Bad and mysterious things

Unfortunate events are a near guarantee in a person’s life.  They happen daily, perhaps mostly in microform, to each of us.  Such bad things must happen in the stories we tell, not only because they help to form narrative, but also because we can relate to them in very powerful ways.  The specific problem need not be the same; it is the struggle that any person can identify with.
In “ufo in kushiro”, the loss of Komura’s wife allows us to empathize with his character.  Her abandonment seems senseless, but even now I can hear my father’s words ringing in my ear: “That’s life.”  It is understandable that bad things happen, but their causes are often mysterious.  Keiko and Shimao attempt to explain this as they relate Komura’s tale to another about a UFO sighting and the disappearance of woman.
The women offer a way to understand this first mystery in the story, of Komura’s wife leaving him.  Mystery, not complexly as something that must be solved, but simply as strangeness, also imbues the story.  The small box, the full plane to Hokkaido, and Keiko’s way of moving (“The upper half of her body was still, while everything from the hips down made large, smooth, mechanical movements.  He had the strange impression that he was witnessing some moment from the past, shoved with random suddenness into the present.” 14) all contribute to the eerie feeling present in the text.
On the first page of the story, we are told of a very odd reaction to disaster.  Komura’s wife’s fascination with the television is not explained, but is instead delineated further: she does not move except to change the channel, and does not eat, drink, or use the toilet.  She is not named.  Mysteries like this, little things that cannot be explained, crop up and then grow unimportant.  We are told that people did not understand why Komura married the woman that he did, for she is not as handsome as he is or of any great personality.  Later, Sasaki asks Komura to deliver the small box, though he does not tell Komura what is inside, only that Komura will not get in trouble for its contents.  We never really learn what was in the box, though Shimao offers a startling option.  Komura also questions briefly how Keiko recognized him if he did not have the box in his hands as Sasaki told him.  It seems for a moment that the story will go in a different direction, but though the reader is left uneasy, the feeling dissipates as the story shifts to concerns with bears, relaxation, and emptiness.
The story ends, quite mysteriously, with Shimao tracing her fingertips on Komura’s back, “as if she were casting a spell” (28).  He’s only at the beginning, she tells him and us.