Narrator and Japan

The narrator’s bond with Japan is both a childhood conversion and the first great loss she learns to anticipate. At two and a half, she declares herself Japanese, finding in Nishio-san’s care, the gardens of Shukugawa, and a language she does not yet distinguish from French a sense of home more profound than the one she experiences elsewhere. When she is told that the family will eventually leave, Japan becomes more than a place she loves: it is the first home she understands she may be made to lose. Her later account turns that attachment into a lasting theme, in which memory preserves what departure takes away.

Choosing Japan

The narrator describes becoming Japanese as a choice shaped by daily intimacy. At lunchtime, she evades Mother’s attempt to stop Nishio-san from indulging her and continues eating the nanny’s okonomiyaki and tsuke-mono rice. The meals divide between dining room and kitchen: she eats sparingly with her parents so that she can eat more with Nishio-san. She frames the decision as a choice between adults who treat her like the other children and a nanny who treats her like a god. For the child, this is no abstract question of national identity. Japan is bound to the person who gives her attention, food, stories, and a special place in the world.

The narrator locates her declaration precisely: at two and a half, in Kansai, in the village of Shukugawa, she became Japanese. Her account makes belonging sensory and particular. To be Japanese means breathing the smell of flowers in a rain-moistened garden, sitting beside a pool and looking toward distant mountains, and hearing the yam seller’s song pass through the neighborhood at twilight. It also means being Nishio-san’s chosen one. Nishio-san will stop what she is doing to hold and comfort her, sing about gardens and cherry blossoms, and tell stories of bodies cut to pieces or people cooked in a witch’s cauldron. Japan is at once landscape, language, food, and a relationship of devoted care.

Language and belonging

The narrator’s early experience of language reinforces the intimacy of this belonging. She does not initially understand Japanese and French as separate languages, but as versions of one large language from which a speaker may choose. When asked whether she learned Japanese before French, she answers, “They’re the same thing.” She has not yet encountered a language she cannot understand. This account presents Japanese not as a difficult foreign code but as part of the shared world she inhabits, alongside the French she is also expected to speak.

Her movement between inward and spoken language gives that early fluency a private dimension. Before she speaks aloud, she has already been talking in her head; she regards the public utterance of a word as an act that gives it weight and recognition. At the time of her grandmother’s death, she believes she is officially limited to six spoken words, yet she has questions she cannot ask without revealing how much language she already possesses. She turns to Nishio-san, whose Japanese limits her exchanges with Mother, as a way to ask what she needs to know. Japanese thus offers both a means of closeness and a shelter for the narrator’s concealed knowledge.

That shelter does not mean that the narrator’s relationship with Japan is separable from her other language. When she is drowning, she first cries “Tasukete!” and, when the onlookers continue to stare, screams “Au secours!” The two appeals mark the practical reach of her bilingual world in a moment of danger. The narrator attributes the bystanders’ inaction to a principle against saving another person because rescue would create a crushing debt of gratitude; she experiences their watching as a public spectacle of her possible death. Japan is therefore not presented only through beauty and affection. Her attachment coexists with a frightening encounter in which she cannot rely on the people around her to intervene.

A home made concrete

The narrator’s strongest image of being at home in Japan comes during a walk with Father through flooded streets. He lets her jump into the rushing water along the curbs, soaking her dress and his trousers, while Mother would not have allowed it. Their neighborhood is calm and beautiful, with tiled walls and ginkgo trees overhanging the gardens. Farther on, the street becomes a path winding along the mountain toward Little Green Lake. The narrator calls this her universe, given especially to her, and recalls that, for the only time in her life, she felt profoundly at home. Holding Father’s hand, she feels that everything is where it ought to be, beginning with herself.

The scene’s sudden reversal makes the security of that belonging fragile. The narrator turns her head and discovers that Father is gone; she did not notice when he let go of her hand. Her fear that a person can simply disappear anticipates the later, more consequential separation from Japan. The two losses are not identical, but the episode gives physical form to the narrator’s sense that what feels solid and present may vanish before she is ready. The neighborhood, mountain, lake, and hand she holds belong to one remembered moment of wholeness, while the empty hand shows how quickly its conditions can change.

Departure and the lesson of loss

When the narrator learns that the family will leave Japan, she refuses the news. She insists that she cannot leave and must live there, claiming the country and the house as her own. Mother tells her that Japan is not her country, a statement that collides with the identity the child has made through everyday life. The narrator shakes her head and imagines herself lost at sea, with water rising around her and no foothold in sight. Her distress is not simply reluctance to move: departure threatens the place in which she has located herself.

The narrator later treats this announcement as the beginning of a lifelong pattern. She formulates the lesson as “That which is given you will be taken back.” The first losses she names include Japan, the mountain, the flowers, the house, Nishio-san, and the language. By placing these things together, she shows that what is being taken is not just a location but an entire world of attachments and habits. She expects no replacement to restore what has gone; consolation, in her view, cannot return the thing itself. Japan’s importance is therefore measured not only by the happiness of belonging but by how clearly its threatened departure teaches her the structure of mourning.

Memory as continued belonging

Memory becomes the narrator’s answer to a loss that cannot be reversed. She says she remembers everything after February of 1970, while acknowledging that she does not retain every parental worry or conversation. Before White Chocolate gave her an identity, she remembers nothing firsthand and must depend on other people’s accounts; afterward, she says, what she knows comes from her own recollection. She also insists that her sweeping claim cannot be proved or disproved and that she is increasingly uninterested in being believed. The account thus presents memory as a foundation for her relation to Japan, while making visible the narrator’s own questions about how that foundation can be trusted.

The memories she chooses to preserve are concrete: the lake where she learned to swim, the smell of the garden, and the taste of plum wine sipped when no one was watching. Later, she urges herself to remember because she will not always live in Japan and will lose Nishio-san and the mountain. She compares memory with writing: a written word cannot reproduce the neighbor’s cat, but it can preserve something of the pleasure of seeing it. In the same way, recollection cannot return Japan as a lived present, yet it can keep something of its power available to her. Her bond with Japan consequently continues in a changed form. The country ceases to be a home she can assume will remain hers and becomes a remembered world she must carry forward.