Japan

Japan is not merely the country in which Narrator (God) spends early childhood; it becomes the narrator’s first remembered home, formed through particular people, places, tastes, and routines. In the account, belonging there is intimate and sensory, while the prospect of leaving turns that intimacy into the original measure of loss.

Birth and First Awakening

Narrator (God) locates the beginning of conscious identity precisely: in February 1970, at two and a half years old, in Shukugawa, in Kansai, under the care of a paternal Grandmother and through White Chocolate. The geographic specificity matters to the account. The narrator’s awakening is placed not in an abstract childhood but in a village and province in Japan, where a family visit and a sweet taste become the boundary between an unremembered beginning and a life the narrator claims to remember.

Before that awakening, the child appeared to the adults as wholly unresponsive. Specialists found no reflexive movement when they tested the child’s joints, and no pupil response to light; the parents said the child neither cried nor moved nor made a sound. They called the condition pathological apathy, and the doctors recommended hospitalization. The parents declined: they already had two children they considered fully human and, despite the diagnosis, found tenderness in having a third child described as a vegetable. They called the child the Plant. This family response establishes the first Japan of the narrative as a domestic world shaped by adults’ judgments and choices as well as by the child’s later recollection.

By age two, the child had not tried to crawl or speak. The adults around the child—the parents, doctors, and nanny—assumed a developmental blockage, treating the stillness as a physical problem. Narrator (God), looking back, gives it a different interpretation: the possibility that an infant might prefer inertia had not occurred to them. The distinction between the adults’ medical explanation and the narrator’s account of a mind that had not yet chosen movement is part of how the book frames this early life in Japan.

A Household That Makes Belonging

White Chocolate gives the narrator, in the narrator’s own account, both identity and memory. The voice that announces a self continues to speak in the narrator’s head, and the narrator says that everything after February 1970 is remembered firsthand, while recollections from before then must come from other people and be filtered through the narrator’s mind. The claim is expansive but qualified: the narrator does not remember every parental worry or conversation, yet insists on retaining what felt essential. Japan is therefore represented through a deliberately selective childhood memory, not as a complete record of family life.

After the awakening, the parents’ relief follows a change in the child’s behavior. The narrator describes becoming alert, quiet but present, playful yet attentive, and more or less normal in the parents’ eyes; they began using the narrator’s first name. Walking came first, followed by running, which opened up the possibility of evading notice and getting away with forbidden things. Speaking required more caution. Rather than begin with one of the tempting words already present in the narrator’s thoughts, the child chose a familiar sound that would reassure the parents and reveal little: the first spoken word was Mama.

The paternal Grandmother and her treats stayed in Japan for only a month, but their brief visit had lasting force in the narrator’s account. The child’s new responsiveness brought the parents relief after two years of stillness and a subsequent period they experienced as difficult. Yet it was the continuing daily care of Nishio-san, the nanny, that made childhood belonging feel like a form of devotion.

Childhood Status and Japanese Identity

At two and a half, the narrator understood the treatment received from Nishio-san as a special status accorded to a child before nursery school. The narrator names this the Okosama Sacred Child Status: a child treated as a little lord, while older children who had passed beyond that stage were addressed more ordinarily. In the household, the distinction took practical form. Nishio-san bent down to the narrator’s height and gave the child what was requested, including food from her own plate, waiting to eat until the child had finished.

That indulgence produced a small but consequential domestic conflict. Mother scolded Nishio-san for letting the child tyrannize her and asked her not to submit. Once Mother’s back was turned, the child resumed taking food. Nishio-san’s okonomiyaki, a cabbage pancake with shrimp and ginger, and rice with pickled vegetables were more appealing to the narrator than the pureed carrots and meat served elsewhere. There were, in the narrator’s description, two meals: one in the dining room and another in the kitchen. The child nibbled at the first to leave room for the second, and the contrast between parental treatment and Nishio-san’s adoration made choosing sides feel inevitable.

From this household allegiance the narrator draws a larger declaration: at two and a half, the child became Japanese. The statement is attached not to a formal ceremony or abstract principle but to a lived environment—beauty, flowers after rain, distant mountains, and the twilight song of the yam seller. Above all, Japan meant being Nishio-san’s chosen one. She would put aside what she was doing, hold the child, and sing about gardens and cherry blossoms. The narrator’s identification with the country thus grows through care and sensory experience, with Nishio-san at its center.

Landscape, Father, and the Meaning of Home

A walk with Father gives the narrator’s sense of belonging a geography beyond the kitchen. In flooded streets, Father held out his hand and the two wandered together. The child jumped with both feet into the water rushing along the curbs, soaking both the child’s dress and Father’s trousers. Mother would not have allowed it; Father seemed not to notice. The scene makes the walk a particular kind of freedom, grounded in the contrast between the parents’ ways of responding to the child.

The neighborhood was described as Japanese in character: quiet streets bordered by walls topped with tiles, gardens overhung by ginkgo trees, and a road that became a path winding along the mountain to Little Green Lake. The narrator calls this landscape a universe given especially to the child and remembers it as the only time in life when home felt wholly secure. Holding Father’s hand, the narrator felt that everything was where it belonged, including the self. The sudden discovery that Father had let go and was no longer beside the child overturned that security. In this memory, the possibility of losing a person appears inside the very scene that had made Japan feel like home.

Leaving, Seasons, and Remembered Loss

The country becomes inseparable from loss when Mother tells the narrator that the family will leave Japan one day. The child protests that Japan is their country and that the house is their home; Mother answers that it is not the child’s country. The narrator describes the response as a collapse of security, and retrospectively formulates its lesson as That which is given you will be taken back. The losses named in that reflection begin with Japan and extend to the mountain, flowers, house, Nishio-san, and language. The place is therefore not simply left behind in a future move: its threatened absence becomes the pattern through which the narrator understands attachment.

The approach of age three complicates the earlier feeling of being specially protected. The narrator had heard that nursery school would mean leaving the garden and joining other children, an idea that seemed intolerable. The narrator also recalls nature as having become too lush and overfull by mid-August: trees too green, grass too abundant, flowers seeming to burst with excess. At three, seasonal change was visible without the memory of previous years that might make it familiar. The narrator presents this age as a point of overwhelming uncertainty, when the child could see change but did not yet understand its cycles. Japan’s garden, once a place of beauty and sanctuary, becomes a setting where the child senses that something is ending without being able to explain why.

The account’s retrospective authority rests on both insistence and uncertainty. Narrator (God) says that memory after February 1970 is firsthand, but acknowledges that recollection has limits and that the earliest period depends on other people’s testimony. At the close of the childhood account, the narrator also wonders whether the first suicide attempt was dreamed or invented, then points to a scar on the left temple as material evidence. Japan is thus held in memory as a place of extraordinary attachment, but not as a perfectly verifiable record: its importance lies in the remembered home it made possible and in the losses that taught the narrator how fragile that home was.