After Giving Someone Away#

At the beginning of Autumn, Nobuko and Shunkichi have no formal engagement. They share literary ambitions and intend to enter the literary world; their university friends already imagine them in a wedding photograph. Nobuko denies the rumor while letting it linger. Her younger sister Teruko often joins them on outings. As soon as Nobuko notices that talk of literature has excluded Teruko, she changes the subject to bring her back in. Nobuko is the first to care for Teruko, and always the first to forget her.

The change enters through a missing letter. Teruko wrote to Shunkichi, but the letter never arrived, or at least received no reply visible in the story. She suspects that Nobuko read it. Nobuko later asks whether she loves Shunkichi and says she will help if the answer is yes. Teruko gives no proper answer. Soon afterward, Nobuko accepts another marriage and moves to Osaka. The story never records an admission that she intercepted the letter, and Shunkichi never learns what passed between the sisters. All we have is a sequence of adjoining facts: Teruko’s suspicion, Nobuko’s question, the younger sister’s silence, and the elder sister’s marriage.⁴

Teruko supplies a name for the sequence: sacrifice. In her farewell letter, she decides that Nobuko has abandoned Shunkichi for her sake and asks her sister never to abandon her in turn. Nobuko cries whenever she reads it. Yet at the moment when this account seems most complete, the narration asks whether the marriage was caused wholly by sacrifice. Nobuko declines to think further and rests in the warmth of the sentiment.

The question does not uncover some base truth concealed behind love. Love, jealousy, social pressure, self-protection, and Nobuko’s ideal of an elder sister all use the same act of withdrawal. She may sincerely wish to spare Teruko and fear open competition or rejection. A marriage that can be carried out may also offer her a way out of a triangle no one can state. There is no final motive that turns every other impulse counterfeit.

Her marriage in Osaka is no simple punishment. Her husband is initially neat and gentle, willing to hear her discuss fiction and drama and to go out with her. Daily arrangements gradually make her smaller. When Nobuko returns to writing, he starts with collars that need washing, household expenses, and the warning that she cannot remain a schoolgirl forever. He presses the duties of a wife ahead of the manuscript. In the dark, she says she will never write fiction again, and cries. The couple are “naturally reconciled” the next day. The story records no apology and no redistribution of housework. Natural reconciliation keeps the days moving while leaving the cause of the quarrel intact. Nobuko writes little afterward; Shunkichi is already publishing in magazines.

A year later, she visits Teruko and Shunkichi alone in Tokyo. Their old literary conversation returns at once, along with a shared tact about never mentioning either marriage. Whenever silence begins to resemble waiting, Shunkichi starts another subject. Teruko returns, and the three eat eggs laid by her hens while Shunkichi declares that human life depends on plunder. That night he says that the Muse is a woman and only a man can capture her. The sisters join forces against him. They have a relation and a language of their own; neither exists only as a claimant to the man between them.

In the moonlight, Shunkichi calls without naming whom he wants to follow him outside. Nobuko goes with him to the henhouse. He remarks only that the hens are asleep, while she thinks of “the hens whose eggs have been taken.” Back inside, Teruko sits alone, watching a small blue insect crawl sideways across the lampshade. The next morning, Shunkichi leaves to visit a grave and asks Nobuko to wait until noon. Only after the man has gone do the sisters broach what happened the night before.

Nobuko says that Teruko is happy, and Teruko answers that Nobuko is happy too. Each pronounces on the other’s life from the appearance of her marriage. Nobuko asks, “Do you truly think so?” and regrets it at once. Teruko begins to cry. Nobuko feels a moment of cruel pleasure, then says that Teruko’s happiness and Shunkichi’s love are all she needs. Teruko raises her head and gets only as far as: “Then why did you last night too…”

The sisters reconcile in tears, and the affection is real. The unfinished sentence makes their immediate closeness possible. It also preserves an unease. Teruko cannot know whether Nobuko is still laying claim to Shunkichi, and Nobuko need not admit that she wants Teruko to see the sacrifice. If the younger sister is happy, she owes thanks. If the elder sister is unhappy, her pain confirms the magnitude of her former love. A single withdrawal becomes a lifelong debt.

