Tōhoku region

Tohoku is the disaster-struck region whose distance from the novel’s characters does not keep its losses from reshaping their lives. The 2011 earthquake and tsunami become a measure of mortality for Kido, a reason for his legal work, and a contrast to the more intimate tragedies remembered in Town S; later, the region’s devastation also draws attention to older histories of violence and belonging.

A distant disaster and local memory

The novel sets the disaster against the life of Town S, a small community of about thirty thousand in central Miyazaki Prefecture. In mid-September 2011, its residents heard that Rié’s husband had died. Although Japan associated that year with the Great East Japan Earthquake, some Town S residents—including Rié’s mother—had never met anyone from the devastated Tohoku region. For them, the local death held a more immediate place in memory than the nationally defining catastrophe. The contrast does not diminish the disaster; it shows how public events and private losses occupy different scales of attention.

Kido, by contrast, is profoundly affected by reports and footage of the tsunami, even though it has harmed no one he knows personally. The images of entire cities swept away disturb him too much to remain an observer. Two years after the disaster, the more than fifteen thousand people who died become central to his reflections on what death means: they cannot perceive the present, and the living world continues without them. His fear of that final severance makes him newly attentive to the details of being alive.

Legal aid and the uneven aftermath

Kido responds to the disaster through legal work. With Nakakita and the other partners at his firm, he volunteers to support people affected by it, including residents who fled areas with elevated radiation after the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant meltdown. Their situations reveal a divide between those officially ordered to evacuate and people who left voluntarily, despite their fears about radiation.

In particular, Kido advises evacuees seeking to move from temporary housing assigned under the Disaster Relief Act. Some subsidized apartments are dilapidated, have disruptive neighbors, or expose residents to harassment. Yet people who move without meeting strict conditions—such as a demonstrable danger or a landlord’s demand—can lose their housing coverage. The formal rules thus complicate the very aid intended to help, making legal advice necessary.

The burden is often borne by families divided over whether to leave. Many of the evacuees Kido encounters are mothers who have gone with their children while their husbands remain behind, after disagreements about radiation risk, work, and relocation. They continue to hope that the family will reunite, but some of the cases Kido handles end in divorce. The disaster’s consequences therefore extend beyond displacement: uncertainty and separation can unsettle the relationships people are trying to preserve.

Disaster, history, and belonging

The earthquake also prompts Kido to reconsider his connection to Japan’s history of anti-Korean violence. After the disaster, media coverage recalls the massacre of Koreans that followed the 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake, nearly ninety years earlier. Kido learns that Yokohama was one of the main places where false rumors of a “Korean riot” began. He had previously given little thought to the relationship between his ancestry and his Japanese in-laws, but this history makes him wonder whether his father-in-law’s earlier words of welcome carried implications he had missed.

Kido had not asked his wife or her parents about what they knew of the earlier earthquake and its aftermath. The silence becomes especially significant because his wife’s grandfather was a young child in 1923, while her great-grandfather was an adult; the earthquake reportedly destroyed 80 percent of Yokohama’s urban area in fires. Later, as the ninetieth anniversary passes and the centenary approaches, Kido consults records documenting 53 prosecutions involving the murder of Koreans and a Justice Ministry death count of 233, while recognizing that estimates of the actual toll are several times higher and that Chinese people were also killed. The disaster in Tohoku has not erased the older catastrophe; it has reopened a history whose violence remains difficult to contain within official records or family conversation.

Kido’s response is not a simple identification with one side of that history. He feels connected to the victims as fellow members of a community, while also confronting the responsibility attached to his citizenship. In this way, Tohoku’s disaster works as a turning point in his attention: a contemporary catastrophe first makes death immediate, then leads him toward the less openly discussed violence of the past. The region matters not only as the site of immense loss, but as the distant event through which private memory, public history, legal responsibility, and belonging become newly entangled.