Jiyugaoka is where Aomamé settles after Tamaki’s death, leaving both her sports-drink company and the boarding house where she had lived. In a modest two-room apartment, she finds an unexpectedly spacious, nearly empty home: a place of self-direction whose very bareness also carries the weight of her past.

Setting and Domestic Life

The apartment is small but feels open because it contains so little. Its kitchen is adequately equipped, while the furniture is kept to a minimum. Aomamé likes to read, but sells each book to a secondhand shop when she has finished it; she enjoys music without building up a record collection. Accumulation itself unsettles her, and buying something can leave her feeling guilty because she regards most possessions as unnecessary.

Poverty, Memory, and Possessions

The apartment’s spareness is not simply a matter of taste. As a child, Aomamé longed to grow up, leave her parents, choose what to eat and wear, spend her money freely, and have friends with whom to exchange beautifully wrapped gifts. Yet as an adult she discovers that she feels best living ascetically, alone at home in a sweatshirt and track pants, without trying to dress elegantly or go out with friends. The attractive clothes and shoes in her closet do not straightforwardly signify the freedom she once desired: they bring back the poverty and constraints of childhood, when she had been given nothing.

Freedom and the Larger Cage

Jiyugaoka therefore holds together independence and unease. Aomamé has left her former job and lodging and made a home whose arrangements are her own, but the abundance once imagined as liberation now feels oppressive. Her question about whether escape from one cage can mean confinement in a larger one gives the apartment a meaning beyond shelter: it becomes the intimate setting in which she tests what freedom means, and finds that possession and choice do not automatically make her feel free.