Novenmber 1 Reflection -Jaxon

 I enjoy reading Erika Kobayashi's works. Although the works are short, I saw the change of times, wars, and different generations' inheritance in a few pages. With similar phrases, it's amazing to see when different generations reach the same age and make different decisions. 

"Abandoning a Cat" is relatively hard to read since Murakami is telling a real story some parts of the family issues, in reality, are not that fun to read. I didn't know he likes cats, and I just realized cats appear in the long novels I read, like "Wind-Up Chronicle" and "Kafka On the Shore." The content is a little bit too realistic, which makes me feel a little bit depressed. The conflicts between old values and new values, such as working as a writer and putting effort into studying something you are not interested are appealing to me.

"Tokyo Ueno Station," from what I recall, doesn't tell me when the story is narrated, and the narration jumps from time to time a lot, but I think in the book it mentioned it was during the period when Japan's economic bubble broke so maybe it's around the 1980s? I have been to Ueno Park, so it provided me good imagery when I was reading. The perspective of a homeless worker is interesting to me, and from the part we read, I think there is a lot of information missing, like how the narrator ended up homeless and what happened to his hands.

I feel very bad to read "Love Isn't Easy When You Are National Anthem" since in China, I'm confident to say, at least in the school I attended, 80% of the students don't sing the national anthem, and I'm also one of them who pretend I'm singing. 

There are many Korean words in "The End of August," and I have to go online to search for them. Although they are easy words, it's still hard for a person like me who knows nothing about Korean. The narrative structure is a little confusing, or maybe I miss something. The narrator keeps switching from the third-person perspective to Woo-Gun's first-person perspective. I didn't get what the roles of the girls appeared in the beginning are.