Three Photographs Cannot Assemble a True Self#

No Longer Human first asks a narrator who has never met Yozo to study three photographs. In the first, he says, the child is not smiling at all. The smile in the second is contrived from beginning to end. The third leaves him with no impression of the person. Three notebooks then appear, and readers may readily use them to explain the photographs, as though Yozo can finally tell us who was hidden behind them. The novel never confirms that the notebooks explain the three photographs one by one, and the photographs cannot establish the stranger’s judgments by themselves. They leave several readings that pull against one another.³

Yozo later pushes his clowning all the way toward self-condemnation and ruin; at first, however, it is sustained by other people’s responses. Yozo calls clowning his “last courtship of humankind” and the one thin thread by which he remains connected to others. At school he makes people laugh on purpose, then checks whether the teacher laughed as well. Laughter reassures him and supplies a usable image: the odd, likable child who threatens no one.

Takeichi breaks that measure. He does not announce that he has seen through Yozo. After one deliberate fall, he only murmurs, “On purpose. On purpose.” Yozo immediately imagines the words spreading until his whole performance is exposed. He rearranges his conduct around this particular spectator. In the rain he lends Takeichi an umbrella, brings him home, apologizes, lets the boy rest his head on his lap, and carefully cleans the pus from his ear with cotton and alcohol. Yozo says outright that he means to “tame” him. Calculation runs through the care, yet the act of care still occurs. Clowning misleads people and gives Yozo a way to approach them. Takeichi’s remark does not release a complete Yozo from disguise; it makes an image that once worked suddenly fail.⁴

Lacan’s account of the mirror stage asks how the ego gains unity through a complete image located outside it. “Misrecognition” here means more than making an error about oneself. A living body, scattered acts, and conflicting experience come to be recognized as one coherent “I,” and that coherence already depends on an external image. But this coherent ego does not exhaust the person speaking. Even the most honest self-account is still addressed to someone, and it produces new consequences once spoken.⁵

The notebooks later pass into a stranger’s hands, exposing Yozo to judgment by another pair of eyes.

The postscript adds two more versions. The outer narrator first calls the author of the notebooks a madman. The woman he takes to be the proprietress of the Kyobashi bar says that Yozo was beyond saving by the time he became like that, yet remembers him as “a good child, like a god.” Her testimony comes from time spent with “Yo-chan” during his bar years; the outer narrator has never met him at all. Both judgments carry weight, and neither has final authority. Yozo’s verdict of disqualification, the stranger’s reading of the photographs, and her everyday memory do not merge into a seamless portrait. More material does not reduce a life to one interpretation.⁶

The father’s, teacher’s, and schoolmate’s responses belong to different scenes and cannot replace one another. In love, however, we often ask one person to join childhood, present life, desire, and future into a single line. The lover need not see more accurately. We have handed her too much interpretive authority: because she remembers where I came from, I ask her to decide whether the person before her is still the person I once was.

She Still Recognizes the Old Movements#

At the beginning of South of the Border, West of the Sun, Hajime first knows himself through the label “only child.” Few children around him share it. The name makes him feel that he lacks something other people possess as a matter of course, while those around him habitually describe only children as spoiled, weak, and selfish. Shimamoto is the only other only child he meets in sixth grade. They recognize something shared, but they do not bear the same condition. She is also a transfer student and drags her left leg because of polio. Looking back as an adult, Hajime admits that her burden was far heavier than his. During her first month at the school, she is seated beside him because their houses are close. The school also expects nearby pupils to look after a newcomer, and the teacher specifically asks Hajime to take care of her.⁷

Their closeness grows in her room after school. Shimamoto’s family owns only about fifteen records, and the children play them over and over. She takes out a record, sets it on the turntable, cleans the stylus, and lowers it; afterward she sprays and wipes the disc before returning it to its sleeve. The adult Hajime writes as though she were tending a fragile soul inside a glass bottle. Neither child understands the lyrics of “Pretend,” which survive only as incantatory English sounds. A Liszt piano piece becomes a secret garden known to them alone. By repeating the same listening ritual beside one turntable, they make time that needs no explanation to anyone outside the room.

