Sea of Japan

The Sea of Japan is where the Narrator (God)’s first encounter with the open sea becomes a near-drowning, a rescue, and an unexpected revelation about her speech. Reached on a family trip to Tottori, it first appears as a place of attraction and uncertainty; its changing depth later makes the Narrator’s imagined command over the world untenable. The episode also turns the sea into an agent in her development, drawing out the French she has been withholding.

Setting and First Encounter

In April, the Narrator’s parents take the family to the seashore in Tottori, on the opposite side of Japan from Osaka Bay. The Narrator already knows the bay, but describes it as too polluted for swimming. The Sea of Japan is therefore not simply a larger version of a familiar place: it is her first encounter with this open stretch of water, and she is captivated by it.

The Narrator notes a distinction in Japanese usage: the sea is considered male, while the ocean is considered female. She says the logic of this division escapes her, both at the time and in retrospect. The observation places a cultural classification beside her own uncertainty about the water, without resolving either into an explanation.

The beach at Tottori seems so broad that crossing it feels interminable. At the water’s edge, the Narrator hesitates, while the advancing and retreating water seems as wary as she is. The others enter the sea. Mother calls for the Narrator to follow, but the child remains afraid despite wearing an inflatable tube around her waist. Mother takes her by the hand and leads her in. Once afloat, the Narrator discovers the freedom of being carried on the surface and stays in the water for hours, until the adults make her leave. The first encounter is thus not a simple triumph over fear: delight follows hesitation, but does not make the water predictable.

From Play to Peril

The Narrator’s next experience begins in play and in a child’s mistaken sense of power. Walking out into the sea, she finds that the water is not getting deeper and concludes that she has somehow raised the seabed. She decides to continue toward Korea, imagining that she can walk all the way to the Asian continent. The water’s apparent shallowness seems to confirm her imagined miracle, and she proceeds farther from Japan.

That confidence ends when the seabed drops away and she loses her footing. The water pulls her under; when she reaches the surface, waves push her down again. From there she can see the distant-looking beach and her parents, who are napping, as well as people watching her. No one comes to help. The Narrator interprets their inaction through what she calls an old Japanese principle against rescuing another person: intervention, in this account, would create an overwhelming debt of gratitude. The bystanders’ refusal to act, and their failure even to alert her parents, make her exposure to danger a public spectacle.

The Narrator first calls for help in Japanese, then cries out in French. That second appeal marks a change in the episode: she recognizes that her long-held reluctance to speak French has become absurd in the immediate need to be heard. The account presents the sea as having brought about a confession, though the people on the beach do not hear her calls. Rescue comes instead when Hugo, playing with André and Juliette, notices that the Narrator has disappeared beneath the water. He goes to Mother and points out where she is. Mother reaches the Narrator, brings her back to the beach, and holds her close; after the child has expelled water, Mother explains Hugo’s part in saving her. The danger ends through his intervention, not through the watching crowd.

Language, Memory, and Narrative Significance

After the rescue, the Narrator thanks Hugo and tells him that he is nice. The remark surprises the family because they had not understood her to be capable of speaking in this way. She answers that she has been speaking for a long time. Elsewhere, she explains the distinction between thought and public speech: saying a word aloud gives it recognition and weight. The beach episode makes that distinction consequential. The Narrator has treated French as something she can keep back; faced with danger, she uses it alongside Japanese, and her ability is no longer concealed.

The episode also gives the sea a role beyond its setting. It first offers pleasure and a sense of release from the pull of the earth, then exposes the limits of the Narrator’s imagined control. Her movement toward the Asian continent ends not in a completed journey but in a recognition of vulnerability and dependence on another person. Hugo’s warning brings Mother to the water; the Narrator’s survival rests on that chain of noticing and action.

The Narrator presents the scene as firsthand memory and says that her memory begins after February 1970, when white chocolate gave her an identity. She acknowledges that her expansive claim to remember everything may not be believed, and distinguishes essential remembered particulars from the many ordinary details she has forgotten. The Sea of Japan belongs to the remembered sequence through the concrete episode at Tottori: the journey from the beach into the water, the failed walk toward Korea, the calls for help, and Hugo’s intervention. In the later account, this place preserves both the beginning of her pleasure in the sea and the moment when fear forces her private knowledge of language into speech.