Names and self-identity

Names in “A Shinagawa Monkey” are not interchangeable labels: they make people recognizable to others, carry the marks of marriage and family, and can become entangled with a person’s sense of who she is. Mizuki Ando’s sudden inability to remember her name turns that ordinary social function into a private crisis. When she recovers the name tags taken from her, the recovery is also a confrontation with a painful truth she had long avoided.

A name that vanishes

Mizuki’s memory failure is sharply specific. If someone unexpectedly asks her name at a boutique or on the phone at work, she can go blank; the harder she tries to retrieve it, the more completely it disappears. She can remember other people’s names, her address and phone number, her birthday, passport number, and even clients’ telephone numbers. The lapse concerns her own name alone, and it began about a year before the story’s present, first occurring roughly once a month and eventually at least once a week.

The practical workaround makes the rupture visible. Mizuki keeps her driver’s license in her purse and consults it when she cannot answer, a pause that can leave someone on the telephone wondering what has happened. She buys a thin, simple bracelet engraved with “Mizuki (Ozawa) Ando,” wearing it whenever she leaves home so that she can look down rather than produce her license. She jokes that the bracelet makes her feel like a cat or dog. Its inscription is not merely a reminder: it gathers her maiden and married names into a portable record of identity.

The episode does not amount to total amnesia. Mizuki knows who other people are and retains ordinary identifying information about herself; she understands that forgetting her name does not erase her existence. Still, she describes a life without a name as like a dream from which one never wakes. The comparison registers the disorientation of being present and functional while briefly unable to call herself back into social recognition.

Marriage, work, and competing names

Mizuki became Mizuki Ando when she married Takashi Ando three years earlier. At first, the new name looked and sounded wrong to her; repetition and signing it gradually made it familiar. She privately compares it favorably with hypothetical alternatives such as Mizuki Mizuki or Mizuki Miki. The name thus records a change in legal and personal status, but becoming accustomed to it is a gradual process rather than an immediate transformation.

At work, however, she continues to use Mizuki Ozawa. Changing the official workplace records would mean altering the company computer data herself, and she keeps postponing the paperwork until she simply settles into using her maiden name. Her business cards, name tag, and time card all carry Ozawa; colleagues address her as Ozawa-san, Ozawa-kun, Mizukisan, or the familiar Mizuki-chan. For tax purposes she is listed as married, so the workplace name does not negate the marriage. It is a separate, habitual public identity maintained through convenience and everyday address.

Her husband knows she uses her maiden name at work and accepts it as a matter of convenience. Mizuki does not tell him about the memory lapses. She expects that his tendency to reason about everything would lead him to interpret the problem as evidence that she is unhappy with their marriage, whereas she is not dissatisfied with it. The silence leaves the naming crisis outside their shared account of married life: the name itself is the problem, but the marriage is not, in her understanding, its cause.

The stolen tags and the revealed wound

When Mizuki learns that the name tags were stolen from her, Mrs. Sakaki explains that recovering them was necessary for Mizuki to recover her name. The explanation shifts the problem from an inexplicable failure of memory to an external theft, while leaving the thief’s purpose to be answered by the person responsible. A name tag is a mundane workplace object, but in this account it has become a material link between a person and the name by which she is known.

The monkey gives theft a double meaning. It admits taking people’s names, but says that doing so can also remove negative elements clinging to them. It even suggests that, had it stolen Yuko Matsunaka’s name, it might have carried away some of the darkness hidden within her, perhaps preventing her suicide. The claim makes a name more than a neutral label in the story’s supernatural logic: it can be bound to burdens a person carries, and taking it can be imagined as both harm and attempted release.

The monkey’s account of Mizuki’s childhood makes that symbolism painfully personal. It says that her mother never loved her, that her older sister disliked her, and that her mother sent her away to school in Yokohama to get rid of her. Her father is described as not bad, but too lacking in force to stand up for her. The monkey connects this deprivation with Mizuki’s habit of shutting the truth away and argues that she has consequently been unable to love another person deeply and unconditionally. Mizuki is silent as she hears this. Her difficulty with her name is therefore set alongside a longer estrangement from the family that should have recognized and cared for her.

Reclaiming the name

Mizuki does not treat the revelation as wholly new. She says that the monkey is telling the truth and that she has known it for a long time, while avoiding it and closing her eyes and ears to it. She asks the Sakakis to forgive the monkey and take it to the mountains rather than kill it. Her response is not an effort to excuse the childhood rejection; it is a decision to stop making avoidance the condition of continuing her life.

She accepts the return of her name together with what lies beyond it: she says she is willing to live with what is out there, because the name is hers and so is her life. The statement joins identity to responsibility without suggesting that a recovered label repairs the past. She can reclaim her name while acknowledging the reality she had previously tried to keep contained.

At home, Mizuki puts the name tag reading “Mizuki Ozawa” and the bracelet engraved “Mizuki (Ozawa) Ando” into a plain brown business envelope, then places it in a cardboard box in her closet. The two objects preserve the different names she has used, rather than forcing one to cancel the other. The narration ends with a measured uncertainty: things might work out, or they might not, but she has her own name back, a name that is hers alone.

A name imposed from outside

The story’s concern with naming also appears in the history of Tony Takitani. After Shozaburo Takitani’s wife dies, a major who has been trying to console him offers to be the baby’s godfather and give him a name. Shozaburo has forgotten that the child is still unnamed. The major proposes Tony, his own first name; Shozaburo writes “Tony Takitani” on paper and studies it for several days, reasoning that an American-style name might be useful while the American occupation of Japan continues.

For the child, the name is not an uncomplicated advantage. Other children tease Tony as a half-breed, and people react to his name with puzzlement, distaste, or anger; for some, encountering a Japanese child called Tony reopens old wounds. The name makes him conspicuous before it makes him known. His experience contrasts with Mizuki’s: Tony is burdened by a name publicly assigned and interpreted by others, while Mizuki’s own name intermittently becomes inaccessible to her. In both cases, a name mediates the distance between private selfhood and the world’s readiness to recognize someone.