Hikone is a key investigative setting in the novel: the detectives travel there to learn about Michiko Oshitani’s work at Melody Air, while the city’s connection to her past opens onto a much wider inquiry into nuclear-industry labor, uncertain identities, and missing records. The movement between the company’s ordinary office and the dispersed work sites of nuclear contractors makes Hikone a local point of entry into a national, difficult-to-trace network.

Setting and the Melody Air inquiry

Michiko Oshitani worked for Melody Air, a company whose listed businesses included facilities cleaning, housekeeping, and environmental sanitation. Its office was near Hikone Station. Since Oshitani’s job took her outside the office to hospitals and care homes to arrange cleaning contracts, the detectives expected their inquiries would need to extend beyond her colleagues to the customers she had visited.

Matsumiya and Sakagami arrived in Hikone by bullet train at about 10:30 in the morning. After stopping at the Hikone Police Department as a courtesy, they went to Melody Air. Matsumiya had imagined a gleaming white building befitting a cleaning firm; instead, the office was in a low, factory-like building. The fleet of cars in the parking lot, by contrast, was spotless and white. That contrast gives the company a tangible presence in the investigation without making its outward appearance a guide to the complexity of Oshitani’s work or history.

Inside, the office resembled a small local-government office, with about ten employees at their desks. The detectives were met by branch director Morita, whose deferential manner surprised Matsumiya, who had anticipated a more authoritative figure. Morita took them to a meeting room and brought in Okumura, the sales-department section chief who had directly supervised Oshitani. The visit thus began with the practical work of locating her through her workplace, supervisor, and customers.

From a local workplace to a wider search

Hikone is the starting point for an investigation that quickly exceeds the boundaries of a single company. As the detectives pursue the identities of Watabe and Koshikawa, they confront the difficulty of tracing people who may have worked under assumed names through long chains of contractors and subcontractors. In the nuclear industry, employee records could be unavailable after years had passed; the legal retention period described by the investigators was three years for full-time employees, and it did not cover short-term workers. The resulting gaps made it plausible that a worker’s employment history might leave little discoverable trace.

The search also had to account for the scale and instability of that labor structure. The firms directly hiring workers were often small companies far down the contracting chain, while many smaller businesses withdrew from the industry after the 2011 earthquake and tsunami. Investigators across Japan contacted company owners, crew leaders, and former workers, showing how a case first pursued through Oshitani’s Hikone workplace became a distributed effort to reconstruct a scattered employment network.

Nuclear work and the meaning of place

The novel’s account of nuclear-plant employment sharpens the contrast between the stable-seeming company office in Hikone and workers’ temporary lives elsewhere. One worker describes crews moving from plant to plant, staying for a few months in dormitories provided where they were assigned, then moving on. He likens the work to day labor in construction and says he has lived this way for four years. In this system, a dormitory is a temporary home rather than a lasting address, and repeated relocation helps explain why a person might be hard to locate through conventional records.

The work itself is described as cleaning contaminated areas during inspection and maintenance. The worker says that removing radiation could involve scrubbing with cloths and brushes. This detail links the cleaning business familiar from Oshitani’s employment to a far more hazardous form of cleaning undertaken within nuclear facilities, while the subcontracting structure places workers and their employment histories at several removes from the larger institutions whose sites they service.

Hikone therefore functions less as a complete portrait of a community than as the first legible node in a dispersed investigation. Its station, local police department, and Melody Air office give the detectives a concrete route into Oshitani’s working life; the case then follows that route outward, toward mobile workers, temporary accommodation, and fragmented records. The shift in scale is central to the setting’s narrative significance: a local inquiry becomes difficult precisely because the people it seeks may have been made elusive by the organization of their work.