Since the modern era, Japanese literature has adopted new writing aspects as a response of Occidentalism. Some Japanese writers have manifested through their literary works this substitution of culture that besides of being just external changes, it left deep internal conflicts of adaptation in the society. Accordingly, the short story “The Elephant Vanishes” by Haruki Murakami, one of the most popular Japanese writers of the 21th century, portrays an alienated man who is obsessed with the vanishing of an old elephant and its keeper. Murakami gives the old elephant a symbolic meaning; therefore, its disappearance seems to question the existence of the traditional way of life in Tokyo. Further, the author has a lot of western influences in his style of writing but he also has inherited the mysticism of the oriental world which is presented in his short- story. Murakami, besides of being the most commercial and global writer of Japan, he is unconsciously faithful to his traditional principles. Therefore, the story “The Elephant Vanishes” contains magic elements Japanese consciousness of the modern society.
The setting focuses in the conflict between the tradition and modernity. The story is set in a suburb of Tokyo when the economy of Japan was increasing enormously. Specifically, the old zoo of the town is sold to a developer to be replaced by the construction of a high-rise condo. Accordingly, this new infrastructure in the town implies the changes in the pattern of life among the residents because it attracts more commercial businesses and people. Usually, small towns have more traditional ways of life; however, with the construction of large buildings, inhabitants would have to adapt to a more populated and commercial town.
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... personal pronouns as long as the text is understandable. This provides an impersonal aspect in the Japanese literature that gives a high value to the effect and not to the cause.
In the Man'yoshu, the oldest Japanese anthology of poetry, there are examples of the omission of the subject. Accordingly, “Since the heavens and earth were parted...” (Shirane 89). Again, the exclusion of the subject gives a sense of spontaneity; to be more specific, things can emerge for itself. In another poem, “The lament for Prince Kasukabe”, the author writes, “In the beginning of heaven and earth / on the riverbanks of celestial heaven...” (Shirane 69). In this case, there is no a word that refers to the responsible who created the heavens and earth. Obviously, Murakami uses his native language naturally, and that implies the Japanese characteristics in his literary works.
All of three essays say that people’s attitude toward the reality and explain the reasons why people like to stay in their “cave” and are unwilling to face the reality is because of their fear and ignorance. Moreover, “The Allegory of the Cave” and “Shooting an Elephant” are more similar because both of them use symbolism to expand notions and use allegory in their essay. In“The Allegory of the Cave,” the darkness, the shadows, and the sunlight all represent ignorance and enlightenment. The fire, the prisoners, the puppeter and the light all had abstract qualities that go back to mankind’s behavior and Plato’s argument. In the“Shooting an Elephant,” the elephant represent the British Empire. The death of the elephant symbolize imperialism of British Empire will fade and die off, as well as cowardice of the police and the ignorance of the
Many great authors that study human nature stood out the most during the period of time between the Imperialism and World War II. Among these authors were George Orwell and Virginia Woolf. Their study of the human nature is especially visible in certain short stories that each author respectively did. Orwell’s “Shooting an Elephant” and Woolf’s “The Death of the Moth.” In either of these stories the respective author uses animals to depict their complex ideas about the nature of life, men, and the whole world.
Elephants'." Studies in Short Fiction. 17.1 (Winter 1980): 75-77. Rpt. in Literature Resource Center. Detroit: Gale, 75-77. Literature Resource Center. Gale.
George Orwell’s “Shooting an Elephant” is a short story that not only shows cultural divides and how they affect our actions, but also how that cultural prejudice may also affect other parties, even if, in this story, that other party may only be an elephant. Orwell shows the play for power between the Burmese and the narrator, a white British police-officer. It shows the severe prejudice between the British who had claimed Burma, and the Burmese who held a deep resentment of the British occupation. Three messages, or three themes, from Orwell’s “Shooting an Elephant” are prejudice, cultural divide, and power.
In the book, Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen, power is held by those who use intimidation, violence, and have a high standing title at the circus. The Ringmaster, Uncle Al, is a very powerful character at the circus who uses his authority to blackmail and intimidate others in order to get what he wants. When August and Marlena split up, Uncle Al wanted Jacob to convince Marlena to come back to August; however, when Jacob refused, Uncle Al threatened : “If you want a job to go back to, you will sit back down” (Gruen, 2006, pg 266). By using this method of intimidation, Uncle Al validates that he has power over Jacob and that if Jacob goes against what he is told, there will be consequences for him and his friends. Furthermore, it’s people
Since its establishment, surrealist media has been able to capture our attention with its abstract thought provoking nature. It began with literature and spread to all other forms of expression across the globe. Although it had gained such renown, it wasn’t until The Second Bakery Attack was released in a collection of short stories by Haruki Murakami that surrealist literature arrived in Japan. The Second Bakery Attack stood out above all other literary releases of its time, receiving universally positive reviews and revolutionizing the way Japan viewed literature. The story is set in modern times, revolving around a newlywed couple who awake one night with a strange and powerful hunger. The narrator is the husband, speaking in the first person, he dictates his thoughts on the events as they unfold. The couple soon set out on a mission to rob a bakery in order to break their “curse” of hunger. Throughout the story, strange situations arise, which the husband convinces himself are normal aspects of married life. In order to clarify the husband’s feeling towards his wife, Murakami uses a vivid, metaphoric image of a volcano beneath the sea. By using a unique and original postmodern surrealist style and descriptive imagery in the short story The Second Bakery Attack, Haruki Murakami was able to give birth to a new era of surrealist literature in Japan. This originality served to break away from the realism of the traditional Japanese I-novel and appeal to the Japanese people of the time who desired literature with more of a western approach.
