Midori’s two childhood runaways, at ages eight and ten, were acts of anger and defiance that also led to unusually close conversations with her father. Both times she took a train from Ueno Station to Fukushima, where an aunt she liked lived; her father came to bring her home, turning the return journeys into the only occasions she could recall having a long, good talk with him.

The Two Runaways

Midori explains the episodes while trying to interpret a muddled message from her father, in which the words “Please take care of Midori” and “Ueno Station” prompt her to search her memory for what the station might mean. She recalls that somebody at home had made her angry, and that she ran away to get even. On each occasion she took money from the till to buy her ticket, then travelled from Ueno to Fukushima to stay with her aunt.

The repeated route makes the episodes more than two isolated acts of escape. Midori went to a relative she liked, but it was her father who travelled the hundred miles to retrieve her. The journey home together—not the destination alone—became the important part of the memory.

Conversations on the Journey Home

As they rode from Fukushima back to Ueno, Midori’s father told her stories in fragments, with long pauses between them. He spoke about the 1923 earthquake, the war, and the time of her birth—subjects he did not usually discuss. Midori remembers those train rides as the only times she and her father had something like a good, extended conversation, giving the runaway journeys an unexpected intimacy alongside their original anger.

His account of the earthquake stood out for its comic incongruity. He had been riding through Koishikawa with a cart attached to his bicycle and failed to notice the major earthquake happening around him. Only after returning home to find roof tiles fallen and his family clinging to pillars did he realize anything was wrong. Midori also recalls his detached way of telling stories about major historical events, as if little of importance had happened in Japan for decades.

At the end of the train rides, her father would tell her, “So that goes to show you, Midori, it's the same wherever you go.” She says she was young enough to be impressed. In adulthood, the phrase remains attached to her memory of those trips: her father’s halting stories, the shared train ride, and the rare experience of sustained conversation.

Memory and Meaning

Midori identifies Ueno Station not through an abstract association but through these two returns from Fukushima. When asked whether she had ever run away, Watanabe says he had not. The contrast leaves her childhood account as a distinct piece of family history: anger initiated the journeys, but the remembered conversations with her father gave them a lasting, more complicated meaning.