Iwa ni Hana

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.

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.

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. With 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…

A few people have emailed me to see if I am doing okay, as I have not updated for a while. There is actually a reason for this.

In the English law of tort, there was the leading case of R. v Ireland in which the defendant made a large number of silent phone calls to his victims. I think I have been experiencing the cyber equivalent of that in the past few months.

I use Google Analytics to track my site traffic. Since the beginning of 2010, someone from Del Mar (which is apparently an American town with a population of around 4000 people) have been using the search term “what happened to iwa ni hana” to reach my blog. This was repeated for about 40-50 times, sometimes more than once a day. I found it annoying, but let it be for the time being.

And then a few weeks ago it got scarier. The same person from Del Mar began to use the search term “iwanihana suicide” to reach this blog. This has been repeated for over 10 times so far. I wish that person would stop as it is seriously disturbing.

That was also when I began to worry about personal safety. Iwa ni Hana is only a blog about personal hobbies – manga, anime, books, films, languages etc. I never get involved in any kind of flame wars with anyone. It is not even like I have some extreme message in politics or religion to deserve this sort of fanatic attention. And although I still have a ton of stuff to write about, I had to stop and think about what to do with this blog. To be honest, I cannot say I have come up with any good answer. I can only say that I no longer feel comfortable to blog in English, so I will stop that for a quite a long while. In the meantime, I will continue to blog in some other language sphere and see what happens.

I apologize if this is disappointing news to anyone. Please understand that I receive this sort of mental harassment every day. In the mean time, I always welcome emails.

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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