Hokkaido is the destination Reiko selects after leaving the sanatorium: a remote northern place associated with cold and distance, but also with a possible return to work and ordinary life. Her choice is modest rather than triumphant—an old friend has asked for years that she help at a music school in Asahikawa—and the journey by train and ferry makes departure a deliberate, grounded act.

Reiko’s Destination

Reiko tells Toru Watanabe that she is going to Asahikawa, far up in Hokkaido, where an old college friend runs a music school. The friend has been asking for two or three years for her help. Reiko had refused because she expected the place to be too cold; now that she has regained her freedom, she still struggles to feel excited about going somewhere she dismissively regards as an isolated hole in the ground. The plan nonetheless gives her departure a specific purpose: she is not simply leaving the sanatorium, but accepting an invitation connected to her musical life.

Her reluctance and decision remain side by side. Toru Watanabe counters her bleak expectation by saying that he has visited Asahikawa and found it a pleasant town with its own atmosphere. Reiko asks whether he really believes it is not so bad. His reassurance does not erase her uncertainty, but the exchange places the destination within a human relationship: she can set out without pretending that the future already feels welcoming.

The Journey North

Toru Watanabe tries to persuade Reiko to fly because it would be quicker and easier. She insists on the train, explaining that she likes the ferry to Hokkaido and has no desire to fly. Her preference makes the route itself part of the departure: reaching the north will take time, and she chooses a mode of travel that keeps her close to the passage between places rather than treating arrival as the only thing that matters.

At Ueno Station, Toru Watanabe accompanies her to the platform. She carries her guitar; he carries her suitcase. Reiko wears the same tweed jacket and white trousers she wore when she arrived in Tokyo. These practical details make the farewell continuous with her arrival while marking a change in direction: she is leaving Tokyo with her instrument and luggage, bound for a life beyond the sanatorium and the city.

Distance, Memory, and Renewal

Hokkaido’s significance is sharpened by the novel’s recurring geography of separation. Earlier landscapes include the meadow where Toru Watanabe remembers walking with Naoko, its woods and imagined field well; the mountain route to Ami Hostel, where cedar forest, narrow roads, and deserted villages make isolation palpable; and the coast where Toru Watanabe wanders after Naoko’s death, unable to absorb that she is gone. These places do not simply decorate the action: they shape movement, solitude, and the work of memory. Hokkaido enters that pattern as a real destination for a living person, not merely as scenery recalled from the past.

The final journey does not promise that grief has ended or that Reiko’s new life will be easy. It does, however, give her departure a direction and an undertaking—helping at a music school—while preserving her uncertainty about what awaits. Against the novel’s repeated returns to the dead and to places that hold painful memories, her chosen passage north offers a restrained possibility of beginning again.