Peaches (the only one of Akira's stories able to be found in English)
Our unnamed protagonist begins the story with an aphorism about memory: he knows it can't be trusted, but its deception still takes him aback. This story is one about memory - a specific memory, which the narrator attempts to place in the wide landscape of memories that he recalls in order to decipher the true nature of that one recursive and yet elusive memory.
The memory is this: he remembers being a young boy, accompanying his mother down a dark country road in winter, pushing a pram full of peaches. He can remember this scene perfectly, but its context always escapes him. He recalls his mother tucking his shawl around him to keep out the cold and comforting him in the wake of her stories about dangerous foxes at night. The road in question connects their town and the neighboring one, a long slope that seems even longer because of the darkness.
Suddenly doubts assail his mind, making him doubt the memory: why were they transporting peaches in winter? The rest of the story consists of the narrator attempting to reconcile the various aspects of this seeming discrepancy. He brings in evidence of age: he must have been old enough to walk, and yet not old enough to have graduated primary school, by the way his mother was acting. His father was away because of the war, so it must have been his brother at the house, waiting impatiently for them. But even these pieces of "evidence" are questionable; how does he know that he didn't fabricate these details?
He relates anecdotes about his family: his mother's relative drowns herself after being falsely accused of theft; his mother has a strange relationship with a family friend while her husband is away; his father forces his weeping mother to leave and settle something once and for all in the middle of the night.
By the end, his memory is no clearer than when he began, and he evokes an arcane concluding image of himself pushing an infant version of himself in a pram, demonstrating the self-dependent and indefinite nature of memory.
The narrative illustrates how memory is an active, frequently unreliable construct molded by our views and emotions rather than merely a passive archive of past events. The fragile and subjective nature of memory is brought to light by his attempt to make sense of the memory of wheeling a pram full of peaches in the winter and the larger background of his upbringing. By carefully examining his family's past and sharing personal tales, the narrator emphasizes the intricate relationship that exists between memory, identity, and reality. Ultimately, the topic of uncertainty recurs, reflecting the ambiguity that permeates our perception of the past and raising the possibility that some memories—like the picture of him pushing his baby self in a pram—may always stay elusive and paradoxical.
