Toru Watanabe moves to Tokyo

Toru Watanabe moves to Tokyo after Kizuki’s death, seeking escape from Kobe and the life that has become inseparable from loss. The move begins a new chapter without providing a clean break: the dormitory offers a place to live, while memory carries the dead into the life he tries to build.

Reasons for Leaving

In the ten months between Kizuki’s death and his examinations, Watanabe cannot find a place for himself in the world around him. He briefly sleeps with a girl from school, but the relationship does not last six months, and he feels little connection to her. He applies to a private university in Tokyo whose entrance examination requires little preparation and passes without exhilaration. The girl pleads with him not to go, emphasizing the distance, but he says he needs to get away from Kobe. She cannot understand, and they part.

On the bullet train to Tokyo, Watanabe feels terrible about leaving her and knows the decision cannot be undone. His departure is thus not a confident pursuit of a particular future: he wants to begin again somewhere he knows no one, even as he carries guilt about the person left behind.

The Dormitory and the Attempt to Begin Again

At eighteen and in his first year of university, Watanabe is new both to Tokyo and to living alone. His anxious parents choose a private dormitory rather than leave him in a single rented room. It provides meals and facilities, costs less than a private room, and requires little furnishing beyond bedding and a lamp. Watanabe would have preferred a flat and solitude, but does not insist; he does not care much where he lives.

The dormitory stands on a hill in the city, within a large walled quadrangle. A zelkova tree, said to be at least 150 years old, rises just inside the gate, its dense leaves obscuring the sky. Two three-storey concrete dormitories face each other across a straight path and broad grounds. Their appearance suggests flats converted into jails, or jails converted into flats, though the buildings are neither dirty nor dark. Radios play through open windows; the rooms have matching cream-coloured curtains. Beyond them stand a common building with a dining hall, bathrooms, auditorium, meeting rooms, and guest rooms, as well as a third dormitory, lawns, sprinklers, a sports field, and six tennis courts. This extensive, regulated provision contrasts with the solitude Watanabe would have chosen, while giving his new life a fixed institutional setting.

He tries to make the move an exercise in emotional distance: he will stop taking everything so seriously and forget the pool tables, Kizuki’s red N-360, the white flower on a school desk, and the other details bound up with the death. At first, this seems to work. But the effort does not erase what he remembers; an indistinct knot remains within him, gradually taking a clearer form. He comes to understand death not as life’s opposite but as part of life, a presence carried alongside the living rather than held at a safe distance.

The New Life’s Limits

Tokyo does not immediately make Watanabe feel at home. In February, near the end of the month, he gets into a fight with a third-year student on his floor and punches him. The student hits his head against a concrete wall but is not badly hurt. Nagasawa straightens things out, yet Watanabe is called to the dorm head’s office and warned. The incident leaves him increasingly uncomfortable in the dormitory, showing that the new residence is not a settled refuge.

His academic results are mediocre, and he finishes the year a few credits short. The beginning he sought is therefore uneven: he has escaped Kobe, but neither the dormitory’s facilities nor the passage of a university year resolves his estrangement or the presence of the past.

A Pattern of Departure and Return

The move to Tokyo becomes part of a recurring pattern of trying to outrun grief through physical distance. After Naoko’s death, Watanabe leaves Tokyo and travels without a destination, changing towns by train, bus, or rides in lorries and sleeping in stations, parks, car parks, riverbanks, and on the shore. He works as a labourer when his money runs low. Moving farther west, he sleeps on beaches, makes fires from driftwood, and thinks about Naoko; the journey disperses his surroundings but cannot disperse his memories.

On his return to Tokyo, he again withdraws rather than re-entering ordinary life. He shuts himself in his room for days, his attention fixed on the dead rather than the living. The first move and these later departures are linked but not identical: at eighteen, he hopes to start over among strangers; after Naoko’s death, movement becomes a way to endure grief, not a cure for it. The novel’s account of his departure to Tokyo thus establishes an enduring tension between geographical escape and emotional attachment, and between the life Watanabe tries to begin and the dead who remain part of it.