Unreliable memory and self-deception

Unreliable memory and self-deception are central to how Etsuko presents the past: she recognizes that recollection is shaped by the circumstances of remembering, yet cannot always separate what happened from what she later wants to believe about it. The uncertainty reaches beyond factual detail into interpretation. An image she recalls may have been an ordinary daydream rather than a premonition; her account of family decisions shifts as she considers what she felt at the time; and a happy memory of Keiko is described as having nothing special about it. The narrative exposes these acts of qualification without supplying a final, authoritative version of events.

Memory as Retrospective Reconstruction

Etsuko directly warns that memory can be an “unreliable thing,” heavily coloured by the circumstances in which a person remembers. She applies that qualification to certain recollections she has gathered, making the act of telling itself a subject of the account. The past does not arrive as a stable record: it is revisited from a later point, when present feeling may affect what seems important, vivid, or true. Etsuko does not claim that every recollection is false. Rather, she admits that she cannot assume her memories are untouched by the conditions under which she now recalls them.

That distinction gives her uncertainty a particular force. She identifies the possibility of distortion, but cannot simply step outside memory and replace it with an unmediated account. Her acknowledgment therefore offers some candour without guaranteeing accuracy. The reader is asked to attend both to what she remembers and to the reservations she places around that memory; her self-awareness makes the narrative more alert to its own limits, not free of them.

The Image and the Temptation of Premonition

A striking example comes when Etsuko looks back on an afternoon after an outing to Inasa. She remembers seeing the large American car return across the wasteground and later noticing a thin woman walk towards Sachiko’s cottage and disappear behind its roof. Around this sequence, Etsuko recalls an unpleasant image entering her thoughts. In retrospect, she is tempted to persuade herself that it was a premonition, something more intense and vivid than an ordinary daydream.

She immediately qualifies that interpretation. The recent discovery of a little girl who had died after being found hanging from a tree had shocked the neighbourhood, and Etsuko reasons that others may also have been troubled by disturbing images that summer. This explanation places her private impression within a shared atmosphere of fear rather than treating it as foreknowledge. The remembered image remains unsettling, but Etsuko refuses to certify it as supernatural insight or as an exact anticipation of later events. The sequence instead shows how a powerful later association can encourage the mind to enlarge an earlier, less certain experience. Her admission of that temptation makes the uncertainty visible while leaving its precise origin unresolved.

What Etsuko Knew, and What She Recalls

In her conversation with Etsuko, Sachiko acknowledges that she may never reach America and that departure would bring difficulties. She nonetheless asks what she has to lose by going to Kobe: her uncle’s house, as she describes it, offers only empty rooms and the prospect of growing old there. When Etsuko raises Mariko, Sachiko says that the girl will manage and questions whether she is a good mother. The exchange presents Sachiko as aware of risks, even as she continues to contemplate leaving. It also cautions against interpreting a decision as simple ignorance of its likely consequences: Sachiko says she knows the journey may not lead to America and understands that life would be difficult.

Etsuko’s later discussion with Niki makes a different uncertainty explicit. Niki suggests that Etsuko’s present defence of the old Japanese arrangement—living with a widowed father-in-law—may not reflect what she thought at the time. Etsuko insists that she was very fond of her father-in-law, then allows that Niki may be right that she felt relieved he did not move in with them. She cannot remember how she felt. The admission preserves both possibilities instead of smoothing them into a single, consistent account. Affection and relief need not cancel each other, but Etsuko cannot recover their exact balance from memory.

Happy Memories and Unresolved Meaning

When Niki asks whether something was special about the day Etsuko spent at the harbour, Etsuko says she was simply remembering it. She recalls that Keiko was happy and that they rode the cable-cars, then repeats that it was only a happy memory, not a special occasion. Niki responds that everything seems quiet there and that she does not remember it being so quiet. The exchange gives Etsuko’s memory concrete details while leaving its significance open: her description emphasizes ordinary happiness, whereas Niki’s response draws attention to a difference between her own recollection and the present place.

Across these moments, self-deception is not presented as a confirmed plan to mislead. It appears as a possibility Etsuko recognizes in herself: the wish to make an impression into a premonition, to revise an old feeling into something more definite, or to settle a memory’s meaning by naming it ordinary and happy. Her corrections and hesitations do not solve the gaps. They show instead how the account is shaped by the effort to remember honestly, and how that effort can reveal uncertainty without overcoming it.