The labyrinth

The labyrinth in the novel is not a single place but a recurring structure for thinking about stories, memory, and access to knowledge. It names the maze between illusion and truth through which Nutmeg Akasaka carries a long-hidden wartime memory, the branching system of tales she and Cinnamon create together, and the protected digital world Cinnamon constructs. Across these forms, the labyrinth is both a way of preserving what might otherwise remain untold and a boundary that can swallow speech or resist intrusion.

Memory and the stories within a story

Nutmeg describes having kept her account of the transport ship and zoo to herself for a long time. The memory concerns what she witnessed in August 1945: Japanese soldiers shot the animals in her father’s zoo while an American submarine trained its cannon on the ship. She characterizes her silence as a passage through a gloomy labyrinth spread between illusion and truth. The image makes remembrance less like the retrieval of a settled record than movement through uncertain territory, where the distinction between what happened and how it can be told is difficult to navigate.

Cinnamon’s birth changed the conditions of that silence. Nutmeg decided he was the one person to whom she could tell the story, and began recounting it when he was too young to understand words. She told it in a near whisper, returning to it repeatedly; in the act of telling, its scenes came alive to her again. The account thus becomes a route back into memory as well as a means of passing memory on. Its private audience matters: the labyrinth is entered first through the intimacy of a mother telling her child what she had never told anyone else.

As Cinnamon learned language, he asked Nutmeg to repeat the story, but the repetitions did not remain identical. He would ask about a different small tale contained in the larger one, a separate branch of the same tree, and Nutmeg would follow the route he chose. The narrative expanded by branching rather than by simply accumulating a fixed sequence of events. Their retellings moved among the zoo’s animals, the soldiers, and details of their lives and circumstances. A single wartime account thereby became a structure with many interconnected passages, each opened by a question about another part of the whole.

Nutmeg says that mother and son created an interlocking system of myths. That description presents their stories as jointly made and mutually sustaining: the narrative grew through their daily conversations, not through one final authoritative version. The labyrinth here is a model of storytelling itself. Its branches preserve details and invite further exploration, but they also complicate any clear separation between an initial event and the stories subsequently built around it.

Speech lost in the labyrinth

The shared storytelling ended on a February morning when Cinnamon stopped talking and stopped sharing stories with Nutmeg. In her later account, the cessation of speech marks a decisive change in the labyrinth’s meaning. What had been a space they could explore together became a destination into which words could disappear. Nutmeg understands that change as an effect of something from the stones that took Cinnamon’s tongue and, a few years later, killed her husband. Her explanation is expressed through the story’s symbolic language; the passage does not turn the labyrinth into a plainly explained or independently verified mechanism.

The contrast between the two phases of Cinnamon’s life is central to the image. Before his muteness, he and Nutmeg used language to open and extend the maze, following one story branch into another. After he stopped speaking, Nutmeg says that words were lost in it, swallowed by the world of stories. The same narrative world that enabled communication could therefore also seem to absorb the means of communicating. Rather than resolving that paradox, the account preserves the uncertainty between metaphorical explanation and an uncanny presence associated with the stones.

Cinnamon’s digital labyrinth

The labyrinth takes a technological form in the computer Cinnamon customizes. Nutmeg says he has configured every part of its system, built a complex database, and protected it with a secret code and other devices. Its organization is described as three-dimensional and subterranean: Cinnamon is its absolute ruler, familiar with intertwined passages and able to move among them at the stroke of a key. For anyone who is not Cinnamon, the alarms and traps make the route to important data a task that could take months.

The machine is not especially large, and the computer at the Residence is of the same class as the one in the Akasaka office. Both are hard-wired to the mainframe at home. The scale of the labyrinth therefore comes from its organization and defenses, not from an unusually powerful or enormous machine. Nutmeg identifies client information and complex double bookkeeping among what Cinnamon stores, while Toru Okada suspects the system contains something beyond records connected with their work. His suspicion is not confirmation of what else is there; the concealed contents remain part of the computer’s mystery.

Okada’s observations of Cinnamon at work give the digital maze an intimate dimension. In the small office at the Residence, Cinnamon usually keeps the door shut. When it is sometimes left ajar, Okada sees him move through keyboard commands, study the screen, and return to the keys. The apparent dissatisfaction or slight smile that crosses Cinnamon’s face as he works makes his concentration difficult for Okada to read from the outside. The computer seems less like a passive filing cabinet than a world in which Cinnamon has a special intimacy and a mode of engagement unavailable to observers.

Okada imagines that, in this subterranean world, Cinnamon might have a clear voice with which to speak and express emotion. This is Okada’s conjecture, not a confirmed account of Cinnamon’s experience. It nevertheless draws together the computer and the earlier stories: in both, Cinnamon is associated with a hidden system whose interior can be more accessible to him than to those around him. The digital maze may hold information, but it also figures a private realm that others can approach only by inference.

Access, communication, and control

The computer’s barriers become consequential when Okada attempts to navigate them. He initially tells Ushikawa that he does not know the password and has never touched the machine. Cinnamon’s customization makes the problem more than a matter of guessing a single code: access means finding a way through a system designed around passages, alarms, and traps. The labyrinth turns information security into an image of personal knowledge. A person outside Cinnamon’s system cannot assume that proximity to the computer grants understanding of what it contains.

Okada eventually succeeds in opening two doors in the system using the terms Zoo and Sub. The success is limited and he recognizes it as progress through the labyrinth, not mastery of it. On returning to the main menu, he chooses to shut down the computer and declines the prompt to record the procedures in the Operations File, following Ushikawa’s instruction. The scene makes access procedural and partial: Okada finds a route into the system, but the choice not to leave a record also means that the route is not openly documented.

The computer is also implicated in communication with Kumiko. During their exchange, Okada considers what she writes and encounters a figurative wall that keeps him from fully understanding her account of slowly going bad. He is aware that Noboru Wataya may be monitoring their conversation through the communications link into Cinnamon’s computer, and suspects that Noboru and his men want to discover the secrets of the Residence. Communication thus occurs inside a contested labyrinth: Kumiko’s words reach Okada, but their meaning remains incomplete, while a hostile observer may also be trying to use the same system.

Okada responds to the possibility of surveillance with confidence in the computer’s depths. He regards those depths as the depths of Cinnamon himself and believes that Noboru and his men have no way of knowing how deep they are. The claim emphasizes the gap between technical connection and genuine access. A communications link can expose a route into the system without making its full structure legible; Cinnamon’s labyrinth remains a defense as well as a repository.

A structure between history and truth

The novel’s labyrinths are connected without becoming identical. Nutmeg’s wartime story branches into shared myths; Cinnamon’s computer turns hidden passages into a protected archive; and Okada’s conversation with Kumiko confronts him with a barrier to understanding. Each instance places the desire to know beside the limits of knowing. Stories can be passed on, but they change as they branch; a system can be entered, but not necessarily comprehended; a message can arrive without making its writer fully accessible.

The image also gives a formal shape to the novel’s uncertainty. The labyrinth links a remembered historical event with stories created around it, and links those narratives with a present-day computer whose contents are only partly known. Nutmeg’s explanation of speech lost among stories remains an interpretation, while Okada’s theories about Cinnamon’s machine remain partly conjectural. By allowing the labyrinth to signify both a means of connection and a site of loss, the novel makes the search for truth a passage through overlapping accounts rather than a direct route to a final, transparent answer.