Comparing Chance Traveler By Murakami And Benjamin Alire Saenz

Stories that are allegorical to me are often the ones that bear the most importance; allegorical stories allow me to insert what I’ve learned from the parameters of the story to apply into my everyday life. Haruki Murakami author of “Chance Traveler” and Benjamin Alire Saenz author of “The Art Of Translation” both authors have similarities in the way they use allegories but they are conveyed in different ways. Murakami and Alire both used what I called in-depth imagery to help the readers see what the authors depicted in the story and wrote explicit details for me to culminate my own interpretation of the morals I received from reading these stories. In literature a motif is a recurring element, theme, idea, subject and or topic that …show more content…
This coincidence to me as the reader held no significance to me at all but the way it was conveyed in the story made you grasp the concept of what was going on and also it showed how rare that occasion really is to play the exact two songs a person was thinking of. Another instance was when the character found an used copy of a Pepper Adams record titled “Ten to Four” and purchased it and within a few minutes a stranger asked him for the time and he states it’s exactly “10 to 4”. Once again it holds no meaning until it is read in full context in the way it’s conveyed in the story. Murakami then later tells a tale about a piano tuner who resides in the prefecture in Kanagawa Japan where he lives a simple lifestyle, having been estranged from his family for coming out as a gay man. This causes him to become secluded and only keeping to him due to the fact that his homosexuality wasn’t accepted and he came out at a very crucial time for his sister who was soon to be married and it almost broke off the wedding. Being estranged from the closet person in his family, his sister, who he has not been in contact with for over 10 years. Until he meets a woman at a café who is …show more content…
In “The Art Of Translation” Nick being physically assaulted and having “Illegal” carved into his back made him lose his fondness of wanting to define words that he loved so much, what I’ve interpreted from that is if he would have continued to translate after he was attacked he would feel as if he didn’t belong because the world “Illegal” carved into his back means some one who either doesn’t belong here or isn’t wanted. Being labeled illegal is also correlated with being called immigrant and both of those things have severely negative connotations. In these cases both stories were not very didactic, I didn’t receive a feeling of being preached to at all. To me these stories were implicitly explicit because these stories went deeply into detail about what was going on and conveyed what each character had to deal with when it came to making decisions when it came to dealing with themselves or