Amelia Barbosa - Readings for 11/4

Out of this week’s stories, I particularly enjoyed Aoko Matsuda’s two ghost stories: On High and The Missing One. Themes of feminism and empowering women have been common in the author’s works so far, so I’m not entirely surprised that those themes continue on in this week’s readings. And as usual, Matsuda’s writing has caught my attention and inspired my weekly blog post. 

With these stories, I particularly enjoyed the way that they aren’t simply scary stories to tell around a fire, with the ghosts being viewed as monsters or eternal victims, trapped and bound to the site of their death, as many stories go (particularly with female ghosts). Here, the ghosts in Matsuda’s stories have agency. They get bored, tired, disgusted, they retire, and they have the option to move on, if they so choose. With Okiku, she took that option, leaving the castle and transmigrating to live out her afterlife with a young man she seems quite happy with, as Tomihime described. 

Since Tomihime is the narrator of her story, we see more of her life, her personality, her emotions, her day-to-day, and her thoughts on said day-to-day. I enjoyed her character. She thoroughly expresses her boredom with her job and the people who visit the castle, the disgust and annoyance she conveys about the shuffle shuffle shuffle of their slippers as they come, take pictures, and go, over and over again. She feels nostalgia for when men risked their lives out of terror just to climb up to the keep, she remembers how she and the other female spirits felt special and unbeatable. She shared with us the lingering feeling of uselessness now that the castle has simply become a tourist attraction. She has no issue perceiving Himekawa as a “weirdo”, or feeling spiteful when she sees the joy on his face in response to her decision to stay on as guardian of the castle (and the town), for now. 

She has an abundance of character and control over her life, and it’s nice to see. The story was refreshing, funny, and even a bit radical in a way, just as all of Matsuda’s work has felt to me throughout the semester. 

11/4 Readings - Raian

  “A First-Rate Material” was a pretty weird read at first, it was pretty jarring to see human parts used as commodities. It reminded me a lot of Peddler of Tears because of that, humans became commodities after that, but it is pretty different thematically. I think most of us would be Naoki, although I’m not sure if I would be particularly moved by my father’s skin becoming a wedding veil. That’s what makes me question Naoki’s acceptance, is it out of understanding of its value, or is he resigning himself to these peculiar social norms?

The two short stories by Aoko Matsuda were pretty interesting to me, seeing how both briefly intertwine, as well as their seemingly happy endings. The Missing One was pretty sad at some parts, especially when Kikue prepares for the worst even from a simple email because of her being a woman. It was just sad to see her struggle as a small business owner, and it makes me happy that she finds some joy with Yuta at the end. On High was also really interesting to me, and I appreciate how Tomihime regained her confidence and ownership of her role in the end. 

Self-Reference Engine was a really interesting, although a little confusing, read for me. The idea of an established language and people going extinct and extremely advanced technology being used to try and decipher it is  a really cool premise to me. It makes me wonder if a language like Japanese could be decipherable if it became alien to humanity. I also find it to perhaps be about the potency of human resistance, with the found texts possibly having gibberish mixed in to prevent machines and AI from ever truly cracking the essence of the language. It’s really relevant today as well, with generative/transformative AI being able to seemingly train off of any human dataset. 

The Cage of Zeus excerpt was an extremely interesting read to me, specifically the idea of Rounds. I can’t form an idea about why they’re called rounds, but their status as human-yet-not, to me,  reflects how gender non-conforming people are treated in real life. Even past the depictions of gender, the conflict between the inhabitants of Jupiter-I and the Vessel of Life was really interesting to me, specifically how it's supposedly a clash of ethics. I’d like to see how the rest of the book further depicts it.

The Place of Shells was yet another really interesting read, and it felt really connected to a lot of the earlier stories we’ve read about tragedy. There’s an overwhelming emphasis on distance throughout the excerpt, and to me it feels like a part of the narrator’s guilt of being safe from the 2011 earthquake. Her discussion of how beautiful and peaceful the sky was that night, and how far and disconnected it was from the happenings below really solidified it for me. I also find interesting how Nomiya’s existence as a ghost is treated normal and yet somewhat abnormal at the same time.

