Haginomachi is the Sendai area where Kyoichiro Kaga’s mother, Yuriko, lived before her death. For Kaga, it is not merely a point on a map but a place bound to the unanswered question of what his mother was feeling when she left him and his father. His visit gives physical direction to an inquiry that has remained intimate and incomplete.

Place and approach

After speaking with Tokiko Kanamori, Kaga and Shuhei Matsumiya begin walking back toward the station, with time to return to Tokyo by early evening. Kaga asks to take a detour to Haginomachi, explaining that it is where his mother lived. Matsumiya immediately rejects the casual word: this is somewhere Kaga has to go, not an optional diversion. Kaga grins and agrees.

They take a train to the nearest station. On arrival, Kaga seems disoriented and studies the map on his phone before choosing a direction. The account establishes Haginomachi through this act of searching rather than through a detailed description of its streets: the place is approached as unfamiliar ground, despite its closeness to his family history.

Yuriko’s life and emotional history

The significance of Haginomachi emerges through what is later conveyed about Yuriko’s life in Sendai. In a letter delivered to Kaga, Shunichi Watabe identifies himself as the man who had been in a long relationship with Yuriko and who supplied her contact details to Yasuyo Miyamoto. He writes to explain the state of mind she had kept largely to herself. More than a year after he and Yuriko met, she suddenly told him about her family, having previously said nothing of it.

Watabe’s account describes a woman who believed she had been a burden to her husband from the beginning of their marriage. She felt responsible for the rupture between him and his family after her quarrels with her in-laws, and guilty that her mother died despite the demands Yuriko had made on her husband so she could care for her. Convinced she was of no use to anyone, she became seriously depressed and doubted her ability to raise a child. Watabe believed she may have suffered clinical depression, though he stresses that in those days the condition was not understood and Yuriko instead judged herself a complete failure.

The absent son at the center of the place

Watabe’s letter also reveals the force of Kaga’s presence in Yuriko’s life after the separation. For years, she lived with an unhealthy preoccupation with suicide; the sight of her only son asleep was what could draw her back from the brink, because she feared who would care for him if she were gone. This history gives Haginomachi a meaning that the physical visit alone cannot settle: it is connected both to Yuriko’s isolation and to the attachment that endured within it.

Kaga’s father, Takamasa, had believed Yuriko wanted to see her little boy, even briefly, before she died. He did not pursue her, in part because he blamed himself for not helping her through her mental-health problems and thought it might be better for both of them not to go after her. Kaga’s journey to Haginomachi therefore follows a history shaped by separation, guilt, and concern that could not be resolved by simply seeking Yuriko out. The visit makes the past a destination, while leaving its emotional truth dependent on the accounts and fragments that survive.