Yamanote Line

The Yamanote Line gives Lucy a way to move through Tokyo without choosing a destination, and later becomes the path along which she revisits the people and places that shaped her life there. Its circular route links an early, tentative encounter with Teiji to a night of grief and estrangement: after walking a marathon around the city, Lucy returns to Gotanda, where she started.

The line as a way of wandering

After Mrs. Yamamoto’s death, Lucy often travels by taking the Yamanote Line to a station and walking along the tracks toward the next one, or farther. She does not describe herself as lonely, but remembers that, on the night she met Teiji in Shinjuku, she could not bear to leave him and be alone again. The route therefore begins as more than practical transport: it lets Lucy drift through the city while making an unexpected meeting possible.

The line also provides a structure for her memory. Lucy recalls twenty-eight stations arranged like beads in a necklace, each one a distinct place rather than an interchangeable stop. As she walks, stations call up particular episodes, acquaintances, and former versions of her life. The railway connects these memories geographically, while the return to familiar places makes the city feel at once intimate and difficult to leave behind.

Shinjuku and the beginning with Teiji

Lucy’s first meeting with Teiji takes place in Shinjuku after she has been walking around Tokyo. On a rainy night near the Keio Plaza Hotel, she notices him photographing a puddle. She approaches, and his photograph includes her feet reflected in the water. The meeting makes the line’s wandering pattern consequential: Lucy had been moving between stations without a fixed purpose, yet that movement brought her to the person with whom she would form an intense attachment.

Their early life together also grows out of walking and returning. They move through the streets, spend time at his uncle’s noodle shop, and go out in warm rain. Later, Lucy remembers this period as one in which the rainy season seemed to recur continually. Shinjuku thus becomes both an actual point on her urban route and the remembered threshold of a relationship that will shape how she experiences the rest of the city.

The station-to-station walk

The line becomes a setting for separation at Tokyo Station. After the trip to Sado Island, Lucy and Lily say goodbye to Teiji and head through the underground passages toward their separate platforms. Lucy is travelling clockwise and Lily counterclockwise; their platforms face one another. Lucy looks across before her train arrives, cannot see Lily where she expects her to be, and runs to search the other platform. Lily is gone. The opposing directions and facing platforms make their parting visible as a split within a route that otherwise encircles the city.

On the fourth day after Lucy has cut herself off from Lily and Teiji, she leaves her apartment in the evening and walks counterclockwise from Gotanda toward Osaki. Memories of Lily and Teiji, including the handkerchief and ice cream they exchanged and their desertion of Lucy on the cliffs, return as she moves. Lucy keeps walking because movement makes her thoughts faster and less clear, and therefore less able to inflict fresh pain. When she reaches each station, its familiarity gives her a sense of homecoming, even as the walk carries her farther from home.

The route passes through places loaded with separate histories. At Shinbashi, Lucy recalls waiting for Natsuko before travelling to Odaiba; at Yurakucho, she remembers eating with Bob beneath the railway arches. She continues past Tokyo Station and Kanda, then Akihabara, where she and Teiji once looked at cameras, and Ameyoko, where she shopped with Natsuko. Ueno recalls her first-year visit to see the cherry blossoms, while Yanaka brings back the cemetery where she sat before going to Mrs. Yamamoto’s house. In this sequence, the line’s stations do not merely mark distance: each gives Lucy a concrete point from which a different memory surfaces.

As the night continues, Lucy passes Komagome, Ikebukuro, Takadanobaba, and Shin-Okubo, moving toward Teiji’s territory. She sometimes loses sight of the tracks and makes her way along side streets until she finds them again. In the early hours she reaches Shinjuku, close to the place where she first saw Teiji. There she thinks of Sachi and wonders whether Teiji moved from Sachi to Lucy and then from Lucy to Lily as if they were consecutive stops along a track. The railway’s sequence offers Lucy an image for a succession of relationships, though it cannot tell her how much time or feeling lay between them.

Return and significance

From Shinjuku, Lucy walks past Yoyogi Park and hears again the song she and Teiji and Lily sang there. She continues to her office in Shibuya, a place she thinks she may still be able to regard as home without either Teiji or Lily. As morning begins, she walks from Ebisu to Meguro and finally arrives back at Gotanda. She has covered the distance of a marathon and circled Tokyo.

The completed circuit gives the line a double force. Its stations hold Lucy’s attachments in specific locations, but walking through them does not restore those relationships; instead, familiar places expose how much has changed. The route ends at its starting point, while Lucy returns to an apartment where the telephone is still ringing and runs a hot bath for her aching feet. The Yamanote Line’s loop thus shapes both the geography and the form of her recollection: the walk can bring her back to where she began, but not to the life she had before the losses that set her moving.