The revelation of Teiji and Lily's romance is the moment Lucy Fly’s suspicions become visible fact: first in a quiet exchange of ice cream and a handkerchief on Sado Island, then in a kiss at Tokyo Station. The two discoveries transform Lucy’s place in the relationship. What she had tried to treat as a possibility becomes an intimacy she cannot explain away, and the sight of it drives her out of the station and into a night-long circuit of Tokyo.

Background and First Reading

Lucy’s attachment to Teiji begins in a city she is already traversing alone. After Mrs. Yamamoto’s string quartet disbands, she has no settled plan for her Sunday evenings. She takes the Yamanote Line to a station and walks toward another, insisting in retrospect that she was not lonely, while admitting that, on seeing Teiji, she could not bear to leave him and be alone again. Their early closeness is built from shared places and quiet routines: walking around Shinjuku, spending time at his uncle’s noodle shop, and going out together on warm rainy nights.

That first encounter, outside the Keio Plaza Hotel, gives the later revelation a charged background. In steady rain, Lucy sees Teiji photographing a puddle while people stream past beneath umbrellas. He seems to her made of water and ice; when he finally looks through his camera toward her, she is drawn into the frame of his attention. Rain, looking, and being looked at thus belong to the history of their intimacy before Lily enters it. During the trip to Sado Island, Lucy watches Teiji and Lily with the same heightened attention, trying to interpret gestures that do not announce themselves in words.

The Ice-Cream Scene on Sado Island

The first decisive evidence arrives by chance. Lucy has agreed to meet Teiji and Lily later at the town hall, but sets off early and comes upon them seated together on a street bench. They are close but not touching, and their silence stops her from crossing the road to greet them. Each holds an ice-cream cone. Lily licks melting ice cream from the side of hers; Teiji eats the bottom of his. When she says something, he takes a handkerchief from his pocket and gives it to her. She passes him her half-eaten cone while wiping her fingers, and he licks it as he waits.

For Lucy, the exchange says more than a kiss would have at that point. Teiji accepts Lily’s cone without looking at it; Lily uses his handkerchief without thanking him or apologizing. The ease of their actions makes Lucy think that they have already slept together. She stares, hoping to see something that will overturn her interpretation, but the small, unselfconscious gestures have already changed what she believes about their closeness. When Teiji returns the cone, Lily takes it; she looks up at the sky and closes her eyes, while the handkerchief remains bunched in her hand. Their silence seems to Lucy not awkward but familiar, the quiet of people who are already at ease with each other.

She walks away and paces until she is lost, trying to imagine when the intimacy began: on the beach, on the clifftop where she had been unconscious, on a hillside, or during one of the nights at the inn. She goes into a public toilet and tries to cry, but cannot. When she comes out and meets Teiji and Lily, she bursts into laughter. Later, she holds Teiji’s arm and reminds herself of what she has not seen: no kiss, touch, exchanged glance, or photograph of Lily taken by Teiji. She remains willing, briefly, to be proved wrong. The return journey to Tokyo therefore carries both a suspicion and Lucy’s effort to contain it.

Confirmation at Tokyo Station

At Tokyo Station, Lucy and Lily say goodbye to Teiji because he must work late and early the next morning. They enter the underground passages together, then separate for trains traveling in opposite directions on the Yamanote Line: Lucy clockwise, Lily counterclockwise. Their platforms face one another. Lucy checks her departure time and sees that her train is due in a minute. When she looks across, Lily is missing from the expected place. Lucy pushes through the crowd, runs along her own platform, and searches Lily’s platform from end to end.

Instead of taking the next train and looking for Lily elsewhere, Lucy returns to the place where they parted from Teiji. She approaches the shinkansen barriers cautiously, buys a copy of the Daily Asahi at a kiosk, and peers from beside a pillar. There she sees Teiji and Lily face to face, standing so close that Lily’s foot is between his and their thighs nearly touch. Teiji whispers to her and they kiss. The scene confirms the suspicion formed on the island: they are together as lovers. Lucy’s response splits between the wish to escape unnoticed and an uncontrollable urge to make herself heard. She gives a loud, wolf-like cry; Teiji and Lily turn toward her, wide-eyed. She drops the newspaper and runs.

The Walk and Its Aftermath

For four days Lucy refuses to speak to Lily or Teiji. Lily calls repeatedly, and Lucy lets the telephone ring through the morning; she wants to know that Lily is trying to reach her, even as she refuses to answer. Unable to stay in the apartment with the ringing, Lucy goes out in the evening and walks through the night. Starting from Gotanda, she follows the railway counterclockwise toward Osaki and continues from station to station. The images that recur as she walks are the handkerchief and ice cream, and the memory of being deserted by Teiji and Lily on the cliffs.

The route becomes a map of former attachments. At Shinbashi she recalls waiting for Natsuko before a trip to Odaiba; near Yurakucho she remembers dinners with Bob beneath the railway arches. At Akihabara she passes the place where she and Teiji looked at cameras, and at Ameyoko she remembers shopping with Natsuko. Yanaka Cemetery brings back the time before she went to Mrs. Yamamoto’s house. These are not merely landmarks: moving past them makes the city’s separate periods of her life coincide with the immediate loss of trust. She passes the northwest districts of Takadanobaba and Shin-Okubo, eventually reaches Shinjuku and the place where she first saw Teiji, then continues past Yoyogi Park, hearing again the song she had sung there with Teiji and Lily.

By morning Lucy has walked the distance of a marathon and circled Tokyo. Her return to Gotanda does not resolve the rupture; it gives the betrayal a physical route through places associated with the lives she had built in the city. Back in her flat, she ignores the still-ringing phone and sinks into a hot bath, eyes closed against the night’s streets, stations, and remembered relationships. The revelation is therefore not only a disclosure about Teiji and Lily. It is the point at which Lucy’s confidence in her place beside Teiji gives way, and walking becomes her immediate means of enduring what she has seen.