On Seeing The 100 % Perfect Girl One Beautiful April Morning By Haruki Murakami

Short Answer Responses

1. Haruki Murakami’s “On Seeing the 100% Perfect Girl One Beautiful April Morning,” with a clever shift in narrative point of view halfway through the text, adroitly toes the line between doe-eyed romanticism and bleak (but substantial) drama. The narrator opens the story in the first person to describe a woman he passes on the sidewalk, claiming that despite his immediate infatuation with her, “she was no great beauty” (Murakami). His infatuation, however, is disarmingly instantaneous. He describes how, just by seeing her once, “from fifty yards away: She's the 100% perfect girl.” After establishing an emotional connection with the audience, the point of view transitions to the third person in the form of a story told by the first-person narrator. He recites a fairytale that serves as an

allegory of the two proverbial ships in the night and how they were always fated to meet but destined to be apart. And, because “100% Perfect Girl” ends with the story within a story, it adds an element of magical realism by way of ambiguity to make the entire text more poignant. The transition between points of view is seamlessly woven into the plot, effective, and balances the tone.

4. Emotional distance in “The Odor of Chrysanthemums” is one of the story’s driving themes. While cleaning her husband’s corpse, Elizabeth feels “the utter isolation of the human soul, the child within her was a weight apart from her” (Lawrence). Her fear and shame are inextricably linked, the result of a strained marriage: her fear is rooted in the idea of her isolation being permanent, while her shame stems from the fact that she was one of the two culpable parties who let her marriage fail. The fresh horror of her widowhood is made even more explicit when Lawrence writes of how “he was dead, and her living flesh had no place against his. A great dread and weariness held her: she was so unavailing. Her life was gone like this.” While Elizabeth is never painted to be the most effusive individual, this encroaching dread offers insight into her character.

6.

Italo Calvino meticulously crafts a surreal setting in his “The Distance of the Moon.” As the plot progresses, however, it becomes clear that his fantasticism is necessary. The reader is privileged to a setting shortly after the moon broke off of the Earth and is barely suspended over the Earth’s surface. It is whimsically depicted as a popular destination for a group of acquaintances, but it also serves as the center for a love story. The narrator’s deaf cousin, who is isolated from others because of his disability, forms a stronger bond with the moon than with any of the other characters. The theme of identity if furthered when the narrator describes how Mrs. Vhd Vhd, with whom the narrator is enamored but who loves the deaf man, proves “her passion for the deaf man hadn’t been a frivolous whim but an irrevocable vow. If what [the narrator’s] cousin now loved was the distant Moon, then she too would remain distant, on the Moon” (Calvino). Much like the Moon forms its distinct identity away from the earth, so too does Mrs. Vhd Vhd. While her title, “mrs.,” denotes a melded identity with her husband, she aligns with the moon to create her own

identity.

7. Gwendolyn Brooks’ “We Cool” is obviously derived from the jazz culture of the mid-20th century. The phrases like “sing sin,” “thin gin,” and “Jazz June” evoke a Kerouacian-by-way-of-Miles Davis kind of cultural context (Brooks). Yet this poem does not praise jazz clubs or beatniks. Instead, the “we” that follows every claim is a reflection of the fact that there is not sense of identity among these “hep cats.” Their individual identities cannot be said to exist but are instead reliant on one another. And even though they are rebelling by skipping school and staying out late, the fact that they only do so to appease the other members of their group undermines their rebellion and asserts that they live by their own fatalistic code of conformity.

10. The use of metaphor drastically shifts the meaning of Helen Chasin’s “The Word Plum.” While “Word” is italicized in the title, the first line finds “plum” italicized. This creates a conflation of words and plums (the title is ambiguous in this respect as well, as it could mean the word plum itself or a plum derived from words, a metaphorical fruit). In either case, Chasin effectively uses descriptive, vaguely lurid words to convey the sultry emotionality of language, words like “pout and push,” “savouring murmur,” “taut skin,” and “juice, and tart flesh.” The verging-on-erotic poem, through the clever use of metaphor, could be a testament to the power and influence of words themselves or merely a descriptor of a garden-variety plum.

Bonus. Two of Shakespeare’s most famous sonnets, 18 and 130, end with couplets that address not only the Bard’s love interest but speak to the influence of literature and the written word. In the 130th, he ends by asserting that “And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare
As any she belied with false compare,” essentially meaning that his love exceeds the power of other, more exaggerated sonnets (Shakespeare). Because this sonnet does not attempt to flatter, as evidenced from the opening line when he writes of how his “mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun,” his love seems more genuine because it is rooted in her imperfections. The 18th sonnet reaffirms the longevity of the written word over the brevity of mortal beauty when Shakespeare writes that “So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see, so long lives this, and this gives life to thee.” This closing couplet asserts that, though the body may end, one can live on through art as long as there is an audience for it.