Brain-dumpage for further reference

[petronia]

The problem (or the thing, at any rate) about reading series all mixed up like this is that one starts to see correspondences, and by that I don't mean that Sasaki Kojirou is from Echizen. *g* No... Vagabond in a lot of ways is a kind of extreme, shounen manga ethos at its most stripped-down and terrible; makes you see sports manga (and even, say, Naruto) for the sublimations they are. Not that sublimation isn't a good thing. Sublimation into anything from board games to company-man fervour is what keeps latter-day society going, or we'd all be spilling our innards out onto sandy beaches instead of playing PS2. You know how I say people go see Gladiator-the-film for the same reason that Romans went to see gladiators at the Colosseum, the only forward motion involved is the invention of CG? Well, indeed. Motto Tsuyoku Nare laid bare is basically a monkeytestosterone urge to bash in the other ape's brainpan with a rock, and it's a testament to the monkeytestosterone-ity of humanity at large that it can produce such beauty in the eyes of the beholder (me in particular). But pointy metal things to balls is not such a bad progression.

Halfway between Vagabond and TeniPuri you get Peace Maker. In passing, the source of the illogical Japanese fascination with the Shinsengumi (because it is rather illogical): something to do with mono no aware. The last functional flowering of a certain beauty. It's still beautiful now in obsolescence, but Japanese aesthetics is never about superfluity. ...Mind you it took people a century or so post-Shinsengumi to figure out that it was obsolete. Once they did, though, they looked back and found a metaphor... Oshima pursues the train of thought to its stern logical end: the beauty is destructive to those it seduces and thus must be destroyed, or no progress can be made. (Refer Mishima's Kinkakuji, which is the individual counterpoint to the societal view.) The bishounen is to the Shinsengumi as the Shinsengumi is to Bakumatsu Japan. No joke, but of course he had to go and drown it in sex.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but Okita Souji really is the last hurrah of the bishounen ideal, isn't he?

Want to finish my GB drabbles. Want to write drabbles for PMK, for that matter, except I'm really not far enough into the series as yet, and anyhow I'll probably be fabulously wanky about it and call them "netsuke" or something. Have been storing up a certain type of tanbi-wank that hasn't been employed properly since Maidens, and am dying for a series to dump it all on. Pity the fandom if I ever manage to drag my arse down to Villa Maria in order to rent Juuni Kokki. (No, no, wait wait wait I can be even wankier than this - "fuchigashira". Will someone please shut me up and tell me to get back to paid work? Thank you.) Will try again for manga today. Possibly kibishii ojisan made the person who took out the Peace Maker tankoubon bring it back in three days too.

Comments

[tsutanai.livejournal.com]

I don't know that Okita really is, though: I mean, Mishima post-dates, what with his decline of the angel and all that.... And how much of the image is the *now* image of Okita versus the *then* image?

I mean, the thing that bugs me about people talking about the Yoshitsune (buck-toothed tho' he was)-Okita sort of complex is that it denies the Tamemoto-Musashi sort of characters, which are (rarely) depicted as tragic/frail/doomed. (Even when they end up killing themselves against pillars full of arrows.) I don't know that authors should spend so much time emphasizing one without contextualizing: how rare(ified) is the image? When does it pop up? Why? What are the precedents?

(Yes, we see why I'm in a history department now.)

As for Vagabond, I think you have to look at it not just in terms of when the manga is produced, but when Yoshikawa Eiji was writing the novel it's based on (and you should see what he did to my Taira! My poor Taira!). We had Ganryuu in the taiga drama on Saturday here, and the production design there was very aristo-versus-proletariat. I mean, even beyond the costumes, killing with a stick? (I knew I should have bought that book on "the real history, such as there is, of Musashi" when I saw it in the Ueno museum. Curses.)

And Shinsengumi.... That was my original dream-dissertation right there. Because I think the image has definitely changed over time, definitely. But that, Horatio, requires a hella lot more jidaimono novel reading on my part.

Notice the lack of complaining. XD (Except that I have no time! None!)

(Prof has suggested, semi-seriously, that I someday study not only the history of the reception of the Genji, but that of mappo and mono no aware. I think Motoori has more to do with that than one might suspect, but there are a lot of political treatises to read on that before I can be sure.)

