OKAZAKI Kyoko is a new favorite on my list of women authors for josei manga. River’s Edge is a stark look at contemporary Japan and the emptiness and unreality that characterizes life in the barren suburbs of modernity.

Told through the focalizing narrator, Haruna, the manga plays out as she becomes friendly with a group of teenagers, whose lives intersect through the harrowing consequences of their individual choices and actions. What I find most refreshing about this manga is that it intentionally scrapes away all the gloss and glitter that are usually layered on in so many shoujo and josei manga. The drawing style is intentionally cluttered with an extreme attention to detail so as to emphasize the decay of modern Japan in the common settings that we see in everyday life: classrooms in disarray, dilapidated buildings, the spidery cracks creeping through every solid surface, and the very sight of death itself when it confronts us in its inescapable truth.

The major themes of the manga address the anxieties and psychological issues of the youth growing up in Japanese society where superficiality and violence are sold as mass commodities. Yamada is an attractive boy whose heavily-guarded secret is his homosexuality, which he hides by maintaining a sham relationship with a girl whose insecurities and neediness ultimately leads to tragedy. So often used as a convenient plot-device in yaoi manga, homosexuality is finally addressed here in its full complexity as Yamada faces not only shame and social exile by his community, but his true feelings are forcefully repressed and warped into cruelty as he mistreats his girlfriend due to his own frustrations and resentments. Here, the role of the male love interest, who is usually presented to us as Prince Charming, is subverted and what we get instead is a boy who is frequently a victim of malicious bullying and consequently has grown into a very callous and unsympathetic individual.

After being rescued by Haruna from her boyfriend’s relentless bullying, Yamada takes her to an abandoned plot where the grass grows wild and where another one of his precious secrets dwelt. The secret is revealed to be the skeleton of an unidentified corpse. Haruna and Yamada’s blank stares as they gaze upon the corpse perfectly convey the sense of unreality that permeates the entire manga. Yamada offhandedly states, “I found it last fall. Back then there was still some flesh on it.” This is the only acknowledgement that what they see before them used to be a real human being. Haruna’s private thoughts illuminate the alienation that has found concrete form in the sight of the skeleton.

Another person who shares their secret is Yoshihara, who works as a model and television actress. Yoshihara’s physical beauty (her seductive eyes, long legs, and slender body) masks the ugliness of her eating disorder, bulimia. During lunch hour, Yoshihara steals away to binge on copious amounts of food only to purge all of it afterward inside of the girl’s bathroom. Through her character, we see the paradoxical nature of the pressures that teenage girls face in wanting to be beautiful and desirable to others while at the same time maintaining the false impression that they can somehow embody these standards effortlessly, without complaining or speaking the truth about their personal hell.

But perhaps the most pitiful character in the manga is Yamada’s girlfriend, Tajima. Unable to get through to Yamada, Tajima becomes desperate for his attention. She guilts him into taking her on dates and attempts to fill in the silences with awkward chatter. At the end of one of their dates, Yamada loses his temper and bluntly tells her that he is sick of her always talking about herself. This sets off a chain of events in which Tajima becomes more and more delusional toward her relationship with Yamada. In one of the most eerie scenes of the manga, Yamada obsessively knits a sweater in class and proudly tells her friends that it’s for Yamada, lying that he keeps pestering her for one. Her unfocused eyes and obsession with carrying out her duties as a girlfriend are a product of his neglect and mistreatment of her. Unable to communicate with or understand the person who she cares most about, Tajima becomes frantic and obsessed with maintaining the sham relationship as it is her only connection with Yamada. She blames Haruna for trying to steal Yamada away, completely oblivious to the real reason as to why Yamada cannot return her feelings. This misunderstanding grows into a deep-rooted hatred as Tajima is forced to stand by and watch her boyfriend become more intimate with Haruna. The climax of the novel ends with Tajima burning herself alive after sneaking inside of Haruna’s room and setting fire to it. Her charred corpse becomes another unreality unto itself. The tragedy is Yamada’s statement afterward, in which he confesses to Haruna that he likes Tajima now that she is dead more than he ever liked her while she was still alive.

Unable to touch one another’s lives, to affect or change another human being in any significant way, the children continue on in their apathy. What does it mean when a life has been lost without leaving even the smallest impression on another person? Should we judge the life that has been lost? Or the people left behind who feel nothing in the face of such loss?

