Iwa ni Hana

When I first watched this animated short film, my knee-jerk reaction was: This would be just the perfect style of art direction if The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov were ever to adapted into animation. (Has anyone read that book?)

Labyrinth (1963) was an award-winner at the Annecy International Animated Film Festival in 1963. The plot (as far as I could make out) goes something like this: A flying man descends on an entirely deserted city where the only other man seems to have his body encased in a machine. In the city, his encounter with the fair sex seems rather unfortunate – the first lady prefers the embrace of a beast, the second lady devours his flesh. Then he undergoes (among other things) some kind of brainwashing experiment, after which he kisses a bird in the mouth. Finally he flies, leaving the deserted city, only to be devoured by black birds in the sky…

May I also add that the background music sounds very… Alban Berg? If you like that sort of music that gives off a macabre vibe, you may also like to check out György Ligeti’s opera Le Grand Macabre. (Has anyone listened to Alban Berg and György Ligeti?)

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There was a time in my life when I used to live very close to a river. That was during a year when I got a scholarship to study as an exchange student at a certain university in the East Anglia part of England.

But let me explain a bit about the general geography before I get to what it means to leave to live near a river. The town I lived in has a long history dating back to medieval times, and it has more churches than I could count. Having a lot of medieval churches in town means that you can tell the time by listening to the ringing of church bells, and during festival times like Christmas there would be extended tolling of church bells at midnight. I was also lucky in being assigned a dorm room with a view of a river that runs through the town. On sunny days, I sometimes saw real ducks swimming past.

Having a river means that there is humidity, and humidity means the formation of mists. So during certain times and under certain weather conditions, the entire town would be covered by heavy mists.

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I just learned about a Japanese theatre troupe with the sort of angsty decadent beauty that I always go ga-ga about. They are called Kokushokukitan Katarinaha [黒色綺譚カタリナ派], and you can find out more from their official website here: http://www.kokusyoku.com/

There is a catchphrase on their homepage which I think summarizes the kind of beauty which is preoccupied with death and destruction that the theatre troupe embodies. (I call that hakai no bi [破壊の美] and have written about it here before.) The catchphrase goes like this:

飛ぶ鳥水面に波紋の残さずして死ねるか

(Can a flying bird die without leaving a trace on the water surface?)

I think you might get a feel of their aesthetic sense if know what the kind of original plays they produce are like. For example, the play Ashi no Kago [葦ノ籠] dated 2008 goes something like this:

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1) In the spirit of trying something new in the new decade, I have decided to also blog in Japanese. The address is here.

There are many motives behind this. One of them is that I think it makes more sense to talk in Japanese about books (such as most novels of Kyōgoku Natsuhiko) which will probably never be translated into English. Another is that I recently came across some very impressive blogs in the Japanese blogosphere of people writing kanshi [漢詩], or poetry in the classical Chinese style. That reminds me of all the poetry I write in the classical Heian style which I hide in the drawer. I should try to post them from time to time.

When I was at university (that was a university somewhere in North America, by the way), the way they taught Japanese in the upper years was very old-fashioned. There was no “practical” course like Business Japanese whatsoever. The upper years were spent mostly in learning classical Japanese and – only marginally and as if in a fit of afterthought – modern Japanese literature. That… was the beginning of the slippery slope for me. (I hear that they changed the curriculum right after I graduated though.)

Give me time, and soon I will be blogging in Russian and Korean too (which I am learning just to survive at work).

2) One thing that disappointed me recently was that Nokemono to Hanayome was completely sold out on the first day. I could not get a copy even though I had placed an order. For all the talk of how the manga industry is going down the toilet, it has been years since I last heard of a manga being sold out on the first day.

That, ladies and gentlemen, is the magic of Ikuhara “Utena” Kunihiko.

Ikuni has also written about this news on his blog. Let us hope that they will reprint it soon.

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Bakeneko (the cat spirit) in film and anime

This is purely a guess. If any one film inspired Nakamura Kenji’s anime Bakeneko (2006), it must be the B&W film directed by Shindō Kaneto [新藤兼人] dated 1968 and entitled Yabu no Naka no Kuroneko [藪の中の黒猫].

