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Summary Of The Samurai's Garden By Vail Tsukiyama

1205 Words5 Pages

Beauty deceives. Those who look the most beautiful end up acting shallow and judgmental, but people who appear unattractive at first glance turn out to show the greatest beauty. People cannot always define comeliness as a well-proportioned face, long, silky hair, or a slender body; it can come in the form of hard work, emotional strength, humor, or intelligence. The Samurai’s Garden, written by Gail Tsukiyama, features a theme of finding underlying beauty in people and objects typically viewed as ugly. Many parts of the world view scars as more than just a memory of pain. In Africa, tribal leaders receive intricate designs cut into their faces, necks, and chests to show their position and to prove their leadership capabilities. Scarification, …show more content…

To the Japanese people leprosy as a disease that brought a person’s innermost secrets, sins, and flaws into the light and turned them into physical defects. Due to this fact and the disfigurations the disease caused, those with leprosy were forced to kill themselves to return honor to their family. When Sachi contracted leprosy she could not stand to kill herself so she sent herself into exile. She went to live in leper colony called Yamaguchi. Yet, when Sachi’s leprosy spread to her face, she started wearing a veil around her head to cover up her “imperfections.” She felt ashamed for others to see her scars even though all the people of her village wore the same blemishes. The idea that disfigurements were shame had been engrained in her from the time of her birth. Even when living in a village with people wore the same blemishes, her scars made her ashamed. Fortunately, Stephen and Matsu were able to show her the beauty they saw in …show more content…

Matsu created a garden of stone for Sachi after she contracted leprosy because she could not stand to view the beauty of a traditional Japanese garden. Sachi’s rock garden soon transformed her life, and into it she poured all of her fears and sorrows. The patterns she raked into the stones and the designs she made from different colored and sized rocks made her garden more beautiful than she or Matsu ever

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The Samurai's Garden Gail Tsukiyama The Samurai's Garden written by Gail Tsukiyama. The Samurai's Garden takes place is both the crowded streets of Hong Kong and a small coastal village in Japan, during the time when Japan's Imperial Army was invading China in the late 1930's. The book follows a 20-year-old man named Steven, who is sent from Hong Kong, to his deceased grandfather's beach house in a coastal Japanese village to recuperate from Tuberculosis.

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Throughout the course of The Samurai’s Garden, Gail Tsukiyama uses Sachi’s experiences with having to deal with leprosy and how she wasn’t beautiful anymore to illustrate the idea that inner beauty is more important than outer beauty. Sachi had to go through the horrors of experiencing leprosy. One thing that Sachi had was outer beauty and most girls from Tarumi didn’t have as much as she did. Once Sachi found out she had leprosy she couldn’t brace herself into thinking that her life was never going to be the same. “ Then I had to admit that it might be a sign of the disease.

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885 Words | 4 Pages

The Samurai’s Garden by Gail Tsukiyama follows Stephen’s journey through Tarumi, as he learns about the human nature and dives deep into the world of human fallibility. Stephen, a boy taking a break at Tarumi to regain his health, gets the opportunity to watch the role of emotions play a huge part in his life, and Sachi's life, a woman whose life was turned around after being affected by leprosy. First, he watches a fight between Kenzo, Sachi's ex-lover and Matsu, a friend who is Sachi's only connection to her old life, go down after fighting about Sachi’s leprosy. He's also able to encounter his own father betray his family to live a different life in Kobe with another woman. Through the use of characterizing Stephen and Kenzo’s thoughts and

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1019 Words | 5 Pages

When Sachi first reaches to Yamaguchi, a place of isolation, she has a difficult time accepting her new life. Michiko an old leper tells Sachi a heart warming story. Once the story is over, Sachi feels like “‘[she’d] been awakened from a dream. All night long, [she] lay in bed thinking of Sumiko the pearl diver, and how she managed to give her daughter life, knowing she couldn’t stay and watch her grow. ’”(147).

