In Chapter 23, Naomi observes Nomura‑obasan’s now‑empty bed and notices the subtle transformation left by her absence:

The quilt of blue and white squares on her cot is strangely straight and orderly, as if a hill had suddenly been flattened into a farmer’s field.

This simile compares the neatly flattened quilt to a hill abruptly pressed into a flat farmer’s field. The image vividly conveys the absence of Nomura‑obasan, whose sleeping body had once formed the “hill” in the quilt. With her departure, the once‑lived‑in bed appears unnaturally rigid, stripped of warmth and vitality.

By evoking a farmer’s field, the simile situates this domestic moment within a larger, natural frame. A field is a place of labor, human touch, and cyclical life, yet here the field is unnaturally imposed, suggesting a quiet finality—life has been pressed out of the room. This figurative comparison captures a tension between motion and stillness, between the energy of human presence and the flatness of absence.

The simile also reflects the narrator’s childlike perception: she processes displacement and loss through concrete, tactile imagery drawn from the natural world. A quilt is not just a household object; in Naomi’s gaze, it becomes a landscape that mirrors her emotional environment. This layered figurative moment underscores the novel’s tone of meditative sadness, where even small domestic details carry the weight of change and the echo of impermanence.