Shindō Kaneto is best known for the film Onibaba (1964), of which Yabu no Kuroneko is said to be a “sister work”. The story is set in the late Heian era, in which a pair of mother and daughter working on a farm were raped and killed by a group of passing samurai who had just returned from war. Having struck a deal with some dark powers, mother and daughter return to the human world as bakeneko (cat spirits) in order to lure passing samurai to death. The plot thickens when the daughter’s husband, who had been taken to war by force, return with high honours as a samurai, and is charged by his superior to confront and exorcise the two bakeneko. He is surprised that the two bakeneko look so much like his wife and mother-in-law. Meanwhile, part of the deal that mother and daughter struck with the dark powers is that they must never speak to anyone of why they turned into bakeneko…

So I wondered, could the ban to tell their tragic story be what inspired the Medicine Seller’s catchphrase in the anime Bakeneko, which is:

モノノ怪の形を成すのは 人の因果と縁
よって、皆々様の 真と理 お聞かせ願いたく候
The katachi (form) of mononoke is caused by the karma and enishi of people. Therefore, would everyone please let me hear your makoto (truth) and kotowari (reason)?

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So I got my copy of that novel a week ago and just finished reading all 753 pages of it. True to reviews in the Japanese blogosphere, the novel is “Kyōgoku Natsuhiko Lite,” which explains why I finished it much faster than I anticipated. Now I just want to write a spoiler-free post of some general impressions while the story is still fresh in my mind.

I believe it was the English novelist Graham Greene who once wrote (I am paraphrasing here): if you cannot stand someone in an uncivilized country (ex. Mexico), you would kill him; but if you cannot stand someone in a civilized country (ex. Europe), you would kill yourself. That was with reference to the world in the 1930s, and it is also a quote that floated to the foreground of my mind after reading Loups=Garous.

Loups=Garous is a SF story set in Japan in the near future. As every Kyōgoku fan knows, there is always a main theme to his novels – with Mouryou no Hako, it was “eternal life”; with Kyōkotsu no Yume, it was “resurrection of a god”; with Tesso no Ori, it was “halting the passage of time”. In the case of Loups=Garous, it was “wolfishness/cannibalism”.

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The modern Chinese middle-class home is just like the housing arrangement during the Warring States Period.

I once read somewhere that if one were to travel back in time to the kingdom of Han [韓], one would most likely to find that ordinary people did not live in houses on the land they farmed on. Instead, people lived in walled-in towns and traveled everyday to the plot of land they farmed.

If one were to travel to China in 2009, one would most likely find that middle-class people lived in privately developed housing projects similar to the “Lily Apartments” series developed by Greentown China. These “Lily Apartments” have been built in first-tier cities such as Beijing, as well as second-tier cities such as Haining, Zhenzhou and Hefei. Essentially, they are housing projects that have the capacity of containing 1,000 – 1,500 households. Naturally, they are gated communities for which you need a security pass to get in.

Take Beijing Lily Apartments, for example. You can see pictures of the place from the official website here. Within its walls, you would find just about anything you would expect in a small town – a shopping arcade, a park, a clubhouse, and even its own kindergarten and elementary school. You can also check out Greentown China’s official website to find out more about their projects in various cities. There are too many other similar companies developing housing projects just like the Lily Apartments for me to remember them all. My point is, that is what the typical middle-class Chinese home looks like these days. Just to stress this point, you can explore the websites of some of the latest projects in Shenzhen here, here, and here – and even then I have to emphasize that they are but a small sample of the whole building boom across the country. (I even remember hearing about several housing projects that come with their own medical clinics, though their names escaped me just now.)

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It seems no exaggeration to say that Shiba Ryōtarō [司馬遼太郎,] was the foremost intellectual in post-war Japan. I think you would enjoy his prose writings if you enjoy reading informed opinion (let me stress the informed part).

