Monday, July 11, 2005

Missing things and "Fires"

So yesterday I took my exam. Terrible. The multiple choice was easy, but the essay was very dificult for me. I thought about the book "Kokoro" so much after I read it that I was unable to write a suscinct essay about it. Oh well.

But some other intresting stuff happened that day, in the morning my umbrella was stolen from the umbrella holder outside of the computer room. Saddened, I walked to the campus store to buy a new one. But halfway there I saw my umbrella in an umbrella rack outside a diffrent classroom. So I stole it back. The on the way home I found a dropped Mini-disc player in the middle of the quad. It gave me an excuse to ask people directions for the lost and found, and now I know several words for lost items.

The rest of the day I slept and read all of Fires on the Plain, a book about a Japanese soldier during the Phillipne campaign of World War 2. I thought this book was excelent. Very well written. While the subject matter is horribly depressing, the main character is so disconnected with reality that he rarely becomes depressed. I hated Kokoro because the main character allowed his sadness to consume him, but in "Fires on the Plain" the main character experiences much more trauma, but has the strength of will to go mad and keep on living rather than sink into depression and kill himself. Also, the reoccuring theological imagery of the book was fantasticly done! One thing I would say though, since most of what goes on is people starving to death, I would not read it on an empty stomach.

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