Miyazaki Prefecture gives the novel’s private losses a distinct geography: a small community in central Kyushu, far from the national center of attention, where a death in Rié’s family can remain more vivid than the catastrophe that defines the year for the country. Around Town S, parks, flowers, and cherry trees become places where a family’s changing bonds and unfinished grief are remembered.

Setting and Local Perspective

Town S lies in the center of Miyazaki Prefecture, a rustic community of roughly thirty thousand people. Mera Road runs through it on an old route over the Kyushu Mountains toward Kumamoto; Miyazaki City is about a forty-minute drive to the southeast. The town is associated with enormous burial mounds, a professional baseball team’s spring training camp, and Kyushu’s largest dam, but these public distinctions do not define Rié’s relationship to home. She has little interest in the town’s familiar claims to fame, even as she develops an attachment to a cherry tree in the park containing the burial mounds.

The novel introduces this provincial setting through a difference in scale. In mid-September 2011, word spreads locally that Rié’s husband has died. Across Japan, 2011 is associated with the Great East Japan Earthquake; in Town S, however, the husband’s death takes a more prominent place in some residents’ memories. Rié’s mother is among those who have never met anyone from the devastated Tohoku region. The distance is not merely geographic: the same year holds different defining events depending on where people live and whom they have lost.

Family Memory in Burial Mound Park

Burial Mound Park turns the town’s ancient landscape into a setting for family memory. Its mounds stretch in an ellipse about half the width of a soccer field, while fields of cosmos cover the park. The account describes around three million flowers and 319 tumuli when the smaller mounds are included. The grounds were once barren; a city initiative introduced seasonal planting, so the park now changes with the year, from cherry blossoms and mustard flowers in spring to sunflowers in summer.

Going to see the flowers is a tradition Rié inherited from her own childhood. Her late husband loved the park’s scenery and chose the name Hana, meaning flower, for their daughter; Hana consequently thinks of the park as her own. At one visit, the normally empty parking lot is filled with cars from within and beyond Miyazaki Prefecture, and families and amateur photographers crowd the paths. The scene carries a measure of ordinary pleasure, but it also makes time visible: Hana asks Rié to photograph her beside the cosmos so she can compare her height with the flowers and with pictures from previous years. Rié recognizes that her daughter may soon grow taller than them.

The family’s cherry trees offer a more personal ritual. After Rié remarries, each family member chooses a favorite tree: Rié selects one farther ahead, Yuto chooses a tree two places from his father’s, and Yuto chooses one for Hana before she is born. At the next visit, the selected trees have become distinct from all the others in the family’s eyes. Each spring they compare the blossoms and decide whose tree has flowered best. In the year of his father’s death, Yuto’s tree loses to his father’s; the following year, Yuto’s tree wins. He wants to tell his father about that victory at his grave, but keeps waiting for the chance.

When Rié returns to her late husband’s bare tree, she does not know his past. She does know that, among the park’s roughly two thousand cherry trees, he had chosen this one and returned to look at it through the seasons as if it were his double. The tree cannot explain who he was, but his preference gives Rié a concrete, limited knowledge of him: the person whose history remains uncertain was also someone capable of attaching himself to this particular place. The family’s annual visits have made the tree both a shared landmark and an imperfect memorial.

Loss, Place, and Unfinished Questions

The park’s rituals do not resolve the family’s grief. By the time Yuto speaks to Rié, another anniversary of his father’s death has passed, and she still has not made a grave for him. Yuto raises the omission in a controlled voice and makes clear that he will not accept a vague answer. His question brings the family’s private mourning into the open: the place where they remember his father does not substitute for the grave Yuto believes is missing.

Rié’s return to the tree sharpens the contradiction at the heart of her remembrance. She can recognize the man through a repeated choice—his attachment to one tree—while still lacking knowledge of his history. The park preserves what the family did together, including a ritual begun after Rié’s remarriage, but it cannot settle what her husband’s past means or how his death should be commemorated. In this way, Miyazaki’s landscape is not simply a backdrop to loss. Its recurring seasons make continuity possible while revealing what remains unresolved.

Provincial Distance and National History

Miyazaki Prefecture also forms a contrast with the national histories that enter Kido’s thoughts. After the Great East Japan Earthquake, media coverage draws his attention to the massacre of Koreans following the 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake. He learns that Yokohama was one of the places where false rumors about a “Korean riot” originated, and wonders what his wife’s grandfather, then a young child, and her great-grandfather, then an adult, might have experienced amid the violence. He has not asked his in-laws, or even Kaori, about that family past. Their conversations about the major earthquake expected to strike the Tokyo region have not extended to the earlier disaster.

The novel places these unasked questions alongside the local memories of Town S without suggesting that the two scales of history are interchangeable. The 2011 earthquake is nationally defining, yet people in Rié’s community may remember her husband’s death more strongly; the older massacre, by contrast, becomes personally pressing to Kido as he considers his ancestry, his Japanese citizenship, and his connection to his wife’s family. Miyazaki’s distance from the disaster’s center helps establish how history is unevenly encountered: public events reach people through news, family silence, and later reflection, while private loss can become the most immediate measure of a year. The province’s landmarks hold the novel’s intimate memories, but they do not shield its characters from histories beyond the town.