Ue o Muite Arukou

Ue o Muite Arukou is a song whose significance for Lucy lies in its return: once associated with a night shared with others, it resurfaces as she walks alone through Tokyo, making music an intimate route into memory and loss.

The Song and Shared Memory

During her night walk, Lucy passes Yoyogi Park and hears the song again, recalling that they sang it together on an earlier night. The passage does not dwell on lyrics or explain the song’s full meaning; instead, its recognizable sound is enough to summon a scene of shared experience. The distance between that earlier togetherness and Lucy’s solitary walk gives the recollection its force.

Return During the Tokyo Walk

Lucy’s walk begins after days of refusing to answer Lily’s repeated calls. She sets out from Gotanda without a destination, follows the Yamanote Line counterclockwise, and continues from station to station through the night. Familiar places bring back different parts of her life in the city, while thoughts of Lily and Teiji recur alongside memories of their desertion of Lucy on the cliffs. When she reaches the road beside Yoyogi Park, the song becomes one more point at which the route and the past meet.

Lucy cries as she hears it, but does not lift her head to stop the tears, despite the song’s instruction. The gesture makes the recollection more than a comforting return: she allows grief to be physically visible, alone in the street. She then continues toward her office in Shibuya and eventually reaches Gotanda again, having walked the distance of a marathon and circled Tokyo.

Meaning and Recurrence

The song links a remembered night of companionship to the present separation from Teiji and Lily. Its recurrence does not resolve Lucy’s grief or restore the earlier group; it sharpens the contrast between the people who once sang together and Lucy’s solitary passage through the city. In the structure of the walk, the song is both a particular memory and a sound encountered again along a circular route: the past returns, but Lucy arrives back where she began without recovering what she has lost.