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人質の朗読会 Home Thread
Week 2
Start Date: May 02
Previous Part: Week 1
Next Part: Week 3
Reading:
| Week |
Start Date |
Chapter |
End Page |
Page Count |
| Week 2 |
May 02 |
1st Night [end] |
33 |
14 |
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Interesting. I don’t even know how I should categorize the book so far.
It seems to me after finishing night 1 that the stories will be totally independent of each other. If that is the case I’m not yet sure why the prologue and the framing was chosen.
I’m definitely enjoying what I read so far.
Poor woman loosing a leg. Her dream sequence while she was knocked out for 8 days was pretty wild though.
How she helped the factory worker with his leg was described really vividly. I would expect a child around that age to act roughly that way. It’s funny what things we tend to remember from our childhood.
Same question here. Why do we need the hostage situation to collect 8 stories from 8 unrelated people? Is the first story supposed to be autobiographical or is it a story invented to ‘entertain’ the other hostages?
BTW
In my understanding she doesn’t lose a leg. It is saved by the mysterious vision of the factory worker she helped years ago.
Ah I must have only been half reading that part. You are right. My brain apparently shortcircuitet after 切断…
Agree with the others so far - I enjoyed it a good bit though. One thing to note is that there is a night 9 listed in the ToC… I wonder if it will somehow bring things together in the end. I’m up for a short story collection either way, but I did like the intro, so I hope it comes together in some shape or form
Had to urgently read something else for a bit and only finished this week’s reading just now.
Good question! I think that there might be be some sort of “similar vibe” to the stories - I could imagine it being stories that are very important to each person, that maybe shaped them or had a strong influence on them. That way it would become “not just” a collection of short stories - instead Ogawa would be able to create a connection between them that goes beyond the contents. Curious to see if we can discover something like this!
Just finished this week’s reading
I’m enjoying the writing style and generally vibing with the contents, but am likewise curious how these stories will develop together, if at all. I glanced again at the summary on the back and think maybe it’s meant to be somewhat inspiring? 人生のささやかな一場面が鮮やかに甦る。それは絶望ではなく、今日を生きるための物語。しみじみと深く胸を打つ blah blah haha. Sorry typing out summaries by hand is a pain 
It is interesting. My experience, like others here, is that the content of the story isn’t what I had expected. From the framing, I had imagined that the stories were all going to be the different perspectives of the hostages about being prisoners, their fear, their anxieties, hunger, privations etc etc. But instead (at least from this first night), they are stories/memories told by the prisoners - about their previous lives.
I noted elsewhere that Ogawa was inspired by Paul Auster’s radio series and book based on the ‘National Story Project’. Auster’s idea was to collect together stories from the public that were ‘true, but sounded like fiction’, or to use another descriptive phrase ‘brief, true and close to the bone’. I haven’t read or listened to it, but it sounds as though the project allowed a kind of collective sharing of important stories and anecdotes. Maybe these stories allowed other people to have tiny glimpses into the lives of others? Maybe they create a tiny fragment of immortality by allowing the people in the project to live on after their death??
I presume that Ogawa’s stories are not true at all. But they seem to have the same form. And I think that perhaps they have the same function. I imagine Ogawa being struck by the events of the Japanese embassy hostage crisis, and wondering about the lives of the individuals concerned. Perhaps at the time there were brief descriptions of people who had been taken prisoner (Woman, 53 year old interior designer…) and was inspired to wonder what stories the people involved would tell about their own lives. I think maybe the book is her imaginative exploration of the power of anecdotes and stories to bring flickering briefly to life a real sense of someone’s life who we might otherwise just be aware of as a name in a list or a picture in a newspaper…???
I loved this first story. It took me a little while to warm to it. The narrator reminded me a lot of the narrator (Tomoko) in Ogawa’s wonderful novel ミーナの行進. Tomoko is a similar age - on the cusp of puberty, and has a similar vivid imagination and mixture of wise understanding and naive mis-understanding of the adult world she is observing. In this story, our narrator has this dark fantasy that the ironworks is actually a factory in which the world is actively being melted down and destroyed . I don’t know how much she believes in that fantasy, but the final strange dream that inverts her perception seems to be a chance for her to revisit with adult eyes and reinterpret her childish imaginings.
I enjoyed too the character of the ironworks apprentice. He too is a curious mix of half child and half adult. Forlorn and somewhat pathetic through most of the story, it is nice to see him undergo a transformation by the end (even if it is only ? a dream).
It will be interesting to see how the stories tie together (or don’t) and whether they connect with the external tale about the hostage taking.
My guess (from reading a number of Ogawa’s books) is that there won’t be any neat ending or explanation. That is not her usual way…
