November 8th - Maya Thiart

This week’s readings had a much more puzzling theme than those of the previous weeks— the stories felt disjointed and not as connected to each other, but I found that a lot of them had a bit of bittersweet hope from a fantastical world not too dissimilar to our own.

I quite liked “The Flying Tobita Sisters”, as it reminded me of some of the messages of the stories from the week that we talked about environmentalism— the protagonist in this story learns to reconnect with nature and herself, and comes to learn just why her mother had a fascination with the time before flight. Just like humans in modern day have developed dependency on technology for their everyday, humans in this story have developed a dependency on wings so that they no longer can walk properly.

“Goodbye, Christopher Robin” was a sad story for me. I feel like there could be two possible interpretations of the story— one relating to loss of innocence/childhood, and the other about losing memories as we age. It made me think of “Scattered All Over the Earth” and “The Memory Police”, in dealings with memory and loss. The short story follows Pooh, a character from a children’s story, as he slowly loses everything and everyone in his life, eventually even the closest friend of his. Because of his status as a children’s story character, he could be emblematic of childlike wonder and innocence, a sense of imagination that dissipates as we mature and step into the “real” world. This lack of imagination would explain why the Alice character couldn’t find anything to do once she chased after the rabbit, and why what was happening in the “other world” had effects of within— the “internal world”.

“A First-Rate Material” was a story that both made me feel ill, but also introspective about the way people use and discard their own bodies. One thought I had was that the story could be symbolic of labor, that in order to produce the goods we take for granted (like furniture, technology and clothes), there are many workers toiling in horrific hours and conditions, often at the expense of their bodies and physical condition. While I do think the story is a commentary moreso on how we treat our bodies after we die, it does contain some interesting messaging for how we treat our bodies while alive.

“Paprika Jiro” was one that I couldn’t truly make sense of— while reading it, it felt like the market traders, like Paprika Jiro, were NPCs in a video game, and the men in suits were the people playing it—  their stalls were destined to be wrecked because it fit the storyline. It reminded me of a joke I’ve seen online that video game NPCs should just give up making pottery because their stuff will always be smashed— Paprika Jiro and his cart is similar.