Social dictates and etiquette are fluid concepts, changing and varying depending on location, culture, time period, and other factors. Referring to transporting a carriage of peaches through rural Japan in the middle of a cold winter night, the narrator of Abe Akira's Peaches discerns “Today, perhaps. But so what? Unthinkable” (Akira 11). This serves to suggest that one or more aspects of Akira's narrative may have been taboo in his younger years, slowly starting to normalize or at least escape large-scale humiliation or punishment as he made his way through adulthood. In Abe Akira's short story, Peaches, the narrator creates a central theme of disorder through his family's defiance of social norms in the form of infidelity that results in an illegitimate child and abortion. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay The violation of etiquette is initially posed through the insinuation of infidelity on the part of the narrator's mother. With a father at war, the narrator remembers “the face and voice of a man… inseparably associated with peach trees (Akira 14). Stopping regularly to tend to the family's peach trees, the reader sees a sort of handyman who often has tea and chats with the narrator's mother. It is also suggested to the reader that there is always a job suited to the man in the house. Akira writes: “The time would come when he would also ask him to dig an air raid shelter. They could be asked to collect the night soil, to do any work,” painting a picture of their domestic life in which man's work and efforts are enduring and ever-present. While no sexual matters between the two are openly stated, the narrator child is absent from many interactions between his mother and the peach tree man as he is still at school, and any interactions between the two during that time would be completely private. With a husband at war, the expectation that the wife would take care of the home and children was likely, and certainly not adultery at all. The above infidelity leads gracefully to the next point of disorder in the form of the implied illegitimate child. As they sit and talk together, the peach tree man's promiscuous reputation is brought up, and he seems to take it playfully and lightly, "while on the other side there was [the] mother, more and more serious to the point of taking her breath away" (Akira 15). If the mother and the man in the peach tree had hypothetically been in a relationship for some time, why would she suddenly become serious, perhaps to the point of worry, unless something had changed rather drastically? After hearing about the end of the war on the radio, Akira suggests, referring to the “choking” smell of rotten fruit, “my father must have been aware of it long before he reached the threshold” (Akira 15). The author does not mean the stench of the fruit evoking a suffocating awareness in the father, but the mother's infidelity and what had resulted from it, suggesting that it radiated a strong aura. Furthermore, our narrator senses an irregularity in his mother's tone of voice with the man in the peach tree, but in no way sees the physical manifestation of it. He understands that something must be happening outside of his ability to perceive, observing "As far as I could see, his life had undergone no change, and it was precisely for this reason that I remembered the scene as if I were witnessing a dangerous act on the razor's edge" (Akira 15). Perhaps knowing something more would have put young Abe Akira's mind at ease, at least a little. Finally, and equally important, is the idea of ​​the mother's abortion and how it fits into the theme of.