Chronicle of My Mother

Yasushi Inoue

2 ideas

1. Memory erased backward from the present

   Inoue pictures his mother's dementia as an eraser rubbing out the line of her life, starting at the present end and moving steadily back toward childhood. On this model, forgetting is ordered rather than random: the most recent decades go first, and what survives longest is the earliest and most deeply laid material. That explains why she can lose her own children while still keeping a girlhood attachment vivid.

2. Her decline returns him to an early separation

   As a small child Inoue was raised apart from his mother by Nui, his great-grandfather's mistress, in the mountains of Izu. Watching his mother's decline leads him back to that separation, which his account explains through her pregnancy at the time and his own attachment to Nui.

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