Water and Self-Identity

Water and Self-Identity traces the Narrator (God)’s changing sense of herself through encounters with water that are at once pleasurable, formative, and dangerous. Water first brings her out of a life without conscious awareness: the sea provokes sensation and speech, and swimming gives her a world she can explore. Later, she imagines herself as rain, merging identity with an element that is both life-giving and destructive. In the carp pool, that imaginative union returns in a darker form, as water becomes the setting for a deliberate attempt to die. Across these episodes, water is not merely a backdrop to self-discovery; it changes what the narrator can feel, remember, and believe herself to be.

From Inertness to Sensation

At the beginning of her life, the narrator describes herself as the Tube: a body occupied with ingestion, digestion, and excretion, but unaware of these processes. The Tube is at once full and empty, a hollow substance that retains nothing. This account establishes a striking contrast with the later importance of water. The early body passes nourishment through without attending to it; water, by contrast, becomes something she notices, desires, and eventually incorporates into a story about who she is.

The first decisive encounter occurs on a family trip to Tottori. The narrator already knows Osaka Bay, but finds it too polluted for swimming; at the Sea of Japan, she encounters the sea as a new and compelling presence. The broad beach makes reaching the water seem to take a long time. At the shoreline, she and the waves approach and retreat from one another, each seeming afraid of the other. Her Mother leads her in by the hand despite her fear, and the water lifts and bounces her on its surface. The resulting sensation is ecstatic: for hours she resists being taken out. She speaks the word sea, which becomes her seventh word. Water has thus helped bring language into the open, turning an experience she could not yet express into a spoken name.

That first pleasure does not make water safe. During a later episode at sea, the narrator becomes exhausted and sinks beneath the waves. Underwater, she opens her eyes and is absorbed by the sunlight and the silent movement of sparkling reflections. Her attention to this view momentarily displaces fear; then arms pull her back to the surface, where she gasps for air and sees her Mother crying. The sequence makes water a threshold between wonder and mortal danger. It also shapes the narrator’s later judgment that she is glad to have survived: on the beach, with her sister and Juliette nearby, she reasons that without Hugo there would be no her, and concludes that living is worth the effort.

Learning a World Through Water

After returning to Shukugawa, the narrator decides to learn to swim. Nishio-san takes her each morning to Little Green Lake, which the narrator names and experiences as a small paradise, with warm water and azalea-lined shores. She learns to swim underwater by herself, keeping her eyes open to the marvels that her earlier near-drowning revealed. When she surfaces, tree-covered mountains surround her; the lake becomes a place from which she can perceive the landscape as an expanding circle of beauty. Water is now not only an overwhelming encounter but also a practice: repeated visits let her move through it and look from within it.

This experience supports an early conviction of divinity that the narrator says her brush with death does not shake. She does not treat the possibility of death as proof against divinity; instead, the image of a peony that will eventually wilt lets her imagine beauty and mortality together. The lake’s importance lies partly in that combination. It offers pleasure and a sense of belonging without removing the limits of bodily life.

During the rainy season, the narrator extends this identification beyond the lake. While Nishio-san holds tightly to her umbrella, the child leaves home in a swimsuit, wanting to be wet even before she swims. She enters Little Green Lake and floats as rain falls, opening her mouth to receive it. Water surrounds and enters her, and she interprets the rain as a reflection of herself: abundant and quiet, joyous and difficult, life-giving and corrosive. This is a self-image made from contradiction rather than a single stable quality. She imagines herself as rain that can pass through barriers and return, while also recognizing the element’s capacity to bless or damage. Nishio-san eventually calls her out of the lake, warning that she will dissolve. The narrator answers the warning in her own terms: she feels that dissolution has already happened.

Memory, Identity, and Retrospection

The narrator’s account of water belongs to a larger claim about memory and the arrival of a recognizable self. She says that White Chocolate gave her an identity and a memory, and that she remembers everything after February 1970. She acknowledges that this claim may not be believed and that she cannot prove it. Her recollection is also selective: she does not remember every parental worry or conversation, but retains details she considers essential, including the greenness of the lake, the garden’s smell, and the taste of plum wine. Before White Chocolate, she has no memories of her own and must rely on others’ accounts; afterward, she presents what she knows as firsthand recollection.

Water gives this remembered identity a sequence of concrete places and changes. The Sea of Japan is where fear turns into pleasure and pleasure into a spoken word. Little Green Lake is where the narrator practices swimming and sustains her sense of wonder. Rain becomes an expansive metaphor for a self that can be gentle or destructive. In retrospect, these episodes do not settle into a simple story of mastery: the narrator learns to move through water, but repeatedly acknowledges its power to take her beyond what she can control. Her self-description develops through remembered encounters, while the element at the center of those memories remains larger than any single interpretation.

The Pool and the Limits of Identification

The pattern darkens in the narrator’s later encounter with the carp pool. She sees the garden, once her refuge, as a place that now harbors death, and collapses into the water. Beneath the surface, she feels at home and regards the view through the water as beautiful. The carp have moved away, and she focuses on the bamboo near the water’s edge. Water once again changes perception: it gives her a still, altered view of the garden and intensifies her sense of connection to it. But this time the connection accompanies a decision not to return to the surface.

The narrator distinguishes this episode from her earlier drowning at sea. Previously, she had wanted to get back to the surface; in the pool, she feels that she has chosen otherwise. She imagines herself turning back into the Tube, open to water and stripped of other functions. That return links the pool to the beginning of her story: the body that once passed through nourishment without awareness now becomes, in her account, a self tempted by a state without ordinary identity. Water’s earlier role in awakening her does not prevent it from becoming the medium through which she imagines the self disappearing.

Kashima-san watches from the pool’s edge and does not intervene. The narrator believes Kashima-san will let her die, and later speculates that she may have understood the nature of the act and respected her choice. This interpretation echoes the narrator’s earlier experience of onlookers watching her struggle at sea, but the meanings are not identical: the earlier scene ends with her Mother rescuing her, whereas in the pool Kashima-san’s inaction forms part of the narrator’s understanding of her choice. The narrator is eventually pulled out and revived by Nishio-san. She does not tell her parents that the episode was intentional, nor does she tell them about Kashima-san. A scar on her left temple remains as material evidence that the event happened, even as the narrator admits that she sometimes wonders whether she dreamed or invented it.

The narrator also places her private attempt beside the mass deaths on Okinawa after Japan’s surrender in 1945. She recounts that the island’s inhabitants had been told the Americans would kill them, and that many leaped from cliffs despite the war’s end and orders to stop resisting. Reflecting on the deaths, she identifies fear of dying as central to suicide and emphasizes the paradox of people dying to avoid being killed. She explicitly says that, at three, she knew nothing of this history. The comparison is therefore retrospective, not knowledge that motivated the child’s act: it brings two distinct accounts of fear, death, and choice into the same later reflection without making them equivalent.

Across these returns, water sustains no single meaning. It draws the narrator toward speech, pleasure, memory, and a vivid sense of being alive; it also permits fantasies of invulnerability and, finally, of erasure. Her remembered self takes shape through these contradictions, while the recurring water makes clear that identity is neither wholly separate from the world around her nor securely in command of it.