Iwa ni Hana

Cover image of 'Remember the Time' （溯时). This photo belongs to a series entitled 'Mr Butterfly: Hallucination of Life' (蝴蝶先生), in which he appears in a white dress.

I am a huge fan of the Chinese cosplayer Huang Shan [黄山]. I finally got my copy of his most recent cosplay album Remember the Time [溯时]. Among others, he cosplayed the Sengoku-era general Imagawa Yoshimoto [今川義元]. Below is my rough translation of his observations of this historic personality:

“We often see the common stereotype of Imagawa Yoshimoto as a clown, but at the time he was also known as “Tokaido’s champion archer” as well as “the man closest to the Shogun”. I believe the real him was quite different from the stereotype of him as a foolish, fat man. It is also my guess that he was not even fat when he was young!

“How much courage does it take for an individual to persist on a kind of aesthetics that does not belong to his times, a kind of aesthetics that has been left behind by his times?

“Perhaps he just wanted to see poetry gatherings in the sakura season as a pass-time popular not just among aristocrats at court. The spirit of aristocracy was embodied in his entire person. Maybe his way was interpreted as foolish, or even idiotic. But I think in the times he lived, it was an amazing thing that he knew what he wanted and pursued it. Compared to a lot of people who were lost on the way to power, Imagawa Yoshimoto was a person of greater depth.

“He was only born in the wrong times. Therefore he should not be blamed.

“If he was born 500 years earlier, perhaps you would see this man dancing, at a splendid feast in the Heian capital of Kyoto – with beauty and joy, and faithful to his ideals to the last.” 

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I have decided to start a sub-blog dedicated to Mawaru Penguindrum. It is more convenient to dump all episode commentaries and news/gossip/rumours in one place.

I think I owe this to Ikuni for having produced such a fabulous show as Utena. I really do.

The sub-blog is here. The RSS feed for entries is here and the RSS feed for comments is here.

Comments with spoilers in no particular order as usual:

1) There are many shadow statements in Level E.

 i) Mankind being seen by aliens of advanced civilization as backward and therefore warrants statutory protection under interstellar law
-> Aboriginal peoples being seen by developed countries as backward and therefore warrants statutory protection under national law

The above is an interesting rebuke of the SF tradition of aliens as invaders.

ii) An alien species which reproduces itself by the male devouring the female has intellectually evolved to the point where the concept of love becomes an obstacle to pure act of reproduction
-> The human species which reproduces itself through sex has intellectually evolved to the point where the concept of love becomes an obstacle to pure act of reproduction

From the perspective of biological survival and/or maintaining population growth (which is a great social issue in Japan, among other places), the idea that you should have babies only with The One is a bit of a drawback.

iii) God -> The Idiot Prince

The Idiot Prince remains unnamed to the end – very much in the tradition of the Biblical God whose name is not known.

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As usual, random comment with spoilers in no particular order:

1) Initially, I thought the stars in Himari’s bedroom were just some kind of decoration for cuteness’s sake. But what was I thinking? Every fan of Utena ought to know by now that in the world of Ikuni’s animation, nothing (and I mean nothing) ever appears on the screen by accident. I finally got what he was getting at when Ringo’s bedroom appears at the beginning of Episode 3, because the “theme” there is the sea. Himari is associated with the sky, whereas Ringo is associated with the sea.

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I have an announcement to make: I think I will be relocating to the Tokyo branch of my bank for work fairly soon.

Didn’t you say you already resigned and wanted to live in Kyoto for 3 months to do nothing except reading history books, learning Kyoto cuisine and zazen. Yes, I said that. After a lot of lengthy and complicated negotiation with my bosses, I can go away for 3 months before I report to our Tokyo office for work. But it is not my intent to write about work on this blog, so I will leave it at that.

I still have not written about:

• My trip to Shanghai and Hangzhou in March 2011: This was sobering lesson on new-found wealth and all the social complications that come with it. I was staying at five-star hotels either owned by someone I knew or paid for by someone I knew. I was even offered a car to drive around by someone I knew. (“Do you have a driving license? I can lend you one of my cars – they are all just sitting in the garage!”) I also managed to steal some time off to see some out-of-way neighbourhoods that I can only describe as Dostoyevskian.

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The theatre Shōchikuza (松竹座) in Osaka

(Continuing from the previous post.)

Day 4: Osaka

Of course I have read my share of books on the traits and characteristics of Osaka people. I was even warned by a Tokyo colleague to expect fastly-spoken Osaka dialect. However, for some reason I met with less authentic Osaka-ness than I anticipated. I heard standard Japanese spoken everywhere I went, and though the people I talked to here and there were as friendly and kind as Osaka people are said to be, when I asked them if they were Osaka locals, it turned out that their hometowns were actually elsewhere.