The novel takes the reader into "Night City" (pg. 4), the decayed inner part of Chiba, which lives at night and is "shuttered and featureless" (pg. 6) during the day," waiting, under the poisoned silver sky" (pg. 7). The author uses techno images to describe the natural environment, "the sky...
The setting shows a world of opposing ideals, contrasting the weight and solidification of the port and land with the open and free sailor life that Ryuji has been living. This realm of opposites is bolstered by the physical environment in which the characters are placed. Yokohama, a busy Japanese shipping town, is an ideal representation of conflicting spheres. As the city is the ideal connection amidst land and sea, the ocean plays a vital point in connecting the differing ideologies present in the novel. As the plot begins, Fusako and Ryuji’s affair show how Ryuji attempted to overcome the grasp of sealife. The scene of consummation shows the elements of land and sea, Fusako and Ryuji respectively, in perfect harmony with each other as “the universal order [was] at last achieved” (13). The simply beautiful act of sex becomes su...
The setting takes place in many different locations in the short. The author mastered creating a story within a story and magnificently mastered shift tenses. The story starts off with Tengo at a train station in Koenji. “He had nothing planned that day.”The story then stated that, “Wherever he went and whatever he did (or didn’t do) was entirely up to him.” (Town,1) It is important to the story because it shows a sense of power that was absent in Tengo’s childhood. After pondering on what he should do for the day, he decides to visit his father, who resided in a sanatorium in Chikura. The sanatorium is for people who suffer from cognitive disorders. After deciding to visit his father, the narrator describes Tengo’s relationship with his father. He stated that, “He had never much liked the man, and his father had no special love for him either.” (Town, 2) The reader then finds out that Tengo has only visited his father twice since he was put in the sanatorium, four years ago. The story then discusses why Tengo doesn’t like Sundays. We discover that as a child Tengo worked every Sunday for his father, who worked as a bill collector for the NHK, Japan’s quasi-governmental radio and television network. Tengo dreaded Sundays because he went door-to-door with his father and never had much time to be a kid on the weekends. Tengo w...
...ainment, Japanese culture, and shopping in the form of Japanese themed outdoor shopping malls, the Japanese American National museum, a handful of Buddhist temples, public murals that ooze culture and history, and an endless number of ramen establishments. Many experts talk about how contradictions bring about change and eventually reinvention, but the interesting thing about Little Tokyo is that the change is actually the source of new contradictions as the neighborhood struggles to maintain its cultural identity while also expanding and transforming to attract more leisure seekers. There is no question that change will occur in Little Tokyo, the question is, as F. Kaid Benfield puts it, “whether that change can be managed so that it inures to the benefit of Asian-American residents, institutions and businesses, and whether it will be environmentally sustainable.”
In East Africa many parks find themselves under siege for their elephants and ivory. Poachers are sneaking into parks, killing masses of elephants and then crossing borders to evade park rangers and police. Then the ivory from the elephant tusks are smuggled to various destinations for sale on the black market. This is when Taxidermist George Dante was tasked with creating an artificial tusk with a tracking device to track trafficking of ivory and to potentially find terrorist hideouts.
Perspective is a crucial aspect of anthropology, the study of humankind and the different aspects that affect human nature. There are four main subfields of anthropology that allow anthropologists to analyze different areas of human behavior. These subfields are as follows: biological or physical anthropology, archaeology, cultural or social anthropology, and linguistic anthropology. Each area of study is equally important and is able to be integrated into one idea that looks at the whole picture rather than the individual parts (“What is Anthropology?”). This idea of looking at the complete picture rather than just the smaller “constituents” is a holistic approach to anthropology (Peters-Golden 17). A variety of elements can affect a person’s
In the written text, there is very few use of pronouns as heads of noun phrases in contrast to text (2), the spoken, in which most of the noun phrases consist only from a personal pronoun such as (We). Whereas, in text (1), the noun phrases consist of lexical nouns, as the text is packed with more information, than text (2).
Pronouns are forms that often act as a kind of shorthand for referring to some personal noun phrase or entity or event. Personal pronouns refer to persons or entities (you, possessive she, I, it, me, etc.). Possessive pronouns are forms of personal pronouns that indicate either actual possession or more often just an abstract relation between the wh person and some object (my, your, his, her, its, one's, our, their). Wh-pronouns (what, who, whom, whoever) are used in certain question forms, or may also act as complementizers (Frida, who married Diego. . .). A closed class subtype of English verbs are the auxiliary verbs. Cross-linguistically, auxiliaries mark certain semantic features of a main verb, including whether an action takes place
"Shooting an Elephant" is perhaps one of the most anthologized essays in the English language. It is a splendid essay and a terrific model for a theme of narration. The point of the story happens very much in our normal life, in fact everyday. People do crazy and sometimes illegal moves to get a certain group or person to finally give them respect. George Orwell describes an internal conflict between his personal morals and his duty to his country to the white man's reputation. The author's purpose is to explain the audience (who is both English and Burmese) about the kind of life he is living in Burma, about the conditions, circumstances he is facing and to tell the British Empire what he think about their imperialism and his growing displeasure for the imperial domination of British Empire.