THEME "A Souvenir of Japan" by Angela Carter and "The Management of Grief" by Bharati Mukherjee

The theme of a story is "far more general that the subject" of it. To discover the theme one must pay attention to setting, character, plot, symbols, point of view, and language.
We've read about and discussed all those parts of literature, and now they come together as a whole to help identify the central idea.
Themes are powerful. To create themes, a powerful tool is drawing on some common experience and knowledge. The theme can remind the reader of their own experiences or take a reader into a new existence...to a whole new world in one's imagination.
Themes to look for/be aware of:
Cross-cultural scenarios
Allusions (references to religion, history, cultural practices...)
Customs
Social differences
Misunderstandings

"A Souvenir of Japan" by Angela Carter

The story is about a Japanese man and a Caucasian woman. They have an affair. It's hard to say "love affair" because I got the feeling through the reading that it wasn't about love as much as excitement and taboo for them both. Their secret rendezvous and ineffective communication. No discussion of the "elephant in the room", and a lot of tension surrounding what they both knew about their relationship. The main character, not of Japanese upbringing or thought, saw hypocrisy in the Japanese culture...a "world of icons and there they participate in rituals which transmute life itself to a series of grand gestures, as moving as they are absurd." The words repressed, torture, "object of passion" all made it so hard for me as a US citizen to even comprehend their lifestyle. "Taro" (his name) and ? (I never got her name in the story) ended up with a failed romance, with the differences between their personal politics and cultural/social policies being the reason that they could not spend their lives together. He needed a quiet, available, & subservient woman. She wanted a relationship of equality, of partnership...at least I think so because she came from a different world than Taro. Cultural clash...but probably some great sex!

After I read this story, I looked into Angela Carter's personal bio. Pretty interesting path she lead with many twists and turns in her own life! I'm not gonna say "poor little rich girl", but I imagine her choices were based upon her desire to understand the world and her place in it, along with self-actualization and no seeming fear of anything. Well, at least she didn't let things get in her way or shy away from much...talk about "balls"...

"The Management of Grief" by Bharati Mukherjee

A story of an Indian family who live in Canada. The husband and sons are all killed in an airplane crash. The "care" by other people, the "widowhood", the day-to-day routine of going on when everything she loved had been taken from her. Then, she has to separate between the customs of her homeland and the customs of her new life in Canada. What she takes from the old, and what she takes from the new and how it all will melt together as she rebuilds her life. She seemed to have all these people around who thought she should be doing this...behaving like that...oh my goodness...she just needed to heal in her own way and in her own time.
"I never once told him that I loved him," I said. I was too much the well brought up woman. I was so well brought up I never felt comfortable calling my husband by his first name.
Her friend says, "He knew. My husband knew. They felt it. Modern young girls have to say it because what they feel is fake." (Oh my, how young and fake I was, then! Ha!, what a difference in culture and belief)
Then later, in a haze or illusion high in the Himalayas, she has a discussion with her deceased husband. She asks him, should she stay? The image tells her "You must finish alone what we started together." How poignant, brought me to tears.
She may not understand why the catastrophe happened to her, and how she will survive. Yet, she draws from her original culture and her new culture and finds herself as a brave woman beginning a new voyage.

This story really hit home with me. Of course, I didn't have the India/Canada culture clash...but definitely how death and dying affects each individual so differently and how the healing process varies for everyone. She told us of how she should have been behaving, how she felt, how others behaved, and how the rituals from her homeland gave some order to her crazy feelings. She found her way through it. I thought it was interesting that she would take the bodies back to India on a plane...that she could get over how their death happened and move forward.