Unreliable Memory and Recollection

Unreliable Memory and Recollection shapes how the novel turns the past into a story without making recollection a dependable record. Lucy’s memories can be intensely vivid yet incomplete, revised, or mixed with speculation. She repeatedly distinguishes what she experienced from what she merely believes happened, and that distinction becomes crucial when her account of Lily’s disappearance is entangled with a false confession and unresolved evidence about Teiji.

Memory Under Pressure

The novel’s recollections emerge within the pressure of police questioning. Lucy wonders what control she has over her future, then turns toward the past as a way to understand how it became the present and how her friendships came apart. Memory is therefore not a neutral archive: it is the method by which she tries to make sense of her situation, even as the gaps in that method remain visible.

Her first encounter with Teiji illustrates the difference between sensory certainty and narrative certainty. Lucy remembers wandering through rainy Tokyo after Mrs. Yamamoto’s string quartet had disbanded, and seeing Teiji photograph a puddle outside the Keio Plaza Hotel. Water, reflections, neon, and his camera remain sharply present; she even remembers her shoes entering the reflection and being included in his photograph. But vivid detail does not settle what the encounter meant or what followed. The scene is recalled through Lucy’s perception of Teiji as almost made of water and ice, so its striking clarity is also a portrait of her way of seeing him.

The next morning, Lucy leaves her address beneath Teiji’s camera but not her telephone number, wanting him to find her. When he arrives a week later, she cannot recover what either of them said. She proposes several possibilities: he may have complimented her, they may have gone straight to bed, or they may have spoken not at all. The uncertainty reaches a basic fact of their relationship: if they never spoke, she cannot explain how she learned his name. The memory preserves the intimacy and the address while leaving the words that might connect them unaccounted for.

Recollection, Invention, and Other People’s Stories

Lucy’s memories of Teiji’s bed repeat the same instability. She recalls him taking a photograph that included his own image, then whispering something she cannot retrieve. She recognizes that their exchanges cannot literally have been without words, yet remembers no syllables; the image that comes to her instead is of rain-like sound passing between them. Her account does not resolve the missing conversation by supplying dialogue. It makes the failure to remember part of the remembered relationship.

The story Lucy tells about Sachi is still more explicitly provisional. She remembers finding Teiji’s photographs and being haunted by a final image of Sachi lying on the pavement, but cannot tell whether Sachi was overdosing, drunk, asleep, or dead. Lucy admits that she did not ask Teiji about Sachi again and that she invented the crying man she associated with one photograph. Even the apparent background to the photographs—Teiji attending performances to watch Sachi act—is left open to correction: perhaps he never went to the theater, and the red, moist eyes in the image had an ordinary cause. The episode shows Lucy forming a story from photographs, then acknowledging that the story exceeds what the images can prove.

Other recollections preserve gaps without filling them in. As a child, Lucy cannot remember exactly what happened during a geography project with Caroline, although she presumes they worked on it; what she does remember is the later moment outside the bathroom, watching Caroline’s father and imagining the life contained in his eyes. The contrast is revealing: the missing stretch is marked as missing, while the remembered encounter acquires an intense, interpretive significance. The novel lets the reader see where recollection ends and imaginative construction begins, without treating either as a complete account of the past.

Perception, Feeling, and the Limits of Recall

Some uncertainty concerns not an event’s sequence but the status of an experience itself. On Sado Island, after Lucy faints near the cliffs, she remembers a voice telling her to rest and saying that what happened was not her fault. She first takes it to be Lily’s, then notices that the voice was speaking Japanese and considers that it may have been Teiji’s, suddenly unfamiliar. She cannot decide whether this detail belongs to a dream or to the event as it occurred. When she wakes, Lily and Teiji are gone, and the two other bikes have disappeared; the abandonment is clear, while the remembered voice that precedes it remains unsettled.

Lucy also describes a moment of exhilaration while swimming in the cold Sea of Japan. At the time, she tries to store the happiness in memory for later use. Back in a stuffy room in Tokyo, she can picture the water and remember its coldness, but cannot recover the sensation of fresh air or inhabit the happiness again. The episode gives recollection a limit different from factual error: memory may preserve that a feeling existed without restoring the feeling itself.

Perception can also be named after the fact without being explained. During a night when Lucy hears a sound that seems to have been present since before she woke, she calls it Earthquake bird; as she listens, the sound fades and she knows the room has stopped moving. The naming and the bodily change are recorded, but their relation is not explained. Elsewhere, the peak of Mount Fuji appears suspended above the other mountains, prompting Lucy to describe it as ghostlike. Such moments keep ordinary perception and uncanny interpretation close together without confirming a supernatural cause.

The City as a Map of Recollection

Lucy’s movement through Tokyo gives memory a physical route. After meeting Teiji, she had wandered along the Yamanote Line from station to station without considering herself lonely; seeing him in Shinjuku made it impossible to walk away and return to being alone. Later, following the line again becomes a way to move through places attached to different periods and relationships. The city does not merely contain the past: familiar stations and streets call it back in fragments.

After Lily and Teiji leave Lucy near the cliffs, repeated calls from Lily continue while Lucy refuses to answer. On the fourth day, she walks counterclockwise from Gotanda toward Osaki, then keeps following the tracks from station to station because movement makes her thoughts less clear and less able to wound her. The route gathers particular memories: Akihabara recalls looking at cameras with Teiji; Ameyoko recalls shopping with Natsuko; the cemetery at Yanaka recalls the period before Lucy visited Mrs. Yamamoto. Passing these places does not restore a settled chronology. Instead, the city layers the old attachments over the immediate pain of Lily and Teiji’s desertion.

The walk eventually returns Lucy to Shinjuku, near the place where she first saw Teiji. There she thinks of Sachi and wonders whether Teiji’s relationships with Sachi, Lucy, and Lily followed one another without a pause. She cannot know how much time separated them, and recognizes that the imagined sequence may be wrong. By morning she has walked the distance of a marathon and completed a circuit of Tokyo. The loop gives the recollections a pattern of return, but it does not prove the conclusions Lucy draws from them.

Confession, Evidence, and Qualified Guilt

The sharpest consequence of unreliable recollection appears in Lucy’s account of Lily’s death. She gives the police a detailed story in which jealousy, rage, and obsessive love lead her to use a pair of stockings to kill Lily. Yet Lucy explicitly says that she did not kill Lily and describes the confession as a story spun for the police. The force of the account and its falsity coexist: her fluency does not make it true, and her admission of invention does not erase her uncertainty about her own responsibility.

Lucy’s qualification is ethical as well as factual. She wonders whether Lily would have appeared at her street if Lucy had allowed her calls through; she also remembers introducing Lily to Teiji and persuading Lily not to return to Britain when she wanted to. She accepts neither complete innocence nor the murder charge as the whole truth, expressing her position as not guilty but not entirely innocent. The distinction prevents the novel from turning uncertainty into a simple acquittal of feeling or consequence: Lucy can deny the killing while continuing to question what her choices helped bring about.

Photographs further complicate the competing accounts. Lucy recognizes Teiji as the photographer, although the police do not know that he took the pictures. She says the images do not prove that Teiji killed Lily, but do show that Lucy did not. From there she speculates about Teiji’s meeting with Lily at McDonald’s, what Lily might have told him, and whether he could have had a motive to kill her; she immediately acknowledges that the case against him is circumstantial and warns against hasty judgment. The photographs constrain one claim without resolving the larger mystery. Across the novel, memory and evidence can expose the limits of a story, but neither supplies Lucy—or the reader—with a final, complete account.