God

God is the guide who meets Shun after death, names his destination as Heaven, and offers him a way to answer his parents’ grief. His decisive role is not to erase loss but to disclose a costly possibility: Shun can be born again to his parents only if his memories of being Shun disappear. The choice God presents joins death to renewal without making them interchangeable; Shun’s parents can begin again, while the snow preserves evidence that the boy they lost once lived.

Identity and Arrival

God appears to Shun as an ancient man in white robes. Shun recognizes him as the figure he had seen at the art museum, though the encounter begins in bewilderment rather than reverence: Shun notices that he has no feet and then realizes that his whole body is gone. God calmly tells him that he no longer needs the body that once tied him down and held him back. The exchange makes God an interpreter of the changed conditions Shun faces, explaining death in terms the stunned boy can begin to grasp.

The first explanation is direct: nothing is about to happen to Shun, because he has arrived in Heaven. The place around him is dark, but scattered with pulsing stars. As Shun gazes at their abundance and beauty, thoughts of his death recede for a while. God allows him to do what he wishes, while observing that Shun remains attached to his last life and has unfinished matters to consider. Understanding, God suggests, will come gradually rather than all at once.

A Guide Who Cannot Undo Grief

Shun’s continued attachment is focused on his family. When he returns to his home, he sees his mother in black clothes, crushed by his death; she cannot see the body he no longer has, but her hand touches him, and he feels the warmth of the cuddles she gave him when he was very small. The contact offers comfort without restoring ordinary communication. God’s account of Heaven does not make that distance disappear.

Later, Shun sees his mother staring at his photograph, not eating, and weeping that she cannot go on living without him. He embraces her shoulders, unseen, and stays beside her until dark. His private comfort cannot reach her as an answer: she does not know he is there, and he cannot stop her grief. The scene gives God’s eventual offer its emotional cause. Shun has already found that presence without communication can sustain him, but it cannot relieve the people he loves of their suffering.

When Shun asks God for help, God first answers with the limits of what can be changed. He understands how Shun feels, but says that his parents will be able to see him again in Heaven when their own lives end. Shun understands the answer without being comforted by it: to him, the wait leaves his parents’ present pain untouched and makes happiness in Heaven seem impossible. God listens, then considers the problem rather than dismissing Shun’s distress. His role is therefore both consoling and bounded: he can explain the separation, but he cannot make a son’s invisible presence sufficient for grieving parents.

The Offer and Its Cost

God then reveals an unexpected alternative. Shun can be born to his parents again as their child. The possibility immediately fills him with joy, and he wants to return to them at once. God interrupts that rush with the condition that defines the choice: once born, Shun will no longer be Shun, because all memories of Shun and of being Shun will cease to exist. Rebirth is offered not as a reunion in which the old identity remains intact, but as a return that requires its loss.

Shun considers the condition and makes up his mind. He summons all his courage and calmly asks God to return him to his mother. The composure of the request marks the weight of the decision: he does not mistake rebirth for a way to keep his memories and resume his former life. He accepts the separation from his remembered self for the sake of returning to his family. God’s proposal gives Shun a means to act where his visits and embraces as an unseen presence could not change his parents’ grief.

At God’s intervention, many-coloured orbs appear in the air, each containing a tiny gold sphere. One by one, the orbs pop, and a chime follows. The story does not narrate Shun’s rebirth as an ordinary return to his former existence; it places the transition in a brief, wondrous image. The disappearing orbs give the choice a visible threshold, while the chime carries the scene onward without showing Shun retaining the memories he has agreed to lose.

Memory, Mourning, and the Snow

The consequences are shown through Shun’s parents. His father acknowledges that Shun is always watching over them and suggests that they begin again. At the window, the first snow of the year falls lightly. The narrator identifies its crystals as formed from Shun’s tears and as God’s proof that a boy called Shun once lived in the world. The snow does not reverse the death or restore the parents’ son as they knew him; it gives their continuing bond a visible sign.

The parents see beauty in the snowfall and remember that Shun loved snow. Their words join the fresh start to remembrance rather than setting one against the other. God’s solution thus has two forms in the ending: Shun’s return to his mother through rebirth, purchased by the loss of his former memories, and the snow that affirms the life that preceded that return. As guide, God connects a private act of sacrifice to the family’s fragile movement toward beginning again.