Nagoya is Mizuki’s hometown, the place she left each week to attend a private girls’ school in Yokohama and returned to on weekends. In her recollection, it represents both the security of family and the distance she chose to put between herself and home.

Home and School

Mizuki says she came from Nagoya, while her junior and senior high school stood in Yokohama. She lived in the school dormitory and usually took the Shinkansen home on Friday evenings, returning to Yokohama on Sunday nights. The journey took only two hours, so she did not remember feeling especially lonely.

Her mother had graduated from the same school and wanted one of her daughters to attend it. Mizuki’s older sister, who was sickly and more inclined to stay at home, went to a local school instead. Mizuki describes herself as healthy and more independent, and says she accepted the proposal after elementary school; the prospect of riding the train home every weekend also appealed to her.

A Weekly Route and a Chosen Distance

The regular trip linked Nagoya to the school dormitory without making either place wholly unfamiliar. Mizuki could spend the school week apart from her parents and still return home every weekend. She recalls the arrangement as exciting rather than isolating, presenting separation as an experience she welcomed, not simply a hardship imposed on her.

She spent six years at the Yokohama school and generally enjoyed them, though she remembers its food as poor. The account makes Nagoya part of a larger geography of adolescence: family residence, school, dormitory, and a repeated train journey between them. That routine gives concrete form to the independence Mizuki associates with her younger self.