Stories about bad things

When someone describes life, they usually list all of the wonderful, and joyous aspects of life. But this does not fully encapsulate all that life has to offer. In my opinion, we are all interested in listening and telling stories about bad things, because in truth, life is full of bad things. To not pay attention to them would mean you are not paying attention to a good chunk of what life fundamentally dishes out. As a listener, you are interested in the bad things because you have undoubtedly experienced something bad, and you can instantly relate to the suffering and despair that comes with these events. When someone experiences this type of bad event, they are suddenly plunged into a world where they feel isolated, alone, and as if everyone else is enjoying life, while they suffer. To hear a story where a storyteller clearly illustrates an instance when a believable character has to deal with the bad events of life, as a listener you easily empathize, and you have a weird voyeuristic feeling. As stated above, someone going through these hard troubling times probably feels isolated and alone. This is a normal feeling when going through grief. It is a complete individual experience and no one can truly feel how you’re feeling because of this event. By hearing a story of a character experiencing these types of events, you gain insight into their thoughts, desires, hopes, and emotions. In my opinion, this is part of the reason why people enjoy these stories. People enjoy understanding the thoughts and feelings of someone grieving. It not only gives the listener insight into other peoples feelings, but also into their own feelings. By following the experience of someone else in this situation, it can make going through a similar situation easier, simply by knowing how other people handled it. By hearing of others sufferings, it makes one feel less isolated in their own suffering. In my opinion, a great deal of life is spent figuring out how to deal with your sufferings. If authors avoided these topics, they’d deny themselves access to a rich plethora of human experience, and great stories.

I think that UFO in Kushiro is mainly driven by mystery. It’s what holds it all together. As a reader, it kept me entranced simply because I wanted to know the answers to each peculiarity that seemed to manifest in every scene. It starts off with the odd habits of the main characters’ wife. I immediately wanted to keep going, to simply figure out why she was exhibiting this odd behavior. We then learn that this odd behavior was happening because she fell out of love with her husband, but we do not know why. From our perspective, he seems like the perfect man. If not perfect, certainly suitable for the average woman that he describes his wife to be. The mystery is further enhanced when she says living with him is like living with a chunk of air, which in truth, seems not to match the husband’s personality, but the wife’s instead. The story is thus left in mystery, because the answers to the questions we have about the wife are never given to us. In my opinion, this story is completely led by mystery.