The stories assigned for this week all share a throughline of exploring women's' lives through the lens of love. Whether this be in relation to their own personal understanding of love or the broader social ideals of love we are constantly bombarded with understanding the intricacies and complications of love from a woman's perspective.
In this exploration there are some stories that seem to consistently draw on each other or on past events giving us diverse perspectives on the ideals themselves. I would group these together would be: Dojoji (1), Dojoji (2), and The Greengrocer's Daughter with a Bundle of Love, all based on the historical story and mythologization of Oshichi's love affair; The Straw Husband, and The Ice Man, most likely drawing from each other as well as the mythical tale in Japanese mythology of an ice woman; Smartening Up and Silently Burning, in its portrayal of love of the self.
Love in all of these three different categories means different things to each. In the Dojoji and Greengrocer stories love is primarily shown to be about passion. The rapidly evolving and intimate relationship between a man and woman very quickly leading to an unstoppable need to find connection with each other constantly. This passion is then quickly turned into insanity through the portrayal of Oshichis turning into a snake in Dojoji and trying to set her house on fire in Greengrocer. Irrationality and moral incorrectness are strong themes found throughout these stories in particular.
In contrast to this The Straw Husband and Ice Man portray a type of love which is much less directly about passion and more so about love as an inclusive and restrictive phenomenon. Whilst a slow burn of the creation of love emerges between the main character and Ice Man in Murakami's story it is their ensuing love that seems to both let her accept him as being different form her as well as what ends up trapping her into a cycle of, quite literally, being frozen in place. The Straw Husband deals with these same ideas but presents them in a slightly more volatile manner. This is expressly shown through the idea that both the Ice Man and the Straw Husband are creating toxic relationships for the woman. The use of their bodies as being entirely different can be seen as a representation of a certain lack of emotional availability and maturity from them, very quickly leading to a suffocating relationship. In Ice Man this is shown through the use of cold as a reductive force and the loss of the individual faced by the woman, and in Straw Husband the inability for her husband to understand her feelings eventually leads her to feeling trapped and vulnerable before him even eventually pushing her to feel like "burning him up."
Finally, Smartening Up and Silently Burning seem to stand a step apart from the others in the sense that they most clearly portray themes of self-love as well as the value of being present for oneself. Whether this is shown in the apparition of the grandmother's ghost and the woman trying to use her hair as a way to reinvent herself after her breakup, or in the way that the young woman in Smartening Up finds her self-worth and social image existing almost entirely through her calligraphy, these stories seem to contend with the idea that love is intransigent. Meaning, love exists in all things, physical or not, and that our value exists in both our craft and, subsequently, the way that we think of ourselves.
All of these stories share a common thread of exploring the idea of love through the lens of a woman and how love can be a tool of passion and folly, a tool of acceptance and or trapping, and a method of self-expression.
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