Aoyama, a fashionable district of Tokyo, appears in the book through specific routines and destinations rather than as a broadly mapped setting. Its streets and businesses frame the return of unwanted clothing, the pursuit of new purchases, and the practical aftermath of bereavement; elsewhere, it is evoked through an image of an ordinary shopping break. These scenes make Aoyama a place where private feeling meets the habits and objects of city life.

A District in Everyday Use

Aoyama is associated with upscale shopping and local commerce. In one comparison, a mother kangaroo under the hot sun resembles a woman who has finished shopping on the district’s main drag and stopped at a nearby coffee shop. The reference gives Aoyama a familiar, everyday scale: not simply a marker of luxury, but a recognizable urban setting for errands and a pause in the day.

Shopping and the Return of Clothing

Aoyama becomes more consequential in the account of Tony Takitani’s wife and her clothing. Deeply attached to buying clothes, she tries to resist the desire by staying home for a week, surrounded by the garments she already owns. She eventually returns a recently purchased coat and dress to one of her favorite boutiques in Aoyama, receives credit on her card, and drives home trying not to look at other shops. At a red light, however, the returned clothes occupy her thoughts so completely that she closes her eyes; when she opens them, the light has changed. A truck strikes her car in the intersection, killing her.

The district is therefore tied to both the attempted reversal of a purchase and the fatal journey that follows it. The clothing’s colors, cut, and texture remain vividly present in her mind after she has given the items back. The episode turns a routine trip through a shopping district into the last movement in a sequence shaped by desire, restraint, and loss.

Work and Bereavement

After his wife’s death, Tony is left with an immense wardrobe, including 112 pairs of shoes. He sells some accessories, burns stockings and underwear, and leaves most of the dresses and shoes in place. Ten days after the accident, he advertises for a female assistant whose height, dress size, and shoe size resemble his wife’s. Thirteen applicants come to his studio-office in Minami-Aoyama, drawn by the unusually high pay; after excluding five who misrepresent their size, he selects the applicant whose build most closely matches his wife’s.

Tony explains that the assistant’s ordinary office duties would include answering the telephone, delivering illustrations, collecting materials, and making copies. His unusual condition is that she wear his late wife’s clothes as a kind of uniform. He hopes that seeing another person in them will give him time to absorb the fact of his wife’s death. Minami-Aoyama thus connects the public world of employment to the private space of mourning: the clothes are at once possessions to be managed and a material stand-in for an absence Tony cannot yet fully accept.

Routine, Time, and the City

Other appearances of Aoyama are embedded in repeated daily schedules. A restaurant manager makes a nightly trip at eight to deliver the owner’s dinner, leaving the busy restaurant for fifteen minutes and returning an hour later with the empty cart. The ritual is so fixed that staff members eventually stop questioning it. Elsewhere, a couple on vacation spends three days returning each evening to the same small restaurant after mornings at the beach and walks through town; their repeated meals and shared time give their days a temporary, self-contained rhythm.

Aoyama’s references range from a shopping street and a work address to places organized by habit. Across these scenes, the district is less a single unified portrait than a recurring urban coordinate: a place where commerce, schedules, and private lives intersect, and where ordinary movements can acquire lasting consequences.