Shōwa period

The Showa Period supplies a historical frame for the novel’s interwoven stories of homes, memory, and political violence. It dates the reported beginning of a deadly pattern at the Miyawaki property to 1926, while recollections of the 1930s and the collapse of Manchukuo show how private life and domestic space are shaped by imperial policy and war.

Historical Frame and the Hanging House

A newspaper investigation into the property known locally as the hanging house places its curse within the Showa Period, which began in 1926. The article describes a 3,500-square-foot plot in Setagaya as desirable in practical terms, yet unwanted by people familiar with its reputation: since the start of the era, at least seven owner-occupants had died by suicide. The reported recurrence turns an ordinary measure of historical time into a register of domestic loss, binding the land’s present reputation to successive former occupants.

The same property appears in the narrator’s account as a house and garden encountered through a narrow passage between back gardens. The so-called alley is about two hundred yards long, scarcely more than three feet wide, and sealed at both ends; neighborhood development and residents’ efforts to enclose their yards gradually eliminated its original function as a shortcut. The house is similarly defined by its changing relation to those who live around it: familiar enough to be visible from nearby homes, yet set apart by the story attached to its land.

Homes, Occupancy, and Erasure

The narrator and his wife move into a Setagaya house owned by his uncle during the autumn of their second year of marriage. They leave a Koenji apartment because it is scheduled for renovation, and the uncle offers the house for nominal rent while retaining the right to reclaim it on three months’ notice. Though the house is far from the nearest Odakyu Line station, its yard and quiet neighborhood give the couple a sense of having become a household. That provisional domestic security contrasts with the Miyawaki house, whose vacancy and reputation unsettle the meaning of a home as a stable possession.

In an account recalled from childhood, May Kasahara describes the Miyawaki family as apparently content: the family, including its German shepherd, seemed to live peacefully despite neighborhood rumors about the property. Their sudden disappearance changes how the house appears to her. It seems to disclaim any connection to its former occupants, while the abandoned building becomes a constant presence outside her window over the years. Her description makes the house an image of memory’s instability: the family’s happiness vanishes, but the structure remains, seemingly indifferent to the lives it once held.

When the narrator visits the vacant property, the house looks relatively new but visibly neglected. Rust marks its second-floor railings; weeds crowd the small garden around a stone bird statue, and old plastic chairs lean against the building. Later, after the house is demolished, he finds only a fenced, flattened plot of dark earth, with no well, trees, paving, antenna, or bird sculpture left to identify what once stood there. The physical clearing of the site sharpens rather than resolves the question of what the place contained: the narrator can scarcely believe that a deep well had been there and that he had descended into it.

The Well and the Limits of Place

Before the demolition, the narrator returns to the property and prepares to enter its well. He removes the stones securing the cover, lifts away one wooden half-circle, and drops a pebble to confirm that the bottom is dry. He then ties a rope ladder to a nearby tree, tests the attachment, and lowers the ladder until its end disappears into darkness without a clear indication that it has reached the bottom. The practical care required to secure his return stands beside the well’s uncertain depth, making the domestic plot a threshold between an observable neighborhood and an obscured space below it.

The later empty lot preserves no visible trace of that descent. Its transformation from garden and house to a bulldozed surface parallels the wider disappearance of the site’s occupants and belongings, but the narrator’s memory resists the apparent blankness. The Showa-era history attached to the land, its successive owners, and the well that once lay beneath its garden are not erased simply because the structures are gone; they survive as different, partially conflicting accounts of the same place.

Imperial Rule and Wartime Collapse

The Showa Period also frames Lieutenant Mamiya’s recollection of service in Hsin-ching during the late 1930s. He remembers an outwardly comfortable life for young officers, including evenings spent drinking and visiting cafes, while war with China expanded and relations with the United States deteriorated. He calls that apparent calm make-believe: the distance between a sheltered daily routine and the growing consequences of war makes the era’s political violence present even before it intrudes directly into his assignment.

In 1938, Mamiya is appointed commander of a small escort accompanying Yamamoto on a mission toward the Hulunbuir Steppe. His responsibilities include mapping the western border of Manchukuo near the Khalkha River, where existing maps are crude and the political stakes of formally drawing boundaries are high. The vastness of the region, the presence of nomadic communities, and the sensitivity of neighboring powers make cartography more than a technical task: accurate information is wanted, but asserting a border could provoke an international conflict when the army is already committed to war in China.

The later account of Manchukuo’s collapse exposes the human consequences behind that military and administrative landscape. As Soviet forces advance, the Kwantung Army evacuates its main force, leaving border garrisons and Japanese civilian settlers exposed. Japanese authorities flee or withdraw; Chinese members of the Manchukuo Army desert or revolt rather than fight for Japan, and the capital is left in a political vacuum. These outcomes strip the colonial state of the stability its Japanese builders had claimed for it, while transferring the cost of its collapse to soldiers and civilians with little power over the decisions that produced it.

Mamiya’s later reflection also rejects the political systems that shaped these events. He says that what he witnessed in Soviet custody, alongside the violence committed in Manchuria under Japanese rule, made belief in either ideology or its institutions impossible for him. He specifically recalls Chinese laborers being killed to protect the secrecy of a Japanese military installation at Hailar. In this account, the Showa Period is not merely a date range: it is a contested history of occupation, secrecy, displacement, and the enduring consequences of state power.