Prewar Japan

Prewar Japan is evoked through Soutaro’s personal history rather than shown as a sustained historical setting. His recollection links a childhood on the outskirts of Tokyo to the city’s wartime devastation and postwar reconstruction, giving the novel’s present-day streets a history of loss and change.

Childhood on Tokyo’s Edge

Soutaro was born in northern Tokyo and grew up just outside the Yamanote Line. In his prewar childhood, that position made him feel almost provincial. The boundary that once marked the edge of his world later lost its force as the city spread outward: what had been an outlying address became thoroughly metropolitan. The contrast makes urban change legible through one person’s remembered sense of place, rather than through an abstract account of development. Soutaro’s attachment to Tokyo is also expressed as local pride. He regards the city as the heart of Japan and contrasts it with his disparaging impressions of Osaka and Nagoya, which he considers respectively too loud and too showy with money. These judgments reveal his particular allegiance to the capital; they are Soutaro’s opinions, not a neutral portrait of the regions he names.

Wartime Rupture and Return

During World War II, Soutaro was evacuated to the mountains of Gumma and thereby escaped the firebombing that swept away most of his family in Tokyo. His father and younger sister survived. The account makes the war a decisive break in his relationship to the city: it removes much of his family while separating him from the place to which he remains attached. After the war, Soutaro returned determined to take part in Tokyo’s rebuilding. He and his father opened a small noodle restaurant in Takadanobaba, serving a basic dish to fellow residents of the city. The restaurant gives his return a concrete form: rebuilding is not only the recovery of a damaged city but also the creation of a family livelihood within it.

Family Time and the Novel’s Present

The account continues across generations. Soutaro’s sister married and moved to Kyushu; nineteen years later, a span that seemed to him more like nineteen months, she came back with her son. That son is Teiji, whom Lucy later knows through the noodle shop and whose uncle becomes her remaining link to him. The compressed sense of elapsed time brings the family’s history forward into Lucy’s present without making the prewar years a directly narrated sequence of scenes. The novel sets this inherited history against a Tokyo Lucy knows through repeated journeys on foot. Her route around the Yamanote Line passes stations and neighborhoods attached to different phases of her life, including places associated with friends and with Teiji. The contemporary city is not Soutaro’s prewar Tokyo: it has expanded beyond the boundary he remembers. Yet both accounts make place a record of time, where altered streets and familiar routes hold the traces of people who have left or been lost.

Narrative Significance

Prewar Japan matters chiefly as the beginning of a personal chronology that runs through evacuation, wartime family loss, return, rebuilding, and the next generation. Soutaro’s history gives the restaurant where Teiji works a past reaching beyond Lucy’s relationship with him, while the city’s transformation places that family story within a changing urban landscape. The period is therefore present as remembered context: its consequences persist in Tokyo’s geography and in the family connections that shape the novel’s later events.