We have many nouns for describing those who can gaze and see the future – fortune-teller, soothsayer, prophet, visionary etc; but we have only one noun for describing those who can gaze and see the past – historian. I once read somewhere that a writer and historian like Robert Graves (of I, Claudius fame) would probably not find himself lost if he were were suddenly transported through time travel back to Augustus’ Rome; he would know just every street and corner there as though he had lived there all his life. To apply the same comment on Shiba Ryōtarō, I think he would just know his way around Tokugawa Iemitsu’s Edo if he ever found himself transported there.

There are other reasons why Robert Graves and Shiba Ryōtarō overlap in my mind. One of them was that both wrote erudite essays on a wide range of topics. Those written by Robert Graves seem to have sadly fallen out of print (I now have only the notes I took when I borrowed those books from my university’s library). Those written by Shiba Ryōtarō are still popularly in print and I was lucky to get a large number of them at a second-hand bookstore. I have already read about twenty volumes of his prose writings and interview transcripts so far this winter. I just started to tackle his series of travelogue which runs to some twenty volumes. (It was also from these books that I suddenly got inspired to do what I call the “Shiba Ryōtarō pilgrimages” – I want to visit the historic sites he highlighted – not all in one go but gradually from area to area. Please stay tuned for more.)

There is another reason why Robert Graves and Shiba Ryōtarō overlap in my mind: they were both deeply scarred by their wartime experiences as young conscripted soldiers (the former in WWI and the latter in WWII). I think of them as kindred spirits – they seem to be coloured by the same spirit of disenchantment or disillusionment about the world at large. It makes you wonder what kind of conversation would have sprung between them if the two had met.

My favorite so far is a series of essays entitled Kono Kuni no Katachi [この国の形]. Below is an essay from that series that I translated, because I have a feeling I will be referring to it in future posts -

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Choukoudou Shujin [澄江堂主人]

News reached me that the manga artist Yamakawa Naohito [山川直人] is launching a new series entitled Choukoudou Shujin [澄江堂主人] on the monthly manga magazine Comic Beam.

When I looked at the illustration on the left, my gut reaction was: “This is just what Chūzenji Akihiko would look like if Yamakawa-sensei were to draw a portrait of him.” Then my second thought was: “Well, since Chūzenji Akihiko was modeled in part after Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, maybe this manga is inspired by Akutagawa after all.” After researching on the internet a bit, it turns out that my gut feeling was right, “Choukoudou Shujin” was indeed one of several literary names by which Akutagawa Ryūnosuke was known.

Details on this manga seem to be scarce at the moment, but I am pleased to see Yamakawa-sensei continuing with his unique trademark medieval-engraving-like drawing style from his previous works such as -

Koohii mou ippai [コーヒーもう一杯]

This is a 5-volume manga series comprised of individual short stories that all have to do with coffee one way or other. Each of them is bittersweet with a philosophical bent. I have always thought this would be the sort of manga that the writer Murakami Haruki [村上春樹]* would have drawn if he were a manga artist. (Or least Murakami in his The Elephant Vanishes phase. I have fallen behind on his more recent works such as 1Q84 but have been told that his artistic/literary style had changed a lot.)

Anyway, my favorite story by far in Koohii mou ippai goes like this:

A man comes home one day and finds the cat he used the keep two years ago waiting for him. The cat has grown up and is apparently running his own successful business. The cat wears a suit and has a handful of employees by his side. They exchange news while drinking coffee, and the cat finally reveals that it has come to watch a movie called Coffee and Cigarette with him. The man is of modest means and has no DVD player, so the cat dispatches one of his underlings to fetch a DVD player at once, and the two of them sit down to watch the movie. During the movie, the man notices that the cat has fallen asleep. The cat apologizes and the man reckons that the cat must be tired from overwork. The man remembers that two years ago, the cat was still only a child, and he wonders what would be the human equivalent of two years in a cat’s life…

I think it is a unique story that illustrates basically the same concept as Shinkai Makoto’s Byousoku 5 Centimeter – that people live and grow at different speeds. On a personal level, it is a theme that I feel more profoundly than anything else. (I often feel like that cat when I meet with people from the past.)

