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.

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[This post is not a plot summary or general book review of Mouryou no Hako, a novel written by Kyōgoku Natsuhiko (京極夏彦), but spoiler discussion assuming prior knowledge of the book. This is also not a review of the anime adaptation by Madhouse either, though it may or may not be useful reference information. If you are looking for spoiler-free information about the Hyakkiyagyō series (of which Mouryou no Hako is the second book), please do not proceed any further and refer to this post instead.]

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[This post is not a plot summary or general book review of The Summer of Ubume, a novel written by Kyōgoku Natsuhiko (京極夏彦), but spoiler discussion assuming prior knowledge of the book. The version I read is the Japanese bunko edition published by Kodansha. There is also a translated English version published recently by Vertical but I have never read it. If you are looking for spoiler-free information about the Hyakkiyagyō series (of which The Summer of Ubume is the first book), please do not proceed any further and refer to this post instead.] (more…)

If you can read Japanese (preferably some archaic Japanese and a lot of difficult kanji at that), and if you are ever in the mood for something like Umberto Eco’s erudite thrillers with shocking endings like The Name of the Rose and Foucault’s Pendulum, broad literary canvas of interlocking individual lives captured in a certain historic period like Honoré de Balzac’s magnum opus The Human Comedy, and pure masterpieces of interwoven arcane lores and mystery like Robertson Davies’ The Deptford Trilogy, combined with touches of the eerily beautiful that is typical of Japanese kaidan tales, I would recommend to you without reserve a series of supernatural detective novels written by Kyōgoku Natsuhiko (京極夏彦) known as the Hyakkiyagyō series (百鬼夜行シリーズ), which is also popularly referred to as the Kyōgokudō series (京極堂シリーズ).

A screenshot from the DVD of "Ubume no Natsu" (姑獲鳥の夏), a movie adaptation of the first novel of the series.

The Background

This novel series is set in Japan in the 1950′s when society was just returning to some resemblance of order after WWII. I personally think there couldn’t be a better time to set a series like this in. The war put a pause of seven or eight years in people’s lives – men were conscripted to fight abroad and those who remained behind were dislocated etc. But past action, no matter how long ago and how much the face of society has changed, always has an effect in the present. The past just never goes away.

The timescale of some of novels in the series spans across centuries and millennium. Actions from distant history, actions before and during the war, and actions in the near present combine to form these stories. The 1950′s was a time for unearthing past shattering secrets and settling scores.

It was also an interesting time from the reader’s point of view. The 1950′s was a time of transition when old beliefs gave way to the unknown. The country was directionless and exhausted from the high tension and mass hysteria during the war. A number of new spiritual cults were springing up from nowhere. The characters in the books can only ask open questions as to what the new social order and various trends in technology may bring in the future. Now that some sixty years had passed since the 1950′s, the reader is free to draw his or her own answers to those open questions in the series.

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The entire second quarter at work was crazily busy, but recently I finally got more time to rest and recharge. Some part of my brain was yearning for period drama plus some sort of supernatural detective story (summer is traditionally the season for supernatural thrillers in Japan), so I went down to a bookstore and swept off the entire Kyōgokudō series (京極堂シリーズ) by Kyōgoku Natsuhiko (京極夏彦), of which Mouryou no Hako (魍魎の匣) was the second book. I have been curious to find out more about the onmyouji-detective character Chūzenji Akihiko (中禅寺秋彦) ever since I watched Madhouse’s excellent anime adaptation of Mouryou no Hako.

Mouryou no Hako

Anyway, I wish they had put some sort of health warnings on the novel covers – the stories are not only lengthy (they are thick as dictionaries) but also highly addictive (you just can’t bring yourself to put them down); they can cause considerable eye strain and destroy your sleep pattern. But I am glad that I read them – it has been ages since I got sucked into detective thrillers, not since Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum which I read back in university, I think. The Kyōgokudō novels are full of interesting ideas, which will take some time for my brain to properly sort them out. The stories themselves are like creepy kaidan tales from the Edo period, beefed up with logic in the style of Sherlock Holmes, and completed with psychological analysis of the Jungian school. The only thing I wish to say for now is that it became apparent to me that there is a distinct difference between horror (ホラー) and kaidan (怪談). Horror is creepy and the visual presentation often aims to turn your stomach – think the horror manga of Umezu Kazuo (楳図 かずお); but kaidan is always both creepy and beautiful in some dangerously attractive and eerie sense, or ayashii [妖しい]. I think an example of this would be Mononoke.

The Meaning of Ayashii

There are many words for “creepy” in Japanese and ayashii is one of them. If you look at the kanji 妖, it is comprised of 女 “woman” and 夭 “premature demise” – in other words, the premature demise of a woman makes for something creepy. I would like to stress that “creepy” is not really a good translation of the word ayashii. Ayashii refers to something creepy that is also at the same time enchantingly and bewitching attractive.

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