So, I would like you to meet: http://coffee-spoons.curry-fury.com/

Look how shiny and pretty and new he is! I will be blogging about LUV with him from now on. To the 5(?) or so people who read my blog, update link as you see fit.

This entry is also cross-posted at THAT Animeblog. Impz recruited me over the past weekend and kindly introduced me to a number of bloggers on #AB, all of whom have been quirky and memorable in their own ways. Future anime editorials will be posted both here and over at THAT. Although I will update this blog more often with my own thoughts and opinions on a variety of Japanese media in which my entries will be a lot more free with the crazies and the personal because the mentality is –> my blog, my comfort, my freedom of expression. Now to get to the topic at hand.

Originally, I was scared that the series wasn’t going to get subbed because it was so radically different from mainstream anime. So I was ecstatic when I found out that Ureshii and Froth-Bite has picked up the series. The amount of time and effort they put into their work is remarkable and it really shows through the excellent quality and wonderful subs in Kaiba. A big thank you to the people over at Ureshii and F-B subs. And now onto the spoils of their hard labor.

Short summary: The series is about a boy who wakes up in a strange world without any memories of who he is or how he ended up there. The only clue to his lost memories is a locket with the picture of a girl inside. This series has been described as a romantic sci-fi. I think it’s the best thing since I discovered Nutella.

Kaiba really took the concept of classism and ran with it. The stated facts are: the rich live above the clouds, the poor live underground. Now what about that ominous purple cloud separating them? A cloud is a cloud, a cloud is not a wall because a wall is something that is impenetrable. But a cloud is just water droplets in the air, just soft wetness on your skin. It is not a physical obstruction. But it’s still there as a perceived entity taking up space in your awareness along with all of your doubts and reservations. Now how do we get through this meta-barrier?

Villager X proposes that they fly there on a hot air balloon. But their makeshift, patchwork hot air balloon is what it is, just hot air, hasty goals, and clumsy dreams. There is no point in making it to the surface and then forgetting who you are or why you wanted to go there in the first place.

Let’s see if Warp will have more luck with that in the future.

In Japanese culture, purple signifies royalty and wealth, and is worn in different shades by the various characters who chase after Warp. During the scenes where they are in the club, the purple is volatile and so unnatural when meshed with green that it violates the eyes, forces you to see a world in infrared, a stark contrast to the earthly colors of the underground (clay grey, mud brown). The color schema here suggests that the rich are the abnormal beings because they are the ones who seek to bypass death and violate the order of nature. Whereas the poor live underground, so close to the earth, among the mud and dirt, that they themselves are extensions of nature. But beware of this natural vs unnatural binary because the world of Kaiba as a whole functions on very different standards and values from our world, intentionally so in order to encourage out-of-the-box reflection on our own societal norms. Therefore what is unnatural to us, may actually be ordinary to them, and that’s what makes the prospect of it so horrifying. That something so cold and so UGLY (like the harvesting of human bodies, like Neo-slavery) could be normalized.

I found the scene with the faces on the wheels extremely disturbing. Because of an individual’s debts, the whole family unit must collectively suffer for it. The face of the adolescent girl who said, “I want to fall in love,” the lack of privacy and the constant struggle to talk over each other and be heard, the future of little Momo who can’t even speak yet, all of these individual dreams and ambitions have been compromised by of the lack of a physical human body to carry them out.

My initial reaction to the people who shook their heads and walked away from the wheel, the same people who decided not to put big brother’s memories back in his body because he was a burden on them, was that they were cold fuckers. But then I finished the episode. And then I mentally kicked myself, really hard, for being such a high-minded bitch. It’s so easy to look down on those who are lower than you and condemn them for lacking in human compassion and empathy, for being something less than human. It’s so easy to ignore their circumstances and say that they deserve their plight because they don’t have the luxury of being generous or kind when there is a whole network of institutions in place that create these horrible circumstances. It’s not that people don’t give a fuck, it’s because they don’t know how they could possible help with their own hands tied behind their backs. People are just trying to make do with their own lot, and it must be hard when you live in a giant mud pie and the rich are after your body.