In any case, I recommend Yamakawa-sensei’s works without reserve. Even if you cannot read Japanese, the unique, engraving-like artstyle is a still pleasure to look at. There is always a touch of the fantastical in the artwork, just like the stories themselves. Here are some random pages I scanned after the jump:

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Huang Shan [黄山], the king of cosplay from the PRC, is to release his second album of cosplay entitled “溯时” soon.

From what I gathered on the internet, Huang Shan is an arts graduate born in 1985. His first cosplay album entitled “浮岚” was released in 2007. It caused quite a stir and propelled him to semi-celebrity status. As you can see from his works, he is obviously someone born with an innate sensitivity to beauty and the endless drive to pursue it. A while ago, I was even beginning to come across a newly coined term shan liu mei xue [山流美学], which may be taken to mean “the Shan school of aesthetics”. I have also been following his blog posts and understand that he is currently located in Shenzhen. I am sometimes gripped with the mad impulse to run to Shenzhen and interview him. His blog can be found at: http://hscos.blog.163.com

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Has any of you seen it yet? It has been ages seen I saw something this mind-blowingly good. Wow, just wow. It is stylishly directed, full of angst and emotional tension – not to mention the beauty and sadness…

1) I was initially curious as to how they were going to stretch a story so short as Dazai Osamu’s Hashire Melos into two whole episodes when it could easily be told in under 10 minutes. Now I know – they have a character called Takada adapting Dazai’s story into a screenplay. In the course of that, he remembers his old friend Joujima (or Joushima?), who betrayed him 15 years ago.

2) I believe this is the first work that Nakamura Ryōsuke [中村亮介] directs after Mouryou no Hako. Not only does he use the soundtrack from his previous work and have the same voice actor who played Sekiguchi Tatsumi voicing Takada, the art style, the setting, the character design and the direction also combine to give the impression that the story takes place in the same fictional universe as Mouryou no Hako. So much so that I was half expecting Chūzenji Akihiko or Sekiguchi Tatsumi to make an appearance as Passerby A and Passerby B or something…

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I will make it simple. The questions below should be self-explanatory:

1) What do you want to see more/less of in terms of content here at Iwa ni Hana?

The reason I ask: I once read somewhere that if a blogger sways too far from a niche topic, then readers would dwindle away. Such is the reality of blogging – readers are more interested in following a niche topic than a personality (unless you are Paris Hilton). In other words, never assume that the force of one’s personality is such that one’s readers would gobble up everything one writes, on-topic or off-topic.

The niche I pitch at is this: a non-academic working adult fan of animation/manga/books/films/East Asian culture writing for a general audience of non-academic working adults who like the same things.

I must stress “non-academic” part because I think it is more interesting to ask “what does this work say to me?” rather than “how would so-and-so’s theory apply to this work?”

2) Do you think the length of the posts are: i) too long, ii) just about right or iii) too short?

The reason I ask: When I blog, I apply the same assumption I have when I send emails at work – that nobody ever reads what someone else wrote carefully word by word. So I aim at brevity, precision and clarity. I assume that people’s eyeballs just glide through the screen. (I do that sometimes when I read other blogs.) That is why I try to break a long post into smaller sections etc.

I am concerned about length in particular because I typically have a stock of at least 50 ideas I want to discuss. The drafts exist on my mobile phone and I tinker with them whenever I have time. I have a choice of i) discussing one idea in one post of around 500 words or, ii) discussing several ideas in one post of around 1500 words. Naturally, this would also make a difference in the frequency I post. It usually doesn’t take me long to write. Usually I have been turning over the ideas in my head while I wait in line-ups or work out at the gym etc. I always know what I want to say and it is just a matter of banging it out with a keyboard. I have never really experienced “writer’s block.” Any temporary drop in posting frequency has only one explanation and it is my work schedule. Personally, I prefer blog posts to be short and focused on one idea, but I wonder if you guys may think otherwise.

Thank you kindly for taking your time to answer this survey. Your comments would be a great help to me.