Nobuko does not wait for Shunkichi. She leaves in a carriage and sees him approaching through the small window in its roof. She thinks of stopping and of letting the moment pass. His name almost reaches her lips, but the vehicle has already gone by. The ending leaves only “autumn.” The season replaces a name and turns a call that might have received an answer into an atmosphere no one can answer.

Autumn gives no assurance that stopping the carriage would have brought the three a better ending. It shows how the gentlest act of yielding can decide for other people. Nobuko neither asks Shunkichi nor waits for Teruko to finish. Teruko’s marriage becomes a reality after her sister withdraws, and every later happiness can seem to spend what the elder sister gave her.

To You, My Sworn Enemy states the same grammar more violently: “I entrusted him to you” and “Give him back.” Setsuna and Kazusa love each other and imagine the other as stronger and more suited to Haruki. Kazusa believes only Setsuna can save him. When Setsuna sees Haruki improve alone, she declares herself useless and tries to return the “more useful” Kazusa. Once envy is mistaken for authority, the person who yields can decide the future of three people in one stroke, while the person who remains must carry gratitude to a benefactor alongside her love.

One difference matters. During the call, Kazusa admits that Haruki must make his own decision. The sentence does not undo the possessiveness in “give him back,” but leaves a crack within it. Autumn does not preserve the making or explanation of Shunkichi’s choice; at the end, the carriage completes the missed encounter on behalf of Nobuko’s hesitation.

In The Love Suicides at Amijima, the women’s letter does not go missing. It arrives and saves a life, at least for a time. Osan later produces four hundred momme in cash and clothes valued at the missing three hundred and fifty, assembling a rescue plan that could alter the immediate situation. She has already changed her mind, but her new decision never arrives. The old promise continues to act.

A Letter Can Save Someone and Still Arrive Too Late#

Jihei is a paper merchant in Osaka’s Tenma district. He has a wife, Osan, and two children, and has exchanged twenty-nine written vows with the courtesan Koharu. The lovers possess an extraordinary number of oath papers, but another letter is the first to change what anyone does. Once Osan learns that her husband means to die with Koharu, she privately asks the other woman to break with him and save his life. Koharu agrees. She would rather let Jihei misunderstand and kick her than reveal his wife’s request.

No Haruki-like man carries messages between these two women. Osan asks, Koharu receives the request and acts on it; their agreement has more force than Jihei’s own vows. Secrecy is what makes it fail. Jihei does not know what his wife and Koharu share, and Osan does not know what Koharu endures to keep faith with her.⁵

Koharu is not wholly bent on death. She fears pain, wants to live, and worries about the mother who depends on her. The old promise binds one of her choices, not the whole of her desire.

Osan later hears that Tahei is about to redeem Koharu and realizes that her first request has created a different danger. If Koharu betrays Jihei to save him, disgrace and broken faith may drive her to suicide. Osan changes her mind. She takes four hundred momme from the shop’s money and packs clothes valued at the missing three hundred and fifty, hoping to rescue Koharu before Tahei can. Seven hundred and fifty momme is the earnest or half payment needed at once, not the whole ransom of nearly ten kanme. Four hundred already exists in cash; the rest remains an estimate of clothes yet to be pawned.

Once money appears, abstract self-denial runs into the question of where people will live. Jihei asks what will become of Osan if Koharu enters their home. Weeping, she says she can nurse the children, cook, or move aside. The text does not make her volunteer as a servant or hidden wife, much less surrender her legal position. Her imagined solution reduces the wife to child care, cooking, or a peripheral place in order to fit both women beneath one roof.

This plan goes much further than “I wish you happiness.” It includes cash, clothes, a deadline, and the first question about housing. Yet only one woman can retain an undiminished social position; the other’s kindness depends on lowering her own. Who raises the children, how the shop operates, what income either woman possesses, and who may change her mind remain outside the plan.

