Permanently Masking the Truth in Post-War Japan.

Passage: "A young woman, very thin. I knew something was wrong and Mariko must have done too because she stopped running. At first I thought the woman was blind, she had that kind of look, her eyes didn't seem to actually see anything. Well, she brought her arms out of the canal and showed us what she'd been holding under the water. It was a baby. I took hold of Mariko then and we came out of the alley" (Ishiguro 74).

The narration of the speakers dialogue, who is in this case Sachiko, is done so in a way that emphasizes the ambiguity in the language and tone to show the unreliability of the reflecting narrator who is traumatically affected by the devastating bombings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. As the narrator, who is believed to be Etsuko, retells her friends story as being an example of her bad and negligent parenting--she creates a screen memory that replaces her responsibility of how the bomb affected her into a descriptive imaginary friend that mirrors her own blurred experience after the bomb dropped. The woman who is "thin" cut her throat in front of Mariko and that triggered her natural emotion to overtake her and her mother just cant understand why. She mentions that she looks blind which shows the real blindness of the narrator because she is retelling the story and going over explicitly how this "Sachiko" supposedly saw this setting, but why is she able to retell this with such great detail? It could be because she cant and never will accept the truth even though there is all this talk about moving forward on her half, and she just cant realize that she is the witness to this horrific event. The parallel of this scene to the scene on pages 165-166 reveal that it is quite possible that it was Etsuko who killed her child. The baby is held up out of the water by the ghostly woman and similarly, Sachiko hold up the wet kitten and says its all right. This is a cover up, a mask that Etsuko chooses to believe is real to escape her reality and it shows just how devastating war technology can affect an entire society.  

By Alex Hanley