[tsutanai.livejournal.com]

Ugh, for "political treatises" read "poetry treatises."

Not that they don't overlap (pace Marra), of course. Right. Back to the nuns.

[luckykitty.livejournal.com]

i <3 you and your wankery! i'll never be able to keep up, smarts-wise, but <3

[petronia.livejournal.com]

Oh, the novel is hugely aristo-vs-prole. So are the movies. The manga... the manga seems to be telling a different story.

(I think I'm going to have to call this entire Sasaki Kojirou arc the O-Ren Ishii Flashback. I expect when we cut back to Musashi we'll find him sitting under a tree and wiggling his toes. XD;;)

Does Mishima count as bishounen? XD Because I didn't mean ideal qua ideal, that of course is still alive and well or why the hell am I reading this schtuff (which wouldn't exist for me to read otherwise), but ideal-incarnate-in-historical-character, almost in a pedantic sense. Like Lives of the Saints, except Lives of the Bishounen instead. 'Cos I wanna know the precedents too. There was the Sengoku one, Ranmaru...

Methinks the Musashi-type characters are not so much denied by commentators as not paid so much attention to, because their fascination operates in a way that's more immediately comprehensible. Or, if we want to be Western about it, more readily related to an Occidental heroic archetype.

[tsutanai.livejournal.com]

If we're ideal-incarnating in the historical characters, then we're definitely limited to pre-Restoration, no? I mean, we haven't really gotten any archetypical characters since then. So in a small part that seems kind of historical accident, as an answer to "why Shinsengumi"?

But if it's just archetypes as a whole.... Well, looking at Kaori Yuki, but how does her typos place against others? (And I suspect that Kaori Yuki and doujinshika Japan-over owe a huge debt to Mishima, but, well. Hm, that guy who's name I'm forgetting and it's driving me nuts but there's a prize named after him and he did horror stories often, too.)

I mean, we don't have too many historical archetypes running around post-restoration, do we? Even of the Musashi-mold? (Makes me think, reluctantly, of Eliade.) Well, hm, there's the generic yakuza I suppose (and they do have an active hand in their image now and again). Aught else? (Still not your Lives of the Nantoka, though, that.)

Regarding the commentators, well, it's not so much the ignoring than the elevation of the Doomed Bishounen as The Japanese Ideal (Man, Those Japanese Are Unique!), which I object to. (And, I mean, Tenjin was doomed, but I don't think I've ever seen him bishounen. And somewhere, a bell rings, and a mangaka has gotten an idea....)

I suppose I'll need to break down and buy Vagabond instead of just tachiyomi-ing as I can, as I have been. Foo. These manga and their exceedingly longness.

[tsutanai.livejournal.com]

Actually.... As for origins, I bet you it's the Heike monogatari. When the warrior government in Muromachi (perhaps as a cultural salvo against the court in Yoshino?) started looking to the Taira as Warrior-Courtiers (and they blackened their teeth! Atsumori!). Even though in the common text, Yoshitsune is mentioned as small and buck-toothed....

The Ashikaga, it is said, not only looked at themselves as the True Heirs to Yoritomo, but as also the heirs of Sanemori (I've been told), excellent diplomat and culturati, who prayed that he might die if the Taira were doomed... and did....

You know, I bet that's it.

Hmm....

[tsutanai.livejournal.com]

(Most commonly translated-and-annotated text, that is. I just forget the name of the variant. Said to be highly courtly.)

[petronia.livejournal.com]

My impression is that Mishima isn't the cultural influence we're inclined to think he is. An end-product of the culture, certainly, but. And Yuki Kaori acts so often as a Japanese filter on Western aesthetics that... well.

(Edogawa Ranpo...?)

Mind you there's something to the Unique Japanese Ideal bit - but I rather think it's neither the physical beauty of the bishounen, or the fact that they're doomed, but the fact that they're uniformly deadly. Neither Chinese nor Greek were specifically into Beautiful Boys Who Kill, And Are Killed In Their Turn. But to the Japanese it's a warrior archetype.

I bet you're right, and it is the Heike.

