By the end of Part One, I'm thinking about the invisible ways
that we experience race and racism in Canada. For people like Murasaki and
anyone else who doesn't look Caucasian, this is something we deal with on a
daily basis from the time we are children onwards. Our parents and grandparents
endured name calling, hateful speech, and racist policies from governments and
other institutions, and thankfully, these kinds of things are more history than
current event. But that doesn't mean that racism has become a thing of the
past.
Murasaki tells her grandmother:
"everyone wants to hear stories. And I can't finish them. They scatter
like sheep. Like dust" (63). The ways she has been treated because of her
race are not obvious, but she still senses they are there. How does the
sprinkling of these short anecdotes, like the story of the
"Oriental"-looking Valentine, affect the way you experience the other
parts of the book - Naoe's internal monologue and stories of her childhood, and
Murasaki's later goings-on with her lover? Why include them if they don't seem
to lead to a point?
Other things I'm thinking about:
Murasaki seems very casual about the details of her
narrative, whether it's how she met her lover - "We could have met
anywhere. We could have met, say, in an airport", as if it doesn't matter
where they actually met (58). So is Naoe, including things like home perms and
Meiji chocolate in her story of Uba-Sute Yama. Does this affect how much you
believe other things in the novel so far? Do you believe the fantastical
elements? Or does it make you doubt some of the more mundane and otherwise "believeable" details?
Smell is mentioned in interesting ways in this section. Why
do you think the author is giving this sense such importance? Is this a
realistic detail, a fantastical or symbolic one, or somewhere in between?
This is an interesting point about smell, it being a more subtle and lingering sense and so intimate. I've been thinking about how important it is to my dog, just this morning. But a negative association, a bad smell, can be similar, I think, to a feeling of discrimination.
ReplyDeleteI agree - it's like how people respond emotionally to something a split second before they start thinking about it intellectually. Smell hits us and we react to it before we think about it. And it's closely linked to food, which is so cultural and also personal. So it can be a natural trigger for prejudices about other cultures, but something you can't do away with (and conversely, can cause a lot of pleasure for the very same reasons).
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