Tadao Asai’s suicide breaks apart his daughter Hiromi’s childhood and sets in motion a lasting chain of bereavement, separation, and secrecy. First recalled as the consequence of his wife’s departure and debt problems, his death also leaves Hiromi without a proper funeral or farewell to her friends; later testimony reframes it as an event whose damage extends well beyond its immediate cause.

Background and Circumstances

Hiromi tells Michiko Oshitani that her father died by suicide after her mother walked out on the family. She says he jumped from a building, then explains that there was no proper funeral and that she was sent straight to an orphanage, without the chance to say goodbye to her friends. Her account makes the death not only a family loss but the reason her childhood relationships and home life were abruptly severed.

The investigation reconstructs a broader sequence: Hiromi’s parents divorced while she was in her second year of junior high school, and Tadao took sole responsibility for her. He died soon afterward, reportedly driven to suicide by debt problems and jumping from one of the taller buildings in their town. Hiromi was then sent to an orphanage. The account presents debt as the stated pressure behind his death, while Hiromi’s own recollection places it in the wake of her mother’s departure; both descriptions locate the suicide within a family already undergoing a profound rupture.

Hiromi’s Experience of the Loss

Before Tadao’s death, Hiromi encounters danger on her way home from school when men in a car offer her a lift. She runs away and, once safely home, tells her father what happened. Tadao sits silently for a long time, his expression gloomy. Hiromi assumes that he is thinking about how they might escape their difficulties and survive. She later recognizes that she misread him: what she saw in his eyes was a yearning for death. The contrast between her hopeful interpretation and her later understanding gives the event a delayed, painful revelation in her memory.

After Tadao dies, Hiromi is placed in an orphanage. A vice principal later describes her mother’s departure as neglect and Tadao’s suicide as an abandonment of his duty of care, while adding that the one consolation was that he did not take Hiromi with him. The institution’s care, as the story describes it, is limited: it is large, understaffed, offers little individual attention or privacy, and Hiromi faces bullying from other children. She often cries herself to sleep, but support from Seizo Naemura and Motoko Yoshino helps her endure. She also understands that her father’s actions made it possible for her to have a life at all, even as his death leaves her grieving and separated from him.

The Secret Aftermath

The separation is compounded by secrecy. Tadao’s first letter reaches Hiromi a month after she enters the orphanage, sent under the name Kyoko Kondo and from an address in Fukushima Prefecture. In it, he presents a reassuring account of a new life and directs her to reply under the name Kazutoshi Yokoyama. Hiromi realizes that her father is living under the identity of the man she killed. His letter tells her that he is safe, but that reassurance rests on an assumed identity and does not undo the loss of their former home or their enforced separation.

Hiromi’s later account to Michiko likewise reveals how little the people around her knew at the time. Michiko is surprised to learn that Tadao died by suicide and that Hiromi was sent to an orphanage; she remembers only being told by a teacher, Mr. Naemura, that Hiromi had transferred schools. The absence of a proper funeral and the lack of explanation to Hiromi’s friends turn the death into a private rupture, hidden behind what others understood as a school transfer.

Later Meaning and Narrative Role

The event also resonates with Kyoichiro Kaga’s search to understand his mother, Yuriko. Kaga’s father believed that his failure to help Yuriko through her mental-health difficulties made him responsible for her suffering, and that she might have wanted to see her only son before she died. In a separate account of Yuriko’s life, the loss of her own mother removes her strongest source of support; Kaga’s father only understands the effect much later. These parallels do not make the losses identical, but they place Tadao’s suicide within the novel’s wider attention to family distress that goes unseen until after a decisive separation.

For Hiromi, Tadao’s death is both the end of their shared life at home and the beginning of a long period in which care must continue at a distance and under a false name. For the narrative, the suicide first appears as a stark biographical fact explaining Hiromi’s transfer and orphanhood; later recollections add the circumstances around it, including the danger she reported, her mistaken reading of her father’s silence, and the concealed life that followed. Its significance lies not in a single explanation, but in the consequences that persist: grief, separation, an obscured family history, and Hiromi’s enduring awareness of what her father’s actions made possible.