Tokyo Ueno Station

Without water, there is no life. Therefore, it is ironic that in this book, water symbolizes death more often than not. It has an almost suffocating presence, and many of the scenes described have in common a profusion of rain, wetness, and dampness. The end of the book is punctuated by catastrophic flooding that causes extreme death.

Water repeatedly appears in scenes related to death. Kazu repeats “it was raining” when he and Setsuko go to the morgue after Koichi’s death (50), though ironically, it is bright and sunny when he carries Koichi’s coffin out of the house. It is similarly raining when Kazu discovers Setsuko’s body, the second major loss in his life. Water appears in less concrete ways, too; when his mother calls him unlucky, Kazu compares her words to rain, and he also dreams of a bath scene shortly before his death by suicide. The one form of water that does not appear in these scenes is tears: Kazu repeatedly mentions his own inability to cry, a sign that grief, for him, manifests primarily as shock and denial.

As the novel enters into its final section, Kazu describes an unrelenting, cold rain. He feels himself becoming sick.