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Souji doesn't remember much of the last however-many-it's-been years (all his papers say he's forty-seven, but he doesn't look a day over twenty-five), but they've instilled in him a deep hatred of fire, old-fashioned telephones, and school administrators.
When someone asks him, he just smiles and says it's a long story. When they ask him again, he says he has amnesia. Which is almost true; by 'not much' he means 'almost nothing'. Not where he worked, what he did, why he left.
But he remembers clear as day the click of that phone hanging up, and stumbling out of the school gates with the clothes on his back and a suitcase full of silver halide photographs. The sunlight had felt like the heat of summer. . . .
Souji still doesn't recognize a single face, a single scene from those photos, but they cover his walls like tiles, like wallpaper, like memories. They must have been important to him once, so in a way they still are.