Ryotsu is the fishing town on Sado Island where Lucy Fly, Lily Bridges, and Teiji first come ashore during their island trip. Seen through Lucy’s recollection, it is both a point of arrival and a place of fleeting ease: the trio wanders its small streets, plays together, and then leaves by moped for the coast. The town’s importance lies less in an extended stay than in the passage it marks, from the mainland to an unfamiliar island and from shared anticipation to a fragile moment of intimacy.

Arrival at the Island

The ferry journey from Niigata takes more than an hour across a calm sea, reaching Ryotsu in the late afternoon. As the travelers leave the ferry, Lily Bridges studies the dark mountains behind the town, turning her gaze from side to side as she takes in their severe appearance. Teiji, by contrast, turns toward the rugged bay they have just entered. A gust of wind catches him as he walks backward; he spins, staggers as if about to fall, then springs upright. Lucy laughs at his unsteady, almost theatrical movement. Their different responses give the arrival its first character: Lily attends to the land’s imposing outline, while Teiji plays with the motion and exposure of the crossing.

The ferry has carried them away from Honshu toward what Lucy associates with bad fortune and exile. Yet she recalls being deliriously happy as the mainland disappeared and the group approached Sado Island. Ryotsu therefore begins the island stay as a threshold charged with contrasting ideas: departure and ill omen on one side, holiday excitement and shared possibility on the other.

Streets and Shared Play

In Ryotsu, the three walk through narrow back streets with the smell of fish in the air, run around corners, and peer through the windows of small wooden houses. Teiji picks up a discarded piece of fishing net and chases Lucy through the sleepy streets. The people who see them smile and appear untroubled by his small act of taking the net. For a moment, the town is not a backdrop for formal sightseeing but a place where the visitors’ exuberance spills into ordinary streets and draws a friendly local response.

Lucy hides between two houses. When Teiji approaches, she charges out and tries to wrest the net from him. He turns with a broad smile, pulls the net over both of them, and gently pushes her back into her hiding place. As he tries to kiss her, a tiny strand of rope falls from the net, brushes his cheek, and touches his shoulder. Mistaking it for an animal or insect, he cries out and slaps at his neck; Lucy laughs so hard that she falls, pulling him down with her. Lily Bridges runs up to find them tangled together and laughing, then blushes and steps back. The net’s stray strand turns a flirtatious pursuit into slapstick, while Lily’s arrival makes her an onlooker to a moment of closeness between Lucy and Teiji.

Departure and Narrative Significance

After the laughter, Lily helps them up and they return the net. The three had planned to rent a car to tour Sado Island, but at the rental shop they find themselves drawn instead to the mopeds and bicycles on display. Lily favors the idea as fun; Teiji is reluctant to be enclosed in a car when another option is available. Lucy wants the freedom of riding through the island’s plains and along the coast without sharing the confined air of a car, while still imagining her two friends traveling beside her on their own vehicles.

They rent mopeds and leave Ryotsu for the coastal road, riding onward toward Nyuukawa and the northern cape. The town is thus a brief hinge in the trip rather than its destination: the ferry deposits the travelers there, its streets furnish an unscripted scene of shared laughter, and the choice of mopeds carries them away into a more open landscape. In Lucy’s recollection, Ryotsu holds a bright interval of togetherness whose ease is made especially vivid by the knowledge that the three friends’ closeness will not remain secure.