Yoroido is Chiyo’s village on the coast, the home she leaves for Kyoto and continues to inhabit in memory long after she is gone. Its sea-cliff path offers a private refuge from her loneliness, but letters and recollections transform that remembered landscape into a measure of irreversible separation: Chiyo learns that both parents have died and that Satsu has left the village again.

Home Remembered

During the bitter winter after her failed escape, Chiyo lies awake worrying about Satsu and her parents. She imagines walking along the path beside Yoroido’s sea cliffs, a route she knows so well that it feels present even while she remains in Kyoto. In the fantasy she runs toward the family’s tipsy house holding Satsu’s hand, although the sisters had never held hands before. She never reaches the house or sees her parents in these imagined returns. The journey itself, rather than arrival, brings comfort; the sound of a maid or Granny in the room breaks the illusion and returns Chiyo to her lonely futon.

The imagined path preserves Yoroido as a place of belonging at the very moment Chiyo is being cut off from it. Her mind supplies a reunion that reality has not promised, and the detail of the unheld hand makes the dream both intimate and impossible. The village is therefore not simply a remembered setting: it is the home toward which Chiyo’s hopes continue to travel, even as her body and daily life remain in Kyoto.

News from the Village

In spring, a package addressed to Sakamoto Chiyo arrives at the okiya. Its contents include a letter informing her that her mother died six weeks after Chiyo left for Kyoto and that her father died a few weeks later. Their remains are enshrined in the village cemetery; services were held at Hoko-ji Temple in Senzuru, and women in Yoroido chanted sutras for them. The message gives concrete places and rites to the deaths that Chiyo had feared but could not confirm.

The letter also reports that Satsu passed through Yoroido late the previous fall and immediately ran away again with Mr. Sugi’s son. Mr. Sugi asks Chiyo to inform him if she hears from her sister. Yoroido thus remains a point through which news travels, but no longer a place where the family is intact: the parents are buried, and Satsu has already departed. The report closes the possibility that Chiyo’s old household might simply be waiting for her return.

The Village as a Turning Point

Years later, Chiyo describes Yoroido as the starting point of a life that might otherwise have followed a single, familiar course. Had Mr. Tanaka not sent her into the world, she says, her life would have been a simple stream running from the family’s tipsy house to the ocean. Instead, the move to Kyoto changed her direction. Yet for more than six months in Gion, she continued to believe she could find a better life elsewhere with at least part of the family she had known. She was, in her recollection, living only half in Gion; the other half remained in dreams of going home.

That division gives the village a double significance. Yoroido is a literal origin, linked to the house, the sea, and the family Chiyo leaves behind; it is also the imagined destination that sustains her before the news makes return impossible. The novel’s water imagery makes the separation legible as a change of course: the remembered stream cannot keep flowing toward the house once loss has altered what home means.

A Landscape of Memory

The sea cliffs also shape how Chiyo remembers the kind stranger she encounters in Gion. To describe his calm, broad face, she recalls a weather-smoothed tree at the edge of the cliffs in Yoroido. As a small child she had seen a face in its smooth patch, with cheekbones, eye-like shadows, and a nose, and imagined it to be the face of a Buddha. The remembered tree becomes a point of comparison for the man’s serene presence, carrying an image from her childhood landscape into a decisive encounter in Kyoto.

This return of the cliffs in a new context shows that Yoroido persists not only as a place Chiyo longs to revisit but as the storehouse of images through which she understands what she sees elsewhere. The village cannot restore the family or undo her departure. It can, however, remain vividly available in memory: a path that comforts her, a home she cannot reach, and a landscape whose images accompany her into the life that followed.