Teiji’s departure from Tokyo for Hokkaido is a quiet but decisive separation: after a weekend on Sado Island, he returns changed, leaves a note and undeveloped film at the family noodle shop, and disappears north. Neither his note nor the photographs explain his reasons. For Lucy, who later learns even his surname from the police, the departure makes a man she had loved seem more elusive than ever.

Background in Tokyo

Before he left, Teiji’s life was tied to a noodle shop in Takadanobaba and to the quiet routines he shared with Lucy. His uncle Soutaro had grown up in northern Tokyo, was evacuated during the war, and returned to help rebuild the city. He and his father opened the shop, where they served noodles to local residents. Soutaro expected the business eventually to pass to his sister’s son, Teiji, who had come to Tokyo from Kyushu after his mother returned there with him.

Soutaro’s initial doubts about his nephew gave way to respect. Though he had thought the thin, brooding boy might not be suited to work, Teiji proved strong and diligent, mopping floors, throwing out old food, and preparing ingredient orders. He worked through the day, then went out in the evenings. In the shop’s future, Soutaro saw a family succession: he had never married and liked the thought that his nephew would inherit the business. But Teiji’s camera and his solitary habits made him a source of increasing concern. Soutaro wondered why he had no friends apart from Lucy, the foreign girl who spent time with him.

Lucy’s bond with Teiji had formed through shared presence more than speech. She had been walking Tokyo’s Yamanote Line and found herself in Shinjuku on the night they met. They developed silent conversations and gestures, walked the streets, and spent time at the noodle shop while Teiji served customers and took out rubbish. They also spent weekends together, often going out into the rain on warm nights. This intimacy makes his eventual departure more than a change of address: it leaves Lucy without the companion around whom her private life in Tokyo had taken shape.

The Departure

Soutaro had been ready to speak to Teiji about marriage, and hoped he would choose a wife who was not a foreigner. The sequence that followed unsettled that expectation. Teiji went away for a weekend on Sado Island; when he returned, he seemed jumpy and nervous. A couple of weeks later, he left a note on the shop counter, pinned beneath a roll of undeveloped film. The note said he was going north to Hokkaido to try his luck.

The account supplies no further explanation of what Teiji intended by trying his luck, or of what had happened on Sado Island to make him return nervous. Soutaro’s thoughts about marriage belong to the background, but the narrative does not establish that they caused Teiji to leave. The note communicates a destination and a broad intention, not a plan, a promise to return, or an account of his state of mind. That gap is central to the event: Teiji makes a deliberate departure, yet withholds the context that might let those left behind understand it.

What He Leaves Behind

Soutaro had hoped the film might offer a clue. Once it was developed, however, the pictures showed deserted beaches, railway tracks without trains, boarded-up buildings, and abandoned trash cans. He turned them around and examined them from different angles, then put on old three-dimensional glasses from a wildlife magazine and looked again. The photographs remained images of emptiness rather than a message he could decipher. Soutaro eventually threw them away.

The departure also dismantled the future Soutaro had imagined for the shop. With a bad back and no prospect of continuing the business without Teiji, he retired and sold it to a stranger. At home, he began sketching flowers and birds against backgrounds of deserted places. His conclusion that he would not see Teiji again gives the move north the weight of a permanent loss, even though the evidence offered is a note and an absence rather than confirmation of what became of Teiji.

Lucy’s Knowledge and the Aftermath

Lucy encounters the departure indirectly, during police questioning. When an officer identifies her relationship with Matsuda Teiji and reports that his uncle says he is in Hokkaido, she denies knowing anyone by that name. The surname itself shocks her: after living with Teiji’s presence, she realizes she had somehow never registered or retained his family name. The police’s information confirms that he has left Tokyo, but does not restore the sense that she knows him. Instead, she feels that he has eluded her.

After Lily and Teiji’s betrayal, Lucy walks through the night along the Yamanote Line, moving counterclockwise from Gotanda and passing places attached to different periods of her life. In Shinjuku, near the spot where she first saw Teiji, she thinks of Sachi and wonders whether Teiji moved from Sachi to her and then to Lily without a pause. This is Lucy’s speculation, not an explanation of Teiji’s departure; the remembered route turns the city into a map of relationships she can no longer trust. Later, when she imagines a visitor might be Teiji, she recalls that he is in Hokkaido and believes the police will not find him in the city or the mountains. The imagined reunion disappears before it can answer her question about why he left.

Narrative Significance

The event is narrated through separated recollections and partial knowledge: Soutaro sees the note and studies the developed film, while Lucy learns from the police where Teiji has gone and tries to fit that fact into her memories. The different viewpoints do not combine into a full explanation. The film’s empty landscapes echo the absence left by the departure, but they cannot establish Teiji’s motives or what he will do in Hokkaido.

His leaving also reverses the intimacy of the earlier Tokyo scenes. Rain, shared walks, and silent gestures had made Lucy feel close to him; after he goes, even his surname becomes a missing piece of their history. Hokkaido is both a concrete destination reported by the police and a distance that keeps Teiji outside Lucy’s reach. The departure therefore functions as a break in their relationship and as a lasting uncertainty: he has gone north, but the people he leaves behind cannot turn that fact into an answer.