Mizuki begins forgetting her own name

Mizuki Ando’s inability to recall her own name begins as a small, sharply bounded failure of memory and grows into an unsettling breach in her sense of identity. She remembers her address, telephone numbers, birthday, passport number, and other people’s names; what disappears is the name by which she herself can answer when unexpectedly asked. The episodes make ordinary encounters—at a clothing boutique or on the telephone at work—into moments when she cannot say who she is.

The Episodes and Their Pattern

The problem appears most often when someone suddenly asks Mizuki for her name. If she is having a dress altered and a shop clerk asks, or if a caller at work requests her name, she can go completely blank. She can recover it by taking out her driver’s license, but doing so creates an awkward pause and can make the other person wonder what is happening. The lapse is therefore not a general inability to remember personal information: her address, phone number, birthday, passport number, and the names and numbers of people around her remain available.

The circumstances of the question matter. When Mizuki brings up her name herself, or knows in advance that she will need to say it, she has no difficulty. A sudden demand seems to switch off access to it; the harder she tries to remember, the more completely blank her mind becomes. The episodes begin about a year before the story’s opening, initially occurring roughly once a month and then increasing until they happen at least weekly. That escalation changes the incident from an occasional embarrassment into a recurring threat to her confidence in her own continuity.

The name at issue has two forms. Mizuki’s married name is Mizuki Ando, while her maiden name is Mizuki Ozawa. She had needed time to become comfortable with the married name after marrying Takashi Ando, but gradually accepted how it looked and sounded. The later lapses unsettle that hard-won familiarity: when the name vanishes, she feels briefly like a nobody, though she knows that forgetting it does not erase her existence or her other memories. She describes a life without a name as like a dream from which one never wakes.

Names in Marriage and at Work

The distinction between Mizuki Ando and Mizuki Ozawa is not simply a conflict between her marriage and her former identity. At work, Mizuki continues to use her maiden name because formally changing it would require her to revise her information in the company’s computer system, a task she would have to do herself. She keeps putting the paperwork off and eventually continues under the name already printed on her business cards, name tag, and time card. The workplace calls her by several familiar forms of Ozawa or Mizuki, while tax records identify her as married.

Her husband knows she uses her maiden name at work and accepts it as a matter of convenience. Mizuki does not conceal that arrangement from him; what she keeps to herself is the name-loss problem. She expects him to interpret it as proof that she is unhappy with their life together, although she does not believe that explanation. Apart from his tendency to reason at length about everything, she has no serious complaint about him or their marriage. The story thus places the symptom beside a real division in how her name is used, without making that practical split proof of marital dissatisfaction.

That division also gives the episodes a social dimension. Mizuki’s name is not only an inward possession: it appears on documents and workplace objects, and it is spoken by customers, colleagues, and strangers. At work, the name that identifies her is the one she has not formally changed; in her married life, she has gradually accepted another. Neither name is inherently dramatic, yet both participate in how she is recognized. When she cannot summon either in response to a sudden question, the failure disrupts that everyday exchange between personal memory and public identification.

Attempts to Explain and Contain the Problem

Mizuki first fears that the lapses could be an early sign of a serious disease, including Alzheimer’s. The possibility troubles her because she has learned that illnesses she had never heard of can begin with slight symptoms, and she wonders whether an unknown condition might be spreading through her body. She goes to a large hospital and explains what is happening. The young doctor asks whether she forgets anything besides her name; when she says she does not, he treats it as more likely to be psychiatric and tells her to return if she begins forgetting other things. His response offers no explanation for why this particular word should vanish, and does little to ease her concern.

Mizuki finds a practical way to reduce the embarrassment. She buys a thin, simple bracelet and has the name “Mizuki (Ozawa) Ando” engraved on it—not her address or telephone number, only her name. Wearing it whenever she leaves home means that she can glance at the bracelet rather than rummage for her driver’s license. The aid is both effective and disturbing to her: she feels as if she were a cat or dog that needed to wear a tag. The object supplies the answer from outside her memory, making visible how dependent ordinary self-identification can be on a written name.

She also decides not to tell her husband. Since she believes he would read the symptom as evidence against their marriage, and expects him to pursue the subject through his habitual theorizing, silence seems easier than arguing over an interpretation she considers mistaken. Her reticence does not establish that the marriage caused the problem; it shows instead how the anticipated meaning of a symptom can shape whether a person seeks understanding from someone close to her.

Counseling and the Name Tags

A small notice in a local ward newsletter gives Mizuki another route to help: Shinagawa Ward is opening a counseling center where residents over eighteen can speak confidentially with a professional counselor at a reduced rate. Though uncertain that a ward-sponsored service will be useful, she decides to try it. She arranges her work schedule, makes an appointment by telephone, and pays two thousand yen for a thirty-minute session. When she arrives at the third floor of the ward office, she is the only client. The counselor, Tetsuko Sakaki, is a friendly woman in her late forties whose appearance initially suggests a helpful neighborhood housewife more than a formal specialist.

The consultation eventually moves the problem beyond Mizuki’s fear of illness and her own conjectures about marriage. When the explanation is disclosed, Tetsuko Sakaki tells her that the name tags were stolen and that their theft is why she has trouble remembering her name; recovering the tags, she says, has allowed Mizuki to recover it. The explanation links the private blankness to the loss of physical objects that carried her name into the world. It also gives the earlier bracelet a pointed contrast: Mizuki had made a new, wearable record of her identity to protect herself from forgetting, while the story’s revelation makes missing name tags part of the cause of the disturbance.

The episode’s movement is from an isolated symptom, through medical anxiety and practical self-protection, toward a revelation that changes what the symptom means. Mizuki’s memory is not shown failing across the board; the missing element is precisely her own name, and the story attaches that absence to the names and tags by which she is addressed and recognized. The result leaves the distinction between identity and its external signs deliberately unsettled: a name can be remembered, written, worn, or taken away, while the person who bears it remains present even in the moment she cannot say what she is called.