Osan’s father Gozaemon now arrives at the paper shop. He sees Jihei dressed formally and carrying a sword, with a servant bearing the bundle of clothes. He then finds the wardrobe nearly empty and concludes that his daughter and grandchildren are about to be dispossessed. He takes Osan away by force. The father does not know that she is trying to save Koharu, and the visible facts give him reason to worry. Osan refuses a divorce. Gozaemon does not wait for a letter of dismissal; he says no document is needed and removes her. Osan keeps silent to protect her husband and their plan; that silence lets her father’s attempt to protect her undo the rescue.

The rescue of seven hundred and fifty momme never takes effect. Three hundred and fifty remains only the estimated value of unpawned clothes. Jihei spends the four hundred in shop money still on his person on accounts, alms, and expenses. He tells the shopkeeper that he is leaving to buy stock in Kyoto. Even when he hears his brother and children searching for him, he stays hidden and then departs with Koharu. Osan’s new decision never reaches the other woman. The old promise still binds one of Koharu’s choices: she must preserve the wife’s honor, and she also follows Jihei toward death.

At the end they try to keep even their deaths apart. Koharu fears that dying together will disgrace Osan and asks to die in separate places. Jihei first stabs Koharu with his sword, then goes elsewhere and hangs himself with her sash. Physical distance is Koharu’s last act of fidelity to the wife. At dawn, fishermen find the bodies; illustrated broadsheets and puppet drama reunite the two sites as the single “love suicide at Amijima.” The public story erases the separation Koharu tried to preserve and produces a more moving union.

Chikamatsu makes paper change shape throughout the play: the merchant’s accounts, the lovers’ vows, the wife’s secret letter, the unwritten divorce, and the illustrated account that anticipates the tragedy. Paper lets an absent person continue to act and fixes money, honor, and promises in place. It cannot know that the facts have changed. Osan has moved from “Leave him” to “I will pay to save you,” while the old request keeps acting through Koharu.

The telephone offers a practical advantage. Kazusa can say stop, Setsuna can refuse, and the proposal of care can be revised that same night. When a request no longer fits, the other person can hear its replacement at once. Haruki remains outside the call, however, and its contents never become facts the three can review together. Setsuna offers to go to Europe and Kazusa refuses; housing, work, and care receive no further discussion.

Quicksand brings both ends of the exchange into one room. The three central figures know the basic relation, and the women love each other directly. Mitsuko visits every day and sometimes stays overnight. Even face to face, one person’s “no” can fail to stop the other.

Even Face to Face, They May Not Let Go#

The survivor Sonoko narrates Quicksand. The opening already calls her “the widow Kakiuchi,” so the reader knows that her husband will die, but not why Mitsuko dies or Sonoko survives. She works through letters, photographs, a blood oath, detective reports, and news items that she has preserved and selected. The more material she presents, the less the dead can correct her account. Sonoko admits that her versions may contradict each other. Tanizaki places no omniscient archive behind the documents; each form competes to explain the relation.⁶

The relation begins as a portrait. At a women’s art school, Sonoko paints the Willow Kannon with a model’s body and the face of Mitsuko, a woman to whom she has not yet spoken. Rumors of a sexual relation spread through the school. When Mitsuko first approaches Sonoko, she proposes that they make a public show of intimacy and give the gossips what they want. Much later, she claims that she planted the anonymous letter and rumor herself to conceal Watanuki and a proposed marriage. Sonoko began as a screen; her adoration later turned exploitation into love.

This late testimony cannot overrule every earlier version by itself. It shows only that a false rumor brings the two together before society has discovered anything, and their life together makes the rumor increasingly true. They do not only suffer the gaze of others; they use it to summon desire.

The nude scene before the mirror makes the problem bodily. Mitsuko consents to being painted and enjoys Sonoko’s gaze, but refuses to remove the final strip of white cloth. Sonoko treats the covering as secrecy and deceit, threatens to end the relation, and grabs it. Mitsuko tells her plainly to let go. Sonoko tears the cloth, strips it away, and seizes Mitsuko’s trembling wrist. The two later embrace and kiss.

