Aomori

Aomori is the northern destination of Midori’s solitary travels after a trip to Nara with her boyfriend ends in a quarrel. Its narrative importance lies less in a detailed portrait of the region than in what Midori’s journey there brings into focus: away from her companion, she realizes how much she wants Watanabe beside her. Northern landscapes also recur elsewhere in the novel as places where isolation and memory become physically vivid.

Midori’s Journey North

Midori explains that she went south to Nara with her boyfriend, then traveled north to Aomori alone; the two journeys were separate, not a single trip across the country. In Nara, she and her boyfriend fed the deer and walked around, but they had a major fight and she had not seen him since they returned. After lingering for a couple of days, she decided to travel by herself.

She first stayed with a friend in Hirosaki for two nights, then continued around the region, naming Shimokita and Tappi among the places she visited. Midori had previously written a map brochure for the area, so her travels there were not wholly unfamiliar terrain. Her conversational account moves briskly from the failed trip with her boyfriend to the independent journey that followed, presenting travel as a change of company and direction rather than as a cure for trouble.

A Place for Recognizing Attachment

Midori tells Watanabe that she thought about him throughout her solo travels and wished he could have been there with her. The confession gives the journey its emotional consequence: Aomori becomes the setting, in recollection, for recognizing the absence she feels and the closeness she wants. The contrast is pointed. Her earlier journey with her boyfriend ended in a fight; traveling alone brought Watanabe to mind instead.

The scene does not make Aomori itself a solution to Midori’s relationship difficulties. Rather, the distance from Tokyo and the company of neither man allow her to articulate what she wants. Her remark turns a travel anecdote into a disclosure of attachment, advancing the intimacy between her and Watanabe without making the journey itself a declaration or resolution.

Northern Landscapes and Memory

Aomori belongs to a wider geography of remembered travel and remote landscapes in the novel. In another recollected scene, the narrator describes a mountain route through a cedar forest: the trees block the sun, the air turns cold and damp, and the road eventually opens onto farmland surrounded by peaks. The repeated passage from forest to village gives remoteness a palpable rhythm, rather than treating the landscape as a decorative backdrop.

A different remembered landscape is the meadow where Watanabe walks with Naoko. He recalls its washed-green mountains, tall grasses, and distant barking, while an imagined field well—described by Naoko and never seen by him—becomes inseparable from the actual scene in his memory. These images are not descriptions of Aomori, but they establish how the novel makes places carry emotional associations: landscapes can be remembered, altered by another person’s words, and bound to absence.

Later, after Naoko’s death, Watanabe travels along the coast, far from Tokyo, sleeping on the sand, making fires from driftwood, and listening to the waves while thinking about her. He cannot reconcile the vividness of his memories with the fact that she is gone. On a subsequent autumn afternoon, the clear light and small details of the season recall his earlier visit to Naoko; each return of autumn seems to widen the distance between the living and the dead. Against this broader pattern, Midori’s journey to Aomori marks a different movement through distance: not mourning someone irretrievably lost, but discovering whom she longs to have near.