period since Lily Bridges’s death and Teiji’s disappearance. When an earthquake wakes her in the night, the tremor itself is ordinary for Tokyo, and she explicitly resists treating it as a sign or as evidence that her personal crises have converged. Yet her response shows how exposed she has become: she takes refuge beneath the wardrobe’s clattering coat hangers, puts on a cycling helmet, and checks for a flashlight, whistle, and bottle of earthquake water. The scene does not explain Teiji’s disappearance; instead, it shows how his absence belongs to a larger condition of nervousness that now accompanies Lucy even at home.

After the shaking stops, Lucy cannot sleep. She tries to occupy herself by turning over Japanese words that share the pronunciation of the word for earthquake, but the familiar mental game fails to settle her. Her next strategy is to imagine Teiji behind her, circling her with his arms and rocking her as he did when they slept together. The memory briefly comforts her, perhaps enough for her to doze, but it cannot restore his presence. By morning, she returns to the routines of folding her futon, preparing instant noodles and tea, and going to work, carrying the loss into an apparently normal day.

Intimacy Recalled, Not Recovered

The disappearance is felt most sharply through physical memories of the relationship. Lucy recalls their former happiness in tactile terms: the two slept close together, and she remembers Teiji’s arms around her as a source of comfort. In another memory, they kiss beneath a railway bridge while trains pass overhead. The remembered scene joins their intimacy to the recurring movement of Tokyo’s trains, but its return in the present has the opposite effect: the physical closeness exists only as something Lucy can summon and then lose again.

That contrast becomes a deliberate act of self-punishment. Lucy says that she has recently stood beneath railway bridges, making herself shiver as trains pass. She weeps because Teiji’s smile and body are not there, and then because the echo of her sobs returns her own grief to her. Lily is included in that crying, so the two losses are emotionally entangled without being made identical. Teiji’s disappearance is not presented as a resolved episode in the past; it continues to recur through places and sensations associated with the relationship.

After Lily’s death, Lucy also goes to a pond near her apartment looking for Teiji’s reflection. She wants him to teach her words of comfort, but finds only turtles and carp. Drunk after taking gin for breakfast, she wanders past reeds and water lilies, notices the pond’s vivid colors, and considers whether to pray for Lily and Teiji at a shrine before deciding not to pray while drunk. A young man resting on a bench briefly draws her attention, but the scene resolves into renewed longing: she wants to touch Teiji and believes she will never see him again. The search for his reflection gives absence a concrete shape—the water offers life and movement, but no answer about where Teiji is.

Absence in the Police Interview

Teiji’s disappearance also shadows Lucy’s arrest and questioning. While left alone with Oguchi, she wonders what control she has over her future and thinks that, if Teiji were there, she would not care what happened next. Imagining him in the chair opposite her, stroking her fingers, leads her back into memory rather than supplying any new knowledge about his whereabouts. The interview’s present-tense pressure and the past’s remembered intimacy therefore meet in the same room, but the memory remains a refuge, not evidence.

When Kameyama tries to question her, Lucy says that the night under investigation is blurred and that she must recover it a little at a time before she can speak. Her thoughts move between the possible crime and memories of earlier losses. Later, she produces a detailed account in which jealousy of Lily and obsessive love for Teiji supposedly lead her to kill Lily with stockings. She subsequently states that she did not kill Lily and had invented the story. In that false confession, Teiji appears as the object of a love Lucy claims kept her from believing the relationship was over; this is part of the story she tells police, not independent confirmation of why Teiji disappeared or what he felt.

Responsibility Without Resolution

Even after identifying the confession as invented, Lucy does not treat herself as entirely blameless. She reflects that, if she had let Lily speak to her on the phone, Lily would not have come to her street that night; she also remembers introducing Lily to Teiji and persuading Lily not to return to Britain when she wanted to. These admissions concern Lucy’s own actions and her sense of responsibility for the chain of relationships surrounding the disappearance. They do not establish that she caused Teiji to leave, that she knows where he went, or that he is dead.

The police later release Lucy without charges after finding no fingerprints or DNA linking her to Lily’s body and receiving photographs that place Lily at a McDonald’s after visiting Lucy. That new evidence changes the case against Lucy, but it does not resolve Teiji’s absence. The distinction matters: the account supplies a concrete development in the investigation of Lily’s death while leaving the disappearance that haunts Lucy unexplained. Teiji remains present in her recollections and absent from the life she is trying to continue.

Narrative Significance

Because the story gives no explanation of Teiji’s fate here, his disappearance functions as both a plot uncertainty and an emotional condition. Lucy’s memories preserve the warmth of the relationship, while her present-day searches—in the imagined embrace, beneath railway bridges, and beside the pond—show how little memory can do to repair absence. The earthquake at the opening is not offered as an omen; its importance lies in the juxtaposition between a familiar physical disturbance that passes and a personal loss that does not.

The disappearance also intensifies the uncertainty surrounding Lucy’s account of herself. She can recall affection vividly, admit that she helped bring Lily and Teiji together, and invent a murder narrative that casts her jealousy as motive, yet none of this answers what happened to Teiji. His absence thus remains distinct from the confirmed facts Lucy supplies about her own actions and from the later evidence that leads to her release. The unresolved state is the point: Lucy can speak at length about the past, but she cannot turn recollection into Teiji’s return or into an explanation of his fate.