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| Visiting the man himself, 18/4/19 |
"The muddiest monologue of youth."
We associate youth and childhood with purity. When we were still students, untethered by the need to make the ends meet at the end of a month, untainted by earthly desires inspired by the society. Perhaps for some this could not be said, but if one were to be an idealist at some stage of one's life, it must be during one's teenage years. Dazai lived a short life with his suicide at 38, thus somehow preserving his "youth" right up to his death. He was born into a well-off family, but rejected a steady, wealthy life in favour of a degenerate lifestyle, immersing himself in psychedelic drugs and prostitutes, getting involved in radical left-wing politics. In a collection of short stories, traces of such rejection of this earthly concept of "humanity" or "adulthood" is displayed clearly.
Written when he was 30, Joseito (Schoolgirl) describes a (perhaps middle to junior high school) girl's ordinary day---a slice of life, an introspection into her thoughts. From waking up in the morning, getting ready for school, walking along the usual path through the temple to commute to school, sneaking off for a hair treatment, going home along the same way... nothing out of the ordinary, a very typical, almost boring day. Indeed, "boring" seems to be a fitting description, a sort of frustration for the lack of originality, the staleness, the cheap, convenient excuses that an adult would be more than used to, the sad state of an "adult" life. Between childhood and adulthood occurs a period called "teenage", when one is not exactly an adult but no longer a child, a transition period of sorts. Her brain is more than developed to generate complex emotions, yet not quite ready to handle them in a mature way. She is aware of her rapidly aging consciousness, yet not quite ready to give up her innocence, the special role of being a child, one who can be exonerated for naivety. This is a tale about one long day, in this one long period of confusion.
Many times in this story has the narrator openly expressed disgust: towards herself humming cheap songs when tidying up her futon, sighing like an old lady; towards the commuting workers making lewd remarks about her, but more importantly her own cowardice preventing her from speaking out, or the thought of having to "get used to it"; towards the prospect of marriage, having to dress herself up to attract (seduce even) men to earn a stable living as a housewife... She reflects on all these habits or tasks an adult woman must complete, and expresses nothing but contempt---despite the complaints all being within her own heart. She could not stop time from converting her into these mindless drones whose only purpose is to fit into the society and perform these acts that rids oneself of any freedom and purity, and this is the main driver of frustration and internal conflict. It is a strong sense of disillusion with the general concept of "Society". Must one give up their childhood innocence to be able to coexist with one another? Thinking about it, a reasonable explanation of Dazai extraditing himself from society despite being more than privileged with the opportunity to live a luxurious life may exactly be this mentality. Nothing short of misanthropism. While sympathizing with these outcries, I reflected upon whether I myself have become one of these drones. These are definitely some of the most sobering words I have read.
"I thought about the hag with a thick makeup sitting next to me on the train this morning. Oh, filthy, filthy. Women are so disgusting. Since I am female myself, I would understand the filth deep inside a woman. I hate it to my bones. The stank after handling goldfish permeated through the entire body; day after day it sticks, no matter how much you attempt to wash it away. Will I be carrying that disgusting stench one day?"[1]
Many times in this story has the narrator openly expressed disgust: towards herself humming cheap songs when tidying up her futon, sighing like an old lady; towards the commuting workers making lewd remarks about her, but more importantly her own cowardice preventing her from speaking out, or the thought of having to "get used to it"; towards the prospect of marriage, having to dress herself up to attract (seduce even) men to earn a stable living as a housewife... She reflects on all these habits or tasks an adult woman must complete, and expresses nothing but contempt---despite the complaints all being within her own heart. She could not stop time from converting her into these mindless drones whose only purpose is to fit into the society and perform these acts that rids oneself of any freedom and purity, and this is the main driver of frustration and internal conflict. It is a strong sense of disillusion with the general concept of "Society". Must one give up their childhood innocence to be able to coexist with one another? Thinking about it, a reasonable explanation of Dazai extraditing himself from society despite being more than privileged with the opportunity to live a luxurious life may exactly be this mentality. Nothing short of misanthropism. While sympathizing with these outcries, I reflected upon whether I myself have become one of these drones. These are definitely some of the most sobering words I have read.
