Kumiko’s pregnancy

Kumiko’s pregnancy, discovered in the third year of her marriage to Toru Okada, forces the couple to confront the difference between wanting a future together and being able to raise a child. Their careful contraception has failed; their finances and work circumstances make parenthood seem impracticable. Kumiko ultimately decides to have an abortion while Toru is away, after asking him to leave the decision to her. The episode is at once a practical crisis and an instance of the private uncertainty that shapes their marriage.

Circumstances and the decision

The pregnancy comes as a surprise because Toru and Kumiko have been extremely careful about contraception. They cannot identify a particular lapse, and the pregnancy therefore arrives without a clear explanation beyond the possibility of a moment of carelessness. Their circumstances make the news difficult to separate from material limits: Kumiko has recently settled into her publishing job, and her small employer offers no maternity leave. If she had a child, she would have to leave work, while Toru’s income alone could not comfortably support the household.

When the doctor gives them the news, Kumiko responds without outward expression that they will have to pass this time. Toru sees the decision as sensible: they are young, unprepared for parenthood, and still trying to establish a life together. He also admits a different feeling. Although he knows the pregnancy is unrealistic for them, he does not want Kumiko to have an abortion. Their discussion thus holds two positions at once: the practical case against continuing the pregnancy and Toru’s reluctance to end it.

Kumiko’s right to decide

Toru and Kumiko continue talking, but Kumiko eventually asks him to let her make this decision herself. She says that she cannot yet explain fully what she is thinking or feeling, while acknowledging that the problem affects both of them. Toru tells her that he believes the right to decide belongs to her and that he respects it. Kumiko then asks them to stop discussing the matter for a while, saying there is still about a month to decide and that she has a good sense of his view.

This pause does not resolve the uncertainty so much as mark a boundary around it. Toru has expressed his reluctance, but he agrees not to press the discussion further. The decision remains shared in its consequences and hers in its final exercise: their conversation makes space for Kumiko’s autonomy without pretending that Toru has no feelings about the pregnancy.

The abortion and its immediate aftermath

Kumiko has the abortion while Toru is in Hokkaido on a brief business trip. His firm sends him north because no one else is available; he is carrying important papers that cannot be sent by mail or entrusted to a courier. With return flights full, he has to spend the night in a Sapporo business hotel. Kumiko goes to the clinic alone that day.

After ten that night, she calls Toru and tells him that the operation took place that afternoon. She explains that a place had opened at short notice and that, with him away, she thought it would be easier on both of them to make the decision and take care of it by herself. Toru tells her not to worry and says that whatever she thinks best is acceptable to him. Kumiko says she wants to tell him more but cannot do so yet, adding that she will have to tell him sometime. The call therefore communicates the outcome while leaving an important part of her experience unspoken.

Family history and later significance

The pregnancy and abortion take place against a family history marked by separation, bereavement, and unshared emotional burdens. Kumiko recalls being sent from Tokyo to live with her grandmother in Niigata at age three, then returning to her parents’ home before starting elementary school. In the months around that return, she shut herself off from the world; the next several months became a blank in her memory. After she came back to the household, her older sister was the family member who most persistently supported her. That sister died of food poisoning the following year, and Kumiko later described feeling guilty and unable to take her place. These earlier experiences do not explain the pregnancy decision, but they give context to the isolation and difficulty of expression that recur in Kumiko’s life.

Much later, Kumiko writes that Noboru Wataya had exerted a profound power over her and her sister, and says that she intends to kill him and surrender herself to the police. Her disclosure identifies the pregnancy episode as occurring within a marriage whose partners do not yet have access to everything Kumiko is carrying. The late revelation does not change the stated reasons for the abortion—financial constraint, the demands of her job, and her wish to decide for herself—but it casts the couple’s unfinished conversation in a harsher light. The episode matters not as a complete explanation of Kumiko’s later choices, but as an early instance of a consequential decision communicated between spouses alongside something she is not yet ready to tell.