Becoming Responsible

          I am in no way a literary master.  I usually read for educational purposes and not much further than that.  I pick up the occasional magazine or newspaper and read through it but when it comes to focusing all of my attention to reading it is usually for a class or some specific reason (like a manual or figuring out how to make something work).  But over the course of this past spring semester, I developed a more tolerant approach to reading.  All be it that the books that I was reading were for a class, I actually started getting wrapped up in the stories and began looking forward to the next book or set of chapters that I was going to be reading. 

          As I was reading these books, there were two authors that really spoke through to me with their stories and impacted me.  Not to say that the other authors didn’t, because all of the writers had amazing stories, but it was Kazuo Ishiguro and Salman Rushdie that wrote about something that really caught my interest.

          First, I will start off with Ishiguro.  This story really interested me by not only being entertaining to read but it challenged me a little to look more into the culture of Japan.  The entire story is set in Japan at different times ranging from before, during, and after the war.  I didn’t go and study the history of Japan after reading each section but he references things in his book that I had no idea what they were or meant.  Usually the books that I have read are based in the U.S.A and talk about things I am at least somewhat familiar with.  But the thing that really hooked me was one of the underlying principles that I took from it.  If I would have read this at another time and didn’t get to analyze it in class, I more than likely would have read right over the principles that were talked about in his story.

          The first thing I noticed, although it sounds a little lame, is not to “judge a book by its cover”.  I know that sounds dumb but when I first started reading the book I had a totally different opinion and point of view of his character, Masuji Ono, than when I finished.  I think that Ishiguro did this on purpose by letting the reader get friendly with the character first, then showing another side of him.  And that is a lesson that everyone should practice, maybe not to the extreme of thinking all of your nice elderly neighbors might have once been Japanese propagandists for the war, but to wait and hold judgment until you know a little more about someone. 

          The second thing that caught my attention was that (at least in my opinion) it seemed like Ishiguro was trying to show people to look at things through other people’s eyes.  Now this is just another form of the judgment argument but instead of judging someone by first impressions, he is telling us to take a look through the eyes of someone else before you pass judgment.  Around the middle of the book the reader starts learning about all kinds of people not liking Ono for his involvement in the War.  They said he did many bad things and even he started to believe that all the things he did was wrong (which in many people’s opinions is).  But in his eyes he was trying to save his country and if Japan would have won the war, then he might have been held as a hero.

          The next author I want to talk about is Salman Rushdie.  Rushdie writes a lot of his stories as satires and ironies.  Not only were his stories a lot of fun to read but I found it much easier to see what he was saying and a lot of it I agree with.

          The first principle that I found in one of his stories, was not to take yourself too seriously.  I have been a big fan of this way of thinking for awhile now because I believe that many people take everything too seriously.  Not to say that being serious is a terrible thing to be because everyone at one time or another needs to be serious for one reason or another, but we should all take a step back sometimes and “relax”.  In The Prophets Hair, Rushdie is poking fun at religions.  He does this by writing a story about a religion that prohibits relic worship but people freak out when a strand of hair from a prophet of that religion is gone.  I think the story is very well-put.  I am in no way against religion, I go to church and have a religion, but I think that everyone has flaws even religions.  And instead of standing on a street corner and screaming out the flaws, Rushdie takes a sarcastic approach.  I understand why people can get offended by sarcasm and satire but I believe it’s because they take themselves too seriously.  In my opinion, if you can’t look at your flaws and laugh while trying to correct them, then you’re not having too much fun.