Shin-Okubo

Shin-Okubo enters Lucy Fly’s story as the destination of her first walk with Teiji from central Tokyo: a shift from illuminated skyscrapers to narrow backstreets, and from watching a stranger to entering his private world. It later becomes part of the northwest district associated with Teiji and a point along the remembered geography Lucy traverses during a night-long circuit of the city.

Setting and First Arrival

After meeting Teiji in the rain outside the Keio Plaza Hotel, Lucy walks with him for about twenty minutes to his apartment in Shin-Okubo. The route carries them away from the neon towers of Nishi-Shinjuku and into a different Tokyo: old houses stand between small apartment buildings, and narrow gray streets are lined with tiny shops and bars. Orange lanterns mark inexpensive eating houses; cats hiss at dogs barking from balconies. The change of setting gives the encounter a quiet, domestic direction after its public, rain-soaked beginning.

Lucy remembers that they pass puddles on the way, but Teiji takes no more photographs before they reach his apartment. There, in the lamplight with the curtains open, he photographs her naked body. The walk to Shin-Okubo thus leads directly from their first meeting to a private encounter in which the camera mediates how Lucy is seen: she recalls feeling less exposed to its unblinking gaze than to a naked eye.

Teiji’s Home and Their Routine

Teiji’s apartment is small and sparsely furnished. Lucy recalls clothes hanging from the walls, piles of books and CDs, a begonia with swimming goggles caught among its leaves, and several cameras scattered across the floor. Although photography fills the room with equipment, no photographs are displayed. The bare walls and unseen book titles leave the apartment’s contents only partly legible to Lucy, even as she tries to acquaint herself with the man she has just met.

The following morning, Teiji takes Lucy to the small noodle restaurant where he works. She later learns that the restaurant belongs to his uncle and that Teiji is expected to inherit it. Before it opens, they sit behind the scratched wooden counter and drink iced barley tea. They do not look at one another, but their bodies touch side by side, and Lucy describes absorbing Teiji’s warmth. In the life she recalls, the restaurant becomes one of the places where their largely wordless intimacy takes shape: they spend time there while he serves customers or takes out the rubbish, and Lucy reads Japanese literature and practices kanji in a notebook.

Their shared life also extends beyond the apartment and restaurant. They walk around the streets together and spend whole weekends in bed; on warm rainy nights, going out in the rain is among their favorite pursuits. Shin-Okubo belongs to a broader pattern of movement and attachment rather than serving only as a fixed backdrop: Lucy’s memories connect the neighborhood to the repeated walks and ordinary routines through which she and Teiji become close.

The Neighborhood in Lucy’s Return to the City

Later, after the rupture with Teiji and Lily, Lucy walks through the night from Gotanda, following the Yamanote Line counterclockwise. The city’s stations summon distinct periods of her life, and as she approaches the northwest she recognizes that Takadanobaba and Shin-Okubo lie in Teiji’s territory. The neighborhood is no longer simply the place reached after their first walk; it has become part of a map organized by intimacy and loss.

By the time Lucy reaches Shinjuku in the early morning, her thoughts have returned to Teiji’s former relationship with Sachi and to the possibility that one woman followed another in sequence. Shin-Okubo sits close to this remembered chain of places and relationships, though Lucy does not claim to know how much time separated the women. After walking the distance of a marathon and circling Tokyo, she returns to her starting point in Gotanda. The route makes the city feel at once familiar and emotionally altered: Shin-Okubo remains tied to the beginning of her life with Teiji, while its position in the northwest places it within the larger circuit of her recollections.