Okada Receives a Healing Ritual from a Mysterious Woman

Okada Receives a Healing Ritual from a Mysterious Woman is an encounter in a darkened room in Akasaka in which an unnamed woman attends to the mark on Okada’s cheek. The scene makes bodily estrangement its method: deprived of sight, Okada imagines himself as an empty house and lets the woman move through that image, while the unexplained physical consequences of the encounter carry him back into ordinary life. Neither the woman’s identity nor the purpose of the ritual is disclosed.

The Room and the Blindfold

Before the encounter, a silent young man leads Okada into a small workroom furnished with a workbench, tools, design books, two tailors’ dummies, and a vase of fresh gladioli. He asks Okada to sit and presents a pair of ordinary swimming goggles. Their lenses have been painted over, so that once the young man fits them around Okada’s eyes, they impose an artificial darkness even though Okada remains indoors. The young man assures him that he will not be harmed and leaves him alone in the room.

A woman enters and sits nearby. Unable to see her, Okada registers her presence through her movements and fragrance, then senses her gaze fixed on his face. The mark on his cheek feels feverish. She touches it carefully, as though inspecting something fragile, and traces it with her fingers. The ritual is intimate but nearly wordless: the woman does not explain what she is doing, and Okada has no clear sense of what response is expected of him.

The Mark and the Empty House

The mark gives the encounter a focus, but it does not give Okada an explanation. He experiences himself as detached from reality, suspended between moving vehicles, and recalls the vacant Miyawaki house as an image for his own condition. If he is an empty house, he reasons, the woman may move through it without requiring him to act. That image lets him relax into an experience he cannot interpret or control.

The woman eventually moves behind him and continues attending to the mark with her tongue. Okada feels an involuntary physical response. Rather than treat it as evidence of an understood desire or a mutual relationship, the scene emphasizes his effort to separate himself from his body: he imagines himself as the walls, floor, roof, and other parts of a vacant house. He extends the image to a weed-choked garden, a stone bird that cannot fly, and a dry well. The ritual thus turns the novel’s recurring language of vacancy and descent into a means of enduring a bodily event whose meaning remains uncertain.

Return to Ordinary Objects

The young man returns, removes the goggles, and guides Okada to a shower. Only as Okada undresses does he realize that he has ejaculated. He washes, changes into new underwear and a T-shirt supplied for him, and puts his own clothes back on. The young man then leads him to the waiting room and gives him chilled mineral water. The clean garments and shower make the aftermath orderly, but they do not explain what has taken place or who arranged it.

After leaving, Okada walks from Akasaka Mitsuke Station toward Yotsuya and continues along Shinjuku Boulevard. At a small restaurant, he finds a heavy envelope in his jacket pocket. Inside are twenty new 10,000-yen notes, a total of 200,000 yen. He puts the money away and decides to buy new shoes. The episode therefore ends not with a revelation about the woman, but with a payment, a practical purchase, and the return of ordinary needs after an experience that has unsettled the boundary between body and self.

Place in the Novel

The ritual’s treatment of the cheek mark recalls earlier episodes in which other people attend to the same mark, but this encounter does not establish the woman’s identity or connect her explicitly to them. Nor does Okada learn what the mark signifies. Its role here is to draw together several recurring elements: the body as something estranged from its occupant, the empty house as an image of selfhood, and darkness as a condition in which ordinary certainties become difficult to hold.

The scene’s resolution is deliberately limited. Okada regains his sight, showers, receives new clothes and water, and returns to the city with money in his pocket; the central experience itself remains unexplained. By placing an intense loss of bodily and perceptual control beside such practical details, the episode leaves its mystery intact while making the passage back to everyday life tangible.