Chiba Prefecture is the childhood setting of Aomamé’s only known period of shared schooling with the boy she remembers. Their connection belongs to a specific, bounded interval: they were classmates in third and fourth grade in Ichikawa, before Aomamé moved to another school in Tokyo and never saw or heard from him again.

Setting and Childhood Connection

In conversation with Ayumi, Aomamé identifies Ichikawa, in Chiba Prefecture, as the place where she and the boy were in the same class during two years of primary school. The location anchors an otherwise fragmentary memory in a concrete place and span of time. Their shared schooling ended when Aomamé transferred to a different school in Tokyo in fifth grade.

Separation and Lasting Uncertainty

The move to Tokyo marks the end of their contact: Aomamé says that she never saw the boy again and never heard anything about him afterward. When Ayumi asks where he is and what he is doing now, Aomamé can offer no answer. She knows only that, if he is alive, he must be twenty-nine and would turn thirty in the autumn. The absence of news leaves Chiba as the setting of their known childhood connection, not a place to which she has returned to find him.