Marriage of Toru Okada and Kumiko

Toru Okada and Kumiko’s marriage joins a shared household and a bond Kumiko says she continued to value to a history of family estrangement, unspoken difficulty, and an eventual separation neither spouse can fully explain. Its decisive rupture is Kumiko’s departure after an affair: she insists that she loved Toru and was glad she married him, yet describes an overwhelming desire and an inability to communicate what had been happening inside her. Toru, rather than agreeing to end the marriage at her family’s demand, insists on hearing her decision from her directly.

Marriage and Family Background

Kumiko’s relationship with her family complicates the marriage from its beginning. She and her brother, Noboru Wataya, were nine years apart, and Kumiko spent several childhood years living with her grandmother in Niigata. She doubted her parents’ explanation that the move was for her health; a relative’s account suggested instead that the arrangement had served as a truce in a longstanding dispute between her mother and grandmother. Kumiko understood herself as having been sent away as a convenient solution to an adult conflict, not as a child whose feelings had been considered.

After returning to her parents’ home, Kumiko struggled to feel that it was truly hers. Her older sister alone gradually became someone she could trust: she kept Kumiko company, read and talked with her, walked her to school, helped with homework, and comforted her when she withdrew in tears. The sister died of food poisoning the year after Kumiko returned. Kumiko later associated that loss with her guilt and her sense of being unable to make her family happy. These experiences help explain why marriage to Toru did not mean easy reconciliation with her parents and brother, or uncomplicated security within a family.

When Toru and Kumiko decided to marry, Toru sought a conversation with Noboru before meeting Kumiko’s father. He hoped that a man closer to his own age might help smooth the way with the father, but Kumiko warned him not to count on her brother’s help. Toru’s own feelings toward Noboru were wholly negative, and Kumiko regarded that hostility as reasonable. She, too, was far from fond of her brother; the blood relationship, rather than any felt closeness, was what bound them. Toru’s later break with Kumiko’s father further reduced contact with her family. He told Kumiko she could visit her parents without him, but she made no effort to do so.

Shared Life and Growing Distance

For six years after their marriage, Toru did not sleep with another woman, despite having felt desire and having had an opportunity. The marriage also rested on everyday habits that gave their shared life a quiet structure. Breakfast, in particular, was a tacit ritual: except for a business trip, they had not missed eating it together. That ordinary constancy would later make Kumiko’s absence legible not only as a change in their relationship but as the disappearance of a familiar household rhythm.

The distance appeared in small signs before Toru knew its cause. After Kumiko called to say she would be late, he found discarded gift wrapping from the Matsuya department store and a Christian Dior eau de cologne box in her workroom’s wastebasket. The matching bottle was nearly unused in her cosmetics cabinet. Toru recognized its fragrance and reasoned that an expensive gift of cologne, given outside a birthday or anniversary, might point to someone close to her. The object gave him a suspicion, not an explanation; his uncertainty about who had given it, and why, shows how little access he had to the life Kumiko was keeping from him.

On the night Kumiko failed to come home, Toru waited until midnight and eventually went to bed with the light on. In the morning he found her side of the bed empty and her washed, neatly folded summer pajamas on the night table. He searched the house, then made coffee and breakfast alone. The empty place at the table broke the couple’s long breakfast routine. As he ate, he connected her absence with the cologne and imagined that she might be with another man, but this remained Toru’s fearful conjecture at the time, not knowledge.

Kumiko’s Account of the Separation

Kumiko eventually wrote to Toru in a letter bearing no return address. She acknowledged that she had disappeared without warning and confirmed that she had been sexually involved with a man she met through work for close to three months. She said the affair was over and that Toru did not know the man. She could not say whether she had loved him, but answered without hesitation that she had loved Toru and had always been extremely glad they had married.

Her account did not present the affair as retaliation, the result of losing affection for Toru, or a considered plan to replace him. Kumiko recalled that she had not set out to take a lover and had initially regarded the other man as a colleague with whom conversation came easily. She acknowledged that Toru’s past overnight stay with another woman had rankled, but said it was not why she had the affair. She described the desire that arose as something she could not explain or suppress, while also insisting that it had not felt to her like betrayal in the moment. Her explanation therefore reveals the affair while leaving its deepest cause unresolved.

The letter also distinguishes emotional attachment from sexual experience. Kumiko wrote that she had loved being held by Toru but had never experienced genuine sexual pleasure with him, before or after their marriage. She attributed this to a blockage within herself, not to a failure on Toru’s part. The newly intense desire she felt with the other man made the difference impossible for her to ignore. In the same account, she recalled an earlier abortion: three years before writing, she had told Toru there was something she needed to say, but had not managed to tell him what was in her heart. She wondered whether speaking then might have changed what followed, while acknowledging that even afterward she could not make those feelings clear in words.

Kumiko described the result as a divided life. She had kept the affair hidden, calling Toru from the hotel to say work would keep her out late and lying without feeling the guilt she thought she should feel. She said that her home with Toru remained the world to which she belonged, even as she felt compelled toward another relationship. At the same time, she recognized that this split could not continue indefinitely. The letter turns the marriage’s familiar home and its concealed parallel life into opposing claims on her: she says the bond with Toru was real, but that her actions had destroyed what she called their delicate closeness.

Separation, Uncertainty, and the Final Message

Kumiko asked Toru not to look for her, to forget her, and to begin a new life. She said she would write to her family, take responsibility for the separation, and begin formal divorce proceedings; she also asked him to dispose of or donate the belongings she had left behind. Her instructions framed the marriage as finished, but Toru did not treat the letter as a complete answer to where she was or what was happening to her.

Kumiko’s family pressed Toru to agree to a divorce. When her father called, Toru said he was not absolutely opposed, but would agree only after seeing Kumiko alone and hearing her tell him that this was what she wanted. He connected that condition to the way they had decided to marry: they had talked matters over before making that decision, and he wanted them to speak directly before ending it. His position does not erase the separation or guarantee reconciliation; it establishes that, for him, a decision relayed through her family could not substitute for a conversation with his wife.

The family’s claim that Kumiko did not want to see Toru deepened rather than resolved his uncertainty. He knew that Kumiko had long struggled to remain independent of her parents and brother, and found it difficult to believe that she had simply gone from him to them or was communicating through them. He considered whether she had suffered an emotional breakdown or might be held against her will, but could not settle either possibility. The unresolved question is central to the marriage’s separated state: Kumiko’s letter gives a substantial account of her affair and her request for divorce, while Toru still doubts that it explains her present circumstances.

In a later message, Kumiko disclosed that she intended to kill her brother, Noboru Wataya, by disconnecting his life-support system in the hospital. She said she would surrender to the police afterward and accept arrest and trial without offering an explanation or defense. The message makes clear that her separation from Toru unfolds alongside a conflict she describes as her own responsibility and as something she has to confront. Her marriage is thus left suspended between her request that Toru begin a new life and his insistence on a direct conversation, while her final communication reveals an intention with consequences far beyond divorce.