Lucy, Lily, and Teiji's trip to Sado Island

Lucy, Lily, and Teiji's trip to Sado Island takes the three friends beyond Tokyo for a journey that is at once playful, intimate, and shadowed by Lucy Fly’s belief in the island’s bad-luck associations. Teiji’s unexpected arrival transforms a trip Lucy had planned with Lily into a shared excursion; its pleasures of ferry travel, mopeds, and the sea briefly bring the three together, while later memories make the island’s cliffs and their return to Tokyo part of a much more painful story.

Background and Bad-Fortune Geography

Lucy’s plan grows out of a relationship with Teiji formed through solitary companionship in Tokyo. After the string quartet at Mrs. Yamamoto’s house disbanded, Lucy spent Sunday evenings wandering alone. She met Teiji in Shinjuku, and their connection developed through quiet gestures, time in his uncle’s noodle shop, weekends together, and warm rainy nights. Their shared silences and walks gave Lucy a sense of closeness that did not depend on conventional conversation.

The island carries a particular charge for Lucy. Mrs. Katoh had told her that Sado Island was considered unlucky because it lay northeast of Kyoto, the old capital; temples across the island were understood as protection against bad spirits. From Tokyo, however, Sado lies to the northwest, a direction Lucy considers unlucky for herself. She connects the idea to the tragic monk in Mishima’s Kinkakuji, who travels northwest despite a fortune-teller’s warning. Rather than being deterred, Lucy feels drawn toward a place associated with misfortune. The journey is therefore not simply a holiday: its destination already fits the fatalistic way she interprets her own life.

Departure and Teiji’s Arrival

Lily is waiting for Lucy at Tokyo Station. They intend to take the shinkansen to Niigata and then a ferry to Sado Island. Lucy has told Teiji about the plan but does not expect him to come. As far as she knows, he has not left Tokyo since arriving there at fourteen to meet his uncle, Soutaro. She imagines that the city’s streets, bridges, and rivers have become his whole world, an endless pattern he follows outward without reaching an edge.

That expectation lasts only until Lucy has found Lily and led her to the correct part of the platform. Teiji comes through the ticket barrier and waves. Lucy jumps with joy and hugs him, carefully easing back because his response to an embrace is neither a conventional hug nor a cold refusal. He explains that he misses the sea, which he used to love but no longer visits, and did not want Lucy to go without him. His arrival changes the emotional shape of the trip: Lucy had expected to travel with Lily alone, but Teiji chooses to cross the boundary of his familiar city and accompany her.

The journey carries them away from industrial Japan through green paddy fields and hills toward Niigata. Lucy prompts Lily to repeat Japanese words for features of the landscape. At the port, the three run to find a place on deck from which to watch mainland Japan disappear. Lucy is deliriously happy to leave Honshu for what she thinks of as a storm-beaten land of exiles, although the crossing itself is calm and takes a little over an hour. They arrive in Ryotsu in the late afternoon, with dark mountains rising behind the fishing town. Teiji turns to look back at the sea, laughing and staggering in a gust of wind, while Lily studies the mountains.

The Island Journey

In Ryotsu, the friends wander through narrow back streets, breathe the fish-scented air, and peer into the windows of small wooden houses. Teiji picks up a discarded piece of fishing net and chases Lucy with it. When they return the net, they abandon their plan to rent a car after noticing the shop’s mopeds and bicycles. Teiji dislikes the claustrophobic prospect of sharing a car, and Lucy welcomes the thought of riding through the island’s plains and along its coast with her companions nearby but each on a separate vehicle.

They rent mopeds and ride away from Ryotsu toward the Sotokaifu coast, continuing beside the sea to Nyuukawa and then farther toward the northern cape. Their simple traditional inn has a room overlooking the Sea of Japan. After leaving their bags and shoes, they go down to the rocks and sand, first intending only to look at the sea and then wading into the small waves under a few shore lights. Cold water splashes around their tired feet, and the sand between the rocks gives way beneath their steps. Lily runs through the shallows, and Lucy follows, laughing. When Lily trips and falls backward into the water, Lucy laughs so hard that she fears she will be unable to stop even if Lily is hurt. Lily then pulls Lucy back into the sea and throws her down, turning the laughter into shared physical play.

The island also becomes a place where Lucy watches for signs of a closeness between Lily and Teiji that she cannot yet establish. During the return account, Lucy learns of a separate visit to the sea: photographs were taken, the two encountered each other afterward, and they had ice cream. Lucy considers what she herself has seen and finds no kiss, touch, shared secret, flirtatious exchange, or photograph of Lily taken by Teiji. She continues to trust her first instinct, but is prepared to be proved wrong. The information unsettles her without resolving her suspicion.

Return and the Trip’s Afterlife

On the final day, the friends spend the afternoon in temples and museums before collecting their bags and boarding the ferry. As the jagged mountains recede, Lucy remembers the island in a rush of images: wooden temples, seagulls, the road unwinding beneath the mopeds, white futon covers, and people moving like puppets as they dig for gold. She is happy to be going home. At Tokyo Station, Lily and Lucy say goodbye to Teiji, who has to work late and start early the next morning. The two women take the Yamanote Line in opposite directions. Lucy looks across at Lily’s platform, where she expects to see her, but cannot find her among the waiting passengers.

The trip acquires a harsher meaning in Lucy’s later recollections. After the island, she thinks of the handkerchief and ice cream exchanged between Lily and Teiji, and of their desertion of her on the cliffs. On the fourth day, unable to remain in her apartment with Lily’s unanswered phone calls, Lucy sets out from Gotanda and walks through the night, following the Yamanote tracks counterclockwise from station to station. She recalls the island’s hurt while moving through a city mapped by other stages of her life. The contrast is telling: the outward journey to Sado had seemed to offer a shared escape, whereas her later circuit of Tokyo becomes a solitary passage through remembered attachments and losses. By the time she returns to Gotanda, she has walked the distance of a marathon and circled the city. The island trip remains in that later account as both a vivid holiday and an early landscape of separation.