Myogadani is the Tokyo neighborhood where Midori Kobayashi takes Toru Watanabe after their rain-soaked reunion. The stop at her flat offers a small, concrete interval of warmth and ordinary care; set against Watanabe’s later isolation and wandering after Naoko’s death, it makes visible the difficult passage between attachment to the dead and contact with the living.

Setting and the Return to the City

After the two have dried off, they travel by subway, buying the necessary top-up tickets, to Midori’s flat in Myogadani. Inside, she lets Watanabe shower first and then takes her own shower. While his clothes dry, she lends him a bathrobe and changes into a polo shirt and skirt. The sequence moves from rain and travel into the private routines of a home: bathing, changing, and sitting together at the kitchen table over coffee.

A Domestic Interval

At the kitchen table, Midori asks Watanabe to tell her about himself. That invitation turns the flat into a place for conversation rather than merely shelter from the weather. The scene’s intimacy is practical and unceremonious: borrowed clothes, coffee, and a question that opens space for him to speak. Yet the passage does not establish Myogadani as a permanent refuge. Its significance lies in the brief possibility of closeness it provides.

Contrasts Across the Novel

The location’s small domestic scene stands apart from the institutional and bounded spaces elsewhere in the story. The dormitory is a large compound organized around shared facilities; the sanatorium restricts residents’ movement, and leaving means giving up the right to return. Myogadani, by contrast, appears through a visit to Midori’s own flat, where Watanabe is welcomed and cared for. The contrast is one of circumstance, not a claim that the apartment resolves the troubles surrounding either character.

Distance, Grief, and Significance

After Naoko dies, Watanabe goes back to Tokyo but shuts himself in his room for days, unable to turn his attention from the dead toward the living. He later travels without a destination, sleeping in his sleeping bag in places ranging from empty car parks and stations to riverbanks and the seashore, and once calling Midori because he needs to hear her voice. On the coast, memories of Naoko return with overwhelming vividness; he describes living, in those memories, in a place where the dead remain part of life. He also comes to understand that no truth, sincerity, strength, or kindness can cure the sadness of losing someone loved. Against this movement away from the city and from human company, the earlier visit to Myogadani registers as a fragile point of contact: not a cure for grief, but an instance of the living reaching toward one another.