“Disease” of Self-Restraint

The “Disease” of Self-Restraint is Narrator (God)’s explanation for Kashima-san’s refusal to respond with visible delight. In the narrator’s childlike world, pleasure ought to be accepted and shared, while the people who love her confirm her sense of divinity. Kashima-san’s reserve therefore appears not as a preference the narrator might respect, but as a disorder to investigate. The episode turns a series of small social gestures into a comic inquiry—and, when every experiment fails, a lesson in the limits of the narrator’s power.

Identity and Interpretation

The supposed disease belongs to Kashima-san, the narrator’s aristocratic nanny, but it is diagnosed entirely through the narrator’s interpretation of her behavior. Kashima-san’s handsome, hard features, pinched expression, and air of disdain seem to the child to register a rejection of sweetness and light. The narrator feels sorrow for her: it must be terrible, she thinks, not to adore the narrator. That pity is inseparable from self-regard. The narrator does not initially consider that Kashima-san might simply not share her enthusiasm, or that the lack of affection could have anything to do with the narrator herself. Her own divinity, as she understands it, is beyond question; the explanation must be a problem in the other person.

The name for this problem is the disease of self-denial. The narrator identifies it in a recurring physical sign: when there is cause for celebration, Kashima-san’s mouth tightens and her lips set. To the child, such composure suggests that Kashima-san is holding herself back, as though pleasure were beneath her or joy amounted to surrender. The diagnosis thus makes an inward condition out of outward restraint. It gives the narrator a way to make Kashima-san’s difference legible without admitting that another person may have independent tastes, judgments, or limits.

Experiments in Delight

Rather than accept the first signs of indifference, the narrator sets out to test the theory. She brings Kashima-san the garden’s most fragrant camellia and says she picked it especially for her. Kashima-san tightens her mouth and offers a curt thanks. The flower, intended as a personal gift, becomes evidence in the child’s accumulating case: even a gesture chosen for its fragrance and thoughtfulness cannot elicit the response the narrator expects.

The next test involves food. At the narrator’s request, Nishio-san prepares Kashima-san’s favorite dish, a sublime chawan mushi. Kashima-san nibbles it delicately and silently. The narrator then tries to make a shared spectacle of a rainbow, running to Kashima-san so they can admire it together. Kashima-san only shrugs. These trials vary the object of pleasure—gift, favorite food, natural beauty—but the response remains restrained. For the narrator, their repetition strengthens the diagnosis; for the reader, it also shows how little room the child’s worldview leaves for a response other than enthusiastic participation.

As a last resort, the narrator presents herself as the most beautiful sight imaginable. She puts on a traditional Japanese outfit given to her by Nishio-san: a little red silk kimono decorated with water lilies, a large red obi, lacquered geta, and a purple-paper parasol bearing storks in flight. She adds her mother’s red lipstick and looks at herself in a mirror, convinced that she is magnificent. Before approaching Kashima-san, she performs for her most loyal followers. They cry out in ecstasy as she spins and flutters around the garden like a butterfly, then places an enormous peony on her head. Their delight appears to confirm the power of the spectacle—but only within the circle already devoted to her.

Kashima-san offers no reaction. The silence is the experiment’s decisive result. The narrator takes it not as evidence that the costume or performance has failed to appeal to this particular person, but as further proof that Kashima-san is suppressing pleasure. The grander the offering becomes, the clearer the gap between the child’s certainty about its effect and Kashima-san’s actual response.

Pleasure, Difference, and the Tube

The episode’s insistence on pleasure and refusal sits within a broader concern with bodily life. At the beginning of the book, Narrator (God)’s existence is described through ingestion, digestion, and excretion, largely unconscious processes that make the infant body seem like a tube: a hollow form that takes things in and lets them pass through without retaining them. Later, the narrator becomes acutely alert to what bodies contain. While feeding the Koi (carp), she recoils from their gaping mouths and visible digestive tracts, and begins to treat disgust as a disclosure of individuality: what repels someone may reveal who that person is more deeply than ordinary preferences do.

That later meditation offers a useful contrast to the narrator’s reading of Kashima-san. Faced with the carp, the narrator recognizes that a response of disgust can mark a real difference between one person and another. Faced with Kashima-san, however, she cannot yet grant the same independence to someone else’s response. Reserve becomes pathology because the child expects the world to echo her own pleasure. The distance between the narrator’s early image of the body as a receptive tube and her later preoccupation with exposed interiors underscores a developing attention to bodily boundaries, but it does not make her interpretation of Kashima-san reliable.

Limits of the Narrator’s Power

The narrator’s concern for Kashima-san remains genuine within the terms of the child’s imagination: she feels deep sorrow, calls her poor, and mourns the inability to fit her into a vision of the world. Yet that compassion does not overcome the self-centered premise beneath it. Kashima-san is pitied for failing to adore the narrator, and her silence is made to signify a defect rather than a refusal the narrator cannot control.

The episode ends with a small but consequential recognition. After deciding that Kashima-san must be holding back, the narrator realizes that there is no way to integrate this apparently sad creature into her worldview. The narrator cannot make Kashima-san respond, cannot discover a cure, and cannot turn indifference into admiration through increasingly lavish offerings. She has discovered the limits of her power: an insight that punctures, without wholly dismantling, her self-deification. Kashima-san’s unaltered reserve is the point the child’s interpretation misses and the scene itself preserves.