Realizing Fun Things through Water:
The impression of this novel for me is that Hatsuoka doesn't dislike other people; on the contrary, she cares about them a great deal. She worries about whether what she says might hurt the other person—it's a bit like being overly empathetic. So the water, or the LINE that her sister doesn't reply to, is essentially an absolutely safe listener, and Hatsuoka can speak freely to it.
Picnic：
What this short story gives me is the feeling that people may be able to understand another person more and more, but it's almost impossible to "completely understand" another person. Many times, when we feel we can know and understand another person, we have merely built a model of you in our own consciousness based on your words and behavior. This model may be very accurate, but it is never "true self." This reminds me of a philosophical problem called the problem of other minds. Although it's not exactly the same as this theme, it says that you can directly feel your own pain, thoughts, and emotions, but you can only see or hear other people's behavior, so we can never accurately know another person's inner thoughts. And coming back to the story, I think that in intimate relationships it's actually easy to form an illusion—that is, the more intimate you are, the more easily you develop the illusion that "I already understand you." However, it might just you deepen the model you build for the other person.
Convenience Store Woman:
For this story, the point that interests me more is the discussion of sociology. First, I think the reason society naturally tends to exclude "oddities," such as Furukura and Shiraha, is that in order for society to function, people's behavior needs to have a certain degree of predictability. Without predictability, every interaction between people would have to be judged from scratch. The cost of that is too high, so society naturally produces a large number of norms. So from this point, I think conformity is a natural choice with social efficiency. This reminds me of the sociologist Émile Durkheim's concept of collective consciousness—that is, for a society to exist, it must possess certain shared rules and values, and this can be called a kind of collective conscience. Which society's norms or standards are not decided by any one person or group, but are gradually formed through the interactions of countless people.
In addition, I think this normative power is sometimes even stronger than law, because society's normalization does not directly punish "oddities," but instead pushes you to conform through a kind of implicit pressure. In the story, no one truly forces Furukura to marry, but it still brings her enormous pressure. And I think this can also explain why Furukura keeps staying at the convenience store, because the convenience store can be said to be a place without this kind of normative power, since everything is written into the "law." And Furukura, as an "oddity" in society, inherently lacks the ability to follow social norms, so only in a place like the convenience store, where all the rules are explicitly written out, can she achieve conformity.
Sea Horse/Dissecting Misogyny/Tomo-chan’s Happiness:
I'm not very familiar with the topic, and after reading it I didn't have any particular thoughts either.
No comments:
Post a Comment