4 Commentaries of My Mother by Yasushi Inoue (1975)
Yasushi Inoue’s (1907–1991) Commentaries of My Mother describes the illness and subsequent death of the author/narrator’s mother. The novel explores the trials and tribulations a family undergoes as it tries to support and care for a patient with dementia. Therefore, the output of reading becomes the combination of “dementia and adaptive ability.” This term then becomes the input signal and proceeds into the writing brain of the author through the information cognition. Yasushi Inoue’s narrative describes human relations and events with a lot of sensitivity and each scene can be visualized. The writing brain may be perceived as “memory and balance of association cortex.” Commentaries of My Mother can be divided into three parts depending on the degree of the severity of the author/narrator’s mother’s dementia.
The first part introduces the initial symptoms of dementia. The protagonist’s mother is 80 years old and very forgetful. She says the same thing repeatedly. When she moves to her youngest daughter’s house, the symptoms are very active. She talks over and over again about the clever brothers of her relatives many times in one night. However such light dementia does not pose a great problem for her daily life.
In the second part, the narrator’s mother is 85 years old and lives in her hometown. She repeatedly iterates the same thing as something new and the extraordinariness of her utterances explains the progress of her dementia. At this stage, an example of her dementia is the hallucination of the woman who asked for directions one summer in Karuisawa. There is also the episode where she wanders away on a moonlit night to look for her son. As her dementia advances to a medium degree of severity, communication with her becomes difficult.
Hanamura（2018）”How to make a synergic metaphor”より translated by Yoshihisa Hanamura