Tornado
K explicates, “In the spring of her twenty-second year, Sumire fell in love for the first time in her life. An intense love, a veritable tornado sweeping across the plains—flattening everything in its path, tossing things up in the air, ripping them to shreds, crushing them to bits. The tornado’s intensity doesn’t abate for a second as it blasts across the ocean, laying waste to Angkor Wat, incinerating an Indian jungle, tigers and everything, transforming itself into a Persian desert sandstorm, burying an exotic fortress city under a sea of sand. In short, a love of truly monumental proportions.” The allegorical tornado accentuates the intensity of Sumire’s foremost love which cannot be stifled. Sumire’s love evolves speedily and mightily like a Tornado. The citation of the tornado represents the astonishing, uncontainable passion that governs Sumire’s love for Miu. Based on K’s comments, any entity that obstructs the love is figuratively swept away in the same manner that the tornado does to its physical blockades.
Lava
K observes, “She (Sumire) had so many things she had to write, so many stories to tell. If she could only find the right outlet, heated thoughts and ideas would gush out like lava, congealing into a steady stream of inventive works the likes of which the world had never seen. People’s eyes would pop wide open at the sudden debut of this Promising Young Writer with a Rare Talent. A photo of her, smiling coolly, would appear in the arts section of the newspaper, and editors would beat a path to her door.” The lava signifies Sumire’s concepts which she craves to include in a novel. Sumire is deficient a plot that would renovate the lava-alike concepts into a suave narrative. A plot would expedite the smooth course of the thoughts from her mind into a text.
Breathing
K explicates, “Sumire and I were very alike. Devouring books came as naturally to us as breathing. Every spare moment we’d settle down in some quiet corner, endlessly turning page after page. Japanese novels, foreign novels, new works, classics, avant-garde to bestseller—as long as there was something intellectually stimulating in a book, we’d read it. We’d hang out in libraries, spend whole days browsing in Kanda, the second-hand bookshop Mecca in Tokyo. I’d never come across anyone else who read so avidly—so deeply, so widely, as Sumire, and I’m sure she felt the same.” The allegorical breathing highlights, Sumire’s fondness for reading which inspires her to aspire for a career in novel writing. Had Sumire not valued reading she would not have aspired to be a writer.
