nrl242's blog

I’ll admit that I might have been a little bit jaded in my junior year when I studied abroad in Tokyo. I first got the idea at the beginning of high school when I was questioning my identity as an American, asking myself what that really means. I’ve always been interested by travel, and I wanted to be immersed in a culture completely different from what I was used to. Essentially, I was looking for some sort of epiphany to answer the questions inside of my young mind. Having never left the country before, I guess I didn’t really know whether this place I’d heard so much about even existed. When I first saw the bright lights and massive buildings in Shibuya, I remember being in complete awe. Outside of Hachiko station, huge screens sprawled over a sea of people. To this day I’ve never seen anything that looks quite like it.

The feeling I experienced reinforced my perceptions of Japan in the back of my mind; I had always thought of it as a place where people are always polite, where racism isn’t an issue, where the bad things about the United States didn’t exist. A place like Gebel. Like Ibn Fattouma, I wanted to find this place I had created in my head. It turned out I was wrong, unsurprisingly. I realized that pretty after quickly hanging out at Asuka High School. I was surprised by how mean some of the kids were to each other. Many of the kids were also very rude to their teachers and kids slept during class every day. One of my teachers showed me a Japanese history textbook that left out crucial details about how the Japanese made their language the official language of Korea during the time of their occupation. In fact, the more I learned about Japanese culture the more I realized that it’s really hard to make judgments about their culture as a whole. Japanese people are people just like everyone else, and they make mistakes and do things that aren’t very nice sometimes. With that being said, I love the Japanese. I didn’t see it coming, but I got homesick by the end of my stay. All I wanted to do was leave.

The routine of daily life in Tokyo had taught me what it had to teach me and it was really valuable, but I still wanted to go home. When it started snowing as I was biking to school in the morning the week before I left, I was even more eager to leave. Eventually the day came and I suddenly didn’t want to leave once again. But after giving in, I boarded the plane and was on my way home. It was surprising to me as well when my real epiphany appeared to me not when I was in Tokyo, but during the plane ride back. I thought back to before I had arrived and asked myself whether it had been what I had expected. I realized that what I had gone traveling for was to find my own identity, and, on the way back home, I identified with my American heritage more than ever before. And then I thought to myself, “yes, this is what I expected.” I realized that all I had really wanted in the beginning was to find a place where I feel at home. I’m an American, and it took me a trip to Japan to realize it.

a vicious animal, ready to strikeEpiphany seems to be an important aspect of travel for many people, even if not in the context of a novel. Epiphany is generally a word used with a positive connotation. By traveling, many of us try to learn new things and reach new levels of existence, whether through an epiphany or simply by relaxing. Sometimes, though, epiphany can sneak up on us when we least expect it, as it does for K in Sputnik Sweetheart by Haruki Murakami. After hearing from Miu that Sumire, his object of desire, went missing in Greece K heads to Greece to help search for her. The news and the trip caught him off guard having come up all of a sudden. This trip leads to him meeting Miu, learning all about their relationship and about them as people.

In the process, K even has an epiphany of his own which he may or may not have expected or been looking for. After reading documents one and two, he comes to the conclusion that Sumire must have gone to the “other side” (165). He then narrates his thoughts about a memory that Sumire had written: “So what should we do to avoid a collision? Logically, it’s easy. The answer is dreams. Dreaming on and on. Entering the world of dreams, and never coming out. Living there for the rest of time” (166). The narrator writes about the night after he read these documents that Sumire had left as he begins to ponder these ideas of “dreams.” He wonders about how to get to this “world of dreams” and he writes about the difficulty of putting it into words. After making dinner for himself, K listens to a couple of Mozart cassettes from Sumire’s room before, at some point, drifing off to sleep only to be woken up again (possibly within the dream world) by music being sung in Greek. K makes his way out into the summer night in search of the source of the music when he began to feel a sense to being swept into a different world. He tells us:

I stopped and turned to look behind me. The slope twisted palely down toward the town like the tracks of some gigantic insect. I looked up at the sky then, under the moonlight and glanced at my palm. With a rush of understanding I knew this wasn’t my hand anymore. I can’t explain it. But at a glance I knew. My hand was no longer my hand, my legs no longer my legs (170).

