“Class, today we’re going to start a VERY long lesson on allegory. It starts today with the reading of this short story, and it ends 30 years from now when you’re watching your last parent die in a hospital bed of old age with nothing you can do about it.”
I am! Thanks for asking.
I was riffing off the OP post. We’re exposed to ideas early in life (at school) that we don’t understand the gravity of until much later.
“Alright, class! We’re gonna read a story about a guy who locks himself in a hotel room with a decked-out kitchen, a surgery machine, and every prosthesis one could need, and this guy is gonna eat himself from the bottom up and describe it in careful, emotional, joyous detail!”
Yeeeeah, fuck that shit, decades later.
“The Savage Mouth” is the English title, by Komatsu Sakyou.
I have a similar reaction, but it was to “The Yellow Wallpaper”, about a woman locked in a room for a long period of time to deal with her mental health, and the solitude drives her quite insane. In quite haunting detail.
Fun historical note: many yellow paints and dyes used in that time period had some sort of neurotoxic heavy metal (probably mercury, IIRC) that actually caused or at least exacerbated symptoms of mental illness. Many of these compounds were relatively safe to use as paint in England, but when used in warmer, humid climates, they broke down and caused hallucinations as well as respiratory complications that caused the patients to be bedridden (further worsening the symptoms).
Lead makes yellow and red paints have a wonderfully bright colour.
Many children’s toys had lead paint because of course the kids liked the brighter colours.
Kids also love to chew on toys… and the lead paint even tastes sweet. It was always a recipe for disaster.
That’s really interesting, thanks for sharing! I wonder if the author knew that, or if yellow was just used a lot… (I’ve seen occasional older advice to paint kitchens yellow to make them “feel sunny”, but imho that’s not an easy color to live with. My mom had a patterned yellow antique couch that was just absolutely hideous… but it was the style at some point…)
I got pictures of the text in English, further down my comment history. CTRL-F “autocannibalism”. I don’t have any Japanese copies, that was a long time ago.
There was a Stephen King short story called Survivor Type where a doctor gets stranded on an island and eventually begins eating himself for sustenance. The story is told through the journal he keeps as he becomes more unhinged.
Nobody going to mention a Cask of Amontillado? Maybe not the most mind-bending example, but the tale of leading a supposed friend to their own horrific murder was not a thing I expected to be reading in school.
Funnily enough I did on a similar post a month ago.
After the hide under your desk from nuclear bombs drills but before the active shooter drills.
I grew up in a small town in Canada. We never had any kind of lock down drills.
Dang, things must be pretty good up in Canada. People are sending their children to first grade with ballistic-shielded backpacks down here.
Lots of great nightmares fuel here, but I can’t believe nobody’s mentioned The Lottery yet. The end of that story still makes me feel absolutely nauseous.
I still can’t figure out why this is taught to children. What value does it offer, other than being generally well written, which a lot of other less disturbing stories also are? Did the teachers just hate us?
Maybe try a poem.
The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner
From my mother’s sleep I fell into the State,
And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.
Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life,
I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.
Randall Jarrell, 1945
I should have attributed, sorry.
Randall Jarrell, published in 1945.
Bomber ball turret gunners and tail gunners had the shortest life expectancy of any combat occupation in the war, as these were the first targets of incoming fighters. I found one site that said tail gunners’ combat life expectancy was four missions.
Ball turrets couldn’t reload in flight. The ball was too small for parachutes, and the mechanisms jammed or froze often. Typically they put small, young, single guys in them.
I think that was the inspiration for the B-17 scene from the animated movie Heavy Metal, which fucked me up as a kid.