Study Questions for Kadohata's The Floating World Thad Curtz (for Politics of Identity)

1. Thinking about titles is often a good idea. This program is called Politics of Identity, and you can reasonably figure that title points to one of the program's central themes, to one of the fundamental issues we will be working to understand more deeply in all our experiences in this program. So, let's begin with it. (You should be working with this theme every week, so you don't need to try to be definitive at all right now. Just pay some attention.)

a. Why put it this way, exactly?

How do you understand the concept of "identity"? Does everybody have one? Does each of us know what it is? How do you end up with one? Are there better and worse identities? What can or should you do to develop one? Does a person's identity change? What does it have to do with being identical?

How do you understand the concept of "politics"? It can be useful in thinking about an important phrase like this to play around with variations on it to throw some light on what it means by contrast with related meanings. How is this different from Psychology of Identity in your mind? How about from Psychology of Personality?

b. Why does this theme matter?

Make a list for yourself of any places in your life or the world you can think of right now where you'd say something is at stake that involves the politics of identity. (You can certainly assume that the faculty picked this theme as the center of the program because we thought it mattered in students and teachers lives, in the country, and in the world, and was likely to be an issue of ongoing central importance in the coming decades, but your personal answers to this question will be much more important in making the program's work interesting and educational for you.)

c. What can you learn from this week's reading that can connect to and deepen our understanding of this theme, or raise new questions about it? It's probably worth asking yourself this repeatedly as you read the book, and as you think or write about it to get ready for seminar.

Questions for this week - on The Floating World

1. Who is telling the story?

The dust jacket notes on the first edition say:

The voice of an adolescent wise beyond her years is rendered here authentically, memorably and beautifully in a very different coming- of-age story.... Olivia, the twelve year old Japanese-American narrator of this complex and breath-takingly beautiful first novel, captures and confines the seemingly limitless expanse of her adolescent world and gives it shape and focus.

There are actually a number of claims here which might be worth evaluating, but for now - is the narrator twelve or not? (You might offer two kinds of evidence at least about this - some sentence that states her age, or, much more interestingly, how she talks, thinks and feels as she tells the story...) If you decide that she isn't twelve, you may well think that she sometimes talk as if she were, or sort of as if she were. If so, exactly when does this happen and why does it happen at those points in the story? (To take the earliest possible example of this kind of question, you might think about the first sentence - why is it in present tense, instead of, say, "My grandmother always tormented me?")

2. Structure

a. "Why do you think of that now?" (p. 123) What can you say about the book's parts or sections? How does the stuff that is in each chapter fit together, if it does? (The book is roughly chronological, but she digresses and brings in memories and slides into telling stories - how do these connect to what preceeds and follows them? Sometimes this is obvious; sometimes it is complicated and interesting .) The book also seems to some readers to have bigger sections or movements, like a piece of music - stretches about the same subject or theme. Is this true of your experience as a reader, and if so, what sections do you experience in the book and how do you understand them? [This may be a misleadingly fancy way to get at this - I'm just thinking Grandmother, Arkansas, free from her family (LA), and the return in the last two chapters, for starters about sections...] (To take one example, you might ask why the beginning of Chapter 17 echos the end of Chapter 16, and what kind of a closing Chapter 17 and 18 make, in relation to the stretch that leads up to them.)

b. How do the characters compare and contrast with each other? (You might think about this as a psychological question, about family history and dynamics, or a literary one, about how novels are put together to convey meaning...) It might help to start by trying to make a list of Olivia's traits. For example, Olivia says, "I want to be the opposite of Obasan. Anything she does, I never will" (p. 20). How successful is she in this? Why does she spend so much of the novel talking about her? How are they alike? How different? After all, her mother says that her grandmother's soul is "... a little bit in everyone who knew her, more in some of us than others" (p. 37) (You might consider, in relation to this, the last paragraph of Chapter 1, and in particular what Olivia might mean by"...it seemed, at the time, that I had more important things to imagine." Why "seemed"? Why "at the time"?) Olivia's dream about confessing has an interesting line in it too - she imagines that her mother responds by saying her grandmother "...gave you her guilt. Use it" (p. 69) What might that mean...

At the end of Chapter 6, we hear about a matched set of pronouncements about Olivia's identity, one from each parent. Her mother says she knows Olivia's star, "a happy heart". Her father tells Olivia that her mother is "...lonely because she had too many fathers, and happy because that's never going to happen to you." How good are their predictions? What does each of them contribute to her identity, if anything?

3. Some more particular questions about this book.

I. "If you couldn't see her, you wouldn't even know she was Japanese" (p. 9)

Before you start reading the book, make a list of whatever you have in your head at this point about what "being Japanese" means. (For most of us, this is probably a mix of some experience, some reading, some stereotypes, and so on.) Which of the people in the book are Japanese- American? How do you tell this as a reader? (Can you "see" them?)

How Japanese is Olivia? "I would do many things that were contrary to my upbringing...," she says (p. 100) How true is this? If it is true, what are some of them? She also says, much later, about leaving home - "I was already full of beliefs, assumptions and feelings that many years later I would want badly to unlearn. My parents had taught me many things that they hadn't meant to teach me and I hadn't meant to learn" (p. 146) What are some of these? How well does she do in her efforts to unlearn them?

II. Some of the themes you might look for - most simply, words or ideas or issues that come up repeatedly in the book...

(We highly recommend trying to track issues like these in each of the books by inventing some little label for each of topic, and putting a note in the margin each time one comes up, or by some other set of marks in the text - boxes, underlining, keeping a list with page numbers, or whatever you find works well for you. Needing to mark up the text is perhaps the most tangible sign of the difference between how you are supposed to read in most high schools, where putting notes in the books is forbidden, and how you are supposed to read in college, where it's essential. Marking up the book as carefully as you can as you read will be a big help in developing your understanding of what the novels are about, in discussing them in seminar, and in writing the papers.)

a. Murder b. Knowledge and the unknown (The killer she meets tells her that his question to her, "Where do you locate your expertise in this world?" simply means "Who are you?") c. Fear d. Being free e. The "...pleasures and loneliness change brings" (p. 6). What are these? f. Loneliness vs. being alone g. Language and ways to use it h. Looking on i. Resentments j. Necessities k. Imitations l. And, of course, identity - where does it come from, and what ideas or assumptions do different characters offer about it?

III. Imagery - "...pictures from a car window" (p 66). How the world looks to Olivia, what she notices or at least remembers seeing, frequently seems to embody or reflect her feelings. You might pay careful attention to some of these remembered glimpses of the world, and see what you can infer about her emotions at various moments from what she's remembering noticing.

IV. Writing about writing "My memories are a string of pearls and rocks," her grandmother says (p. 27) How well does that description fit Olivia's writing?

How about, "No idea had definite form: Every fact could dissolve into fiction" (p. 35)?

How about, "The point of these fantasies was to make my stomach hurt" (p. 13)

I have one more possibility, if I can find it - a quote for the end about wabi and sabi, which are two really big aesthetic principles in classical Japanese literature - varieties of elegant, nostalgic melancholy which seems eerily apt for the tone of this book...