Kobe

Kobe is a recurring place in the narrator’s memories, associated with wartime trauma and with the aftermath of a childhood suicide attempt. The city connects Nishio-san’s account of the 1945 bombing to the narrator’s later rescue and emergency journey, while also appearing in a story she repeatedly tells about her sister.

Wartime Memory

Nishio-san recalls that she was seven when bombs began falling on Kobe in 1945. She had heard bombing at a distance before, but this time she understood that her family was in danger. After an explosion, she found herself trapped beneath debris. Hearing cries, she stopped digging in uncertainty and turned toward the sounds, reasoning that life was where the noise came from. Her memory makes Kobe a place where survival depends on finding other living people, even amid disorientation and loss.

The account is presented through the narrator’s recollection of Nishio-san telling it, rather than as an impersonal history of the bombing. That framing gives the city’s wartime past a personal scale: the account follows one child’s experience and the choices she made while trying to reach help. Kobe thus enters the narrative not as a panoramic setting, but through a remembered story of danger and survival.

Family Story and Repetition

Kobe also figures in Nishio-san’s recurring account of her sister, who was run over by the Kobe-to-Nishinomiya train as a child. Nishio-san tells the narrator this story repeatedly, and the narrator interprets the retelling as a way of making the death happen again in speech. The railway route gives the anecdote a specific connection to Kobe, while its repetition prompts the narrator’s early conclusion that words can both create and destroy.

The narrator places this story within a broader effort to understand speech: some words seem harmless, while others can alter how a person or an event is held in memory. Kobe is therefore attached not only to an event in the past, but to the act of repeatedly recounting that event and to the narrator’s developing suspicion of language.

Hospital and Retrospective Memory

After the narrator’s suicide attempt, Nishio-san calls for help and carries the child inside, where the narrator’s mother sees what has happened. The mother announces that they are going to Kobe Hospital, and Nishio-san runs with them to the car. The city is named as their medical destination; the account does not describe the hospital’s treatment in detail, though the narrator later remembers a doctor stitching the temple.

The narrator eventually identifies the episode as the first and, to that point, only suicide attempt, while acknowledging that the parents were never told it was not an accident. The narrator also entertains uncertainty about whether parts of the experience might have been dreamed or invented, then points to the scar on the left temple as material evidence. In this sequence, Kobe is linked to a journey toward treatment, but the narrator’s later account also makes memory itself part of the story: what is recalled, what remains concealed, and what can be corroborated are not quite the same.