It is at this point that K begins to his epiphany. He seems to leave his physical body behind, entering a separate world. The setting is perfect for him to experience an epiphany. By going into nature, he is setting forth on the biggest journey of the trip. In addition, the words “rush or understanding” have a very epiphany-related meaning. Something about his experience in Greece leads him to the end of a road, some sort of completion that allowed him to enter this world. Be it the reading of the documents of the walk outside in search of music, he has channeled into the spirit of Sumire. What he describes appears to be a kind of religious experience. He continues to say:

Time reversed itself, looped back, collapsed, reordered itself. The world stretched out endlessly—and yet was defined and limited. Sharp images—just the images alone—passed down dark corridors, like jellyfish, like souls adrift. But I steeled myself not to look at them (170).

Time goes by as K continues to search for the source of the music he has been hearing to no avail. Sumire is not to be found. The more time passes the more he tries to convince himself it was a dream or “illusion”. He tries to convince himself that it never happened or that maybe it had been “meticulously planned”. After making it back to the cottage, K has a lot of trouble trying to fall asleep (probably because of something that resonated inside him from his epiphany). His experience ends with a vision he has of cats slowly devouring him. “If I listened carefully, somewhere far far away I could hear the cats lapping up my brain” (172). The cat symbolism really brings together this Murakami landscape. It really shows us K’s despair over having lost Sumire. And, ultimately, it is this knowledge that he takes from the epiphany. The next chapter begins: “In the end, we never found out what happened to Sumire” (173).

The Great BeyondMurakami’s Sputnik Sweetheart is without a doubt an accurate representation of the Murakami style. The storyline is full of dreams and visions, many of which are still not confirmed to have really happened by the end of the book. This reminded me a lot of Murakami’s book Kafka on the Shore in which the main character lives out many of his actions through dreams. In fact, I was surprised by the overall straightforwardness of Sputnik Sweetheart in comparison. The only part of the book that seems to suspend reality is when Miu sees herself in her apartment from the Ferris wheel in chapter twelve or “document 2”. The other telltale sighs of Murakami’s work include symbolism using cats, references to Western culture and specific recordings of Western music, and issues with sexuality. Kafka on the Shore has all of these same characteristics. What separates Sputnik Sweetheart is that it is also a travel fiction.

But even as a travel fiction, Sputnik Sweetheart is different from many of the books we have a read this semester. Although Sumire and Miu go traveling in the first half of the book, it isn’t until the narrator goes leaves Japan that Greece becomes the setting of the story. The juxtaposition of setting helps to create the surrealist savor of Murakami’s writing. The trip takes on a different meaning than the other books we have read this semester. Most of the other books have main characters that decide to travel of their own accord. K travels for a very specific purpose, however, in trying to locate Sumire. Instead of encountering a conflict after traveling, he encounters the conflict before. The rest of his journey comes as a byproduct of traveling to Greece; K travels to the “other side” when he hears music and leaves to search Sumire.

The idea of a parallel universe also appears in Kafka on the Shore, where two parallel storylines with two separate characters help to demonstrate these alternate realities. Sputnik Sweetheart does essentially the same thing. By creating Miu as Sumire’s love interest and by having them share the experience of having their hair turn white, Murakami allows us to see Miu within Sumire. One could even interpret the story by seeing them as the same person existing in a sort of duality (which would explain Miu seeing herself). This part of the book is very much up to interpretation, however, which makes it one of the most distinct and beautiful parts of Murakami’s writing.

Yin and YangA Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers undoubtedly employs an unorthodox method of narration that gives the reader an “authentic” viewpoint of a foreigner. Xiaolu Guo does this to capture the experience of a person from the East attempting to assimilate into Western culture by learning English. The technique is interesting to say the least. The writing at the end of the book is a lot better grammatically than at the beginning. It is also more interesting to read, as I found her writing techniques in the earlier part of the book somewhat contrived rather than charming. It keeps the writing excessively simple. The most successful parts of the book seem to me to be the parts in which Z incorporates her experience as a person from China into her journal.

Z’s character as a person who has not fully assimilated into Western culture is interesting to look at. Her behavior is sometimes what we would call unorthodox, but when we look from her perspective it becomes understandable. For example, no one (or maybe I should say not many of them) who grew up in London would look at porn in a restaurant. She seems to struggle with manners and Western customs. For example, she doesn’t understand how to act in certain social situations:

"'Would you like some tea?'

