Yokohama is more than a backdrop in the novel: it is where Rié’s first family life was formed and broken, where Kido’s domestic routines become a measure of his vulnerability, and where his investigation of borrowed identities leads to a prison visit. Across these distinct episodes, the city holds together personal grief, legal work, and the fragile continuities people try to make from family and place.

Rié’s Years in Yokohama

Raised in Town S, Rié left home after high school to attend university in Kanagawa Prefecture. She found steady work there and, at twenty-five, married an assistant at an architecture firm. In Yokohama, she and her husband had two sons, Yuto and Ryo. The city thus marks the beginning of the family life to which Rié would later look back from a very different home.

When Ryo was two, he was diagnosed with a brain tumor and died six months later. Rié’s first profound sorrow became inseparable from the conflict surrounding his treatment: she and her husband fought over what should be done, and the hurt did not fade when he insisted that they move forward as a family. She could only shake her head. Their divorce mediation proceeded through repeated arguments and took eleven months to settle. With the help of a capable lawyer, Rié secured custody of Yuto, a point her husband had resisted. The rupture extended beyond the couple: a postcard from her in-laws, formerly on good terms with her, denounced her as inhuman.

Years later, after returning to Town S, Rié found that the seven years since her return had abruptly lost their reality. The period in Yokohama, when she had lost Ryo, had become the clearest part of her memory. That recollection helps explain why she turns to Kido when the police fail to answer her questions about her late husband’s identity: he had been her lone bedrock during the earlier crisis. Yokohama persists, then, not simply as the site of an old loss but as the place where a relationship of trust was established.

Kido’s Home and Everyday Life

Kido lives on the ninth floor of a condominium just around the corner from Yokohama’s Chinatown. He bought it four years earlier with his wife, Kaori; each took out a thirty-five-year mortgage. Kaori, three years younger than Kido, works at a car company, and they have a four-year-old son, Sota. Their home was laid out with two children in mind, since they had hoped to have a second child soon after Sota’s birth. When that did not happen, both gradually stopped talking about it. The unfulfilled plan is built into the apartment as an absence: its intended future remains visible in the layout even as the couple falls silent about it.

A dinner brought home from Chinatown—deep-fried chicken and savory steamed buns—looks like an ordinary family meal. Kido repeatedly reminds Sota to stay in his chair, but the familiar scene stirs his emotions more than usual. Afterward, while bathing Sota, Kido listens to him haltingly recount a children’s picture-book version of Greek mythology and ask why Narcissus turned into a flower. These small domestic moments give Yokohama another function: it is the setting in which routine care can suddenly expose the intensity and uncertainty underneath a family’s daily life.

That vulnerability becomes sharper in Kido’s encounters with Sota outside the home. After an incident that leaves Sota sobbing, Kido hugs him until he stops crying, takes him to day care without a word, and then feels sorrow and regret as he watches the boy disappear inside. Later, collecting Sota from day care in the Motomachi-Chukagai Station building, Kido sees him rush over smiling after a day without problems. As they leave, the children call their usual farewell, “Together, farewell!” On another evening, amid Christmas lights and a strong ocean wind, Kido spots a man repeatedly kicking a utility pole. He squeezes Sota’s hand, retreats a few paces, and leaves when the man stays put even after the light turns green. The city’s public streets become part of Kido’s private vigilance as a father.

The City as a Place of Investigation

Yokohama also lies at the center of Kido’s inquiry into the identity exchanges behind the novel’s family histories. He learns of a 2007 case in Adachi ward, Tokyo, in which two men mutually traded family registers. One participant had used another man’s name to receive a pension; the other had arranged the exchange to persuade his fiancée that he had never been married and was ten years younger. A third man had brokered the swap, charging a fee for such arrangements. Kido notices that the case dates to the same year Daisuké Taniguchi moved out of his Osaka apartment and X appeared in Town S. He wonders whether the two may have encountered the broker.

Further research shows that the broker is serving his sentence at Yokohama Prison, only a thirty-minute train ride from Kido’s condominium. Kido writes to ask about an incident from six years earlier. The prisoner replies that it would be “his pleasure” to meet, an oddly willing response from a man who has never met the lawyer. Kido goes to the prison at ten in the morning, as the inmate prefers early visits. The short journey from home to prison turns Yokohama into a practical point of access to the hidden transactions that may connect separate lives.

Memory, Care, and the City

The novel’s Yokohama is assembled from sharply different scales of experience: an apartment bought on a thirty-five-year mortgage, a lost child whose illness and death fracture a marriage, an old lawyerly friendship revived by distrust of the police, and a prison visit prompted by a case file. These strands do not make the city a single, unified refuge. Rather, Yokohama holds both the intimacy of family routines and the institutional spaces in which private identities are questioned.

Its recurring importance lies in how the past remains active in present decisions. Rié’s memory of the city’s losses sends her back to Kido; Kido’s own household makes him newly alert to the vulnerability of a parent and child; and the prison gives his investigation a concrete next step. Yokohama is therefore a place of return and inquiry: a city where earlier grief does not disappear, but shapes who can be trusted and what must still be found out.