Hiromi Asai’s orphanhood

Hiromi Asai’s orphanhood is the consequence of losing both parents in quick succession: her mother left the family, and her father died by suicide. The loss sends Hiromi into institutional care, where practical hardship and loneliness shape her childhood; at the same time, the people who support her and the letters exchanged with her father preserve ties that her new circumstances might otherwise sever.

Loss and Placement

When Hiromi arrived at the orphanage, she was miserable and withdrawn. Motoko Yoshino, then a young staff member, remembered that Hiromi barely spoke. Her grief followed the loss of both parents within a short period, leaving her to enter care already carrying a profound rupture in family life.

Yoshino understood the circumstances as a form of neglect: Hiromi’s mother had walked out, and her father had abandoned his duty of care by taking his own life. She also recognized that Hiromi had not been taken with him. The orphanhood therefore arose not from a single separation but from two distinct parental losses, with the surviving child left to bear their consequences.

Life in the Orphanage

The institution was large, chronically understaffed, and unable to offer much individual attention. It provided little sense of family, and privacy was difficult to obtain. As a newcomer, Hiromi was bullied by other children. These conditions made the orphanage a place of shelter without the closeness or security of a household.

Hiromi endured the bullying with help from Seizo Naemura and Motoko Yoshino. She knew that her father’s choices had made her life possible, and the thought that he was facing even greater hardship helped her persist. Even so, she often cried herself to sleep. Her endurance was therefore not an absence of suffering: it depended on the support she received and on her continuing concern for her father.

Her Father’s Letters

A month after Hiromi entered the orphanage, a letter arrived from her father. As they had arranged, it was sent under the name Kyoko Kondo and gave a return address in Fukushima Prefecture. The letter described a move for her father’s work and his employment cleaning up radiation at a nuclear power plant. It also reassured Hiromi that he was managing and asked about her new living arrangements.

Hiromi felt relieved to learn that her father was safe and continuing his life. She understood that he was using the identity Kazutoshi Yokoyama, the man she had killed, and that the name carried painful associations for her. Yet she accepted that her father had no choice but to use it. The correspondence sustained their connection across separation, while also keeping the circumstances of his hidden life present in their relationship.

Meaning of the Orphanhood

Hiromi’s orphanhood is presented through both material conditions and enduring attachment. The institution’s lack of privacy and personalized care contrasts with the personal support offered by Yoshino and Naemura; the separation from her father is softened, but not undone, by letters that arrive under assumed names. Her memories and correspondence show a child trying to make sense of loss while remaining attentive to the parent who is himself living under severe constraints.

The story later connects Hiromi’s family history to Kyoichiro Kaga’s effort to understand his own mother’s distress and separation from her family. Kaga recalls that his grandmother’s death removed his mother’s strongest emotional support, and that his mother had described herself as a failure as a wife and mother. In another conversation, Tokiko Kanamori tells Kaga that his mother may have been thinking of her only child when she died. These parallel histories make orphanhood and family separation part of the novel’s wider concern with losses whose emotional consequences are understood only later.