Kumiko’s Affair and Departure

Kumiko’s Affair and Departure is both a concealed breach in her marriage to Toru Okada and the beginning of her deliberate withdrawal from their shared life. In a letter, Kumiko says she had been involved with another man for close to three months, insists that her attachment to Toru remained real, and describes an intense desire she cannot explain. When the affair ends, guilt and self-reproach take the place of desire; unable to make sense of what happened or speak openly about earlier distress, she leaves and asks Toru not to look for her.

The affair and the double life

Kumiko’s letter identifies the other man as someone she met through work, whom Toru did not know. She says the affair lasted nearly three months, but does not present it as a love match: the man was older, married, and not someone she had initially regarded as a potential lover. She recalls that their work-related conversations gradually extended beyond business, without her expecting the relationship to become sexual.

The change, as Kumiko tells it, was a sudden and overpowering desire for this man, not dissatisfaction with Toru or a judgment that he was sexually inadequate. She describes the experience as unlike anything she had felt before, while acknowledging that she cannot explain why it arose or why it was directed toward someone other than her husband. Her account therefore gives no settled motive for the affair; its defining feature is precisely her inability to reconcile its force with her prior intentions or sense of herself.

During the affair, Kumiko maintained her marriage and concealed what was happening. She called Toru from the hotel and attributed her late returns to work, layering one lie over another without, she says, feeling guilty at the time. She continued to regard their home as the place where she belonged, while her sexual life with the other man occupied a separate sphere. This division let her imagine that the two lives could continue indefinitely, even as she recognized that a break would eventually come.

The collapse of desire and trust

The turning point came when the other man asked Kumiko to leave Toru and join him, saying they were well matched and that he would leave his family. Kumiko asked for time to think. On the train home after that conversation, she found that her desire for him had disappeared. She describes its loss as abrupt and complete, leaving her unsure where she belonged rather than ready to begin a life with him.

Only after the desire vanished did Kumiko begin to feel guilty toward Toru. Before then, she had treated his trust as something she could rely on while she kept the affair hidden; afterward, the lies became evidence, in her own eyes, that she had violated her understanding of herself as an honest person. She says the affair was not simply a betrayal of Toru’s confidence: it made her feel empty and worthless, and destroyed the life she had thought she could preserve alongside it.

Her letter also distinguishes this crisis from the state of the marriage’s sexual intimacy before the affair. Kumiko says she had not experienced true sexual pleasure with Toru, although she valued his embrace, and describes an internal blockage that had kept feeling at a distance. She does not blame Toru for that difficulty. Rather, the sudden disappearance of the blockage during the affair left her unable to understand what had changed or what she should do with that knowledge.

Earlier silence and the decision to leave

Kumiko connects her present inability to explain herself with an earlier occasion, three years before, when she had an abortion and told Toru there was something she needed to discuss. In retrospect, she wonders whether speaking then might have prevented the present crisis. Yet she says that even afterward she could not put her feelings into words: naming them seemed likely to make the damage more final. Silence, followed by disappearance, became the course she chose.

The letter does not frame leaving as a decision to join the other man. Kumiko says that the affair had ended for her, but she could not return without confronting what it had exposed about her own conduct and feelings. She apologizes for the delay in writing, accepts responsibility for the damage, and asks Toru to stop concerning himself with her and not to search for her. She also says she will contact her family to make clear that he is not to blame, and anticipates that formal divorce proceedings will begin soon.

Her instructions extend the separation to the material remains of their home. She asks Toru to dispose of or donate the clothes and other belongings she left behind, saying they belong to the past and that she has no right to use anything from the life they shared. The ordinary objects become part of the break she is trying to make: departure is not only physical absence but a refusal, expressed in the letter, to resume possession of their former domestic life.

Significance and limits of the account

The episode reaches the reader through Kumiko’s letter, not through an independent account of the affair. Its emotional and causal explanations are therefore hers: she affirms that she loved Toru and was glad she married him, while also admitting to prolonged deception, unexplained desire, and a decision to leave. The letter does not resolve those contradictions. Instead, it makes them the substance of her explanation, placing love and betrayal, belonging and disappearance, side by side without offering a motive that can neatly reconcile them.

Kumiko’s departure also transfers the relationship’s uncertainty to Toru. She names the separation she wants, asks him not to pursue her, and proposes a divorce, but does not offer a conversation in which he can question or answer her. The letter supplies intimate disclosure while simultaneously setting a boundary against further contact. Its final goodbye turns confession into an act of separation: Toru learns what she says happened, but is told that understanding it cannot be the condition for finding her or restoring their life together.