One Arm
One Arm (かたうで, kataude) is a 1964 short story by the Japanese writer and Nobel Prize winner Yasunari Kawabata. It was first translated into English by Edward Seidensticker and published as "One Arm" in Japan Quarterly in 1967. This short story has been considered as a main example of the current of magic realism in Japanese Literature.
| "One Arm" | |
|---|---|
| Author | Yasunari Kawabata |
| Original title | "片腕 "Kataude"" |
| Translator | E. Seidensticker (1967) |
| Country | Japan |
| Language | Japanese |
| Genre(s) | Magic realism |
| Media type | |
| Publication date | 1964 |
| Published in English | 1967 |
Plot
A young woman removes her right arm and gives it to the a man (the protagonist) to keep for the night. The story follows his thoughts and actions as he takes it home to keep for the night. He talks and caresses it, and then decides to replace his own arm with it. The "relationship" the man has with the detached arm serves as a portal into the landscape of memory and emotions.
gollark: * anyway
gollark: If you *do* go around using a definition which admits stars and everything else, it's basically meaningless, but ends up bringing all the weird things English ties to "life" and "organisms" along with it anywya.
gollark: Which are mostly for some specific technical context and make sense there. Because it's a hard to define word.
gollark: The broader issue is that when people say stuff like that they generally mean to sneak in a bunch of connotations which are dragged along with "organism" or "life".
gollark: You could *maybe* stretch that to extend to *all* humans, but *also* probably-not-organism things like stars, which also reproduce (ish), process things into usable energy (ish), sort of respond to stimuli for very broad definitions of stimuli, maintain a balance between radiation pressure and gravity, and grow (ish).
References
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