'No,' I say

She looking at me, her face suddenly frozen. Then she asking me again:

'Would you like some coffee then?'

'No. I don't want.'

'Are you sure you don't want anything?'

'No. I don't want anything wet,' I saying loudly, precisely.

Mrs Margaret looking very upset."

In this situation, Mrs. Margaret is taken aback by Z’s abrupt and seemingly ungrateful responses. Z notes, “China not have politeness in same way”. But what we also begin to understand from learning about Z as a Chinese citizen is that the politeness she “lacks” comes from her upbringing in poverty. As a love story, it is interesting to see the dynamic between Z and her indecisive English companion. The cultural differences between them teach a lot about the vast differences between Eastern and Western culture, while at the same time showing how the two are similar. It is when the broken English of the novel starts to become more coherent in the middle of the book that these cultural differences become more in depth and interesting as Z’s speech increasingly reveals details of her personality.

Bob Dylan, writer of the song "The Gates of Eden"As I was reading Naguib Mahfouz’s The Journey of Ibn Fattouma, I couldn’t help but notice that I identified with Ibn Fattouma’s character much more than many of the protagonists from the other books we’ve read this semester. Mahfouz writes the book in an interesting way, as well, by having the protagonist narrate his own journey. The Comfort of Strangers and The Sheltering Sky had less identifiable characters and overall I could not see myself in them. But Ibn Fattouma seems to be a more independent, focused and overall likeable individual. This could possibly be because he is alone on his journey and he shares a lot of information about himself as the narrator.

I also identify a lot with Ibn Fattouma’s search for Gebel, which symbolically represents his search for perfection. This could arguably have been the motive that drove Colin and Mary to travel (to find perfection in their marriage) but, unlike Colin and Mary, Ibn Fattouma states clearly from the beginning that the wonders of the land of Gebel are what he is setting out to find. The prevalence of religion in his journey offers insight into the nature of the journey. Ibn Fattouma is not simply looking for a physical place, but also a mental state of being that he naively associates with the land of Gebel. It is his very naïve sense of hope that makes him an identifiable character.

It seems natural for many travelers to associate travel with moving to greener pastures, as in when people began to come to the United States as immigrants. In The Journey of Ibn Fattouma, the journey to Gebel is idealized so much by the protagonist that it becomes a religious journey and, in many ways, Gebel is representative of some sort of paradise like Heaven or the Garden of Eden. Already a questioner of his beliefs, Ibn Fattouma is forced to face the reality of living in places with religions that are not Islam as when he tries to marry Arousa, but is not granted permission because of the religious differences of her people. Ultimately, Ibn Fattouma is interested in finding a greater good. Through his unorthodox methods of teaching religion to his kids we can see that Ibn Fattouma isn’t as interested in fitting into one religious group; instead he is more interested in finding perfection and enlightenment. These are values that I can identify with because they transcend social and ethnic boundaries.

The Religious ExperienceErik Cohen’s “A Phenomenology of Tourist Experiences” attempts to create a method for classifying different types of tourists and in doing so suggests useful ways for us to think about tourism and travel, but at the same time Cohen seems to be oversimplifying the matter. It is nearly impossible for me to classify myself within one of these “modes” (let alone to be able to classify characters from the books we have read this semester), mostly because the modes overlap each other and, at the same time, don’t account for every possible objective of travel. The five modes of tourism as Cohen describes them seem not really to be five distinct modes, but instead his method of typology places the experiences of tourists somewhere between two extremes: the “recreational” experience and the “religious” experience. Several arguments can be made if we are to look at Dean Moriarty and Sal Paradise from On the Road through the point of view of Erik Cohen. One argument could be made that there is nothing deeper in meaning within their travel than to experience recreation and that they in fact are not searching for “authenticity” within their travel. In many ways, their experiences with alcohol, drugs, and girls fit in with the description of the recreational mode as “shallow, superficial, trivial and often frivolous activity” (184). While this is true, I believe that the method in which Sal and Dean travel throughout the book is very much focused on the excitement of the experience and they take a somewhat moral nihilistic approach to their behavior. Sal, on the other hand, does have a somewhat “religious” experience toward the end of the novel in Mexico during his sickness and after he recovers. In fact, he spends much of the end of the novel reminiscing about God and even how Dean looks like God. Such a “religious” experience, as Cohen refers to it, is important to his explanation of the “existential mode”. But we also must not neglect MacCannell’s argument. A significant portion of Cohen’s essay uses MacCannell’s idea of “false backs” to address the concern that some tourists may become convinced of the authenticity of their experience when really what they are experiencing is not authentic at all but contrived and inherent to travel or tourism. For example, one might suggest that if Sal thought he had any kind of religious experience, it may have been induced by his sickness and have had nothing to do at all with the fact that he was in Mexico, making it an inauthentic experience. This leads us to question the authenticity of the experiences written about in the other books we have read this semester. As much as we can speculate, it is quite apparent that these types of delusions exist within travel and tourism and they convince us of things that may not be true and ultimately confuse or even harm us. In the case of The Comfort of Strangers, it is made clear by the end of the novel that what Colin and Mary had mistaken for an “authentic” experience was really an unfortunate trap that ultimately lead to Colin’s death. Ultimately, Cohen’s essay gives us many tools to argue about tourism and talk about tourism, but his typology is not all-encompassing and does not allow us to classify tourists accurately without neglecting the nuances of each case. Is Sal really a part of the recreational mode or the existential mode? Or does he, in fact, belong to one of the modes that lie in between? The answers to these questions are highly subjective and bring a lot to the table for the sake of argument, and the typology presented in “A Phenomenology of Tourist Experiences” doesn’t give us a concrete answer to these questions.

