Kyushu is the regional setting that gives Town S its geographic and cultural context, while its vernacular supplies the phrase used to describe Rié’s repeated losses. The narrative’s attention to roads, distance, and local speech makes the region more than a backdrop: it locates private grief in a community whose memories do not necessarily follow the country’s dominant account of 2011.

Setting and Geography

An old thoroughfare called Mera Road runs through Town S on its course over the Kyushu Mountains toward Kumamoto. The settlement lies about a forty-minute drive southeast of Miyazaki City, a measure of distance that helps establish its separation from the urban center. Town S is presented as a place with a simple appearance, though its surroundings and local landmarks give it a distinct identity.

Local Landmarks and Changing Reputation

Town S is known for its enormous burial mounds, a professional baseball team’s spring training camp, and a dam described as the largest in Kyushu. These features register the town’s varied claims to recognition, although Rié herself has little interest in them. Her eventual sentimental attachment to a cherry tree in the park by the burial mounds gives one part of this public landscape a personal meaning.

The town also attracts a particular kind of visitor after a 2007 documentary about a remote mountain village abandoned en masse in the 1980s amid severe depopulation. Tourists fascinated by ghost towns begin arriving in Town S, moving through it with a condescending air. Their attention turns a local landscape into an object of outsiders’ curiosity, linking the town’s identity to the broader anxiety of depopulation without making Town S itself the abandoned village.

Memory, Loss, and Local Speech

In mid-September 2011, news spread through Town S that Rié’s husband had died. The narrative contrasts this local event with the Great East Japan Earthquake, which most people in Japan associate with that year. For some residents, including Rié’s mother, the death in their own community occupies a more prominent place in memory; some had never met anyone from the devastated Tohoku region. The contrast shows how national history and lived recollection can assign different weights to the same year.

After the death, neighbors who had known Rié for years commiserate with her using the Kyushuian expression “badly marked,” meaning unfortunate. The phrase is described as somewhat anachronistic but still in use, often spoken by elders with sympathy shaped by long experience. Its local resonance matters because Rié’s bereavements do not remain a single calamity: including her husband, she loses three of the people she loves most, one after another. Kyushu’s regional speech gives that recurrence a communal name without reducing it to a claim that the region or its people are unusually fatalistic.