“Twelve Twitter Stories” confused me because I couldn’t really figure out a coherent theme that tied all the paragraphs together. But maybe this was the point - maybe it suggests that social media and a platform like Twitter is so chaotic with different people’s voices sludging together and information being spread so quickly. The very first paragraph about the thousand tongues could be referring to the concept of people of different languages and cultures all go on social media share their thoughts.
I thought “I Want to Kick You in the Back” felt like a commentary on both loneliness and celebrity culture. Both Hasegawa and Ninagawa are outcasts, but it feels like they both choose to be that way, or at the very least, justify that it’s by choice. While Hasegawa hates being part of a group because she doesn’t want to conform to people or fake being excited about things she doesn’t care about, Ninagawa is too obsessed with Oli-chan to truly care about the outside world. On another note, Ninagawa’s obsession with Oli-chan feels really jarring. The way he asked Hasegawa to draw a map of the store felt creepy.
The discussion of romance in “People Who Talk to Stuffed Animals Are Nice” was really interesting. Nanamori doesn’t feel true romantic feelings for his girlfriend and is mainly only in the relationship because he wants a girlfriend and feels like it’s a rite of passage of some sort. One thing that stood out to me is when Aokawa cried, and Nanamori’s reaction was something along with lines of woah, I didn’t know love was this serious. I think romance might be concept that’s inflated in society, so much so that people crave being in relationships without the actual connection or feelings. So I find it very real that Nanamori likes being in the Plushie Club because there’s no distinction between man or woman and no talk of romance or gossip.
In “The Hole,” I wonder if the black animal she saw was real or just a figment of her imagination. I was also curious about the large presence of cicadas throughout the story. This part about cicadas stood out to me: “They hear other cicadas crying around them and use what they hear to choose a partner. To my human ear, they sounded like a bunch of machines, a spray of emotionless noise. Maybe that’s how we sound to them, too” (31). This quote could suggest that relationships, specifically the narrator’s marriage, feels more like an emotionless contract than a real connection. The hole could be symbolic of how the narrator feels trapped after becoming a housewife, slowly losing her sense of time and identity.
“Hunchback” shocked me with the way it started, but I found it both moving and interesting how the narrator wishes she were able to do rather extreme things like get pregnant and have an abortion in order to feel “normal.” This one made me think a lot. Like the part about book culture being able-bodied was something that I never thought about before. Or like how much of it privilege it is to even be able to breathe normally.
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