It was a bit Ironic to see Gandhi used in this story.His evasion on the question of self defense against male assault disappointed the main character.Gandhi himself was a sexually repressed pervert who molested a lot of women.
I guess the mother is so insistent that the daughter never get married because she herself is stuck with a dude she never loved.
So Miss Sasagawara’s madness is explained by her poem at the end.She went crazy because her Dad went crazy.
The drunk guy represents what America truly feels about Asians or at least he spells out plainly the intangible racism that is sensed from Americans.
Gambling addiction and alcoholism are two traps for dads that I’ve seen come up in multiple immigrant family stories I’ve read.The dad falls prey and the family suffers for his selfishness.
The wild dogs starving, getting overfed, and then roasting sounds pretty tasty.It reminds me of in Tampopo, the dying gangster boyfriend’s story, about hunting wild boars in the winter and roasting their intestines that are filled with sweet potatoes they had eaten.
That’s how I eat my fried eggs, I scarf em like that.
“(It is a wicked and unfaithful generation that asks for a sign).”That’s pretty hardcore to say but is also an admission of their vanity considering that they themselves were looking for a sign.
I see a lot of recurring foods in this book show up at once in this chapter.Fried eggs, rice cakes, bean cakes, pickled vegetables, fish, and vinegar rice.Japanese immigrant food staples.
The theme of quiet helpless anger and bearing disrespect is recurring in these stories.
The part about Emiko being mindful of criticalness to the art of others resonated with me.I think most people have self-esteem deficiencies in various areas or perhaps a lack of inner strength to defend their egos.So people are shaped by what gets attacked and what they let get taken away from them.The fragile parts of the ego can be torn away by critics or bullies, so all that remains is what goes untouched or what is invincible to attacks.I think art is a common thing that people get taken away from them in life because it seems for the most part only people who learn to love making art survive the pressures to give up (singing, drawing, dancing, acting, music, etc.)
Muhammed Ali fighting a sumo wrestler is really silly. I had to google that.The fight looks like it was a total mess and made everyone mad.
This story shows the discomfort and sympathy of interacting with homeless people.It also shows two detached perspectives of the Japanese from the homeless lady.Her irrational paranoia plus her idealization and identification with those idealized qualities of being polite and quiet.
Envying the child dancers for seeming worlds apart.I wonder if Chisato wants to do what they are doing or maybe Chisato just wants to fantasize about having a different life,