Reach Japan

Alice Munro , Nobel Prize in Literature 2013

Reaching Japan (in the original To Reach Japan ) is a short story by Alice Munro from 2012, which, among other things, is about self-determined action.

action

The story is about Greta and her travels in life, writing poetry, at a party, on a train, with her little daughter Katy, her father Peter and other men. One day Greta uses her poetic skills to try out a message in a bottle in a modern format, to which the title of the work refers. Greta couldn't get out of her mind a certain man who had brought her home from the party. But he doesn't live in Vancouver, but in Toronto. There Greta has promised to look after the house to friends who have been absent for a while, because there does not seem to be any accommodation for her and her daughter at Peter's seasonal workplace far to the north. When Greta and Katy arrive at a certain place on a certain day at a certain time, as announced, a new phase seems to begin which, according to Greta to Katy, is supposed to be a kind of interim period until the father leaves his job is back in the north. On the occasion of this train journey, the daughter got to know two ways of waving men on the platform. The ending is open and depicts the daughter's dependence on her mother's decisions. It is partly told from Katy's perspective.

Reviews

With Munro there is nothing invariable of the kind that Greta recalls from stories of flight and displacement, according to Cathleen Schine in her review of the collection for The New York Review of Books , in which she cites a section from To Reach Japan at the beginning . Above all, when something familiar returns in a work by Munro, an infinite number of variations in life would be shown. There were possibilities inherent in the variant, which in each of her works push the narrative forward. Christian Lorentzen wrote at the end of his review in the London Review of Books in June 2013 that a “sad woman becomes happier” story was inevitable after so many stories . Greta had already broken out of her marriage subconsciously when she parted with her husband The beginning of the story, says Elke Schröder.

Editions and versions

Alice Munro: To Reach Japan (2012/2012), version differences according to sections

To Reach Japan is included in Dear Life (2012), Alice Munro's fourteenth and most recent collection of short stories published in German entitled Liebes Leben (2013). To Reach Japan has a length of 27 pages in the volume Dear Life . Another version can be read on the web free of charge.

The magazine version is slightly longer than the book version. A section change has been canceled, namely between the first and the second section. Two more section changes have been placed elsewhere (in sections 8 and 9). The eighth section was thereby split into two others, and the ninth section too. In the book version, the eighth section consists of two parts that were not in the same section in the magazine version.

The two most detailed differences can be found at the end of section 1 of the book version (in the journal version this is a separate section, the second) and in the middle of section 3 of the book version (in the journal version in section 4). The first of these two passages is about the poet's understanding of herself in the face of what her husband and other people would say or say about her writing. In the second passage, Greta compares the party in writers' circles that she is currently at with others, in engineering circles, where she was with Peter. Otherwise, the versions differ in that the book version lacks the words “their daughter” at the beginning, that at the end the last two sentences have been split up differently and that the magazine version has the word “downcast” at the end ) as a description for Katy.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Karl-Heinz Lampert illuminates one aspect of this story as follows: “A woman gets drunk at a party and a strange man almost kissed her. She leaves her daughter alone for a moment for a quickie on the train and risks the catastrophe. "Cf. karl-heinz.lampert," Moments that change everything ", In: Darmstädter Echo , December 11, 2013.
2. ↑ Cathleen Schine, Blown Away by Alice Munro , nybooks.com , January 10, 2013.
3. ^ Christian Lorentzen: Poor Rose. Against Alice Munro. Review of Dear Life by Alice Munro. In: London Review of Books , Vol. 35, No. 11, 6 June 2013, pp. 11-12.
4. ↑ Elke Schröder: Volume of stories "Liebes Leben" in German. Alice Munro's literary finale . In: Neue Osnabrücker Zeitung , December 6, 2013
5. ↑ Alice Munro: To Reach Japan (the beginning can be read without registration, registration is free), in: narrativemagazine.com , Winter 2012.
6. ↑ List of 18 works by Munro that can be or were read free of charge in the English-language original on the web. openculture.com