The Swimmers

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2022

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

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Discussion Questions

Part 3Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 3 Summary: “Diem Perdidi”

In Part 3, the narrative switches focus from the pool and the swimmers to Alice’s life, describing the course of her dementia through catalogs of what she does and does not remember. At the start, she retains most of her long-term memories. Events from her past, especially her youth, remain accessible to her, like her daughter’s birth and the man she almost married. It’s the most recent things she doesn’t remember, like going for a walk with her daughter earlier that day. She also struggles with routine self-care and hygiene, forgetting to take her medications or comb her hair. Alice doesn’t remember the crack in the pool or that the pool closed. Instead, she thinks she was “kicked out” because she couldn’t remember the rules.

As a child, Alice and her family were sent to a detention camp during World War II. She remembers the number assigned to her family by the government right after the war started. She remembers being singled out in front of her fifth-grade class before going to the camp so they could say goodbye. Her mother told her many times to never let anyone see her cry. She remembers the exact date they came home. At the start of the war, the FBI took Alice’s father away, and she didn’t see him again until it was over. He came back a changed man and eventually abandoned his family. They never spoke of him again.

Before marrying her husband, Alice was in love with a man named Frank. She was never happier, before or since, than when she was with him. She remembers a day she spent picking apples in with rain with Frank as the best day of her life. She still keeps his letters in a drawer by her bed. Alice and Frank planned to marry, but he joined the Air Force and suddenly stopped writing. Alice was terrified he’d been shot down over Korea or taken hostage by guerrilla fighters. When she found out he’d fallen in love with someone else, she decided to propose to the man she ended up marrying the very next day. At the time, he was engaged to another woman, but her parents disapproved of her marrying a Japanese man.

Alice remembers many details about her husband and their life together. He loves peaches. He hates pumpkins because they were practically all he ate in Japan during the war. Every Sunday, he takes Alice for a drive to the coast. Every evening, he sets out two fortune cookies and says it’s a party. They still live together, though they sleep in separate rooms now due to his snoring. Alice doesn’t always remember her husband’s name.

Alice’s first child, a daughter, lived for only half an hour. After the baby died, she agreed to donate the body for scientific study of her unusual heart. She later regretted this decision. At the start of Part 3, Alice remembers this daughter, though she doesn’t remember her name. Alice had three more children, a daughter and two sons. She remembers taking her one-year-old daughter to visit Japan and to meet her husband’s family, who still lived there. Her daughter stayed with relatives in a mountainous silkworm village while Alice and her husband toured the island. Alice worried about her daughter the entire time. Of all her children, she felt her daughter was the most delightful to be around. The two had a very close relationship throughout the daughter’s childhood. Alice’s favorite part of each day was putting curlers in her hair before bed because her daughter sat by her side, handing her the bobby pins. She told her daughter later that she wanted to be with her all the time.

Growing up, Alice’s daughter hated wearing dresses and never wanted children of her own. She had odd compulsions, like those evidenced by some of the swimmers in Parts 1 and 2. Starting at age five, she wouldn’t leave the house without tapping the door three times. She clicked her teeth repeatedly. Everything had to be in its place. Now, Alice’s daughter is an author. Her husband left her six years ago, just after her first book was published. When she brings a new boyfriend to meet Alice, Alice tells the man she’s her firstborn. In that moment, she no longer remembers her first child that died at birth.

Whenever Alice sees her daughter, she remembers to give her a big hug. Many of her habitual motherly behaviors haven’t changed. She still tries to set her daughter up with any man she considers successful or nice, like her doctor or a stranger in the grocery store. She fixes unruly strands of her daughter’s hair and offers to iron her blouse. Other things have changed. She no longer remembers how to iron a blouse.

Alice remembers that many of her childhood friends have died and that her mother passed away four years ago. She misses her mother more every day. Despite her declining memory, her grief over this loss doesn’t go away. Ironically, Alice still remembers a Latin phrase she learned in high school: diem perdidi, “I have lost the day.” By the end of Part 3, she no longer remembers her daughter’s name.

