Odawara

Odawara is the nearest substantial city to the unnamed rural town where Kawashima Masayuki grew up. It enters the narrative through a childhood memory: a department-store rooftop Playland that first serves as a family destination, then marks the contrast between his younger brother’s outings and Kawashima’s growing isolation.

Setting and Family Outings

Kawashima recalls that the three family members went to the rooftop Playland in Odawara a few times. The account does not identify the town where the family lived or give a precise distance to the city; Odawara is described only as the nearest city of any size. The Playland thus provides a concrete point of reference in an otherwise unnamed childhood landscape.

Exclusion and Isolation

When Kawashima was about five or six, his mother began locking him in the house and taking only his younger brother to Odawara. On one occasion he climbed out of a window and ran after them. His mother brought him back and tied him to the bathroom pipes. He later recalled falling asleep on the tiled floor and waking after dark, with the narrow road outside the window empty. The remembered journey to the city is inseparable from the experience of being left behind and the punishment that followed his attempt to rejoin the family.

Memory and Narrative Significance

Odawara itself is not described at length; its significance lies in how the remembered outing changes meaning. A place associated with a children’s play area becomes the destination from which Kawashima is excluded, while the road outside the house becomes the image that remains with him. After a middle-school teacher arranged for him to enter Home, Kawashima began drawing, initially making pictures of narrow roads at night. The narrative therefore links the city and its family outings to a larger recollection of childhood separation without suggesting that the city caused the abuse or that the unnamed hometown was within Odawara.