Jehovah’s Witnesses

Jehovah’s Witnesses are the faith in which Aomamé was raised, a community whose rejection of blood transfusions shapes her understanding of religious authority, childhood vulnerability, and the family she later leaves behind. The novel neither treats all believers as malicious nor softens the danger Aomamé sees in a doctrine that places a child’s life under a religious choice the child cannot meaningfully evaluate. Her estrangement from the faith becomes a decisive break with her parents and a past she tries, unsuccessfully, to abandon.

Faith and childhood

Aomamé’s parents are described as fervent Jehovah’s Witnesses who remain committed to the faith in adulthood. Their religious life is not presented only as an episode from her childhood: their continuing belief helps define the distance between them and their daughter after she leaves home. Aomamé’s experience of the community is one of psychological suffering, and she later understands that history as a wound whose effects persist even after she has rejected the faith.

The most consequential teaching discussed is the prohibition against blood transfusions. Aomamé remembers that the doctrine was taught to children early and framed as an absolute choice: accept a transfusion and risk divine punishment, or refuse it, die with body and spirit pure, and attain paradise. There is no compromise in the terms as she recalls them. The starkness of that choice matters because the people expected to make it are children, still dependent on their parents and not yet equipped to distinguish religious instruction from scientific evidence.

Aomamé recognizes the asymmetry between adult authority and a child’s capacity to judge. A child cannot independently test the claims on which the decision rests; she can only accept what her parents teach and believe them. Looking back, Aomamé concludes that, had she faced the need for a transfusion as a child, she would have listened to her parents and refused treatment, with death as the consequence. The episode gives her criticism its force: the issue is not merely disagreement over belief, but the possibility that doctrine may direct a child toward a fatal choice before the child can assess it.

Leaving the faith and family

The Dowager tells Aomamé that her parents are still devoted Jehovah’s Witnesses and that they never forgave her for abandoning the faith. Aomamé acknowledges this without disputing it. Her departure is thus both a religious separation and a lasting family rupture, not a difference that has been reconciled over time.

Aomamé has an older brother, four years her senior, whom she remembers as gentle. Unlike her, he followed their parents’ instructions and continued as a believer after she left the family home. She wonders what became of him, but does not actually want news of her family. In her understanding, they belong to a completed part of her life, and the connection has been severed. The contrast between her brother’s continued faith and her own departure makes the break personal as well as doctrinal.

Her decision to leave does not free her from the history she associates with the faith. Aomamé has made repeated efforts to forget everything that happened before she was ten, declaring to herself that her life truly began at that age and treating what came earlier as a miserable dream. Yet the past returns despite this attempted division of her life into a before and an after. She recognizes that much of what she does remains rooted in those early experiences. The remembered childhood is not a closed chapter simply because she has chosen to leave the community.

The novel’s treatment of religious authority

Aomamé’s account keeps two judgments in view. She does not claim that every member of Jehovah’s Witnesses is insincere or cruel: in her comparison with the abuse she associates with the Pioneers, she recalls the fellow believers around her as thoughtful and sincere, serious about their faith and willing to live by it even at personal risk. But she also concludes that sincere motives do not guarantee just effects. The contrast prevents personal integrity among believers from resolving the danger she identifies in doctrine and authority.

The Dowager condemns the refusal of necessary surgery on the basis of a literal interpretation of biblical writing, arguing that such a rule could leave a seriously ill or injured child to die. Aomamé’s recollection supplies the child’s perspective on that danger: the doctrinal choice is presented as spiritually absolute at an age when a child cannot independently judge its claims. The resulting tension is central to the novel’s treatment of the faith. Respect for the seriousness of individual believers coexists with an unsparing account of what their religious commitments may require of a child.

Jehovah’s Witnesses also serves as a point of contrast in Aomamé’s perception of the Pioneers. She distinguishes the community she knew from the sexual threats and violations associated with that other group; she does not describe herself as having faced such threats within her own faith. Yet this distinction does not make her childhood harmless. For Aomamé, the deeper injury includes psychological suffering and a doctrine that, in a medical crisis, could place obedience ahead of a child’s survival. The contrast clarifies her judgment without collapsing different forms of harm into one.

Memory and narrative significance

Aomamé’s effort to declare her life begun at ten gives her remembered childhood a particular narrative shape: she tries to cast the years before that point out of her personal story, yet repeatedly finds that later actions remain connected to them. Her family’s continuing religious commitment, her brother’s decision to remain a believer, and the transfusion teaching are not detached background details. Together, they explain why leaving home did not end the influence of her upbringing.

Her past is also part of the emotional weight she brings to Tsubasa’s situation. Aomamé sees in the child a reminder of herself at the same age and fears that suffering may leave lasting effects. The comparison draws her attention to what might have happened to her, and to how difficult it can be for a child to recover from what adults and institutions impose. Jehovah’s Witnesses is therefore presented both as the community of Aomamé’s upbringing and as the origin of a difficult question running through her reflections: how far a child can be held responsible for beliefs and choices formed under parental authority. Her rejection of the faith ends one form of obedience; it does not erase the childhood from which she is still trying to separate herself.