Tadao and Hiromi Asai’s flight from home is the desperate nighttime departure that breaks the daughter’s familiar life and places her in the care of a father who says there is no other way. Recalled from the perspective of Hiromi decades later, it is both a physical escape and a severing of ordinary ties: she leaves her house, school, and known surroundings without knowing what her father’s promise to make things work out will mean.

Background and Recollection

The episode returns while Hiromi is on a train, looking out at rice fields that seem unchanged. She has a brochure for an old-age home, originally given to her by Michiko Oshitani, and its presence accompanies the return of memories from thirty years earlier. The shift from the still landscape outside the carriage to the urgent domestic scene gives the departure its retrospective shape: a moment once lived in confusion is now recalled as a defining break.

At night, Hiromi is asleep in her futon when someone shakes her awake. She sees her father’s drawn, anxious face. Tadao tells her to get ready to leave immediately; after taking a deep breath and putting a hand on her shoulder, he says they are getting out because there is no other way. Hiromi notices that his eyes are red. His alarm is visible, but the reason for the urgency is not explained in the recalled scene, and she has to act without a full account of what is happening.

The Escape

Hiromi thinks of school and her future, but recognizes that staying in the house offers nothing. She packs the clothes and toiletries she can fit into her largest backpack. It is not a cold time of year, a practical detail that matters when she is carrying what she can take with her. The hurried packing makes the departure concrete: a household life is reduced to a bag, assembled before she has time to understand what lies ahead.

At around two in the morning, Tadao and Hiromi climb out through a second-floor window. Tadao fears that someone may be watching the front door, so they cross the roofs of neighboring houses with their heavy bags. Hiromi remembers that an elementary-school classmate used to climb over those same rooftops for fun; a familiar route of childhood play is transformed into a means of getting away unseen.

Once they reach street level, they trot toward the next railway station rather than their local one, where they might encounter someone they know. The alternative is five kilometers away and takes them an hour and a half to reach. They then spend a couple of sleepless hours in a small park before boarding the first train, bound for Hokuriku. The long walk and wait carry the risk of discovery into the journey itself: escape is not a single act at the window but a sequence of evasions, exhaustion, and movement away from familiar faces.

School, Secrecy, and Dependence

The train offers a destination because Tadao knows someone in Hokuriku whom he once helped through financial trouble. That person had said they would be welcome at any time, and Tadao believes he will help when told what has happened. His plan rests on an old act of assistance and a promised welcome; for Hiromi, however, it does not answer the question she asks most immediately: what will happen to her schooling?

Tadao frowns and tells her she cannot attend school for a while. If he transfers their residence registration, people will be able to track them down. He promises that she need not worry because he will work something out. Hiromi does not know what he means by that promise and keeps her doubts to herself, judging that this is not the time to ask many questions. The flight thus makes her dependent on his decisions while also showing the cost of those decisions: her education must be interrupted to keep their whereabouts from being traced.

Aftermath and Narrative Significance

The remembered flight belongs to a wider history of family separation, but the scene itself stays close to the child’s partial knowledge. Hiromi sees the red eyes, the heavy bags, the roofs, and the empty hours before the first train; she does not yet know how to interpret her father’s plan. That gap between what Tadao knows and what he tells her gives the memory its tension. His assurance is an act of care, but it cannot make the future intelligible to the girl being asked to leave it behind.

The episode also acquires added weight through the novel’s later account of Yuriko Tajima’s life after leaving her family. In a letter to Kyoichiro Kaga, Shunichi Watabe explains that Yuriko saw herself as a burden, felt guilty over her mother’s death, and became seriously depressed, doubting her capacity to raise a child. Watabe says that the sleeping face of her only son was what could bring her back from the brink of suicide. These revelations do not explain the immediate circumstances of Tadao and Hiromi’s nighttime departure, but they connect the remembered escape to the book’s larger pattern of love expressed through separation, and of family histories understood only belatedly.

The contrast between Hiromi’s silence on the train and the later arrival of Watabe’s letter is central to that structure. During the escape, she withholds her questions because there is no room for them; years later, other people’s testimony helps make a parent’s emotional life more legible. The departure is therefore more than a change of place. It is an early rupture whose meaning remains incomplete until later memories and disclosures begin to supply what the child could not know.