High and Low Limits of Friendship in 'Separate Ways' by Higuchi Ichiyo

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Comparison Essay
Written by Higuchi Ichiyo, Separate Ways is a short story that demonstrates the high and low limits of friendship. It is a tale of 16-year-old Kichizo who forges a friendship with a young lady named as Okyo. The lady is quite stylish and fashion-oriented, and her friendship with Kichizo is not casual. With time, their relationship strengthens, and she allows Kichizo to peep through her window even in the midlist of the night. She proves her worth as a good companion and lets Kichizo feel satisfied and happy. Eventually, money and the greed for power weakens their companionship (Bollinger 226).
Kichizo, who works in a factory, is forced to live without his family as he was adopted by the former owner of the same factory, who is Okyo’s landowner too. It is how she meets Kichizo for the first time. Their story reminds of that all human beings are resilient, but at the same time, they are quite fragile. Abandonment can ruin a person’s life, and the same happens with Kichizo. However, he gets attracted toward Okyo due to her friendly and polite nature, and it proves that our hearts always accept the invitation of the universe to love our neighbors (Bollinger 227).
On the other hand, the story of Akutagawa Ryunosuke’s In a Grove consists of different accounts of the death of Kanazawa no Takehiro, whose body gets found in a distant forest. Every section of this story connects the readers to how the murder took place, leading to a sophisticated and contradictory incident that brings a lot of questions in their minds but end up giving the answer. The first f...