Where has the old, authentic Osaka of Tanizaki Junichirō [谷崎潤一郎] and Oda Sakunosuke [織田作之助] disappeared to? (Or is it just me reading too many novels for my own good?)

Downtown Osaka

My first stop was the Bookoff store in the Shinsaibashi [心斎橋] shopping arcade. There I picked up another dozen used books. Then I did some shopping around this shop-till-you-drop neighbourhood, and before I knew it I had already walked all the way to Shōchikuza (松竹座). I was in luck that they were staging a real kabuki play that evening (they sometimes stage musicals instead), and I bought a ticket for that evening.

Then I did more shopping. Just when I was wondering why I had not bumped into vans of political parties (the right-wing sort) during my trip so far, there it was, right before the department store Takashimaya near Nanba station:

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It is not infrequent that I think of the sky of Hong Kong as a witch’s cauldron; strange chemicals from the industrial zone across the border dye the heavens into strange shades of orange and purple, and rare is the day you can see with the human eye beyond 100 metres. The day I embarked on my travel was likewise shrouded in thick fogs of god-knows-what, except that the colour was white for once, probably because the factories in the Pearl River Delta area had not yet resumed production from the Chinese New Year break.

When I finally landed in Osaka’s Kansai Airport in the evening, I took several deep breathes of fresh air. It was civilizations ago since I last breathed in fresh air. With that, I took the JR Haruka line to Kyoto and called it a day.

Day 1: Kyoto

• Kyoto National Museum [京都国立博物館]

I originally intended to make my first stop at Sanjūsangendō, but no sooner had I seen this banner hanging at the Kyoto National Museum from just across the street, I knew my fate was sealed. Look at the stunning beauty of the four words bi mo jing shen [筆墨精神] (“spirit of brush and ink”) presented in such elegant and graceful font!

"Spirit of Brush and Ink: The World of Chinese Paintings and Calligraphies" at the Kyoto National Museum

And look at the mind-blowing beauty of the below leaflet designed for this exhibition!

Leaflet of "Spirit of Brush and Ink: The World of Chinese Paintings and Calligraphies" at Kyoto National Museum

I think my heart skipped a beat at the sheer joy of seeing such beauty.
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Drawing by Takehisa Yumeji (1886 - 1934).

The other day, I was watching a TV series on Japanese aesthetics produced by NHK called Bi no Tsubo [美の壺].

There was one episode about Takehisa Yumeji’s [竹久夢二] drawings of beautiful women. Apparently, there is one principle that Takehisa understood well about the female body, namely:

If you want to know what a woman in his drawing is thinking or feeling, don’t look at her face – instead, look at her back, and particularly at the curve of her neck and shoulders.

It follows that his painted beauties all seem to express themselves through their neck and shoulders.

Actually, I don’t think this principle is limited to the female body per se. I too seem to get a better sense of what a person is thinking or feeling by looking at his or her back. (Doesn’t anyone else feel the same?)

This reminds me of my favorite painting of all time. Actually, I am not sure “favorite” is the right word, but it is certainly a painting I think about a lot. It is Casper David Friedrich’s The wanderer above the sea of fog (1818).

In it, a man dressed in clothes that seem to be more intended for town than for mountain-climbing, stands at the top of a mountain, with his back turned towards us. Beyond him is a sea of fog and other mountain peaks in the distance.

I once saw a cover of the German magazine Der Spiegel that features this painting, except that the sea of fog is modified by computer graphics into a burning, infernal abyss. I thought it was a masterly modification that brings out a facade of the original painting that the less attentive viewer may not have spotted -

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Robertson Davies (a man of quaint ideas, among other things) once said in a public speech that the Age of Aquarius, of which we are now entering, would probably not be an age of democracy. This is because Aquarius is under the influence of the planet Uranus, and Uranus, as you know, was the father of Titans – and one thing that democracy cannot stand is Titans and mighty ones.

It was some ten years ago when I first encountered that idea of his. At the time, it only brought mild amusement to me. “So Titans are to spring forth from these functional buildings we live in that look more or less the same, from the universal education we receive that rests on the assumption that all pupils are more or less the same, and the general prevailing Freudian Zeitgeist that seems to reduce the human being into push-buttons that are more or less the same?” thought I, and tossed that idea to the winds.

Time passed. I graduated from school, started working and saw more of the real world, and through incidents large and small, his prophetic words found their way back to the foreground of my mind from time to time. Until one day I heard a story from a lady with whom I was engaged in some charitable work – that was the final straw that had me convinced that the age of Titans is afoot indeed.

