Memory, unreliable recollection, and self-deception

Memory, unreliable recollection, and self-deception shape both what Etsuko remembers and how she interprets it. Recalling a brief friendship with Sachiko while reflecting on Keiko’s death, Etsuko recognizes that the past may not have happened as she now sees it; yet her account also reveals how difficult it is to separate one memory from another, or protective intentions from the harm they caused.

Retrospective knowledge and its limits

Etsuko’s recollections are framed by a visit from her daughter Niki in April, after Keiko’s death. Niki has come partly out of a sense of mission: she wants to reassure her mother that the choices she made in the past do not make her responsible for Keiko’s death. Etsuko describes Niki as affectionate, but the visit is not simply a conversation about bereavement. It becomes the occasion for Etsuko to remember Sachiko, someone she had not thought about for a long time.

Etsuko sets a limit on the authority of that recollection. She says she never knew Sachiko well and that their friendship lasted only several weeks one summer, many years earlier. The small scale of the relationship contrasts with the importance it acquires in her present account. Her retrospective narrative does not offer the past as a complete or settled record; it foregrounds the gap between what she can remember and what she can claim to know.

That uncertainty becomes explicit when Etsuko reflects on the scene in which she and Sachiko find Mariko by the riverbank. She allows that time may have made her memory hazy and that events may not have happened quite as they return to her. At the same time, she remembers the moment with distinctness: she and Sachiko first stand looking toward a shape farther along the bank, then run to it. Etsuko’s pregnancy slows her, so Sachiko reaches Mariko first. The account holds doubt and precision together rather than resolving one into the other.

Sachiko, the past, and the dream

The act of remembering Sachiko begins to affect how Etsuko understands a later dream. She had told Niki about dreaming of the little girl they had watched in a park. Looking back, Etsuko interprets the fact that she mentioned the dream on its first occurrence as evidence that she already had doubts about its apparent innocence. She suspects that the dream concerned less the girl in the park than her own recent return to Sachiko in memory, although she says she did not fully understand why at the time.

This explanation is retrospective, not a certainty available to Etsuko from the beginning. The remembered Sachiko and the dream’s little girl become connected through an association that Etsuko only gradually recognizes. Her account therefore presents memory as an active process: the present does not merely retrieve the past but changes what earlier images seem to mean. The dream is not offered as proof of a single interpretation; Etsuko’s uncertainty about its meaning remains part of the evidence.

When Niki later brings up the dream, she says that the girl Etsuko had in mind was not really the little girl from the park, and then suggests that Etsuko means Keiko. Etsuko rejects this suggestion, laughing and insisting that the dream had nothing to do with Keiko. The exchange leaves a telling discrepancy between Niki’s interpretation and Etsuko’s denial. It does not establish that Niki is right, but it shows how the same image can prompt a recognition that Etsuko resists even while her larger account has already linked the dream to an earlier act of remembering.

Regret and self-protection

Etsuko’s reflections on Keiko make the stakes of that resistance clearer. She now regrets the attitudes she displayed toward her daughter. In retrospect, she recognizes that a young woman leaving home is not unexpected in the country where Etsuko now lives, and that her own opposition did not protect Keiko as she had intended. Instead, Etsuko believes it helped ensure that when Keiko left, almost six years earlier, she severed her ties with her mother.

Etsuko distinguishes the reason she gave herself at the time from the consequence she sees now. She had believed that the world beyond home would overwhelm an unhappy Keiko and that opposing her was an act of protection. She had not imagined that Keiko could so quickly disappear beyond her reach. This explanation does not erase Etsuko’s responsibility: her regret arises precisely because she can now set her protective purpose beside the estrangement that followed. Niki’s effort to absolve her and Etsuko’s own retrospective judgment thus coexist without producing a simple verdict.

Narrative significance

The account makes uncertainty part of its method. Etsuko openly qualifies what she remembers, identifies the narrow extent of her friendship with Sachiko, and later revises the significance of a dream. These admissions do not make every recollection equally doubtful; rather, they require attention to the difference between a scene remembered distinctly and the explanation attached to it. Her account of Mariko by the riverbank is vivid in its sequence while explicitly uncertain in its accuracy.

Self-deception in this pattern is not presented as a fully conscious fabrication. Etsuko’s account shows how a sincere belief in protection can sustain a comforting interpretation, and how later events can make that interpretation harder to maintain. Niki arrives hoping to release her mother from guilt, but the remembered past brings forward connections and consequences that reassurance alone cannot settle. Memory becomes both the means by which Etsuko approaches responsibility and the means by which she sometimes tries to keep its meaning at a distance.