Japan’s bubble-era prosperity and subsequent downturn

Japan’s bubble-era prosperity and subsequent downturn shape the material circumstances of the story, from the boom that helps a Sendai bar thrive to the later competition that strains local businesses. The economic shifts are not merely background: they alter the prospects of Yasuyo’s restaurant and Yuriko’s bar, while the Great East Japan Earthquake and the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster bring a more decisive break in Yasuyo’s working life. Elsewhere, the difficulty of tracing a former nuclear-plant worker shows how precarious labor arrangements and the limited retention of records can make the past hard to recover.

Prosperity and a thriving bar

During Japan’s economic boom, Yasuyo’s bar consistently made money. Its growing regular clientele helped make it lively, and Yuriko began to feel at home in Sendai. The bar’s success offers a local, personal measure of prosperity: a business could draw patrons and provide a stable place for work and belonging. Yet Yuriko remained guarded even as the bar flourished, so its commercial success did not mean that every part of her life had become settled.

The downturn and local competition

Several years later, the economic bubble had collapsed, and Yasuyo’s restaurant was struggling. She wanted to offer good food at reasonable prices, but the market had become more competitive. Two new restaurants opened nearby and fought over a small pool of customers. This change contrasts with the earlier period when the bar was a consistent moneymaker: economic contraction appears not as a single dramatic event but as mounting pressure on ordinary businesses and their ability to retain customers.

The bar, too, began to suffer, though its immediate difficulty was also tied to Yuriko’s recurring health problems and absences from work. She eventually asked Yasuyo for permission to quit, explaining that she was causing problems and that Yasuyo would be better off hiring someone else. The downturn and Yuriko’s declining ability to work thus converge in a practical decision: the once successful arrangement could no longer continue as before.

Disaster and the end of Yasuyo’s businesses

More than a decade after Kaga’s visit, the Great East Japan Earthquake and the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster had become the most significant changes in Yasuyo’s surroundings. She remembered the earthquake’s destruction in her neighborhood and the losses among relatives who lived on the coast and were caught in the tsunami. Her account situates economic life within a wider regional rupture, in which the question was no longer simply whether businesses could compete for customers.

In the aftermath, Yasuyo closed both her restaurant and bar. Electricity, gas, and water had been cut off, making operation impossible; she also expected that customers would not return for some time even if she reopened. Now over seventy, she took the disaster as a fitting point for change. Savings accumulated during the boom, together with her state pension, allowed her to live comfortably, meet old friends for drinks, and take occasional trips. The same earlier prosperity that had supported her businesses therefore helped provide security after their closure.

Work, records, and the recoverability of the past

The novel also links the economic setting to the organization of nuclear-plant labor. Investigators learn that the passage of time has left no records of the relevant employment: companies were required to retain employee documents for three years only for full-time staff, while short-term workers fell outside that requirement. Work in the industry was routinely passed through layers of contractors and subcontractors, and workers might be employed under false names using forged residence cards. If Shunichi Watabe was an assumed identity, investigators would have little chance of finding a trace of him.

This account makes the downturn’s broader significance more than a matter of business fortunes. A labor system built around short-term contracts and subcontracting also leaves people difficult to identify in retrospect. Economic change, disaster, and institutional gaps all shape what can be recovered: a business can close when its infrastructure fails, while a worker’s history may vanish because the system never preserved it in the first place.

Social consequences and narrative significance

The economic and historical shifts also frame the vulnerability of family life. A vice principal later describes Hiromi as a victim of neglect: her mother’s departure amounted to neglect, in the vice principal’s view, and her father abandoned his duty of care by committing suicide. This testimony does not reduce the family’s circumstances to economic causes; rather, it places personal abandonment within a society whose conditions and institutions change over time.

Across these strands, the boom, its collapse, and the earthquake’s aftermath mark different kinds of instability. Prosperity can sustain work and routine, recession can narrow the margin on which small businesses depend, and disaster can make continued operation impossible. At the same time, employment practices determine whether a person’s past remains legible. The state’s importance lies in connecting these material changes to the story’s questions of livelihood, loss, and the limits of investigation.