Fukuoka

Fukuoka is Ogata-San’s hometown and retirement home, a place invoked through his return from a visit with Etsuko rather than depicted directly. It gives his movements a point of origin and destination, connecting his family ties and settled domestic life to the novel’s wider changes in how generations live together.

Identity and Setting

Ogata-San identifies Fukuoka as his hometown when Shigeo Matsuda asks whether he likes living there. His answer establishes both an enduring personal connection to the city and his present residence there. The novel offers no extended description of Fukuoka itself: readers encounter it chiefly in conversation, as the place to which Ogata-San expects to return after staying with Etsuko and Jiro.

Retirement and Return

During breakfast at Etsuko’s home, Ogata-San says that he will not be able to relax in bed once he is back in Fukuoka. His return is tied to unfinished work at his own house: he needs to build new veranda panels and attend to a rockery whose stones have been waiting in the garden for months. He also expects his daughter and her husband to visit again in autumn, and wants the work completed before they arrive. These practical plans make Fukuoka the setting of his next obligations as well as his homecoming.

Family Life and Social Change

Ogata-San describes his Fukuoka house as more compact than the one he left in Nagasaki, which he considered too large for one old man. His account of his daughter’s visits also opens onto tensions around domestic independence: he says her father-in-law, whom he likens to a warlord, rules over the younger couple, and observes that more young couples now want to live apart from their parents. Fukuoka is not presented as the cause of this change, but as the home from which Ogata-San reflects on shifting family arrangements and prepares to receive the next generation.