Kansai

Kansai is the regional setting of the Narrator (God)’s birth and formative childhood in Japan, remembered through a landscape shaped by water, gardens, and seasonal change. It is more than a point of origin: its flooded streets and route to Little Green Lake become the geography of the child’s brief, powerful sense of being at home.

Birth and Early Setting

The narrator places her birth in Japan in February 1970, in Kansai, in the village of Shukugawa, under the benevolent gaze of her paternal Grandmother. White Chocolate is part of this origin: the narrator later identifies it as the gift that awakened her sense of self and began the memory she claims for the rest of her life. Kansai thus enters the account both as a location and as the setting of a decisive transformation.

The narrator distinguishes this remembered life from the period before that awakening. She says that before the White Chocolate she remembers nothing and must depend on other people’s accounts, whereas afterward her memories are firsthand. Her sweeping claim to remember everything after February 1970 is qualified: she acknowledges forgetting ordinary worries and conversations, while preserving what she regards as essential. Kansai’s gardens, waters, and neighborhood belong to that selectively vivid record.

Neighborhood, Mountains, and Seasonal Flooding

The family’s neighborhood is described as calm and beautiful, with walls topped by tiles and gardens shaded by ginkgo trees. A street eventually became a path winding along the mountain toward Little Green Lake. The narrator presents this route as the center of her childhood universe, a landscape in which the arrangement of home, family, and surroundings seemed momentarily complete.

Summer rain regularly transformed the area. In the Kansai Mountains, rising water was an annual occurrence rather than an exceptional catastrophe; storm drains were left open in anticipation. Cars moved slowly to avoid the open manholes, and flooded roads could feel like waterways. At Little Green Lake, the water sometimes nearly doubled the lake’s size and spread over the azalea bushes. When swimming space disappeared, the child could still feel flowering bushes underfoot in the water, an encounter that made the familiar landscape strange again.

These floods give Kansai a recurring seasonal rhythm. Water does not remain within the lake or drains: it fills streets, changes how people travel, and carries the child into excursions with her Father. During one such walk, she jumped into the rushing curbside torrent, soaking her dress and her father’s trousers. The ease of this outing, and her father’s apparent lack of objection, contrasts with the restrictions she associates with her Mother.

The Sea and the Wider Region

Kansai also serves as the point of contrast from which the child encounters other waters. She already knew Osaka Bay, but remembered it as so polluted that swimming there was out of the question. In April, the family crossed to Tottori, where she saw the Sea of Japan for the first time. The beach seemed as wide as a desert, and the sea’s repeated approach and retreat mirrored the child’s own hesitation at the shore.

Her Mother eventually took her by the hand and led her into the water. The episode extends the childhood geography beyond Kansai while preserving water as its connecting element: the local lake and floodwaters are familiar, but the sea first appears as an object of simultaneous terror and desire. The narrator also recalls being unable to understand the Japanese distinction that treats the sea as male and the ocean as female, a small sign of how a child’s regional discoveries could exceed her grasp of adult categories.

Memory and Significance

The significance of Kansai rests on the contrast between a concrete home landscape and the narrator’s awareness that childhood belonging does not last. She recalls holding her Father’s hand on the neighborhood route to Little Green Lake and feeling, for the only time in her life, profoundly at home. When she turned and found his hand gone and no one beside her, the same setting became the scene of sudden fear: a person as substantial as her father could disappear without warning.

In retrospect, Kansai gathers together the narrator’s strongest early memories of place: the tiled walls and ginkgoes, the mountain path, the swollen lake, and the flooded streets. Its waters are at once ordinary seasonal conditions, invitations to play, and occasions for vulnerability. The region’s importance in the narrative comes from this layered recollection, in which the landscape that once seemed arranged especially for the child also becomes the measure of how fragile that sense of home was.