Nagano Prefecture is the inland refuge where the narrator of “The Seventh Man” rebuilds his life after the wave that swept away K. He moves there as a child to escape the beach and the recurring nightmares, stays through school and into adulthood, and makes a home in a mountain village near Komoro. The distance quiets his terror without ending it; more than forty years later, a bundle of K’s watercolors draws him back toward the coast.

A refuge after the wave

At the end of the year in which K was swept away, the narrator begs his parents to let him move to another town. He cannot go on living within sight of the beach, and the nightmares have become intolerable. His parents understand and arrange for him to live with his father’s family in Nagano Prefecture. He arrives in January, settling in a mountain village near Komoro, far from the seaside landscape associated with the loss.

The move marks a decisive break in his childhood. He finishes elementary school in Nagano and remains there through junior and senior high school; he never returns to his hometown, even for holidays. His parents visit him from time to time, but his own life proceeds elsewhere. Nagano is not simply a temporary shelter: the narrator’s separation from the coast becomes the geography of his growing up.

An adult life built at a distance

The narrator continues to live in Nagano as an adult. He graduates from an engineering college in the city of Nagano and takes a job with a local precision-tool manufacturer, where he still works. He describes himself as living like anyone else, with a few friends he goes mountain climbing with, though he is not especially sociable. The routine and work of adult life give shape to the decades after the disaster without making its memory disappear.

Leaving his hometown reduces the frequency of the nightmares, but they remain part of his life. They return when he seems close to forgetting, like bill collectors arriving at the door, and repeat with the same details. He wakes screaming, his sheets soaked with sweat. The persistence of the dream makes the distance between Nagano and the beach an incomplete protection: he has moved away from the place, but not beyond the event’s hold on him.

The coast remains present through what he avoids

For more than forty years, the narrator stays away from his hometown and from the shore where K was taken by the wave. He avoids every other seashore as well, fearing that the nightmare might become real. Although he once enjoyed swimming, he never returns to a swimming pool; he also keeps away from deep rivers and lakes, avoids boats, and refuses to fly abroad. These choices show how the childhood disaster reaches beyond one location, constraining his encounters with water and travel throughout adult life.

Nagano therefore offers safety at a cost. The narrator’s settled life there contrasts with the territory he has relinquished: the sea is not merely far away but excluded from the range of places he can comfortably enter. His fear remains less a conscious recollection than a persistent image of himself drowning, which he likens to K’s cold hand gripping his mind.

Return and the limits of refuge

The narrator’s return begins after his father dies of cancer and his brother sells the old house. Among the childhood belongings sent to him from the storage shed is a bundle of watercolors K had painted and given him. The pictures revive his terror; he wraps them away, intending to throw them out, but cannot bring himself to do so. After several days he opens the bundle again and forces himself to look closely. As he studies the paintings, he finds in them only the gentle, innocent spirit of the boy he knew. By dawn, he knows he must go back.

He leaves Nagano by train, taking a few belongings and calling work to say he will be absent. The old seaside town has been transformed by an industrial city that grew nearby during the rapid development of the 1960s: the gift shop has become a mall, the movie theater a supermarket, and the narrator’s former home has been demolished. K’s house is gone too, replaced by a concrete parking lot. His return does not restore the landscape or undo the loss. It does, however, end the long refusal to approach the place, making Nagano’s role in his life clear: it gave him distance enough to continue, while the past waited beyond that distance for him to face it.