Japan

Japan is the country Lucy Fly chooses as the farthest practical point from her English home, but it becomes more than a destination: it is the setting in which she learns to live, forms intimate ties, and repeatedly confronts the people and losses she hoped distance might leave behind. Through the contrast between Tokyo’s familiar routes and Sado Island’s history of exile, Japan gives physical shape to Lucy’s unstable balance between escape and belonging.

Choosing Distance

As a teenager, Lucy’s fascination with maps and languages made Japan a deliberate choice. After leaving Yorkshire for London to study Japanese, she weighed the demands of Chinese characters against Japanese writing and consulted the map: Japan lay slightly farther from England, a distance that mattered to her because she wanted to get away. Australia seemed farther still, but did not count in her reckoning because English was spoken there. The choice thus joined linguistic difference to geographic separation; Lucy wanted a place whose language and distance could help set her apart from the life she was leaving.

Her departure took place amid estrangement at home. Lucy had grown uncomfortably close to Miriam after most of her brothers left, and she did not contact her mother before setting off for Japan. She decided she would speak to Miriam only if Miriam wrote or called first; Miriam did neither. With no explanation required, Lucy left for the country she had selected as an opposite to her small-town upbringing. What began as a plan for distance became a long residence rather than a temporary visit.

Work and Everyday Life

In Japan, Lucy found an apartment and worked for several companies before settling into a small industrial translation firm. For four years she translated and edited Japanese documents, presentations, and instruction manuals into English. Although she lacked knowledge of engineering and electronics, her work required her to reshape sentences so that English could supply articles and plurals and turn vagueness into specificity. Japan was not merely the foreign place she had imagined from maps: it was where she built a practical life through language and employment.

That life remained socially selective. After Mrs. Yamamoto’s death, Lucy wandered around Tokyo alone, though she had Japanese and non-Japanese colleagues. She generally avoided going out with them more than once or twice a month, finding sustained conversation a waste of her life. The city offered movement and company without requiring her to make a settled community of it. Yet her routes through it would become deeply personal, carrying the memories of the relationships that made Japan feel like home and then made that home difficult to inhabit.

Routes, Rain, and Attachment

Lucy’s first encounter with Teiji takes place in rainy Shinjuku, soon after the string quartet she had played in with Mrs. Yamamoto disbanded and her Sunday evenings became empty. Outside the Keio Plaza Hotel, she sees Teiji photographing a puddle as people pass under umbrellas. The reflected hotel divides between light and darkness; Lucy steps into the water, and Teiji’s photograph includes her feet. The encounter joins Japan’s urban landscape to the beginning of their relationship: Lucy is drawn not only to Teiji but to the way he attends to a small, overlooked surface of the city.

Before meeting him, Lucy had used the Yamanote Line as a means of wandering, getting off at stations and following the tracks onward. After their encounter, Tokyo becomes a shared landscape. She and Teiji walk together, spend time at his uncle’s noodle shop, and go out in the rain on warm nights. Under a railway bridge, they wait for a train; its passage above them frames their intimacy against the city’s recurring noise and motion. Rain, tracks, and stations become more than scenery: they are the ordinary surroundings through which Lucy’s attachments acquire a geography.

That geography also organizes separation. After discovering Teiji and Lily’s closeness and feeling abandoned on the cliffs, Lucy refuses their calls and walks through the night from Gotanda, following the Yamanote Line counterclockwise. The twenty-eight stations form a circuit through districts layered with her earlier life: places associated with Natsuko, Bob, Teiji, work, shopping, and loss. In Shinjuku she returns near the spot where she first saw Teiji and thinks of Sachi, wondering whether the women in Teiji’s life followed one another like stations on a track. By morning Lucy has walked the distance of a marathon and circled Tokyo. The route gives her no escape from memory, but makes the city’s accumulated associations visible as she moves through them.

Exile and Uncertain Signals

Japan also contains a more remote landscape of separation. When Lucy wants Lily to remain in the country rather than return to Hull and Andy, she proposes a visit to Sado Island, a rugged island in the north with a history of receiving criminals and political undesirables. Lucy imagines it as a fitting destination for two modern exiles. Her proposal is at once a journey and an effort to delay Lily’s return to a life Lucy believes would become another kind of captivity. The island’s history gives their planned escape a charged parallel, without making it a simple refuge from the past.

The country’s physical instability enters Lucy’s experience through earthquakes and the sound she calls the earthquake bird. She and Teiji had heard an uncertain noise around tremors; Teiji thought it might be a night bird disturbed from its perch, while other explanations included metal striking something or a can being kicked. Lucy notices that the noise seems to begin just before the shaking, but doubts her own judgment and cannot determine whether it is a warning, a symptom, or a misperception. Later, a calm, successful neighborhood earthquake drill does not erase her nervousness. Trains passing near her home shake the buildings vigorously enough that she can miss movements beginning beneath the earth’s crust.

Near the end, ordinary sounds and remembered places converge again. A noise in the sky recalls Lily and the unidentified woman whose body was found in Tokyo Bay; Lucy also thinks of Sachi. In the trees outside the house, she hears what she recognizes as a camera clicking and the film advancing. She looks for Teiji but sees only trees and bushes, while the sound seems to echo in every direction. Rain begins, first as separate drops and then harder, and Lucy turns toward the warmth of the house and her friends while fearing Teiji is waiting outside. Japan’s familiar weather, city sounds, and seismic uncertainty do not settle whether that presence is real. They leave Lucy poised between the safety of home and the pull of the past, making the country she chose for distance the setting where return remains imaginable but never entirely secure.