Summary

In Chapter 46, Mitsuki saw an elderly couple the next morning at breakfast. The seemed to represent Japan before the war. She wondered if they had an arranged marriage. As she considered why so few couples lived together into their old age, she glanced at the copy of Madame Bovary beside her on the table. It was the story of a French country girl who read too many novels. Those novels gave her the desire for excitement and romance, much different from her real life. She was married to a poor man so she took lovers, and ran up debts in an attempt to create a life like those in the novels she read. She eventually killed herself. Women in France saw themselves and their lives in the novel. Bovarism is a word made popular by the novel that describes the French “women who...