The Great Kantō Earthquake of 1923 appears in Midori’s account not as a narrated disaster scene but as an offbeat family recollection. Her father, who had been in Tokyo during the earthquake, later told her about riding through the city without realizing that anything extraordinary had happened; the story’s force lies in the mismatch between a historic catastrophe and his matter-of-fact, belated recognition of it.

The memory’s setting

Midori associates the story with two childhood runaways, when she was eight and ten. Each time she took money from the till, bought a train ticket from Ueno to Fukushima, and went to stay with an aunt she liked. Her father came all the way to retrieve her. On the return journey to Ueno, they ate boxed lunches and talked—an unusual stretch of conversation between them.

Those journeys give the earthquake story its personal frame. Her father shared fragments about the past, including the earthquake, the war, and the time of Midori’s birth, subjects he did not usually discuss. Midori remembers these trips as the only occasions when the two of them had something like a good, long talk. The catastrophe enters the narrative through the rare intimacy of a parent bringing a runaway child home.

Her father’s account

Her father said he had been riding through Koishikawa with a cart attached to his bicycle and had not felt the earthquake. Only after he arrived home did he see that roof tiles had fallen throughout the neighborhood and find his family clinging to pillars in fear. Even then, he did not understand what had happened; in his recollection, he asked what was going on.

The account’s comedy depends on the distance between the devastation visible around him and his uncomprehending passage through it. Midori laughs at the story and calls it her father’s “fond recollection” of the earthquake. His other stories of the past, she says, are similarly undramatic and slightly off-center: even the 1936 uprising by young officers and the Pacific War appear in his telling as events he remembers only when prompted.

Historical catastrophe and family speech

The earthquake is one item in a string of remembered historical events, but Midori’s father does not arrange them into a grand account of national history. He relates them in bits and pieces during the train ride, and his recurring lesson to his daughter is that things are the same wherever one goes. As a child, she was impressed by this simple conclusion.

In the novel, the episode establishes how a large historical event can survive in family memory as an intimate, eccentric anecdote rather than a solemn public narrative. Its emotional significance is inseparable from the circumstances in which it was told: two otherwise unusual companions, traveling home after Midori’s acts of escape, sharing a conversation neither usually had. The earthquake becomes part of the small store of stories through which she remembers her father and their limited moments of closeness.