.There was always something strange about Robert and Caroline, but the ending really took things to another level. Up until about the ninth chapter, we follow Colin and Mary around as they rediscover their love after seven years, smoking weed and drinking wine and forgetting that they are two separate people. “Their lovemaking surprised them too, for the great, enveloping pleasure, the sharp, almost painful, thrills were sensations, they said that evening on the balcony, they remembered from seven years before, when they had first met” (77). At this point in the story, Colin and Mary have already met Robert and Caroline. It appears that their stay at Robert’s place may have sparked this newfound excitement in their relationship, as Mary becomes strangely obsessed with Colin in a way that wasn’t present at the beginning of the book. But why would this be? Why did they talk about Robert and what was it about him that was unsettling? When Mary wakes up early in the morning trembling, Colin becomes concerned. He gets dressed and goes out with Mary to the patio, only to have her confess her love for him. The strangest part of the episode, however, is that Robert is brought up at the end, pointing out once again the peculiarity of his character and his influence on their relationship. It isn’t until Caroline begins to explain her masochistic tendencies that we identify the reason behind her and her husband’s fascination with Colin and Mary. “I didn’t doubt Robert’s hatred for me. It wasn’t theater. He made love to me out of deep loathing, and I couldn’t resist. I loved being punished” (110). From here, the story takes a quick turn to reach its sick climax. The tea that Mary drank finally takes its effect, rendering her incapable of speech or movement. Colin’s concern to get Mary to a hospital is only greeted by hostility, leaving him to bleed to death next to his helpless partner. The moral of the story is unclear to me, as the fate of Colin and Mary is not in their hands. Perhaps if they had not gone back to see Robert and Caroline they would have missed the whole ordeal, but that is not how McEwan chose to write it. Instead, the themes of romantic love and desire are paralleled against hostility and death, in a way reminiscent of Death in Venice.

Venice, ItalyIn the beginning, it makes sense to me that Aschenbach would want to travel for inspiration. But once he makes it to Venice, Aschenbach’s eventual death becomes evident immediately. Images of death are prevalent from the beginning of the book, as when the gondola he rides is likened to a coffin. What makes the story interesting isn’t simply the symbolism of death, but the symbol of Tadzio as it is juxtaposed against death and sickness. Aschenbach’s old age is likely meant to further distance him from Tadzio’s youthfulness, making the comparison between Tadzio’s symbols of youth and purity and Aschenbach’s symbols of sickness and old age more apparent. Tadzio gets compared to many mythological figures such as Eros and Narcissus, while Aschenbach’s life is generally devoted to excellence and other Apollonian virtues . Aschenbach’s obsession with Tadzio is without a doubt sexually driven, which leads to the Dionysian imagery present in the book. The power of Dionysus seems to haunt Aschenbach through his journey to Venice, as though the stranger god means to bring him to his demise. It is Aschenbach’s devotion to Apollo that creates such a strong suppressive force against Dionysus.

