Literary Comparison Essay: Falling In Fate
Today, most people cannot see past the attractive and practical side of love, let alone are willing to leave love to fate. And yet, the male narrators of Lizard by Banana Yoshimoto and The 100% Perfect Girl by Haruki Murakami are prime examples of this. Though the narrator of Lizard is more realistic than the narrator of The 100% Perfect Girl, fate seems to affect the narrators’ love lives and themselves similarly, in terms of time, their perception of their romantic interests and relationship with them, and to an extent, their actions throughout their respective stories.
Both stories give us a glimpse of what is it like to find love and to be in love in modern Japan, where fate intertwines with love, which are the stories’ main themes. Lizard is the internal monologue of a male counselor/therapist who talks about his romantic relationship with Lizard, a healer, starting off with its present, past and objectively, a future. But a dark secret is holding Lizard back from accepting the protagonist 's proposal of marriage, one that made her the way she is today. Though, later on, it seems that Lizard is not the only one
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The ‘perfect girl’ does not even match the narrator’s tastes, or exceed his beauty standards. He too admits it is unusual, confiding to his friend the weirdness of it all. Even though the narrator does little to none to engage with the ‘perfect girl’ she is perfect because he chose to fall in love with her. This can be supported with the fact that he was so afraid of being rejected by her, that he failed to approach her and had lost her in the end; his ridiculous fears are stemmed from how completely perfect the narrator thinks she is. Even though the narrator was convinced that fate brought him to her, he over idealised the ‘perfect girl’, severing any chance of making his perfect romance