Week 7 Essay: Analyzing a Recurring Motif

For this week’s essay I am focusing on the reoccurring theme I have seen in two of the past units I have read. The theme is the idea of “wanting what you don’t have.”

A want button where you can press what you want, Image source: LaBLog

Last week one of my favorite stories from the Japanese FairyTale (Lang) unit was The Stonecutter. This story follows a poor stonecutter who happens upon the magical spirit of the mountain one day when he is cutting stone. He wishes he is rich and the spirit grants his wish by giving him a palace to live in. But this is not enough. When he sees a prince who has servants to shade him from the sun, he wishes to be a prince. He wants what he does not have. But this was not enough power for the prince. He wanted to have power over all the earth, so he wished to be the sun, but when the clouds covered the sun and cast the earth in shadows, he wished to be a cloud. And when the cloud stormed and destroyed the village but did not damage the mountain, he wished to be the mountain. Until, one day a stonecutter came by and began to chip at him for the stone. He then wished to be a man and he was content for the rest of his days. Through the journey, he constantly wanted what he did not have. He was never satisfied with what he had to start with until he saw that, in the end, it was what he wanted most.

This week one of my favorite stories in the unit Japanese Fairy Tales (Ozaki) was the tale entitled The Man Who Did Not Wish to Die. The man named Sentaro does not want to die and part with all of the splendors he owns in this life. He had heard tales of there being an elixir of life that would make him last forever and he decided he must have it, so he sets out to Mt. Fuji to find the hermits who possess it. In order to obtain the elixir and live forever Sentaro must become a hermit. Sentaro has been spoiled his whole life, and the reason he seeks the Elixir is in order to live this grand life forever, not a life of being cold and hungry and barefoot. So his next option to live forever is to venture to the land known as Perpetual Life where the people live forever. But, the people there have heard of Paradise, a magical place you go to only when you die. So Sentaro, who came from a land where you do die wanted to find eternal life and the people who had eternal life only wanted to die. This shows a perfect example of people wanting what they do not have. Luckily, for Sentaro it was just a dream and he soon realized that he did not want to live forever, and returned from Mt. Fuji to his land where he would eventually die.