Yeah exactly, in particular because I would say there were harder sentences to parse than this one? Not sure, will keep an eye out for later occurrences. (And I was all over the place in my first comment so no worries. I edited that comment just a bit)
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I showed the sentence to a native speaker and they confirmed that の connect to 瞳. And for the why of such a random comma here… they just literally say that it’s キッチン, so it’s literature and in literature writers can put comma wherever they want, and it’s not based on logic, just feeling 
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I might have been totally wrong then 
or not
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To be honest it’s hard for me to swallow such argument… Those fuzzy feeling must be based on something, some kind of internalized rules or conventions…
Instead I think you are right about not being a pause but an help for parsing . The sentence is already quite long up to this point so maybe it’s to help showing that it has to be read (見慣れた玄関に立つその人)の瞳
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I feel confident in saying that the Japanese comma has no inherent meaning whatsoever and instead only what the individual author invests it with.
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Just in case anyone was wondering, here are a couple of katakana references that you might have missed, which we talked about during the read aloud session this evening.
After the funeral: ライナスのように毛布にくるまって眠る
Linus is a character from the US comic strip Peanuts, and he always carries a blanket.
After meeting えり子 for the first time: はじめて水っていうものがわかった ヘレンみたいに、言葉が生きた姿で目の前に新鮮にはじけた。
Helen Keller (1880-1968) was left deaf and blind after a childhood illness. She learned to communicate via touch (spelling words on hands).
This is from Wikipedia: Keller’s breakthrough in communication came when she realized that the motions her teacher was making on the palm of her hand, while running cool water over her other hand, symbolized the idea of “water”. Writing in her autobiography, The Story of My Life, Keller recalled the moment. “I stood still, my whole attention fixed upon the motions of her fingers. Suddenly I felt a misty consciousness as of something forgotten — a thrill of returning thought; and somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me. I knew then that w-a-t-e-r meant the wonderful cool something that was flowing over my hand. The living word awakened my soul, gave it light, hope, set it free!”
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Ooooh, nice. I completely missed the second one. I just skipped the reference to water, since that part made no sense to me 
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might i ask really quickly…
田辺家 : is that read たなべけ？たなべうち？
け when attached to family name.
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