Part One. The Chimera Will Save and Destroy You . . . It All Depends
Junpei’s foolish “3-Woman Theory” compels him to seek the “Right Woman”—a chimera. See page 236 in the middle as he finds a way to see commitment as a way of “missing out on life.”
The Chimera as a Force of Destruction:
Junpei’s pursuit of the chimera distracts him from his personality failings—using women as consumer and recreation products; fearing real intimacy with women; indulging in self-pity; fearing life as he shelters himself; stuck in a rut that stifles his creativity. Because no real chimera exists, he always has an excuse for never committing to a single woman.
The Chimera as a Force of Positive Change and Redemption:
Junpei’s infatuation with Kirie causes him to critically examine his shortcomings. It causes him to see the splendor of falling in love with a single woman. It causes him to open up his creativity by embracing life with more courage because after all Kirie is a chimera of courage and adventure. His life will never be the same after his encounter with her. Having said this, I don’t know if Kirie is real or a figment of Junpei’s imagination.
The Chimera’s Definition, Causes and Effects
1. The chimera is a mirage that draws us in slowly, starting with a burp or a trifle (something stupid like a father saying, “you only get three women in your life”), a tease, an iridescent color that flashes before our eyes or it hits us over the head. In either case, it grows into an obsession and consumes all our energies, thoughts, and dreams.
2. The chimera is based on unconscious longings: belonging, acceptance, proving yourself, being good enough, popularity, parental unconditional love, proving our doubters that they were wrong, having a chip on the shoulder.
3. We project our fantasy onto a tabula rasa.
4. Often the chimera is a panacea, a cure-all for all our woes.
5. The Absolute Fallacy
6. The Transcendence Fallacy
7. The Bitch Goddess Fallacy
8. The inevitable despair of the chimera. George Bernard Shaw said there are two great tragedies in life: Not getting what we want and getting it.
9. The cycle of ongoing chimeras, people who never learn and who go in circles, jumping from one chimera to the next.
10. The paradox of the chimera: Chimeras destroy us but they also feed our dreams and in some ways give us strength, drive, motivation, and vitality that we otherwise wouldn’t have.
11. The need for the chimera: We must have stars in the horizon for which he can row our oars.
Part Two. Examples of chimera (have students come up with some):
1. The low-carb diet or the South Beach Diet
2. Yoga
3. A Lexus IS350
4. Viagra
5. Prozac, Paxil, Zoloft
6. Dianobol
7. Having a six-pack
8. Cosmetic surgery, botox or nose job or implants.
9. G-Star Jeans (underground store for special jeans, not the ones you can buy at Nordstrom)
10. the cognoscenti.
11. Becoming famous
12. Angelina Jolie; she’s more than a human. She’s become the great bitch goddess, every man’s dream and every woman’s nightmare. The fantasy of the seductress.
13. Jennifer Aniston, the myth of the good girl, the myth of innocence.
14. Celebrity of all kinds, an autograph, a sighting.
15. Las Vegas
16. Palos Verdes (my neighbors in Torrance are bitter that they haven’t moved to PV yet. Peevers.
17. UCLA
18. iPod
19. Anything sold on the QVC network
20. Marriage. Not all marriages but most are built on the Goody Box chimera. When I want a goody I reach into the goody box. But what happens when all the goodies run out.
21. Me-Time. People who have lots of me-time are miserable.
22. A childhood longing, like Christmas in July and a Budweiser sign.
Part Three. Study Questions:
1. How is the theme of commitment raised in the story’s first page (235)?
2. Characterize the relationship between the father and son and how does the relationship connect to the story’s theme? Aloof masculinity protects a man but impedes intimacy, commitment, and the ability to let go so that he can experience the mystery of love. Additionally, his reticence causes women to “jump ship” and find other men who are more emotionally available (236).
3. What vicious cycle regarding Junpei’s hardened heart is revealed on page 236?
4. What is Junpei’s “existential crisis” that he is aware of on page 236? How does his crisis make him a universal figure more than a pathological aberration?
5. What defense mechanisms does Junpei create to prevent him from falling in love even as he pities himself for not being in love? 236
6. In what way has Junpei made the “three-women theory” a chimera? How does this chimera betray him as chimeras betray all of us? 237
7. What is the inextricable link between Junpei’s sexual foppery and his romantic emptiness? 237
8. What evidence in the story suggests that Kirie has a supercilious, perspicacious, assured, and ironic personality that someone like Junpei would be drawn to? 237-239; also consider her eclectic interests on page 241. Also see 243 where she “calls the shots,” announcing her limited interest in Junpei, which of course would drive any man crazy and make him fall in love even more than he already is.
9. What contributes to Kirie’s mystery? She shows genuine interest in Junpei but reveals little about herself, a quality that is contrary to most people who are so self-absorbed that feel compelled to monopolize conversations with information, often tedious, about themselves.
10. What on page 239 suggests Kirie’s supernatural powers or at least hints to the possibility that she plays a role much larger than a “love interest”? It appears she wants to teach him how to really observe others instead of being so self-absorbed. As a writer, he needs this quality of observing others, so perhaps she is some sort of artistic muse. Also see 244 where Kirie makes Junpei violate his rule of never discussing a story evidencing her role as muse. Her role as muse is evinced further when we see that his story becomes “un-stuck” and he continues telling it to her, as if she were the inspiration on page 245 and 247 and 248.
11. How is Kirie Junpei’s opposite? See 242 where we see Junpei achieves balance and brings Junpei out of his shell, including knowledge about feelings he doesn’t even know he has regarding another woman.