The desire is real, and so is “let go.” A later kiss cannot travel backward in time and issue consent for the earlier tearing. Choosing only one side produces equally crude stories: Mitsuko never desired Sonoko and only submitted afterward, or her later response proves that the first refusal was play. The novel places pleasure in being watched, a bodily limit, coercion, and an active kiss in succession within one scene.

The relation repeatedly seeks stronger guarantees against this unease. Mitsuko asks Sonoko to call her “older sister” and rejects “madam,” the title conferred by marriage. Sonoko and Watanuki later form a secret alliance and use a blood oath to divide their places beside Mitsuko. Its terms are exact. If she abandons one, the other must leave too; neither may elope or die with her alone. They even regulate Mitsuko’s future marriage, pregnancy, and what is to be done if she conceives.

Only Sonoko and Watanuki sign this supposed contract for governing three people. Mitsuko, whose body and future they divide, never signs. Neither do Sonoko’s husband Kotaro, both sets of parents, or any possible child. Two people who feel pushed to the edges secure themselves through an alliance, then use it to legislate for the person at the center.

They photograph, crop, and exchange the blood oath. Watanuki gives the material to Kotaro. Kotaro recovers it with a receipt and a promise not to divorce Sonoko, then pays for the photographs, negatives, and other evidence. The payoff does not remove Watanuki from the relation. His suspicion, contract, and methods of surveillance pass into Kotaro, whom the others call “the second Watanuki.” A tabloid eventually prints a photograph of the oath and the scandal. The document preserves signatures but cannot hold desire in place. The oath becomes material for extortion, sale, and selective display.

After Kotaro enters the relation, all three central figures know its basic form. He lies to Mitsuko’s family that the women share a chaste friendship and uses his positions as husband and lawyer to win their trust. Mitsuko visits Sonoko’s home each day and sometimes sleeps there. She forbids the married couple’s old forms of address and requires given names or “older sister.” The arrangement remains private; lies exclude the families and the public. It is no formal or public three-person household.

Changing names does not distribute power evenly. Mitsuko begins to force the other two to take sleeping pills. She watches them swallow, checks eyelids, breathing, and pulse, and changes the formula when it proves too weak. She also restricts their food and turns the contrast between her own wakefulness and their stupor into proof of fidelity. Kotaro must still drag his drugged body to his office. He and Sonoko each suspect that the other secretly takes less. Greater proximity makes refusal harder: declining the test appears to prove a lack of love.

After the tabloid exposure, Mitsuko proposes that they truly die. The three take pills before the original Kannon portrait, Mitsuko in the center and the married couple on either side. Sonoko wakes; Mitsuko and Kotaro are dead. She wonders whether they meant to leave her behind. The novel finds no evidence for her and never establishes the final doses. The source of the leak and the cause of her survival remain questions asked by the survivor.

From portrait to death altar, Mitsuko occupies the center of an ideal image. Her attachment to both people is real, and she faces marriage pressure, sexual stigma, and Watanuki’s control. Those experiences coexist with her later control of the pills and tests of loyalty. Sonoko resists her husband’s supervision, yet uses his habit of treating her as a child to force concessions through tears and feigned suicide. Kotaro offers forgiveness while linking “unhappiness” to death among the three. A person subjected to control can control someone else in turn, and an act of rescue can decide for the rescued. New names abolish one set of rules and create another.

Same-sex desire and a direct relation between the women give them real love and agency. Their lives are destroyed when a specific “no” cannot stop the act in progress, and each disagreement escalates toward rupture, exposure, drugs, self-harm, or death.

