“I wonder if memory is not simply a question of following things through to the end”

“I wonder if memory is not simply a question of following things through to the end” is an epigraph attributed to Yûko Tsushima. It gives the book a method as well as a question: remembering is not treated as the recovery of a complete, ready-made account, but as the work of pursuing images and evidence until they yield words. The phrase’s emphasis on following through resonates with the narrator’s decision to write about her abortion and with the repeated returns through which the past becomes narratable.

Memory as an Investigation

The epigraph’s proposition is made concrete in the narrator’s account of beginning the book. She describes wanting to become immersed in that part of her life again and to discover what could be found there. Rather than relying on recollection alone, she turns to the diary and engagement book kept at the time to establish dates and events. Writing requires her to revisit each image until she feels physically connected to it and words emerge that seem to fit. The act of following memory through is therefore both archival and embodied: records supply chronology, while remembered sentences and images carry the force of what she experienced.

Material Traces and the Limits of Recall

The narrator distinguishes between the imperishable marks left by objects and the uncertainty of remembered thought. While searching for information about abortion, she copied references to medical magazines into her address book; the blue-ballpoint entries later fascinate her precisely because they remain physically present. She calls attention to the possibility that such traces convey reality more readily than either memory or writing alone. Elsewhere, she says that her diary and engagement book cannot provide sure evidence of what she thought or felt, since thoughts are abstract and fleeting. The epigraph’s insistence on persistence thus does not promise that recollection can become complete. It points instead toward a patient inquiry that acknowledges what documents can verify and what they cannot.

Returning to Places

Following memory through also means going back to places associated with the past. The narrator consults a map of Paris before returning to Passage Cardinet, seeking the café where she waited to see Madame P-R and the church where she had sat for a long time. The map names Saint-Charles-de-Monceau Church; she wonders whether it might be the church she remembered as Saint-Charles Borromée, renamed. On the street, she notices that a new plaque has been placed above the former blackened, illegible one. But physical return does not restore the earlier scene in full: in front of Madame P-R’s locked building, the narrator walks on, feeling like a puppet reenacting an episode without emotion. The remembered place is both material evidence and a site where the distance between past experience and present feeling becomes visible.

Narrative Significance

The epigraph connects these acts of checking, revisiting, and writing into a single pursuit. The narrator’s inquiry moves among records, bodily impressions, remembered words, and present-day locations without pretending that any one source can settle the past. Its form gives the book’s retrospective narrative a tension between persistence and uncertainty: to follow memory through to the end is to continue working with evidence while recognizing the gaps that remain. The epigraph consequently describes not a guaranteed recovery, but the discipline through which an experience once difficult to articulate can be approached in writing.