Miyazaki City is both a practical hub in the novel’s regional geography and a place where remembered life takes visible form. Rié travels there as a schoolgirl from Town S, later sees that journey preserved in a watercolor of the city’s bus terminal, and returns to the area as an adult after loss has altered the course of her life. The city also serves as a base for Kido’s visits and investigations: from its airport and hotels he moves between Rié, the legal institutions handling her family register, and the mountains where Makoto Hara once worked.

Regional Setting and Routes

Miyazaki City lies southeast of Town S, about a forty-minute drive away. Town S is connected to the wider region by Mera Road, an old thoroughfare running through the town and over the Kyushu Mountains toward Kumamoto. The route gives the city a role in everyday life rather than making it a remote destination: for Rié, travel there first means the regular commute of a student, and later it is part of the geography to which she returns as an adult.

The distances between Town S and the city recur in different forms. As a teenager, Rié commutes by bus to a university-preparatory school in Miyazaki City rather than attending the local high school. Years later, she passes the same bus terminal again after coming back to Town S. The city thus belongs to both an earlier life imagined ahead of her and the altered life she actually inhabits.

Rié’s Education and the Bus Terminal Painting

Rié is not described as an exceptional student, but her good grades lead her friends to accept her daily journey to a prep school in the city as natural. The commute marks a passage between the small community where she grew up and a larger urban setting, though the narrative does not present it as a dramatic escape. At the time, she has no reason to foresee the sequence of adulthood that will eventually bring her back: work in Yokohama, marriage, the loss of a child, divorce, and a return home.

The bus terminal later appears in one of X’s landscape sketches, painted in watercolor as Rié remembers it from those school mornings. It is the final image in the second sketchbook she examines. The painting depicts the building much as it appeared in her memory, but the teenage girl in uniform who once waited there is absent. That omission gives the scene its quiet force: the place remains recognizable across fifteen years, while the person who once occupied it can no longer be returned to that earlier moment.

Rié begins to cry as she studies the picture, brushing away her tears with annoyance and apologizing for her reaction. She tells Kido that she knows the place and that it seems to have reminded her of something long ago. Her own later account cannot settle exactly why the image moved her. She understands it as a moment of psychological instability, after grief for Ryo and her father had accumulated since her return, until a seemingly small emotional stimulus broke through what had been holding it in. The terminal painting does not simply illustrate her past; it makes the distance between remembered possibility and lived experience briefly palpable.

Kido’s Visits and the Investigation

Miyazaki City is also a staging point for Kido’s legal and investigative work. After meeting Kyoichi Taniguchi at the Cerulean Hotel in Shibuya, he is trying to understand how a dead man who had lived as Daisuké Taniguchi could have been someone else, even though government records had recognized him under that identity. The problem extends beyond ordinary use of a false name: the supposed Daisuké’s marriage and death had been entered into official records, and he had used a driving licence and health-insurance card. His brother, however, had identified the man in a photograph as someone different from the real Daisuké.

Because Rié and the man listed as Daisuké had their legal residence at her family home in Town S, Kido petitions the Miyazaki Family Court to correct the family register. The process would cancel the recorded death of the real Daisuké, remove the false Daisuké from Rié’s register, and restore her maiden name, Takemoto. It would also annul her second marriage on the grounds of error, with the consequence that Hana would be legally illegitimate. The court requires Rié to appear in person and asks for DNA evidence, so Kido gathers samples from X’s personal effects, including hair, nail clippings, an electric razor, and a toothbrush.

A conversation in Kido’s firm gives the identity investigation a more unsettling possibility. Nakakita explains that children born within three hundred days of a divorce may be legally attributed to the former husband; some women, concerned about that rule, do not submit birth notifications, leaving their children without family registers. After hearing about unregistered tsunami victims whose existence was missing from government records, Kido wonders whether X himself had been unregistered and whether the real Daisuké had taken on his identity. If the real Daisuké had vanished while living under an identity absent from official records, the state might not recognize his death; if the tsunami had taken him, even physical evidence might be gone. The idea deepens Kido’s fear for Rié, who is already emotionally vulnerable, and makes the family register more than a bureaucratic obstacle: it becomes the boundary between a life the state can record and one it may fail to acknowledge.

The City as a Base for Return

On a later visit, Kido flies from Tokyo toward Miyazaki. The clear skies give way to clouds as the plane descends; rain streaks the window, and the landing is followed by warm, drizzly weather. He rents a car at the airport, checks into a hotel in Miyazaki City, and has lunch before the next day’s appointment with Rié. The itinerary is ordinary, but the visit carries a purpose he cannot reduce to delivering a report: he wants to speak to Rié in person and feels an irrepressible desire to return, hoping to find closure.

Kido arrives early to meet Ito, president of Ito Lumber, because he wants to see where Hara worked. Rather than inventing a pretext that might sound suspicious, he tells Ito that he is interested in forestry; Ito agrees to show him the company’s logging mountains. Since the worksite cannot be reached without four-wheel drive, Ito arranges to pick him up at the Miyazaki City Hall branch in Kiyotake. The meeting shows how the city links the formal investigation to the material landscape of Hara’s working life: Kido begins in the city, then travels outward toward the place associated with the dead man’s employment.

Memory, Records, and Narrative Significance

Miyazaki City gathers together different kinds of evidence about a person: a school commute retained in memory, a painting made by someone who had shared a life with Rié, and legal records that determine which name and family relationships the state recognizes. These forms do not agree neatly. The terminal survives as an image, but the girl who once waited there is gone; official records can confirm a false identity while failing to account for an unregistered person; and the worksite Kido seeks lies beyond the city, requiring a journey into the mountains.

The city’s importance is therefore less that it resolves the novel’s mysteries than that it provides recurring points of passage through them. Rié’s bus terminal connects the adult woman to a schoolgirl she remembers but cannot re-enter. Kido’s hotel, court-related work, airport arrival, and meeting in Kiyotake connect personal loss to legal correction and field investigation. Miyazaki City holds these routes together without erasing their differences: memory can preserve a place, while neither memory nor documentation can restore the lives and identities that have been lost.