15% of my English HL grade here I go

Henry James, an American writer, said, “It takes an endless amount of history to make even a little tradition.”  Traditions are traditions because they’ve been practiced for so long.  Humans are creatures of habit, and thus, one would not expect them to deviate from things they have done for a long period of time.  In So Long a Letter, the characters exist in an Islamic culture where polygamy is a traditional practice, and marriage is more of a monetary contract than a bond between individuals.  Similarly, the Japanese culture of Thousand Cranes has traditional garments, as well as the traditional practice of the tea ceremony.  In both of these novels, the characters try and abandon the traditions within their culture.  Aissatou and Mawdo Bȃ enter a monogamous marriage where one person exists on a completely different social level than the other; Fumiko and Kikuji claim that they will abandon the tea ceremony.  However, both sets of characters are eventually drawn back into their traditional practices.  Bȃ and Kawabata use characterization and irony to suggest that tradition remains resilient in a modernizing culture.