Kasahara May

May Kasahara’s letters give an intimate account of how a familiar neighborhood can become a storehouse for absence, memory, and imagined identity. A childhood observer of the Miyawaki home, she later links its disappearance to her own sense of loss and, at a distance, imagines herself in Kumiko’s place. Her voice reaches Toru Okada through letters whose delivery she doubts, making her both a witness to the neighborhood’s past and an uncertain companion to his crisis.

Identity and the neighborhood

May addresses Okada as Mr. Wind-Up Bird and writes from a mountain workplace where she makes wigs. The available passages present her through her own letters rather than through an outside account: she reports her routines, thoughts, and imagined states directly to him. She describes working alongside other girls and says that even when absorbed in a delusion she can continue the simple operations her job requires. Her letters therefore place practical daily labor beside a private imaginative life without treating the two as mutually exclusive.

The alley connects her home to the vacant Miyawaki property and to Okada’s movements through the neighborhood. Once a shortcut between two streets, it was narrowed as houses filled the surrounding lots during the economic growth of the mid-1950s. Residents screened off one end and walled up the other, leaving a passage roughly two hundred yards long and barely more than three feet wide, with overgrowth and spiderwebs. The alley’s physical blockage matters to May’s story: it is part of a settled residential world, yet it leads into a space marked by disuse and disappearance.

May’s attachment to the Miyawaki family grew through observation rather than intimacy. From her window, she watched their house and yard over the years, though she says she rarely spoke to them beyond greeting them on the street. She remembers clothes drying outside, the daughters calling for the family’s large black German shepherd, and the warm lights going out one by one in the evening. Birthdays and Christmas brought visitors; the older daughter practiced piano and the younger one violin. Because she watched these ordinary scenes so often, May felt that the family’s happiness had become part of her own life, despite the distance between them.

The Miyawaki house and the sense of loss

The contrast between the remembered home and the later vacant property shapes May’s account of the Miyawakis. She recalls that debt collectors came, that the family left and died by suicide, and that the eldest daughter alone apparently survived and disappeared from public knowledge. May says the family’s image repeatedly comes to mind amid work, meals, or time in her room. She does not describe herself as haunted; instead, the memory enters whenever there is an opening in her thoughts and lingers there. The recurrence makes the family’s fate an unresolved presence in the ordinary spaces of her current life.

Her feeling of having lost part of herself through the Miyawakis is explicitly figurative but persistent. May compares herself to an incidental person visible in the corner of a family photograph and says that some part of her seems to have absconded with people she hardly knew. That formulation turns watching into a form of attachment: the family’s household became part of her inner landscape through repeated, distant attention. The vacant house is consequently more than an abandoned building in her recollection; its absence marks the disappearance of a life she had incorporated into her own sense of the neighborhood.

Okada encounters the same property after emerging from the well. He finds that the Miyawaki house has been demolished and the yard enclosed by a high plank fence. Through gaps, he sees only compacted earth and scattered weeds: the house, paving stones, well, trees, television antenna, and bird sculpture are gone. He can scarcely believe that the deep well he entered once stood there. May, meanwhile, is no longer at her family home, so he cannot expect her to appear and greet him. The changed ground and her absence together register how completely the old neighborhood has been altered.

Letters, imagined identity, and distance

May’s letters make communication itself uncertain. She wonders whether the many letters she has written ever reach Okada, since the address is only approximate and she provides no return address. She imagines them accumulating unread in a post office, yet says that writing to him helps her put her thoughts on paper. One letter matters especially to her because she wants him to read it. The correspondence thus has two functions: it may or may not reach its recipient, but the act of addressing him gives shape to thoughts she finds difficult to contain elsewhere.

Among those thoughts is a recurring identification with Kumiko. May says that she sometimes feels she has become Okada’s wife, has left him, and is hiding in the mountains while working in a wig factory under the name May Kasahara. In this imagined arrangement, her own name becomes an alias and she pictures herself wearing a mask, while Okada waits at home for Kumiko to return. She emphasizes that these episodes are not deliberate performances: they arrive involuntarily, sometimes occupying much of a workday, and other girls may notice her speaking to herself. Her report does not establish that she is Kumiko; it records a felt and imagined crossing between her identity and the absent wife’s position.

This imagined substitution brings May’s distant attachment to Okada into sharper focus without resolving it into a claim about their relationship. She pictures herself as the person who has left him, while also hoping that Kumiko will come back so that he can recover a quiet, happy life. The two positions coexist: May can imaginatively occupy the absent wife’s place and still wish for Kumiko’s return. Her letter holds the contradiction open rather than supplying a simple explanation for it.

The well and the limits of help

During Okada’s danger in the rising water, May appears to him through an image he creates with his imagination: he pictures her opening the well cover with complete clarity. Her voice then reaches him from above, echoing through the well shaft. She asks whether he is thinking again and later asks if he is afraid to die. Okada answers that he is afraid of dying in the dark well. May says she is far away and cannot help him. The scene makes her presence emotionally consequential while keeping its practical limits unmistakable: she can be imagined and heard, but she cannot directly rescue him in that moment.

May’s later letter recalls another moment in which she says she was in a room, crying beneath the moonlight, before sitting down to write. She describes the scene as strange and difficult to explain, then ends by saying that she and the duck people in the woods are praying for Okada to be warm and happy. She invites him to call her aloud if anything happens to him. The letter offers care across distance, but, like her other writing, it leaves open how communication reaches him and what kind of presence that care can provide.

Narrative role

May’s letters preserve details that a view centered only on Okada’s search cannot provide: the Miyawaki home as a lively household before it became a vacant ruin, the long afterlife of its disappearance in a neighbor’s memory, and the way an absent person can become an imagined position for someone else. Her childhood observations restore the ordinary domestic scenes behind the property’s later reputation and destruction. By setting those memories beside Okada’s encounter with the demolished lot, the narrative makes physical change and remembered life answer one another without making them identical.

Her correspondence also complicates the boundary between companionship and isolation. May writes because imagining that she is addressing Okada helps her record her thoughts, but she cannot be sure he receives them; in his well, she is both a vivid imagined presence and someone who acknowledges she is too far away to help. Her role is therefore neither simply rescuer nor detached observer. Through her letters, the neighborhood’s absences acquire a voice, while the distance separating the characters remains real.