After the quake

The whole time I'm reading UFO in Kushiro, it has a very ominous tone and feeling to it. It starts off just a few days after the earthquake and right from the start you get a weird notion about Komura’a wife. She barely moves a muscle when he’s around and she’s described as being stolid and rather unattractive, both physically and personality-wise. Komura is the exact opposite but enjoys having his wife around for his own reasons, up until his wife randomly vanishes and takes all her belongings with her. This is where we start seeing the components of magical realism begin.When he goes to Hokkaido to deliver a small box to a colleague’s sister, he realizes that she knew who he was at the airport, without him having to hold the box out in the open in order for her to recognize him. Authorial resistance is displayed here as he merely asks himself how were they able to recognize him, but then ignores the situation and offers no explanation as to how they did. We get a sense of mystery throughout the entire story also, as we wonder why his wife left in the first place and especially, what was inside the box his colleague gave him. He doesn’t bother asking about the box until the very end, and gets a chilling answer that it was something inside him and now he’ll never get it back. He sits up, upset with what he just heard, but calms down after Shimao explains she’s only joking. The ending rather surprised me, as it ended rather abruptly and a bit mundane, whereas I felt it was building up to a mysterious/magical ending, only to have nothing actually happen.