Hayashi's Feast of the Commoners
What do I do to be what a high-society person should be like—Mariko Hayashi's "The Feast of the Commoners" and Emer. The answer given by Torres's Law of the Upper Class is that when you ask yourself in this way, you are definitely not part of the glittering class and are doomed to suffer the pain of Sisyphus.
In "The Feast of the Commoners", Fukuhara yumiko's father died early, pulled up by the strong mother, remembering that she is the daughter of a doctor, although a village doctor may not earn much money, but the mother has been educating Yumiko since childhood: even if the doctor's children are forced to live in ordinary apartments, they cannot be mixed with other children living in ordinary apartments. Thanks to her mother's efforts, the family moved into a high-end apartment, Yumiko graduated from college, married a typical office worker, stabilized her middle-class position, the years smoothed out her edges, she no longer expects her husband to get ahead, and pins all her hopes on a pair of children - the hard journey of the middle class to climb up is the unremitting efforts of generations, a war that began in childhood.
Such middle-class mothers, every weekend early in the morning to take their children to the elite school cram school alarm clock is their loud war song, they are shrewd and beautiful, youth is no longer more domineering, looking back on the first half of their lives, they played every card beautifully, in exchange for a number of chips - the diploma of a famous school, a successful husband in the eyes of everyone, a high-end school district room, a well-maintained face and figure, an expensive designer suit - the upper class is within reach, So there's probably nothing more angry about children than their willing depravity.
Yumiko's son Xiang Mingming was still obedient and hard when he was a child, admitted to a private school, and then dropped out of school after junior high school, and dragged on until he was twenty years old without the intention of getting on the right track, although young people in Japan can also have an income of thirty or forty thousand yen per month by temporary work, but Yumiko looks forward to her son entering a stable middle class, Xiang can live and live a state of life that makes her gradually lose patience, the days go by, it is not the child's Xiang has no intention of returning to school, She also plans to marry a provincial girl who came to Tokyo to make a living after graduating from high school, and the marriage becomes the last straw, pressing on Yumiko's faltering middle-class dream.
Contrary to Xiang's passive escape, her daughter Kenai desperately aspires to join the upper class, and as early as after graduating from elementary school, the ambitious Kanai applied for a private school where rich ladies gathered, and although the family was working-class, because of Xiang's dropout, she also fulfilled Kenai's dream of attending an aristocratic school. However, Kenai found that it was difficult to squeeze into the school gate, and there were still three, six, and nine grades in the school: the big ladies on the tip of the pyramid were all promoted from a young age, and as a student who was admitted later, they were inferior. She soon discovered the value of her beauty, which, like a diploma from a prestigious school, was just a bargaining chip to please successful men when attending a sorority.
When Kenai joins the network to meet successful men, she also finds that although the circle she has not been able to sharpen her head into is shining in the eyes of outsiders, it is also silently demarcated inside - whether it is Todai or Waseda, whether it is Antonyap or a graduate student at UTokyo, whether it is a returned child or a native of her own country... The golden turtle son-in-law that Kenai used all his heart to tie up can be described as a diamond in this circle: a young and handsome stockbroker with an annual salary of hundreds of millions of yen. Kana manages to become a Roppongi lady like she dreamed of as a girl – wearing an expensive cashmere cardigan and pushing a stroller around a designer store, but things don't turn out the way she planned...
The family in "The Civilian's Feast" is all struggling, Yumiko strives to stabilize the position of the middle class in her family, and also sincerely despises the poor fiancée of her son's family and rejects her; Xiangfa resists the ideals of the middle class from the heart, but is repeatedly pulled into this whirlpool by the people around her, first the family, then the fiancée, all involved in this war towards the society; Kanay dreams of marrying into the rich, and after the organs have won the golden turtle son-in-law, she finds that the situation has taken a sharp turn for the worse, and she has just stepped into a new cycle Every time you think you have stepped into the circle of nobility, you find yourself pushed farther by reality.
Emmer. Tols's Law of the Upper Class
The contemporary Japanese middle class has its own poignancy, and "The Law of the Upper Class" unfolded a tragicomedy of two young girls in New York City in the 1930s and 1940s. In drunken Manhattan, Katie and Eve are ordinary girls, beautiful and poor, and their only wealth is their youth, which is rapidly depreciating with the passage of time. They live together, share hardships and hardships, and meet the "True Destiny" together on New Year's Eve, the handsome Tinker.
For the girls, Tinker was extraordinary, "exuding a certain self-confidence in his demeanor, with a restrained imperiousness of polite interest and friendliness toward his surroundings, which is reserved for young people who grew up in well-educated families."
They quickly and expertly plucked his background from Tinker's words: "from Massachusetts" — Boston's old affluent back bay; "college in Providence, Rhode Island" — graduate of the Ivy League Brown University; "working at a small Wall Street company" — working in a family fund; "living in uptown" — owning a mansion next to Central Park.
Right in the middle of the bullseye, but two arrows.
The three soon became close friends, and they were all eager to share their Manhattan with each other: Katie and Eve took Tinker to a lively Russian nightclub, and Tinker took them to a high-society club. The ambiguous and heating relationship between the three is like a silent tango. No one can say for sure whether Tinker likes the quiet and clever Katie or the enthusiastic Eve.
