Scattered All Over the Earth:
Actually, I didn't really understand it completely, but my interpretation is that Hiruko comes from Japan. This is a novel with a fictional setting, but it's very much like the real world, except that Japan has already disappeared. In addition I think the feeling this novel gives me is that rather than Hiruko searching for Japanese speakers, she is actually searching for someone who can share her memories. Because she can already communicate in Panska and has found a job, her insistence on finding people who can speak Japanese is more kind of because those people share the same memories as her. For example she can make Northern Europeans understand what she says, but when she says that sushi comes from her culture, or that a certain word comes from her native language, others may not necessarily believe her. She remembers folk tales from her childhood, but no one can help her confirm whether the stories were really like that.
The Easy Life in Kamusari:
This one also gives me the feeling of a light novel. Which the story is relatively easy to read, the character designs are fairly distinct, and there are also a lot of humorous remarks and comedy. My thoughts on this novel so far are that Hirano is very much like a modern young people, at least a modern young Chinese people, which they're all confused and don't know what they want to do, and can't find their direction for the future. For example, Hirano doesn't want to go to university, doesn't want to join a company, and doesn't want to work in forestry either. The reason this is very common in China is that China's education places too much emphasis on exams, so young people don't have the opportunity to encounter and develop interests in life. Take Hirano for example, although I don't know the later plot, based on my experience, he will definitely come to like forestry later on. So what I want to express is that when many people say they can't find their interests or have no direction for the future, it's very likely because from the very beginning they resisted trying things due to lacking interest. But interest is often not something that exists from the start, rather, it is gradually cultivated. However, although I'm writting these things, I think I'm just someone who doesn't like experiencing new things, so even knowing these stuff, when faced with the time and energy costs required to engage with new things, people may still choose to stay in their comfort zone.
The Memory Police:
What interests me more in this novel is its discussion of memory. First of all, I find the novel's premise quite interesting: after people lose the memory of a thing, the thing itself does not disappear, but rather loses its original meaning. This makes me think of the famous philosophical theory, empiricism. Empiricism holds that the basic materials through which we come to know the world mainly come from experience. In other words, we can imagine combinations we have never seen, but it is very difficult to create out of thin air a feeling that has no basis in experience at all. Back to the novel's example of perfume — the perfume bottle and the liquid are still there, and the female protagonist can still smell a certain scent, but because of the removal of memory, she has lost her experience of the perfume. Correspondingly, she cannot understand why her mother treasures this perfume, and she cannot even understand the concepts corresponding to the perfume, such as "dating," "romance," and "love." Therefore, the perfume loses its original meaning.
Then there is another point that interested me: one aspect of memory erasure is that it affects personal identity, a philosophical discussion — that is, "Why am I, the past me and the present me, is they the same person?" How do you prove that you and your former self are the same person? On the physical level, it is like the classic Ship of Theseus question — our cells will all be replaced by new ones within a certain cycle, so physically we are already completely different people from our former selves. So if identity is considered to depend on raw materials or the physical level, the answer may be no. On the other hand, the same person can become a very different person — for example, a person can change greatly from childhood, but he will still consider the person from childhood to be himself. So I think one major criterion affecting personal identity, that is, proving that one is still oneself, comes from memory. So this is one point about the disappearance of memory in the novel that I find interesting. For example, a person used to love music very much. One day, he no longer understands music, no longer remembers why a certain song was important, and cannot evoke the feelings he had when listening to it. He may still know, "I used to like music." But this sentence may be nothing more than incomprehensible information. He can no longer understand that past self from within. Of course, we cannot say that forgetting one thing turns a person completely into another person. But a complete disappearance of memory like in the novel will thin the connection between oneself and one's past self, and begin to raise questions about personal identity. Finally, I think personal identity is still very complex, and it certainly cannot be explained from the single aspect of memory alone. For example, from a social perspective, a person who has lost his memory is still himself. So this issue also involves social identity and other problems, which it is too long to discuss.
The Little Woods in Fukushima:
The author mentions Camus in the novel, which interests me quite a bit: "All can be justified, no one is just." The view Camus puts forward is that tragedy can arise between two conflicting forces, each of which has its own legitimate grounds. This indeed corresponds to the author's feelings about Fukushima, or to his memories of childhood. That is to say, the forest and the mushrooms raised him, his older brother protected him, and his mother labored hardly for the family — all of these deserve love and gratitude. But the same family also made him take on labor from a young age and constantly be judged as "useless," to the point that he wanted to escape very early on. Gratitude and the desire to escape hold true in him at the same time. So after the disaster, when he stands up to support Fukushima, he encounters an inner dilemma: it seems that only by first saying "my hometown is beautiful, I have always loved this place" can his support be easily understood. But saying this requires suppressing his real childhood. So I feel this can also, to some extent, explain why he opposes simply restoring "the beautiful Fukushima of the past." In addition, before the disaster, his older brother already did not have many choices, and the family was already bearing heavy labor and economic pressure. So if reconstruction is merely a restoration of the past, that "beautiful Fukushima of the past" is still two-sided, which still contains unresolved pain.
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