Hi Everybody!
For the past week, my ASTU 100 class has been reading the book The Reluctant Fundamentalist written by Mohsin Hamid. The main character, a young man named Changez is a Pakistani who goes to Princeton then works in a valuing company called Underwood Samson. But despite this “idealistic American life” Changez lives at the beginning of the book, he becomes very “indecisive” so to say near the middle. After 9/11, Changez seems to face an identity crisis where he doesn’t know if he wholly belongs in his new country America, or if he truly belongs in his home country of Pakistan.
The interesting thing about this book is that the events in the book are portrayed as a kind of story telling where Changez is already in Pakistan and he meets an American whom he (Changez) invites to dinner. It is during this dinner that the events in the book are told. But during this dinner, the American and Changez are very suspicious of each other. The book leaves enough room for the reader to speculate why they are so suspicious of each other, such as the American is really an assassin sent to kill Changez, or Changez is really a terrorist. The book never gives a concrete answer, but throughout the novel, it seems to me that the American and Changez are playing a game of “cat and mouse” due to the overwhelming sense of suspicion and suspense that the book is seemingly impregnated with.
When I was reading this novel and saw/felt the heavy sense of suspense and suspicion I immediately thought of the anime Death Note. Death Note tells of a regular high schooler named Light Yagami where one day he finds a notebook that can kill anyone who’s name is written in it. He immediately wants to become the person who kills all the “bad guys” to make a better world, but his actions soon catch the eye of the world famous detective known only as L, and soon a deadly cat and mouse game ensues. Though in the book, there is no deadly occurrence unlike in Death Note but the suspense and suspicion between Changez and the American is eerily similar to the one found between Light and L. Like the reader possibly thinking Changez is a terrorist, the actions of Light can be seen as the same. Though Changez did not kill anyone, it is the fear of his appearance in the post-9/11 world that made people think of him as one, while Light’s actions of killing many criminals in the attempt to create a “perfect world” ended up scaring the entire population of Japan. It is this fear that has many of the fans of this anime/manga saying that Light is no “God” as he likes to portray himself but as a terrorist.
Tell me what you guys think!
-Fiona