The narrator is very indifferent and not attached to the men she have affairs with. She seems to be able to move on and adjust to different situations very quickly from scene to scene in the story. When she was thirteen, after she and the soldier have been found out, the soldier was punished to death. At the time she felt injustice for his death, “I was merely punished, but the man – how cruel they were! He lost his life for what we’d done.” However, she was able to move on and forget about him very quickly. Later on when she became a mistress to a lord, she felt happy from the amount of luxury she was given the right to enjoy. Yet once she learned that the lord became weak and can no longer satisfy her desires she longed to leave. The narrator was overjoyed the moment she heard about her possible dismissal, “I was amazed to discover that the councilors thought it was my fault.” At the following setting where she was initially unhappy and even found life to be boring when she had to live underground, she quickly adjusted to the situation and yearned for the priest’s presence. Nevertheless, toward the end of the scenario when she felt that her life was in danger, she immediately came up with a way to escape and executed her plan of pretending to be pregnant. She was told to return after giving birth to the baby which she never did, “there was a lot of time left on my contact, but I never went back.” In the end, although she was temporarily attached to the priest, she was able to get over it within a short amount of time and move on with her life just as she have done with the previous two men.
– Chi Zhang
I agree with Chi, that it didn’t really matter to the narrator about who the man was or how much he supposedly loved her. When she was separated from him, the narrator would grieve for a short period of time then move on. As if they were just there to please her and she didn’t really value their love the same way the men did.
My view on the narrator’s relationship with men is that she was the instigator of the intercourse between her and the men. When she fell for the low ranked samurai and decided to reply to his letters it showed that, as much as he wanted to meet with her, the narrator wanted to meet with him just as much. But the narrator was the one who took the step in actually trying to meet with him; “It was hard for us to meet, but I managed to arrange things sometimes, and we were able to make love.”
Even when she started to have intercourse with the priest, the narrator was the one who sought after him. She literally went with the jester and the man who carried her stuff around to the temple; pretended to look at the cherry blossom while the jester spoke with the priest, to try and get the priest to meet with her. “We walked right through the gate in the earth walls surrounding the temple, pretending we were going to see the small cherry blossom tree. Then the jester went to the head monk’s quarters.” This really shows that she was always willing to be the one who started the affair with any man she desired.
-Myra Khan
I agree with Myra’s post about how the narrator was always the one who instigated the relationships between her and men. In almost all stories it seems that she is the one who chooses to have a sexual relationship with a man and goes after it. When she was writing letters to a woman for another man and decided that she wanted to have that mans affections placed on her instead, she declared her feelings boldly and although his reply was “rude” she still went through with her initial intentions.
I can see where Chi found the reasoning for how the narrator has little attachment to the men she was with. It is agreeable that she moved on pretty quickly and let go of them pretty fast. The narrator does have a tendency to move on pretty quickly on to the next portion of her life, kind of leaving the past behind to look towards what task may come to her next.