“badly marked”

“Badly marked” is a Kyushuian expression meaning unfortunate. Applied by Rié’s neighbors after Daisuké’s death, it names not a personal failing but the painful impression that misfortune has singled her out—and introduces the narrative’s insistence that grave loss can recur.

Meaning and Usage

The expression is described as somewhat old-fashioned, yet still in use in the Kyushuian vernacular. Elders often utter it with deep commiseration shaped by long experience. Its force lies less in explaining suffering than in recognizing it: the phrase gives a communal name to a fate that neighbors cannot undo.

Applied to Rié

After Daisuké dies, neighbors who have known Rié for many years express sympathy by calling her “badly marked.” Their words make her loss visible as part of a longer pattern rather than an isolated bereavement. The phrase’s old, familiar register also places that recognition within a local community, where sorrow is met with an inherited language of compassion.

Repeated Misfortune

The narration widens from the neighbors’ remark to the human tendency to assume that a major misfortune, if it comes at all, will come only once. The fortunate may hold this belief innocently; those who have suffered cling to it as a desperate hope. Against that expectation, misfortune is compared to a stray dog that follows the same person twice, then a third time. Rié has lost three of the people she loved most, one after another, including Daisuké.

Narrative Significance

The expression gathers private bereavement and shared recognition into a compact phrase, but the passage does not treat repeated suffering as proof that Rié is inherently cursed. It explicitly allows that misfortune can visit anyone and rejects the idea that Kyushu’s people are unusually unlucky or fatalistic. Instead, “badly marked” becomes a way to register how unbearable recurrence looks from the outside—and how a consoling belief in one-time suffering fails those who must endure loss again.