Setsuna True contains another “let go.” Kazusa tells Setsuna to release her; Setsuna holds on. Later Kazusa can still voice her jealousy and her refusal to be excluded. She first rejects a proposal and later changes her mind. This moment does not silence her forever.⁷

Setsuna first proposes the record project, and Kazusa refuses it. Haruki and Setsuna nevertheless take the proposal into the editorial process, while Youko appoints Setsuna to press it in person. Kazusa gives no consent for the following week. Only after the telephone performance does she explicitly agree to the concert and album. Setsuna pushed the project forward; Kazusa later agreed. Both actions occurred.⁸

Yesterday’s “no” should have stopped yesterday’s act. Today’s willingness belongs to the person speaking today. A relationship needs that much room at every moment if love is not to rewrite a violated boundary as prior consent.

The blood oath ends as a photograph in a tabloid. Even after a person lets go, documents and works continue to assign the parts of wife, older sister, lover, betrayer, and survivor. Beauty and Sadness extends that power across twenty-four years. A man writes a sixteen-year-old girl into a celebrated novel. His wife types the manuscript, and people of the next generation follow the book back into the old affair. By the time three women meet, an accident has occurred, leaving only blame and silence.

Whose Past Does a Work Preserve?#

Beauty and Sadness begins when Oki, nearing sixty, returns to Kyoto. At thirty-one, already married, he had a relationship with the sixteen-year-old Otoko. When she was seventeen, she gave birth eight months into a pregnancy, and the girl died. Oki took her to a shabby maternity clinic on the edge of Tokyo. He later wonders whether the child might have lived in a better hospital. The novel never says that he chose the clinic, but places an adult man, his marriage, the girl’s body, and the medical conditions within the same memory.⁹

Oki later turns the affair into a novel, A Girl of Sixteen or Seventeen. At his request, his wife Fumiko begins typing the manuscript. She says that the typewriter is a machine while she feels used by it. Mistakes, torn paper, tears, and vomiting repeatedly interrupt the copying. A few days after she completes it, she miscarries. The narration offers only a conjectural connection between the two events, not a medical cause. The novel nonetheless makes the wife’s labor and body bear an old affair written by her husband.

Fumiko is not an instrument without choices. When Oki later offers to stop, she insists on finishing. After he sets the manuscript aside, she is the one who asks why he will not publish it. Her persistence does not cancel the power of the marriage, but it prevents us from reducing production to “a man forced his wife to type the book.” She suffers the novel and also helps complete, publish, and maintain it. With each later printing, Fumiko affixes inspection seals for runs of five or ten thousand copies.

The celebrated book goes on working in society without them. It brings Oki reputation and royalties that support the household and Taichiro’s education. Its sixteen- or seventeen-year-old Otoko never ages; the living Otoko must continue with the memory of the clinic, the dead infant, and a past rewritten in public. Oki himself knows that a work lives apart from its author. Yet the income remains with the author’s family. The girl’s image has left Otoko but has not stopped speaking in her place.

Otoko becomes a painter. Keiko first sees her through a Tokyo exhibition and a weekly magazine’s photographs while still in high school. Drawn by the paintings and the artist’s face, she visits of her own accord and asks to live with her and study. Oki’s novel does not lead her there. Keiko and Otoko have a life independent of him: painting, cooking, washing dishes, making beds, arguing about style, and living with jealousy and sexual desire. Their positions as teacher and student, homeowner and lodger, also remain. Otoko’s first slap does not acquire advance consent because Keiko later asks to be struck again. When Otoko approaches with a razor, Keiko runs in fear; Otoko catches her, takes her back to the mirror, applies soap, and uses the blade. Keiko continues to resist, and only then does Otoko stop forcing her. A woman who holds the brush can still turn someone else into the figure she needs.

Keiko says she will avenge Otoko, who responds with shock and repeatedly denies ever wanting revenge. Keiko ignores her objections and separately enters relations with Oki and Taichiro. Oki invites her at the station to deliver a painting to Kita-Kamakura; she did not create that opening alone. When they are by themselves, Keiko explicitly forbids him to touch her left breast. Oki moves her hand aside and looks by force. Keiko later arranges Taichiro’s lodging and the trip onto the lake. She describes revenge as loving Taichiro and making him love her, and also admits jealousy that Otoko still loves Oki. The novel seldom gives readers access to thoughts she has not voiced or performed before someone else. We must judge her motives from words and acts that conflict with one another.¹⁰

The most consequential telephone call occurs while Taichiro is in the bath. Keiko tells Fumiko that she and Taichiro are engaged. His later shock establishes at least that the supposed engagement was not jointly confirmed at the time. Before anyone decides whether it is true, the claim has already forced Fumiko to act and brought the father’s old affair into his household again.

