“You just can’t trust a house”

“You just can’t trust a house” is May Kasahara’s verdict on the Miyawaki house after its family vanishes. To her, the house’s apparent indifference to the people who had cared for it makes a home seem capable of abandoning its history: a place can hold years of domestic happiness, then stand as though it never knew its inhabitants. The phrase gives sharp words to a recurring unease in the novel, where houses and other enclosed places do not guarantee belonging, safety, or continuity.

The House Before and After the Disappearance

May recalls the Miyawakis as a family whose home seemed serenely happy. The two daughters appeared kind, the family seemed always to be laughing, and even the dog seemed part of that happiness. Although May was not close to them and spoke to them only in passing, she watched their house from her window often enough that their everyday life became part of her own imaginative landscape.

Then the family and their German shepherd disappeared, leaving the house behind. For about a week, neighbors did not realize what had happened; May first took the dark windows for a sign that the family was away. When she learned that they had absconded, the empty house seemed to change character. It did not look bereaved or battered. Instead, May saw it as wearing an expression of blank denial, as if it had never heard of the Miyawakis.

That apparent self-sufficiency is what provokes her anger. May imagines the house as having shared in the family’s happiness: it had been built by Mr. Miyawaki and lovingly maintained, and the clean laundry and lively household had made it more than a structure. Yet once the family was gone, the house seemed to have no memory or obligation toward them. Her accusation that a house cannot be trusted arises from this gulf between the home as the family experienced it and the vacant building that remains.

May’s Watching and the Long Vacant Years

The house’s vacancy was not a brief impression for May. It stood outside her window while she studied, or pretended to study, through clear weather, rain, snow, and typhoons. As the years passed, she tried less and less to ignore it, sometimes spending half an hour simply looking at the house. Bird droppings and weeds replaced the signs of care; the clean laundry that had once moved in the wind belonged to a vanished domestic life.

May’s attention makes the empty house part of her own experience even though she had barely known the family. She compares herself to an incidental figure visible in the corner of a family photograph: someone not belonging to the household, yet caught within its image. Because she repeatedly watched the Miyawakis’ life from outside, their disappearance seems to take something of her with them. The house remains in place, but the happiness she attached to it has no visible witness or keeper.

The Phrase in the Novel’s Spatial Pattern

The house’s uneasy independence resonates with the novel’s other unsettled spaces. The narrow alley beside the Okada home had once served as a shortcut between two streets, but housing development and neighbors’ barriers closed its ends. Reduced to a passage with no way through, it became an overgrown buffer zone that people no longer used. Its physical enclosure reflects a larger uncertainty about whether a place remains what it was made to be once access, use, and human connection have been withdrawn.

For Toru Okada, the alley is also a route to the vacant Miyawaki property and its well. During his search for the missing cat, he moves through the alley in an unnatural quiet, feeling that clouds have absorbed not only sound but perception. Later, after emerging from the well, he returns to the alley and senses that a new reality has displaced the familiar neighborhood. The physical surroundings are recognizable, yet his relation to them has altered.

Eventually the Miyawaki house and yard are demolished. Toru looks through gaps in a high plank fence at flattened, dark earth, with no house, paving stones, well, trees, antenna, or bird sculpture remaining. The disappearance of the structure makes May’s distrust newly tangible: the house that seemed to outlast its family is itself erased, while the ground offers little proof of what once occupied it. Across these scenes, the novel treats houses not as reliable containers of memory but as places whose meaning can change, vanish, or refuse to match the lives once lived within them.