Asahikawa is a town in Hokkaido that becomes Reiko’s intended home after her long stay at the sanatorium. She is heading there to help an old college friend run a music school, and her journey gives the place a double significance: it represents the uncertain work of beginning a life beyond institutional care, while the letters she asks Watanabe to send promise that departure need not mean isolation.

Reiko’s destination and new work

Reiko describes the offer as one her old college friend had been making for two or three years: come to Asahikawa and help at the friend’s music school. She had repeatedly answered that the town was too cold. Now that she has her freedom back, she admits she is not excited by the prospect and dismissively calls it a remote hole in the ground. Her resistance makes the move feel less like an eagerly chosen adventure than a practical step into a future she cannot yet picture clearly.

Watanabe counters her reluctance by saying he has been there and that it is a pleasant town with its own atmosphere. He adds that it is better than staying in Tokyo. Reiko asks whether he is sure, then accepts his assurance without claiming that her doubts have vanished. She has nowhere else to go, and her belongings have already been sent. Asahikawa is therefore both a decision already put into motion and a place she is still trying to imagine.

Leaving Tokyo by train

Watanabe tries to persuade Reiko to fly, arguing that it would be faster and easier, but she insists on taking the train. She likes the ferry to Hokkaido and has no wish to fly through the air. The choice makes the departure a deliberate journey rather than a quick transfer: getting to Asahikawa will take the route she prefers, even when another option is more convenient.

At Ueno Station, Watanabe accompanies her to the platform. Reiko carries her guitar; Watanabe carries her suitcase. She wears the same tweed jacket and white trousers she had worn when she arrived in Tokyo. Their departure is arranged through small, practical acts of help, while the familiar clothes carry the scene back to her arrival and mark the distance she has traveled since then.

A place made less lonely by letters

Before the train journey, Reiko asks Watanabe to promise to visit her in Asahikawa. At the station she again asks whether he truly thinks the town is not so bad, and he promises that he will visit soon. Her questions reveal how much reassurance the move requires: even as she leaves, she seeks a continuing bond with someone who knows the life she is leaving behind.

Reiko also asks Watanabe to write to her. She says that when she reads his letters, she feels he is right beside her. Her request gives correspondence a specific role in the new life awaiting her: letters will make distance bearable and preserve a sense of companionship after she has gone north. Watanabe agrees to write often and tells her he believes she will manage wherever she goes.

The exchange also recalls Naoko’s relationship to Watanabe’s letters. Reiko says that Naoko burned the letters he had sent her, even though Reiko thought they were excellent. Watanabe answers that letters are only pieces of paper, and that what remains in the heart will remain whether the pages are kept or burned. The contrast is pointed: Naoko’s destroyed letters did not erase what Watanabe carried, while Reiko openly asks to receive his words as a source of nearness.

Freedom without certainty

Asahikawa stands at the end of Reiko’s sanatorium life, but the departure does not turn freedom into certainty. She voices anxiety about going there alone and asks Watanabe for promises of a visit and regular letters. The book does not show her arrival or describe the life she will build at the music school; the town’s significance rests instead in the choice to go, the work waiting there, and the ties Reiko seeks to carry with her.

Her route also sets the move against the novel’s recurrent geography of separation and return. Tokyo is where Watanabe and Reiko share their final conversations, while Asahikawa lies far to the north, beyond the ferry journey she prefers. Yet the distance is not presented as a severing: Reiko leaves with her guitar, Watanabe’s promise, and a request for correspondence that can make him feel present. As a destination, Asahikawa marks a fragile opening toward ordinary life, sustained not by certainty about the future but by a chosen connection across distance.