Fukushima matters less as a described landscape than as a destination embedded in Midori’s childhood and the rare closeness she remembers with her father. Twice, after running away from home, she took a train from Ueno to Fukushima; the trips became the setting for conversations that she later recognized as among the only long talks she and her father had shared alone. When the name resurfaces in her father’s last confused words, the place opens a path back to that memory.

Childhood Journeys

At eight and again at ten, Midori ran away after someone at home had made her angry. She took money from the till to buy her tickets, travelled from Ueno to Fukushima, and went to stay with an aunt she liked. The journeys were acts of childish defiance, but they also brought her into the care of her father, who travelled all the way to retrieve her.

The return trips were not simply a delivery home. Midori remembers eating boxed lunches on the train to Ueno while her father told her stories in bits and pieces, leaving long pauses between them. The railway journey gave father and daughter a shared stretch of time in which conversation could happen without becoming a formal discussion.

A Family Memory in Fragments

Her father’s stories ranged across the Great Kantō Earthquake of 1923, the war, and the time of Midori’s birth. He did not usually speak about such things, and Midori came to understand that these train rides were exceptional: the only occasions on which she and her father had something like a good, extended conversation together.

The earthquake story captures the off-centre quality of his recollections. He had been riding through Koishikawa with a cart on the back of his bicycle during the earthquake and did not feel it. Only after he got home, found neighbourhood roof tiles fallen and relatives clinging to pillars in fear, did he ask what was happening. Through Midori’s amused retelling, large historical events enter family memory not as solemn lessons but as disjointed, oddly personal anecdotes.

Meaning of the Place

At the end of these stories, Midori’s father would tell her, “So that goes to show you, Midori, it's the same wherever you go.” As a child, she was impressed by the remark. The words attach Fukushima and the return journey to a small paternal philosophy, delivered through the hesitant rhythms of a conversation rather than through direct instruction.

Fukushima returns later when Midori tries to interpret her father’s disordered final words, which include “Ueno Station” and her name. She connects the station to the two childhood escapes and the journeys that followed. The association does not turn the fragmented message into a clear explanation; instead, it brings back the remembered route and the rare conversations it carried. Fukushima thus holds a double place in her story: a destination she chose while fleeing home, and a setting where her father came to find her and, in fits and starts, let her hear his past.