Response to Jeremy

            The story was about a girl named Itami, who was killed in a fire and wakes up in a very strange place. When she first wakes up she cannot remember anything, including her name. A man named Kain steps forward and is sort of beating around the bush about where she is, which is really confusing to her considering she has no idea who this person is. He soon introduces her to another boy named Kage who is supposed to begin her “training” as well as allow her to stay with him temporarily. Throughout the story we find out that Itami is really dead and was killed in a fire. She becomes upset at this realization because she isn’t really satisfied with how she lived her life up to the point of her death. Later she finds out that Kain is really the one responsible for her death because he wanted her to become some sort of escort to other people who have died and gone to hell. In the end she fights Kage because she is upset that she hasn’t had a choice in anything in her life or in her afterlife. She makes a choice to kill herself so that she doesn’t have to go back to Kain. The story ends with her sinking in some sort of water that Kage put her in.

            I liked the uniqueness of the story. It was definitely different from everything else we have read in this class. It was refreshing to read something new and out of the ordinary. However, I felt very confused through much of the story. I think maybe a lot of it had to do with the fact that I wasn’t exactly sure what Kane’s purpose for killing her was because I was very unclear about what the cultivated was. I also got very confused when Itami seemed to run back into her other life. She expresses the desire for a normal life where she can just go to school and hang out with friends, yet I was under the impression that she chose to go back to where Kage was waiting and I wasn’t really sure why that happened. Basically I just think the story needs to explain the situation a little more because I was very confused.