Shimamoto once takes Hajime’s hand. She holds it for about ten seconds, then lets go. From the touch he senses that a place capable of receiving him exists somewhere in the world. Days later, the warmth seems to remain, though he has no idea where to take it. The handclasp announces no love and promises no future. It lets a child isolated by the name “only child” feel, for a moment, that his body has reached another person.⁸

Hajime later moves two train stops away. At first he visits three or four times. Then a new school, the bodily changes of puberty, embarrassment, and his guesses about Shimamoto’s mother’s gaze make him stop. He would rather preserve the memory of intimacy than risk finding out whether Shimamoto still wants to see him. Shimamoto later says that she kept waiting, believing that his new life had made him forget her; she says that she mailed a postcard with her new address, while Hajime says that he never received it. In his third year of middle school, Hajime finally visits the old house and finds an unfamiliar nameplate. Their hesitation and misunderstanding, together with a blank they can never verify, gradually bring about the break in contact. Fate cannot carry the whole explanation.⁹

Both preserve fragments of that earlier life. Hajime remembers the tracks, the warmth of her hand, and the way she dragged her left leg. Shimamoto says that when her father died, she took all the old records as keepsakes; years later, not one bears a scratch.¹⁰

Shimamoto also initiates their adult reunion. She later tells Hajime that she found his photograph in a magazine and hesitated for almost a month. When she first enters the bar, she means to leave if he fails to recognize her, but finally sits beside him of her own accord. She watches his movements, his eyes, the way his toe taps the floor, and the way he frowns. “You really are the Hajime from long ago,” she tells him.¹¹

The sentence joins the man before her to the twelve-year-old boy. His clothes, body, and career have changed, yet someone who knew him at twelve recognizes him in a set of movements. A lover’s force as a witness to authenticity grows from memories this specific. She has seen a version of me that others have not, and she can connect one small gesture today to a much earlier time. By a “witness to authenticity,” I do not mean the person who understands me best, but the person asked to prove that these scattered fragments belong to one and the same “me.”

Shimamoto can confirm only what she has seen. Hajime later tries to fill the twenty-year blank with photographs. She tells him that photographs explain nothing and that “the real me is somewhere else”; she even wants to turn those years into a blank. Hajime declares that something special exists between them and supplies the thought that she “must know it too.” Shimamoto does not deliver the expected reply. She says only that some things cannot be reversed. In Hakone she also tells him clearly that she has loved him since they were twelve and thought of him while she was with other people. Both answers can stand. She acknowledges the long love and keeps those twenty years in her own hands.¹²

This witnessing has never been equal. Shimamoto can recognize the present Hajime by his movements, while he knows almost nothing about her adult life. She calls him herself, limits each meeting to two or three hours and leaves when time is up; she also initiates their journey. When he asks about her home, work, and marriage, she tells him to wait until tomorrow and ask nothing that night. The next day she leaves. The novel never explains why. Even after Hajime has placed her in the position of exception, she can set limits and depart.¹³

Hajime also runs his bars and raises his daughters with Yukiko. They have made that household together over many years. Essay VII discussed the material conditions of this life. Shimamoto can confirm that “the old Hajime” remains; she cannot use that recognition to declare the proprietor, husband, and father false. Hajime wants her to gather lives that do not fit easily together into a more compelling line of continuity.¹⁴

We often ask a lover to prove that the earlier self has not vanished and that today’s desire had a source all along. Losing her can then feel like betraying oneself. Shimamoto acknowledges that she too has lived within that past, but she does not join Hajime’s whole life into a single line. The love remains, and so do her boundaries.

The Echo Arrived Before the Interpretations Met#

Haruki still does not know who is beyond the wall when the piano answers his guitar. He cannot tell whether the pianist is teasing him, instructing him, or showing off. Kazusa knows that “Guitar-kun” is Haruki, but unilaterally takes their playing to mean that they have made up. Setsuna later follows the sound and joins “WHITE ALBUM,” believing that the Light Music Club already has a keyboardist. Throughout the sequence, the three act on different interpretations and never reach a shared account of what the relationship means.¹⁵

The anonymous duet then becomes training through the wall. Kazusa first brings in several instruments. She waits for the guitar to begin, stops and resumes with Haruki, corrects him with the proper tempo, and plans to introduce him gradually to the other instruments. Haruki keeps practicing even during the examination period. The game has him notice that the two sounds have “somehow come together.” They can play together before they know what the duet means to each of them.

