Grandmother

Grandmother’s brief visit to Japan changes the Narrator (God)’s life: the White Chocolate she offers becomes, in the narrator’s account, the source of a first-person identity and the starting point of all subsequent memory. Though present in only a small number of remembered scenes, Grandmother remains central to how the narrator explains being born as a self—and how memory can preserve someone who has died.

Identity and Family

Grandmother is the narrator’s paternal grandmother. She lived in Brussels, while her son, his wife, and their children were living in Japan. The family had not seen her for three years when she eventually travelled to join them. Her first response to the news that the Plant had awakened was to say she could not set off at once: she would need to have suits made before making the long journey. The account describes her as an elegant woman, and the tailoring, suitcase, and visit to the hairdresser establish the care she took over her appearance and preparations.

Her delay lasted a month or two, the time needed to make the suits. She then packed them, went to the hairdresser’s, and flew from Brussels to Osaka, a journey that took twenty hours. At the airport, she embraced her son, congratulated her daughter-in-law, and declared Japan wonderful. On the drive into the mountains, the parents described their children: the two older ones were marvelous, but the youngest had become difficult to manage. Grandmother reassured them that things would work out. Her place in the family is thus both affectionate and practical: she returns after a long separation, listens to the parents’ worry, and offers reassurance before meeting the youngest child whose awakening had prompted the journey.

The Visit and the Gift

When Grandmother approached the child, the narrator’s remembered account presents a wary, pre-verbal being. Adults habitually brought their fingers near its face, and it expected to bite. This time the approaching hand held something unfamiliar: a white stick. The child recognized the word white, associated with walls and milk, but did not understand chocolate or Belgium. Grandmother identified the object as White Chocolate from Belgium, placing the unknown sweet close to the child’s mouth.

The gift’s consequence, as the narrator tells it, was far greater than its size. Its sweetness produced a voice that announced a distinction between being an “it” and being a “me,” and connected that new self to the pleasure the chocolate gave. The narrator locates this birth in Japan at the age of two and a half, in February 1970, in Kansai, in Shukugawa, under Grandmother’s benevolent gaze. The account assigns the awakening to the White Chocolate and remembers Grandmother as the person who brought it within reach. It does not claim that she could have anticipated what the gift would mean.

Grandmother and her treats remained in Japan for only a month. The narrator says that the idea of pleasure had already set the child in motion: after two years as a vegetable and six months as a wild beast, the child seemed more or less normal to the relieved parents, who began using the child’s first name. Grandmother’s visit is therefore short, but its place in the narrator’s life is lasting. The gift marks not simply a change in behavior but the beginning of the self who can later tell the story.

Memory and the Narrator’s Account

The narrator treats White Chocolate as the source of memory as well as identity. It claims to remember everything after February 1970, while acknowledging that this does not mean recalling every parental worry or conversation. What remains, it says, is what mattered: the greenness of the lake where it learned to swim, the garden’s smell, and the taste of plum wine sipped when no one was watching. The distinction is between exhaustive recall and essential recollection; Grandmother’s gift supplies the point from which the narrator can call its memories firsthand.

The narrator also marks the limits of that claim. Before the White Chocolate, it remembers nothing and must depend on what other people tell it, filtering their recollections through its own mind. Afterward, it presents its knowledge as direct memory, written by the same hand that experienced it. It recognizes that a claim to remember everything from so early a date is unlikely to be believed and says the claim can neither be proved nor disproved. Grandmother consequently stands at the boundary between inherited account and personal recollection: the narrator’s explanation of its first memory is itself an assertion whose certainty it acknowledges cannot be independently established.

Death and Continuing Presence

Looking back after Grandmother’s death, the narrator imagines an exchange between them. Grandmother had helped liberate it from death, it reflects, and soon afterward it was her turn; the narrator wonders whether she knew that their lives could be understood in those terms. This is the narrator’s interpretation of the sequence, not a stated motive or bargain on Grandmother’s part.

Memory becomes the narrator’s return gift. Because Grandmother gave it memory, the narrator says, its remembering can keep her alive. It pictures her still carrying her bar of White Chocolate like a queen carrying a scepter, transforming an ordinary sweet into an emblem of the power she holds in the narrator’s origin story. The image does not undo her death; it makes her presence recur within the act of recollection.

Narrative Significance

Grandmother’s significance lies in the convergence of a specific family visit, a material gift, and the narrator’s account of becoming a person. The journey from Brussels, the twenty-hour flight to Osaka, and the single month in Japan give the awakening a concrete domestic setting. Within that setting, a child who had treated approaching hands as threats encounters an unexpected object, and pleasure gives way to speech, self-recognition, and memory.

The narrator’s later reflections enlarge the scene without resolving its uncertainties. Grandmother is remembered as the giver who made a first-person life possible, while the narrator openly concedes that its extraordinary claim about memory cannot be verified. Her lasting presence therefore depends on both the event as the narrator recounts it and the act of telling: the bar of White Chocolate becomes the means by which the narrator identifies its beginning and gives back, in memory, something of what it received.