Persepolis, by Marjane Satrapi is a classic “coming of age” story.  Everything Marjane goes through, from moving out on her own to experimenting with drugs, is typical of any adolescent starting off on their own. Writing about her struggles in her book makes it more relatable to all readers.  Satrapi describes her transition from life at home, to life on her own in Austria in a rather comical way that reminds me, and I’m sure many others, of when I first moved away to college.  Not only were their new responsibilities such as grocery shopping on your alone, but moving out on ones own is also a time for self-discovery and experimentation.  Trying drugs for the first time as a teenager is not uncommon and by incorporating this detail of her youth into her story Satrapi makes the this fact seem less taboo and more of a comical way to relate to her audience.

            When Marjane first moves out on her own she is given an allowance to grocery shop with.  At first she is very excited to have this new grown up responsibility but quickly finds that her allowance is only enough to buy pasta and says that it turned out to be her “only food in the four years to come” (160).  This reminds me of any broke college student who ever ate Top Ramen for more than a week straight.  Budgeting and hard financial times are mandatory rights of passage for any person starting off on their own.  It’s a learning process that everyone can sympathize with because everyone has had or will have to struggle through.  This passage also helps convey one of the story’s overall themes of racial understanding.  By describing common financial troubles Satrapi is showing that regardless of whether we’re Iranian, Austrian, American, etc, we all go through the same strains growing up.

            Another common milestone for a teenager is making the decision to try drugs for the first time.  This subject is usually a little more sensitive to talk about and is not something that many authors would care to share about their past.  Satrapi not only talks about her drug use, she makes it comical by describing how she only PRETENDED to do drugs in the beginning.  Nothing describes adolescents better than peer pressure and trying to fit in, so although she didn’t want to inhale marijuana smoke Marjane said she would blow the smoke out but would stick her fingers in her eyes to “make them good and red” (192).  By tackling this high school milestone in a comical way readers who have gone through similar situations can relate more to the story and maybe even laugh about their own past.  Persepolis is a coming of age story that presents the trials and tribulations of growing up in a relatable way that allows the reader to fully connect with and enjoy the story.

Marjane Satrapi’s use of comic illustration works as an affective way to convey the intensity of her life’s story without overwhelming readers who have no prior understanding of life in Iran.  The comic illustrations gives the reader a lighter version of Iranian living by drawing each scene of Satrapi’s life as she would have seen it at that certain age, not necessarily how things actually happened. This is first apparent when Satrapi is told as a child that her parent’s friend Ahmad was “cut to pieces” (52).  The comic box for this description shows a man lying down, body fully intact, only he is separated at each of his joints as if the glue holding him together simply lost its stick. 

            It is safe for a reader to assume that that act of death by torture and being cut up into pieces would be a far more gruesome and terrifying picture than the one Satrapi imagines as a small child.  However, by giving the reader her childlike interpretation of the incident, an audience of non-Iranian background is able to digest and understand Iranian war little bits at a time as a child growing up would do.  The audience is better able to relate to Satrapi and the fear she must have felt to have war going on around her and not have a comprehensive view of why or how it is happening.  I find the use of comics to tell a powerful story such as this one enhances understanding and relatibility of the story due to the fact that the reader can see the mental images of the characters as well as read about their emotions. 

“TV People” from The Elephant Vanishes is one of Haruki Murakami’s stranger short stories.  By using exaggeratedly abnormal scenarios, Murakami uses “TV People” to comment on, or mock the power of “group think.”  Throughout the story the main character encounters many strange occurrences, however he does not react to any of them.  Sometimes it seems as if he ignores the odd things that happen to him because the people around him are either pretending or are actually unable to see the oddities that are happening right under their noses.  Not wanting to seem as if he is crazy, the main character also goes along ignoring the weird happenings and even goes as far as to call something with no resemblance to a flying craft, an airplane just because all the TV people agree that it is.  This idea of people conforming to each other whether right or wrong in order to seem “normal” is a common theme through out many of Murakami’s short stories.

            The tale of “TV People” begins with our protagonist lying on the couch when all of a sudden three men carry in a television set and being hooking it up without speaking a word.  The man on the couch watches silently until they leave and fines it strange when his wife returns home and makes no mention of the new appliance sitting in their living room and has “no reaction at all. None. As if she doesn’t even see it” (202).  The part I found most odd about this scene was that although his wife makes no mention of the television, our main character never asks her about it or mentions it himself, almost as if he believes it must not really exist if she does not see it and acknowledge it.  This proves Murakami’s theme of group conformity two people sit ignoring the huge TV in the room all because the husband does not want to risk seeming silly.

            The power of group think is further conveyed at the end of the story when the man crawls out of the television set and begins telling the protagonist of how he and his men are building a plane.  As the man describes what he sees the TV people building it becomes clear that they are not building an airplane but something he says looks more like a giant orange juicer that anything.  However, once he tells this to the TV man the only reply he gets is “that’s probably because we haven’t painted it yet” (213) and insists over and over that after that everyone will know it’s an airplane.  The man from the TV insists this enough that the protagonist actually starts to believe that something with no propeller, no windows and no front or back is actually capable of flying simply because someone kept insisting it would instead of using critical thinking to know that it wouldn’t.  This further shows how group conformity ends up making a person look more foolish than just voicing out his or her own opinion.

Many of the shorts stories in Murakami’s collection The Elephant Vanishes, center around characters that are almost boringly average in everyway from their appearance to their the size of their home or even their grades growing up.  Everybody is described has having lived though one mediocre life event after the next until, one day something strange or out of the ordinary begins to happen, almost as if it’s a dream.  Furthermore, each time one of these perfectly ordinary people does have an uncommon or unfortunate situation like, losing their job or not sleeping for two weeks, Murakami is always sure to describe how the other strangely average people around them show no reaction of surprise or concern toward the main character.  I think Murakami’s style of depicting each of his characters as overly “normal” or “run of the mill” that has nobody acknowledge when something out of the ordinary does happen is his way of commenting on the monotony of Japanese life in the early 1990’s.

            In the first story the main character describes himself as a “regular sort of guy” whose grades had been “not bad” and was voted “runner-up ‘Most Likely To Succeed’ (10).”  This is a common depiction of one of Murakami’s protagonists.  Someone who has done well but not stood out in any extraordinary way could be easy for him to write about because it is who he sees everyday on the street or at the store.  Fashioning all of his characters to imitate the sameness he sees in real life and then having something strange happen to them could be Murakami’s way of trying to break the routine of the Japanese culture.  The Repetition conveying the average daily life of everyone is in each story could lead the readers to self reflect on their own lives and hopefully make a change before they have their own odd experience that in the stories almost seems to be a mental breaking point for the characters. 

            Not only do the main characters of Murakami’s stories go through weird or surprising incidents but more bizarrely nobody around them notices that anything out of the ordinary is even happening.  In the story “Sleep” the main woman begins her tale by saying she is starting her 17^th day without sleep.  She says just a little later how she has also lost 15 pounds due to her inability to sleep which makes it almost unbelievable when she said that “neither [her] husband nor [her] son noticed that [she’s] not sleeping (76).”  By making the people surrounding his characters oblivious to the strange occurrences right under their nose could be Murakami’s way of teasing or pleading with the people of the world to be more involve and aware of the world around them.  If people are blinded by their everyday routine they will never see something extraordinary right under their nose.