The Man who Never was

The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea by Yukio Mishima My rating: 4 of 5 stars Cliff Notes (Placeholder) : A young boy and his posse of psychopaths in training act out their chunibyo delusions and need for inflicting violence on the boy's step-dad; the eponymous sailor who fell from grace with the sea. View all my reviews Summary One night Noboru Kuroda finds a hole behind the dress drawer in his room, which allows him to peek into the room of his widowed mother, Fusako. Every night he intrudes on her, as she touches her flesh. Later, he spectates as she makes love to her lover, the Sailor Ryuji Tsukazaki. This filles him in wonderment, as he feels a hero worship towards the man he considered to be some hero from Mythic. He discusses this all with his ‘Gang’, a posse of six led by the ‘Chief’. They are all docile and excellent students to the society. Who hold Chuunibyou delusions about being geniuses above the Plebeians of the common world, burdened with glorio

The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman Continuing on the trend of reading stories which follow a ‘Less is more’ philosophy, the contender for this week was ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. I had entered the story intentionally blind, and mistaking it for a terror tale of sorts; I guess the title had given me Poe vibes for things within the wall, or wallpaper. For such a short read, I went through several theories as to what it truly was as I read it. First I thought it was a typical horror tale set in a dilapidated gothic home. Then it seemed like the narrator’s fall to insanity, or a thriller where the doctor husband was fabricating the wife’s insanity for some nefarious means, and finally an allegory for the oppressive life of women at the time. Turns out it was part of all of the above. Admittedly, after the first reading, my mind was too focused on the surface level narrative. Perhaps, I reasoned, the narrator was undergoing a mental health c