Sunao

Sunao, Jake Adelstein’s wife and the mother of their children, anchors the family life that Jake’s reporting repeatedly interrupts. Seen mostly through his retrospective account, she appears in moments of practical care and domestic strain; his admissions reveal how his absences and silences affect their marriage, even as he makes consequential choices without consulting her.

Family Life and Care

At three in the morning, Jake came home to find Sunao exhausted, holding Beni and walking with her in an effort to soothe her. He took the baby and paced gently on a step machine while playing U2 quietly, until Beni began to settle. The scene gives Sunao no speech or explanation: her fatigue is conveyed through the hour, the crying child, and the effort she has already spent trying to calm her.

The nighttime episode also shows Jake taking over care that Sunao had been carrying alone while he was away. As he held Beni, he thought of Tim and Jane Blackman and the memories they might have of Lucie. His thoughts about the case then became personal, a shift he recognized as potentially damaging to a reporter. Sunao is not the subject of that reflection, but the family scene places his work beside its intimate consequences: the investigation follows him home, into a moment of shared care.

Another brief domestic detail offers a different measure of family closeness. After getting home at five in the morning, Jake slept for about an hour before Beni crawled over and put her fingers in his nose. He then had the day with his family, which felt like a holiday. The episode captures how rare ordinary time together had become without suggesting that one day repaired the larger strains.

Work, Secrecy, and Distance

Jake later describes a growing distance between himself and Sunao. He was rarely home, called at night to say good night to the children, and tried to email during the day but often forgot. He says he watched the separation develop as if it were happening to someone else. Their arguments included her accusation that he spent too much money on alcohol; he did not tell her that he had also been giving money to women she did not know.

His silence was partly driven by an assumption about how Sunao would respond. He feared she would tell him to stop, then acknowledged that she probably would have supported him and that he had not given her the chance. The account therefore locates the distance not only in his demanding work but in his decision to withhold what he was doing. His observation that lying as part of a job can make a person forget how love is supposed to work frames the marriage as one of the places where professional habits have crossed into private life.

Their living arrangements added a practical constraint to intimacy. The couple shared a room with their children; there was no separate bedroom, only a tatami living room where they laid out their futons. Jake also describes losing interest in sex amid chronic fatigue and his growing distaste for it. These details make the strain both emotional and material, though his account remains focused on his own perceptions rather than Sunao’s unspoken response.

A Decision Made Without Her

When a friend offered Jake a role in a U.S. State Department study of human trafficking in Japan, he considered the work, its funding, and the possibility of doing more good. He also thought about his plans for law school and his promises to Sunao. Despite those considerations, he accepted the job without consulting anyone. His choice took him back into the world he had left behind and, before the year ended, back to Japan.

The decision is a pointed counterweight to his earlier recognition that he had denied Sunao the chance to support him. Even after identifying his secrecy as part of their estrangement, he again made a major choice alone. The account does not record Sunao’s response or establish what the new assignment meant for their marriage. Instead, it leaves the cost in the contrast between Jake’s stated awareness of his promises and his unilateral acceptance of the work.