This girl is the epitome of perpetual discontent. She has the nice body, she wears the cool colors, but she’s still unhappy. Why is that? Does her discontentment hint at the problematics of wealth and beauty, that maybe those two things don’t exactly equate to happiness? Or maybe she’s just a greedy little girl who doesn’t acknowledge there are so many other people worse off than her, because at least she has the freedom to pursue the things that makes her happy even if she keeps failing. I think it’s interesting that her pursuit of happiness entails the changing of bodies. Her failure thus far indicates that her discontentment transcends the physical, that’s it’s something inherent within her and it follows her around as she keeps trying on different bodies. It’s vexing and heartbreaking and it’s all in your head.

The notion of being able to preserve memories and transfer them into different bodies is profoundly interesting to me. The idea that you will not end with death, that something so fundamental to you will live on after the rest is gone, will still exist in this world without the prospect of an afterlife. What a mind-fuck.

I give Kaiba two thumbs up for being able to convey and facilitate the multiple discourses that I have barely touched on in just the first episode. Looking forward to the rest of the series. I am not an episodic blogger, so I won’t write on every episode. But I will most likely post more editorials on Kaiba in the future. Thank you for reading. Do comment.

hiroki endo – hang

an iron hook / we had to fasten him with a hook / we had to tell him something / with a hook / while the dirty floating bundle / fell / drop / by / drop / from where the / missing / would fling a stone upon us

First of all, thank you for the warm welcomes from everyone who commented on my first post. Looking forward to getting to know the anime blogging community.

Secondly, Hiroki Endo IS GOD.

And that pretty much sums up my reactions and feelings about his works. But for the sake of proper blogging, I should probably elaborate.

I reread “Hang”, one of Endo’s short stories from Tanpenshu over this past weekend. Now I am going to rave about it.

The cast of characters in this short comprises of school girl Megumi who might be missing more than a few screws, perpetually exasperated Shokichi who gets dragged along for the ride against his will and is taken advantage of in every situation [and probably likes it], and Megumi’s brother (or at least his consciousness) who lives on after his suicide attempt in a contraption that looks conspicuously like a rice cooker.

The world that they live in violates one’s sensibility because of the numerous surreal elements that contrast with “our” world, and yet it still bears the same inherent flaws. Giant TVs hanging from the sky announce disjointed reports of the progress on cable installation and repairs, relocation of the citizens, population control, and government endorsement of contraceptions. Throughout the short story, the trio travels from one cable station to another, striving to find “the end of the world”. The plot is purposely underdeveloped and incomplete, no backstory is given on how the world got to be in that condition nor is there any background information on the characters. The lack of history highlights the immediacy by which the characters live. There is a sense of repressed hysteria and muted despair throughout the manga as the panels nonchalantly jump from the scene of a ruined city to the setting of a cozy hotel room. Cue hot, neurotic sex, cue anxiety and ambivalence, cue arms and legs and bodies overwhelmed and trembling while facilitating various philosophical discourses with their deceptively simple dialogues and capricious decisions.

The big revelation comes at the end [SPOILER – SPOILER] after the masterfully subtle build up, as Shokichi flies Megumi over the edge of the world in a stolen jet. The sight that we are presented with is horrifying and beautiful and devastating and wonderful all at once, impossibly breathtaking to say the least (taking into account that it’s depicted in the limited medium of a manga panel).

Picture this: The world is just a oversize mass of land being suspended in midair by cable wires. The government obsesses over population control because if there are too many people then the mass would be offset from the center of gravity and that would put the world in danger of tipping over and falling into a literal nothingness. And heaven, in this strange world, is simply (definitely, unquestionably) the point from which the world hangs.

