Lucero > Recent Status Updates

“It was this accomplishment, more than the close to 100 million yen she had managed to extract from various men, that seemed to Rika deserving of admiration. In principle, all women should give themselves permission to demand good treatment, but the world made doing so profoundly difficult.”

“The decision to not lose weight and remain plus-sized was one that demanded considerable resolve.

And yet, Kajii had given herself that permission. Ignoring other people’s yardsticks, she had decided that she was enough as a woman. To be treated well, to be adored, to be showered with presents and affection, and to eschew that which she disliked […] she went on demanding these things […]”

“What the public found most alarming, even more than Kajii’s lack of beauty, was the fact that she was not thin. Women appeared to find this aspect of the case profoundly disturbing, while in men it elicited an extraordinary display of hatred and vitriol. From early childhood, everyone had had it drummed into them that if a woman wasn’t slim, she wasn’t worth bothering with.”

“What was so confounding about the fact of an ordinary man’s violence? So many people needed monsters to look monstrous. They couldn’t accept, despite all the evidence to the contrary, that the demons looked just like them. That a seemingly regular life could conceal a deeply vicious soul.” (57)

“If he was remembered at all, the man would quickly become something other than a man. A beast, a monster, a devil, but the names would all mean the same thing—not human. Not just not like us, but not of us. In other words: not our problem. An abhorrent anomaly that couldn’t have been foreseen. Unfixable, so why bother trying? Best not to look at it too closely.”