Iwa ni Hana

Oshii Mamoru’s film “Innocence” and the world of things

One of the most iconic features of Oshii Mamoru’s film Innocence is a sequence of festival parade lasting approximately 5 minutes. The parade was extravagantly animated with a myriad of ornate details, but at the same time the sequence did not really advance the story in any way, and even felt somewhat out of sync in the natural flow of the story. When I first watched it, I remember wondering to myself: why bother?

The festival parade scene in Oshii Mamoru's "Innocence"

Oshii-sensei has probably been asked this question and answered it accordingly somewhere. For my part, I could only say that my gut feeling on seeing it was that it is a powerful and nostalgic expression of the world of things – by which I mean the seen and touchable world:

• that one interacts with through one’s physical senses
• in which one lives in perpetual want of one thing or another

This is a point of contrast to the state of human existence you see in the film. Humans live in various states of modification from their natural biology – the Major long transcended to a form of existence not unlike “data” on a vast network, and various characters living in man-made bodies instead of their natural bodies. Yet the world of things is still the point of reference in human existence, even though ironically humanity seems to show tendencies of leaving that world of things behind. The parade seems to express nostalgic yearning for physical presence, the sensation of being there, of things with colours that you can perceive through your eyes, texture that you can perceive through your sense of touch, producing sounds that travel to your ears. The objects you see in the parade are all reminders of the natural world, recreated from man-made materials in the likeness of their natural counterparts. What you can no longer have, you create a likeness of.

So that was my belief until recently I read the eighth book of the Hyakkiyagyō series by Kyōgoku Natsuhiko -

Novel cover of "Loups=Garous"

Onmoraki no Kizu [陰摩羅鬼の瑕] and the world of things

In Onmoraki no Kizu, there is a character who grew up under a set of unusual conditions and believed that:

• life is having physical presence in this world
• death is physical disappearance from this world

Therefore, to him a human corpse still has “life” because it has physical presence in this world, and only when the corpse disappears is it considered “death”.

If you think about it, you cannot entirely say that he does not have a point. This assertion really shook me up when I was reading the novel. In this line of thinking, “life” is extended to inanimate things like a mirror or a bowl, and “death” is not confined to an animate being drawing its last breath, but can include anything animate or inanimate disappearing from the physical world of things. Now I think I begin to see why some cultures believe that even inanimate things like a mirror or a bowl have “spirit”.

Loups=Garous [ルー=ガルー] and the world of things

I do not know if you can use “Oshii Mamoru” as an adjective, but Kyōgoku Natsuhiko is certainly very “Oshii Mamoru”. So that when news reached that his SF novel Loup-garou is to be adapted by Production I.G. into an animated film, I was naturally curious and found the story to be very “Oshii Mamoru” indeed.

From what I gathered on the net, the story of Loup-garou goes something like this:

In the mid 21th century, the world’s population has been decimated due to a deadly infectious virus. To cope with this crisis, people came to avoid physical contact and the world of reality and fantasy became increasingly blurred as day-to-day life came to be managed solely through computer networks. In such a world, murders of young girls around the ages of 14 and 15 occurred and a group of young girls resolve to solve these murders.

I know this sounds like the bane of science fiction, but knowing Kyōgoku-sensei’s style I am sure he is Up To Something. I have ordered a copy of the novel and will be sure to write more on this.