IntroductionSayaka Murata’s Convenience Store Woman begins with a deceptively simple question: what if a person is content with a life that society considers incomplete?Keiko Furukura does not seem to need marriage, status, ambition, or conventional adulthood in the way people expect. Her life forces readers to ask whether “normal” is really a truth, or merely a … [Read more...] about Convenience Store Woman: 5 American Stories About Marriage and Freedom
belonging
Convenience Store Woman: Who Decides What Is Normal?
IntroductionSayaka Murata’s Convenience Store Woman begins with a woman whose life looks, from the outside, strangely incomplete.Keiko Furukura is thirty-six years old.She has worked at the same convenience store for eighteen years.She is unmarried.She has no children.She has no conventional career trajectory.Most people around her assume that something must be … [Read more...] about Convenience Store Woman: Who Decides What Is Normal?
Social Health Stories: 5 Ways We Lost Our Sense of Belonging
IntroductionWe usually think loneliness means having nobody.But what if that is not always true?A person can have loving family, longtime friends, coworkers, messages arriving throughout the day, and hundreds of online connections, yet still lack something harder to name: social health.Inspired by the ideas explored through Kasley Killam, Robert Putnam, Sherry … [Read more...] about Social Health Stories: 5 Ways We Lost Our Sense of Belonging
Social Health: Why Modern Life Is Making Us Lonely
IntroductionModern life has given us extraordinary freedom, convenience, mobility, and access to people across distance. Yet many people still feel strangely alone.Kasley Killam, Robert Putnam, Sherry Turkle, and Priya Parker approach this problem from different directions. Killam looks at social health. Putnam studies the decline of civic life and social … [Read more...] about Social Health: Why Modern Life Is Making Us Lonely
Lafcadio Hearn’s Dialogues of the Soul: Fear, Story, Belonging
Introduction by Lafcadio Hearn If there is one question that has followed me from continent to continent,it is this:What invisible hands formed the person I became?I was never a man of one country.I belonged to Greece by birth,to Ireland by circumstance,to America by survival,and to Japan by the quiet unfolding of destiny.And yet, beneath all these … [Read more...] about Lafcadio Hearn’s Dialogues of the Soul: Fear, Story, Belonging