Depopulation of Town S

Depopulation of Town S is the slow contraction of a community whose emptying streets turn demographic change into an intimate, everyday condition. Once a flourishing center, the town becomes a place of closed shops and dwindling social life; through Rié’s return, its decline is felt not as an abstract statistic but as the loneliness of living among the remnants of a familiar home. The novel sets this gradual local disappearance beside the more radical erasure produced when people are absent from official records.

Setting and Local Identity

Town S lies in the center of Miyazaki Prefecture, along the old Mera Road, about a forty-minute drive from Miyazaki City. Its population is around thirty thousand. The town has several claims to recognition: ancient burial mounds, a professional baseball team’s spring camp, and the largest dam in Kyushu. Rié, who grew up there, has little interest in these attractions. Her attachment is more personal and particular, eventually gathering around a cherry tree in the park with the burial mounds.

The town’s local memory is also shaped by its distance from national events. In 2011, the Great East Japan Earthquake defined the year for people across Japan, but many residents of Town S—including Rié’s mother—had never met anyone from the devastated Tohoku region. For them, the death of Rié’s husband was a more immediate point of reference. This contrast does not make the disaster less significant; it shows how a small community’s recollections are organized around nearby lives, even as the country shares a larger public history.

Economic Decline and the “Showa Burial Mound”

Town S’s center had flourished after redevelopment during the Shōwa-era economic bubble. Later, a low birth rate and an aging population contributed to the permanent closure of many businesses along the main shopping street on Mera Road. The remaining stretch acquired the rueful nickname “Showa Burial Mound,” turning the town’s own historical associations with burial mounds into an image of commercial decline.

The change is gradual rather than a single catastrophe: one by one, shops cease operating, and the everyday activity that once sustained the street recedes. Seibundo Stationery, Rié’s family business, is among the few shops still open. Yet its survival does not mean that local trade is secure. Visitors are scarce, and mail-order customers, rather than walk-in business, support Rié’s life with her son and mother. The future of the family shop is uncertain even while it remains a visible holdout on a dwindling street.

Return, Memory, and Isolation

Rié had seen shuttered businesses on annual visits for New Year’s and the Obon Festival, but the decline changes in meaning when she settles back in her hometown. Having lived away since high school, she experiences the emptied town as a place that has left her alone, like a large, dilapidated house. The difference between visiting and living there is decisive: familiar streets no longer serve as brief scenery for a holiday but as the setting of her daily life.

Across from the stationery shop stands the abandoned building that once housed the piano studio where Rié studied for eight years. It has fallen into neglect; there are not even young people around to spray-paint it. The empty studio gives a physical shape to the loss of the town’s former routines. Rié remembers crossing the street for lessons and returning to the shop to do homework while waiting for her father to finish work. She particularly longs for the drive home beside him, just the two of them. The town’s decline is thus registered through the disappearance of places that once held ordinary patterns of family life.

Rié sometimes imagines starting over elsewhere, considering Yokohama, the area around Tokyo, or the nearer possibility of Hakata, and wondering whether she could find a new job. But the thoughts fade before she acts on them. Her life in Town S combines some comfort in being home with a profound sense of abandonment; neither attachment nor escape readily resolves the other.

Depopulation and Forms of Disappearance

The town’s decline is also framed by the arrival of tourists after a 2007 documentary about a remote mountain village abandoned en masse in the 1980s following severe depopulation. Some visitors come to Town S with a condescending fascination for ghost towns. Their gaze treats decline as an attraction, whereas residents encounter it through closed businesses, an uncertain livelihood, and the loss of familiar places. The gap between those perspectives makes the town more than a backdrop: it is a lived community being turned into an object of outside curiosity.

Elsewhere in the novel, depopulation and disappearance meet the question of administrative recognition. A family register can establish a person’s recognized identity, but the system has also left people unrecorded. The novel traces the register’s history from its use in policing and tax collection under the Ritsuryo system, through its expansion in the Edo period to monitor religious affiliation and personal status, and into the modern system introduced after freedom of movement was recognized in the Meiji period. People have repeatedly fallen outside or falsified these records, which were never a complete account of everyone who lived.

The three-hundred-day rule provides a contemporary example: a child born within three hundred days of a divorce is legally considered the former husband’s child. In some circumstances, women who have divorced after domestic violence and then had a child with a new partner have refrained from filing a birth notification. Their children can consequently grow up without family registers. The account links this administrative absence to the tsunami: although such children may meet the conditions for Japanese citizenship, the state may not know they are alive and therefore cannot count their deaths if they are lost. The novel’s concern with official legibility reaches its starkest form when existence and disappearance alike fail to enter the record.

Narrative Significance

Town S’s population decline operates on two connected scales. In the local landscape, it is incremental and visible in the closed stores on Mera Road, the deserted piano studio, and the dependence of Seibundo Stationery on mail-order customers. In the identity plot, disappearance can be less visible but more absolute: a person missing from the family register may be excluded from the state’s account of birth, life, and death. The parallel does not equate economic contraction with personal erasure; it places them beside one another as distinct forms of absence that ordinary systems can overlook.

The town’s slow emptying also shapes how Rié experiences her past. The places that remain prompt memories of her father and childhood routines, but the present no longer contains the same social world. That tension gives the local decline emotional weight without making the town merely a symbol: its failing businesses and neglected buildings are concrete conditions affecting the people who still live there. Town S is at once a specific community, a source of Rié’s attachment, and a setting in which the novel tests what it means for a life or a place to be remembered.