Dedicated to Professor Vsevolod Alekseevich Solonnikovon the occasion of his 75th birthday.Abstract. We consider the free boundary problem of the Navier-Stokes equation with surface tension. Our initial domain Ω is one of a bounded domain, an exterior domain, a perturbed halfspace or a perturbed layer in R n (n ≥ 2). We report a local in time unique existence theorem in the space W 2,1) with some T > 0, 2 < p < ∞ and n < q < ∞ for any initial data which satisfy compatibility condition. Our theorem can be proved by the standard fixed point argument based on the Lp-Lq maximal regularity theorem for the corresponding linearized equations. Our results cover the cases of a drop problem and an ocean problem that were studied by Solonnikov [15,16,18,19], Beale [3] and Tani [21].