comment on narrator

Much of the drama in this story is due to the narration of this particular first-person narrator, Mikage. Another narrator would have emphasized different events—the strangeness of the dream that Mikage and Yuichi have simultaneously, for instance, or even the fact of Eriko's sex change. To Mikage, these events are no more or less mystifying than the juicer that Eriko brings home or the great taste of the katsudon at the late-night diner. She is young enough to be delighted with small, unexpected treats, yet old enough, having lived with her old grandmother, to recognize the joys of traditional, home-based values. She is urbane, both in the sense that she is a product of city life and because she accepts different cultural practices easily, having moved among all of the different sorts of people that compose a metropolis like Tokyo.