Wandering through the dark streets of memory in search of lost time
A man's lonely yet beautiful journey

This is the winner of the Prix Goncourt, France's most prestigious literary award, and is the representative work of Patrick Modiano, a master of modern French literature.
This novel depicts the journey of a retired detective suffering from amnesia as he traces his past. The narrator, a retired detective from a private detective agency, traces his unfamiliar past as if he were following another person, relying on a few crude clues.
Beyond simply reconstructing a vanished past, the author clearly depicts a section of France's tragic modern history, symbolized by "amnesia," and furthermore, the universal theme of human existence: "the search for the vanished self."


The protagonist, Roland, who works as a detective at a detective agency, is a person who has lost all memories of himself.
After retiring from his job as a detective, he begins to investigate his past as if he were looking for someone other than himself.
The only clues are a photo of a severed ear and an obituary.
Using that as a clue, he meets people who have even a little bit of memories related to him, such as the pianist, the gardener, and the photographer, and gradually enters his past, coming face to face with his 'lost time'.
Born into the devastation of World War II and raised in a generation that lost all of its past, Modiano has densely depicted the lonely yet beautiful journey of a man wandering the dark streets of memory in search of lost time.

I am nothing.
That evening, on the terrace of a cafe, I was nothing more than a bright silhouette.
--- p.9

I had already lived my life and was now just a ghost floating in the warm air of a Saturday evening.
--- p.65

Strange people.
Those people who, as they pass by, leave behind nothing more than a smoke that can be easily erased.
Wit and I often shared stories of people who had disappeared without a trace.
They suddenly appear from nothing one day, shine brightly, and then return to nothing again.
Beauty queens, stylish playboys, butterflies.
Most of them were not even as dense as water vapor, which could never solidify even while alive.
Wit used to give me an example of a man he called 'the man on the beach.'
The man spent forty years chatting with summer vacationers and idle rich people at the beach or poolside.
He stands in a corner behind thousands of vacation photos, his swimsuit on, beyond a group of people having fun, but no one knows his name or why he is there.
And no one will notice that one day he suddenly disappears from the photos.
I didn't dare say that to Wit, but I thought that 'man on the beach' was me.
Well, even if you had said that to Wit, he wouldn't have been surprised.
After all, we are all 'beach men,' and 'the sand,' to quote him, 'keeps our footprints for only a few seconds at most,' Witte used to say.

--- pp.75-76