UFO in Kushiro Response--Andrew Adams

Rather than one, central mystery driving the story, ufo in Kushiro, the story is driven by multiple unexplained happenings that incite the reader to be suspicious of a je ne sais quoi in the story that is never explained.  

The story begins with a series of televised natural disasters on page 1, Kushiro’s unnamed wife disappears on page 2, and Kushiro’s sex drive is described on page 3 as mysteriously having “vanished” when he inexplicably became attracted to his wife. Mysteries don’t resolve themselves in this story; instead they are followed by more mysteries.

The story’s weird je ne sais quoi is compounded by the ennui of Kushiro, our main character. As he remarks, he feels as if “there’s nothing inside of me”, and, indeed, Kushiro seems to listlessly progress through the story (as he says himself in the story, “making plans…would have been too much trouble” [10]), without driving at the strange happenings that we want resolved. What’s in the box that he dutifully carries without question? Who are Shimao and Keiko—what do they do for a living, and what do they want with the box? Kushiro gives voice to the uncanniness of the story, without resolving it for us. For instance, Kushiro asks, “how did they know who I was?”, without posing the same question to the women.

As for why we tell and listen to stories where bad things happen, I believe we’re inclined towards these stories so that we can exorcize bad feelings through an external soruce. The nature of story is that it appeals to our desire to be someone else—to enter their world, their consciousness, and their point of view. Ultimately, however, readers get to put down their books and become themselves again. This is an awesome feeling of control; of being able to turn the world on and off. In the course of our lives, we can’t control the bad things that happen to us. We can have a degree and feeling of control over the bad things that happen to story characters. In clichéd stories where bad things happen before a happy ending , this feeling of control is all the more enforced. We love clichés and heroes that overcome adversity because it reifies our notions that the world will ultimately be right.

Perhaps, however, readers are just petty. Economist Robert Frank, in a famous paper entitled the Economics of Happiness, developed a notion that happiness is relative, rather than absolute. We’re only happy so long as we are above a relative baseline of happiness, which we set depending on our neighbors’ happiness. If we read about people who have shitty things happening to them, according to Frank’s “happiness thesis”, we should feel better about our own lives.