[tsutanai.livejournal.com]

Re: Yuki Kaori: actually, I think that's what Mishima is as well, honestly. (I mean, before his final years, he seems to have been a fairly Westernizing figure. Well, to me anyway; those plays of his, for example.) I suspect that in post-war stuff, certainly you can't really eke out this "Western" from the "Japanese" in the depiction of the Pretty, Bad, And Dangerous To Know. Oshima's Gohatto, to me, really owes a debt to Mishima-ish stuff (if we want to remove the man's works from being exemplars of their kind). Certainly it's not divorced from the gothic (to my view).

And, no, the guy I'm thinking of his initials are AJ? Something? Died horribly young, I think. (Sigh, this is going to drive me nuts.)

I'm definitely going to have to think more on this archetype. Hm. Perhaps, even before kabuki (and the plays of Soga monogatari that combined wagoto with aragoto), Muromachi war-chronicles are the place to look.

[petronia.livejournal.com]

Oshima's debt is certain - stop me before I drag David Bowie into this discussion. XD (Actually I do wonder if I'm not overthinking, and it really is about subverting machismo as the film critics would have it or something boring like that. Given that if you're not contextualising Gohatto with a priori knowledge, the settei comes across to the blank-slate viewer like it may as well be 16th century, and not bushido's last dying gasp at all. But then, no one says a film has to be about one thing at once. XD

In the end, though, this is the only way I can get Gohatto to make sense in my head. And it does very much strike me as a film that's supposed to make sense on some level, unlike, say, a lotta Lynch.)

...Oh, I know the guy you mean! The one who wrote the really weird long book! ("The tenor! Y'know, the Italian tenor!")

[tsutanai.livejournal.com]

I was wrong on the personal name, but Akutagawa.

Actually, surely someone's done work on the gothic in Japanese literature? Surely? (If not, what are we paying those lit people for?) Because that's tangential a bit to our Archetype, but I think in terms of modern depictions, it definitely flavors.

I have to wonder how much a series like Peace Maker Kurogane can assume in terms of what the audience knows about the settei. (Musashi ends every episode with a history/geography/Come Visit Senic Ganryuu! or wherever, spot, but you can't expect that sort of thing on commercial tv, now can you. Yet, wasn't Twelve Kingdoms NHK? I forget these things.) But it's a kid's show, right? Imagine if I were to get my history from spaghetti westerns.... Well, I'd get something, but still. (And take something like that Space Hakkenden series. As much as I twitch when Sosuke becomes a talking dog, and I think that was Sosuke, how much do people really "know" about the series, among the kids in the audience? Aside from the fact that probably this guy wasn't a talking dog, etc.)

Layers within layers of intent and interpretation. Oy.

[canis-m.livejournal.com]

12 Kokki wants YOU! And your wankage.

[tsutanai.livejournal.com]

Does it really want wankage? Because, if so, I have books on the rites of Mount Tai in the Tang period.... (Heh, thought not.)

Well, Sabina's wankage is superior to mine, anyway.

[tsutanai.livejournal.com]

Not fair, really: according to this bibliographic database, the "gothic" in Japan starts with Tales of Moonlight and Rain and ends with Izumi Kyouka, with nothing in between. (So obviously, she says optimistically, they're using a different term, right? Right.)

[petronia.livejournal.com]

Oh, the Rashomon fellow. (I was hoping that you'd know more about studies on the gothic in Japanese literature than I do. ^^; The genre's not very widely translated, which is frustrating, because so many of the manga I read run off that tradition implicitly or explicitly. Motoni Modoru often seems to be paying hommage to specificities I know nothing about, and it has to be pre-war lit, because otherwise why fill her speech bubbles with kanji for words like "wagamama"? All nicely furigana'd by order of the editor, of course, because after all it's shoujo manga, and thank goodness.)

The kids won't know, I'm assuming. But even Sesame Street had Monsterpiece Theatre, and that for a purported audience of American toddlers. *g* The creators have to amuse themselves, if nothing else. And if any of the little children evince the slightest soupçon of interest, all they'd have to do is put off homework another half hour and watch the jidaigeki that's on afterward, or something... That being said I'm not sure Peace Maker really is a very kiddie show. 12-14, I would've said - there's a *lot* of blood - and by that age you'd have to be pretty uninterested not to know who the Shinsengumi are. In which case you wouldn't be watching.

