Logical consistency and randomness

Logical consistency and randomness is May Kasahara’s name for two competing ways of experiencing the world: as a coherent sequence in which events follow logically from causes, or as a succession of disconnections whose outcomes cannot be predicted. In a sleepless letter to Toru Okada, she uses the contrast to describe her own life and to question whether familiar explanations reveal anything about what happens between cause and consequence.

Two Kinds of World

May begins from what she sees as the prevailing assumption: that life is basically logical and consistent, or at least ought to be. People explain an event by pointing to what preceded it, then treat that connection as an adequate account. To her, saying that A happened and therefore B followed does not explain what took place in between. The apparent order may be an interpretation imposed after the fact rather than a transparent view of how events actually unfold.

Her microwave example makes that hidden interval concrete. Someone puts instant rice-pudding mix in a bowl, turns on the microwave, and expects rice pudding when the bell rings. Because the process occurs under a cover, however, its internal stages remain unseen. May imagines the mix temporarily becoming macaroni gratin in the darkness before returning to rice pudding. The comic impossibility is also a challenge to ordinary certainty: the expected result seems natural only because people presume continuity across a process they cannot observe.

May admits that an unexpected dish would shock her, but says she might also feel relieved. Macaroni gratin emerging from rice-pudding mix would disrupt the orderly explanation and make the hidden interval impossible to overlook. Its greater reality, for her, would lie not in a new account of how the microwave works, but in the break it creates in the expectation that the world must always produce a consistent result.

A Life Without a Neat Causal Chain

May tests this distinction against her own biography. She regards herself as more serious than her parents, whom she portrays as trusting a world as orderly and explainable as the floor plan of a new, expensive house. They expect that acting logically and consistently will make things turn out right; her difference from them unsettles that confidence. She cannot explain how she came to be their daughter without becoming like them, and the absence of an answer is part of her evidence that life does not reliably supply a reason for every outcome.

She extends the same uncertainty to social rejection. May says she did nothing wrong and was simply living her life when she suddenly realized that nobody liked her. The change has no cause she can identify and no explanation she finds persuasive. Rather than arrange it into a reassuring chain of reasons, she leaves the gap open: something happened, but she cannot say why.

The motorcycle accident likewise belongs to a sequence of disconnected turns in her recollection. She does not remember it as one event naturally producing the next; instead, the events seem lined up without a dependable causal link. Her repeated image of opening the microwave after the bell captures that experience: each time the cover comes off, the result is something she has never seen before.

The sequence that leads her to Toru Okada and her work with wigs is especially suggestive. After the accident, May stops going to school and spends time at home; before meeting Toru, she has already been doing surveys for a wig company. She cannot remember why that work began. She wonders whether the accident displaced something in her brain or whether psychological shock buried memories as a squirrel hides a nut and forgets where. Neither possibility is confirmed, and the missing explanation remains part of the pattern she describes.

Chance, Consequence, and the Wig Factory

May calls her attachment to wigs almost like destiny, while emphasizing how arbitrary its origin seems. The surveys led toward wigs rather than stockings or rice scoops, and that distinction helped lead her to work in a wig factory. A different product might have meant a different job. She offers no hidden plan that makes the chain necessary; its force comes from how a small, unexplained turn acquires consequences.

She traces those consequences onward to her meeting with Toru in the back alley that summer. Without the motorcycle accident, she supposes, they might never have met. Without meeting May, Toru might not have learned about the Miyawaki family’s well, and without that knowledge he might not have acquired the mark on his face or become involved in the strange events around him. The chain is intelligible when told backward, but May’s insistence on its contingency resists treating that intelligibility as proof that each link had to follow.

This is the paradox at the center of her account: chance can accumulate into a history that looks patterned, yet the pattern does not erase the uncertainty of its beginnings. May can name the connections among the accident, the surveys, the wig factory, the alley, the well, and Toru’s mark. What she cannot supply is a governing logic that makes the whole sequence feel inevitable. Her life’s story has consequences, but consequence is not the same as explanation.

The Letter’s Unfinished Explanation

May suspects that people may inhabit different versions of reality. For some, the world is a reliable rice-pudding place; for others, it is a realm of hit-or-miss macaroni gratin. She imagines her parents responding to an anomalous result by deciding they had used the wrong mix or by insisting that macaroni gratin was really rice pudding. In her account, they would preserve consistency by changing their explanation rather than accepting randomness as part of the world.

She doubts that she could persuade them otherwise. If she tried to explain that the same mix could yield macaroni gratin, they would probably become angry. The possibility of different ways of seeing therefore has a social consequence: an experience that one person regards as an ordinary break in expectation may be unintelligible, or unacceptable, to someone committed to making the world consistent.

The letter itself does not resolve the disagreement. May repeatedly signals that explanation has limits: she cannot account for her place in her family, the suddenness of other people’s dislike, the accident’s consequences, or her own attraction to wigs. Her thoughts move through examples and associations rather than completing a proof. That form makes the concept less a settled theory than a record of someone trying to describe a world whose transitions she cannot see.

The distinction also shapes how May approaches her earlier kiss on Toru’s cheek mark. She says she has thought about the kiss since saying goodbye to him the previous summer but cannot explain what it meant. She can say that she likes him better without the mark, then correct herself because he did not choose to have it, and settle on the less explanatory thought that he is good enough for her without it. Like the unpredictable result beneath the microwave cover, the feeling is real to her even when its cause and meaning remain inaccessible. The letter leaves both the world and the kiss unresolved: connections can matter profoundly without becoming logically transparent.