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.
The narrator’s mother turns the advanced old age of 89 years in the third part. In one incident, she wakes up, turns on a flashlight, and enters the room. She whispers to her granddaughter Yoshiko, that “she can’t go out anymore.” She thinks she is confined to the room. Immediately after she has had her breakfast, she assumes evening has come. The family is also pulled into her increasing wandering episodes. Her dementia becomes very serious and the life of her family is brought to the brink of collapse.
The neuron nerve fibers in the brains of patients with dementia atrophy and the information cannot be transferred smoothly. In time, the neurons of the receptors will be damaged and information cannot be adequately communicated. The dietary intake of acetylcholine essentially becomes insufficient and communication areas and other symptoms of the disease manifest themselves. The type of dementia suffered by the author/narrator’s mother is Alzheimer’s disease. This is the most common form of dementia and the memory defects of not being able to remember experiences is often accompanied by abnormal behavior.
Hanamura（2018）”How to make a synergic metaphor”より translated by Yoshihisa Hanamura