The New Yorker: PRINTABLES
didn’t ask questions or show any surprise. She just listened carefully to Mizuki’s story, and,
except for the occasional frown, as if she were considering something, her face remained
unchanged; her faint smile, like a spring moon at dusk, never wavered.
“It was a wonderful idea to put your name on a bracelet,” she commented after Mizuki finished.
“I like the way you dealt with it. The first goal is to come up with a practical solution, to minimize
the inconvenience. Much better to deal with the issue in a realistic way than to brood over it. I can
see that you’re quite clever. And it’s a lovely bracelet. It looks good on you.”
“Do you think that forgetting one’s name might be connected with a more serious disease?”
Mizuki asked. “Are there cases of this?”
“I don’t believe that there are any diseases that have that sort of defined early symptom,” Mrs.
Sakaki said. “I am a little concerned, though, that the symptoms have got worse over the past
year. I suppose it’s possible that this could lead to other symptoms, or that your memory loss
could spread to other areas. So let’s take it one step at a time and determine where it all started.”
Mrs. Sakaki began by asking several basic questions about Mizuki’s life. “How long have you
been married?” “What kind of work do you do?” “How is your health?” She went on to ask her
about her childhood, about her family, her schooling. Things she enjoyed, things she didn’t.
Things she was good at, things she wasn’t. Mizuki tried to answer each question as honestly and
as quickly as she could.
Mizuki had grown up in a quite ordinary family. Her father worked for a large insurance
company, and though her parents weren’t affluent by any means, she never remembered them
hurting for money. Her father was a serious person; her mother was on the delicate side and a bit
of a nag. Her older sister was always at the top of her class, though Mizuki felt she was a little
shallow and sneaky. Still, Mizuki had no special problems with her family. She’d never had any
major fights with them. Mizuki herself had been the sort of child who didn’t stand out. She never
got sick. She didn’t have any hang-ups about her looks, though nobody ever told her she was
pretty, either. She saw herself as fairly intelligent, and she was always closer to the top of the
class than to the bottom, but she didn’t excel in any particular area. She’d had some good friends
in school, but most of them had married and moved to other cities, and now they rarely kept in
touch.
She didn’t have anything bad to say about her marriage. In the beginning, she and her husband
had made the usual mistakes that young newlyweds make, but over time they’d cobbled together a
decent life. Her husband wasn’t perfect, but he had many good qualities: he was kind, responsible,
clean, he’d eat anything, and he never complained. He seemed to get along well with both his co-
workers and his bosses.
As she responded to all these questions, Mizuki was struck by what an uninspired life she’d led.
Nothing even remotely dramatic had ever touched her. If her life were a movie, it would be one of
those low-budget nature documentaries guaranteed to put you to sleep. Washed-out landscapes
stretching endlessly to the horizon. No changes of scene, no closeups, nothing ominous, nothing
suggestive. Mizuki knew that it was a counsellor’s job to listen to her clients, but she started to
feel sorry for the woman who was having to listen to such a tedious life story. If it were me and I
had to listen to endless accounts of stale lives like mine, Mizuki thought, at some point I’d keel
over from sheer boredom