(Or, even if you don’t feel like answering the survey, please feel free to take this opportunity to say “hi” if you have been a lurker, or have been lurking for a while. December is the festival season after all. And before people start to go away on holidays – let me get it over with the seasonal greetings: Merry Christmas and Happy New Year! Farewell to the old decade! All the best in the 2010s!)

I just want to do a quick post on a fanciful thought I suddenly had.

If Revolutionary Girl Utena were a novel of the Hyakkiyagyō series, I think the whole concept of “the prince” would probably be considered a youkai that is like a tsukimono (ie. a “spiritual thing that attaches itself to an individual”), which only someone like Chūzenji Akihiko can “let fall” [落とし] or exorcise.

Utena has always struck me as a story in which only one half is told (though I do not necessarily mean this in a negative way):

• It tells of adolescent development below the neck (ie. the emotional and the physical/sexual), but not so much above the neck (ie. the intellect). You see the teenage characters agonizing a lot over what goes on the below the neck, but you never see them reading a book and get hit over the head by a whole new world of ideas.
• Likewise, only the “female” side of the story is told – or at least feminist sentiments are echoed, although even then I am not sure I have enough information to draw any decisive conclusion, except that the scene in the movie where Utena and Anthy run away from the castle reminds me of a quote about atheists I once read. An atheist (I am just paraphrasing) is someone who walks away from church, but he walks away from church with his eyes fixed on the church and with his back facing towards where he is going. In other words, he cannot see where he is going. Atheism can only define itself against Christianity, whereas Christianity does not have to define itself against anything. I suppose feminism (at least as it appears in Utena) is also like that – you can walk away from “the prince,” but you walk away with your eyes fixed on the prince and with your back towards where you are going. If anything, I think it is the “male” side of the Utena story that is begging to be told – it is the male characters who are the active initiators in the story, whereas the female characters tend to be passively playing along or “acted upon.” As it is, I feel that I know about the key male characters (Akio, Touga etc) a lot less than I know about the key female characters.

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I was in luck today. I managed to pick up the current issue of KERA, which is running a special on the manga Nokemono to Hanayome [ノケモノと花嫁]. I have been making noise about it on this blog because the story is written by Ikuhara “Utena” Kunihiko [幾原邦彦] and illustrated by Nakamura Asumiko [中村明日美子]. True to Ikuhara-sensei’s style, the story seems allegorical and endlessly intriguing. Below is my rough translation of the plot summary published on KERA:

Sera Hitsuji and Hagumaduka Itaru are a pair of eloping lovers. They are running away from the police and a group called “Moeru Kirin,” which is formed by children with the aim of rebelling against adults. They stop at a church they happen to pass by, and try to have a wedding there. In the church, there is a priest with bizarre tastes, and two young girls called Maronie and Miyutan who are in middle of their confession. The priest makes Hitsuji and Itaru unconscious out of his own bizarre tastes, and Inumori Eiji and Sera Shougo come to the church with a special order from “Moeru Kirin” to “ensure the safety of Hitsuji and Itaru.” Hitsuji (who has run away from the priest) tries to return to Itaru, but is taken away by Shougo. Itaru escapes with the help of Maronie and Miyutan. However, the kidnapped Hitsuji is confused in her memory, seems to take on another personality altogether, and has forgotten about Itaru. Meanwhile, Itaru has recovered from his wounds with the help of Maronie and Miyutan and tries to help Hitsuji to escape. At that time, back at “Moeru Kirin” Tonakai rebels against Togawa Gin (who tries to wield absolute power), and helps Itaru to search for Hitsuji. While the four of them are searching for Hitsuji, they hear Hitsuji’s cry from an abandoned factory. Hitsuji remembers Itaru again when she sees him. When Itaru tries to help Hitsuji to escape, Eiji beheads Itaru. Just when everyone gets confused, Gin says meaningfully that “he is not dead for sure.” In the midst of confusion, Shougo tries to escape with Hitsuji and is attacked. He vanishes into thin air from the scene just like Itaru before him. Maronie etc are caught by “Moeru Kirin,” and are sentenced to be burned to death by Gin.

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