The Malleability of Memory and History in Barnes’s The Sense of an Ending and Murakami’s The Last Lawn of the Afternoon

By Renee de la Roche-Zhu

Introduction

Recently revisiting Haruki Murakami’s short story collection The Elephant Vanishes, I stumbled upon a story previously overlooked, The Last Lawn of the Afternoon, which sparked profound reflection not only emotionally but philosophically, offering abundant possibilities for an existentialist interpretation akin to Julian Barnes’s The Sense of an Ending, which deeply impressed me upon first reading.

In this essay, I first employ an Existentialist lens, influenced by Jean-Paul Sartre, to analyze how these two works, set coincidentally in 1960s Japan and Britain respectively, delineate how passive young men navigate periods of significant personal change against the backdrop of monumental societal shifts. I argue that both Barnes and Murakami portray protagonists who drift rather than choose, and whose distorted memories mirror the broader human tendency to rewrite both personal and collective history in order to evade responsibility. In other words, through the exploration of memory’s malleability and our incapacity to document personal and societal histories objectively, I first argue that such distortions resemble Sartrean self-deception, the inner mechanism of mauvaise foi or bad faith, which becomes both cause and symptom of the hypocritical sensibilities characteristic of modernity: cause, insofar as it shields us from accountability and painful truths; symptom, insofar as it reveals the contradictions between the values we profess and the lives we lead. While Barnes depicts this through intimate betrayals and retrospective self-deception, Murakami, in more abstract terms, elevates it toward larger questions of unjust wars, imperial influence, and historical unconsciousness.

I then deploy, secondly, a dialectical-historical lens, in the fashion of Hegel, to deepen this judgment, arguing that hypocrisy may be not merely a ‘failure’ of modernity but one of its fundamental, structural mechanisms wherein individuals and societies alike proclaim values and narratives they cannot yet fully inhabit, and through whose contradictions progress, or History, is painfully, belatedly made. What appears as falsehood in one register may, in another, mark an unfinished consciousness struggling toward clearer forms of freedom, self-knowledge, and ethical life.

I will first provide a brief recount of Barnes’s novel and Murakami’s short story, followed by analyses of the 1960s historical contexts, the passivity and blankness of the protagonists, the role of women as mediating figures, and the relationship between truth and history as well as memory and fiction, culminating in an account of how hypocrisy itself, by creating and resolving contradiction, may serve as one of the mechanisms of progress.

I. Two Curious Narratives of the 1960s

The Sense of an Ending follows Tony as he recounts his salad days in 1960s England as he prepares for Bristol University while his brooding friend Adrian anticipates the more elegant prospect of attending Cambridge. In high school, they engage in ferocious debate with their History teacher, fear that “Life wouldn’t turn out to be like Literature,” and grapple with a sense of waiting. Tony starts dating Veronica, initially hesitant about intimacy, but later changes her mind after a weekend at her home, where he meets her flirtatious and competitive mother, Sarah. Later, Veronica ‘betrays’ Tony by becoming Adrian’s lover in college. Decades later, divorced in his sixties, Tony inherits Sarah’s diary and money posthumously to his great surprise. Veronica, still distant, insists Tony “just doesn’t get it.” The story ends with Tony discovering Veronica visiting a man named Adrian Jr. weekly at a disability center, who turns out to be her brother (versus son).

The Last Lawn of the Afternoon follows Boku as he reflects on a summer fifteen years prior in the late 1960s when he is a pubescent Tokyo boy who mows lawns expertly. After a breakup letter from his long-distance girlfriend, he loses interest in extra money and decides to quit. His final job takes him to a Western-style house in Yomiuri (a pocket of postwar Japan in which US military bases had mellowed into neighborhood form), where he meets an eccentric, day-drinking, middle-aged woman. She makes him a sandwich for lunch, reminiscing about her late American husband who enjoyed her cooking. After the job, she takes Boku to her missing daughter’s room, asking him to look through her things and “imagine” her. Boku, though perplexed, complies. He receives a generous tip and ends his day eating spaghetti nearby. He concludes he has not mowed a lawn since and will not unless for his own home, which will, as fate would have it, not be for a while.

