Using The Plot Design Element In A Fami

Using the plot design element in A Family Supper, Kazou Ishigurd depicts a meaningful story. A son’s mother past away through eating a Fugu two years ago when the son was in California. Two years later, the son decides to come back which makes his father feels so cheerful. So the father decides to prepare for a family meal, includes a special fish. Unfortunately, the son knows his mother’s death. At the supper, the son knows his father was retired because of a failed firm. And worse still, the seventeen years partner of the father killed himself within his own family as a matter of “principle and honour”. The son realizes that how lonely his father was during the past two years since his mother past away. After the dinner, the son has a discussion with his father, but sooner, they are in silence.
At the beginning of the work, the author interpreted how to deal with the Fugu when cooking it as a delicious but dangerous meal. This is an interesting beginning which has a double meaning: first is just to introduce hoe to deal the Fugu when prepare to eat it; secondly, it use the dangers of Fugu in order to interpret how and why the Fugu is so significant to the son. From the technical point of view, there are some repeating parts through the work: the son asks once more, “What’s the fish?”(page249), but he only get “Just fish.”, “help yourself, there’s enough for all of us.”(page249). Why doesn’t the father tell his son what the tasty fish is when the son asks repeatedly? Why he repeats there is enough fish for eating? Connected with the introduction of Fugu, we can just have a guess “is that Fugu?”, so here comes suspense through the plots. For other techniques, the author has used both foreshadowing and flashback. At the first paragraph, the son said that “The fish (Fugu) has become a significance for me.”(page244), the author used this way to write the special delicious fish cooked by his father and suggest maybe that is also Fugu. As for flashback, the author flashed back to time which the father was retired from a failed business through narrates from the father. On another field, there also are some cause-effect relationships, for example:”I didn’t know of the circumstances surrounding her death until I returned to Tokyo two years later. ” (page244), this is the direct why “My relationship with parents became somewhat strained.” (page244), and it is also the reason why the son and his father “fell silent once more”. It is obvious for us to see that there is a logical order for the occurring of events. The son decides to come back to Tokyo in which place he knows the death of his mother, and he knows why he has a strained relationship with his mother. His father decides to make a family supper to ceremony the back of his son and daughter, during the dinner, he tells the truth why he retired earlier and feel so lonely. These series of event seems like divided but they actually have some logical connection inside. Lastly, it is not difficult for us to find that the family supper time is the climax through the whole story, and the author used a silence as the opening end of this work, only left us enough space to have some imagination.