Comparing The Magic Chalk 'And The Moon On The Water'
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One theme that came to mind when comparing The Magic Chalk by Kobo Abe, and The Moon on the Water by Yasunari Kawabata was the idea of appearance versus reality. This idea can be most seen and realized in The Magic Chalk. However, when thinking about it, in The Moon on the Water, Kyoko deals with struggles of recognizing what is real versus what is made up, or in her mind and imagination. In the story, The Magic Chalk, Argon can not live without this world that he has created in his imagination. In the story, he is told to be a broke artist that is struggling to even stay alive because the lack of food that he has. One day, Argon finds this piece of chalk that happens to bring life to whatever he draws with the piece chalk. He mainly draws food, since that is what he lacks and needs the most of. The pictures that he draws of food simply come from his starvation, which could help…show more content… The new world that she creates, she truly believes is better than the real world. When the story begins, Kyoto is in her second marriage, and is looking back on how her first marriage had ended. Her first husband got really sick right after they got married, and ended up dying which left Kyoko as a widow. What made her first marriage so different from others, was that her husband could not see her working in the garden, so he came up with the idea to set up these mirrors. This was so that he could watch her when she was in the garden working. This idea gave him the ability to not just see the garden, but to see everything around him through these mirrors. In a way this made a new world, and left Kyoko feeling as if there were more than one given world. She explains this by saying “numerous worlds are reflected in the two mirrors” (Kawabata 352). This is when she realizes and accepts that there was more than one world that was seen, due to the