The Unseen Things That Stay-Sylvia Chen

This week’s stories I personally think are very different in tone, but they share one thing that moved me: they are all about something are unseen.

In Love Isn’t Easy When You’re the National Anthem, the narrator is the national anthem itself. I thought this idea was very cool, and recheck mutiple times. I found it funny and clever at first, but later a feeling of sadness came over me. The anthem falls in love with a student who refuses to sing it. It wants to be heard, but no one answers. The story looks like one about love, but it also shows the distance between a country and its people. When a song stands for a nation, those who stay silent are really saying they do not belong. It made me reflect of people who are told to show loyalty but still feel left out.

And In Tokyo Ueno Station, I did not understand the story at first. But, I later learned that the narrator is the spirit of an old man who has died but still wanders in the human world. After death, he still cannot leave. He quietly watches the world move, watches people pass by. This made me think about people who are being ignore. Many people are still alive but have already become invisible—they have no address, no name. In the story, when the old man hears the debates about nuclear power and politicians speaking empty words about “reconstruction after the disaster.” I sensed a certain connection, for his silence mirrored the voices in our society that are either overlooked or unable to express themselves.

When I first read Abandoning a Cat, it looked like a simple memory of a summer afternoon when a man took his son to the beach to leave a cat behind. But reflect on it more, I felt it was not only a story about a cat, it was also about postwar Japan, a generation that chose to forget, stay silent, and carry guilt. The cat is a little crack in that silence, showing the emotional scars of that time. The father is quiet and serious, he never talks about his past and keeps a distance from his son. He leaves the cat, then accepts it when it comes back.This make the cat's existence transformed into non-death, but existing, like a trace of what cannot be spoken.

In Sunrise, the characters do not cry, but they all remember. The story shows how a mother and daughter’s lives connect with Japan’s history, from the bomb to the disaster, where personal memory and national pain meet. Light stands for both life and destruction. Yoko lives her whole life under this light, carrying the quiet weight of the past. Coco’s Century feels like a wall of my old family photos, each one trying to speak. Coco’s(Ko?) life is a fragile line between family and history, dim but real, like the yellowed photos we remember but cannot explain. His Last Bow, to be honest, I don’t quiet get the theme. But it made me think about the invisible—about the memory and history. In this story, each generation is seens repeating the same cycle of birth, loss, and rebuilding and overlap with public history. I come out with one question about does the radiation of time, persistently affect future generations? Are we shaped by what we cannot see?