II. Historical Atmosphere and the Unlived Zeitgeist

Both stories, while set oceans apart, center on young men at critical developmental junctures, navigating personal growth, heartbreak, and questions about meaning against significant cultural, social, and political change. In Britain, Tony comes of age during the civil rights era that produced the Abortion Act (1967), the Sexual Offences Act (1967), and the Race Relations Act (1965), accompanied by economic growth and the Labour Party’s 1964 victory under Harold Wilson. In a way, Tony perceives a Britain teetering on the cusp of hope yet wrestles with the evolving landscape of sexual liberties and shifting attitudes among British women toward intimacy.

In contrast, while Boku initially seems apolitical, his story unfolds against the backdrop of Japan in the tumultuous 1960s, a period characterized by widespread student movements that galvanized the nation, including the Anpo crisis of 1960, marked by sweeping protests against the US-Japan Security Treaty and the resignation of PM Kishi, and later, vehement student revolt against US policies in Vietnam during Boku’s lawn mowing summer of 1967/1968. The idyllic setting is therefore shadowed by darker undercurrents of anti-American sentiment and lingering sensitivity to postwar influence, both of which embodied in the broad-framed, mid-aged woman and her missing, half-American daughter, with whom Boku forms a connection.

What is striking in both cases is that neither Tony nor Boku meaningfully participates in the movements or shifts of his era. Both characters are passive and even numb toward their environments. This aspect of non-action, importantly not stoic in nature, is critical to their subsequent encounters with women who meaningfully shape their experiences and understanding of the world.

III. Passivity and the Birth of Bad Faith

For instance, in The Sense of an Ending, Tony is argumentative in class yet unwilling to take action to spark change. He fears that life will not turn out to be like literature yet makes little effort to shape the narrative arc of his own life. He earns mediocre grades, feels unsatisfied with the sexual aspect of his relationship with Veronica and dubs it ‘infra-sex’ in a passive-aggressive manner, and resents her betrayal when she dates Adrian. After graduation, Tony settles into a mundane career where he mends clocks and spends his later years reconstructing the past through jealousy, remorse, and nostalgia rather than reasserting agency over the present.

Similarly, in The Last Lawn of the Afternoon, while Boku shows some drive by taking on summer work and building a reputation for his skill, he quickly decides to quit after his girlfriend breaks up with him. His handling of the breakup is particularly telling: despite being caught by surprise, he does not truly respond. He breaks a few pencils but claims it is not out of anger, only that he did not know what to do. Instead, he focuses on how to spend the money he has saved, fussing about the quotidian to avoid the existential.

The passivity and avoidant nature of Tony and Boku, devoid of meaningful engagement with the zeitgeist of their eras, is philosophically central to both narratives. In Sartrean terms, they evade the burden of freedom by allowing life to happen to them and narrating the result afterward. Importantly, they are not tragic, Homeric heroes crushed by fate, but ordinary men diminished by drift. Their flavor of fungibility, which underscores the Existentialist notion that events or entities do not harbor intrinsic meaning, renders them blank canvases upon which authentic emotions, thoughts, and ideologies can be drawn.

IV. Women as Mediums

Interestingly, Boku and Tony require ‘mediums’, particularly women, to help them grasp the world and especially themselves, or at least attempt to do so. In both stories, Boku and Tony encounter a mid-aged woman who provides a means for them to access the self and seek to ‘make sense’ of it in a broader personal and/or social context.

Tony meets Sarah, Veronica’s enigmatic mother, who profoundly shifts the course of his and Adrian’s lives. Sarah is depicted as a mysterious figure, revealed through fragments of Tony’s imperfect memory. For example, her bizarre, flirtatious below-the-waist hand gesture when bidding goodbye to Tony and Veronica after their first weekend visit stands out. She later begins a clandestine sexual relationship with Adrian when Veronica starts dating him, a pattern consistent with Sarah taking in young male lodgers over the years despite not needing the money. In a scandalous turn, she gives birth in old age to a child whose uncertain paternity likely contributes to Adrian’s suicide, as revealed in her diary.

Upon receiving Sarah’s diary posthumously and meeting Veronica’s disabled brother, Tony remains oblivious to the truths of his youth, despite the inheritance – dubbed ‘blood money’ by Veronica – that Sarah leaves him. Tony insists the child, named Adrian Jr., is Adrian’s son, yet he proves to be an unreliable narrator. Earlier in the story, Tony imagines scenes of dancing and intimacy with Veronica, activities more befitting Sarah. He also fabricates a confrontation with Adrian and Veronica at the inception of their romantic relationship, a confrontation that never occurred.