Lovers do not monopolize this kind of self-recognition. On the common route of Closing Chapter, Koharu and Haruki are not yet lovers, but she has already admitted that she is interested in him; she also turns his own habit of intervening in other people’s lives back on him. Believing that Haruki has a girlfriend, she stands up for Mihoko and the supposed girlfriend. She accuses him of concealment and indecision, then insists on deciding for both sides. At the end of the argument, Haruki recognizes her as “a girl who, like me three years ago, keeps causing trouble for other people.” Later, Koharu counts eight times that he has checked the time and asks why a man who interferes in other people’s affairs to this extent refuses to let anyone touch his own. Haruki may gain no stable self-knowledge from the exchange. Koharu at least makes him glimpse his own conduct from the outside. A junior who has not yet entered a romantic relationship but refuses to withdraw according to his rules can do that too.¹⁶

Together, the two scenes cut the lover’s privilege down to size. A pianist whose identity remains unknown can coordinate another person’s action; a junior who has not yet entered a romantic relationship can make Haruki see his own conduct from outside. A response lets another person’s action enter what I do next. Confirmation goes further: it asks her answer to prove “who I am.” A lover does not necessarily see more accurately. A shared history, however, allows her words to reach beyond the present into past and future, gradually acquiring something close to judicial authority. When she departs from the answer we expect, we are more likely to experience that departure as betrayal. The ending of South of the Border, West of the Sun places this difference inside two ordinary questions.

”You Haven’t Asked Me Anything”#

On the night Shimamoto leaves, Hajime returns home at two in the morning. Yukiko is waiting. She knows that her husband has fallen in love with someone else and that his feelings are not a passing game. Hajime says the matter is not what she thinks. Her first reply is another question: do you know what I think?

Then she asks only this: “Do you want to separate from me?”

Hajime tries to explain Shimamoto, and Yukiko refuses. She does not want to know who the other woman is or what the two of them did. At this moment she wants only one answer: separate or stay together. Hajime says he does not know. Yukiko tells him to keep thinking and says that she will wait for his answer.¹⁷

About two weeks later, she again asks what he is thinking and whether he wants them to separate. Hajime replies, “I love you.” Yukiko does not call this a lie. She points out that it fails to answer her question, which requires yes or no. Only then does he say that he does not want to separate.

Yukiko now speaks of her loneliness during this period and of the several times she wanted to die. Hajime has never asked how she lived through it. “And it never occurred to you to ask,” she says. Hajime admits that he has asked nothing.

Yukiko too carries an unlived life. She once gave up a dream, and another possible life still pursues her. She tells Hajime that he is not the only person haunted by how else life might have gone. He now hears that Yukiko has her own loss; neither “wife” nor “ordinary life” exhausts her.

Hajime then says that they will begin their life again tomorrow. Yukiko points to the same omission a second time: “But you still haven’t asked me.” The earlier remark concerned his failure to ask about her inner life. This one refuses to let him decide their future alone. Hajime has to turn the declaration into a question: I want us to begin again. What do you think? Only then does Yukiko say yes.¹⁸

Her answer does not prove that the marriage has been repaired. Whether it lasts depends on how they live afterward. The immediate change is smaller and more dependable. “Beginning again” has become a proposal that Yukiko can accept or refuse. When Hajime says “I love you,” he still uses his own feeling to settle matters for them both. Asking “What do you think?” leaves his wife a place from which to judge.

Shimamoto preserves the records, returns of her own accord, acknowledges the long love, and refuses to fill in her life. Yukiko is willing to continue the marriage and refuses to be reduced to the everyday life left behind. Neither woman is willing to certify Hajime’s story and nothing more. A certificate merely stamps what is already written. An actual person can misunderstand, change her answer, or ask a question I had never thought to pose. Her answer can pull me out of a monologue; if I accept only the reply I planned in advance, she has no room left to speak as someone other than me.

The confession in Introductory Chapter gives this kind of confirmation consequences within a relationship. Setsuna first tells Io that she does not want the relationship as it stands to change. Only after seeing Haruki and Kazusa in the music room does she face Haruki and ask him to remain with her from then on. Haruki initially takes this to mean that the three of them will continue spending time together after graduation. When Setsuna moves close enough to kiss him, she tells him that he may pull away. Haruki does not; instead, he deliberately kisses her. Kazusa later calls this the two people’s “conclusion.”¹⁹

We already acquire a workable self through other people’s responses. Love then asks one person to witness whether childhood and the present, desire and choice, still belong together. If she is allowed to say only yes, we gain a proof and lose someone capable of answering.

At what point does such an exchange gain the force of a commitment, and how does it alter the positions and obligations of everyone present? The next essay, “Where the Third Term Between Two Comes From,” continues from Haruki and Setsuna’s “conclusion.”