Reflective Journal Distant Neighborhood

Jayshree Jain
In-class Writing Assignment
School code: 4784
8th April, 2013.

What role does time and memory play in the work?
“Time travelling”
Who hasn’t dreamt of going back to their childhood? But who has actually made through it? In “A Distant Neighborhood” by Jiro Taniguchi, I would say that the main plot of the story began by the factor called Time travelling. Time travelling is a concept of moving between two different points or time. Time travelling could hypothetically involve moving or travelling backward in time to a moment which has been experienced earlier or to a moment earlier than the starting point, or it could also involve travelling or moving forward, into the future of that point without the need to experience the time gap in the middle.
In this novel, Hiroshi Nahakara is a forty year old salesman who had been returning to Tokyo after his work. Since he had been returning from his work, he was tired and he boarded his train at Kyoto’s enormous station. He felt asleep and on awakening he discovered that he had been travelling backwards in time to a moment which he had already experienced earlier, he realized that he was travelling back to his town where he was bough up, not Tokyo where he actually wanted to travel. He felt strange for a moment, but later the memories of his mother surface were recalled and he realized that he had the same age as her when she passed away.
For a moment he felt that it was his dream and that how could travelling back into the time be possible? However, he tried to convince himself that he is asleep and that as soon as he awakens he’ll be alright. At arriving in Kurayoshi he was drawn to the cemetery to his mother’s grave. It was late afternoon and he had been transported to the time when he was 14 year old boy, but with all the adult memories in fact. He had all the opportunities to change the future. One question popped up in my mind while I was reading the novel which is that, will he change his past or relieve each painful moment or he will think not to interfere in fate? Another question was that since he has travelled back to his childhood days, would he ever see his family, daughter and his wife ever again and can he find his way back to the present or is he going to be stuck like this forever? When Hiroshi was young, his father had abandoned his family, and he had gone somewhere else without informing his family. Hiroshi always thought that how could he change the fate and that how could he stop his father from leaving. At some point he felt that his mother was the reason. He made sure, that since life had given him another chance, he would change the fate and that he would not let his father leave them this time.
While moving through the streets of Kurayoshi, he realized that he was somewhat familiar with the streets and that everything still looked similar. In the chapter, The paths of love, Masao had a motorbike, since Hiroshi never knew how to ride on bikes back then when he was 14, he was still riding well and this is because in the present he used to travel on bikes. So he quoted “When I worked in the Kurata engineering and design department, I used to bike every day to work. And not just any old bike: The Honda CB125”. This shows that the memory played an important role in this story. Another example is of the wrestling match, During the wrestling match, Hiroshi had some moves which was not known back then. He called it that “dragon turn”.
In the conclusion, Hiroshi had not changed anything that he thought he would. He let fate play the role of itself. After some days when he went back to his mother’s grave, he felt asleep and then on awakening he realized that he had travelled back into the present and that he had travelled backward only for few days whereas, when he was into that phase, he had lived there for months and months.
Time traveling is a very important factor and plays a major role in this novel.