Tuesday, September 14, 2010

Hidemi's Rambling No.241

When ‘LOST Final Season’ started in July in Japan, the cable company also began to air ‘Flash Forward’. Its characters’ experiences of a glimpse of their future were weirdly familiar to me. Come to think of it, I’ve had a similar experience myself, in a way. As long as I could remember, my family members had told me that I was a successor of the family and I was to live with my family all my life as my father, my grandfather, my great-grandfather and on and on and on did, by taking a husband into our family to bear our family name. They kept saying that as a usual chant so repeatedly that I was sort of under the spell that I would be stuck to the house as a successor until the day I died. So, I was an outsider when other girls chatted giggly about what last name they would bear after their marriage or where they would live in the future. I knew what my last name and what my future address would be because they wouldn’t be changed. My whole life was so predictable for that matter. Since I knew my future, I had no interest in my life, and days were so boring. That experience lets me perfectly understand the despair that the characters in ‘Flash Forward’ feel after they saw their future. In my case, I changed my future completely by abandoning my family, my friends, my hometown and the old tradition. Now, I’m free from my once-arranged future. Instead, I dread my uncertain future everyday…