London

London is Niki’s home and the destination she is anxious to return to after visiting Etsuko. The novel offers almost no description of the city itself. Instead, London takes shape through its distance from Etsuko’s quiet country house and through its place in a family story marked by departures, imagined destinations, and uneasy attachments to home.

Niki’s home and return

When Niki visits in April, the days are cold and drizzly, and Etsuko’s country house feels too quiet for her. She grows restless among her mother’s classical records and magazines, while regular telephone calls draw her across the room and into conversations she takes care to keep private. After five days, she leaves, apparently eager to return to London and the life waiting for her there.

Niki describes that life without pointing to a job or course of study: when asked what she is doing in London, she says she is not doing anything in particular and simply lives there. The answer gives London a concrete but deliberately spare identity. It is where Niki has made a life, even if she does not define it by work or education, and where she prefers to be rather than in the enclosed calm of her mother’s house.

Distance from Etsuko’s country house

The contrast between London and Etsuko’s home is conveyed through Niki’s conduct rather than through a description of the city. During the visit, she listens impatiently to the records, flicks through magazines, and shuts the door before taking her calls. These small acts make her London life seem present in the house as something elsewhere: a private sphere of her own that she maintains even while staying with her mother. Her departure after five days confirms that the visit has not displaced her sense of where she belongs.

Etsuko, by contrast, takes pleasure in the quiet and in the landscape around the house. She remembers that, when her husband first brought her there, the fields and house seemed like the England she had imagined; the orchard’s trees were not yet there, and the house could be seen from where they stood. That remembered landscape is not London, and the novel does not equate the two. The distinction matters: Niki’s city is a present home, while Etsuko’s rural surroundings recall an earlier, idealized image of England.

London among imagined destinations

The novel places Niki’s established life in London beside other characters’ plans to leave, without making those plans equivalent. Sachiko repeatedly presents America as the destination she and Frank will reach, first announcing that they will leave Nagasaki within days and later insisting that his disappearance is only a delay. Her confidence is set against a history of disappointment: in Tokyo, Frank had spent their savings drinking in three days, after Sachiko had worked as a hotel maid to build money for a passage to America. She eventually says she will go first to Kobe and then to America, still presenting the latter as the settled destination.

These proposed journeys sharpen the difference between a lived-in place and a promised one. London is where Niki already lives; America is the future Sachiko continues to claim despite evidence that Frank may not fulfill his promises. The novel supplies no comparable account of Niki’s daily circumstances in London, so the city remains defined chiefly by her return to it and by the independence that her brief, restless visit makes visible.