Iwa ni Hana

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].

A scene from "Yabu no Naka no Kuroneko" (1968) directed by Shindō Kaneto.

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…

A screenshot from the OP of the anime "Bakeneko" (2006).

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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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…

Anime adaptation of "Hashire Melos" produced by the studio Madhouse.

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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Akio stands at the exit of the tunnel through which Utena and Anthy try to run away from the castle in the movie "The Adolescence of Utena".

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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As I was saying, Sakura no Mori no Mankai no Shita [桜の森の満開の下] by Sakaguchi Ango [坂口安吾] was my most anticipated storyarc in the anime series Aoi Bungaku produced by Madhouse. I have read the original story and also watched the 1975 film adaptation by Shinoda Masahiro [篠田正浩]. I sometimes think of that story as the Japanese answer to Oscar Wilde’s novel The Picture of Dorian Gray and J.K. Huysmans’s novel À rebours.

Screenshot of the OP of "In the Woods Beneath Cherries in Full Bloom"

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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.

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In my mind, there is a spectrum of Japanese authors. On one extreme end there are those I understand and admire tremendously and they are the likes of Natsume Soseki (夏目漱石) and Kyougoku Natsuhiko (京極夏彦). And then there are others whose works I unfortunately can never quite understand and cannot bring myself to like, and there sits the likes of Oe Kenzaburo (大江健三郎) and Dazai Osamu (太宰治). So that when news reached me that Madhouse is to launch Aoi Bungaku (青い文学) – an anime series based on works of modern Japanese literature – it was with mixed feelings that I received the lineup of titles to be animated. You can find a list of the titles here.

Screenshots of "In the Forest, Under Cherries in Full Bloom" downloaded from Aozora Bunko to the iPhone app Aozora Hondana (青空本棚). Yes, I recently yielded to get an iPhone.

In the Forest, Under Cherries in Full Bloom (桜の森の満開の下) by Sakaguchi Ango (坂口安吾) would be the highlight of this series for me. I have mentioned it briefly before on this blog and I personally reckon it to be the most thought-provoking short story written in the post-war era. The text itself is available on Aozora Bunko. (Actually, the copyright of a lot of Sakaguchi’s works would seem to have expired in the recent months, as I noticed that Aozora Bunko has been active with many uploads of his works.) I don’t want to spoil that story by summarizing the plot because it is much more powerful if you do not know what comes next from the very beginning. For now, I will only say that it is a complex story juxtaposing man and woman, savagery and refinement, beauty and madness, urbanity and wilderness, lawlessness and order, and a host of other things. A story like this begs to be handed by an anime director like Nakamura “Mononoke” Kenji, but I see that they have chosen Araki Tetsuro (荒木哲郎) for the task. I have seen Araki’s recent work Kurozuka (黒塚) and I think he does have the skills to depict that darkly beautiful air that permeates Sakaguchi’s story.

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Quite in spite of its illustrious pedigree with Kenji “Ghost in the Shell” Kamiyama as director, the general impression the 11-episode anime series Eden of the East gave me is that it is like a game of bingo. The story and the marketing are all about hitting certain sets of keywords that you know you have heard somewhere else in various combinations before. Of these keywords, there are two I would like to focus on – one is 正しい道 [tadashii michi] which means “the correct path,” and the other is kuuki 空気 [kuuki] which means “air”.

In Eden of the East, the antagonist is billed as an old man who takes it upon himself to guide the country to “the correct path,” and goes about it by giving twelve randomly chosen individuals 10 billion yen each to spend as they believe would revive the country; meanwhile, the protagonist is billed as “a young man who fights against the air of this country” and is among the twelve individuals chosen. Now, “air” is a loaded word in Japanese politics. For more explanation I would suggest this article by Joichi Ito on The New York Times dated 2007. Joichi Ito is an insightful blogger whom I have been following for several years and the plot of Eden of the East happened to remind me of one of his most interesting blog entries back in 2004 about the cultural context of money in Japan:

One important Japanese businessman once told me. Power in Japan is not about having money yourself. It is about having the influence to move money.

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