“the past explained in words is not the past itself”

The expression “the past explained in words is not the past itself” names a central uncertainty in Kido’s thinking about love and identity: a person’s account can never contain the whole life that formed them, and even a sincere account remains distinct from the experience it describes. As Kido considers Rié’s late husband, he asks whether love survives when the past on which it seemed to rest proves untrue.

The Past and the Present

Kido begins from the thought that the present is a consequence of the past. A person becomes who they are through circumstances, alongside the influence of genetics; under different conditions, that same person might have become someone else. To love someone now, then, is in part to love the accumulated life that made them—but that life cannot be fully conveyed in words.

The distinction is not merely between truth and a lie. Even an honest account is partial: no one can tell another person their entire past, and a spoken life story is not identical to the life itself. The expression holds open the gap between lived experience and its telling without claiming that the gap can be closed.

Love and the Uncertain Story

Kido tests the idea against the possibility of intentional deception. If the past someone disclosed diverged from the true past, he wonders, would love for that person somehow become mistaken? Would a deliberate lie make the love meaningless, or could it give rise to a new love? The questions arise as he thinks about Rié’s late husband, whose concealed identity makes the relation between a person and the story told about him especially difficult to settle.

The expression therefore does not simply expose a false story as worthless. It marks a more unsettling possibility: the account may have shaped a real attachment, even if it misrepresented the person’s history. Kido cannot resolve whether learning the truth cancels that attachment or changes what it means. The uncertainty itself is the point: love meets not an accessible, complete past, but another person as they can be known in the present.

Kido’s Marriage as a Measure

Kido turns the problem toward Kaori. She grew up near the place where she was born, attended nearby Keio University, and remained in contact with friends from middle and high school. She had shared childhood memories with him, which he knew well and had never thought to doubt. Yet he realizes that if Kaori had narrated a stranger’s life as her own, he would likely have believed her, and his understanding of her would have formed around the person that story described.

The possibility makes biography an unstable foundation for certainty: what Kido takes to be knowledge of his wife depends, in part, on what she has told him. He recognizes that Kaori might have had more reason to question his own past because he grew up far away, in Kanazawa. His early disclosure that he was third-generation Zainichi gave her a reason to regard him as sincere, but it could not make his narrated past identical to the past itself.

Historical Silence and the Limits of Knowing

The thought also resonates with what Kido has not asked Kaori about her family. Her grandfather, now in a home, would have been a young child during the Great Kantō Earthquake; her great-grandfather, long dead, would have been in his prime. Kido knows that the disaster devastated Yokohama, where fire destroyed 80 percent of the urban area, and wonders what the two men experienced amid the brutal violence that followed. Yet he has not asked Kaori’s parents, or Kaori herself.

Since the Great East Japan Earthquake, Kido and Kaori have discussed the major earthquake expected to strike the Tokyo region, but they have never compared it with the Great Kantō Earthquake. The contrast makes the limits of shared knowledge concrete: a past may remain close to a family and still go unspoken. The expression gathers this silence together with the problem of deception, insisting that neither an account nor its absence gives complete possession of another person’s history.