Япония: цивилизация, культура, язык 2022

«ISSUES OF JAPANOLOGY, vol. 9» St-Petersburg State Univ 2022 241 park. He suffers because neither his parents nor his friends show any interest in him and seem to have completely forgotten about him; in the rays of sunset he starts digging, and he even doesn't know what he is looking for in the sand – maybe, for a bottom; when all of a sudden something in the sand grabs the boy’s hand down there and writes on his palm, “Let me out of here”. When the scared to death boy makes his choice and refuses to help the unknown monster to get out of the sandbox, the monster sorrowfully lets him go without having done any damage to the boy. Thus, regarding the circumstances in which monster meets its human friend: we can notice that feeling themselves strangers in the family and – even wider – in the society leads human beings to despair and in some cases to friendship with a monster as a result of it. Monsters appear and acquire power only when the principal character feels helplessness, solitude and internal emptiness. This is what happens also in the “SO-Far” 6 story: both parents of the little boy seem to be dead in the car crash, but the boy sees both his mother and father coming to him and calling him to join them in the afterlife. The mother assures the son that it was the father who died in the car crash; while the father assures the boy that it was his mother who does not exist anymore. The boy does not know whom to believe, which one of his parents is a ghost and who is alive; he wants to stay in this world and finally is taken from school to a psychiatrist who reveals the truth to him: none of his parents died, but they got so angry after the car crash that began to ignore each other and started a divorce process, each of them begging their son to stay with him and saying that 6 Otsuichi. SO-far // in: Zoo-1. Tokyo, 2006. Pp. 131-161. (In Japanese).