Nara

Nara is a place Midori associates with temples and a deer park, and the setting for a brief trip with her boyfriend after her father’s funeral. In her recollection, the visit begins as a chance to take a break after months of caring for her father and running the family shop; instead, a sudden bodily disruption and a quarrel leave the couple separated. Nara’s role is modest but telling: its familiar attractions frame a trip whose expected pleasure gives way to stress, disappointment, and Midori’s growing awareness of whom she wishes had been beside her.

A destination after bereavement

After the funeral, Midori and her sister were exhausted from months of nursing their father. They slept for hours, then ordered sushi and discussed what to do. The sisters decided to close the shop for a while and take a break. Midori’s sister wanted time with her own boyfriend; Midori planned to take hers away for a couple of days. Nara was the destination she chose with a sense of familiarity: she said she had always liked its temples and deer park.

The journey belongs to a larger period of recovery from practical and emotional strain, but Midori does not describe the trip as solemn. Her plans are bluntly pleasure-seeking, a deliberate contrast with the daily demands that had drained the sisters. That ordinary wish for leisure is what makes the turn in Nara so pointed: the trip does not deliver the respite or closeness she had anticipated.

The visit and its reversal

Once the couple reached their hotel and put down their bags, Midori’s period began a week early, and she described it as unusually heavy. She said the stress had probably disrupted her cycle and that she began crying; her boyfriend became angry, although, as she insisted, the timing was not something she had chosen. The unexpected onset immediately altered the purpose of the trip. Rather than the intimacy she had planned, she found herself managing discomfort and her boyfriend’s reaction.

Midori later joked that she would wear a red hat for a couple of days after her period began, so that anyone who saw her on the street would know to leave her alone. The joke turns an awkward private circumstance into a conspicuous, playful signal, but it also preserves how much the episode had unsettled her. The small comic exchange does not undo the hurt: when asked what the couple did in Nara, she recalled feeding the deer and walking around, and called the experience awful.

Separation and remembered desire

The walk through the deer park did not repair the mood. Midori and her boyfriend had a major fight, and she had not seen him since they returned. She stayed around for a couple of days, then travelled north by herself, after first going to Nara with him. The abrupt change from a shared holiday to solitary travel gives Nara a clear place in the sequence of her separation: it is where the hoped-for getaway becomes the last episode of their trip together.

In the later conversation, Midori says that throughout her solo travels she kept thinking of Toru Watanabe and how nice it would have been to have him with her. The memory of Nara therefore carries more than the frustration of the failed holiday. Set against the trip she actually took with her boyfriend, her imagined company with Toru Watanabe reveals the emotional direction of her attention. Nara is not presented as the cause of the breakup; it is the setting in which incompatible expectations and accumulated strain become unmistakable.

Narrative significance

Nara enters the novel through Midori’s conversational recollection rather than as an extended, directly narrated travel scene. The place is defined by a few concrete attractions—the temples and deer park—and by the mundane details that disrupt her plans: the hotel room, her early period, the argument, and the walk feeding deer. This scale keeps the episode grounded in the body and in everyday life rather than turning travel into an escape from grief or conflict.

The contrast between Midori’s stated reason for the trip and what she remembers of it gives the place its narrative weight. She went expecting a short break with her boyfriend; she came back from a fight and continued travelling alone, thinking of Toru Watanabe. Nara thus marks a quiet change in the emotional balance of her story: a failed attempt at shared pleasure sharpens the difference between the relationship she is in and the companionship she longs for.