43 pages • 1-hour read
Earthlings
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Chapters 3-4Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of emotional abuse, physical abuse, child abuse, child sexual abuse, graphic violence, and death.
Chapter 3 Summary
As a 34-year-old woman, Natsuki walks home through her neighborhood, thinking that her younger self’s ideas about the Baby Factory still hold true. At her condo, her husband, Tomoya, tends to his plants. Later, she visits her former classmate Shizuka, who pressures her to have a baby.
Back home, Natsuki opens a tin box containing Piyyut, the marriage pledge, and the wire ring. She remembers her promise to Yuu, her Popinpobopian identity, and the rules of her marriage.
Natsuki explains that she met Tomoya three years earlier through a website for people looking for unconventional arranged marriages. They agreed to an asexual marriage with separate rooms, giving the appearance of a married couple in order to escape the Factory’s demands.
After Tomoya loses his job, he expresses a wish to visit Akishina. Over the years, Natsuki has told him many stories about the place, building it up to be ideal. Reluctantly, Natsuki asks her family for permission to stay there. She discovers that Uncle Teruyoshi owns it now and that Yuu has been staying there. Natsuki’s family resists, but an aunt intervenes, pointing out that the incident between Natsuki and Yuu was a long time ago, and Natsuki’s husband will be with her. Finally, the family agrees.
Natsuki and Tomoya travel to Akishina. She introduces Tomoya to Yuu, whom she hasn’t seen for 23 years. The house feels smaller than Natsuki remembers. Over dinner, Tomoya describes their worldview to Yuu, calling society the Factory and explaining their Popinpobopian perspective, which values logic above all else.
Chapter 4 Summary
The narrative flashes back 23 years, to the time after the incident in Akishina. At home, Natsuki’s family confines her, locking her in her room. She is not allowed to leave her room, or the house, without supervision.
Mr. Igasaki, her cram-school teacher, calls Natsuki’s home. Natsuki overhears his phone conversation with her mother, in which they decide that she will return to his class. Her mother puts her on the phone with Igasaki, and afterward, Natsuki realizes that she cannot hear out of that ear anymore.
The next day, Natsuki goes to cram school, and afterward, Mr. Igasaki gives her his house key and tells her to go to his house the next day. That night, Piyyut, her stuffed hedgehog, warns her that Mr. Igasaki is possessed by a Wicked Witch and gives her a mission.
Natsuki sneaks out of the house. In the garden shed, she finds her father’s scythe (taken from Akishina). She goes to Mr. Igasaki’s house and goes to his bedroom. In an out-of-body state, she attacks a form she perceives as a “blue lump,” repeating the name Popinpobopia as golden liquid spurts out. She continues to attack until Piyyut tells her that it is enough.
Natsuki goes to the school, burns her bloodied clothes and the scythe in the school incinerator, and returns home. She develops a fever and recovers as summer ends. When she returns to school in the fall, Shizuka tells her that Mr. Igasaki has been murdered by a stalker, and Natsuki and her classmates help Igasaki’s parents hand out flyers.
Natsuki becomes uncertain about whether she killed the Wicked Witch and what happened to Mr. Igasaki. Searching for proof of her actions, she finds only stains on her backpack. Piyyut thanks her for killing the Wicked Witch, reveals that Natsuki has always been a Popinpobopian. However, he tells her, the spaceship has left, and she is stranded on Earth. He then falls silent forever, and her magical tools lose their power.
Chapters 3-4 Analysis
Chapter 3 further establishes the novel’s central ideological conflict by codifying the protagonists’ alienation into a systematic worldview, defined in opposition to Natsuki’s construct of the Factory. Natsuki and Tomoya’s platonic, asexual marriage is not merely an unconventional relationship, but a deliberate strategy designed to evade the pressures of the Factory—a society that they see as solely structured around the reproduction of human beings. Natsuki perceives society as a dehumanizing system where individuals are reduced to components for manufacturing new life. This conceptual framework is the foundation for the theme of The Destructive Nature of Societal Conformity, portraying social norms not as benign traditions but as a form of coercion. Their marriage, governed by strict rules of separation, functions as a shield for both Natsuki and Tomoya, allowing them to present a facade of “normalcy” that gives them the ability to avoid scrutiny. Tomoya’s explicit statement to Yuu that he married Natsuki “in order to divert the attention of the Factory” clarifies that their union is a calculated act of resistance (129).
The journey back to Akishina functions as a narrative device for exploring the unreliability of memory and the dual nature of the sanctuary as both refuge and a site of trauma. For Natsuki, Akishina exists as a potent internal landscape, meticulously preserved for 23 years, and she has built Tomoya’s understanding of Akishina through idealized stories of her youth. Upon her return, however, this mental construct collides with a diminished reality; the river is a “tiny shallow stream,” and the house itself feels smaller (121). This discrepancy between nostalgic memory and physical reality underscores that the past cannot be a stable haven. The return is further complicated by the presence of Uncle Teruyoshi, whose quiet admission of adult failings serves as a rare external validation of Natsuki’s childhood experience, subtly indicting the world that failed to protect her and Yuu. Consequently, Akishina transforms from a symbol of lost innocence into a liminal space, simultaneously representing the origin of Natsuki’s trauma, the birthplace of her pact for Survival as an Act of Radical Rebellion, and the potential location for its fulfillment. The objects from her tin box—Piyyut, the marriage pledge, the wire ring—act as tangible links to this past, anchoring the alternative identity she must now re-inhabit.
Chapter 4’s abrupt shift into an extended flashback plunges the narrative from the fragile stability of the present into the dissociative logic of Natsuki’s childhood trauma. This structural choice is crucial to the novel’s theme of Deconstructing the Logic of Human Norms, as it presents events through the subjective filter of Natsuki’s traumatized mind. The flashback is an immersive recreation of the psychological mechanisms Natsuki developed to survive, a world governed by magical thinking, where Piyyut is a real emissary. The prose mirrors this fractured consciousness, detailing out-of-body experiences and sensory distortions. This technique dissolves the boundary between fantasy and reality, presenting Natsuki’s psychological reactions as a necessary adaptation to an unbearable situation. By framing the murder of Mr. Igasaki as a heroic battle against a “blue lump” to save the world from a Wicked Witch, the narrative presents an internally consistent logic wherein a horrific act of violence becomes a justifiable, even necessary, act of self-preservation.
Within this flashback, the symbol of Piyyut evolves from a transitional object into the primary manifestation of Natsuki’s alternative identity. He is the voice of her survival instinct, externalized and given authority. Piyyut’s commands provide Natsuki with both the impetus and the justification for lethal action, transforming her from a victim into a “warrior for justice” (140). This process allows her to commit an act of extreme violence without internalizing the identity of a murderer; instead, she is a hero fulfilling a mission. The culmination of this psychological process is Piyyut’s final revelation that Natsuki has always been a stranded Popinpobopian. This statement provides a permanent, non-negotiable identity that explains her lifelong alienation. By confirming that she is not a broken Earthling but a stranded alien, Piyyut completes the construction of a new reality for Natsuki, one that recasts her outsider status as a result of her otherworldly nature. His subsequent silence signifies the completion of this psychic transformation; the scaffolding of magic is no longer needed once the identity is fully formed.
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