The 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake is significant in the novel not only for the destruction it brought to Yokohama but for the anti-Korean massacre that followed. The event reaches the present through public reporting, historical records, and Kido’s questions about his wife’s family and his own place in Japanese society. Its past is never simply past: it shapes what Kido fears might happen again and what he understands himself to owe to history.

The earthquake and its aftermath

After the Great East Japan Earthquake, media coverage prompted Kido to learn that Yokohama had been one of the main places where false rumors of a “Korean riot” originated in the aftermath of the 1923 earthquake. He had previously paid little attention to such history. The discovery made his father-in-law’s earlier reassurance about his Zainichi background newly uncertain to him: Kido wondered whether those welcoming words carried implications he had not recognized.

The family’s connection to that history was close in time, even if its details remained unknown. Kaori’s grandfather would have been a young child during the earthquake, while her great-grandfather would have been an adult. Reports said that fire destroyed 80 percent of Yokohama’s urban area. Kido wondered what the two men might have been doing amid the violence afterward, but he had never asked Kaori or her parents. Although he and Kaori discussed the possibility of a future major earthquake in the Tokyo region, they had not discussed the Great Kanto Earthquake in comparable detail.

Historical violence and the present

The massacre’s historical record deepens Kido’s concern beyond his family’s unanswered past. After consulting records, he understood that documented prosecutions alone involved fifty-three cases of Koreans being murdered. The Ministry of Justice at the time gave a death count of 233; the actual number was disputed and estimated to be several times higher, and Chinese people were also among those killed. The scale and uncertainty of the toll leave the violence both documented and incomplete in public memory.

Kido’s fear is not confined to the historical event. He imagines that, after another major disaster, people might again take the cry “Death to Koreans!” seriously and turn on his family. In his thinking, his roles as lawyer, father, music lover, and good person would offer no reliable protection; those qualities might even intensify the hatred directed at him. On a train, he considers whether Rié’s assurance that he is a good person could matter if he were accused of being a spy or subjected to a test used to identify Koreans for killing. He doubts that an individual’s character would have power against collective animosity, and worries that anyone speaking for him could also become a target.

Kido’s divided historical inheritance

The earthquake’s history changes how Kido understands his own identity. He feels himself identifying with the vulnerability and victimhood associated with Zainichi experience, while also recognizing that, as a Japanese citizen, he inherits responsibility for the history of persecution. This is not a settled resolution: the two positions coexist, making history a source of moral unease rather than a simple division between one group’s suffering and another’s guilt.

The novel connects that unease to Kido’s everyday dependence on law and civic order. His work as a lawyer helps preserve the rights and standing of himself and his family, yet he recognizes how fragile those protections could be if public order gave way to incitement or false information. The earthquake and massacre therefore function as a precedent that makes present-day hatred feel possible, not merely as a tragedy safely contained in the past.

Memory across generations

The event is recalled through gaps as much as through facts. Kido has not asked his in-laws what their ancestors experienced, and he cannot know what those men did during the disaster. His uncertainty sits beside public records whose documented death toll is itself acknowledged to be incomplete. The story keeps these absences visible rather than filling them with invented family testimony.

That uncertainty also connects the earthquake to the novel’s broader concern with how people know one another through incomplete accounts of the past. Kido asks himself whether love for someone in the present depends on the history that formed them, while recognizing that spoken explanations can never reproduce the past itself. His questions about Kaori’s ancestors and the massacre extend the same problem from intimate memory to collective history: what is inherited, what remains unspoken, and what responsibility follows when the past becomes newly legible.