Readings 10/07 Alla

In the first chapters of Scattered All Over the Earth we meet Hiruko, a character from a country that has disappeared from the world. Hiruko then created her own language called Panska. I found it interesting how instead of learning Danish, she reshapes a language to fit her own world, in which she is left without a homeland. I assume Hiruko's homeland was Japan. And I wonder whether Panska (whether in translation or in the original) has any resemblance to actual Japanese. Also the story doesn't necessarily say that Hiruko was from Japan, so it's up to the readers to try and guess. On a broader note, Yoko Tawada raises the question of what's left of a culture when it disappears geographically.

The first chapter of Shion Miura's The Easy Life In Kamusari tells us about a young man Yuki, a high school graduate who gets sent to a forestry training program in the remote village of Kamusari. Yuki becomes isolated from his urban life. There is no cell phone service and no easy escape. Yuki's first days at work were rough, as the physical demands of the job are completely different from his expectations. We don't get to learn a lot about Yuki's character from this chapter, but I wonder if Yuki's values and mentality will change as he spends more time in the village working. Will he connect with nature more and end up liking the village life? Or will he try to escape back home?

I really enjoyed reading a part of Yoko Ogawa's The Memory Police. It reminded me of Orwell's 1984 and We by Zamyatin. In this story, objects disappear by decree, and Memory Police ensure that there is no memory left of that object. Ogawa explores the relationship between memory and identity. In one of the chapters, the Memory Police come into the narrator's house to take every single thing that has something to do with birds. The main character's father was an ornithologist, and, to some extent, birds were the only major connection to any memories left of her dad. Seeing the Memory Police take away these objects feels like they aren't just taking away some pictures or random notes; they are also taking away her personal history and memory of a loved one. However, the narrator's memories show that something can still exist emotionally even when there is no physical object or conversation to remind us of it. The Memory Police may have taken away everything she had that was related to birds, but the connection between the birds and her father does not necessarily disappear with them. This made me wonder whether forgetting something actually makes it disappear, or if it only makes it harder for people to recognize that it ever existed in the first place.

Hideo Furukawa's The Little Woods in Fukushima is a very personal reflection on the aftermath of the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident. Furukawa's writing is really atmospheric. He talks about such a widely known accident from a very personal perspective. Furukawa doesn't focus solely on facts about the disaster. Instead, he focuses on the emotions and memories within his family that were associated with the events of 2011. Furukawa's family is one of the many families that have suffered from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident, but their story was fortunate enough to be told and heard. There are likely thousands more stories of people who experienced the disaster in their own ways but whose stories were never told. I think this connects to my point about The Memory Police: just because something is not talked about doesn't mean it never existed or it no longer matters.