Kobe

Kobe is the city where Toru Watanabe grew up alongside his closest friend, Kizuki, and Kizuki’s girlfriend, Naoko. It becomes inseparable from the deaths that shape Watanabe’s life: after Kizuki dies, Watanabe leaves Kobe for Tokyo, seeking a new beginning and distance from the world they shared. Years later, Naoko is buried in Kobe, bringing him back for a quiet funeral before he sets out on a grief-stricken journey with no destination.

Adolescence and the trio

Watanabe first met Naoko while both were in sixth form. She attended a refined girls’ school run by a Christian mission, and she and Kizuki had been close almost from birth, their homes less than 200 yards apart. Their intimacy was so settled that they commonly spent time with each other’s families; Watanabe joined them on double dates, until the three began going out together instead. The unusual arrangement became the most comfortable one for all three, making Kobe the setting of a friendship and young love that seemed to have begun before Watanabe entered it.

Kizuki’s death and Watanabe’s departure

Kizuki died by suicide in his parents’ garage. Because Watanabe had been the last person to see him, the police questioned him, but he could offer no warning or explanation: Kizuki had seemed as he always did, and left no note. The death remained without a motive anyone could identify. In its aftermath, Watanabe could not find a place for himself in the surrounding world. During the ten months before his exams he began a relationship that did not last, applied to a private university in Tokyo without much study, and passed without exhilaration. His girlfriend pleaded with him not to go so far away, but Watanabe wanted to get away from Kobe at any cost and begin again somewhere he knew no one.

Leaving did not mean that the loss stayed behind. In Tokyo, Watanabe tried to create distance from memories of Kizuki: the pool tables, the red N-360, the white flower on the school desk, and the police interrogation. Yet grief persisted as a knot he could not simply forget. With time, he came to understand death not as something separate from life, but as part of it—a realization first formed through Kizuki’s death and later tested by further loss.

Naoko’s funeral and return to the road

After Naoko’s death, a quiet funeral was held in Kobe at the end of August. Watanabe returned to Tokyo afterward, told his landlord and employer he would be away, and wrote Midori a short note asking her to wait while he could not yet speak. He then spent three days going to cinemas, packed his rucksack, withdrew his savings, and took the first express train out of Shinjuku Station.

The funeral does not resolve his grief. As he travels, Watanabe cannot recall the names or order of the towns he passes through; he sleeps in stations, parks, car parks, riverbanks, or by the sea, working for a few days when his money runs low. Moving down the coast, perhaps in Tottori or on the hidden side of Hyogo, he sleeps on the sand, makes fires from driftwood, and listens to the waves while thinking about Naoko. Her death remains impossible for him to absorb: memories of her return with such force that, for a time, he feels he is living with the dead. The road away from Kobe thus extends rather than ends the city’s hold on him.

Place in Watanabe’s story

Kobe frames two departures shaped by bereavement: Watanabe’s move to Tokyo after Kizuki’s death and his flight back onto the road after Naoko’s funeral. The first is an attempt to escape the town and start afresh; the second follows a return there to bury someone he loved and reveals how little distance can do to quiet grief. In this way, Kobe remains both the place of Watanabe’s formative attachments and the point from which he repeatedly moves outward, carrying his losses with him.