This cartoon illustrates the short story “Super-Frog Saves Tokyo” by Haruki Murakami and how at the end when the main character, Katagiri, awakens from a hospital only to seeing Frog his hope for a new beginning of life looking exhausted from battling the worm and saved Japan from an earthquake attack. This shows the reality of when Katagiri realizes moments before Frog decays and sees him for the last few moments. The way Frog emphasizes and assures Katagiri that he helped him save Japan helped Katagiri’s guilt fade. The frog is a character that symbolizes his  subconscious that resides in his dreams. As soon as he wakes up in that hospital bed and sees Frogs body decay, he figures that the frog is just his imagination that brings him to reality but he holds on to Frog “You were very fond of Frog, weren’t you, Katagiri?” “Locomotive,” Katagiri mumbled. “More than anybody.” Then he closed his eyes and sank into a restful, dreamless sleep”(Murakami). Frog served as a superego which he uses in order to do the good deed in helping Japan to justify his guilt in believing that he isn’t worthy enough. 

This painting signifies the holy grail of Sonny’s feeling of being on stage and doing the thing he loves the most in his world. In the short story “Sonny’s Blues” by James Baldwin music was Sonny’s escape and his sublimation of drugs into music (Freud 2238). The hardships Sonny suffered from being an addict and lacking a supportive family caused him to go off the deep end. But the point of his journey is that he found his inspiration and his meaning to keep living and trying. He found his artistic-gift (Freud 2235). “Sometimes, you know, and it was actually when I was most out of the world, I felt that I was in it, that I was with it, really, and I could play or I didn’t really have to play, it just came out of me, it was there. And I don’t know how I played, thinking about it now, but I know I did awful things..” (Baldwin 17). Throughout everything Sonny went through he still played because it was the only thing that made him feel most alive while everything in the world made him feel like he didn’t deserve to exist. This moment when Sonny’s older brother finally realizes his talent shows us the light shining on him and his freedom to finally be in a safe-space.