Part 3 Analysis

Despite maintaining the present tense throughout the non-linear narrative, Otsuka is able to demonstrate Alice’s worsening condition over time. As the things she does and doesn’t remember change, they evidence the passage of time. This relies on the reader’s recognition that, wherever they come in the narrative, descriptions of Alice forgetting things she once remembered must occur later in the progression of her disease. Presenting these descriptions non-linearly mimics the disordered nature of memories and consciousness.

The point of view pivots significantly from Parts 1 and 2. At first, Part 3 seems to be written in third-person, referring to Alice as “she”: “She remembers her name. She remembers the name of the president” (77). However, the second-person point of view soon becomes apparent as the narrator addresses another character as “you.” Unlike many second-person narratives, this “you” is not the reader—it is Alice’s daughter. In Parts 3-5, the novel strongly resembles memoir or autofiction. (See: Background). Alice’s daughter is, or at least represents, Otsuka. Thus, her use of second-person point of view creates a sense that she is writing notes to herself, as if in a journal or confessional.

While the conflict in Part 2 can be viewed as individual versus the unknown, evoking feelings of anxiety and powerlessness, Part 3’s conflict becomes woman versus disease, or woman versus aging and decay. The feelings surrounding these topics are complex. Both are relatable aspects of what it is to be human, yet in Part 3, Otsuka’s writing style is more emotionally charged. Mood plays a more prominent role as moments that evoke sadness, guilt, regret, and tenderness permeate the prose. In one such tender moment, Otsuka writes, “She does not always remember to trim her toenails, and when you soak her feet in the bucket of warm water she closes her eyes and leans back in her chair and reaches out for your hand. Don’t give up on me, she says” (83).

Alice and her daughter are characterized through descriptions of Alice’s memories. The reader learns who they are—their strengths, flaws, values, motives, and desires—by viewing miniature clips from the movie reels of their lives. Alice’s appearance begins to change, suggesting itself as a barometer for her decline as her dementia advances. Before its onset, she was always stylishly dressed with perfect hair and makeup. In Part 3, her hair is often uncombed, her pants are on inside out on at least one occasion, and she wears the same shirt for days on end. Alice’s personality begins to change as well. She complains more, drinks coffee out of the same dirty Styrofoam cup every day, and develops a desire to be with “her own”: “[W]henever she saw someone who looked like herself—small, older, black-haired, slanted eyes—she made a beeline for them and asked, ‘Excuse me, but do I know you?’” (143). This repetition or attraction to sameness represents a reluctance to let things go or lose things, a site of resistance against her memory loss.

Alice’s memories illustrate her desire to be close to her daughter, who in turn is motivated by her need to atone for the distance she created between them and her desire to honor her mother’s life. The reader is allowed to know the details of what Alice doesn’t remember, a benefit of the story being told from her daughter’s point of view. In a sense, this collection of details and memories serves to memorialize Alice’s life.

The title of Part 3, “Diem Perdidi,” is Latin for “I have lost the day.” In Alice’s case, this phrase represents the loss of her memories, and thus part of herself. Part 3 delves further into the theme of grief and loss but from a more intimate angle than in Part 2. Alice’s terminal prognosis starts her daughter’s mourning process while Alice is still alive. She grieves the loss of the mother she knew as the symptoms of dementia change and diminish Alice. This grief is paralleled by Alice’s previous loss of her own mother, which she still grieves.

Part 3 is a pivot point in the novel’s structure. Alice’s story seems minimally connected to the story told in Parts 1 and 2; she was one of the swimmers but played a minor role in their narrative. The obsessions and compulsions of some of the swimmers relate loosely to those Alice’s daughter experiences in Part 3. The sudden swerve in storylines is intentional. Otsuka published “Diem Perdidi” as a standalone piece in 2011, then created the rest of The Swimmers with “Diem Perdidi” as its center. The shock of Alice going from a peripheral character to the center of the story is meant to feel like the shock of getting out of the water, leaving the warm, comfortable world of the underground pool, and returning to land and blinding sunlight.