September 13th Reading Reflection - Maya Thiart

Of the six readings that were assigned for this week’s class, each of them had a pairing that wove together themes across the stories, with one adapting and playing off of the other one.

Haruki Murakami’s The Ice Man and Yukiko Motoya’s Straw Husband are one such pairing. Both stories touch on a woman’s recollection of her marriage and how her perception on it has changed over time and over the course of their relationships. Both of the main characters in the stories marry unconventional men (one a “Ice Man” and the other a man literally made of straw), and how they married their husbands against the qualms of their family and friends. The stories both address the idea of falling out of love and growing separate from each other, although readers are left with an impression that the two women are left in very different places in their life once the story has ended. In The Ice Man, the wife seems to be trapped in a life of depression and discontent, quietly wasting away while resenting the fact that she ever came to the South Pole in the first place. She is left isolated, homesick, and stuck in her station in life. Meanwhile, the ending of Straw Husband is a bit more ambiguous– the wife in the story seems to now have recognized the faults of her husband, and should she want to leave him, she might have that agency. 

Kanze Kojiro Nobumitsu’s Dojoji and Aoko Matsuda’s Smartening Up are another pairing. Both stories address a woman dealing with the fact that some of her youth/years were “wasted” on a man– in the play, it’s a woman who has been tricked by her father to “wait” for a priest, and in Smartening Up, it’s a woman who has been dumped by her lover, trying to grapple with her life afterwards. Within the text of the story, Smartening Up even references the play, but instead of the main character succumbing to her sadness and trying to fix herself, she reclaims her power within her hair, once again left in a better state than that of the woman in the play. Rather than become a serpent with scales, she becomes a beast with hair, and owns her newfound abilities proudly. She no longer cares about her looks, or how people perceive her, and the readers feel confident in her ability to move on in life.

Aoko Mastuda’s Silently Burning also references Saikaku Ihara’s The Greengrocer’s Daughter and the story of Oshichi by having the main character work at her temple. These stories play on the idea of fire representing passion– in the old text, quite literally, with Oshichi committing arson to see her lover again, and in the newer piece, with the women coming to the temple with the fire inside them “silently burning”. Both stories touch upon women reclaiming and recognizing their power, and fueling their passion for the betterment of themselves.