Endo’s ability to depict the universality of the human experience in narratives that subverts the conventional and redeems the overrated is what makes me beholden to him for the overwhelming experience of simply reading his work.

I am scared of so many things. I’m scared that I won’t be able to keep up with my school work. I’m scared that I am not fit for college, that this really isn’t for me because I don’t even like reading or writing or any of this academic bullshit and maybe I’m just deluding myself into staying here because I am scared to consider the alternatives. I’m scared that even if I were to somehow make it past all of this and graduate from college, that in the end I would realize that none of this toil and suffering was worth anything and I would still find myself out on the streets, cold and hungry and miserable. I’m scared that I am not competent or efficient enough to compete with others because I am so sure that I am somehow inherently defective and inferior and therefore life will weed me out and leave me in the dust. All of these conditions that a person has to live with, this constant, painful awareness of one’s own existence, it’s too much and it’s so hard and most of the time I am scared shitless. But none of these things can be helped. Everyone deals with these uncertainties, everyone grapples with their own inadequacies and struggles to live a life that they find most bearable and fulfilling alongside [not in spite of] their insecurities.

Despite all of the uncertainties, the literal hanging doom above their heads, all of the sadness and the insanity carried over from the stricken past, people will keep on fucking, keep on struggling to understand their existence and all the conditions that comes with it, keep on failing and hurting and despairing, but ultimately they will keep on living.

“Hang” leaves behind this luminous sadness that’s profoundly uplifting in its ability to be violently thought-provoking and simultaneously kind with its gentle reaffirmations of a life worth living.

Hiroki Endo is a prodigious storyteller and wonderful artist. I am humbled and chastened by my reading experience. Highly recommended.

]]> http://itsubun.wordpress.com/2008/04/21/hiroki-endo-hang/feed/ 4 itsubun endo 01 endo 02 endo 04 http://itsubun.wordpress.com/2008/04/17/moving-in/ http://itsubun.wordpress.com/2008/04/17/moving-in/#comments Thu, 17 Apr 2008 07:55:27 +0000 itsubun http://itsubun.wordpress.com/?p=14 ]]>

Just finished tinkering with the various design options of wordpress, which are actually quite limited and disappointing. But maybe that has more to do with the fact that I’m not very computer savvy so things like web design and HTML coding intimidate the hell out of me. I was actually going to wait awhile before I posted my first entry because I haven’t figured out what my objectives for this blog are. But the blog felt depressingly empty, like a new house without any furnitures. So I went ahead and wrote up this non-entry to fill in the blankness and make this cyberspace a little bit more cozy.

One of the anime that I will definitely be blogging about is Kaiba (from Masaaki Yuasa, director of Kemonozume). I have been looking forward to this anime ever since I read Bateszi’s entry, written back in March and watched the 15 second teaser he kindly linked to.

My taste in anime have always tended towards the series that are marginalized from the limelight of mainstream anime due to their deviation from the criterion of fan service and consumer demands. I have a soft spot for series like Princess Tutu, Honey & Clover, and Welcome to the NHK! These underdogs are often overlooked and underhyped because of the unconventional subject matters that they deal with. Apparently fairy tale mythology, college life, and hikikomori aren’t hot topics that would attract a large audience. Understandable. Different folks, different strokes. Idealistically, I want to say that no anime series is better than another and that each has its own flaws and merits, but that’s a loaded statement that I can’t and wouldn’t want to stand by.

Besides Kaiba, I am also hoping to get into Dennou Coil, which I know is last season’s anime. I never got around to watching it while it was airing due to lack of time and will. I’ve heard so many good things about it, but I’m afraid that my friends might have overhyped it for me. I hope I won’t be disappointed. From all that I’ve heard and read, it seems like it would be worthwhile to delve into.

And… that will conclude my ramblings for this first post. Sorry for the lack of structure and coherency. Next post will be more focused. Thank you for reading and happy anime viewing.