Riya - Thoughts on Readings for November 4th

Cage of Zeus does a great job at capturing the non-binary/intersex/non-heteronormative experience while also challenging the role of gender norms in society. Specifically through the perspective of Tei, (th)eir alienation was a result of having one physical (?) difference than other Rounds clashes with the security team members all projecting their gender expectations on Tei. It was an interesting monologue to follow. Additionally, I liked how Ueda specifically made the choice to translate "their" into "eir." She mentioned how the Japanese gender-neutral pronouns were not as common. Ueda's choice to use "eir" is a really clever way to rebel against this notion, and bring more attention to the gender nonconformity found in the story (and in real life). 

In Aoko Matusuda's stories, both main characters seem to share the same disdain/awe for tradition. In On High, the main character, or the ghost, dislikes how commercialized the castle is without real regard for the real people who lived there. In The Missing One, the main character or the story seems to briefly criticize passerbys for their love of the monorail yet ignorance of the castle (when describing her hanging out with her ex, he only seemed excited to see the monorail, not the castle).

In the Place of Shells, it was interesting witnessing the distance between the two characters. I really liked the lines about the masks and associating things with memories. People often put preassigned preconceptions on most things, and things people remember are clouded with nostalgia. It is hard to see the real truth behind something, and often times truth can be obscured by these masks. This is true when interacting with strangers, loved ones, and especially when interpreting historical events. 

In Self Reference Engine, I definitely was very confused. It felt like reading a bunch of observations; this feels like less of a story and more of a scientific observation or a journal entry. It really feels like it is linguistically dissecting the Japanese language.

In First Rate Materials, it was interesting to see such a difference in how people respect the dead. In this universe, respecting the dead looks like wearing them to prolong their usefulness or utility after they've passed. In our world, respecting the dead usually (for the most part) looks like either preserving their remains, or spreading it somewhere with meaning. It was interesting that the husband had such an adverse reaction to this (it felt like he was the most normal when it came to the conversation about wearing human remains). It's interesting to see how society can make something objectively grotesque (such as wearing human remains) into something that is generally accepted,

11/4 Jimmy

 Sayaka Murata - “A First-Rate Material”

What got me about this one is that Murata makes the reader the weird one. Naoki’s disgust is basically our reaction, and the story treats it like a quirk he should get counseling for. The real subject is the word “barbaric.” Both of them use it to mean “whatever the other person thinks,” and by the end it doesn’t mean anything. 

Aoko Matsuda - “The Missing One”

This is a ghost story with no ghost. Okiku’s legend is about a powerless servant and a predatory master, and Matsuda turns that into Kikue’s habit of bracing for the worst from every man she emails. The best move is the ending. I also liked the monorail as the town’s “phantom limb.” 

Aoko Matsuda - “On High”

Same book, totally different energy. Tomihime is less spooky and more of a burnt-out employee at a tourist attraction. What I didn’t catch at first is that the two stories connect: Okiku left the well, and the “fine young man” west of the station is pretty clearly Yūta. (Rereading the shop scene after that was fun.) The ending is what stuck with me. She’s tied to the castle whether she likes it or not, and the place is her identity. 

Toh EnJoe - “13. Japanese”

It’s written like a research report, and the thing being studied is Japanese itself. Every other reading this week looks at Japan from the inside. This one imagines a future where Japan is gone and the language is a dead artifact nobody can crack. The joke is that more evidence only makes things worse. Every new batch of texts creates more theories instead of answers.  I also noticed it fits with the other readings in a weird way. Murata’s bodies become furniture, Matsuda’s monorail outlives its use, and here a language outlives the people who spoke it.

Mai Ishizawa - The Place of Shells

Like Matsuda, this has a dead person come back, but it plays it straight and sad instead of funny. Nomiya is solid and casts a shadow, and that somehow makes it worse. Everything here is about measuring distance: the scale-model planets, the nine years, the masks. The Covid masks and the ghost’s mask end up doing the same job.

Sayuri Ueda - The Cage of Zeus

This was the only true sci-fi reading, but what stuck with me was how human the opening is. Shirosaki wakes from months of hibernation with the smell of cut grass and a memory of picking mangoes as a kid, because the ship uses nostalgia to wake people up. Then he arrives at a station where Jupiter looms over everything and has already broken one of his coworkers. The “eye of Zeus” idea made space feel less like adventure and more like something that wears you down. It connects to the Ishizawa reading too, since both open with memory pulling someone out of a strange present.

