This week’s readings were definitely interesting, and they offered a curious but bleak, and probably honest, portrayal of everyday love, marriage, and sexual desire.
I found that the strangest and most disturbing story from this week’s selection was Hiromi Kawakami’s Seahorse.The magical realism of the narrator being a seahorse that came onto land and was passed from husband to husband to be very unsettling. I am still trying to make sense of the narrative, but I interpreted it as a reflection of the narrator’s past life where they are stuck in limbo. When she first leaves the sea, she is departing from life but must acknowledge an oppressive past; and then when she finally returns to the sea, she finds ground and direction and can move on. ?? Not sure if that makes sense, so I am looking forward to discussing this particular story.
In addition to Seahorse, I didn’t really understand the ending of Banana Yoshimoto’s Tomo-chan’s Happiness when it started referencing something similar to God. Similar to Seahorse though, I thought it centered around trying to find love and/or acceptance after a traumatic and oppressive experience–in this case, when Tomo-chan was raped at 16.
The themes of alienation and identity and how they become intertwined with marriage and social pressures was also interesting to read about. I had read Convenience Store Woman in Professor Frederick’s class last semester, and so it was interesting to see similarities in other stories, such as in Picnic and Realizing Fun Things through Water. I don’t really understand the meaning behind the title of the latter, though. In all three of these stories, there are characters who are not “normal” according to their society and appear to be maybe asexual. It’s an interesting decision to have characters with traits like these, and it says something about a feeling that is a more hidden commonality in everyday life.
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