Shinjuku

Shinjuku is where Lucy Fly first sees Teiji, beginning a relationship that reshapes her sense of solitude and belonging in Tokyo. The district later becomes both a destination in her nightly walk around the city and a threshold into memories of Teiji’s earlier relationships, making its streets a map of attachment as well as a physical place.

Setting and First Encounter

Soon after Mrs. Yamamoto’s string quartet disbands, Lucy finds herself with unfilled Sunday evenings and wanders through central Tokyo. In Nishi-Shinjuku, the high buildings strike her not as futuristic marvels but as dull hotels, banks, and government offices casting long shadows over the pavement. It is raining steadily, and she walks without an umbrella, which she considers cumbersome and dangerous among pedestrians.

In front of the Keio Plaza Hotel, a young man stands apart from the stream of umbrella-carrying people, leaning over a puddle to photograph it. Rain runs over his hair and face without seeming to trouble him. Lucy is arrested by his delicate fingers, sharp shoulder blades, and transparent brown eyes; in the neon darkness he seems made of water and ice. She steps toward the puddle to see what holds his attention. Its dirty surface divides the hotel’s reflection into illuminated windows and darkness, with cigarette butts floating in the water. Teiji keeps his eye to the camera, eventually including Lucy’s reflected feet in the photograph before looking up at her.

A Place Reached by Wandering

Shinjuku is not initially the goal of a deliberate search for companionship. Lucy describes taking the Yamanote Line to a station and walking along the tracks toward the next, or farther still; that habit brings her to Shinjuku on the night she meets Teiji. She says she did not consider herself lonely, yet could not bear to walk away from the silent, studious stranger and be alone again. The district therefore marks a shift in the meaning of her solitary roaming: a familiar practice leads, unexpectedly, to intimacy.

After their meeting, the pair walk through the streets together and spend time at Teiji’s uncle’s noodle shop. Their relationship develops through quiet companionship as well as shared routines, including reading and weekends together. In Lucy’s recollection, warm rainy nights become a favorite occasion for going out. Shinjuku’s rain thus belongs both to the encounter itself and to the atmosphere through which she later remembers her time with Teiji.

Return During the Night Walk

After learning of Teiji and Lily’s closeness and recalling their abandonment of her on the cliffs, Lucy leaves her apartment and walks through the night. She follows the Yamanote Line counterclockwise, moving from Gotanda toward Osaki and then from station to station. The journey is not simply a route home: continuing to walk gives her thoughts motion, making them less clear and less able to inflict fresh hurt. As each station brings back a different part of her life in Tokyo, the city becomes a sequence of remembered attachments and losses.

Lucy eventually reaches Shinjuku again in the early hours, only metres from the place where she first saw Teiji. There she thinks of Sachi, the woman whose photographs she had encountered in Teiji’s past, and wonders how much time separated Sachi’s departure from her own arrival in his life. She considers the possibility that Teiji moved from Sachi to her and then to Lily without pause, imagining the three women as successive stations along a track. Shinjuku’s return to the narrative therefore reopens the first encounter as a question about repetition and replacement.

Place in the City’s Emotional Map

The night walk carries Lucy through districts and landmarks associated with earlier parts of her life, including places connected to Natsuko, Bob, and Teiji. Shinjuku occupies a distinctive position in that circuit: it is not merely another station on the route, but the point where a remembered beginning meets the later knowledge of betrayal and loss. Lucy completes a marathon-length circuit of Tokyo and returns to Gotanda, showing how the city’s rail loop can hold many separate personal histories while bringing the walker back to her starting point.

As a location, Shinjuku binds observation to uncertainty. Lucy first approaches Teiji through the image he makes of a puddle and the reflection of a hotel; on her later return, she approaches the past through associations that cannot settle the exact sequence of his relationships. The district remains materially recognizable, but its meaning changes with the memories Lucy carries through it: first the scene of an encounter, then a landmark in a circular journey, and finally a place where intimacy is reconsidered in light of its possible repetition.