Keiko insists on renting a motorboat that day. The novel then skips three hours and leaves only three results: the pair went out, Keiko was rescued, and Taichiro disappeared. It never depicts Taichiro explicitly agreeing or boarding, nor does it narrate the accident. A news broadcast reports Keiko’s rescue, Taichiro’s disappearance, and the continuing search.

At the end, Fumiko, Otoko, and Keiko occupy one room for the first time. Fumiko shakes the sedated Keiko and turns her blame on Otoko. This is a mother’s accusation, not the narrator’s verdict. Oki leads Fumiko away. Keiko opens tearful eyes and looks at Otoko without speaking. By the time the women meet, the accident has already happened. Taichiro cannot answer; Keiko has not yet spoken.

Compared with the other three works, Beauty and Sadness adds duration. Nobuko’s withdrawal becomes her sister’s debt. Osan’s letter continues to execute an obsolete request. The blood oath in Quicksand changes alliances as it passes into copies and newspapers. Oki’s novel preserves an old affair for twenty-four years, supports his household, shapes the next generation’s guilt, and overlaps with a later refusal spoken by Keiko. The narration never decides whether she repeats a line after reading the book or arrives at it through a similar situation. A work can bring an absent person back while giving her only an identity written in advance.

The video at the end of Kazusa True is complex for the same reason. Two years later, Youko sends an email containing a download address for a compressed file. Haruki saves and extracts it, then watches the video while holding Kazusa’s hand. In the footage, Tomo operates the equipment. Io tells Setsuna that they can do another take; Takeya and Takahiro are present too. Setsuna knows she is being recorded and asks to preserve the best performance and singing from the day. Finally, she looks into the camera and says, “How are you? I’m still singing.”

The words do not name Haruki or Kazusa. Youko’s email frames their recipient. The script never says who edited or uploaded the footage, how Youko acquired it, or whether Setsuna consented to her forwarding it. Consent to be filmed among friends, consent to preserve the file, and consent to send it to a particular person are separate decisions.

The recording returns Setsuna to the room in her own voice. Haruki and Kazusa have spent two years without speaking about Japan or Setsuna, and can no longer imagine her only as broken, resentful, or fixed forever at their departure. She says that she still sings. The ending stops with their opening, watching, and interpreting the file; it does not show them sending an answer back to Setsuna. Her recording comes closer to a subject’s own testimony than Oki’s novel about Otoko, but it remains a completed take.¹¹

Chiaki’s route in Closing Chapter has already staged art’s other power. From the school festival, its video, Haruki’s account, and her own investigation, Chiaki adapts the history of the three. One performer plays Kazusa and Setsuna in turn. The stage can make visible a confrontation between the women that never occurred. The same body that enables the scene also prevents the two women from answering at once. A work may give contradiction a complete shape; that completeness may mean that its maker has finished thinking on behalf of the characters.¹²

The video is a finished file. Setsuna True instead places the three people inside one production process. They can discuss a proposal, repeat a rehearsal, incorporate notes into the final recording, and edit the result. Only after the recording ends can we ask whether the three can revise their relationship in the same way.

How Can All Three Decide What Comes Next?#

Setsuna True opens with a direct conflict between Kazusa and Setsuna. Setsuna begins with Youko’s illness. Kazusa rejects her consolation and refuses to let bereavement pass easily into Setsuna’s familiar language of family. They argue over the flight five years earlier, Setsuna’s early confession, taking Haruki away, and never forgetting. Kazusa acts first and later admits that she hurt Setsuna’s face and heart. The script omits the specific movement, so it cannot be supplied as a slap or scratch. They attack and immediately apologize; an apology is soon interrupted by the next accusation. Haruki is absent, and neither woman needs him to translate.¹³

During their second confrontation, Kazusa admits that proximity to Haruki makes it impossible to give him up, while proximity to Setsuna makes her jealous. She first orders Setsuna to release her and abandon her. What she finally cries is: do not leave me out. At 23:46, Setsuna calls Haruki. He switches to speakerphone and begins playing guitar; Setsuna sings as Kazusa listens beside her. Kazusa asks for “Haruki’s words, my music, your voice.”