Thus, readers are left to deduce that Tony himself may have had a sexual relationship with Sarah and is the biological father of her child, rather than Adrian, yet has categorically repressed this memory. Even when considering Tony’s narrative with skepticism and acknowledging his cowardice and hypocrisy, it becomes evident that Sarah acts as a ‘screen’ through which Tony distorts and revises his personal history, evading painful truths of betrayal and failure.

For Boku, the encounter with the broad-framed, seemingly alcoholic widow in her house in Yomiuri – an enclave replete with facilities built for the American military – proves subtly transformative. It unfolds during his final lawn-mowing stint, a juncture where existential musings about his future – improving grades for college or finding odd jobs – loom large. Despite admiring his skills, the woman’s peculiar demeanor and the antiquated Western-style house conspire to create an eerie ambiance, prompting Boku to contemplate not just his own fate but also his nation’s.

Invited inside twice during the four-hour job, Boku’s first visit involves a modest sandwich the woman makes for him, revealing her late husband was an American soldier – a detail crucial in Murakami’s revised 1990 version after its original in Takarajima magazine in 1982. The second visit leads to a perplexing journey to her missing daughter’s bedroom, where she urges Boku to imagine the absent girl through her clothes and belongings. Amid this, Boku confronts his own difficulty recalling intimate details about his ex-girlfriend – “what had I truly known about her?”

Most significantly, in the daughter’s room, Boku notices well-used English and French dictionaries and a calendar stuck on June (now July), hinting at her likely disappearance due to her American lineage amidst Vietnam War protests. The woman’s silent presence amplifies the sociopolitical turmoil outside. Crucially, Boku’s blindness to his ex-girlfriend’s nuances is juxtaposed with the danger of Japanese youth being oblivious to lurking American influence and the undertones of ‘new age’ imperialism post-war. Given how historical narratives can be ‘distorted’ depending on the perspective, Murakami indexes the need for young people like Boku to see through mediums – figures like the woman to grasp the stark realities behind unjust wars and imperialism. Though Murakami does not state it directly, the poignant fifteen-minute silence Boku shares with the woman in the daughter’s room resonates profoundly – an unspoken testament to the weight of truths left unacknowledged and the era’s simmering contradictions.

In narratives by Murakami and Barnes, there exists an inherent, albeit unintentional, ‘sexism’. Women often appear as symbols, enigmas, and crucially, catalysts through which men perceive and navigate the world. Viewed through an Existentialist lens, this portrayal suggests that men are the active agents of existential struggle and seekers of meaning, shaping their identities in a fluid, unfixed manner. Conversely, women are portrayed with intrinsic and often mysterious significance, their roles often defined passively within men’s quests to unravel them. This structural critique reflects, perhaps, the authors’ educational and cultural influences.

V. The Malleability of Memory and History and the inevitability of Hypocrisy

In both works, the exploration of memory versus fiction and history versus truth centers on the human tendency toward self-deception.

Barnes famously writes that history is “that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation.” He deconstructs both the imperfections of memory and the inadequacies of records – “what one ends up remembering is not always what one witnessed; how often we tell our own life story, adjusting, embellishing, making sly cuts.”

Barnes’s observation on history, both personal and societal, is emotionally and philosophically astute: “what we often regard as grand truths may simply be narratives shaped by those who recount them.” Tony’s own story demonstrates this repeatedly: what he omitted proves decisive – and what he remembered changes under duress.

Similarly yet also meta-textually, Murakami reflects on memory’s “instability” and its similarity to fiction. He notes through Boku that “Memory seemed a kind of fiction, or vice versa,” and that “no matter how hard you try to put everything neatly into shape, the context wanders this way and that, until finally the context isn’t even there anymore.” The inherent subjectivity and instability of memory is a critical human condition. As Barnes points out, we “make sly cuts” in our memories, a natural cognitive process.

