A Family Supper

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The narrator – let’s call him Ryo

Who is he really? Just the son who went away for a few years or a complete stranger from a foreign country? There’s no question about he’s been influenced by the American culture. He still seems to have a close bond to his sister but how’s his relation to his father? I believe that Ryo was had a very strict childhood, at some moment his parents (the father mainly) found out that he couldn’t turn into someone special and then he decreased the strictness a little. Probably he left Japan at the age of about 20, just to discover another country and culture.
I don’t think he was a bad student in elementary school but I do think there were several subjects that didn’t appeal him at all. The big difference between him and his sister is that his sister is gifted in all school-subjects in the perspective that she found them all interesting. Their father realized this and therefore he was more into bringing up Kikuko even stricter. Staying in California would probably make many people think that he would make something of his life and study real hard. I doubt it, Ryo is a very curious person and a curious person wants to learn what thinks are like. Ryo’s first thing to find out what it was like came up at his arrival to California, he wanted to know exactly what the U.S and their people are like. He knew that reading about the civil war wouldn’t make sense, so instead of picking up a course at the university about this, he tried to be a part of the society. He started from the bottom, trying to get a job.

He succeeded an started at Mc Donald’s, got a suburb apartment and started a ”new life”. He loved meeting new people and was very involved in politics. He thought Americans were much more open-minded and confined as the Japanese. For Americans, being with friends and family and enjoying your time was the main-object of life. Japanese had only one thing in mind, work work and work. The only place were they could really relax was at the Karaoke bar (after partaking of several glasses of Sake). When he came back to Japan he realized how grey and boring it was, even though he of course had missed his country and family. The stay in America had made him value the point of life differently. What brought him back to Japan was probably a crushed relationship and he went back to make another comparison.
Ryo is: Curious, open minded, humorous (often ironically), observing.

Kikuko

Kikuko is a very young woman full of energy. At a young age her father discovered this and tried to turn it into study-ambition by bringing her up very strictly. She respects her father more than anyone on earth, and doesn’t even comment if he tells her do something. Kikuko is a class A student at Osaka University and has just got a boyfriend called Suichi and plenty of friends. Due to some reason he started to smoke recently, something that would make her father extremely upset. She’s cross minded whether she’s going to US with her boyfriend or staying in Japan with her friends and father. Of course she loves him but is insecure if it’s good seeing someone that much, and by some reason they may have broke up at that time.
Kikuko appreciates having her big brother around; she’s been dying for the ability to giggle with a non-friend. She also seeks advice from him, as she hardly knows anything about the world around her. When her mother died she felt a big loss as she lost her female role model. It also resulted in a tenser situation with her father. I can’t really find out whether she loves him or not. But I came up with that she either feels so sorry for him due the mother’s death so she accepts doing everything he tells her, either she doesn’t care at all by doing it as it’s a part of the Japanese culture.

The father

The father is a proud old Japanese whose highest priority is to support his family. He’s very careful with acting Japanese, much because of his samurai-blood... The death of his wife was like a lost of a body-part for him. The person who made his life worth living had passed away, so what kept him still living? His children....
As said earlier in the text, he was more accurate with raising Kikuko than Ryo just because he wanted at least one of his children to turn into someone successful. His reputation declined him of officially marrying a new wife, although he couldn’t resist a woman’...