Naoki’s Mother

Quick Facts

• Role: Narrator of Chapter 3, “The Benevolent One,” through diary entries
• First appearance: As the diarist whose voice frames the chapter’s events
• Core identity: A housewife devoted to preserving an image of the “average,” flawless family
• Key relationships: Her son Naoki Shitamura; the teacher Yūko Moriguchi; classmate Shūya Watanabe; her largely absent husband
• Presentation: Seen by others (notably Mizuki Kitahara) as impeccably groomed—“perfect makeup, beautiful clothes”—using appearance to project control and normalcy

Who They Are

At her core, Naoki’s Mother is a woman who confuses love with control and denial with protection. She fashions her family life to replicate an idealized childhood, insisting on a pristine domestic tableau even as reality corrodes it from within. Her world orbits around her “sweet” boy Naoki, a fantasy she sustains by recasting threats—like the death of Manami Moriguchi and the accusations from Yūko Moriguchi—as malicious intrusions. The chapter turns her diaristic self-portrait into a case study of misguided maternal love: she becomes a central figure in Motherhood and Family Dysfunction, where protecting the family’s image matters more than addressing its rot.

Personality & Traits

Her voice is affectionate, composed, and reasonable—until it isn’t. The gentleness of her tone cloaks a fierce moral certainty: that Naoki is good, the family is normal, and anyone who says otherwise is cruel or deluded. She confuses enabling with care, aesthetics with ethics, and loyalty with truth. As fear of social judgment grows, so does her self-righteousness, and her “benevolence” hardens into something lethal.

• Doting to the point of harm: She praises Naoki relentlessly and shields him from consequences, believing constant affirmation will restore him. Evidence: she doubles down on “unconditional love” after the crime rather than confronting it.
• Delusional reframing: She recasts Naoki’s compulsive cleaning, self-neglect, and violent outbursts as signs of “sensitivity” and guilt for something not his fault. Her diary constructs a kinder universe where causality serves her need for innocence.
• Judgmental and status-conscious: She scorns Yūko for being a single mother and treats Shūya as a corrupting influence, not as a boy with agency. Her harshest verdicts are moral performances intended for an imagined audience of neighbors.
• Obsessed with appearances: Terrified of the hikikomori label, she acquires a doctor’s note to legitimize Naoki’s absence from school—papering over crisis with paperwork.
• Control disguised as care: Cutting Naoki’s hair while he sleeps epitomizes her urge to curate him—an intimate violation that ignites catastrophe.

Character Journey

Her arc is less growth than implosion. She begins confident and maternal, convinced she “knows” her son and the rules of family life: praise, protect, present well. When Yūko confronts her with Naoki’s role in Manami’s death, she does not examine the accusation; she rewrites it, casting Naoki as a victim and outsiders as villains. As Naoki deteriorates—scrubbing surfaces, rejecting care, lashing out—her diary grows frantic, its cheerful justifications straining to hold. The breaking point comes when her private caretaking crosses into coercion: the secret haircut that triggers a psychotic eruption and shows her that love cannot control what it refuses to see. Only Naoki’s full confession—intentional murder, fear of HIV—punctures her illusion. Faced with a son who will not fit the story she made for him, she chooses annihilation over ambivalence, rebranding murder-suicide as the purest form of maternal protection.

Key Relationships

• Naoki Shitamura: Her identity is inseparable from Naoki; she loves not the boy as he is but the boy as she insists he must be. By protecting him from truth and consequence, she accelerates his isolation and volatility—and ultimately becomes the victim of the logic she authored: that a mother must do anything to keep her child “safe.”
• Yūko Moriguchi: Yūko is the antagonist of her narrative—a single mother to be judged, a teacher to be dismissed, and finally the scapegoat for Manami’s death and Naoki’s collapse. Treating Yūko as a moral threat allows her to export guilt and preserve the family’s mask.
• Her husband: He hovers at the margins, suggesting rational steps (like going to the police) that she rejects as betrayals. By excluding him from decision-making, she tightens her private feedback loop of denial and ensures the marriage mirrors the family: presentable on the outside, non-communicative within.

Defining Moments

Her diary turns ordinary acts into ominous milestones—each one revealing how “benevolence” becomes brutality.

• Yūko’s visit (inciting denial): Confronted with Naoki’s involvement in Manami’s death, she instantly vilifies Yūko and sanctifies Naoki. Why it matters: denial replaces investigation as the family’s guiding principle.
• Managing the image (doctor’s note, hiding hikikomori): She manufactures legitimacy for Naoki’s absence rather than seeking help. Why it matters: appearances become policy; paperwork stands in for care.
• The secret haircut (control breaking point): She cuts his hair as he sleeps to restore order to his appearance. Why it matters: her “tidying” of the visible self provokes violent rupture, proving that cosmetic control cannot fix moral collapse.
• Naoki’s full confession (truth vs. fantasy): He admits intentional murder and fears HIV infection. Why it matters: her cosmology of innocence implodes; she can no longer mislabel his violence as sensitivity.
• The final diary entry (benevolence weaponized): She plans a murder-suicide as an act of maternal mercy. Why it matters: the chapter’s title turns fully ironic—her protection becomes extermination.

Essential Quotes

It’s all Moriguchi’s fault. This blunt scapegoating crystallizes her moral strategy: export blame to preserve the family’s purity. By reducing complexity to a single culprit, she protects Naoki from accountability and herself from doubt.

If I continue to praise every little thing he does and show him unconditional love—just as my mother and I did for my brother—then I’m sure I’ll get my sweet Naoki back. Or, rather, I’m sure I’ll get my Naoki back, but even more grown-up. Her credo of praise-as-cure confuses love with indulgence and history with wisdom. The reference to her mother reveals a generational script she’s reenacting, mistaking repetition for remedy and maturity for compliance.

When he washed away the filth he was using as a shield, I think he must have also washed away the sweetness he’d had since he was a baby. He is no longer the Naoki I love. Here, hygiene becomes moral metaphor: “filth” and “sweetness” track her need to read behavior as essence. The sentence marks a crack in her denial—she admits a change—but still frames it in sentimental terms that avoid culpability.

He has lost all trace of human kindness and become a murderer and a defiant son—and there is just one thing a mother must do in that case. This chilling logic turns maternal duty into lethal mandate. The shift from “kindness” to “murderer” is swift and absolute, showing how her absolutism makes nuance—and alternatives—impossible.

Yoshihiko, I’m grateful to you for all these years we’ve spent together. Mariko, I’m sorry I never got the chance to see your baby. Take good care of my grandchild. Kiyomi, stay strong and follow your dreams. I’m going to join my dear mother and father and take Naoki with me. The farewell litany mimics the calm of a will, aestheticizing annihilation as orderly and loving. By placing “take Naoki with me” amid benedictions, she reframes murder as care—proof that in her hands, Perception vs. Reality has collapsed into a single, deadly story.