“I no longer have the confidence in myself to be your wife or Kyoichiro’s mother.”

The sentence “I no longer have the confidence in myself to be your wife or Kyoichiro’s mother” is the message Yuriko leaves when she departs from her husband and young son. More than an explanation for leaving, it records how completely she had come to judge herself a failure in her closest family roles. Its meaning reaches Kaga only gradually, through his father’s account and, years later, a letter from the man who loved Yuriko after she left.

The Note and Its Immediate Meaning

Yuriko endured her distress for years without showing its full extent. When she could no longer continue, she left a note saying she lacked confidence in herself as a wife or as Kyoichiro’s mother. Kaga did not know about the note at the time. His father, Takamasa, read it and understood that Yuriko had been under immense psychological pressure.

The wording echoes an earlier episode at the family dinner table, when Yuriko unexpectedly broke down and called herself a failure as a human being, a wife, and a mother. She soon apologized and asked the family to forget what she had said. Kaga remembers the incident only dimly and acknowledges that even this memory may be uncertain. The note thus makes explicit a sense of failure that had surfaced before, but had not been understood as evidence of a deeper change in her state of mind.

The Family History Behind the Words

Takamasa later explained that Yuriko’s emotional support had been weakened when his mother died. Although Yuriko had endured difficulties with her in-laws and felt guilty that her own mother died relatively soon despite her efforts to care for her, she had still had someone who would listen and encourage her. After that support disappeared, she was increasingly alone. Kaga was still too young to offer meaningful help, and Takamasa did not recognize the extent of the change at the time.

Yuriko’s account of herself was shaped by accumulated guilt: she believed she had been a burden to her husband, blamed herself for the conflict with his family, and felt she had failed her sick mother as well as her own child. Takamasa later thought that her low self-worth and hopelessness may have been signs of depression, though he had not understood her condition when she was living with him. The note’s language of lost confidence therefore belongs to a longer history of distress, not to a single disagreement or sudden rejection of her family.

Separation, Loss, and What Remained Unsaid

Takamasa did not pursue Yuriko after she left. He believed he was partly to blame for failing to help her and thought she had done nothing wrong. He also came to believe that, before her death, she must have wanted to see Kaga, even briefly; the thought caused him acute pain. For Kaga, the note is consequently bound up with both parents’ absences: his mother’s departure and his father’s later decision to die alone, which Kaga honored by not visiting him even when he was critically ill.

Years later, Shunichi Watabe, who had been Yuriko’s long-term partner in Sendai, wrote to Kaga about her state of mind after the separation. Watabe described her as having become seriously depressed and convinced she was useless to others. He said that the sight of her sleeping son had once kept her from acting on her suicidal thoughts, because she worried about who would care for him. His letter gives Kaga a fuller account of the despair behind the note, while also making clear how much of Yuriko’s inner life had remained hidden from her family.

A Message Reinterpreted Over Time

Kaga’s understanding of the sentence develops through other people’s memories and documents rather than through a conversation with his mother. When Yasuyo reports that Yuriko had spoken of failing as a wife and mother, Kaga reacts with dismay to the word “failed.” Later, he says that he wants to know what emotional state his mother had been in, even though he knows he cannot recover the time when he might have been able to understand her.

Tokiko suggests that Yuriko may have been thinking of her only child when she died, but Kaga cannot know this for certain. The note offers no direct account of what Yuriko wanted from her family after leaving; its significance lies instead in the self-condemnation it records and the belated effort it prompts to understand her. As a surviving message, it preserves a connection across years of separation, while leaving the deepest parts of that relationship unresolved.