Reading The Devotion of Suspect X made me feel really tight and uncomfortable….. From the beginning, Yasuko and Misato seem trapped in a corner. They are scared and powerless, and when the ex-husband appears, the feeling of “there is no escape” becomes even stronger. While reading, I felt the same tension. When an accidental killing happened, I was not shocked at all. Instead, I felt a heavy drop in my heart, like pressure that had been building for a long time finally bursting. Yasuko and Misato are not bad. They were simply pushed to their limit. And that limit felt very real to me as I read. And the most painful part for me of the chapter was not the death itself, but the helplessness of having to live with it.
I also don’t like the story Strange Houses. The scariest part for me is that the woman in the story actually drew her own death, and she didn’t even know it (or maybe she did.) Her drawings look normal at first, but when rearranged and put together, they reveal how she dies. When simple drawings suddenly become a death scene, it gave me chills. And when the character finally understands what the drawings mean, I also freeze. It’s felt just like a horror movie. Seeing those separate pieces of paper suddenly form the shape of a dead body is very unsettling. (I'm genuinely terrified of this kind of Japanese horror. It gives me nightmares.)
After reading Before the Coffee Gets Cold, I feel like I understand “going back to the past” in a new way. Maybe what we want to change is not the event itself, but the version of ourselves from that moment ( the one who didn’t understand and didn’t have time to speak). I feel like the character wants to go back, not because she wants her ex-boyfriend back. Instead, she goes because the breakup happened so fast that she had no time to think. That feeling of not explaining, not expressing emotions, and not understanding why things ended. And sometimes what we really want is just to know what happened and why. The cafe's rules feel very symbolic to me. They show that the only thing we can truly change is who we are now. The goes back, cannot get a different result, but only an understanding.
In I Want to Eat Your Pancreas, the thing that stood out to me most is how the story shows the small, delicate space between life and death. The male character is very calm, almost cold, and this makes the emotions feel heavier and more real. In contrast, Sakura appears full of energy and light. Her attitude toward her illness seems almost too relaxed, but because of that, I can feel she is actually dealing with fear in her own way. She uses her smile as a shield, and she stays calm because she knows her time is limited. It’s a strange and sad feeling. The closer she is to disappearing, the harder she tries to live fully. When the two characters first start to notice each other, I notice a small but clear change. Sakura is slowly opening up the male character’s world, even though he doesn’t realize it yet.
In Uzumaki, what impressed me most was how Junji Ito creates fear without using any actual monsters. Instead, the story becomes scary when the boy’s father suddenly becomes obsessed with spirals for no reason. The hidden is in small details, and fear grows little by little. For me, this kind of fear feels more real because it comes from something familiar in daily life, slowly turning strange. I also think the spiral is frightening because it is just a simple shape. It has no life or emotion. But in the story, the characters react to it in such strange ways that the spiral starts to feel like something from another world. It feels wrong and inhuman, and that makes it even scarier.
No comments:
Post a Comment