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Summary Of A Family Supper

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In Kazuo Ishiguro’s “A Family Supper” (rpt. in Greg Johnson and Thomas R. Arp, Perrine’s Literature: Structure, Sound & Sense, 12th ed. [Boston: Wadsworth 2015]) the story ends in a cliff-hanger leaving readers with multiple assumptions of what happened. In the beginning, a man who lives in California visits Japan in an attempt to make his father accept him. The father is upset at the son because of his decision to move to America and seem to forget his family. In the concluding paragraphs, the family eats fish, however, what is not known is whether or not the father poisoned the two. The foreshadowing the story provides as to whether or not the father killed the son and daughter is assumed from the story of Watanabe, the father’s current life, and the mother’s death, which is what makes this story laced with many questions and possibilities. While the brother and sister are talking in the garden, the sister randomly brings up what happened to a man named Watanabe. “Did he tell you about old Watanabe? What he did?” (136). Watanabe killed himself with a meat knife as well as his daughters by turning on the gas. The sister tells the brother of how the father told her Watanabe was always a man of principle. This statement can be related to the father’s family history of the samurai. The samurai had a strong belief in death, rather than a life of shame of which the father lived to, and can be assumed that Watanabe lived up to well as because of his actions. This event

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