12. How is the kidney-shaped stone a metaphor of Kirie who in turn is a metaphor of artistic creation? Great essay topic question. See pages 245-247.
13. What fallacies and follies in the character’s life is the kidney-shaped stone protesting? 247 and 236
14. What similarities does the stone have with the myth of Prometheus? 248. In brief, the theme of regeneration, especially the artist’s.
15. Why does Kirie disappear? 248. Perhaps Junpei does not know himself yet and is not ready for love like the doctor in his short story.
16. What does Kirie do for a living and how does it bear on the story’s theme? 249 Height is the opposite of the ocean depths that await the stone.
17. How is Kirie’s life opposite of Junpei’s when we see her life defined on page 250 and his defined on page 236?
18. What happens to the chimera that his father infected him with on page 251? He is finally free of it.
Part Four. A Study in the Constrictive Vs. the Expansive Personality Type
Junpei, the Constrictive:
1. He avoids change by focusing on an unattainable goal (“perfect” woman)
2. He takes the easy way out, living in his comfort zone but thinks he is a courageous artist. Thus he is a charlatan to himself.
3. He values his daily routine more than spontaneity and meeting new people.
4. He shrinks from intimacy while hiding behind his persona as the lonely, misunderstood artist; thus his self-pity becomes a form of egotism.
5. He sees himself as a hopeless and helpless creature doomed to a life of futility and he uses this despair as an excuse to avoid higher aspirations. See page 236
6. He has fallen into the pattern of phony relationships with women in which he pretends to be interested in him but in fact he uses them as a drug. See page 236
7. His life becomes more and more introverted; thus he lacks balance in his life; he lacks, for example, street smart wisdom to inform his writing.
8. He is afraid of change and suffers the life of a coward.
Kirie, the Expansive:
1. For her, life is meaningless unless she takes risks.
2. She judges people based on her insights into their character, not the masks they wear. As a result, she is not easily impressed by people who have high-status labels or have achieved positions of prominence.
3. Her lifestyle defies other people’s expectations because her impetuous tastes do not conform to the status quo or the herd.
4. She has an eclectic education and a “sharp mind.” See page 241
5. Her need to expand is accompanied by a striving for balance. See page 242 at the top.
6. She avoids commitment, not because of a fear of intimacy, like Junpei, but because she must surrender herself completely to everything she does. See page 243.
7. She is not as balanced as she likes to believe. Her need for expansive, new experience impedes her ability to find emotional balance in a committed relationship.
8. Her vibrant personality is a catalyst and a creative force, awakening the dormant dreams and creative energies of others; as a consequence, she enjoys a highly potent trait of charisma and magnetism. See page 247
9. She constantly seeks change as a human being and as such she enjoys the condition of fearlessness. See page 250
Part Five. Junpei’s Loss of Innocence:
1. To be expelled from the security blanket, the womb of comfort and to lose the delusion that you’re invincible because you’ve been wrapped in the cloak of your parents.
2. To realize that your parents are not ultimate authorities or all-powerful protectors
3. To have a consciousness of evil and a strong sense that the world is not fair or just
4. To develop a strong sense that brutal madmen reign in high places and our conformity to their agendas makes us complicit in their evil doings.
5. To have a sense of your lost innocence means part of you has died forever and you cannot get it back. All you can do is move forward; to look back is to indulge in self-pity and bitterness which will inevitably lead to death.
6. To realize that a curiosity about how the world really works, even though traumatic, is essential to developing survival skills and street smarts.
7. To let go of your idealized representations of people you’ve put on a pedestal and as such you take away their power and you become free.
8. To let go of nostalgia, which you realize is a fixation on a romanticized past, which was weighing you down with cheap sentimentality and making you a drama queen.
9. To free yourself from tribalistic prejudices and tribalist behavior, also called groupthink, which is to sacrifice your critical thinking in order to go along with the group’s ideas and ways. Immature people are forever tied to the tribal order and never question it. We see this in the movie Pleasantville.
10. To give up a vain image you’ve had about yourself. The mature person has a self-image that is neither grossly inflated or under-inflated, but has a clear grasp of strengths and weaknesses. Most people error in having an inflated self-image or they sells themselves short. In both cases, there is a failure of responsibility.
11. To give up self-pity and resentment because you’ve found a life calling or passion that’s more interesting to you than your ego, which compels you to wallow in self-absorption.
Part Six. Sample Thesis Statements with Mapping Components for “The Kidney-Shaped Stone That Moves Every Day”
Here are three thesis statements I came up with for my favorite story in the book. Though you can’t use my thesis statements, I hope they help in showing how the mapping statements "map-out" your essay structure:
#1: The story is an allegory that repudiates the all too-common “love quest,” the pursuit of an unattainable chimera that distracts us from our fear of intimacy, our stunted emotional growth, and our self-pitying justifications for losing ourselves in endless cycles of using others for our own short-term gratification.
#2: Kirie is not so much a real person as she is a metaphor for Junpei’s Higher Self, which emancipates him from his father’s emotionally unavailable “default setting,” his pursuit of the chimera as a way of medicating his stunted emotional growth, and the forces of balance, focus, and risk-taking, an antidote to the meandering, solipsistic (self-absorbed), and seemingly “safe” path that seriously degrades and compromises Junpei’s relationships and even his art.
#3: The story shows us that the chimera is both an agent of destruction, accelerating our dehumanization, and a force of redemption, forcing us to look at a glorious, transcendent world beyond our pathetic self-pity and egotism. (The essay would be divided into two halves.)