Self-Deification and Childhood Religion

Self-Deification and Childhood Religion names the imaginative system through which Narrator (God) interprets awakening, pleasure, childhood status, and the devotion of others as evidence of divinity. The child’s private conviction takes on the shape of a religion: it has a language, followers, a sanctuary, apparent miracles, and a dissenter. Its authority is at once intensely personal and dependent on recognition, making Kashima-san’s refusal—and the approaching end of sacred early childhood—its defining challenge.

Emergence from Inertia

Before this religious identity forms, the child is called the Tube and then the Plant. Specialists diagnose pathological apathy, and Mother and Father are advised to place the child in hospital. They refuse: they already have two other children, and find tenderness even in the thought of having a vegetable for a third. By the age of two, the child has not tried to crawl or made a sound. The adults assume a developmental blockage; the retrospective account instead presents the possibility that the child has not wanted to begin moving or speaking. This gap between adult diagnosis and the child’s narrated agency becomes the ground from which the later divine identity emerges.

The turning point is the white chocolate Grandmother brings when she visits the family in Shukugawa, in Kansai, in February 1970. At two and a half, the child tastes it; its sweetness seems to take command of the mouth and releases speech. The awakening is not described merely as acquiring language. The new voice announces an identity, distinguishes a self from an impersonal it, and names pleasure as the self’s companion. Narrator (God) dates the birth of the speaking self to this moment, under Grandmother’s benevolent gaze. The child’s divinity thus begins not with a supernatural vision but with a bodily experience that makes selfhood and pleasure seem inseparable.

The account also makes memory part of this origin story. Narrator (God) claims to remember everything after February 1970, while conceding that not every conversation or parental worry remains available. Before the chocolate, the narrator says, there is no firsthand memory and later knowledge must come from other people’s recollections; afterward, experience is remembered directly. The claim is explicitly difficult to verify, and the narrator says belief is not required. That boundary gives the religious childhood a distinctive narrative status: it is presented as an intensely remembered world, but its authority rests on the narrator’s testimony rather than external proof.

Divine Identity and Its Language

After awakening, the child remains the center of its own universe. Sitting in the yard among toys, Narrator (God) gradually recognizes that the objects exist independently, rather than depending on the child. Their separateness causes profound displeasure. At the same time, the child notices that adults produce articulated sounds that allow them to control and annex things. Naming appears to offer a way to overcome that troubling independence: if the child can name what exists, the child can claim authority over it.

The first attempt at speech does not deliver this power. The child points to an object and tries to speak, but produces incoherent sounds. Instead of interpreting the failure as evidence of inferiority, Narrator (God) experiences humiliation and outrage because the mouth will not perform the power the child believes it possesses. Mother stretches out the sounds of “Paaaapaaaa! Maaaamaaaa!” as a model, but the child’s crisis is not simply about being late to develop. The mother supposes the child senses a developmental delay; the retrospective narrator rejects comparison itself, insisting that the child feels enormous power and resents being unable to exercise it. The divine self-image therefore precedes competence and survives its repeated frustrations.

The new identity finds a social language in Japanese. Narrator (God) later interprets the child’s first use of Japanese as necessary to the worship of the self: followers require an idiom in which they can be addressed. The imagined congregation is small, comprising Nishio-san, the twin girls she calls futago, and passersby, but the child regards the intensity of their reverence as more important than their number. Walking in the street while holding Nishio-san’s hand, the child expects acclamation from servants. Language, in this account, does more than enable communication; it organizes the world into a sovereign speaker and those who hear, answer, and admire.

Status, Followers, and Sanctuary

The child’s conviction has a cultural framework as well as a private one. Narrator (God) describes a Japanese convention under which a child is a god from birth until entering nursery school, a status identified as Okosama Sacred Child Status. Because the older siblings and Nishio-san’s twin daughters have passed beyond this stage, the child understands its own age as conferring a special rank. Nishio-san treats the child accordingly: she bends to the child’s height, gives whatever is requested, and waits to eat until the child has finished taking food from her plate. Mother objects when she sees this conduct and urges Nishio-san not to submit to it, but the child resumes as soon as Mother turns away. The child’s favored okonomiyaki and seasoned rice, contrasted with Mother’s pureed carrots and meat, make the authority material and everyday, not merely symbolic.

