Bad Things & Mystery

Why do we tell and listen to stories in which bad things happen?

There are few easy answers to this question. The first would be to bring up catharsis, which is one way to explain our emotional dependence on tragic stories, in that we need the satisfaction of conflict and resolution, but would prefer to see it play out in fiction rather than in our own lives. I could also reference the Hitchcock quote, which I’m sure has been botched enough that it’s not actually what he said, where he says that fiction/movies/drama is just life with all the dull parts cut out. For readers and audiences, happy events do, to a large extent, constitute the “dull parts,” and so perhaps it comes naturally to emphasize the sad and the tragic events when fictionalizing life.

From a writer’s perspective, I think the tendency towards bad things, for me at least, comes from my view of writing as ultimately a way to experience life. That is to say, I usually treat my work as an experiment in understanding, and most of the time I’m more satisfied with what I learn from fiction than what I learn from anything else. Because it’s such an effective mechanism in this way, we cannot help but use it to try to make sense of the bad things that happen either in our lives or in the world around us. We are usually content with the good things that happen, and rarely feel the need to revisit them or dissect them, but the bad things will always perplex us, and that is why we keep hashing them out through stories.

How does mystery drive “UFO in Kushiro”?

I should first disclose that I did not enjoy this story. As such, any analysis I might make about how mystery drives the story comes with a lackluster eye roll.

Perhaps it was because I was reading the story looking specifically for the ‘mysterious’ elements, but it seemed like the narrative was deploying all the textbook examples of how to increase suspense and ambiguity. First of all, the word mystery/mysterious appears at least a few times with weighty placement. Second, the dialogue is deliberately unfulfilling, with characters asking questions that other characters either don’t hear or choose to ignore. The narrator even asks rhetorical questions (“Why had she followed the earthquake reports…? What could she have seen in them?”) in situations where I as a reader was not particularly confused or mystified. Basically, I didn’t question why the wife would be so obsessed with the earthquake – people just are sometimes – so having this contrived mystery forced upon me was unpleasant. Finally, there’s the biggest eye roll of all, which is that the ‘mystery’ goes unresolved. If the story had been a standard, formulaic mystery, I could have dealt with it in some sense, but because it ends by dismissing the mystery altogether, I see it as trying to hard to be nontraditional, and I cannot get behind it.