11/4 kaya

 The Cage of Zeus by Sayuri Ueda: This week’s stories have a sci-fi/futuristic theme, and this novel was the most sci-fi of them all. I thought it was really interesting how Ueda approached gender, as the concepts of being intersex or bigender were more “normalized” in this society, but they still faced discrimination and a lack of acceptance from the people around them. I wasn’t sure if I agreed with how the author/translator describes the Rounds, it felt like it leaned towards making them seem inhuman. However I thought the use of em/ey/eir was really interesting as I’ve never seen it before, and the explanation about why they decided to translate it that way made a lot of sense.

Self Reference Engine by Toh EnJoe: This one really reminded me of Yoko Tawada’s Scattered All Over the Earth as they both deal heavily with language and memories, and have the basis that Japan as we know it no longer exists. I found the imagination around how we decode ancient languages to be really interesting, and there is always the possibility that we’re missing something or getting it all wrong. I almost wanted more from the story since it creates such a vivid world, but I did like the twist at the end that this was one of the translated texts. The story kind of feels like it was ahead of its time, as when I read it I could only imagine the giant corpora of knowledge as the AI we see today. I’m not really sure what deeper meaning I’ve gathered from this story. 

The Missing One and On High by Aoko Matsuda: I was expecting these stories to be a little bit more spooky but I was pleasantly surprised. I found the backstories behind the stories to be really helpful, and I was especially interested in the Tenshu Monogatari play. I read The Missing One first which I think is my favorite of the two. The roots in the story of Okiku were really interesting and I’m curious how it inspired Matsuda to write this specific story. The description of simple infrastructure as a historical landmark after it becomes “useless” was really beautiful, especially in how despite the gentrification of their city, the people still relied on the pillars of the old monorail (Kikue’s shop literally relied on it). I also enjoyed On High, as it has a similar theme surrounding historical architecture. Tomihime seems like a spirit of the castle itself, as she and it watch over the people of the city. She has a distaste and acceptance of how passing generations have greatly altered the castle in an attempt to preserve it, and I think it is interesting to think about how far we should be allowed to go in preserving these places. 

The Place of Shells by Mai Ishizawa: I  really liked the premise of this story, however I did find it difficult to read as it was really heavy with flowery words and long descriptions. At a few points the story does seem to very obviously state some of its themes (the idea of people and places wearing masks), but to me the story seemed to revolve around different distances in the universe. The distance between planets, distance in time, physical distance (something we all remember from covid), and emotional distance. There are also really intense descriptions of the 3/11 tragedies, and I wonder if this idea of distance could also apply to how we distance ourselves from the tragedies of the past in order to heal or to forget. On a separate note, I couldn’t really tell if Nomiya was the only ghost person in the city as the early descriptions made it seem kind of like a liminal space where many ghosts come and go, and I would be interested to read the rest of the story. 

A First-Rate Material by Sayaka Murata: This story was really a rollercoaster of emotions for me. I went from being intrigued by the idea of human as a material, then to being grossed out, then maybe kind of understanding it, then being grossed out again. The hair didn’t bother me so much (there are many things already made with human hair like wigs and brushes, and it’s a regenerative material), but I wasn’t a fan of the skin and bone. I felt that the main character made a valid point that we use these things from animals without thinking twice, and that maybe it is sustainable to re-use humans as materials so they can keep “living on.” The fiance also had valid points surrounding the desecration of bodies, however it seems like the people who died had wished to be used as material? Although I’m a little confused by the plot, I think this story is deliberately unclear about how much consent the dead people were giving to be used as materials because it allows us to view this future as both a place where we have total control over our bodies, and a place where we have no control at all. Also, in general I’m interested in stories about how humans try to make sense of life after death, and this story was a really new perspective on that question. 

11/4 Wenzhuo Fei (Andy)

The Cage of Zeus:

In the novel, ordinary humans consider the Rounds to be abnormal, while Tei, as a Round, in turn considers ordinary humans' concepts of gender to be abnormal. I think this made me think on society's definition of "normal." Many of the social classifications we take for granted are not all directly stipulated by nature, but are formed within specific historical, cultural, and social environments. Of course, this is not to say that there are no objective biological differences between men and women, but rather that the meanings we assign to these differences and what kinds of bodies are considered normal or ideal are all influenced by social concepts. Further, from Tei's story, it can be seen that even if you create a new society in which everyone has the same reproductive structure, differences may still emerge between individuals, and society may still build new standards of normality around these differences.

