As the story of a woman who is most likely autistic and unable to meet the expectations of society, the book strikes a chord with many people but sometimes I see some disagreement: some people say it’s hilarious, while others say it’s the saddest book they’ve ever read. I think it all depends on how you view the struggles of the main character, Keiko Furukura, and what it would take for her to be happy.
Although she is different from other people (“a foreign object”), Keiko is content with her position as long as they’re not hassling her. She never longs to be like others, and carries no resentment. Her commentary about the expectations of others thus seems to me to be like a natural explorer in a wild new environment: “normal people” want to get married and have kids, isn’t that strange? There’s a hilarious sequence where a parasite of a man comes into Keiko’s house to leech off of her, but when she tells her friends that she’s “living with a man”, they all become ecstatic for her, even though the man is actively making her life worse! “Normal people” are so wrapped up in their own conceptions that they are celebrating something objectively awful because they don’t actually know the details. When her own sister comes by and disapproves of some details of the arrangement, but is mollified by the man’s cover-up story about being a cheating lover (and thus in the doghouse), Keiko is dismayed to realize that her sister would rather she be unhappy and “normal” to content and different. By the end, she decides that she does not care about being normal, and only wants to live life as is fit for her. While it’s sad that she cannot be accepted, she herself is able to make peace with it, and is satisfied with her role in society even if it’s “different”. This is contrasted beautifully with the character Shiraha (aforementioned parasitic loser man), who becomes a black hole of negativity that does nothing but complain about how society is keeping him down. Both of them *are* outcasts, and do face pressures, but Keiko takes it in stride, and lets us laugh at the absurdity of the world that she is peering into with a fresh perspective. If she longed for acceptance, or if the reader wanted it for her, then the book does become a parade of tragic events– it really is painful to see the sister dismiss Keiko’s actual feelings to convince herself that she’s “normal now”. As it stands, though, I have hope for Keiko Furukura’s future.
by stitchstudent