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The Japanese gourmet  Kitaooji Rosanjin [北大路魯山人] (1883-1959) (actually he is a man of many hats but for the purpose of this post let us think of him as gourmet) once wrote about a conversation he had with a guest that is almost like a zen koan of its own:

Guest: Sensei, please tell me about the the essence of cuisine.

Kitaooji: It is something you produce in order to eat.

Guest: So we produce cuisine in order to eat. Then, sensei, what it is that we eat for?

Kitaooji: We eat in order to live.

Guest: Then what do we live for?

Kitaooji: We live in order to die.

If you simplify this into a formula, to produce cuisine => to eat => to live => to die. In other words, we cook in order to die.

The reason why I mention him is because he is the one who solved a mystery that has been on my mind for many years – namely, why is cuisine called ryori [料理] in Japanese?

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Saitou Chiho's new manga series "Vicomte de Valmont ~ Les Liaisons dangereuses"

I should have seen this coming. Who else in the shoujo manga industry is more qualified to work on an adaptation of Les Liaisons dangereuses than Saitou-sensei? (By the way, has anyone else read the original novel by de Laclos too?)

I have always thought of Saitou Chiho as the Vivaldi of the shoujo manga industry. She is not deep, idea-rich nor experimental, but she produces predictable but nonetheless quality work that is calculated to please. You know exactly what you are bargaining for when you hand over your hard-earned money to buy her manga – technically excellent artwork and fine storytelling. I hate to use the word “one-trick pony” on her in part because it seems to devalue her formidable skills as a story-teller – but you just know the drill blindfolded before you even read the synopsis of her story. Usually there is a heroine who is Virtue itself; she is typically good-looking but not really blessed with high intellectual candlepower. One way or other, she captures the heart of a man of higher status who is either proud, or a womanizer, or both. And then something over-the-top happens to those two. Saitou-sensei has not deviated from this formula much since her debut, at least not up to the latest manga series of hers I read which was Bronze no Tenshi [ブロンズの天使]. Knowing the story of Les Liaisons dangereuses, it would seem that she is not in a hurry to reinvent the wheel any time soon.

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When I first heard the name of Yuasa’s newest series – Yojouhan Shinwa Taikei [四畳半神話大系] – I had a faint suspicion that it may be remotely related to Ganso Tai-yojouhan Tai-monogatari [元祖 大四畳半大物語], a vintage manga from the 1970s which is (likewise) about a young man who lives in a four-and-a-half matted room and who is a “softie” not having much luck with women.

Tatami Galaxy / Yojouhan Shinwa Taikei / 四畳半神話大系

In any case, I think blogosphere is already full of plot summaries about this series, so I will just skip to two points I wish to highlight:

1) The “bloomerang” kid and the limitation of possibilities

In the anime series, the protagonist undergoes a dozen times of time-travel where he makes and undoes his decision as to which university club to join in order to fulfill his dream of enjoying “a rose-coloured campus life” – which is his self-coined euphemism for “dating girls”. (In the original novel, he undergoes only four instead of a dozen.) However, whatever choice he makes, he ends up meeting more or less the same people, carrying out more or less the same antics, and feeling more or less than the same dissatisfaction with his life. Eventually, a senpai figure (Higuchi) comes along to enlighten him:

(Below is my translation from the passage in the original novel.)

You cannot use the word “possibility” in the infinite sense. What limits our existence is not the possibilities we possess, but the impossibilities we possess. Can you become a bunny girl? A pilot? A craftsman? A pirate who conquers the seven seas? An ingenious thief who goes after the artworks in the Louvre? A developer of super-computers?  The source of our unhappiness begins with dreaming about the life we could have lived. The source of evil comes from counting on the deception that is our possibilities. You should just accept yourself which no one else can become as it is.

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The artist of the “dangerous and beautiful” and the demonic force

A while ago when news reached me that the manga artist Nakamura Asumiko has stopped working due to reasons of health, I was going to write a post on what I call the “demonic force” among artists. You just know that “demonic force” when you see it. Audrey Beardsley had it. Kusumoto Maki had it. Fujiwara Kaoru had it. I am certain that Nakamura Asumiko also has it.

For one reason or other, all of these artists had a creative existence as brief as the morning dew – they created little gems that hint at greater masterpieces to come, and then disappeared from the scene as suddenly as they had entered it, never to return. The “demonic force” I speak of is not the source of humour or creativity in general that you see in other manga artists of wider appeal – it is a source of that rare combination of the dangerous and beautiful, and it is like Signal No.10 typhoon that blows through a wooden hut on the beach that is the human artist.