Setsuna calls the performance from the day before take 1 and the guitar accompaniment over the telephone take 2. She proposes adding the piano tomorrow for take 3. By calling them takes 1, 2, and 3, she turns a confession into repeatable work. Yesterday did not settle the song; they can do it again tonight, and tomorrow can add the absent instrument. The script never depicts take 3, nor does it say that the call is recorded. The later bonus track is a different, new song and cannot be joined directly to these takes.⁷

The collaboration around the new song allows more revision, but it begins under pressure. Setsuna first proposes the record project, and Kazusa refuses. Haruki and Setsuna still prepare the proposal and move it into the editorial process. Youko assigns Setsuna to pursue Kazusa in person. Kazusa gives no answer for a week and agrees to the concert and album only after the telephone performance. Their work moves from a forced start and a week of stasis to explicit consent.

Once she has agreed, Kazusa proposes that the three make a new song together. Setsuna and Haruki accept. The credits reassemble the old Light Music Club: Setsuna Ogiso, vocal; Haruki Kitahara, lyrics; Kazusa Touma, music; all three, performance. They negotiate dates and tracks. The three write, discuss, and rehearse in one place; Setsuna also gathers the director and recording staff and coordinates their schedules.

After completing her own concert, Kazusa reaches the studio. The three rehearse, receive the director’s notes, and decide to record at once. Setsuna begins to cry. Kazusa calls for a break and comforts her. They finish recording near midnight, and the staff continue editing through the night. Kazusa separately assesses the vocal, piano, and guitar. The release sells out and receives another pressing. Setsuna plans to invite Haruki and Kazusa to the Ogiso home to listen together. Their song passes from private memory into a public world made by an editorial office, a record company, technicians, family, and listeners.⁸

Each medium lets an answer return at a different stage. After the recording, the three make their relational decisions on another timetable. Original analytical figure.

Each medium solves one problem. The telephone in To You, My Sworn Enemy lets Kazusa and Setsuna interrupt each other and return an answer to its sender at once. It has only two ends and supplies no recording the three can review. The Kazusa True video preserves Setsuna herself and still reaches the others two years later. Retakes were possible while it was filmed, but the ending shows no answer returning from its recipients. The studio places all three characters and an outside crew around one object. They rehearse repeatedly, receive notes, then record and edit. When the guitar part goes wrong, they repeat the passage; the piano is played again as well, though nothing was wrong with it. Only after the rehearsal is complete do they begin the final recording. When Setsuna cries, the session pauses, and the work resumes afterward.

The three performed together in Introductory Chapter. This session adds credits, schedules, disagreement, technicians, editing, and release. Their song does more than express a private truth. The three make something with other people, and the result can be tested and revised. This may be the moment in WHITE ALBUM 2 that comes closest to a new form of relation.

The script inserts its own counterevidence into the same sequence. Before recording, Haruki wonders whether the festival will end with one large heart and one small piece attached to it, or with three fragments gathered again. He does not know. Music cannot determine who marries whom or how another person may remain.

Before the final recording begins, Kazusa announces that she will base her career in Japan and asks to remain near her mother, Haruki, and Setsuna. Once the recording is over, she tells Haruki to move forward with Setsuna. Haruki cannot treat the two women equally, she says. The record prints all three names beside each other, but Haruki plans to marry Setsuna and leaves Kazusa as a friend and musical partner whom they may see openly.

