TO REACH JAPAN

                                                        

                                                          TO REACH JAPAN

Plot summary:

                       

                   The story opens on a Vancouver train platform.  Greta and Katy saying good-bye to each other.  The story begins abruptly why they are on the train.  The story moves with the present and past life of Peter and Greta.  We trace Peter is an innocent and ordinary man he seems to be more satisfied with his life and had no peculiar thoughts.  There is a flashback about Peter’s life and about his mother.  Peter is an engineer.  He only knew English.  His mother was a Business Practitioner, and both were escaped from Soviet Czechoslovakia.  Meanwhile, Katy still keeps waving on Peter.  Mother describes the appearance of Peter “he wore a brush cut, light-colored skin which was flushed like hers never blotchy from the sun, but evenly tanned whatever the reason”.  Peter is going to spend the summer in Lund, Up North n regard of his official work.  There is no accommodation.  So, Greta plans to spend her summer in Toronto by housesitting in her friend's house who will be spending her summer in Europe.  This was the reason they were leaving Vancouver for a long journey to Toronto.  Greta wishes to move to Toronto is based on the change of scenery.

            Greta, the protagonist, of the story “To Reach Japan”, herself a poet.  She wrote whether good or bad.  Two of her poems have appeared in a magazine called “The Echo Answers”, which was published irregularly in Toronto.  Munro fiercely inhabits the present life of the protagonist.  Munro lights upon how a young woman conflicts between domestic duties and her ambition to write during the emergence of feminism era.

            Peter and Greta had a significant difference:  He studied business but she studied Paradise Lost.  She avoids using useful while he does the opposite.  She had strong opinions, his opinion is even-tempered.  Greta seems to be more analytical and critical.  Munro through her relatively linear plot, states the vexing life of the woman at the time when feminism doesn’t exist.  Any sum and substance by a woman were seen “as some sort of crime against nature”.  This was travel when Gretta is invited to a party by the editor of the magazine where her poems were published.  When she arrived, she feels alienated and ignored and she becomes slightly drunk and flounders.  She is rescued by a journalist named Harris Bennett.  He was the son-in-law of the party organizer.  He has adolescent children, his wife is in hospital for “emotional problems”.  He offers to take her home. After reaching home, Greta cannot get Bennett out of mind longs for him.  She herself rebuke as an idiot for romanticism.

                        When she received an offer to housesit in Toronto, where Harris lives, she finds a way to meet him.  She writes a note to his work address “Writing this letter is like putting a note in a bottle – and hoping it will reach Japan”.

            On the train trip to Toronto, Greta and Katy meet a couple of young actors named Greg and Laurie, who works with preschoolers.  They both were beautiful and charming.  They were playing with Katy and other children on the train.  Greta says Greg is remarkable, Laurie says “He doesn’t save himself up”. Greg is always giving himself out. Imagine such a character coiling with the insular.  Greta when Laurie gets off the train.  Greta is distracted from thoughts of Peter and Harris.  Greta and Greg have a drink and fornicated in his berth.  When she returns to her compartment.  She finds Katy missing and went stupid.  However, after some panic, she finds her between the cars.  After Greg leaves the train at the next stop.  She holds herself for the ‘idiotic preoccupation’ with the man in Toronto, her fantasies of writing all seemed ‘traitorous’ to Katy and her husband.  She considered it as “Sin”.  “A sin.  The inattention coldhearted foraging attention to something else than the child.  A sin”

                        In the end, when she reached the Toronto station, a man walks up and takes hold of Greta and kisses her.  It is Harris Bennett.

            “First stock, then tumbling in Greta’s inside, an immense settling.  She was trying to hand on to Katy but at that moment the child pulled away she got her hand free.  She didn’t try to escape.  Downcast, waiting for whatever to come”.