Iwa ni Hana

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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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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