"I thought about the hag with a thick makeup sitting next to me on the train this morning. Oh, filthy, filthy. Women are so disgusting. Since I am female myself, I would understand the filth deep inside a woman. I hate it to my bones. The stank after handling goldfish permeated through the entire body; day after day it sticks, no matter how much you attempt to wash it away. Will I be carrying that disgusting stench one day?"[1]
This narrator is no philosopher or poet. While criticizing the filth that is adulthood, we can also sense a sort of frustration coming from her inability to clearly articulate her points. She frequently remarks how she is hollow, merely a copy of everything and everyone she has seen in her life.
"Young women have no personality; their souls are empty."
She feels like everything she does is an imitation---imitating who? Perhaps the adults whom she despises. Although full of disdain, she has little capability of putting them into words. She does not understand the intricacies of emotions, such as "love". She would have some slimmer of thought, but then, because of her lack of life experiences, let it slip away without taking proper form. "Philosophy's tail" is a particularly nice description, like a mysterious cat whose face we shall never actually see. Much like the thoughts on this blog I suppose.
Thus her problem is fundamentally unsolvable, because she cannot even formulate it. What makes the lady she saw on the train ugly, and the flower she sewed on top of her underwear beautiful? What makes her mother's actions of bowing down to her guests disgusting? Her worries are almost by definition unspeakable, and there are no people so dear to her that she can personally confide with, because she alienates herself through her misanthropy. Thus, she puts on a mask, to cover her awakening conscience, which must be extinguished again shortly.
I suppose all children look forward to growing up, to finally be in control of their lives. And, admittedly I enjoy the privilege of not being treated as an idiot. However, the cost is the necessity to live as a responsible member of the society, to bow down to the norms of the society, and when one finally realizes this fact, one has reached the end of one's childhood years. This is a story about the untimely death of innocence. Although quite long for a story spanning only one uneventful day, the pacing never felt slow, as I follow the racing, desperate struggle of the narrator to escape her dilemma. What is the future of this girl? Will she turn into the lady she so hated, or will she preserve her youth like Dazai?
"Young women have no personality; their souls are empty."
She feels like everything she does is an imitation---imitating who? Perhaps the adults whom she despises. Although full of disdain, she has little capability of putting them into words. She does not understand the intricacies of emotions, such as "love". She would have some slimmer of thought, but then, because of her lack of life experiences, let it slip away without taking proper form. "Philosophy's tail" is a particularly nice description, like a mysterious cat whose face we shall never actually see. Much like the thoughts on this blog I suppose.
Thus her problem is fundamentally unsolvable, because she cannot even formulate it. What makes the lady she saw on the train ugly, and the flower she sewed on top of her underwear beautiful? What makes her mother's actions of bowing down to her guests disgusting? Her worries are almost by definition unspeakable, and there are no people so dear to her that she can personally confide with, because she alienates herself through her misanthropy. Thus, she puts on a mask, to cover her awakening conscience, which must be extinguished again shortly.
I suppose all children look forward to growing up, to finally be in control of their lives. And, admittedly I enjoy the privilege of not being treated as an idiot. However, the cost is the necessity to live as a responsible member of the society, to bow down to the norms of the society, and when one finally realizes this fact, one has reached the end of one's childhood years. This is a story about the untimely death of innocence. Although quite long for a story spanning only one uneventful day, the pacing never felt slow, as I follow the racing, desperate struggle of the narrator to escape her dilemma. What is the future of this girl? Will she turn into the lady she so hated, or will she preserve her youth like Dazai?
"I am a Cinderella without a prince. Do you know where I am, somewhere in Tokyo?"
