Yuriko Kaga’s death in Sendai is both a bereavement and an unresolved family history: her son, Kyoichiro Kaga, learns only years later how deeply depression and guilt shaped her life after she left him and his father. In the immediate aftermath, Yasuyo Miyamoto bears the practical work of funeral arrangements and custody of Yuriko’s ashes; much later, a connection between Yuriko and a murder investigation gives Kyoichiro a reason to pursue what he still does not know about his mother. The distance between the modest funeral and the delayed search for understanding defines the event’s emotional and narrative force.

Death and Immediate Aftermath

Yuriko’s death leaves Yasuyo, who had been asked to arrange a service, responsible for decisions that Kyoichiro and other family members have not yet taken up. After cremation, Yasuyo brings the urn containing Yuriko’s ashes home. She knows she cannot keep it indefinitely and, as Yuriko’s guarantor, also considers herself responsible for clearing the apartment. Her uncertainty over what to do with Yuriko’s possessions extends the practical burden of the death beyond the funeral itself.

The next day, Yasuyo holds a modest service in the smallest room at the local funeral hall. She contacts regulars from Seven, and a few attend, but the ceremony remains sad and shabby. The scale of the service reflects how little organized support is available around Yuriko’s death: Yasuyo has assumed the work, while the ashes and belongings still await a more settled decision.

Yasuyo had hoped Watabe would help determine what should happen to the ashes. He tells her he has an idea and promises to be in touch, but after she gives him her mobile number, he ends the call. Yasuyo stares at the blank screen. In the days that follow, her repeated calls go unanswered, and she concludes that he has abandoned the matter. The promise therefore offers no immediate resolution; the funeral and the care of the remains fall back on Yasuyo.

The Life Kyoichiro Had Not Known

The circumstances of Yuriko’s death reach Kyoichiro gradually, through people and evidence rather than through a single family account. More than ten years after her death, Kyoichiro discovers that the victim in the Shinkoiwa murder case had supplied the funeral arranger with his contact details. The fact puzzles him: he had moved repeatedly since leaving home, and his father, Takamasa Kaga, insists that no one asked him for Kyoichiro’s address. The connection turns a criminal investigation into a possible route toward information about his mother.

Kyoichiro tells Tokiko Kanamori that the Shinkoiwa victim may be linked to his mother, who died in Sendai. He wants to learn what emotional state Yuriko was in, not simply to resolve the mystery of how his contact information reached the funeral arrangements. The case thus reopens a personal question that had remained separate from his professional life: what Yuriko experienced after leaving her family, and what her departure meant to her.

An account from Watabe, who had a long-term relationship with Yuriko in Sendai, supplies what Kyoichiro had lacked. Watabe says Yuriko did not speak about her family for more than a year after they met. When she finally told him her story, she described herself as a burden to her husband, felt guilty about conflict with her in-laws and her mother’s death, and doubted her ability to raise a child. Watabe believed she had developed clinical depression, though depression was little understood at the time; Yuriko instead came to regard herself as a failure.

Watabe’s account also changes the meaning of Yuriko’s separation from her son. He says that when thoughts of suicide threatened to overwhelm her, the image of Kyoichiro asleep could draw her back: she worried about who would care for him if she were gone. Tokiko likewise tells Kyoichiro that she believes her patient’s final thoughts were of her only child. These accounts do not erase the years of separation, but they reveal the attachment and anguish that coexisted with it.

Family Grief and the Meaning of Departure

Takamasa’s response to Yuriko’s death was shaped by a belief that she had done nothing wrong and might have wanted to see her son once before she died. Kyoichiro recounts that his father thought he had failed to help Yuriko through her mental-health difficulties and did not pursue her because he believed that would be better for both of them. The thought that Yuriko may have wished to see Kyoichiro caused Takamasa physical pain. His decision not to search for her is presented not as indifference, but as an act constrained by guilt and by his interpretation of her wishes.

Takamasa’s own death echoes that painful restraint. He had decided to die alone, and Kyoichiro honored an agreement not to visit even when his father was critically ill. Kyoichiro was absent from the room when Takamasa died. The parallel gives Yuriko’s death an afterlife in the family: separation becomes a pattern of respecting a loved one’s presumed wishes, even when that respect means foregoing a final encounter.

Katsuko Matsumiya offers Kyoichiro a different emphasis. Although she and Yuriko were not close, she remembers her as kind and responsible, and believes she must have agonized over leaving her son. She urges Kyoichiro to forgive and forget. His response is subdued; the advice does not settle the past, but it articulates the possibility that Yuriko’s departure and his grief might be understood without reducing her to the person who left.

Memorial and Narrative Significance

For years, no one has organized a proper memorial service for Yuriko. When the subject arises within the family, Kyoichiro says he will consider arranging one after making progress on the case. His answer links commemoration to the search for knowledge: before he can decide how to memorialize his mother, he wants to understand the life and emotional circumstances that remained hidden from him.

The funeral, urn, and proposed memorial give grief concrete forms without making it simple. Yasuyo’s service provides a farewell attended by a few people from Seven, but it leaves her holding the ashes and considering the apartment. Kyoichiro’s later visit to the household altar, where he offers incense and thanks Yasuyo for what she has done, acknowledges the care that had been carried out in his absence. Yet his question about the word Yuriko used for herself—“failed”—shows that ritual alone cannot resolve his uncertainty about her inner life.

The death therefore becomes a story of belated knowledge as well as loss. Its facts arrive through scattered testimony: Yasuyo’s account of the funeral and ashes, Takamasa’s guilt as recalled by Kyoichiro, Tokiko’s conviction about a mother’s final thoughts, and Watabe’s letter describing Yuriko’s depression and enduring concern for her son. Their accounts do not restore the years Kyoichiro and Yuriko spent apart. They make visible, instead, the attachment that persisted within that separation and the unfinished work of mourning that followed her death.