Erika Kobayashi, Sunrise: I liked this story. It was a fun little twist that the real narrator was the daughter of the woman being written about. It was similar to last week's mushroom story, going over the effects of nuclear blasts. This one seemed more passive about it though.
Coco's Century: I can see a theme of Kobayashi's writing where she tells a story connecting the different branches of a family tree. How even when you're old and start forgetting the stories of your youth, your family can remember for you and tell your story. Lovely.
His Last Bow: this tied the first and second Kobayashi story together showing us a clear family tree. It showed the history of the father and the history of the mother and their newborn child. It also showed how closely connected and similar families are to one another. How their stories and trials helped make their children who they are. It's also very heartwarming to see the care and love the narrator uses to tell the story of her ancestry.
Haruki Murakami, Abandoning a Cat: Continuing the theme of familial connection and wartime Japan, we have an article of a man telling the story of his father, through facts he's not even sure are fully accurate. The narrator several times tells a story about his father followed by how he could be misremembering or he simply never fact checked with his father. This story talks about the effects of generational trauma being passed down father to son, father to son. Unloading the burdens of a parent to their child. Maybe this was done in an effort to form a deeper connection, but in reality it only serves to separate the two further. Each generation of a family has their own struggles to face in their youth. We've read a few stories now about previous generations struggling in times of war. How the only way to honor them is to respect them and their experience, considering we have not shared these experiences.
Yu Miri, Tokyo Ueno Station (fragment): This story is different from the previous ones read for this week. Rather than focusing on past familial bonds and generational trauma, we have a man, presumably homeless, reflecting on his existence. He was poor since birth and had to do intense manual labor from a young age. Even with all of these countless years spent working, the man is still living in a tent, getting by through the scraps that nearby restaurants leave out for him and his fellow homeless people. It was interesting to me that he was not living with his wife and children. I wonder how he had time to marry at all with how intense his own survival was. The act of having children also adds even more of a financial strain. He portrays his existence as if he were a ghost in the modern world. At Ueno Station, the only people he takes note of are his fellow homeless people. He described everyone one else's faces as "puddles of water". Perhaps he gives attention to his fellow homeless person because society around him will not. The government never seems to intervene either, other than when they clear the homeless people from the park and hint at not wanting them to return. But where should they return if they truly have no where to go? And what ever happened to the homeless man who died's cat that he treasured so much? Now that creature is all alone too. Very sad.
Aoko Matsuda, "Love Isn't Easy When You're the National Anthem" (MB6): Um. hahahah what was this? Sorry. A song was talking about being aroused. Very unserious lol.
Yu MIri, The End of August (fragment): We return to a story of current wartime. One perspective, is a young girl with a crush on a boy, enjoying a hot day playing jump rope with her friends. The next perspective however is quite different. We have this boy, only 18, training for a marathon with his brother who is in his 30s. Their concerns outlay the childish concerns of the young girls before them. They talk about missed potential and a war looming over their heads. The elder brother is resigned to the idea of running away to avoid war. The younger is rebellious, wanting to stay in Korea and make his mark as his own person. He wants to reclaim his name and his freedom with it.
This week's readings focus a lot on war and the effects it has on different people, not just in the generation directly involved, but every generation after. War is not just the time spent fighting but also the time long after that sticks with those who fought, the memory of those who died, and the children who's parents were left permanently scarred. There are perspectives of those who feel hopeless and those who feel a passion to go on.
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