[1]: I believe that a Chinese translation can be much closer to the source than an English one, so unfortunately you will have to put up with my questionable secondary translation from Chinese back to English here.
ED Discussion 28: Sakura Quest ED1: Freesia by (K)NoW_NAME
Sandal-san is amazing
Sakura Quest is a story about a place, Manoyama, a small rural town somewhere in Japan. How do you tell a story about a place? A story is by definition a telling of events---something must happen. Despite how hard some of the most staunchly slice of life shows may seem to break this definition, Something does happen, if you factor in the minute things. Why would we care about the preparation of a festival in this small village, when this sort of thing happens almost everywhere in Japan? What is so special about this town?
Indeed, this is the elephant in the room, for the tourism board in this show. Working to "save" the town from falling into irrelevance, the tourism board is led by the queen of the Chubakabura kingdom, Yoshino, together with five ministers under her. Given this vague task of revitalization, they must propose events that will bring in profit for the townspeople through tourism. They must sell this town to the people of Japan, and beyond, all the while respecting the livelihood and habits of the local people.
The first, overarching, and repeatedly-thrown question within the show is whether there needs to be any "saving" at all. The team consists of young people, two of which come from the outside. From an external perspective, the declining economy---with the shopping street constantly empty---definitely warrants action, but to the general populace of the town? Perhaps it is best to simply stay as a small, localized community rather than disrupting this peaceful lifestyle. This is an account of the "existential" struggles of these main characters, as they find from within themselves the conviction for this job.
Sanae is the "minister of IT", and helped to design various web applications for the team. Hailing from Tokyo, she moved to Manoyama to start a blog on an ecological lifestyle, yet shuts herself within a house, living just like she did before. It is understandable how she is drawn towards the tourism team---it grants meaning to her work, but is this nebulous desire of wanting to find some purpose enough? In a sense, this hits quite close to home. With the prevalence of IT/tech knowledge and knowhow these days (anyone can pick up some programming language or simple data science through bootcamps etc.), what differentiates me from the vast amounts of budding IT practitioners? The desire is to create something unique, something which contributes in a groundbreaking, or at least "meaningful", fashion.
"That's when I realized: it doesn't have to be me. The world will keep turning without me. Everything suddenly seemed so ridiculous..."
I suppose this is true for a lot of other professions. Is the only way out of this conundrum to be like Kazushi, to learn and perfect a craft to an extent which no one can replicate or replace?
Ririko is the youngest of the team. Interested in the extraterrestrial exotics, she often feels like the unique one. Too unique, in fact, that she finds herself excluded. Much like the legendary dragon of Manoyama, she felt herself banished, shut in a cave because of her eccentricity. We have all had a childhood of fascination (hopefully): whether it be stuff of the legends, superheros, monsters... we wanted them to be real, to brighten up this world whose meaning we may have quite a difficult time grasping as a child. Yet, as we grow up we forget about these, and focus on the reality. To give up the fantastical world---is this the hallmark of growth into an adult? To be able to engage with the world fluently like Yoshino, or to have a mature handle on life as Sanae, do we eventually have to change into them, or can we strike a harmony between our own selves, and the relentless demands of the external?
Erika attempts to run away from her family because she is entranced by the glamour of Tokyo: the fashion, the desserts... compared to the desert of livelihood that is Manoyama, she thinks her life deserves much better. On the other hand, Shiori has never left Manoyama in her life. While it seems that Ushimatsu, the president of the tourism board, is holding the team together, she really is the backbone of every project. Behind her diligence and care lies a deep fascination and love for Manoyama, She genuinely wants to improve her hometown, and the lives of all her friends. The meeting of these two presents a very interesting interface: having never been to the external world, is Shiori in a position to lecture Erika about the importance of her hometown? After all, if Manoyama is so good, why is the population aging, and the town so idle? What is so special about a hometown? As one who admittedly has lost quite some touch with my hometown, this question caught my attention.
