Emotional trauma

Emotional trauma is the novel’s name for pain that persists beneath a person’s outward life and distorts how they understand their worth and their ties to others. It is not disclosed all at once: Yuriko Tajima’s suffering emerges through fragmentary recollections, her own words of failure, and, much later, Shunichi Watabe’s letter to Kyoichiro Kaga. That delayed account turns trauma into both a private wound and a problem of witnessing: those who loved Yuriko must piece together what she could not fully explain while she was alive.

A wound concealed by self-blame

Yuriko’s distress appears in the language of personal failure before anyone can explain its cause. When Yasuyo Miyamoto recalls Yuriko’s words, she reports that Yuriko had blamed herself as a wife and mother. Kaga pauses over the precise word, asking whether she had really said “Failed.” His dismay marks a shift in the investigation: the question is no longer only what happened to Yuriko, but what emotional life lay behind the judgment she passed on herself.

Kaga later describes a profound darkness at the core of Hiromi Asai, tracing it to a psychological wound that remains unhealed. He wonders whether someone touching that wound could provoke an extreme response. The exchange does not establish a diagnosis or settle a motive; its force lies in the distinction between an old injury and the later actions associated with it. Trauma matters as an unresolved condition, not as a simple explanation that erases responsibility or uncertainty.

The family history Kaga recounts supplies a parallel account of pain that had gone unnoticed. After his grandmother died, his mother, Yuriko, lost the person who had been her strongest emotional support. Her husband understood only later what that loss had meant. Kaga remembers, dimly, a dinner-table episode in which Yuriko suddenly called herself a failure as a human being, wife, and mother, then apologized and asked her family to forget what she had said. The moment links bereavement and isolation to a change that was not externally visible, while the uncertain quality of Kaga’s childhood memory preserves how little the family understood at the time.

Yuriko and the limits of what others knew

Yuriko’s trauma also shapes what she can disclose. She did not speak to Watabe about her family until more than a year after they met. His later letter explains that, when she finally told him the story, she saw herself as a burden to her husband from the beginning of their marriage. She felt guilty about conflict with her in-laws and about her mother’s death, despite having made demands on her husband in order to care for her sick mother. From these experiences she came to believe she was of no use to anyone and doubted her ability to raise a child.

Watabe’s letter interprets this history as likely clinical depression, while also stressing that depression was not understood in the same way in the period he describes. Yuriko therefore understood her condition through the language available to her: she concluded that she herself was a failure. Watabe says she lived for years in this state and became preoccupied with suicide; the thought of her sleeping son was what could draw her back from that edge. His account gives the earlier words of self-condemnation a history, without turning that history into a complete or uncomplicated explanation of her life.

Yasuyo’s retrospective description of Yuriko and Watabe’s relationship adds another dimension. She does not remember seeing joy or brightness between them; instead, she thinks they were two emotionally damaged people who could soothe one another’s wounds. Kaga takes the observation seriously and says the detectives will keep it in mind. The relationship is thus presented not merely as a romance but as a bond formed between people carrying pain, while Yasuyo’s interpretation remains a recollection rather than a definitive account of either person’s motives.

Abandonment, care, and the wounds passed on

The novel extends the language of emotional harm to Hiromi’s childhood. A vice principal describes Hiromi as a victim of abuse: in her view, Atsuko Asai’s departure from the family constituted neglect, and Tadao Asai’s suicide meant that he had abandoned his duty of care, though he did not take Hiromi with him. The judgment locates harm in the collapse of parental care, not simply in a single traumatic moment.

Hiromi’s placement in a large orphanage brought further hardship. The institution was understaffed, offered little individualized attention, provided little privacy, and lacked a sense of family. As a newcomer she faced bullying, and she often cried herself to sleep. Support from Seizo Naemura and Motoko Yoshino helped her endure; she also drew strength from the knowledge that her father had acted for the sake of the life she still had. Her experience shows how abandonment can be compounded by the conditions meant to provide care, and how trusted relationships can offer support without undoing the loss.

As an adult, Hiromi has sealed away thoughts of her biological mother until Matsumiya’s question forces them nearer. She does not know whether she wants to learn how Atsuko is doing. Her recollection includes Atsuko’s repeated resentment of the marriage and complaints about Tadao’s earnings and circumstances. The passage presents Hiromi’s unresolved response to her mother not as a settled verdict, but as a conflict she had kept shut away and has only recently begun to face.

Belated testimony and the work of understanding

The novel makes emotional trauma visible through delayed, incomplete acts of telling. Yasuyo first offers Kaga only Yuriko’s phrase of failure; Kaga’s own family memories provide another fragment; and Watabe’s letter eventually supplies a fuller account of Yuriko’s inner life. Each speaker knows something different, and no single recollection stands in for Yuriko’s own complete testimony. The resulting picture is cumulative: silence, self-blame, bereavement, and the need for emotional support appear across separate scenes and relationships.

This belated understanding has consequences for the living. Kaga says he still wants to learn what emotional state his mother was in, despite feeling he may be too old to be so preoccupied with her. Tokiko Kanamori answers that Yuriko may have been thinking of her only child when she died. Kaga cannot confirm what his mother was thinking, but Tokiko insists on the significance of that bond, drawing on the words of a patient who had faced death without despair because of what awaited her elsewhere. Her certainty offers Kaga a possible way to think about his mother’s final thoughts, not proof that the mystery has been solved.

At Yuriko’s funeral, Yasuyo takes the urn of ashes home and faces the practical responsibility of clearing Yuriko’s apartment as her guarantor. She wonders what to do with Yuriko’s belongings, while repeated calls to Watabe go unanswered and she suspects he has abandoned her. These concrete aftermaths of death place grief beside unfinished obligations and unanswered questions. Across the novel, emotional trauma is therefore neither a spectacle nor a single revelation: it is the pressure of what went unspoken, the damage carried into later relationships, and the difficult work of making a life’s pain intelligible after the person who bore it can no longer explain it directly.