Our memories extend far beyond what we remember and are shaped greatly by our state of mind at any given moment.

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  • Our memories extend far beyond what we remember and are shaped greatly by our state of mind at any given moment.

I recently completed “The Sense of an Ending,” the exquisitely crafted novel by Julian Barnes. What struck me was the way the main character’s memory of events changes in seemingly small, but significant ways over the course of his life. Actions he took based on one view of events that once seemed harmless, later prove to have devastating consequences. What the character remembers changes, because he evolves as a human being so that he looks at the world in a different way. As a young student, he is particularly angry and remembers those things that rationalize his view of the world and support the actions he has taken. When he looks back on those same events later in life, he remembers details that undercut his earlier version of those same events.

I think of it this way. Suppose you do a Google search on Japan. The first time you type into the search box:  “Japan, beauty, culture” you might come up with articles and posts that would portray Japanese beautiful gardens, its stunning Kabuki theater and its bold woodblock prints. But if you were to type in “Japan, insular, nuclear waste” you would come up with articles that portray the darker side of Japan. The better you know Japan–or the more you understand the complexity of life–the more careful you would be in choosing those key words to come up with a full picture of Japan. In the same way, the frame of mind we are in when we go about remembering something invariably has a big impact on the kinds of events and images that we draw from our memory banks.

The book struck me because the way I looked at Japan and my family–the things I remembered and understood–evolved a great deal from the beginning of the book to the end. I know understand that simply by framing my book as one about living for five generations as outsiders in Japan, invariably had a significant impact on what I drew from my memory and what I understood about Japan. The book was written over many years, and by the time I completed the book, I was a quite different person, and I tried to allow that more mature perspective to add depth to the feelings and sentiments I expressed in the earlier chapters.

Today, as I meet people who read my book but also knew my father, many are surprised by this “dark” side of him. They have fond memories of my father, and wonder if I was sometimes unfair to him. Perhaps I was. But of course, many of them knew my father when he was in the army and in college, the happiest time of his life. I knew him at his worst, and at a time when I was most impressionable.

dad-and-me

I do not regret what I wrote. But I continue the journey the book began of understanding who my father was as a man–his strengths and shortcomings–and learning from him long after we buried him splitting his ashes between the foreign cemetery in Yokohama and the cemetery in Piedmont, California.

dad gravw piedmont


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