Ryan's thoughts on Boku

(following page numbers refer to the Barnes & Noble online edition)
What I found striking from the very beginning of the text was the complex nature of Boku’s emotional expression, and the images through which we as readers may begin to observe and assemble his condition. As is the case with many of his emotions, apart from his immediate sense-perceptions and impressions of external stimuli, and the subsequent
free-associations he pings to in his commentary of them, much is left unsaid. While there exists no question in the text as to what Boku is experiencing physically (that is, within proximity to his body), like his “lost…autumn” (228), his hunger, thirst, and the weirdness of his first stay in Sapporo, the extent to which his faculties for love, rage, fear, and passion, highly subjective, potent, and personal emotionalities, are triggered, and for what reason, is far more vague. These elements of his psyche, too, rarely manifest externally as typical and therefore predictable behaviors, like shouting (Boku is hardly, if at all, seen raising his voice) or strings of lamentations in conversation. Rather, the behavior that is observable is either an action devoid of explicit emotionality, such as tidying himself up or drinking, or an intellectualization of, and therefore an attempted distancing from (from both himself and the reader, either consciously or unconsciously), his emotions. The “vacant chair” left in the wake of his wife’s divorce does not necessarily elicit a sentimental reflection, but instead catalyzes Boku’s mental movement into an intellectual association: an “American novel” (32) and its depiction of male loneliness after failed romance. His loneliness is elucidated in his desire for parts of her to be left behind, his discomfort placed onto the newly emptied house and disruption of the status quo, rather than a desire to reunite with his ex-wife at an intimate level. His routine, his previously established normalcy, has been upended by something he rationalizes beyond his control, “her choice” (33) (the distant way in which he processes both her actions and his reactions), and what we are told of his state is not a moving wave of sentiment, but an admission to a more spatial sort of loneliness: he is left a “tiny child in a De Cherico painting” (32), bereft not of a sexual/ intimate partner, but a secure, constant (and therefore almost implied to be parental) presence.
Ryan Trostle