Nagano

Nagano is the first home Takaki Tohno is shown leaving, and its mountain scenery remains a measure of how disorienting a new place can feel. From his childhood move to Tokyo to his later reflections on Tanegashima and his parents’ return to Nagano, the place links physical relocation with the effort to find belonging.

Childhood Home and Departure

Takaki arrived in Tokyo from Nagano in third grade, after his father’s work required the family to move. The change was not an abstract transition for him: as he travelled with his parents from Omiya to Shinjuku Station, the landscape outside the train window differed sharply from the mountainous scenery he knew. Faced with buildings stretching across the view, he could not imagine living there and was so anxious he nearly cried. Nagano therefore enters the story as a remembered landscape against which Tokyo first appears overwhelming and unfamiliar.

That move also precedes Takaki’s friendship with Akari Shinohara. She, too, had transferred into their Tokyo school, and the two children soon recognized in each other the unease of newcomers. Their shared experience of relocation helped draw them together, though the account does not make Nagano itself the cause of their bond: it is the biographical circumstance that makes Takaki’s sense of being displaced legible.

A Landscape Recalled on the Journey

Years after leaving Nagano, Takaki’s journey through the crowded rail network toward Akari brings the old move back to mind. At Omiya, amid snow and commuters, he remembers riding with his parents toward Shinjuku Station before third grade and watching the unfamiliar city replace the rural view he had known. The recollection changes the meaning of the journey: he recognizes that he had once faced this same urban landscape with fear, yet had managed to live there for five years. He credits Akari with having helped him endure that period and hopes he had offered her the same support.

Nagano is thus recalled not as a destination on that journey but as the place whose absence gives the memory its contrast. The landscape of mountains stands behind the view of buildings, while the child’s near-tears stand behind the thirteen-year-old’s knowledge that he has survived another move. The remembered experience offers reassurance without making separation easy: Takaki can recognize his own resilience, but the immediate purpose of his trip remains reaching Akari before another relocation takes them farther apart.

Leaving, Returning, and the Meaning of Home

After graduating from high school on Tanegashima, Takaki moves to Tokyo for university. In reflecting on his past, he recalls both the anxiety of leaving Nagano for Tokyo and the homesickness he later felt when his family moved from Tokyo to Tanegashima. The direction of the longing reverses: the place he once feared leaving becomes part of a chain of homes whose meaning depends on where he has been taken and what he has left behind.

By the time of a televised rocket launch from the Tanegashima Space Center, his parents have moved to Nagano for work and will probably settle there permanently. Takaki, however, thinks of Tanegashima as a place he passed through rather than his hometown. The contrast makes clear that a family’s return to an earlier home does not automatically restore it as the adult child’s own. Nagano remains an important point in Takaki’s history, but the story gives no indication that he returns there or now regards it as home.

Narrative Significance

Nagano anchors a recurring contrast between places imposed by family moves and places a person chooses. As a child, Takaki cannot choose to leave it, and Tokyo initially seems impossible to inhabit; later, he moves to Tokyo by his own decision, drawing on the experience of having adapted before. The place therefore belongs not only to his past but to the way he understands his capacity to live somewhere new.

Its significance is also relational and comparative rather than purely geographic. Nagano is remembered through the mountain scenery that Tokyo lacks, while Tokyo is remembered from Tanegashima as a lost home; meanwhile, Nagano becomes the place his parents may settle in permanently. Across these shifting perspectives, the novel presents home as something formed through memory, attachment, and circumstance, not a fixed identity guaranteed by birthplace or family residence.