This week I decided to read the short story “Pink” by Tomoyuki Hoshino. The story starts off by describing how Japan is suffering a severe heat wave. The main character Naomi starts spinning in circles when she sees fish in a park pond jumping in the air and spinning while suffering from the overbearingly hot water, believing the fish are trying to escape the “hell on Earth” . Later on, she takes her niece Pink to the park again and encounters a young man who tells them that many people have been spinning in circles clockwise as a sort of prayer to beat off the heat wave. As the story progresses, Naomi and Pink join a circle of spinners. At the end of the short story, somehow time has passed significantly fast and Naomi’s life goes to ruins. By the end, when Japan is suffering another heat wave, Naomi attempts to cool off her sister (Pink’s mother) while spinning counter clockwise and hopes to somehow travel back to take her life back and control it herself.
Network Graph
I decided to focus the connections on who were “spinners” in the story and who were never mentioned as spinning. The “spinning” part of the novel was significant, as it ultimately was the connection to how time sped so fas. With limited characters, the network analysis was not large and was not able to show how the “spinning” had an impact on the characters who did it. However, by knowing who were spinners in the story, the viewer gets an idea of why the spinning connection was important. To the young man, spinning was important as it was an escape from the cold reality he lived in, and him telling Naomi about the spinning group changed the course of the story. To Naomi, spinning was an escape from the current moment, not just from the extreme heat but from the unknowing path that life was taking her on. However, her decision to spin and bring Pink along into to it distorted time itself and both their life paths went downhill. The two non-spinners or “unknown” spinners of the story were Pink’s mom and dad. Pink’s father was barely mentioned in the story but Pink’s mother/Naomi’s sister was more significantly mentioned. By knowing that she was not a spinner, it somehow is understood that her time did not seem to move significantly fast, and rather that the disparities that she faced later in life were somehow due to Naomi and Pink’s spinning and distortion of time. The story is difficult to fully grasp, but understanding that the spinning and the characters directly involved in spinning were central to the story’s progression makes it easier to try and piece apart.