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Tsukiyama uses the phrase “He always knows where beauty comes from” to connect back to and depict the idea that different people have different definitions of beauty. Although Sachi had supposedly “transformed into a monster,” Matsu does not care

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1619 Words | 7 Pages

The topic of beauty and the main characters in this book help communicate that through the course of The Samurai’s Garden, Tsukiyama uses Sachi’s experiences in her garden and her “forceful” banishment to Yamaguchi to exhibit the idea that beauty can be found in the most unexpected places, however, for one to notice it, they must be able to understand inner beauty and its precedence of importance over physical

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A new book written by Jonathan Clements outlines the arrival of Christianity to Japan and the horrific suffering of believerss at the hand of their Japanese persecutors in the 1600s. “Christ’s Samurai” details how the early Christians in Japan were heavily persecuted by the government in an attempt to eradicate the faith. In his new book, British non-fiction author Jonathan Clements describes how some of the early believers were branded with hot irons, immersed in boiling water, and crucified by the shogun’s forces, Japan Times relays. Some of the gruesome acts done to the Christians included attaching straw coats to them and setting them on fire.

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The Last Samurai vs. Historical Events In the late nineteenth century the Meiji government began changing their policies and the ways of life that the samurai were use to living. As a result the samurai began an uprising, protesting against the government and fought to reclaim their previous ways of life. This uprising was called the Satsuma Rebellion (Gordon). In 2003, director Edward Zwick attempted to emulate the Satsuma Rebellion in a Hollywood style film called The Last Samurai.

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They touch on the fact that, “In a post-feminist popular culture, where the imperfect, flawed body is pervasively and persistently on view as a reminder of the requirement to work towards a largely unattainable perfectibility” (354). Every is focusing on bettering herself. On the other hand, the woman in The Dawning is focused on another task. She isn’t shameful of her nudity or of her imperfect body. The Dawning suggests that although the woman is struggling with being an outcast she still holds power.

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Scarification, a bloody and painful way of modifying the skin/body, is done by the Sepik River Tribe to show their strength in growing up. These scars are represented as a crocodile’s teeth mark as if the contributor has been “swallowed” by a crocodile. Though many think it’s weird or very terrifying, the Sepik have their reasons for why they do it. This rite of passage happens to teen Sepiks at the age of sixteen or seventeen at a place called Papau New Guinea (Scarification: Ancient Body Art Leaving New Marks, para.

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The Samurai Did you know that 10 percent of japan was samurai. First, samurai were used to protect their country. Second, The samurai changed over time because the samurai evolved with their weapons. Third, The samurai had an impact on society by originally protecting Medieval Japan but the led to its downfall. The samurai were important for the development of Medieval Japan because of these reasons.

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In the World on the Turtle´s Back the Iroquois wanted to emphasize how there was a Sky World, with people that had extravagant beliefs that explained how good and evil balanced everything in their life. This peculiar place had different gods, like Iroquois. They believed in weird thing for example they believed that a Great tree was the center of their universe. The Great Tree wasn’t a habitual tree, it was huge and had been in that place forever. In this Sky World, there was this woman that seemed to break the rules and desire things that are off limit.

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The history of scarification is an ancient tradition of cutting the skin in a specific way and manipulating the cut to form a scar, usually attempting to form a keloid scar, which is when the scar is raised. It is unclear as to when scarification originated, but it is generally thought to be as old as tattooing, which potentially dates back over 10,000years. Scarification is most prevalent in Indigenous Africans and Australians, as tattoos would not show as clearly on darker skin, and instead led to scarification being the main form of body modification. Most scarification result within individual tribes and families, and therefore it is important to note that scarification differs greatly around the world, and no two tribes are the same, and even scarring within a singular tribe can differ from person to person. For that matter,

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Lastly never be ashamed of a scar , it simply means that to be stronger than what tried to cause

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The narrator claims, that beauty is essential to give us a purpose of life. It has the ability to transform our surroundings, and get us to a higher spiritual level. He explores

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