Kokusai 246-sen

National Route 246 is the urban road Aomamé reaches after leaving the expressway by its emergency stairs. Its overwhelming traffic noise, an enclosed work site between its lanes, and congestion turn her descent into a passage from the expressway into an unsettlingly altered city.

Setting and Physical Character

From the exposed stairway, Aomamé hears the road as a wall of sound: engines, horns, car alarms, loudspeakers broadcasting old nationalist songs from far-right vehicles, and the crash of demolition work. The noise arrives from every direction, mingling with the wind until it makes her feel seasick. The road is not just a destination below the expressway; it is an enveloping urban environment that she must endure while making her way down.

The route also exposes an ordinary residential edge. Across the road stands a four-storey apartment building, its windows shut behind curtains or blinds, with balconies facing the traffic. Nylon laundry lines, garden chairs, and a potted rubber plant—its leaves withered and faded—make the balconies seem stubbornly domestic amid the roar. Aomamé’s attention to these details briefly draws her gaze from the danger and discomfort of the descent.

The Roadside Enclosure

At the bottom of the stairs, Aomamé emerges into a fenced storage lot squeezed between the two lanes of National Route 246. Rusting metal posts lie on bare earth; beneath a plastic roof are three cloth sacks, crushed cardboard boxes, plastic bottles, and manga. Wind scatters plastic bags across the otherwise empty ground. The space is a neglected pocket of the city, used for storing materials but offering no clear way out.

The gate is secured with several turns of chain and a large padlock, and barbed wire tops the high fence. Aomamé cannot climb it without ruining the expensive suit she is wearing for her work. She eventually squeezes through a narrow gap in the fencing, careful not to snag the only suit she has. The route’s apparent shortcut has briefly left her trapped in a locked depot; escape depends not on the gate but on finding a way through its boundary.

Crossing and Continuing the Journey

Once outside the enclosure, Aomamé checks her clothes, crosses National Route 246, and enters a drugstore to buy replacement stockings. She asks the saleswoman if she can put them on in a corner of the shop. After changing, the seasick sensation that had lingered in her stomach has passed, and she leaves feeling better.

Traffic on the road is worse than usual, perhaps because news of an accident on the expressway has spread and caused congestion. Aomamé decides against taking a taxi: the prospect of being stuck in the same traffic makes her go instead to the nearest station and take the Tokyu Shin-Tamagawa Line. The road thus dictates not only the conditions of her arrival but also the next leg of her journey.

Narrative Significance

The road’s physical noise and congestion accompany Aomamé’s uneasy transition from the expressway into the city below. After emerging from the locked lot, she encounters a police officer whose uniform has a changed cut and whose weapon is a modern semiautomatic rather than the revolver she expects Japanese police to carry. Her close attention to that discrepancy helps make the familiar streets feel newly strange. National Route 246 is therefore both a concrete obstacle—wind, traffic, fencing, and delay—and part of the altered urban landscape through which Aomamé begins to recognize that the world around her is no longer quite the one she remembers.