Britain enters the story as a possible destination, not a refuge Lucy Fly recognizes as home. Asked to return, she says that it holds nothing for her and that its people seem like ghosts; later, a possible visit to Yorkshire becomes one tentative thread connecting her life in Tokyo with people she has left behind.

A proposed return

The suggestion that Lucy return to Britain comes after she has described herself as going around in circles in Tokyo. The phrase has a literal echo in her earlier walk around the Yamanote Line: she follows the stations through the night, completes the circuit, and arrives back where she began. Against that physical return, Britain is offered as a destination, but Lucy refuses the assumption that going back would mean going home. She sees no life waiting for her there and describes its people as ghosts.

Home and estrangement

Lucy’s response separates geography from belonging. Britain may be named as home by the person urging her to return, but she does not share that understanding. Her sense of disconnection stands beside her attachment to Tokyo, even when the city has become a place of repetition and loss. Britain therefore functions less as a mapped setting than as the idea of a past that cannot simply be resumed by crossing back to it.

A tentative connection to Yorkshire

Later, while writing to Jonathan, Lucy considers visiting him in Yorkshire at Christmas, but only if he sends a kind reply. The postcard she began becomes a letter in which she tells him about her work, Natsuko’s camellia tree, and her wrongful arrest on a murder charge. The visit remains conditional, not a settled return. Lily’s parents live fifteen miles from Jonathan, giving the proposed journey another connection to Lucy’s life in Japan: she imagines meeting people who might welcome someone who knew Lily there. After a few days, she expects to return to Tokyo and stay with Mrs. Katoh. Britain is thus left as a possible brief encounter with old relationships and the aftermath of Lily’s life, while Lucy’s anticipated home remains in Japan.