Iwa ni Hana

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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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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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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