I finished reading 飼育, so I am (finally) posting my consolidated thoughts on the first three stories. Warning: The drop-downs contain summaries with spoilers that I have not tagged!
死者の奢り
I was immediately drawn into this story from the first paragraph describing the floating corpses and their murmurs! The writing, especially the descriptions of the light and the bodies floating in the tanks, was so vivid and engaging. The contrast between the mundane work that the characters were doing and the grotesqueness of it was really gripping and I had a hard time putting this down.
In terms of the themes, the biggest feeling I got from this story was a sense of betrayal. The narrator and the female student were told one thing and expected a certain payment and then they found out it was potentially all for nothing - but still had to stick around and do the work, not knowing if the other end of the bargain would even be upheld in the end in the face of the bureaucratic authority of their university. This even came at a great cost to the pregnant student, since she falls and the shock also affects baby while she is working in this irrational situation. I thought the sense of betrayal and powerlessness and the almost absurd drudgery of the work, treating the corpses as objects, had some ties to the situation during the war in Japan and the betrayal the populace must have felt after the war ended and the messaging from the government about the country’s identity and status changed so quickly after so many were subjected to death or hardship.
I am thinking there are many other possible interpretations here and I am planning to try and find some online to see what thoughts other readers of this story had.
他人の足
I loved this one! I somehow had a bad feeling the entire time i was reading it, but in a good way? The descriptions were so raw and there was a vague sense of discomfort throughout - the tension inside of the narrator between him and the outside world and newcomer patient, the way the other patients are described as giggling and whispering in the common room, the nurses coming around to sexual pleasure the boys every night out of an unspecified mix of what is perhaps both virtue and curiosity. 大江’s narrator describes the walls of the ward as “viscous”, and the world of the story certainly did feel very self-contained. Until the newcomer comes, that is. Upon his introduction, life in the ward changes in a big way when all of the other patients start becoming interested in life outside of the viscous walls and participating in political discussions and writing letters to newspapers. The narrator isn’t too happy about this, perhaps because he feels wary and abandoned by the outside world already - at one point he makes an offhand remake to the newcomer that he doesn’t remember the details of his illness but it doesn’t matter because the illness, and therefore also his body and disabled status in society, won’t forget him. Right when the narrator finally starts to feel a little uplifted by the recent changes in everyone around him, the newcomer patient has his cast removed and walks again, and quickly goes back to the outside world and abandons life in the ward. Without him, things quickly go back to normal.
I perceived a lot of anger and disappointment in this story, and again a sense of betrayal. Betrayal by society, by one’s own body, by other people, like the newcomer patient who encourages the patients to connect with the outside world - but in the end who also leaves once it becomes clear he doesn’t have to stay there. It turned out that the changes were only possible because of him and were unsustainable when he left, which is why I think the story was called 他人の足. There are a lot of situations in life where it takes someone else or some outside force to do something, and then momentum quickly dies when that element is removed. I appreciated 大江 capturing something like that in a story like this. Of course, that is just my personal interpretation and I think many others are possible too which is why it is so great!
飼育
Oh my goodness! I finished this just yesterday, so it is still extremely fresh in my mind and it is hard to even find the words to talk about the story. It was visceral and disturbing, but also very powerful in what it said and how it said it. I was disgusted by some of the animal-like descriptions of the black soldier in captivity and couldn’t stop reading during the climax when the narrator’s father comes with the axe. I won’t summarize the whole plot again, but I will just say that I can’t believe 大江 wrote that story when he was only 23! Just incredible.
My interpretation of this story was that it was one about power dynamics and the dark things humans can do to one another, told within the larger frame of a coming of age story. Like the first two stories, it also had themes of betrayal and separation from the outside world but explored in different ways. Here, the village that the narrator lives in is cut off from the outside world including the war, and only has contact with a nearby village that seems to hate them (I was not sure, but it seemed possible that they were some type of burakumin, or maybe they were disliked because they did not send people to participate in the war…or maybe it was simply because they were very rural and looked down on?). Within the small inside world of the narrators village there are various power dynamics that exist between the prefecture, village, the adults, black soldier, narrator, and his little brother and throughout the story they are constantly changing like a seesaw, especially in the case of the black soldier and narrator during the tragic climax scene.
The characters in this story use and abuse their power in different ways, reducing others to an animal state, causing physical harm and permanent damage, and finally, death. After what happens to the narrator, he awakens to the potential for darkness that humans have inside of them and loses his innocence, taking his first step into adulthood as a member of the bigger world outside of his village where there is a war happening, the meaning of which only becomes clear to him when the war came to him.
I am still thinking of what the death of the 書記 meant at the end… It seems like it could mean many things, but I am not sure yet how I would personally interpret it. I keep thinking on it for a while before I go off to see what other people on the internet have to say.
I would say that all three stories so far have been incredible, so I am looking forward to reading the rest of the ones in the book. 