Self-reference Engine:

I'm a data science major, and reading this novel first made me think that it is saying that having information is not the same as understanding information. When we train machine learning models now, there is usually a basic idea: increasing the amount of data, model capacity, and computational resources can improve performance on many tasks. For example, training a language model: we collect a large amount of text; the model learns the statistical patterns in the text through training; the model learns the relationships between words, grammatical structures, and context; ultimately the model can generate text that conforms to linguistic patterns. But the novel constructs an extreme situation. Suppose every symbol is unique and there are no known rules connecting them. Then we cannot simply infer language structure through statistical repetition frequencies. So in this case, it is saying that more data is useless for the model.

On the other hand, although this is a bit out of the topic, the novel writes that this Giant Corpora of Knowledge is essentially also a giant neural network model, that is, its underlying logic is the same as what we now call AI (GPT, Claude). So can such an apparently omniscient and omnipotent AI truly count as an agent that can understand problems or understand words? I don't want to discuss technical details too much, but to summarize in one sentence: the current neural network structure AI does not understand your question at all, but it is just a complex context prediction machine, that is, it generates the most likely continuation based on your input. So this makes me wonder: if we are truly pursuing an agent that can understand problems or sentences like a human, then is our current AI research somewhat off track?

First Rate Material:

I think this novel, like The Cage of Zeus, also discusses the issue of social construction. But what interests me more in this novel is the character Naoki. In the first half of the story, Naoki seems like a person with very strong principles. Even though the whole society considers the use of human body materials to be correct, he still insists on his own position. But when Naoki discovers that his father's skin has been made into a wedding veil, his values suddenly begin to collapse. Because in his original understanding, human body materials only meant death, corpses, and disrespect for the dead. But now this veil suddenly has an additional layer of meaning for him. It is no longer just human skin. It is a gift left by his father, a memory, and the emotion between the two of them. This made me think about our moral judgments — that is, perhaps sometimes people with such firm moral positions are all through purely rational derivation, yet they ignore that emotion may also be an important basis for moral judgment. For example, Naoki previously thought he had grasped complete moral principles, but in reality he had never truly faced complex real situations. Because real situations are full of a mixture of rationality and emotion, and often we may not be able to fully follow that firm, rationally derived moral position.  

Emily Kim 11/4 Readings

In The Cage of Zeus, it was interesting how perspective distorts our idea of who the antagonist is. I realized this when it said, "Just who is being inhumane here? Those of us conducting medical experiments or the fringe group unashamed to commit acts of terrorism?" I realized the security team's lack of morals they turned a blind eye on the experiments being done on the Rounds and their blatant disrespect towards them. Shirosaki at least notices this unfair treatment when he says, "But they're also living beings. In that sense, they're no different than we are." Additionally, it was interesting when Tei talks about feeling conflicted in their identity, being similar to both Rounds and humans, as their literal job is an intermediary. 

I connected The Place of Shells with The Cage of Zeus because it also emphasizes Jupiter. It was interesting how the statue of the fighting family is placed next to the Jupiter statue, as Jupiter is considered a dangerous zone in The Cage of Zeus. The story also talked a lot about distance, such as distance in time, planets, and people. For example, the main character has a hard time connecting with Nomiya because it's been nine years since they met. The main character also makes an analogy to Covid, a crisis that has distanced people from each other and masked their identities (physically and emotionally). 

I found a quote in the short story, A Missing One, similar to The Place of Shells when it says, "It was only when all of it was gone that people would cease to be aware of its absence and stop missing it." I connected this to how all the remnants of Nomiya were washed away by the tsunami which would make him slowly be forgotten. I also really enjoyed the parallels between A Missing One and On High. The Himeji castle, the monorail, and the Okiku well are all tourist attractions, and they represent different levels. The castle is the most high up, the monorail is on the ground, and the well digs under the surface. So, it was interesting that we got perspectives of looking down from the castle and looking up from the ground through each story. I also noticed that the man hands Kikue a business card just like in On High. Finally, in A Missing One it mentioned that the abandoned monorail served as a guide for people, and I thought this was similar to ghosts who watch out for people. 

It was interesting how in First Rate Material, using dead human bodies as materials for clothing and furniture is normalized in their society and that it's a symbol of wealth. I think the author wanted readers to reflect how they treat animals versus other humans. I think readers would have a similar viewpoint as Naoki, but he is an outlier in this story.

I was most confused reading Self-Reference Engine, especially because I don't know how the Japanese language works. It was hard to imagine there being 12 million characters in the language.