Niigata Prefecture appears as the home base in the account of Kosuke Sato, a professional pickpocket who travelled elsewhere to steal from train passengers. The contrast between his family routine in a small fishing village and his extensive criminal activity makes the prefecture a point of departure in the book’s portrait of his double life.

Setting and Association

Sato lived in a small fishing village in Niigata Prefecture. The account does not identify the village by name or otherwise describe the prefecture; its specific connection to the narrative is as the place where Sato’s household remained while he spent weekdays away.

Sato’s Journeys and Home Life

Sato told his wife that he was helping a friend run a bar in Tokyo. In fact, he travelled by train to Tokyo, Osaka, or one of ten other prefectures, spending his days at pachinko parlors or saunas and stealing from passengers at night. He returned home on weekends, paid the bills, and gave his wife what the account estimates as about a thousand dollars a week. Niigata thus anchors the domestic routine that accompanied his journeys and concealed their purpose from his family.

Narrative Significance

The passage places Sato’s home in Niigata alongside the scale and regularity of his crimes: by his own account, he committed 420 thefts in less than a year, though he may not have kept complete records. He was arrested by Omiya police while stealing on a train, not in his home village. The distinction between his Niigata residence, his far-ranging work, and the place of his arrest gives the location a precise role in the episode: it marks the private life maintained alongside a mobile criminal practice.