Yoshino moved to Tokyo to find a job after graduation, because she thinks that Tokyo is "special". Indeed, Tokyo is very different from a lot of places in Japan, as the capital of Japan, an international city no less. However, after numerous failed attempts, Yoshino came across this job in Manoyama, which turned out to be a mishap. Staying initially out of pity, she discovers the dejected state of the town, and develops a sense of conviction---she decides to devote herself to revive the kingdom of Chupakabura, and fulfill the dream of Ushimatsu. I think we can all agree if she has become "special". If she had stayed in Tokyo, would she have truly been special?
This was the question on the surface of Yoshino's journey, but a more important message is thrown by her determination to save this town. "It takes an outsider and a (youthful) fool to save this country" [1]. To an insider, used to the Manoyama way of life, it is natural to reflexively reject changes, and attempt to label those as foolish, naive children. On the flip side, traditions are established because they are deemed beneficial, at least at the time they were established. Simply applying the thinking process from another place to another is nothing short of naivety...
Across all these threads of thoughts, the setting of Manoyama acts as an overarching connection. Reality often embraces an "Aristotelian" sense of "balance". Is it always good to change? Is it always good to be famous? A famous TV programme's coverage of Manoyama surely brought life into the town, but at the cost of completely distorting what the town is about. A trope of famous musicians' performance brought in a large wave of tourists. Trying to capitalize on this opportunity, Yoshino's crew held a festival to host these tourists. While the tourists did spend much on souvenir and food while in Manoyama, they completely ignored the town's surroundings, Yoshino's hard work on the festival and only thought of the remote location as an inconvenience. I particularly like the latter's depiction: mostly, the message here is that the event brought more harm than good, but the message was not hard sold; I felt that there was room for ambivalence, or rather a sort of inevitability for a small town attempting to be a tourist attraction.
This brings us to the next point: the necessity of the town to become a tourist town. By definition, the board's aim is to attract tourists, and, necessarily, something must be changed to increase the appeal of the town to external visitors, but what? Considering the stance of the local residents, while business is business, do we really need tourists? How much of Manoyama is still Manoyama after these radical changes, and how much of what a tourist sees is the actual Manoyama? As a frequent tourist myself, this story presented a new perspective of tourism to me.
Manoyama is a special place. It is a town which is the interface of antiquity and modernity. It is a town which needs to learn from the outside, but not at the expense of its own culture. It is a town full of old traditions, stories of the livelihood of the settlers, but also a town with a promising generation of innovators. How will the Manoyamans step into modernity, and prevent their town from falling into irrelevance? In the face of the dragon from a foreign land, how will the villagers react? I have raised a ton of questions in this brief exposition, but Sakura Quest at its core is a show which raises many questions without a clear answer. It is a show whose stance is not always clear, but that is the beautiful thing about it. Its queries linger in my mind, inviting me to rethink my role as an outsider. I wish this show would last longer, but the fairy tale of the kingdom of Chupakabura must end.
[1]: This is very probably a non-verbatim quote. I am too lazy to look through all episodes again to find this quote...
"That's when I realized: it doesn't have to be me. The world will keep turning without me. Everything suddenly seemed so ridiculous..."
I suppose this is true for a lot of other professions. Is the only way out of this conundrum to be like Kazushi, to learn and perfect a craft to an extent which no one can replicate or replace?
Ririko is the youngest of the team. Interested in the extraterrestrial exotics, she often feels like the unique one. Too unique, in fact, that she finds herself excluded. Much like the legendary dragon of Manoyama, she felt herself banished, shut in a cave because of her eccentricity. We have all had a childhood of fascination (hopefully): whether it be stuff of the legends, superheros, monsters... we wanted them to be real, to brighten up this world whose meaning we may have quite a difficult time grasping as a child. Yet, as we grow up we forget about these, and focus on the reality. To give up the fantastical world---is this the hallmark of growth into an adult? To be able to engage with the world fluently like Yoshino, or to have a mature handle on life as Sanae, do we eventually have to change into them, or can we strike a harmony between our own selves, and the relentless demands of the external?
