Hakumi's "Deterioration"

Kumiko’s “going bad” is her explanation for why she has become estranged from Toru and does not intend to return to him. In a computer conversation, she describes it not as a single mistake or a change caused only by her affair, but as a gradual transformation imposed by forces beyond her control. Her account gives their separation the shape of an illness while withholding a concrete diagnosis: Toru is asked to accept the metaphor, even as he struggles to understand what it means.

Meaning and Scope

Kumiko introduces “going bad” while responding to Toru’s questions about where she is, why she remains away, and why she refuses to meet him. She says she is no longer the person he knew and that, for some people, transformation can make them go bad. That condition, she says, is why she will not see him or come back. Her language connects a changed self to the practical fact of separation: she is not merely refusing a conversation but presenting the person Toru might meet as fundamentally altered.

She asks Toru to forget her, complete the divorce formalities, and begin another life. In her account, the two of them have already been separated into different worlds and cannot return to their former relationship. She also tells him that communicating this way is painful. The combination of a plea for release and an assertion of irreversibility makes “going bad” a boundary: it is the explanation she offers for withholding herself, and a reason she believes Toru should stop expecting their marriage to resume.

A Change That Predates Its Disclosure

Toru asks what the phrase means in concrete terms. An affair, he argues, can shock and hurt him, but that is not the same thing as making a person go bad. Kumiko agrees that he may be right, then insists that the affair is only one manifestation. She describes “going bad” as something that happens over a longer period, not as a consequence that can be reduced to one act or explained by one immediate cause.

Her account pushes the origin of the change outside her own conscious decisions. It was, she says, decided in advance, without her, in a dark place and by someone else’s hand. This formulation presents her condition as imposed rather than chosen, but she supplies no name for the agent or explanation of the process. The gap between her certainty that the change has a history and her refusal or inability to make that history concrete is central to the exchange: she offers a firm conclusion while keeping its cause obscure.

Marriage, Escape, and the Missing Cat

Kumiko recalls that when she met and married Toru, she thought a new set of possibilities had opened for her. She hoped she might escape through an opening somewhere, but now considers that hope an illusion. In this retrospective account, marriage matters not simply as the relationship she is leaving; it had once represented a possible way out of a condition that, as she now describes it, had already been determined.

She connects that disappointed hope to the disappearance of their cat. Kumiko says that there are signs for everything and explains that this was why she tried so hard to find the cat when it went missing. The search appears in her message as an attempt to read or respond to a sign, although she does not spell out what the cat’s disappearance foretold. The remembered search therefore links an ordinary shared event to her larger sense that her life had been moving along a course she could not alter.

The Incurable-Disease Metaphor

Kumiko asks Toru to imagine her as slowly dying of an incurable disease that would gradually disintegrate her face and body. She explicitly marks this as a metaphor: her body is not literally disintegrating. Yet she calls the comparison close to the truth and warns that it cannot convey the full situation or prove what she says. She presents it as the most she can offer, then asks Toru to accept it despite its inability to explain everything.

Toru responds that he can accept the metaphor, but cannot understand why she went to Noboru Wataya rather than staying with him. His question turns the exchange back toward their marriage and the choices he can see, while Kumiko’s explanation insists on a deeper process that those choices do not exhaust. The conversation thus holds two accounts of the rupture side by side: Toru seeks a comprehensible reason for her departure, whereas Kumiko describes a prior, prolonged transformation whose source remains beyond his reach.

Form and Unresolved Ending

The explanation unfolds through pauses and typed messages rather than face-to-face speech. Toru watches the cursor wait and resume; after Kumiko’s account, he rereads her words and tries to find a way through what he understands as a wall between them. The computer exchange makes her statements available in exact sequence, but does not make her inner condition transparent. Each clarification narrows one possibility—“going bad” is not simply the affair—while leaving the underlying cause unanswered.

The phrase returns after the conversation in Toru’s reflection that it describes something happening over a longer period. He asks himself how long that period is. The question remains open. “Going bad” names Kumiko’s experience of irreversible change and gives form to her refusal to return, but the exchange does not establish a literal illness, identify the outside force she invokes, or resolve whether Toru can understand her account. Its final effect is not diagnosis but distance: he has her words, yet the words preserve the separation they explain.