Cindy's post

I enjoyed this week’s reading very much, which mainly focuses on depicting marriage and love from different angles and perspectives. I think that they provoke deeper thoughts inside me and grant me some new insights:

First of all, I wish to talk about a toxic marriage motif in Murakami Haruki’s The Iceman Man and Yukiko Motoya’s Straw husband. In my opinion, the Ice Man story can be classified into horror novel class, and it is about an ice man husband, who robbed away every single warmth and joy from his wife unintentionally, and made his wife an ice woman as himself. This story reminds me of a saying, which goes: “if someone does not love you as you expected, it does not mean that he/she does not love you”. And Biologically speaking, everyone has different body languages and distinct ways to show love. We can undoubtedly make the point that the Ice Man does love his wife, who is our protagonist. And it is assured that they once loved each other deeply and profoundly, disregarding all the disagreement surrounding them. Nonetheless, they are people living in different worlds, who wants a love that the other could not accurately expressed. This crucial point serves the main reason for their tragic end.The wife can bear with the Ice man’s coldness, yet she still needs certain amount of tangible warmth and regular connection with the society to maintain her life; On the other hand, the Ice man has secluded himself from the outside world, and is rejected by the whole Tokyo society, therefore, does not particularly need love, which follows that he cannot show love in a consoling manner. So, it goes along with the passage of time that fissure should certainly crack between their gradually toxic relationship. In other words, although they love each other, their love cannot communicate and thus not reciprocal and equal, which irretrievably turns their happy marriage into a toxic and heavy bond, such that they both became cold physically and psychologically, lose hope totally, and became people who only live in the past. The wife unfortunately lost herself in the end , and even her sorrow is frozen into ice… From which, I conclude that this ice man story might intend to show what disaster a toxic marriage might bring. And this shares a common ground with Motoya’s Straw husband, which depicts a frightening story that because of the straw husband's overly obsession with his new car and his picky attitude towards his wife Tomoko, Tomoko has thought of kill him by flames and regretted the marriage. Which again, shows how trivial quarrels could become huge problem through mutual failure to forgive between husband and wife. 

Besides, in addition to what states above, I wish to add two other angles to view Murakami’s ice man story: firstly, it can also be viewed as a story, which talks about people, who refuse to change and immerse in the past, would only earn a life as cold and dull as an ice cube; Secondly, it might also be interpreted in the light that the story itself serves as a satire, which criticizes the lack of liveliness of the contemporary Japanese society. (I got these two insights after reading some book reviews online, so they are not totally original).

What’s more, I also wish to briefly talk about another motif in the other stories, which is the braveness and boldness of a woman’s love. For instance, in the Dojoji story, Kiyohime chased behind her monk lover Anchin and transformed into a snake, which leads to Anchin’s destruction at last. And in the greengrocer’s daughter tale, our female protagonist burns a house in order to see her samurai lover again, which condemned her to punishment and her lover into a monk. From the first glance to either of these two tales, they are tragic and troubling. But I want to make a point that they somehow show Japanese woman in a quite different light.In stereotypical view, Japanese woman are conceived as graceful, obedient, and weak (somehow) in novels, such as in the Madame Butterfly. In other words, an image similar to “a damsel in distress” image in the west. However, in these couple of stories that we read, we could see Japanese women fearlessly pursue their love although their passion consumes them to ashes, which surprises me and mesmerizes me. And somehow they are also self-destructive in their love.

Last but not least, I also want to point out a recurring motif that takes place in the Dojoji story, which echoes in world literature. It is the motif of crossing the river for one’s love, which also happens in the Ancient Greek Leander and Hero story, and the South Asian tragic love story Sohni Mahiwal, thus provokes me to think that they might have a same origin or some sort connection while literature circulates the world.