Welcome Mr./Mrs. Earth: A collection of "To be continued"s

            As the school year has begun to come to an end, it has gotten more and more busy. With more classwork and the lack of free reading days, it has gotten harder for me to read long books. Therefore I decided to read a book I had gotten from a friend a few years ago, ようこそ地球さん [Welcome Mr./Mrs. Earth], written by Shinichi Hoshi known for his thousands of short short science fiction stories. His short stories are about various topics such as about clever salesman, aliens coming to Earth, and finding new species, but all have some sort of twist to it, entertaining readers from start to finish. He also adds these drawings once in a while which are interesting to look at. I am not sure why he titled the book as Welcome Mr./Mrs. Earth as this isn't a title of any of the stories nor really relevant (unless it has to do with a lot of the short stories being about space). In this post, I want to share some of the stories I enjoyed reading along with their interesting twists, as this is a book in Japanese.

            One of the stories I enjoyed was called "Weakness" as it leaves the readers with questions that are never answered. The story begins when a group of fishermen bring a mysterious white ball to a professor and his assistant. Believing it is a secret weapon from another country, the two run different kinds of tests in an attempt to break it. They tried using things such as hammers, drills, and even a flame thrower to break open the ball but it did not have the slightest of cracks. Because of this, they were able to get funding from the government officials to get a laboratory try to find out what this ball was.

            After two months, they finally found out that the white ball was not a weapon, but the egg of a specie from space, as the ball had cracked on its own. From the egg appeared an ugly alien creature, and so the goal of the professor and assistant became to get rid of it. They try many different things to kill the creature, but nothing works, as the creature lays 10 eggs in the laboratory. Things only go worse from here, as after 3 months, the eggs hatched with each creature laying 10 more eggs. Finally after there were more than 100 eggs laid, the professor had committed suicide by jumping into the mouth of one of the creatures. The next day the government officials had gotten a call from the assistant that one of the creatures had died along with the professor. In the last sentence, we find out that the weakness of the creature had been humans, as it had been poisoned because it ate the professor.

            One of the questions I had after reading this story, was what the government officials would do with the information they had gained. Although they had killed one creature, they still had many more to come, as they would not be able to get rid of the eggs. So to kill all the creatures, they would need to feed them each the same amount of people. And so I wondered if the officials would feed humans to the creatures as that would be the quickest way to get rid of them. Because none of Hoshi's other works continue this story, readers get the freedom to continue the story in their own way. Perhaps the government becomes corrupt and makes a system to decide who gets fed to the creatures. Or maybe they find out how to train the creatures, in order to use them as weapons against other nations.

            In conclusion, Welcome Mr./Mrs. Earth is a collection of short stories written by Shinichi Hoshi. Each of these stories allows readers to question and think about how the story would continue. They are given the freedom to use the story as a base to create their own version. I believe it is important to read these kinds of short stories, as its open-endedness allows you to critically think and use your imagination.

Thank you for your time to read this and I hope you have a great rest of your day.

- Yuto Inoue