In an absurdist fashion, Murakami further likens memory and, at the aggregate, History to fiction: “Still, you grasp human existence in terms of these rather absurd activities resting on relatively straightforward motives, and questions of right or wrong pretty much drop out of the picture…That’s where memory takes over and fiction is born. From that point on, it’s a perpetual-motion machine no one can stop.” There are two valid interpretations. First, in Sartrean terms, the absence of ‘right or wrong’ can be explained by individuals’ freedom and responsibility to create their own moral values, seen in existential ethics. Second, Murakami implies ethical questions, like the justness of the Vietnam War, are often obscured by meta-narratives spun by larger forces. While true throughout history, it has never been more critical to think independently – to challenge meta-narratives fed to us affirming one way of life while denying others.

The problem, then, is not only epistemological but ethical. Bad faith occurs when one hides from freedom and responsibility behind ready-made stories, whether personal or national. To misremember may be human; to cling to misremembering because it absolves us is more dangerous.

VI. Hypocrisy and Contradiction as Engine of History  

So, it seems, through both Tony and Boku, that we create stories to comfort ourselves. We invent narratives that justify the actions of our societies and nation-states. In essence, we are both architect and product of History, a history often more fiction than fact, fashioned to tell us what we most wish to believe. This existential self-deception is intrinsic to our humanity and mirrors our daily denial of death itself. It is, in no small measure, both the birth and perpetuation of the hypocrisies characteristic of modernity. As Tony reflects in old age, “I had wanted life not to bother me too much and had succeeded – and how pitiful that was.”

Yet one may venture further. If a Sartrean reading primarily treats self-deception and bad faith as psychological mechanisms, a Hegelian interpretation sees them as historical instruments through which contradictions are socially lived within the unfolding of Spirit (Geist). Consciousness, whether individual or collective, seldom arrives at truth directly. Rather, it advances dialectically through contradiction, partial knowledge, and forms of self-misunderstanding that often masquerade as certainty. What appears false in one historical moment may later prove to have been a necessary yet immature stage, not simply discarded but sublated into richer forms of understanding, through which consciousness had to pass on its uneven path toward more rational modes of ethical life (Sittlichkeit) and freedom. Such movement is apprehended only through retrospective intelligibility: as Hegel’s owl of Minerva flies at dusk, wisdom arrives late, when an age can finally begin to understand the shape of its own experience.

Barnes renders this contradiction intimately. Tony’s life is organized around small evasions, selective memory, and narratives of decency he cannot finally sustain, especially in old age; yet it is only through the collapse of these fictions that a harsher self-knowledge becomes possible. Murakami intimates a parallel allegory at the societal level. The unease surrounding the widow, her American husband, and her missing daughter suggests a Japan negotiating postwar identity through accommodations whose tensions remain largely unspoken. Silence itself becomes a historical language.

Both Barnes and Murakami suggest, in different registers, that the gravest distortions of memory and history begin in the small private lies by which ordinary people excuse themselves. Yet they also imply that truth often arrives belatedly, through embarrassment, disillusion, and the failure of our preferred stories. We remember badly, narrate selectively, and inherit stories we scarcely understand.  

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In this sense, hypocrisy may be not simply a vice of modernity, but one of its structural mechanisms. Modernity compels individuals and societies alike to profess values they cannot yet fully inhabit: liberty alongside dependence, equality alongside hierarchy, authenticity alongside performance, peace alongside the machinery of war. Such disjunctions can be morally compromising, yet they also expose the distance between what we are and what we have learned to say we ought to be. The question is not whether contradiction can be abolished entirely, but whether it can be made conscious, and thereby less crude, less destructive, and more honest.

What emerges from Barnes and Murakami, then, is not a narrative of personal or historical despair but a sense of historical realism. Tony and Boku are not monsters of deception but rather ordinary men whose psychological evasions are recognizably human. Their failures – to act, to remember faithfully, to hold themselves accountable – are also, paradoxically, the conditions under which belated self-knowledge becomes possible. If Sartre envisages bad faith as a universal temptation, Hegel suggests that even our self-deceptions may serve a larger movement toward clearer consciousness, provided we survive the disillusionment they provoke. The Sense of an Ending and The Last Lawn of the Afternoon do not resolve the problem of hypocrisy; they instantiate with unrelenting clarity, in the grand scheme of Historical Dialectics, that hypocrisy can become, however unwillingly, the tribute reality pays to ideals not yet fulfilled. That, perhaps, is the only worthy sense of an ending – for the Self, and for History.