Jiyō renai jidai

The free-love era is evoked through Mo’s memories of her parents’ commune, not through a broad account of the period. Its defining image is a circle of unsettled visitors who arrived at Sunrises commune for a meal and then drifted away, a recollection Mo later uses to make sense of her own emotional and physical decline.

Context at Sunrises commune

Mo’s parents’ friends are remembered as people who had not quite moved beyond the era’s casual drug use. They would arrive jittery, stay long enough to get a decent meal, and amble away. The account locates the era in the ordinary rhythms of commune life: visitors appear, eat, and leave, while their unsettled condition becomes part of Mo’s childhood frame of reference.

Mo’s comparison

After Cooper leaves, Mo recognizes a resemblance between those visitors and herself. She is working and serving customers, but she hurts, cannot sleep reliably, sometimes sleeps for fourteen hours, struggles to eat, and finds the smells of food nauseating. Looking in the mirror, she sees a hollow-eyed stare and an unhappy twist to her mouth. The remembered visitors give her a wry measure for this condition: she describes herself as a love addict, as if heartbreak has made her resemble the people who once came to the commune in search of a meal.

Narrative significance

The recollection makes the free-love era a personal reference point rather than a historical explanation. Its humor—especially the contrast between the visitors’ brief stop for food and Mo’s prolonged romantic misery—lets the narration acknowledge how badly she is faring without turning the moment into solemn diagnosis. The commune memory also links Mo’s present distress to the world in which she grew up, while keeping the comparison rooted in her own sharply observed experience.