Hiromi Asai’s orphaning came after her mother abandoned the family and her father died by suicide, leaving her without either parent while she was still a child. The novel treats this not as a single loss but as a rupture with lasting consequences: Hiromi entered institutional care, endured bullying and grief, and carried the knowledge that her father’s actions had been intended, in part, to preserve her future. Years later, her history also clarifies why classmates’ bullying and the family’s circumstances remained bound together in the memories of those who knew her.

Causes and Family Circumstances

Hiromi’s family had already been under strain before she became an orphan. Recalling the bullying, former classmates linked it to events at home: her mother had walked out, and the family store was troubled by repeated visits from gangsters. The recollection connects the hostility Hiromi faced at school to a visible family crisis, though the classmates did not appear to understand the full extent of what had happened to her.

The novel later makes the adults’ responsibility more explicit. Motoko Yoshino, who worked at the orphanage, considered Hiromi a victim of abuse: in her view, her mother’s departure amounted to neglect, while her father abandoned his duty of care by taking his own life. Yoshino’s judgment distinguishes the parents’ different actions while recognizing their shared consequence for the child. She also noted the grim qualification that Hiromi’s father had not taken her with him.

Bereavement and Institutional Life

After the deaths and abandonment, Hiromi was placed in an orphanage. The institution was large and chronically understaffed, with little opportunity for individual attention, no sense of family, and limited privacy. For a newly arrived child who had lost both parents in quick succession, its scale and impersonal routines compounded the absence at home.

Yoshino remembered Hiromi at first as miserable and withdrawn, barely speaking. That silence is presented in the context of her losses rather than as an inexplicable trait: she had been bereaved and abandoned in very short order. The orphanage was not only a setting for her care but also a place where the consequences of family collapse remained present in daily life.

Bullying and Sources of Support

As a newcomer, Hiromi was subjected to bullying by other children. Former classmates later recalled bullying her because of her family’s situation, but their recollections were incomplete: when asked whether they knew she had been sent to an orphanage after her father’s death, one said she had not known. The gap between the harm remembered and the circumstances forgotten underscores how little Hiromi mattered to those classmates after she left their school.

The bullying did not define the entirety of Hiromi’s life in the orphanage. She endured it with support from adults including Seizo Naemura and Motoko Yoshino. She often cried herself to sleep, but the thought that her father was having an even harder time gave her strength to continue. Her response held grief and loyalty together: she suffered from the separation while also understanding her father’s sacrifice as the condition that allowed her to go on living.

Lasting Significance

The orphaning reverberates beyond Hiromi’s childhood. Its effects surface in accounts of her school years, in Yoshino’s recollection of her withdrawn arrival, and in the later recognition that the classmates who bullied her had little understanding of her circumstances. The event also exposes a painful tension between intention and consequence: her father’s decision left her alive, but it also left her to face bereavement, institutional life, and bullying without her parents.

The novel places this childhood loss alongside a broader inquiry into family bonds and unresolved separation. Hiromi’s father remained part of her emotional life even while absent, and her gratitude toward him coexisted with the hardship his death and the family’s collapse brought about. Her orphaning therefore marks both a devastating break in care and the beginning of a life sustained, imperfectly, by other people’s support and by the bond she continued to feel with her father.