I love this story, but I gotta say I find the bit about the apartment weird. I expect island or rural life to have its challenges--no bleedin' jobs, for instance. But most of these places are losing people, and space is less of an issue. Finding themselves scrambling to find a cramped crappy apartment for high rent and missing out better places to people who got there first, Tokyo-style, seems unlikely. Feels more like tactical drama than their plausible lives.
Mind you, the way the job applications are fairly plentiful and formal makes me think this is maybe a bigger population centre than I imagined when they got there.
Might be because it's a seaside town, that it's a more popular destination for people, retirees, short term renters and the like.