You can tell at the swimming pool. Some people let go of tension and stay floating on the surface without effort; others, no matter how much they kick and stroke, keep being pulled downward. Buoyancy is not a matter of will. It is a matter of the body’s specific gravity—the density one is born with.
For a long time I thought of this only as a difference in swimming ability. But some bodies are born, from the start, a little heavier than water. In the same pool, one floats and the other sinks. The water is not different; the body is. When I think of Naoko, that specific gravity keeps coming back to me. She seems not to have sunk because sad things happened to her but to have been born with a density too heavy to stay afloat on this side. In the same water, Watanabe floated and she sank.
This essay looks at that density. Not why she died, but why, from the beginning, it was difficult for her to live on this side.
Not From Loss, But From Never Having Anchored
Freud would first have thought of melancholia. The state in which someone has lost a loved object, and the shadow of that object has descended on the ego, and the ego grows impoverished while holding within itself what it has lost. He put this in a single sentence: the shadow of the object has fallen on the ego. It looks like a fitting picture for Naoko after losing Kizuki—a woman who cannot let go of the person she lost and withers as she holds him inside herself.
But a diagnostic line Freud himself drew keeps catching me. He noted one peculiar feature of the melancholic patient: an incessant, garrulous self-flagellation, finding some satisfaction in self-exposure. Melancholic depression, he observed, is not silent—it is noisy. The patient accuses herself before others of her own worthlessness without rest.
Naoko is the opposite. She cannot talk. Words keep stopping, the connection between a feeling and the words that could carry it keeps breaking. She reaches for something to say and the words disappear somewhere, and she loses track of what she had even been saying. It was precisely these things—the dissolution of speech, the sense of unreality, the hollowness of affect—that Freud placed not in melancholia but somewhere deeper. The place where libido has withdrawn completely from its objects, no longer anchoring itself to any person or thing in the outer world, retreating to a primitive, objectless state. There, not only does the capacity to love an outside disappear—even words are treated like objects, and sentences break apart. He drew a clear line between this and melancholia’s noisy self-accusation.
Her collapse, then, may not have been a response to loss. Before there was any loss, her libido may never have been firmly moored to the outer world. The fact that her sister died the same way at the same age points toward that density. Grief did not pull her under; the pulling density was there first, and the two deaths were events that brought that density to the surface. Melancholia is illness from loss. What Naoko had looks more like something earlier—a place where she was never able to seat herself on this side to begin with.
The Fragile Island, and the Storm That Never Struck It
Jung called consciousness “the fragile island surrounded by the deceptive sea of the unconscious.” Ordinarily the island holds against the sea. We walk on it every day without incident. But some islands are born with barely a hand’s breadth above sea level. Even on calm days, the water reaches their ankles.
Jung wrote about the living being “pulled into” the place of the dead when someone close to them dies. The unconscious is by nature the land of dreams and simultaneously the land of the dead and the ancestors. Too deep an entanglement in it and the island submerges. He used the example of Theseus—the man who descended to the underworld to rescue a friend and found his body fused to a rock, unable ever to return to the land of the living. The tragedy of descending into the depths and being held there.
The temptation is strong to lay Naoko over this image—to say that her sister, and then Kizuki, chained her to that rock. But Jung noted one more caveat alongside this picture: such a pull commonly overlaps with the dangerous phase in which a latent psychosis becomes acutely manifest. Which is to say, less that the sea swallowed the island than that an island already too low was submerged by an ordinary high tide.
This difference is small. But it is decisive. If we say the dead pulled her down, she becomes an island that was normal until she met two unusually violent waves. Yet Watanabe survived the same death of Kizuki, and Reiko found her own way to hold on at the same sanatorium. Same sea, same tide. If only one island sank, the difference lies not in the wave but in the island’s height. In Jung’s terms, her island was, from the start, too close to sea level. The quiet of the Ami sanatorium was not integration regained; it was simply a moment when the sea happened to be calm. The island looked momentarily dry when all stimulation was stripped away, but it had not risen.
One Great Shaking, Ten Years Won’t Return
Here I open Yi Je-ma, though carefully. I have no wish to pin down Naoko’s constitution. Within the novel she is inward, soft-spoken, and physically frail—which at first glance suggests the grain of the Soeum type; but the way her mind solidifies and stops, like matter hardening, comes closer to what Yi Je-ma said about 怯心 (gyeopsin—the fearful, contracting heart) in the Taeeum type. One character falls under the language of two constitutions at once. So I set aside the attempt to classify her by constitution and borrow only one thing Yi Je-ma said.
