Readings 10/21 Alla

Erika Kobayashi's short stories give us a glimpse of life in Japan during some of its most significant historical shifts. In Coco's Century, we learn about Ko, the narrator's grandmother, and how the changes in the world around her collide with everyday moments of a person's life. The other two stories, His Last Bow and Sunrise, seem to have the same concept. What I liked about Kobayashi's writing is that she's able to take such massive events and portray them through the lens of domestic life. The way her stories reflect on the past helps understand the extent to which historical events affect the people of Japan, but not in a history-textbook way. For instance, in His Last Bow, the narrator was talking about becoming a writer in a family of doctors spanning several generations: "They all had been doctors, but I heal no one." I found this quote very interesting because it captures the way family history can shape one's identity, especially during times of change. Personally, I think the narrator can heal people through her writing. Of course, it's impossible to do so in a medical sense, but her storytelling does help. It keeps the memory of the past alive so that future generations can understand the emotional effects left behind by these massive global events. 

In Abandoning A Cat, Haruki Murakami tells us about the memories associated with his dad, a man whose life was also shaped by historical events. In the beginning Murakami talks about a situation in which he and his dad tried to abandon a cat but it ended up coming back. I found it really interesting that the dad seemed to be relieved about that. Maybe deep inside that was exactly what the dad wanted: to keep the cat? At the end of the story Murakami says that everything that had happened in his and in his father's lives was accidental. The dad being able to continue his studies because of some officer who let him go, his parents meeting each other (even though we don't know the full story): everything was a matter of luck. Maybe that's what Murakami's dad deeply hoped for when they tried to abandon the cat. Maybe he hoped that, just like how fate treated him, fate would also bring the cat and the dad back to each other? I think the fact that the dad served in the army and was traumatized by his experiences plays a big role in this case. Having been sent to war, being able to survive by luck, the dad could probably have developed a strong sense of the significance of fate. If the cat could defy the odds and find its way back home, then Murakami's dad's own survival and return from the war wasn't an anomaly, but destiny. 

In Tokyo Ueno Station, Yu Miri seems to center the story around Ueno Imperial Gift Park and historical events. I found it interesting how Miri draws a parallel between the narrator's life and the Japanese Emperor. While the emperor lives in luxury, the narrator's life is defined by hard labor and tragedy. At some point the narrator gets a job building athletic facilities for the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. The Olympics were a symbol of modernization and global pride. Yet the narrator’s firsthand experience exposes the hidden, human cost of this glory. The facilities were built because of the hard work of migrant workers like the protagonist, who left their families in impoverished regions just to survive. I think that through this story Miri forces the reader to question the validity of "official" history itself. On paper, history is shaped by such massive events as the Olympic Games, but in reality, there were so many sacrifices made to make these achievements possible. And, unfortunately, those sacrifices seem to get omitted.

In Aoko Matsuda's Love Isn't Easy When You're the National Anthem, the protagonist is the Japanese national anthem. Matsuda makes a political symbol seem like a human figure with actual feelings and inner dialogue. Out of the whole group, one boy refuses to sing the anthem. I think it's pretty interesting how, even though the boy doesn't want to sing, he still considers the anthem as something that should be ignored. In other words, if the boy didn't care about the anthem at all, he would've joined the others and sung like everybody else. But he does quite the opposite: he chooses silence. In this sense, he does give the anthem the attention it's craving, but the protagonist considers such gesture to be a one-sided love.