Spring

Spring is the seasonal turning point on Kuro when fishing resumes and the rhythms of outdoor life return, but its promise of renewal is shadowed by the possibility that James Bond’s lost memories may come back. For Kissy Suzuki, the season brings both a hoped-for future with Bond and a sudden reminder that his past remains close at hand.

Seasonal Transition

Winter had kept the Ama ashore, occupied with mending nets and boats and working smallholdings on the mountainside. Bond, still recovering from amnesia, had helped with carpentry and odd jobs and learned Japanese from Kissy. Although the glazed look had left his eyes, he remained remote, troubled by dreams of white people, large cities, and half-remembered faces. Kissy reassured him that the dreams meant nothing, and he gradually accepted their stone-and-wood house and the sea horizon as his world.

Kissy also tried to protect that fragile routine by keeping Bond away from Kuro’s south coast. She feared that when fishing began again at the end of May, he would see the great black wall across the straits and his memory might return. Spring therefore restores familiar work and movement while bringing Bond closer to a sight Kissy fears could undo his apparent contentment.

Renewed Life on Kuro

With fishing’s return, Kissy dived naked alongside the other women, and Bond and the bird joined her. Their days varied, but the season also gave the island a vivid communal brightness: the sun shone steadily, the sea was blue, wild irises covered the mountainside, and the villagers celebrated as the cherry trees blossomed. The shift from winter’s shore-bound labor to swimming and fishing makes spring a return to shared life rather than simply a change in weather.

That renewed intimacy sharpens Kissy’s private hopes. She wonders when to tell Bond that she is going to have a baby and whether he will then propose marriage. The possibility of a family gives the season a future-facing promise, but Bond’s understanding of his own past remains uncertain.

The Paper and the Season’s Reversal

On the way down to the cove, Bond becomes preoccupied and asks Kissy to wait because he has something serious to discuss. Expecting that he might propose, she sits beside him and embraces him. Instead, he produces a crumpled square of newspaper from the spike in the small lavatory. Kissy recognizes it with fear: she tears those squares herself and discards any containing English words, trying to prevent Bond from encountering a possible prompt to recognition.

The moment turns spring’s renewal into suspense. Fishing has resumed, and the landscape is in bloom, yet the paper suggests that the boundary Kissy has maintained between Bond and the outside world may be failing. The passage leaves the paper’s significance unresolved; what it makes clear is the strain between Kissy’s hope for a shared future and her fear that Bond’s former life could return.