Jake Adelstein—Sunao Adelstein

Jake Adelstein and Sunao Adelstein’s relationship is shown under pressure from the demands of his reporting and from the things he chooses not to tell her. Their clearest confrontation comes after Sekiguchi dies: Jake wants to stay in Japan for his friend, while Sunao argues that he should keep the family’s travel plans. The dispute is not presented as a simple choice between love and indifference. Jake’s attachment to Sekiguchi is profound, but the episode also reveals how much of the family’s daily burden has fallen to Sunao and how little space the couple has made for honest discussion.

Marriage under the pressure of work

Jake describes a job built around cultivating access and managing relationships. On the police beat, he says, reporters had to do more than follow a manual: they had to get along with officers, entertain them, and bargain for information. Elsewhere, the book describes host and hostess clubs as selling an illusion of intimacy, with clients seeking conversation, sympathy, and attention. These accounts do not establish that Jake treated his marriage as a transaction, but they place his professional life in a world where closeness is continually performed, negotiated, and exchanged.

At home, the cost of his work appears less as a single rupture than as a pattern of withdrawal. Jake says he was rarely home, called at night to say good night to the children, and tried—but often forgot—to email Sunao during the day. He felt himself growing distant, as though watching the change from outside. He believed Sunao did not seem interested in his work, so he stopped talking about it; their silence then became a source of arguments rather than a bridge between their different daily lives.

The withheld information was concrete. Sunao accused him of spending too much money on alcohol, while he did not tell her that he had been giving money to women he met through his reporting, sometimes helping them obtain abortions or pay for travel. He feared that she would tell him to stop. Looking back, he acknowledged that she might instead have supported him and that he had not given her the chance to respond. The passage therefore locates part of the estrangement not in a stated refusal by Sunao, but in Jake’s decision to keep both his actions and his assumptions from her.

Intimacy and withdrawal

Jake connects the emotional strain of his work to a changed experience of intimacy. He says that over time he lost interest in sex, which seemed unpleasant to him, and that chronic fatigue compounded the change. He also describes avoiding conversation with Sunao about what was happening. The account does not assign responsibility for this withdrawal to her; it emphasizes his silence and his sense that he was observing himself become distant without intervening.

Their living arrangements made closeness difficult, though Jake does not present them as the sole cause. The family shared a tatami living room, where they laid out futons, with the children, rather than having a separate bedroom. When he came home late, he began sleeping in the back room; even on the rare nights he returned early, he made excuses to sleep there because he felt better alone and no longer liked being touched while asleep. His description moves from circumstance to choice: a shared sleeping space constrained privacy, but the back room became a retreat he increasingly preferred.

Jake’s own reflection connects this private retreat to the moral habits of his work. He says that when lying is part of a person’s job, it becomes harder to remember how love is supposed to work. In the marriage narrative, that observation is made specific through omitted emails, unspoken work, concealed spending, and the assumption that Sunao would oppose him. The resulting distance is not described as a formal separation, and the account does not establish a final resolution between them.

Sekiguchi’s death and the journey to Konan

The conflict becomes immediate when Sekiguchi’s wife tells Jake that Sekiguchi has died. Jake is forty-eight-year-old Sekiguchi’s longtime friend, and he recalls having known him and his family for almost fourteen years. The news arrives the day before Jake, Sunao, and their children are due to return to the United States. Jake wants to cancel the flight and attend the funeral. Sunao and her mother-in-law argue that he should go to the wake, if there is one, and visit the family on a later trip instead.

Jake proposes that Sunao take the children home without him. He offers to escort her to Narita and arrange for someone in the United States to meet the family and drive them home. Sunao sees this as putting his personal need ahead of the family’s needs, and the disagreement becomes heated. The details make the competing obligations tangible: Jake is trying to preserve his promise and friendship while offering a plan for the family’s journey, but Sunao does not accept that plan as an adequate answer to the burden it would place on her.

After they leave a Chinese restaurant, Jake and Sunao travel together to the Sekiguchi home in Konan. At around ten that night they take a taxi through heavy rain; the fare is nearly $250. They do not speak. Jake wears the black suit he has with him and a black tie borrowed from Sunao’s mother. The journey is both an act of shared presence and a scene of estrangement: Sunao comes with him, but the couple’s silence accompanies them to the family he feels bound to honor.

A promise kept incompletely

Jake had promised Sekiguchi that he would attend his funeral, wear a proper suit, and try to wear matching socks. He arrives at the house to pay his respects, but Sekiguchi’s body is already there and the funeral is to be Shinto rather than Buddhist. Jake says he does not know the Shinto rites; he encounters the body on a futon in the living room. He later identifies his failure to attend the funeral as one of his few regrets. The distinction matters to his account: he makes the difficult trip and honors his friend at home, yet still considers the promise unfulfilled.

The episode does not resolve the marital argument by declaring either obligation invalid. Instead, it preserves both the force of Jake’s promise and Sunao’s objection to being left with the family’s needs. In his later acknowledgment, Jake describes Sunao as a great wife and mother who endured much and raised their children almost single-handedly; he also wishes he had done things right or that matters had worked out better. That recognition gives the earlier conflict a longer frame. His account records her labor and his remorse, but offers no claim that remorse repaired the distance between them.