I decided to read Chikyuu Seijin and trying to catch up with the book club. I just finished this part and I made a mistake by reading a few paragraph more than the end line and now I’m shaking with anger.
My thoughts so far:
Natsuki and family
Hysterical and bullied older sister. Absent and silent father (stereotypical Asian father). A mother who is always tired and irritated. This is a recipe for disaster.
The older sister is bullied and her body is weak. The mother is always taking care of her. The sister is slowly becoming resentful and jealous of her “normal” and “happy” little sister. This is ironic because Natsuki doesn’t think she is “normal”, but from other people’s perspective, she seems “normal”. Natsuki has friends, hangs out with her friends normally, goes to school and cram school normally, nothing seems out of ordinary. But this is exactly because she is making a great effort to look “normal”.
The mother is described as someone who is always degrading Natsuki when talking to the neighbors or relatives. In Asian culture, it’s “normal” to slightly degrade your child to appear humble. And Asian parents have a habit of comparing their children to others’.
: “What a smart kid!”
: “Oh, not really, she’s actually very lazy. Your kid is better. I wish my kid is more like him.”
Of course what Natsuki mother did was beyond normal, to the point that it made the other party uncomfortable. Nowadays people are accepting that this is unhealthy and gradually they stop doing it. It’s precisely because, just like in this book, the children would accept it as the truth. It breaks my heart that Natsuki keeps referring to herself as 「出来損ない」 “good-for-nothing”. Whatever bad things that her mother said about her, she would accept it as the truth without any resistance, and she’s building her identity around it.
I can understand that the mother must be going through a lot of stress. Her oldest child doesn’t want to go to school and gets sick easily. Her husband is absent from the household matters and is not someone you can share your troubles and worries. The money is not enough and she has to take a part-time job. Nobody likes her at work and they’re calling her names behind her back. But really, this is not an excuse to use her unproblematic child as the stress reliever.
It really makes me sad that Natsuki feels that she has no ally in the family. Interacting with her family members only results in negative emotions being built up inside of her, and so she doesn’t feel like she belongs to this family. But she still does her best to please them all because she doesn’t want to be “thrown away” for being “useless”.
The only ally that Natsuki has is Yuu. But Yuu also has his own problems. His mother telling him that he’s an alien (i.e. not her own child) and treating him like a lover is a major red flag. Yuu setting the 3rd marriage rule to be 「生き延びる」 “to survive / to live long” somehow means that there are times when he thought he might not live for long. I really hope this doesn’t mean he has suicidal thoughts.
Natsuki's world view
Natsuki emphasises a lot on “being useful to society” by “getting married and making babies”. It seems that “being useful to society” is the core belief of Japanese society. That’s why when someone is unable to be useful (e.g. NEET), they’re judged by their surroundings. The pressure can result in them becoming a hikikomori, because they don’t want to go out and meet other people and be judged for being “useless”. As a woman in this society, “being useful” means “getting married and making babies”.
Natsuki is very mature and observant for realising all this. She is also very mature at understanding what’s going on around her. She realised that her mother is using her as a punching bag. She realised that her mother is not scolding her to teach her a lesson, but it’s to release her stress. She realised that it’s the same with her sister. The family is using her as a “trash can”. What bothers me a lot is that despite realising all these, she doesn’t understand yet that these things are not okay. She’s still too young to know that this treatment is toxic and as a result, she’s accepting all this abuse. She accepts that it’s normal for her to be treated as a “trash can” because she’s a “good-for-nothing”. To cope with the situation, she uses “magic”. It’s like, “Oh, mother is getting angry again. Time to cast the magic to remove this uncomfortable feeling that is swelling inside of me.”
This is a very dangerous mindset because it can lead to her normalising all the abusive treatment that she receives, not only from her family but also from other people. It makes her an easy target for predators. Bastards like Igasaki can do anything and Natsuki would think, “This is my own fault because I’m a good-for-nothing.”
This 1.5 chapter already sets up the foundation of Natsuki’s character and I’m really dreadful of what kind of tragedy would unfold later on…
So the whole point of it is believing that it is there.
Thanks for the clarification!
(Is that my favourite word this week?) I think that that right there is one reason why the mother acts like that (Natsuki is simply the next one in the pecking order), although I’m also expecting that we’ll learn more about クラッシュボンバー’s past later. And I think there is also a bit of the old pick-on-the-second-child thrown in.
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