Kokubunji is the residential setting of Kawashima Masayuki and Yoko’s home, a place the novel presents through the threshold between their apartment and the empty neighborhood street. Kawashima’s brief move outside brings him some relief from the fear he has been carrying inside the room where the baby sleeps, making Kokubunji the domestic point of departure for a crisis he cannot settle simply by leaving home.

The apartment and its surroundings

Kawashima and Yoko’s apartment is on the second floor of a four-storey building. The lobby has no guard or watchman; residents enter through glass doors using either a code or an intercom buzzer, while a sensor plate allows them to leave. The landlord has stressed the need to prevent strangers from slipping in as residents exit. The concern is tied to reported incidents in the building: a burglar had apparently posed as a delivery worker, children had spray-painted the lobby walls, and someone had melted the intercom keypad with a lighter. These details characterize the couple’s immediate home environment, not Kokubunji as a whole.

A departure into the neighborhood

After quietly closing and checking the apartment door, Kawashima descends the stairs and steps onto the empty street in the couple’s Kokubunji neighborhood. Yoko has awakened but does not seem to have noticed what is happening. Outside, away from the room where the baby is sleeping, Kawashima feels a measure of relief. He zips his jacket against the cold and reflects that he enjoys being outdoors in it; in heated rooms, by contrast, he can feel the boundary between his body and the world around him becoming disturbingly indistinct. The street offers distance from the immediate domestic setting, but only temporary respite: his thoughts return to the fear that he might stab the baby, which he tries to understand as an extreme form of anxiety.

Narrative significance

Kokubunji anchors the novel’s account of Kawashima’s family life in an ordinary residential setting: an apartment building with routine security precautions, a sleeping infant, and a street empty enough for him to stand alone. That apparent privacy gives him space to collect himself, while the fear accompanying him shows that physical distance from the baby does not end his distress. The neighborhood also marks the domestic starting point of a wider movement through the novel’s urban settings: Kawashima later plans actions in West Shinjuku, far from the family home. Kokubunji’s significance lies less in any broad description of the area than in this contrast between the home he shares with Yoko and the dangerous thoughts he carries beyond its door.