No pleasure without me. No me without pleasure!

“No pleasure without me. No me without pleasure!” is the expression through which the Narrator (God) describes the birth of a conscious self. First spoken in response to White Chocolate, it makes pleasure both the proof of a self and the condition of that self’s existence, joining a childhood awakening to the narrator’s later account of identity and memory.

The Expression and Its Origin

The expression arises during the narrator’s first encounter with White Chocolate. The unfamiliar white stick provokes both disgust and desire; when it melts on the tongue, its sweetness forces out a voice the child has never heard before. That voice rejects the status of an “it” and claims the identity of a “me,” calling itself the child’s best friend and the source of pleasure.

The narrator dates this birth of the self to February 1970, at the age of two and a half, in Shukugawa, Kansai, under the benevolent gaze of the paternal Grandmother who gave the child the chocolate. The voice, the narrator says, has spoken in the mind ever since. The expression thus marks more than a pleasurable taste: it gives the experience a speaker and a name for the person who experiences it.

Pleasure as Identity

The child’s response develops as the chocolate is eaten. With each bite, the inner voice grows louder and imagines itself as powerful as the sweetness it can taste, even claiming to have invented that sweetness. The chocolate depends on the child to become pleasure, while the child discovers a self through the pleasure it produces. The expression condenses this reciprocal relation: neither pleasure nor the “me” is presented as complete without the other.

The adult narrator expands that childhood discovery into a general account of existence. Pleasure teaches the narrator that the self is wherever pleasure is; the possibility of pleasure, in turn, can make existence worth inhabiting. This account opposes the child’s new appetite to a world of compulsory meals, including pureed carrots with small bits of meat. The Grandmother’s sugar, which the Mother regarded as a poison, had helped make the previously difficult child fit for society. In the narrator’s interpretation, pleasure does not distract from thought or life; it awakens the spirit and gives the self a reason to join the world.

Memory and the Narrator’s Account

The expression is tied to the narrator’s explanation of when personal memory begins. The narrator says White Chocolate provided not only an identity but also a memory, claiming to remember everything after February 1970. The claim is qualified: the narrator does not remember every parental worry or conversation, but retains what is called essential, including the greenness of the lake where swimming was learned, the garden’s smell, and the taste of plum wine sipped unseen.

The narrator distinguishes this firsthand recollection from the period before the chocolate, of which nothing is remembered directly and knowledge must come from other people’s accounts. The striking claim is presented without insisting on proof: the narrator observes that it can neither be proved nor disproved and becomes less interested in being believed. In this way, the expression’s birth of a “me” also establishes the beginning of the narrator’s autobiographical authority, while leaving that authority open to doubt.

Later Reflection

At the book’s close, the narrator’s recollection of a first and only suicide attempt includes uncertainty about whether the remembered events were dreamed or invented. The visible scar on the left temple supplies a material trace of the episode, though it does not independently verify every detail of the narrator’s memory. This ending returns attention to the difference between a self that tells its story and a story that can be conclusively proved. Against that uncertainty, the expression remains the narrator’s foundational account of how a self first came to speak: through pleasure, and inseparable from it.