Understanding Another Person

Understanding Another Person names a problem that begins in the ordinary routines of marriage and expands into a question about whether one person can ever know another’s inner life completely. Toru Okada’s failure to notice Kumiko’s everyday preferences becomes an early sign of a much larger distance: living beside someone is not the same as understanding what has shaped them, what they conceal, or what they cannot explain.

The Question Begins at Home

About a week after leaving his law-firm job, Toru starts thinking seriously about whether one person can achieve perfect understanding of another. He recognizes that people may spend great effort trying to know someone and still remain unsure how near they have come to that person’s essence. His new attention to the question follows a domestic day organized around routine: while Kumiko is at work, he does the laundry and housework, shops for dinner, and waits for her to come home.

A conversation about food and household goods turns that routine into evidence of a gap. Kumiko points out that although she has lived with Toru, he has hardly paid attention to her and thinks only of himself. Toru disputes the meaning of her complaint: he has not noticed her strong dislike of blue tissues, patterned toilet paper, or beef and green peppers, but he argues that these details do not define who she is. His response exposes competing ideas of attention. He separates preferences from a person’s essence, while Kumiko treats the unnoticed details as signs of how little he has actually attended to her.

The Unknown Companion

That night, at two in the morning, Toru lies awake beside the sleeping Kumiko and revisits the small disagreement. He knows the objects and foods at issue seem trivial, and expects the quarrel itself to pass. What does not pass is the possibility that his ignorance is not trivial at all. He imagines that Kumiko may possess a vast inner world to which he has never been admitted, and that his glimpse of it is no more than a lighter’s small flame in a dark room.

The image shifts the question from whether spouses can remember each other’s preferences to whether a shared life grants access to another person’s experience. Toru wonders whether he could grow old beside an unknown companion without ever seeing the rest of that interior world. He later recognizes that this night’s unease brought him to the core of a problem he would keep thinking about. The novel’s central question is therefore not answered by intimacy or proximity: it begins with the unsettling recognition that both may coexist with profound ignorance.

Family History and Unequal Knowledge

The family history Kumiko recounts makes that ignorance concrete. She was sent from Tokyo to live with her grandmother in Niigata at age three, and returned to her parents at six. Her parents explained the separation as a response to her poor health, but Kumiko doubted that account. She had heard that her mother and grandmother had been involved in a long feud, and suspected that the move served as a settlement between them: in her understanding, she had been treated as a kind of hostage in an adult dispute.

Kumiko’s years in Niigata were not simply unhappy. Her grandmother doted on her, and she enjoyed playing with cousins close to her age. The return to Tokyo nevertheless brought a painful upheaval. As the separation approached, her grandmother swung between clinging to Kumiko and rejecting her, struck her with a ruler, spoke bitterly about Kumiko’s mother, and attempted to harm herself. The child could not make sense of these contradictions. When she was back with her parents, brother, and sister, she shut herself off; the following months became a blank in her memory. She experienced the house as a new environment rather than as home.

Kumiko’s withdrawal shaped the family relationships that followed. She became taciturn and found it difficult to trust or depend on anyone. She felt uneasy even in her parents’ embrace, while her older sister patiently tried to reach her by sharing a room, talking and reading with her, walking her to school, helping with homework, and comforting her when she cried. The sister died of food poisoning the year after Kumiko returned from Niigata. Kumiko later connected that loss to enduring guilt and a sense of inferiority: her family praised the dead girl’s abilities, including her piano playing, and required Kumiko to take piano lessons despite her lack of interest. Her lasting aversion to the piano carries the history of being asked to occupy a place she felt she could not fill.

The relationship between Kumiko and her older brother, Noboru Wataya, offers another limit on what can be inferred from kinship. They were separated by nine years, and Kumiko’s childhood away from the household further weakened any apparent closeness. Toru describes her reaction to Noboru’s name as difficult for him to interpret; he knows that neither he nor Kumiko thinks well of Noboru, but does not claim to understand what her expression means. After Toru’s violent break with Kumiko’s father, Kumiko had little occasion to see her brother. The family bond existed, but did not guarantee mutual understanding or affection.

Marriage, Choice, and What Remains Unsaid

Toru first meets Noboru when he and Kumiko decide to marry. He hopes that speaking to his future brother-in-law, who is closer to his own age, might help smooth the way with Kumiko’s father. Kumiko warns him not to count on Noboru’s help, though she says she cannot explain precisely why. The episode makes Toru’s effort to understand a person part of the marriage’s beginnings: he has to approach Kumiko’s family through her account, while recognizing that even she cannot readily give him a complete explanation of her brother.

The question returns in a later conversation when Kumiko says she wishes Toru would let her decide for herself about her pregnancy. She acknowledges that it is a serious matter for both of them, yet says she cannot clearly explain everything she is thinking and feeling. Toru accepts that the decision is hers. Here, understanding does not mean extracting a full account from someone who cannot provide one. The exchange instead distinguishes listening to another person from claiming authority over what that person must decide.

The novel’s frame also complicates access to experience. The early reflection is narrated by Toru, whose account of his own uncertainty makes the limits of his knowledge visible. Much later, Kumiko’s letter supplies information he could not have obtained from observation alone: she writes that she intends to kill Noboru by disconnecting his life support and then surrender herself to the police. She also tells Toru that Noboru had profoundly affected her and her older sister, and that her earlier account of sleeping with one man had concealed that she had slept with many. Her explanation discloses facts and feelings that marriage had not made available to him, while also showing the weight of what she had withheld and could not say earlier.

Significance and Limits

These episodes make understanding neither a simple achievement nor a single revelation. Toru initially argues that household preferences are separate from Kumiko’s essence, but the novel uses their argument to expose a weakness in that distinction: small, observable details can matter because they reveal whether one person has paid attention to another. At the same time, knowing details does not entitle Toru to claim that he possesses Kumiko’s inner life. Her childhood memories, family ties, decisions, and eventual disclosures exceed what he could infer from the fact of living together.

Understanding another person thus remains a demanding practice of attention, listening, and accepting limits. The novel gives Toru new information in stages, including through a letter that speaks from a life he could not see from within the marriage. Yet disclosure does not erase the distance that made disclosure necessary. The question with which Toru begins remains open: another person may become more intelligible without ever becoming fully knowable.