A crucial transition takes place right before Aschenbach’s death as he is consumed by cholera and orgiastic visions. The sexual nature of Aschenbach’s feelings for Tadzio are revealed during a dream one night filled with symbolism of the stranger god. “The obscene symbol, gigantic, wooden, was bared and lifted: then they howled the watchword more wantonly…Yes, they were he himself as they pounced on the beasts, ripping and killing, devouring shreds of steaming flesh, and on the churned-up mossy ground the promiscuous mating began—a sacrifice to the god” (359). It is at this point of the story that Aschenbach’s sickness takes him over. This dream seems to be induced by his sickness, bringing the symbols of death and desire ever closer. By the end of the novella, the differences between these symbols become indiscernible. A repressed Aschenbach finally gives into his feelings. And it is at this point that the very ideal of beauty that inspired Aschenbach seems to kill him with a single glance as Tadzio beckons him to his death. The end leaves me to question whether the theme of death in Death in Venice is meant to be separate at all from the theme of beauty, for it seems that Aschenbach was killed by the beauty of Tadzio.

There is no doubt that On the Road is a monumental work of fiction considering its optimism and its influence on an entire generation to break down barriers and destroy inhibition. Kerouac’s positive attitude toward travel and the experiences that come with it is expressed at the end of the very first chapter. "Somewhere along the line I knew there'd be girls, visions, everything; somewhere along the line the pearl would be handed to me” (7). Sal’s optimism foreshadows the end of his journey, when he finally meets his wife and things seem to be going well for him. And it did turn out that he had a bunch of good experiences along the way. What is interesting to me is how much of an icon Dean Moriarty becomes for Sal throughout the book, when at the end of the book Sal is way better off than Dean who is a complete wreck. Dean, the symbol of the open road, ends up being nearly incapable of providing for himself, let alone for his family. But at the same time, it doesn’t make sense to me to criticize the book for this reason. Rather than to present a moral at the end of the story or show how Dean has grown, the point of the book is simply to instill in the reader the feeling of the road. As Viktor Shklovsky states in his essay entitled “Theory of Prose”, “Art is a means of experiencing the process of creativity. The artifact itself is quite unimportant”. By this, Shklovsky means to say that the meaning of any given work of art is the experience of it. In the case of Kerouac’s novel, the meaning of his work is the experience of reading it. In the end, there is no real sense of resolution, but so much happens throughout the course of the novel that it leaves the reader with an impression of what it was actually like for Kerouac to travel through the country. The story does a great job of capturing the excitement of travel by romanticizing the element of the unknown. Many books dealing with travel forget to address the thrill of the journey and instead focus on the triviality of traveling. On the Road, however, presents travel in a way that may appeal to the adventurous, but also runs the risk of coming across as pessimistic by the end.

Morocco"Death is always on the way, but the fact that you don't know when it will arrive seems to take away from the finiteness of life. It's that terrible precision that we hate so much. But because we don't know, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that's so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. Perhaps not even. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless." In addressing the “finiteness of life” and the meaning of death, this quote supports the nihilistic themes of The Sheltering Sky. Bowles shows us through the three main characters of the story (Tunner, Port, and Kit) the futility of travel. Port’s nihilistic tendencies help to focus the attention of the story on human nature and suffering, which recalls the nihilistic ideas expressed in the writings of Albert Camus. His works such as The Stranger explore ideas such as nihilism (and absurdism, of course) and covers many topics related to Port’s character and the main ideas of The Sheltering Sky. Port is somewhat annoying, and I found that I had a general dislike for him. In the beginning of the story, it is quite apparent that Kit and Port are suffering from a failing marriage and it seems as though their trip is meant to bring them closer together. But Port seems to completely neglect Kit, leaving her to feel abandoned and dependent on Tunner (despite her general dislike for him). Even as Port and Kit try to work things out between themselves, their surroundings in the desert of northern Africa seem to further tear them apart. Much as in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, the setting of The Sheltering Sky plays an important role as a parallel to the nature of the relationships between the main characters. The unfriendly landscape and the hot sun seem to directly affect the interactions between Port, Kit, and Tunner, as it seems that the disagreeable environment is what creates the misunderstandings that distance the characters from each other. And the desert continues, much like the Congo River, into the darkness, ultimately leading them to a gloomy fate.