[tsutanai.livejournal.com]

Post-war popular lit, I'm sometimes told, is Not A Fit Field for one in early Japanese history. Because, um. Well, different areas/eras/wot. I do know a little, but it's piecemeal from what I read (because I adore the v. modern stuff as far as novels go, which references.... You get the idea). There are others, but I was thinking of Akutagawa there. (Like there's the... um... guy with the... um... drat.) But perhaps I have a winter break project now. XD

(Myself, I love reading mysteeeeeeeeerious stories set in early Meiji, like Mushishi and now Tokyo ibun. By our friend the Twelve Kingdoms author, that one. So I do poke about the classics in my "copious spare time.")

Care to tell me more about Motoni Modoru et. al.?

[tsutanai.livejournal.com]

For "post-war", of course, I mean "post-Bakumatsu." Or, vis my advisor, "post-Sekigahara". (Depending on your field, your wars differ XD;; )

[petronia.livejournal.com]

Japanese Gothic: teh p0w3r of Google, (http://www.findarticles.com/cf_0/m2220/1_42/63819091/p1/article.jhtml?term=) and I hope that link works. ^_^;;

(All right, I found the book I was thinking of. Dogura Magura, by Yumeno Kyusaku. Apparently there's no English translation. I know there's a French one, though, because it was selling in Gallimard for 70$CAN. *insert own epithet here*)

Motoni Modoru is a sometime BeBoy mangaka, of all things, and is perhaps the most Gothic mangaka I know of (by the classic psychosexual romantic-mediaeval horror definition), except when she isn't. You get doppelgangers and werewolves, and schoolboys sexually torturing each other and hanging themselves, and vampiric BL that's actually, like, good. The except when she isn't is an important clause, though.

[naanima.livejournal.com]

It's too early to go all the way with the wankage yet, but if what you say is true (or what Oshima insist on) of the idea that the bishounen to the Shinsengumi is that as the Shinsengumi is to Bakumatsu Japan. Then, Okita Souji might possibly be the only 'true' bishounen ideal.

Hmm. The only other person that seem to fit into this category for me would be Griffiths (but then, he isn't a 'boy' anymore, so that might be mote).

And putting 'PeaceMaker' between 'PoT' and 'Vangabond', for some reason send me into helpless giggles.

[canis-m.livejournal.com]

But do these rites involve unicorns?

[tsutanai.livejournal.com]

Nope. (Toldya) Just books written in gold on jade and buried, I'm afraid. If I remember right.

[tsutanai.livejournal.com]

Ooh, tell her I want to read it. Like, um, now actually. (I think the concept of mono no aware is old, but that Motoori named it, or something. Why am I a continent away from his Kojiki-den? And his Genji commentary? Why?)

Sung novellas... ooh, haven't read them yet.

Oh, and of course you know about the (medieval Japanese) stories where homosexual lust in the monastaries lead to death and enlightenment, right? Of course, thought so.

[petronia.livejournal.com]

It's not so much bishounen-as-a-class to the Shinsengumi, but the particular bishounen of Oshima's movie (who isn't Okita). And yes, I'd say Griffiths counts. It's more a question of function/image than how old he actually is.

But Peace Maker does indeed come between Vagabond and PoT, both thematically and temporally. *g* Someone should really write a short study of the occurrence of historical in-jokes in contemporary-settei shounen manga. TeniPuri refers Musashi, Slam Dunk refers Sengoku, and I'll bet there's some soccer manga or something out there that refers Heike Monogatari.

[tsutanai.livejournal.com]

...And Naruto references a kabuki play and old novel (vis. that link Tin posted a while back, and of which I can only find the three volumes of an over 20 vol. set in this country, and that in a manuscript collection--at least, I think that was the novel).

But, dude, think of the children!sheer amount of archive work needed! And the references in TeniPuri and Slam Dunk are fairly glancing... you'd need a good eye. (And does anyone have all the manga that'd be needed for this? Sigh.)

Otherwise, I'd be all over it like... hm... well, like something that's all over something else.

[(Anonymous)]

[blockquote]...and I'll bet there's some soccer manga or something out there that refers Heike Monogatari.[/blockquote]

Erm, Captain Tsubasa?
(Zetsuai/Bronze should NOT be brought into the equation, I suppose...?)

- anonymus ignoramus