Haruki then distinguishes his “liking” for Kazusa from his “love” for Setsuna and proposes on the spot. Setsuna does not answer at once. She asks for more time so that she can discuss the matter with Kazusa. Haruki refuses to wait and demands an answer now. Soon afterward, he admits that he has made dealing with Kazusa Setsuna’s responsibility. During production, a participant can stop in response to a note, make an adjustment, and then enter the final take. Now Haruki sets an immediate deadline while Kazusa is absent. The difference is not whether Setsuna ultimately answers, but who can begin another round, set its deadline, and choose the participants. The three-person discussion Setsuna requests never occurs.

Setsuna first reveals the recent replies she wrote but did not send, along with jealousy, hatred, and a wish for revenge. She suspects that she has taken Haruki from Kazusa, refuses to let Kazusa flee, and even wants her to spend a lifetime watching this “hell.” Haruki keeps pressing. Setsuna secures five minutes, but in asking for them she has already promised that afterward she will become the “understanding woman” again and be his “home.” The narration reads this as acceptance on the spot. The answer belongs to Setsuna and cannot be dismissed as submission merely because she has borne too much organizing labor. She has only five minutes in which to voice her anger; what she will say afterward is already fixed.¹⁴

Setsuna True cannot be reduced to Setsuna overpowering Kazusa. Kazusa accuses, acts first, refuses, asks not to be excluded, agrees to perform, proposes the new song, and decides to move back to Japan. Setsuna has more family support and greater command of both conversation and organization. She arranges meetings, links the agency to the recording staff, receives Haruki’s proposal, and must continue speaking with Kazusa afterward. Her victory and her labor are two sides of the same fact.

The gap can be put briefly: a song receives shared time for rehearsal, revision, and a final form; the relationship among three people receives no equal time for discussion.

No existing route completes the missing work. Kazusa True has Haruki end the engagement in public, resign, and relocate, taking responsibility for the most complete social rupture. After the Affair route, Kazusa calls Setsuna and the two speak directly about help, return, and refusal. Setsuna True brings conflict between the women, shared care, family contact, and shared production into visible life. Each route acquires a real capacity and leaves a gap that cannot be filled by simply adding the others to it.

For these three, ISMISM’s “fourth position” means that once the facts change, they can negotiate the next step together again. It does not mean adding a fourth person or imagining a fifth route.

Setsuna wants to speak with Kazusa once more, and Haruki demands an answer on the spot. The three therefore need to know the same facts and have the right to speak in their own names. Setsuna cannot use Kazusa’s surrender to choose for Haruki, nor can Kazusa use her understanding of Setsuna to accept on her behalf. Silence, a delayed answer, and refusal to meet must remain decisions made by the person concerned. A later kiss, reconciliation, or collaboration cannot rewrite an earlier “no.”

Their decision must also accommodate daily life. Income and housing, resignation and migration, care and cooking, and the effects on family and coworkers cannot be left for one person to clean up after the climax. If initiation, execution, ending, and aftermath always fall to the person most practiced at self-sacrifice, a shared choice has only installed another center.

Agreements must change with facts. New illness may reopen an old promise, and one refusal must be able to stop what is happening. A telephone call, video, song, or news report cannot fix anyone in a permanent role. If someone can leave only through exposure, unemployment, poverty, self-harm, or another person’s collapse, remaining is difficult to call free consent.

Whether the three eventually love, live together, or separate belongs to them. The fourth position asks only whether they can reach the result together. Setsuna True already achieves much: direct conflict, open contact, outside work, the entry of family, and shared creation. The post-recording scene shows what remains missing. Setsuna asks to speak again, and Haruki presses for an answer; Kazusa first yields, then Setsuna takes charge.

The second volume has followed confession into choice, then choice into the days beyond snow country, and ends in a recording studio. Those fifteen minutes are brief, yet more valuable than “forever.” A failed rehearsal can be repeated, tears can pause the session, and yesterday’s take need not become a permanent verdict.

The unfinished work is to give the three that time as well. Can a recorded voice later be supplemented, revised, or withdrawn by its speaker? When someone says “no,” will the next action truly change?

They have met. They have only begun to settle what lies between them.