From “you are what you eat” to “when you have sex with someone, you are having sex with all of their sexual partners,” we seem obsessed with fear-mongering in order to shape how people behave, and thus, who people become.
About fifty pages into Keiichiro Hirano’s A Man, the reader experiences the first hints of what becomes one motif of the novel:
In the end, although Kido would only drift to law school in the grips of the fuzzy thinking that plagues many students of the humanities, his father’s words would contribute to his firm decision, while enrolled there, to try to see things through and become a lawyer.
KEIICHIRO HIRANO, A MAN (P. 56)
A work written by a Japanese author about a Korean naturalized as Japanese (Akira Kido) resonates in several ways with growing up and making career choices in the U.S.
In less than fifty more pages, Kido is gripped in a panic attack identified as “existential anxiety”: “Kido’s fear of the same thing [death] happening to him made him painfully sensitive to the minutiae of life” (p. 99).
Kido recognizes as he approaches middle age that he is revisiting similar CONTINUE READING: Capitalism Is Your Daddy: “what sort of person to die as” – radical eyes for equity