Japan

Japan is both a physical setting and a measure of change across the book: characters travel through it, leave their hometowns to escape painful memories, and discover that a place to which they return may no longer exist as they knew it. Its history also forms the backdrop to a generation’s youth. In “A Pre-History of Late-Stage Capitalism,” the narrator names the sixties as the age that shaped him, while other accounts trace how memories and choices made in youth continue to govern adult life.

A generation in the sixties

The narrator of “A Pre-History of Late-Stage Capitalism” places his coming of age within a precise sequence: born in 1949, he entered junior high school in 1961 and college in 1967, reaching his twentieth birthday during the student movement. He describes himself as a child of the sixties, immersed in the decade’s live-for-the-moment energy and its music, including Jim Morrison, the Beatles, and Bob Dylan. His recollection is not simply celebratory. Looking back, he can feel the period’s promise and intensity but cannot reduce its special quality to a single explanation; excitement, heroism, betrayal, disillusionment, and ordinary boredom all belonged to it.

He calls the period “A Pre-History of Late-Stage Capitalism,” his personal name for an age when everyday reality seemed simpler and more directly graspable. In his contrast with the present, the sixties offered fewer layers of advertising, options, and consumer information; cause and effect appeared to remain close companions. That historical judgment comes from a narrator who admits he may be too near the period to explain it fully, making Japan not just the backdrop to his youth but the subject of his uncertain act of remembrance.

Movement, departure, and return

Japan’s geography structures personal decisions in several stories. After K is swept away by a wave, the surviving boy’s recurring nightmares make continued life near the beach unbearable. At the end of the year he asks his parents to let him leave; in January they arrange for him to live with his father’s family in a mountain village near Komoro, in Nagano Prefecture. He remains there through school and into adulthood, graduating from an engineering college in Nagano and working for a local precision-tool maker. Distance reduces the frequency of the nightmares, but never erases them: they return when he seems close to forgetting, and the same dream wakes him screaming and soaked with sweat. He says he never married because he could not bear the thought of waking someone beside him with those cries.

Much later, the sight of K’s watercolor convinces him that he must go back. He packs a few belongings, calls his employer to say he will be absent, and takes a train to his childhood hometown. The return reveals how thoroughly the intervening decades have remade it: an industrial city has grown nearby, the station-side gift shop has become a mall, the movie theater a supermarket, and his former house has been demolished. K’s old home is gone too, replaced by a concrete parking lot. The changed landscape does not restore the past; it makes visible the distance between the place remembered and the place that remains.

Other journeys show Japan as a network of temporary encounters. A narrator traveling alone through Italy recalls that he was renting an apartment in Rome and that his wife had returned to Japan when he met a former classmate in Lucca. In another account, a young couple from Tokyo spend a four-day vacation eating crab at a small restaurant, swimming, and walking through town; the contrast between their holiday and life back home makes the city seem distant and almost unreal to them. Such departures make home perceptible as something carried in memory even when the characters are elsewhere.

Routines and confined spaces

The country’s settings are also shaped by repeated schedules. In one restaurant, the owner never appears in the dining room, and employees do not know what he looks like. Each evening at eight, during the busiest service, the manager carries his dinner to his room on a hotel-style cart, then returns fifteen minutes later without it. An hour afterward, the manager brings down the cart with the empty dishes. The ritual repeats every day; the owner always receives chicken, whatever the changing preparation or vegetable sides, and successive chefs eventually give up trying to make their versions matter. The routine turns an unseen private life into a fixed demand on the restaurant’s working day.

A narrator who has left college describes another pattern of work and solitude. After graduating from high school near the end of the sixties, he refuses to attend college and wanders around Japan taking manual-labor jobs. During his second year on the road, he works for a couple of months as a night watchman at a junior high school in a small town in Niigata Prefecture. His rounds take him through the school twice nightly, at nine and three; between them, he listens to records in the music room, reads in the library, or plays basketball alone in the gym. The fixed route gives shape to a life otherwise defined by movement and independence.

In a dormitory, waiting gives a different kind of structure to time. On Saturday evenings, a student sits in the lobby beside the telephones, hoping a young woman will call. Sometimes three weeks pass between calls; sometimes she calls two weeks in a row. As other students go out and the building falls quiet, the wait becomes an occasion for him to search for feelings he cannot yet put into words. Across these accounts, schedules—an owner’s dinner, a watchman’s rounds, a weekly wait—show how ordinary routines can contain isolation as well as order.

Youth, age, and lasting absence

The book repeatedly returns to the threshold of twenty as a point at which youth becomes newly visible. In one story, a waitress tells an older man that she has just turned twenty on the night of her birthday. In the account of a young man and his dead friend’s girlfriend, her twentieth birthday unsettles the pair’s familiar sense of time: they had understood the movement between eighteen and nineteen, but twenty feels different. The dead friend remains fixed forever at seventeen. A cake bought in Shinjuku is battered by the crowded train ride until it resembles a ruined Roman monument, yet the two light twenty candles and make a birthday of it. The damaged cake and the candles together hold the passage of time in view: celebration continues, but it cannot make absence disappear.

For Junpei, questions about a life’s important relationships also unfold over time. After Kirie stops responding and their relationship ends without a quarrel, he wonders whether she belongs among the three women who will have real meaning in his life. Unable to decide, he gives himself another six months. During that time he writes intensely, thinking of Kirie alone somewhere high above the ground with the wind. Her remembered words, “Just me and the wind,” remain with him; though he cannot name what he feels, he recognizes it as something with weight that cannot be exchanged for anything else. The relationship has ended, but its absence stays with him.

Across these episodes, Japan is not a single, unchanging home. It is a landscape traversed in search of work, left behind in the wake of trauma, revisited after decades, and remembered through the routines and relationships that time alters but does not simply erase.