Exile, escape, and belonging

Exile, escape, and belonging are linked through Lucy Fly’s departures and her shifting sense of where, and with whom, she can feel at home. She leaves Yorkshire for Japan in search of distance, but distance does not settle the question of belonging: it recurs in her estrangement from her family, her tentative attachments in Tokyo, her invitation to Lily Bridges to travel to Sado Island, and her eventual circuit around the city after their relationship fractures.

Departure and Chosen Distance

Lucy’s departure begins in Yorkshire, where her childhood friendship with Lizzie offers company but not the complete separation from others she longs for. Her fascination with maps and languages turns distance into a plan. At the British Museum, seeing the Rosetta Stone helps her identify the Roman alphabet as a limitation: she wants to learn a language that nobody around her can read or speak. Japanese appeals partly because it requires fewer characters than Chinese, but the decisive attraction is geographical. Japan lies farther from England, near the point where continued travel would begin to curve back toward home.

Lucy leaves Yorkshire for London to study Japanese, choosing the capital as the opposite of the small town she has endured. Her departure is marked not by tears but by relief on both sides. Family history sharpens that separation: most of her brothers have already left home, and their absence has brought Lucy and her mother, Miriam Fly, uncomfortably close. George Fly had died of grief for Noah Fly two years earlier, and Lucy decides that she will speak to Miriam only if her mother calls or writes first. Miriam never does. When Lucy leaves her residence for Japan, she therefore sees no need to explain her departure. Escape is at once geographical and relational: she crosses a great distance while allowing silence to stand in place of a farewell.

Making a Life in Tokyo

In Japan, Lucy finds an apartment and works for several companies before settling into a job as a translator and editor for a small industrial translation company. Her work requires her to move Japanese sentences into English, supplying forms and specifics that the original wording may leave uncertain. The job gives her a place in Tokyo, but professional residence does not by itself resolve her distance from other people.

After Mrs. Yamamoto’s death, Lucy stops playing in the string quartet and withdraws from the women who had made up its circle. She does not contact Mrs. Ide or Mrs. Katoh, and she never asks for the cello back from the Yamamotos’ spare room. She tries a tea ceremony class, hoping to recover the quiet pleasure of the cup, cake, tatami, and teapot, but the group’s chatter and inattention offer none of the concentration she misses. What remains from the quartet is a destination: Sado Island, the remote home Mrs. Katoh had described. That inheritance is complicated. Lucy values the island as a trace of an earlier connection, yet she later recognizes that the trip she finally makes there with Lily and Teiji leads into painful events.

Lucy’s first encounter with Teiji emerges from another kind of wandering. She used to take the Yamanote Line to a station and walk along the tracks toward the next. That habit brings her to Shinjuku on the rainy night she sees Teiji studying a puddle outside the Keio Plaza Hotel. She had not thought of herself as lonely, but cannot bear to walk away from him and be alone again. Their silent gestures, visits to his uncle’s noodle shop, weekends together, and walks in warm rain create an intimate attachment without requiring Lucy to abandon her preference for silence. Tokyo becomes more than the place where she works: its routes and meeting places hold the beginnings of a life shared with someone else.

Sado Island as Refuge

Mrs. Katoh gives Sado Island its double meaning. She has left her husband and son and lives alone in Tokyo; she describes this self-imposed departure as a reversal of the island’s history as a place where people were sent into exile. She calls it beautiful and remote, a secret jewel in the Sea of Japan, while Lucy wonders why Mrs. Katoh left and never learns the reason. The island is thus associated both with forced separation and with a person’s own decision to leave. Lucy’s knowledge of it comes through a relationship that is itself marked by an unexplained departure.

Years later, Lucy turns that association toward Lily. She imagines Lily’s return to Hull and Andy as a return to captivity, reasoning that Lily has experienced escape and could not make such a return work. Lucy’s concern is not wholly selfless: she has grown used to Lily’s presence, and Lily’s touch has comforted her when memories of past losses and disasters trouble her. Still, Lucy makes keeping Lily in Japan an explicit purpose. She calls back and invites her to Sado Island, describing its temples and clear blue sea and proposing time in Niigata as well. She argues that Lily should see somewhere beyond Tokyo, dismissing the small hill they climbed in Yamanashi as insufficient. Lily agrees, and Lucy takes the decision as a reprieve: Lily will not be leaving Japan for at least another month.

The invitation recasts Sado from a place of exile into a hoped-for refuge for two people Lucy considers modern-day exiles. But the plan does not secure a lasting home or attachment. Lucy’s use of the island’s history is also personal: she selects a place associated with separation as the setting for a journey meant to postpone another separation. The contrast makes the proposed escape precarious from the outset; travel can offer a temporary alternative without undoing the conditions that made departure necessary.

The City as a Map of Attachment

After Lily and Teiji desert Lucy on the cliffs, movement becomes a way to live with thoughts she cannot quiet. On the fourth day of Lily’s repeated calls, Lucy leaves her apartment without a destination and walks counterclockwise from Gotanda toward the next Yamanote Line station. At Osaki she recalls the handkerchief and ice cream that passed between Lily and Teiji, as well as their departure from the cliffs. She keeps walking because motion makes her thoughts faster and less clear, blunting their capacity to wound her.

The route gathers earlier lives into a single circuit. At Akihabara, she remembers looking at cameras with Teiji; at Ameyoko, shopping for cheap food with Natsuko; and at Ueno, seeing cherry blossoms during her first year in Japan. Yanaka recalls the cemetery where she sat before visiting Mrs. Yamamoto. These places do not simply mark a route through Tokyo: each station brings a different attachment or period of Lucy’s life into the present. As she passes through familiar neighborhoods, the city offers recognition without restoring the people whose memories inhabit them.

In Shinjuku, Lucy returns within meters of the place where she first saw Teiji and wonders whether he moved from Sachi to her and then to Lily without pause, as if the three women were stations along a track. The railway image turns intimacy into a sequence of arrivals and departures, while the circular line denies the promise of a final destination. Lucy walks the distance of a marathon and circles Tokyo before returning to Gotanda. The return is physical, not a resolution: she enters her flat while the phone is still ringing, ignores it, and lowers herself into a hot bath as the city’s tracks and sleeping trains remain in her thoughts. Belonging in the novel is repeatedly sought in places and relationships, but the paths that lead toward it also carry Lucy back through loss.