Erika attempts to run away from her family because she is entranced by the glamour of Tokyo: the fashion, the desserts... compared to the desert of livelihood that is Manoyama, she thinks her life deserves much better. On the other hand, Shiori has never left Manoyama in her life. While it seems that Ushimatsu, the president of the tourism board, is holding the team together, she really is the backbone of every project. Behind her diligence and care lies a deep fascination and love for Manoyama, She genuinely wants to improve her hometown, and the lives of all her friends. The meeting of these two presents a very interesting interface: having never been to the external world, is Shiori in a position to lecture Erika about the importance of her hometown? After all, if Manoyama is so good, why is the population aging, and the town so idle? What is so special about a hometown? As one who admittedly has lost quite some touch with my hometown, this question caught my attention.
Yoshino moved to Tokyo to find a job after graduation, because she thinks that Tokyo is "special". Indeed, Tokyo is very different from a lot of places in Japan, as the capital of Japan, an international city no less. However, after numerous failed attempts, Yoshino came across this job in Manoyama, which turned out to be a mishap. Staying initially out of pity, she discovers the dejected state of the town, and develops a sense of conviction---she decides to devote herself to revive the kingdom of Chupakabura, and fulfill the dream of Ushimatsu. I think we can all agree if she has become "special". If she had stayed in Tokyo, would she have truly been special?
This was the question on the surface of Yoshino's journey, but a more important message is thrown by her determination to save this town. "It takes an outsider and a (youthful) fool to save this country" [1]. To an insider, used to the Manoyama way of life, it is natural to reflexively reject changes, and attempt to label those as foolish, naive children. On the flip side, traditions are established because they are deemed beneficial, at least at the time they were established. Simply applying the thinking process from another place to another is nothing short of naivety...
Across all these threads of thoughts, the setting of Manoyama acts as an overarching connection. Reality often embraces an "Aristotelian" sense of "balance". Is it always good to change? Is it always good to be famous? A famous TV programme's coverage of Manoyama surely brought life into the town, but at the cost of completely distorting what the town is about. A trope of famous musicians' performance brought in a large wave of tourists. Trying to capitalize on this opportunity, Yoshino's crew held a festival to host these tourists. While the tourists did spend much on souvenir and food while in Manoyama, they completely ignored the town's surroundings, Yoshino's hard work on the festival and only thought of the remote location as an inconvenience. I particularly like the latter's depiction: mostly, the message here is that the event brought more harm than good, but the message was not hard sold; I felt that there was room for ambivalence, or rather a sort of inevitability for a small town attempting to be a tourist attraction.
This brings us to the next point: the necessity of the town to become a tourist town. By definition, the board's aim is to attract tourists, and, necessarily, something must be changed to increase the appeal of the town to external visitors, but what? Considering the stance of the local residents, while business is business, do we really need tourists? How much of Manoyama is still Manoyama after these radical changes, and how much of what a tourist sees is the actual Manoyama? As a frequent tourist myself, this story presented a new perspective of tourism to me.
Manoyama is a special place. It is a town which is the interface of antiquity and modernity. It is a town which needs to learn from the outside, but not at the expense of its own culture. It is a town full of old traditions, stories of the livelihood of the settlers, but also a town with a promising generation of innovators. How will the Manoyamans step into modernity, and prevent their town from falling into irrelevance? In the face of the dragon from a foreign land, how will the villagers react? I have raised a ton of questions in this brief exposition, but Sakura Quest at its core is a show which raises many questions without a clear answer. It is a show whose stance is not always clear, but that is the beautiful thing about it. Its queries linger in my mind, inviting me to rethink my role as an outsider. I wish this show would last longer, but the fairy tale of the kingdom of Chupakabura must end.
[1]: This is very probably a non-verbatim quote. I am too lazy to look through all episodes again to find this quote...
