Kobe

Kobe serves both as a formative hometown and as a measure of historical change. It is where the narrator’s classmate grows up and begins his relationship with Yoshiko Fujisawa; later, the returning narrator finds that the familiar seaside town has altered beyond recognition. Across these accounts, the city connects private life to wider changes in Japan, from the student generation of the 1960s to the consequences of war and postwar recovery.

Hometown and formative years

The narrator introduces his high-school classmate as someone he knew in Kobe: a capable, popular student who excelled academically and athletically, led class discussions, and kept order in study hall. The classmate’s father ran a large printing company in the city. At one point, the narrator’s cousin asked whether he planned to join his uncle’s company, suggesting that staying in Kobe for work would please the family; the narrator had never considered the possibility and said nobody had raised it with him.

The story places this adolescence within the narrator’s account of growing up in the 1960s. Born in 1949, he entered college in 1967 and describes the student movement, popular music, political causes, films, and sex as part of the era’s vivid atmosphere. Kobe is the hometown against which this period’s restless ambitions and the classmate’s orderly school life are set.

The classmate and Yoshiko Fujisawa

At school, the classmate and Yoshiko Fujisawa appear to the narrator and his friends as an almost faultlessly matched couple. They spend lunch breaks talking together, travel home on the same train despite getting off at different stops, and wait for each other when their club activities finish at different times. The narrator’s group scarcely notices them, absorbed instead in its own pursuits. In retrospect, he recognizes that the boys’ assumptions about life were no less illusory than the couple’s polished appearance.

After the classmate leaves Kobe for Tokyo, distance unsettles the relationship. He writes to Yoshiko Fujisawa repeatedly, and her letters, though less frequent, become a sustaining link to home. When he returns for summer vacation after three months away, however, both the city and the relationship disappoint him. Kobe seems dusty and lifeless; familiar places feel diminished, and even walking his dog along the littered shore is dispiriting. He still loves Yoshiko Fujisawa, but that feeling alone no longer seems enough to keep their relationship moving. He decides to raise again the subject of sex that they had avoided discussing.

A city changed by time

The narrator returns to his old hometown after studying K’s watercolor and deciding that he must go back. The place he finds is not the quiet seaside town he remembers. An industrial city has grown nearby during the rapid development of the 1960s, and the landscape has changed with it: the station’s small gift shop has become a mall, and the town’s only movie theater is now a supermarket.

The changes extend to the homes that held the narrator’s childhood memories. His family house has been demolished, leaving bare ground where its trees once stood; K’s former house has also disappeared, replaced by a concrete parking lot used by commuters. The narrator says the town had ceased to be his long before his return, so its transformation is not simply a fresh loss. The altered landscape makes visible how thoroughly time has separated him from the place he once called home.

War and postwar connections

Kobe also belongs to the wider postwar history surrounding the book’s characters. Shozaburo Takitani, the father of Tony Takitani, had been imprisoned in China after the war ended and returned to Japan in the spring of 1946. His parents had died in the Great Tokyo Air Raid, and his brother had disappeared on the Burmese front. These losses left him alone, and he began rebuilding his life through a jazz band that played at American military bases. His story places the later lives of people connected to Kobe against the upheavals of war and the work of starting again afterward.

A separate account links the war to Officer Sakata’s family. Sakata tells Sachi that his brother, a member of the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, died in Belgium in 1944. Sakata was a child at the time and knew his mother only after his brother’s death had changed her. His memory informs the consolation he offers Sachi: he frames her son’s death as part of nature’s cycle rather than as a death caused by human sides or causes. These connections give Kobe’s local histories a place within a broader landscape of wartime loss and its effects across generations.