A Journey of the Heart to Recover Lost Memories

Asahi Shimbun Morning Edition, May 22, 1999

A man in his thirties fell into a coma for over a month after suffering a head injury in a car accident while on a business trip. After six months of intense rehabilitation, he finally returned to work. The job was grueling, as he had to take anticonvulsant medication for post-traumatic seizures, which impaired his memory. However, with his inherent perseverance, he overcame these difficulties.

The 1996 film The English Patient is set in the deserts of North Africa during World War II. Ralph Fiennes plays an archaeologist who is an avid reader of the historian Herodotus. The same actor who portrayed the Nazi camp commandant indiscriminately shooting Jews from his balcony in Schindler’s List now plays a man mistaken for a German spy.

The protagonist's biplane is shot down, and he suffers severe burns, leaving his face disfigured. His insistence on his British identity earns him the name “The English Patient,” and he is transported to southern Italy. Those around him believe he has lost his memory.

As he responds to the devoted care of a military nurse, the events that took place in the desert—centered around his affair with a friend's wife—gradually unfold in flashbacks. The balance with the film’s dreamlike desert imagery creates a poetic sense of "longing" that transcends mere thirst. The desert’s heat does not feel oppressive; instead, the film leaves the viewer with a sense of freshness. The filming location was apparently present-day Tunisia.

Has there ever been a story that, against the backdrop of a war that claimed millions of lives, so delicately and profoundly valued a single life and its journey?

Last year’s Saving Private Ryan depicted the Normandy landings with an unflinching realism, showing individual lives being taken one by one. Perhaps this kind of storytelling represents one of humanity’s few advances in our long history of repeating war.

The patient from the car accident has yet to regain several months of lost memories. Guiding him through that gap with care and patience is part of a psychiatrist’s role.