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| Hutzpah: Shiro and Kenji |
| go out to dine. |
The same good humor attends What Did You Eat Yesterday by Fumi Yoshinaga, a slice-of-life series that focuses on the day-to-day activities of 40ish lawyer/cooking enthusiast Shiro and his 40ish hairdresser boyfriend Kenji. One of the series I collect, What Did You Eat gives me the same appreciation as watching Golden Girls. This is how to age with hutzpah and dignity.
What Did You Eat Yesterday takes place in real time, so Shiro and Kenji age as I do (I am closer in age to Kenji; Shiro recently hit 50, much to his dismay). With Golden Girls, I can relate to Dorothy's worries about her aging mother. With Shiro and Kenji, I can relate to the sudden need for different glasses, the resistance to changing one's lifestyle (why shouldn't I take the same vacation every year?), reflections on the role of work in one's life, worries about social appropriateness . . .
As Erickson and Levinson and Gail Sheehy have argued, adults go through stages in life just like children and adolescents. The particular problem in Shiro's life from Volume 6 may be exclusive to his life, but the narrator's wry comment--"Yup, that time of life"--is utterly accurate. Even in their 40s, people feel tension between their individual/personal experiences and social functionality.
Unlike young adults, the tension focuses less on "who am I?" and more on "what am I doing?" Young adults focus on establishing their selves, taking on more responsibilities, and making decisions about the future. The 40s are also about the future but in terms of re-evaluation: Do I really want to keep doing this? Am I fitting in? Why or why not? Hey, maybe it doesn't matter if I don't!
Young adults can imagine living on an island because people, ya know, stink. People in their 40s know that they can't move to an island completely, no matter how much they wish they could. But they also know that they are not at the mercy of the peer group nearly as much as they believed at 25. Life keeps going because that is what life does.
Shiro and Kenji's lives don't hugely alter from year to year because, honestly, most people's lives don't: get up, go to work, go home, read/watch something fun. On the other hand, Shiro and Kenji's life is constantly changing because they are each subtly, softly changing. Shiro gets glasses, stops caring so much about what the neighbors think, and recognizes his own lack of ambition. Kenji accepts that he is slowly thinning on top and becomes more assured about his place in Shiro's life. They both worry about saving money (Shiro more than Kenji) and their parents' increasing ages.
Sitcoms and slice-of-life narratives are the best ways to tackle middle adulthood.
