<p>Narratives, because they are sense-making devices, are both useful and increasingly necessary tools to navigate global uncertainty. Meanwhile, the divergence of powerful states’ strategic narratives points to a global contestation, which in turn uncovers the growing importance of narrative power as a political resource on the international stage. Yet narrative power does not stand on its own; it is located in time and space, and relies not on a singular but multiple inter-connected stories. This paper aims to illuminate how inter-narrativity is playing out in the rise of the “Indo-Pacific” as geopolitical narrative. It will follow an argument situated at the crossroad of International Relations (IR) and narratology, and also inspired by critical geopolitics. The global spreading of the “Indo-Pacific” narrative tends to obscure its Japanese genealogy, and its relation to previous stories of the “Pacific”. Those stories are about Japan’s regional identity and its historical dissociation from a Sino-centred world. The oceanic narrative that derives from them offers however a plasticity that accommodates a diversity of geopolitical story-telling. This has implications that are both conceptual (expanding the possibilities of narratology within IR) and empirical (understanding the political use and value of the “Pacific” narrative).</p>