Lucy Fly and Teiji’s first encounter is the beginning of their intimacy and a scene that gives the relationship its defining images: rain, a photographed reflection, and the sense of being seen through a camera. Lucy later remembers their meeting while under police questioning, imagining Teiji beside her before her memory carries her back to Shinjuku. The scene is therefore both an origin story and a recollection shaped by what follows: its apparent ease and tenderness stand against the losses and betrayals that eventually make Lucy retrace the city on foot.

Background and Retrospective Frame

The meeting happens after Mrs. Yamamoto’s string quartet has disbanded, leaving Lucy without her regular Sunday-evening activity. She wanders central Tokyo alone, a habit she later connects to taking the Yamanote Line to a station and following the tracks to the next. She does not describe herself at the time as lonely, but encountering Teiji changes the prospect of walking away: she cannot bear to leave him and return to being alone. Her later account thus distinguishes the solitude she considered ordinary from the attachment that forms in this encounter.

The memory is not presented as an uninterrupted record. During the first meeting, Lucy cannot recall whether the two spoke, or precisely when she learned where they were going; she believes they walked together in silence. Much later, after she has been deserted by Lily and Teiji on the cliffs, she walks counterclockwise around Tokyo, thinking of the handkerchief and ice cream that passed between them and of their abandonment of her. The route brings her back to Shinjuku, near the place where she first met Teiji. Remembering the encounter from this later moment places its beginning inside a circuit of attachment, separation, and return.

The Rainy Street and the Camera

On the night they meet, rain falls steadily around the high buildings of Nishi-Shinjuku. Lucy regards the towers less romantically than guidebook writers do: from the pavement they are dull hotels, banks, and government offices casting long shadows. She has no umbrella, which she considers cumbersome, and is content to let her clothes dry later. That indifference to shelter places her directly in the rain that defines the scene.

Outside the Keio Plaza Hotel, Teiji stands among streams of people carrying umbrellas and bends over a puddle to photograph it. Water runs over his hair and face, apparently without his noticing. Lucy watches him move around the puddle with his camera and sees him as resembling water and ice. His delicate fingers, sharp shoulder blades, and transparent brown eyes intensify her impression of someone fragile and sharply outlined against the neon-dark city. She finds him so beautiful that she cannot simply walk past.

Lucy approaches the puddle to see what has caught his attention. The hotel’s reflection divides the dirty water: one side holds lit windows, the other darkness and floating cigarette ends. She imagines the stubs as people jumping from the hotel, while Teiji seems to be looking more deeply into the water than she can. She steps close enough for the tips of her shoes to enter the puddle and reflect across the hotel. Teiji photographs the scene with her feet in it, then looks at her; he raises the camera again and takes the first pictures of her face. Lucy never sees those photographs. The encounter makes her part of his image before the two have established a remembered conversation.

From Image to Intimacy

Lucy interprets the moment as intimate and treats her entry into Teiji’s photograph as an invitation. In her recollection, he has led her into the image and captured her with a single exposure; her feet and face are now inside his camera. The camera makes the passage from observation to physical closeness seem, to her then, like an obvious next step. That understanding belongs to Lucy’s retrospective account, not to any recorded verbal agreement: the precise words and transitions between the street and their journey are missing from her memory.

They cannot afford a room at the Keio Plaza Hotel, so they walk to Teiji’s apartment in Shin-Okubo, about twenty minutes away. The route leaves the neon towers for a different Tokyo of old houses, small apartment buildings, narrow gray streets, tiny shops, bars, and orange-lit eating places. They pass more puddles, but Teiji takes no further photographs until they reach his apartment. There, in lamplight with the curtains open, he takes one final picture: Lucy’s naked body as she kneels on the bed and leans back. Lucy says nothing in the scene about resisting the camera’s gaze; she regards it as kinder than a naked eye, which might blink or sneer, while the photograph postpones judgment until the film is developed.

Afterward, Teiji closes his eyes and does not open them for a long time. Lucy imagines that her image is framed beneath his eyelids. She climbs over him, and the narration renders their sexual encounter through the same water-and-ice imagery that first described his appearance: his ice body turns to water. Once their breathing has slowed, she remains above him, wondering how the intimacy happened so easily. She eventually lifts herself from his slender frame, feeling pink and aching, with a sensation unusually close to joy. The scene gives their relationship a beginning of physical immediacy, while leaving its emotional meaning filtered through Lucy’s vivid, uncertain recollection.

The Meeting as a Recurring Map

The first encounter becomes a point of reference for the later geography of Lucy’s relationship with Teiji. In their time together, they walk around the streets, spend time at his uncle’s noodle shop, and spend whole weekends in bed. Lucy reads Japanese novels there and practices kanji in a notebook; she recalls their favorite outings as walks in warm rain, during which Teiji teaches her words for different kinds of rainfall. These later habits make the rainy Shinjuku meeting more than an isolated coincidence: it anticipates a shared life organized around walking, weather, and looking closely.

On her all-night circuit of Tokyo, Lucy passes Akihabara, where she and Teiji had looked at cameras although he never bought any. When she reaches Shinjuku, she thinks of Sachi, the woman Teiji had found in a small theater, and wonders how much time separated Sachi’s departure from Lucy’s arrival in his life. She considers the possibility that Teiji moved from Sachi to her and then to Lily as though the three women were successive stations. That comparison recasts the first meeting as one stop in a history Lucy cannot fully know. By the end of the walk, she has covered the distance of a marathon and circled Tokyo; the city’s repeated stations hold different periods of her life, while the original rainy encounter remains the place where her attachment to Teiji began.