The Narrator
The narrator is a Japanese man in his late thirties or early forties, and tells "Peaches" from a first-person perspective. Much of what the reader sees of him is through his own memory: while we rarely glimpse him in his current form, we gain plenty of information of what he had been like as a child, such as in the photograph of him sitting in the pram as a two-year-old, or watching plants and insects through the cracks in the verandah floorboards. By reflecting on his memories, the narrator reveals his interactions with adult figures in his life—his mother, father, and Peach Man—and even, slightly, his brother, as he attempts to reconcile the unreliability of memory with his understanding of what happened. These revelations, in turn, develop the reader's understanding of the narrator's character: a disciplined, contemplative man with strong familial loyalties and a penchant for speculation, with a fascination for stories from a young age and a keen awareness of his surroundings.
Narrator's Mother
IAs the narrator reflects on his memories of his mother, she becomes a complex figure of his past. She is protective, as shown when she covered the narrator's eyes with her shawl and held him against her when he was frightened by the dark. However, she is also shown as "careless" when she teases the narrator about foxes lying in wait along the road, provoking his fears of his physical surroundings. The narrator then develops her as practical when she refuses to walk any faster for fear of bruising the peaches, but adds that she may have been prone to embellishment when he recalls her story of their distant relative. In her interactions with men, the narrator shows her sensuality, and notes her meekness in the face of her husband's temper. As the narrator leafs through his memories, most of which concern his mother, he shows a new side to her each time to paint a picture almost as unreliable as memory itself.
The Peach Man
This nameless character is first introduced to the reader as the man who had convinced the narrator's mother to plant the peach trees. A family friend who would help with gardening and maintaining the narrator's household grounds, he is revealed to be the son of a local landowner, and is a "round, ruddy man" known for debauchery, an unusually loud laugh, and often seen wearing workers' clothes. He was of the narrator's mother's generation and the head of his own household. Whenever he visited, the narrator's mother served him tea and chatted with him on the open verandah, but would never invite him inside.
One day, the narrator catches the Peach Man and his mother talking about sex. He is initially shocked, but goes on to reflect on the implications of the discussion between "the man grown weary of women; the woman separated from her husband by years of war." To the narrator, the Peach Man comes to represent the temptations sown in the absence of a strong patriarchal figure in the narrator's household, and he does not reappear in the story once the narrator's father returns from World War II.
The Narrator's Father
The narrator's father does not appear very much in the earlier half of "Peaches" due to his wartime service and absence from home. This absence is pronounced in the household, and its members attempt to fill it in various ways: the narrator's mother plants four peach trees while her husband is away; she begins to interact with a man whose father had sold his land to the narrator's father; the narrator takes advantage of his father's absence to sleep beside his mother. Even when he does return, his absence on the narrator's nocturnal journey serves as a sort of presence: "Yet, a third person not actually present could well have been part of that night scene on the hill. And was it not my father?" This serves to highlight how the narrator's father exerts a pronounced impact on his family members, whether or not he is actually with them.
When the narrator's father makes a direct appearance, he is shown to be yelling at the narrator's mother to "go now" and fix a problem that she has caused despite it being the middle of the night, and this outburst from his father is what results in the narrator walking with his mother while pushing a pram of peaches. The narrator elaborates that his father was an "obstinate military man" who "often tormented [his mother] in this way, and she submitted meekly." Despite only appearing towards the end of "Peaches," the narrator's father is shown to hold great authority within his household, and both his absence and his presence holds considerable influence over the rest of his family.
The Narrator's Brother
The narrator's brother is cast as a short-tempered man who may be distant from the narrator. When he is first introduced to the reader, he is portrayed as a middle-school student during World War II, studying for the Naval entrance examination. By the following year, his annoyance for his family has resulted in his leaving home. Following his demobilization at the conclusion of the war, he is often absent at home, and the narrator makes no further mention as to what became of him. The narrator's lack of many memories of his brother—memories being the primary bond between many of the characters—indicates the lack of a strong sense of brotherhood between the two.
The Nun (Distant Relative)
In "Peaches" the narrator shows the problems met by people living with a disability. The narrator paints a picture how her mother explains the story of the nun, a distant family relative, who was born with a bad leg and sent to the convent while other girls her age were getting married. She was later accused of stealing something from one of the other nuns, and after being mistreated by the older nuns, she crawled along a tree branch and threw herself into a pond to drown herself. While the narrator suspects that his mother has embellished this story regarding their distant relative, but notes that he was moved more by the "dark drama of an ill-fated life" than the suicide itself. The character of the nun, then, serves to link the narrator's mother's story with the narrator's own recollections, highlighting how unreliable memories of the past can be as they are passed from person to person.
The Narrator's Cousins
The narrator's cousins are briefly mentioned when the narrator recalls walking along the riverbank with his mother and how frightening he used to find the darkness of the water. He traces his fear to his cousins' story of a boy who, while hunting crabs, had fallen into the muddy water and drowned, and they'd added that "on windy nights, you could hear the dead boy's sobbing from the riverbank." The appearance of the cousins in "Peaches" has two purposes: not only do is once again underscore the motif of embellishment and how reliable memories and stories can be, but it also adds to the narrator's fear of his surroundings in the dark.
