Japan is more than the geographical setting of Kido’s story: it is the country whose history of anti-Korean violence and present-day xenophobia forces him to reconsider his own place in the world. As he imagines future disasters and remembers the 1923 massacre, the nation becomes at once a physical landscape at risk and a civic inheritance that implicates him as a naturalized Japanese citizen.

Disaster and Historical Memory

Kido connects the Great Kantō Earthquake of 1923 with the approaching ninetieth anniversary of the massacre of Koreans that followed it. The anniversary’s numerical distance unsettles him: the centenary is only ten years away, while earthquakes in the Nankai Trough and the Tokyo region are regarded as near certainties. In his neighborhood, the possible collapse of buildings and tsunami damage are not abstractions. He imagines that he might be safe on the ninth floor of his home, yet exposed if he were at Yamashita Park with Sota and had no time to escape.

The imagined natural disaster opens onto a second fear: that a future crisis could again release anti-Korean hatred. Kido wonders whether people who take the cry “Death to Koreans!” seriously might target him and his family. His profession, fatherhood, music, and personal decency would offer no protection; those qualities might even intensify the resentment directed at him. The possibility makes national history feel less like a closed record than a danger that could return under new circumstances.

Kido has consulted accounts of the earthquake and knows that documented prosecutions alone involved fifty-three cases of Koreans murdered. The Ministry of Justice then counted 233 deaths, while estimates of the actual toll vary and may be several times higher; Chinese people were also killed. The reported methods of murder are so gruesome that they provoke disbelief and nausea. These figures do not resolve the historical uncertainty, but they give Kido’s fear a concrete human scale.

Kido’s Place in Japan

Kido has long found it difficult to understand himself as either a direct victim of, or a perpetrator within, the troubles affecting Korean communities. He grew up almost entirely as a Japanese person even before naturalizing, and could not imagine developing fellow feeling for other Zainichi in the way Levin had discovered solidarity with laborers. His uncertainty is not simply a question of ancestry: it concerns what responsibilities belong to someone who has lived as Japanese and holds Japanese citizenship.

As he pictures the abused corpses of the massacre’s victims, that distance gives way. He feels the chill of their stolen lives as if it touched his own skin and suddenly recognizes them as compatriots. The feeling recalls his bone-deep anxiety on the bullet train after his friend’s wake in Osaka: he had sensed the threatened collapse of the self he had occupied within his body since birth, without ever needing anyone’s permission. In the present reflection, he identifies with Zainichi experiences of victimhood while also confronting the historical responsibility attached to being a Japanese citizen. The two positions remain in tension rather than resolving into a simple claim of innocence or identification.

Xenophobia and Civic Responsibility

A television feature returns to the studio, where commentators openly condemn xenophobia and mention the massacre of Koreans, a subject Kido regards as rarely acknowledged on television of late. After the commercial, he switches off the set and recognizes that he had misunderstood Misuzu’s participation in counter-demonstrations. She had not joined because she held an idealized view of Zainichi; she had become involved because their existence was currently under threat.

That realization sharpens the contradiction in Kido’s own earlier position. He had argued that Japanese people should treat the issue as a problem of their own country and attend counter-demonstrations, since their inaction gave extremists free rein. Yet he recognizes that, as a Japanese person, he should himself have gone to show support from the beginning. Japan’s condition is therefore measured not only by the persistence of xenophobia but by the gap between condemning it in principle and acting against it.

A Country of Borrowed Lives

Japan also contains the many people who exchanged family registers through Omiura. Thinking of Hara alongside that wider group, Kido compares their transformations to the figures in Ovid’s metamorphosis tales: some may have been changed by grief, desperation, or pressure from others, and their altered lives may lead either to love and happiness or to a further fall. The comparison places personal reinvention within a larger social world, without making every transformation equivalent or predicting the same outcome for each person.

On Kido’s later flight to Miyazaki, Tokyo’s clear skies give way to multiplying clouds and rain streaking the airplane window. He rents a car at the airport as on his previous visit, checks into his hotel in Miyazaki City, and has lunch. The journey is not strictly necessary: he wants to discuss his report with Rié in person, but that practical reason does not fully explain his return. He feels an irrepressible desire to visit again and hopes the journey will bring closure. In the novel’s movement between national history and intimate lives, Japan remains a place where identities can be remade, histories persist, and personal attempts at resolution continue within unsettled surroundings.