Nishio-san’s devotion extends beyond service. She cradles the child like a doll, comforts feigned injuries, and praises the child’s features, declaring that she has never seen a face so beautiful. Narrator (God) takes pleasure in being held within this adoration, which serves as proof of the excellence of the divine self. The child’s understanding of worship is consequently reciprocal: the follower receives happiness from loving the child, while the child reads that happiness as confirmation of its own sacredness.

The garden is where this arrangement reaches its fullest expression. Its planted flowers and trees become subjects; its walls, capped with tiles, keep the laity outside and make the enclosed yard a sanctuary. The Japanese garden’s stone pool, simplicity, and varied plants give the child a setting in which a small domestic space can stand for a whole universe. Narrator (God) commands a budded stalk to blossom, and the next day it has become a white peony. Nishio-san does not deny the child’s claim to power. The garden’s changing flowers seem to confirm that nature is allied with the child’s progress: one bloom fades and another appears nearby, more splendid in its place. The child imagines that this profusion has improved the lives of those who witness it and made their adoration deserved.

Refusal and the Limits of Worship

Kashima-san is the one Japanese woman who does not join the child’s religion. Narrator (God) calls her the anti-me because she refuses the child rather than accepting the offered divinity. The child first commands Kashima-san’s garden not to blossom, only to learn that she has no garden. It then changes tactics, approaching with a magnanimous smile and an extended hand likened to God’s gesture toward Adam on the Sistine Chapel ceiling. Kashima-san ignores the offer. Her refusal is not a passing disappointment: it denies the child the recognition on which its miniature religious order depends.

Narrator (God) explains Kashima-san’s dissent as a disease of self-denial. The child watches her mouth tighten during occasions for joy and reads her reserve as an incapacity to accept pleasure. This diagnosis preserves the divine self-image: if Kashima-san does not adore the child, the failure must belong to her. Yet the child also feels sorrow for her, imagining how terrible it must be to miss the happiness that Nishio-san and the other followers receive from loving the child. The passage thus makes the conflict more complex than simple triumph over an enemy. Kashima-san’s independence unsettles the child precisely because it cannot be absorbed into the child’s account of universal admiration.

The limits of divinity appear again when Narrator (God) asks Nishio-san about Jesus. Nishio-san says she knows he is a god with long hair, but does not believe in him. Asked whether she believes in the child, she answers yes, adding that she knows the child. The exchange makes personal familiarity, rather than abstract doctrine, the basis of this household’s faith. The child’s long hair offers a point of resemblance, but Nishio-san’s answer distinguishes the remote figure from the being she knows and loves. Her belief strengthens the child’s religion while revealing how closely its authority depends on this particular relationship.

The End of Sacred Childhood

A brush with death does not dissolve Narrator (God)’s conviction. The child reasons that divinity does not require immortality: a peony does not become less sublime because it will eventually wilt. The comparison carries the garden’s central promise and its limit at once. The child can remain divine without escaping change, but the natural cycle that once looked like continual renewal will soon make decline impossible to ignore.

Turning three brings the end of the child’s sacred status closer. Narrator (God) connects this age with the loss of belief in the goodness of the world and hears that nursery school will mean leaving the garden and joining other children. At the same time, the plants seem overfull: by the middle of August the greenery and flowers have become heavy, as though nature has reached saturation. The child cannot yet explain the seasonal cycle or recall the preceding year as a guide. The narrator’s account describes three as an especially anxious threshold: unlike a two-year-old who does not notice change or a four-year-old who can compare it with memory, the three-year-old sees everything but understands nothing. The coming end of the garden’s luxuriance and the end of pre-school divinity converge as threats to a world the child had taken to be permanent.

Self-Deification and Childhood Religion therefore describes both an imaginative sovereignty and the conditions that sustain it. Pleasure gives Narrator (God) a speaking self; Nishio-san’s care supplies a congregation; the garden supplies a temple and apparent miracles; and the child’s account of Japanese childhood supplies a culturally legible interval of sacred status. But the religion cannot command universal assent, prevent natural decline, or keep nursery school at bay. Its vivid power lies in the way it turns childhood’s dependence on other people and the surrounding world into a theology of rule—while its episodes of refusal, change, and approaching separation quietly expose what that rule cannot control.