February 1970

February 1970 is the Narrator (God)’s point of origin as a self-aware speaker and the boundary around which the book organizes memory. The Narrator describes being born again at two and a half in Shukugawa, Japan, when White Chocolate made pleasure possible; from that date onward, remembered experience becomes the basis of identity, while the period before it can only be approached through other people’s accounts.

Date and Narrative Birth

The Narrator places this second birth in February 1970, in Kansai, in the village of Shukugawa, under the benevolent gaze of a paternal Grandmother. The event follows the taste of White Chocolate: sweetness prompts a voice to emerge, declaring a distinction between being an impersonal thing and being a self. This is not a claim of biological birth. It names the moment when sensation, pleasure, and language transform the child’s status in the narrative.

The date also closes a first phase of childhood. Before the awakening, specialists call the child’s condition pathological apathy, and the adults interpret the lack of movement and speech as a developmental blockage. Mother and Father reject the recommendation to hospitalize the child, accepting instead the affectionate name the Plant. The Narrator later recasts this stillness as a Tube-like existence, and February 1970 as the beginning of a life that can be experienced and remembered from within.

Pleasure, Identity, and Change

White Chocolate is the immediate cause of the Narrator’s awakening. The sweetness is not merely a treat: it supplies the first felt pleasure, and pleasure gives the child a relation to the world beyond passive existence. The voice that arises with it identifies itself as a self and as the source of pleasure. The Narrator says that this voice has continued to speak ever since, making the date the start not only of consciousness but of an enduring inner narration.

The change is visible to the family. After two years of having a vegetable and six months of having a wild beast, Mother and Father are relieved to have a child they regard as more or less normal; they begin using the child’s first name. The Narrator describes becoming alert yet judicious, silent yet present, and obedient yet independent. Grandmother and her sweets remain in Japan for only a month, but the experience outlasts her visit: the idea of pleasure has, in the Narrator’s account, set the child in motion.

The Boundary of Memory

February 1970 divides remembered life from an inaccessible before. The Narrator says that nothing from before the White Chocolate is remembered firsthand; knowledge of that period must come from what other people report, filtered through the Narrator’s own mind. By contrast, the Narrator claims to remember everything after February 1970, and insists that what is known from that point comes from direct recollection rather than borrowed testimony.

That claim is deliberately qualified. The Narrator acknowledges not remembering every worry of Mother and Father or every conversation they had with friends, while insisting that nothing essential has been lost. The examples are intimate and sensory: the greenness of the lake where the Narrator learned to swim, the smell of the garden, and the taste of plum wine sipped unseen. Memory is thus presented not as a complete record but as a selective archive organized around experience and pleasure. The Narrator also observes that recollection has no connection to what existed before pleasure, making the date a conceptual threshold as much as a chronological one.

Retrospection and Credibility

The Narrator recognizes that the assertion of remembering everything after February 1970 is unlikely to be believed, but treats it as neither provable nor disprovable. This stance makes the date part of an autobiographical pact with the reader: the account insists on the authority of firsthand childhood memory while openly acknowledging the limits of verification. Its distinction between direct recollection and family testimony remains central to how the Narrator explains the formation of the self.

Later uncertainty sharpens rather than erases that tension. Looking back on the first suicide attempt, the Narrator wonders whether the episode was dreamed or invented, then points to the scar on the left temple as material evidence that something happened. The scar does not establish every detail of the memory, but it gives physical form to the narrative’s recurring negotiation between remembered experience and doubt. February 1970 remains the firmest dividing line in that account: before it, a self cannot recall; after it, memory becomes the medium through which the Narrator claims to have lived.