A car accident upsets this delicate balance, Katie and Tinker are fine, and Eve is disfigured.
The previous ambiguity and romance were shattered by the harsh truth, because "if you break it, you will lose it."
Tinker took on the responsibility of taking care of Eve, and Eve naturally moved into Tinker's mansion next to Central Park, and then it came naturally, the two fell in love and established a relationship, the threesome was no longer there, and after the recovery, Eve went to various cocktail parties with Tinker, like a new celebrity in Manhattan's high society.
Katie continued to mediate between what Tinker had taken her and her own between the two Manhattans she saw. Extremely disappointed and confused by reality, Katie dressed up, went to the most exclusive restaurant in New York, and spent all her money to eat a grand lunch by herself. The excess of food and wine only made her sick, and when she was in a cold sweat and wanted to leave in a hurry, an old couple at the next table offered her help—apparently, from the occasion of the meal and The dress of Katie, they regarded her as an upper-class lady, a "man of their own." The old couple insisted that their driver take Katie home, and in the face of their kindness, Katie could not say that she actually lived in a cheap apartment, so she reported an address that she knew had gone to at this time, Tinker's Central Park Mansion.
Readers can stand on moral high ground and mock Katie's vanity, but her desire is so real—a poor and beautiful girl in Manhattan who needs to carefully calculate her chips, and her youthful beauty is quickly consumed by being called by her superiors. And a rich and beautiful girl can be cherished like a work of art, someone to pick up her dropped crystal shoes and kiss her jewel-like fingertips—even if she doesn't crave that wealth, she longs for that kind of look. Her working-class father thought it was not worth it to spend a thousand dollars in a restaurant, because the money used to buy clothes to keep warm, to buy jewelry to preserve value, but to eat was consumed out of thin air, and in Katie's eyes, this was indeed the highest luxury - this was the elegance of an hour in her shabby life, which could not be pawned.
In "The Banquet of the Commoners", through the mouth of Miko, the same moment in the TV series, ordinary people who don't want to have it? Even if they can't live that kind of life, it is enough for some people to have a moment in their lifetime. Every woman should keep a memory of a night in her twenties: in New York, London, Paris, Tokyo, or Shanghai, at the beginning of the lanterns, she was the most beautiful age, with fine makeup, dressed up, and the people on the street threw admiring glances at her, but she pretended not to care about the attention of everyone, because at this time she had an appointment, and the night of where she went to see and what she did would eventually be forgotten, and many years later, only the scene of the night walk on the road to the banquet at that time became a sealed memory between her and the city.
The brightly lit Manhattan or the high-end villas of Roppongi are like the flickering green light on the other side of the Gatsby Mansion, the light of illusion, and the eye of the beast. Young souls and bodies were drawn in, and the city spun rapidly, bringing them to the top of the world and then engulfing them in one gulp.
The plot takes a sharp turn for the worse, Eve doesn't go away, the war begins, Katie mediates between the celebrities, but little by little discovers Tinker's secret - Tinker is the golden ticket of Manhattan's high society in the eyes of the girls, under this glossy surface, he is not one of those who were born with a golden spoon in his mouth, he also sold his soul in exchange for his own ticket.
It turned out that the luxurious place he took Katie and Eve in and out, the "his New York" he showed them, was not "a successful man with a female family who spent thousands of dollars", but "a young peacock showing off his feathers in his backyard", it was not his New York, it was the New York that mrs. Kuo, who had been sheltering him for many years, had taught him to walk into.
Katie finds george in Tinker's old object, who was the Bible when he was a teenager. Washington's "Social and Conversation Etiquette", Tinker's law of the upper class—a teenager's determination to join the upper class, he demanded everywhere of this, memorizing the one hundred and ten rules of etiquette, from manners to dress and dress, as a map for his own climb.
But do the nobles of high society need laws? Only those who struggle to enter Vanity Fair need to carefully trim their words and deeds, trembling and squeezing into the golden threshold of others.
When you have paid for your youth, sacrificed morality, as if the dream is close at hand, but it seems that every step makes the dream go further, is this sailing against the current? Or is this golden dream itself nothing more than a mirage, forever out of reach?
Every seeming success is a feast for civilians.
As long as you don't look back and think: is everything about this drunken fan really what I want?
Maybe it really is. There is no shame in admitting it. Because they are human beings, they will rejoice in things and grieve for themselves.
A phrase in The Law of the Upper Class that has nothing to do with being in high society has become my favorite law: no matter how fascinating the knowledge, elegance, and money are, we must defend that simple pleasure to the death, and never let anyone or anything deprive us of our most authentic pleasures.
Who doesn't have materialism, but if I had a choice, I wanted my fingertips to touch more living things than dead: the stems and leaves of a flower, the flat and lovely forehead of a dog, a pair of smiling lips, more expensive leather bags, cold and heavy jewelry, bills, and wine glasses that could not be relieved.
If you can't choose, remember George Washington's Social and Conversation Etiquette Article 110:
Try to keep the little sacred flame in your chest called conscience alive.