Seaside Town in S—— County is the seventh man’s childhood home and the setting of the catastrophe that shapes his life: during a typhoon, a gigantic wave takes his closest friend, K, from the shore. The town’s beach, first the boys’ everyday playground and then the place of an irreparable loss, remains bound to the survivor’s nightmares and avoidance for more than forty years. His eventual return turns the coastline into something other than a scene of trauma: there, he approaches the water again and finds a measure of reconciliation with the past.

Childhood and the familiar shore

The town is small and unnamed, a seaside community in S—— County. The seventh man is the local doctor’s son and has what he describes as a comfortable childhood. His closest companion is K, a boy one grade behind him whose house is nearby. They walk to school and back together and play together after school, their friendship so close that the narrator regards K as a brother; he says they never once fought. Although he has an older brother, the six-year age gap and their differing personalities leave him without the closeness he finds with K.

The boys meet almost every day at the shore, only a two-hundred-yard walk from the narrator’s home. A concrete breakwater, as tall as the narrator when he is a child, separates the path from the water; a short stairway leads down to the beach. The place is so familiar that the boys know every part of it. Its ordinary character matters: before it becomes the site of loss, the shore is an intimate landscape of shared play, a place they can read through repeated visits.

K is frail and slight, pale, and affected by a speech impediment that makes him hard for strangers to understand. The narrator, bigger and athletic, takes on the role of protector. K struggles with most school subjects, but his talent for art is exceptional. He paints seascapes on the shore, and the narrator watches his quick, precise brushwork bring lively shapes and colors onto blank paper. The paintings make the landscape more than a backdrop: they are K’s way of seeing it, and later become the means through which the narrator recovers a less fearful memory of his friend.

The typhoon and K’s disappearance

In September, a typhoon forecast as the worst in ten years closes the schools and shops. The adults prepare for danger: the narrator’s father and brother nail shut the storm doors, his mother cooks provisions, and the family fills bottles and packs belongings in case evacuation becomes necessary. For the children, however, the storm initially seems like an exciting spectacle. The contrast between adult caution and youthful exhilaration ends as the sky changes, the wind rises, and the family listens to radio reports of damaged roofs, capsized ships, and people injured or killed by flying debris.

During the typhoon’s eye, the narrator and K go out to the shore, accompanied by K’s little white dog. The waves are unusually subdued, and the waterline has retreated far beyond its normal reach, exposing a broad stretch of white sand. The boys climb over the breakwater and explore the storm’s scattered debris: toys, sandals, furniture fragments, clothing, unusual bottles, and crates bearing foreign writing. What looks to them like a trove of curiosities has been carried in from far away by the storm. The temporarily calm landscape makes the danger difficult to read.

A gurgling sound and then a deep rumble alert the narrator to the wave. He understands that K is in danger and knows he should run to him, but fear sends him in the opposite direction, toward the breakwater alone. From there he shouts a warning. K looks up too late: a wave rising as high as a three-story building overtakes him and crashes onto the beach. The narrator escapes its impact by ducking behind the dike. When he climbs back up, the water is rushing out to sea, but neither K nor the dog can be seen. He stays on the breakwater, afraid that more waves will follow, and does not go down to search for his friend.

A hometown left behind

The loss makes the town’s shore unbearable to the narrator. His nightmares return him to the ocean and to K; in one recurring dream, a cold hand seizes his ankle and drags him under, and he wakes screaming and drenched in sweat. At the end of the year he asks his parents to let him leave, saying he cannot continue living within sight of the beach. They arrange for him to stay with his father’s relatives in a mountain village near Komoro, in Nagano Prefecture. He moves there in January, completes school there, and never returns to the town, even for holidays.

Leaving reduces the frequency of the nightmares but does not end them. The narrator grows up in Nagano, graduates from an engineering college, and works for a precision toolmaker. He describes himself as living an ordinary life, with a few friends with whom he goes mountain climbing, but the past continues to intrude whenever he comes close to forgetting it. He avoids his old beach and, eventually, any beach; he stops swimming, stays away from deep rivers and lakes, avoids boats, and will not fly abroad. He also never marries, explaining that he does not want to wake a partner with his screams and cannot share the terror lodged in him. The town’s shoreline thus shapes his life even during the decades he keeps away from it.

The return and a changed memory

More than forty years after the wave, the narrator receives a box of childhood belongings from his brother, who has found it while clearing the family storage shed after their father’s death. Among the objects are watercolors K painted and gave him. At first the pictures revive the old terror: he fears that K’s spirit might spring from them and considers throwing them away. He cannot do it. After several days, he opens the bundle again and looks closely at the paintings.

The familiar seascapes, sand, pine woods, and town remain vivid, their colors and clarity intact. Looking at them brings back not only the places the boys shared but the quality of K’s attention to the world. The narrator recognizes that K’s eyes had been his own: as a boy, he too had looked at the world with an unclouded, lively vision. The paintings change the meaning of the remembered shore. They hold not only the image of the disaster but also the gentleness of the friend who knew the coast before it became inseparable from fear.

At dawn the narrator decides he must go back. The town has changed: development has brought an industrial city nearby, the station’s little gift shop has become a mall, and the only movie theater has become a supermarket. His childhood home has been demolished, its yard trees cut down; K’s former house has given way to a concrete parking lot. The narrator is not overcome by nostalgia, and acknowledges that the town had ceased to be his long before. The changed streets and vanished houses contrast with the shore, which still opens onto the ocean and its straight horizon.

He climbs the breakwater and sits on the sand in the late-afternoon light. The calm beach is difficult to reconcile with the typhoon and the wave that took K, and the distance between the remembered catastrophe and the ordinary present makes the event seem almost like an illusion. Then the darkness inside him vanishes suddenly. Without removing his shoes or rolling up his cuffs, he walks into the surf and lets the water wash over his ankles, soaking his shoes and trouser cuffs. The waves that once embodied a danger he could not escape now touch him gently. By returning to the shore, he does not recover the lost past or undo his flight from K; he finds, at last, a way to stand beside the water without fleeing it.