And then there are artists who give you the impression that they will live to see a creative old age – and Kon Satoshi was one of them. I honestly expected him to be still producing new anime that I can take my grandchildren to see in the far, far future. When news of his death reached my iPhone’s RSS reader this Thursday – it was just too much for my mental bandwidth to deal with.

I remember Kon Satoshi

The first work of Kon Satoshi I came across was Millennium Actress. I remember clearly that it was an idle summer day when I was still a university student. Millennium Actress, as you know, was about the life of an actress (Fujiwara Chiyoko) who unwittingly began her career in films by crossing an ocean to chase after the Man with the Key (鍵の君), whom she had only met once. That summer, I too had just returned from nightmarish phase of my life where I crossed an ocean to chase after a man, but that is where the similarity ends. (He had zero impact on my career choice for one thing – I think he would be horrified to learn that I turned out to be a banker out of all things.)

Anyway, so I was at a video store in my neighbourhood browsing around the DVD section, actively avoiding anything tear-jerking as I had cried more than my fair share in my young life by then. Millennium Actress was packaged like a smart sci-fi story, so I picked it up.

And how wrong was I. I cried like the Niagara Falls.

That was the beginning of my acquaintance with the works of Kon Satoshi.

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This has to be the funniest series I came across since Usavich – only the comedy is obviously a camouflage for a deeper message about life at large and a prelude to a bittersweet ending.

I think I made a new year wish some years ago that Director Shinbo Akiyuki (新房昭之) would make a come-back artistically and quit wasting his tremendous talent on mindless projects. I am pleased to see that Arakawa Under the Bridge is the challenge he undertook and passed with flying colours. I liked the story so much that after watching all 13 episodes of the first season, I also checked out up to Vol. 10 of the manga by Nakamura Hikaru (中村光), and below are some desultory comments with spoilers.

Arakawa Under the Bridge (荒川アンダー ザ ブリッジ)

1) At the very beginning, the story struck me as being a clever mix of:

• Little Mermaid - Nino rescued Kou’s from drowning in the river and asked him to make her fall in love.
• Kaguya-hime / tennyo tales – Nino has bad memory and may forget Kou if they are parted only for a day. This may foreshadow that Nino will likewise forget Kou when she departs from earth – as tennyo are traditionally said to forget about their earthly life the moment they regain their robe of feathers.
• Tannhäuser - A knight spent a year in a subterranean realm called Venusberg, where he worshiped the goddess Venus. He left it behind to return to God, before eventually returning to Venusberg again. (By the way, Neil Gaiman also created a TV series called Neverwhere inspired by the Tannhäuser legend, and the story is similarly about an underworld of weird individuals.)

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Being cyberstalked was only the beginning of my troubles this year. Even the cyberstalker seemed to have lost interest in me, I was snowed under a torrent of challenging work – a partial result of which was that I was awarded a princely amount of bonus money last week. The bonus came in the form of a new award whereby no more than 5% of staff are recognized every half-year for “setting the standard for outperformance in our organization”. During the first round of this award, my name along with nine others were put forward.

Just like in school where it is always the same few kids getting the top grades, I can foresee that this special bonus being won by the same few individuals time after time. Presumably, this pool of winners will be considered the next generation’s leadership material who will someday take charge and lead. What this portends to the quality of my working life has yet to be unraveled, but the one sure thing is that free time will be in even scarcer quantity in the future.

I have not been idle in making use of what free time I have left. Among other things, I have been reading a long-running series called Gyakusetsu no Nihonshi (逆説の日本史) by Japan’s foremost conspiracy theorist Izawa Motohiko (井沢元彦), and (though long-winded at times) his observations about the course of Japanese history are most fascinating. I have also started reading the novels of Morimi Tomihiko (森見登美彦) after watching Yojohan Shinwa Taikei (四畳半神話大系), and that author is the personification of wit itself.

Scene from the movie "Ooku" (2010).

I also look forward to seeing the the live-action movie of Yoshinaga Fumi’s manga Ooku in October 2010. I check their official website almost every week for updates. Without doubt, Shibasaki Kou will be fabulous as the female shogun Tokugawa Yoshimune. I think I may even be around to catch the theatre release.

But what I want to get my hands on most is the CD drama of Ooku, with a stellar cast of Tanaka Atsuko (of Ghost in the Shell‘s Motoko fame) as Tokugawa Yoshimune and Konishi Katsuyuki (of Skip Beat‘s Tsuruga Ren fame) as Mizuno. But that CD just seems to be one of those things that cannot be had for love or money…