the 1960s

The 1960s, remembered as “Our Age,” are both a historical period and a measure against which later life is judged. The decade’s promise feels immediate in recollection, but its meaning remains difficult to pin down: it was a time of palpable energy and apparent simplicity, yet also of illusion, disillusionment, and consequences that endured well beyond youth.

A Generation Coming of Age

The narrator of “A Pre-History of Late-Stage Capitalism” places his own coming of age within the decade: born in 1949, he entered junior high in 1961 and college in 1967, reaching twenty amid the student movement. He remembers the period as boisterous and exuberant, with the Beatles, Bob Dylan, and Jim Morrison supplying a soundtrack to a youth eager to live in the moment. The sense of a special age was strong even while it was happening, though he admits he cannot explain its distinctiveness without falling back on trite generalities.

In retrospect, the decade’s defining impression is its visible momentum and promise. Heroism and villainy, ecstasy and disillusionment, martyrdom and betrayal, silence and eloquence seemed to stand in clear, graspable outlines. These qualities exist in every age, the narrator observes, but in the sixties they appeared unusually vivid, as if laid out directly before the young people living through them. He does not claim that his generation was wiser for having witnessed this intensity; he describes its texture, and the uncertainty of what it ultimately meant.

Directness and Its Limits

The narrator contrasts the decade with a present cluttered by hidden advertising, dubious discounts, loyalty points, and options imposed before people understand what is being offered. In his recollection, the sixties lacked such layers of mediation: things could be taken in hand and understood directly, and cause seemed to sit close beside effect. He names this remembered period “A Pre-History of Late-Stage Capitalism,” suggesting that its apparent simplicity belongs to a world before the complicated commercial structures he associates with the present.

That clarity is not presented as proof that the young understood life. The narrator describes his generation as ignorant and conceited, absorbed in sex, rock and roll, films by Jean-Luc Godard, political movements, and literature. A seemingly ideal high-school couple attracted little attention from his group, who were occupied by what they thought were more vital pursuits. Looking back, he recognizes that their own illusions were not fundamentally different from the couple’s. The decade’s directness, then, is a retrospective impression, not a guarantee of insight.

Age, Intimacy, and Uneven Time

The meaning of turning twenty recurs as a generational threshold. The narrator recalls that, in his estimation, about half of the girls he knew had lost their virginity by twenty, while about half had not; he stresses that this was a general impression, not the result of a survey. A young woman in another scene tells an older man that she has just turned twenty and that the day is her birthday, making the age concrete as a personal passage rather than an abstract marker.

In a separate recollection of student life, a young woman’s twentieth birthday exposes a different difficulty: the passage of time can feel out of step with a group’s expectations. She and the narrator had imagined moving back and forth between eighteen and nineteen, ages they could understand. At twenty, she seems to have crossed into unfamiliar territory, while their dead friend remains seventeen in memory. A cake bought in Shinjuku is badly damaged on the crowded train journey to her apartment, but they place twenty candles on it, close the curtains, and celebrate with wine. The ruined cake and improvised party hold together the ordinary and the irreversible: the birthday continues, but the friend’s age cannot change.

Trauma and the Long Afterlife of the Decade

For the seventh man, the decade’s aftermath is bound to the beach where K was swept away. Persistent nightmares lead him to ask his parents to let him leave his hometown; in January he moves to a mountain village near Komoro in Nagano Prefecture, where he completes school and continues through high school. He never returns for holidays. He later graduates from an engineering college in Nagano and works for a precision-tool maker, building an outwardly ordinary life while the same nightmare returns whenever he is close to forgetting. He has loved several women but avoids spending a night with any of them, afraid that his screams will wake someone beside him. The childhood catastrophe therefore shapes adult intimacy long after the immediate event.

Years later, studying K’s watercolor leads him to decide that he must return. The hometown has changed: development has brought an industrial city nearby, the station gift shop has become a mall, the movie theater a supermarket, and the houses of both families have disappeared. The narrator does not portray this return as a simple recovery of the past; the town had ceased to feel like his long before. The 1960s thus occupy an uneasy double position in the book—as the remembered age of youthful energy and apparent clarity, and as a period whose losses, relationships, and changes remain legible only through the lives that continue afterward.

History Beyond Personal Memory

The decade’s recollections also sit beside wartime losses that extend across generations. After surviving imprisonment by the Chinese Army, Shozaburo Takitani returns to Japan in the spring of 1946, nine months after the war ends, and learns that his parents died in the Great Tokyo Air Raid and his brother disappeared on the Burmese front. His response is restrained: he feels an absence, but not the grief or shock that others might expect. The past enters family life as a set of losses that can be known without being fully felt.

A later conversation on Kauai gives another example of history surviving through family memory. Officer Sakata tells Sachi that his brother, a Japanese American volunteer in the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, was killed in Belgium in 1944. Sakata was a small child when it happened and knew his mother only after his brother’s death had changed her. These histories are not events of the 1960s, but they deepen the book’s account of time: private lives inherit absences from earlier eras, just as youthful experience can continue to govern choices long after the decade itself has passed.