Bin 10/22

 “Every dust of the times falls on a person as a mountain” 

I don’t remember where I first saw this line, but it really fits the theme in this week’s readings. We can see this both in CoCo’s Century and Sunrise — how individuals live out their lives while standing in front of fate.

This idea shows up again and again in other readings too. Also by showing the weight of history, these writers all seem to share a similar attitude toward Japan’s wars of aggression and militarism.

In His Last Bow, heavy history, the vastness of the era, and family legacy are all intertwined — turning family expectations into something as heavy as that Japanese history itself. Luckily, the protagonist finds her own path. Choosing to become a writer instead of a doctor symbolizes her gradual rejection of those expectations, and maybe also a deeper reflection on history. Personally, I think the difference between a writer and a doctor, in the context of Japan’s fascist past, is that doctors were often participants in that dark history, accomplices to the crimes of the military. A writer, on the other hand, steps outside that weight and uses words to expose the pain of the past so that others won’t fall into the same historical loop. The final line — “Invisible light penetrates human flesh. All the things that could not be seen are now revealed, right before my eyes.” — also hints at the author’s view of Japan’s wartime past.

Abandoning a Cat reflects on the war too, but focuses more on the helplessness of the individual in the face of fate — a fate that can’t be controlled. The grandfather hit by a train, the uncle who has to inherit the temple, the father who was almost given away to a temple as a child, and all these lives swept up by war. In the hospital, death is inevitable; history itself is inescapable. Soldiers kill, monks save lives, but war turns good people into monsters. I think the cat represents both the father’s abandoned childhood and the history of violence and aggression. Abandoning the cat reminds the father of his own abandonment and hellish past — yet facing that pain, passing down the memory, becomes a kind of redemption. The family’s trauma has to be seen before it can be healed.

It’s also worth noting that Murakami seems to show his attitude in the ending through his description of the white cat — as if to say that the individual’s helplessness before fate never really goes away. And no matter how much people admit to past crimes, nothing can truly undo what was done. The trauma lingers as punishment for life. I really appreciate this kind of reflection — because if the trauma of committing crimes could be easily healed, then how could the suffering of the Chinese and all the other victims in Asia and Australia ever be healed?

Tokyo Ueno Station didn’t particularly grab me — the writing style felt a bit overworked and made it hard for me to fully get into it. Still, its reflections on the bubble economy, war, and militarism are quite solid. It might be the first Japanese novel I’ve read that includes such a sharp hint of criticism toward the imperial family. I’m not sure if the author’s Korean citizenship gave her the distance to express that attitude more freely in her writing, but it made me wonder.

In Love Isn’t Easy When You’re the National Anthem, I found it interesting that the requirement to “respect the national anthem” actually appears in so many countries — however in this case, I instantly linked it to Japan’s fascist past. Even though the story doesn’t reveal its setting, Japan’s history as an Axis power automatically shaped the context in my mind while I was reading.