The 醫源論 (Uiwonron, “On the Origin of Medicine”—a chapter in Yi Je-ma’s 東醫壽世保元, Dong-ui Susebowon) contains this passage: when joy reaches its extreme and cannot be fulfilled, the loving heart loses its ground. And such a great disturbance is no different from a knife cutting through an organ—一次大動十年難復, “one great shaking, ten years will not bring recovery.” Yi Je-ma marked this as the crossroads where human life and death, longevity and brevity, diverge.
Place Naoko on top of this sentence. What happened with Kizuki was not one more stimulus for her—it was one cut. And by Yi Je-ma’s words, that kind of cut is not sealed back by force of will. There are places that do not return even in ten years. What is interesting is that Yi Je-ma did not explain this by the scale of the external event. The same event, and some 局 (guk—constitutional structure) are cut while others hold. How deep the cut goes is decided not by the knife but by the person’s own condition. The specific gravity again. Place the same weight of stone in two boats, and the one that was already riding low will go under first.
One thing must be said clearly here. This does not mean that what surrounded her was nothing. The years she grew up within one enclosure with Kizuki from the age of three, never having to face the outside world separately—those years would have hardened her already shallow density shallower still. The two deaths were not the cause of her density, but they were the acceleration that made an already tilted weight sink faster. To zero out the environment would itself be false. Only the center of gravity was inside her, not in the events.
When the Command to Cut Arrives Where There Is No One to Cut
Last, I open Buddhism. The Rāhulasutta in the 中阿含經 (Madhyama-āgama, the Middle Length Discourses in the Chinese canonical tradition) describes the suffering of parting from those one loves: when things once loved scatter and change so that they can no longer come together again, 苦 (go; Sanskrit: dukkha—suffering) arises. And it locates the root of that suffering in 愛 (ae; Sanskrit: tanhā—craving and attachment, the clinging to what was loved). While 愛 remains, suffering arises; cut and expel that 愛 entirely, and 苦 ceases. What holds on to the dead and will not release them is what holds suffering in place.
For Naoko this picture is half right. The structure of 苦 is accurate. She cannot release the mind that seeks to re-gather what has scattered—the 愛 directed toward the dead. So far it follows the sutra exactly.
The problem is on the prescription side. Buddhism says: cut the 愛. But cutting presupposes a subject who can cut. You need a hand to release what a hand is holding. In Naoko, that hand—that subject—was never fully established to begin with. Having grown up as one circuit with Kizuki from the age of three, she never set up a separate “I” apart from Kizuki. The 愛 that needed cutting and the self that was supposed to do the cutting were not differentiated; they existed as one undivided mass. So “let him go” becomes “cut away half of yourself.” If the remaining half could stand on its own, that would be one thing—but for her, that remaining half was not there.
The Buddhist path is right. But that path is for someone who has two feet to walk it with. Naoko’s tragedy was not that her 愛 was too strong. It was that the self which would have remained after cutting that 愛 was never there to begin with. The prescription of 苦滅 (gomyeol; nirodha—the cessation of suffering) spins in place before her not because the prescription is wrong but because the subject to receive it had not yet been made.
Four Paths, One Meeting Point
Freud says her libido never anchored itself in the outer world. Jung says her island was too close to sea level from the start. Yi Je-ma says her 局 was in a place where one great shaking left ten years unable to return. Buddhism says the 愛 to be cut is there, but there is no one to cut it.
Four different languages, one place. Naoko did not break down because she lost something. She was someone who had never fully placed herself on the living side to begin with. Death did not take her away; she had never entirely arrived on this side. The two deaths were the trigger that revealed that fact—not the cause that created it.
Read this way, does Naoko become lighter or heavier? Both, it seems. Lighter—because her death was not because someone failed her but because a density that had always tilted toward the other side finally sank below the surface; no one’s failure to love her enough is to blame. Heavier—because if this is true, there was little room for intervention from the start. Even the consolation that if Watanabe had done better she might have floated—that too fades in this reading.
Back to Specific Gravity
Swimming instructors, I am told, do not tell a sinking body to just float. Instead they have the person hold a long breath to fill the lungs with air, and slowly let the tension go. As if to say: specific gravity cannot be changed, but the moments of staying afloat can be made a little longer.
For Naoko, there were too few of those moments. The one night she touched Watanabe may have been the highest she ever surfaced above the waterline. But one held breath does not change a sinking density. She went back down again soon after.
I sometimes think about people like that. People who sink not because they are sad but because they were simply born with a density too heavy to stay afloat on this side. How little the words “just try a little harder” reach them. Specific gravity is not laziness. Naoko was not someone who tried too little; she was, from the start, a body for which this side was difficult to live in. Acknowledging that is, I think, the reading that least insults her.
