“The Hitchhiking Game” & “Three Million Yen”

1.       In both stories, they show similar themes.  The main theme in both stories is relationships, and not just normal relationships, but very abnormal relationships.  In both of these stories, the relationships show a lot of stress and coping that takes place between mainly the girls in both stories.  Both of the couples are definitely in love, but they still have issues.  In “Three Million Yen,” the couple is happily married, but they perform sex for an audience.  In “The Hitchhiking Game,” the couple seems to be perfectly fine until the hitchhiking game begins.  Also, in both stories, a theme that could be considered is sexual innuendos.  In both stories, the couples are portrayed as sexual objects.  In “Three Million Yen,” it is the couple who are the sexual objects.  They get paid to have sex in front of an audience.  In “The Hitchhiking Game,” the young woman would be the sexual object.  By the end of the story, the young man keeps calling the young woman a whore and takes her to a hotel where he makes her strip, get up on a table and dance, and then he eventually has sex with her.  It wouldn’t have been forced upon sex if the hitchhiking game had never started.

2.      In both of these stories, they share similar craft choices that the authors made.  The craft choice that is similar is character.  At the beginning of the stories, both authors make conscious decisions to make it seem like both couples are “normal.”  But, as the stories progress, the characters grow and change.  The couples in both stories are dynamic characters.  Through the choices that the authors made, they made their characters very, very dynamic.  This attracts the readers more by having dynamic characters instead of flat ones.

3.      The effect that these craft choices have on the audience is that it keeps the audience wondering what is going on, what is going to happen?  Because both authors begin the story with normal characters and then change them drastically throughout the story, it keeps the audience engaged.  The changes and growth the characters go through make it so the audience can relate.  If the characters were to stay the same throughout the story and never develop, the audience wouldn’t feel one with the characters.  The craft choices that both authors chose for their characters allow us, the audience, to connect with the story and the characters in it in some way or another.