This manga reminds me of the artistic works of Chris Burden. Burden is a performance artist whose philosophy is that art is something that puts ideas into circulation in an unexpected way. His performances include:

• Shoot – in which he instructs a friend to shoot at him in full view of a room-full of spectators

• Trans-Fixed – in which his hands were nailed down to a Volkswagen Beetle, as he laid on top of it facing up in a position of crucifixion, the car was pushed out of the garage and the engine revved for 2 minutes before being pushed back in

• My personal favorite is Doomed – in which Burden laid motionless in a museum gallery under a slanted sheet of glass with a visible clock running nearby. As the hours ticked past, Burden did not move, drink or eat anything. He pissed and shat himself, yet still laid there in his own filth. Many people came to see the crazy antics of the shock artist. However, it was not until 45 hours later, when a museum guard finally placed a pitcher of water within Burden’s reaching distance. Only then, did Burden get up, smashed the glass, and took a hammer to the clock, thus ending the piece. Unbeknownst to the museum owners and guests, Chris was prepared to remain in that position until someone interfered in some way with the piece.

Chris Burden’s performances are commentaries on passive spectatorship. It was only after Doomed did he come to realize that his fans and spectators are willing to watch him die without ever raising a hand in protest or making any attempts to stop him from hurting himself.

With the explosion of multimedia in a globalized society, the line between fantasy and reality blurs. But, as Okazaki Kyoko and Chris Burden have demonstrated through their respective works, we need to re-evaluate our relationship with media and its effects on our perception of reality. What does it mean for us to exist in this post-modernity in which alienation and apathy are endemic and internalized through the practices of passive spectatorship (a.k.a sitting there and absorbing everything that is thrown at us): television which keeps us enthralled and passive, magazines that perpetuated impossible standards of beauty, violent videogames (Call of Duty 4), porn that encourages violence toward women (Rapelay)



Yoshihara Yuki‘s works differ from mainstream shoujo manga and bears its own distinctive style even within the josei genre due to the mangaka’s drunkenly blunt sense of humor and her clever manipulation of the gender dynamics between her female heroines and their love interests. Her protagonists are outspoken, aggressive, and unabashedly sexual in the pursuit of their romantic interests. They do not bother to put up a front of being docile or coy in their intentions. Their antics are hilarious. They steal their lover’s underwear, they talk dirty without being sexy about it, they are loud about wanting sex and can’t be bothered to beat around the bushes, they stalk their love interests and terrorize them with their monstrous libidos, and still they’re so much fun to read about that I can’t get through a chapter of any of her works without nearly bursting my gut from laughing so hard.

“Yoru no Bannin” does a wonderful job of showcasing Yoshihara’s style and philosophy in a bite-size one-shot that the reader can easily digest. Gotou Maya is an office worker who is struggling to keep up with her professional responsibilities, but often finds that due to her own lack of experience and incompetency she has to stay over time in order not to fall behind on her work. Staying late at the office in the evening, she encounters a security guard, whom she creatively names, “Mr. Guard”. He chastises her for being an inconvenience because his own job requires that he close down the company office and turn off all the lights but he cannot do so with her there. Their bantering usually leads to very comical scenes of him kicking her out of the office and her seething on the streets. Their bitter relationship changes when after an especially hard day at the office Gotou once again finds herself having to work over time. Only on this special evening, Mr. Guard shows up with a bento box that he had especially prepared for her. Giving her the excuse that he doesn’t like to see her getting skinnier because of the stress from work, he feeds her his homemade meal and she cries from the relief. With this gesture of kindness, they are finally able to open up to one another and Mr. Guard reveals that his dream is to become a househusband who stays at home and makes delicious food for his wife. Gotou is so surprised by his confession that she laughs and nervously tells him that there is no way she could ever find the means to provide for a househusband. However, by the end of the story after having gone through an ordeal in which she realizes her feelings for Mr. Guard, Gotou has matured and become admirably efficient at her work. She maintains a career as a salary-woman, allowing her to marry Mr. Guard and provide for him so that he can stay at home and live the kind of life that he had always dreamed of.

Although stories which utilizes the office setting are somewhat innovative in that they depict Japanese women in the workforce who are actually capable of providing for themselves, the way these stories unfold take this seemingly modern ideal in a completely different direction. The office setting is a cliche used to tell a narrative of love as a social device for attaining position and stability. The women find love at work, usually in the form of their boss, who happens to be a multimillionaire or is at least rich enough to provide for them for the rest of their days. The office cliche reaffirms current gender roles by having the women marry above their stations and often concludes with them leaving their workstation in order to live out their marital bliss as housewives, bringing them right back to the home. The take-home message of this cliche is that women do not actually want to work, or that if they mistakenly thought they did, they would be much happier off finding a suitable partner who can provide for them so that they can retreat back into their domestic sphere, where they are apparently better off. Therefore, the office is just another potential place to find love, rather than an actual place of contestation where women can redefine their gender identities.

“Yoru no Bannin” is a brilliant exception in its reversal of gender expectations and deviation from the cliche. Rather than being another escapist narrative in which young girls are culturally indoctrinated to be docile and complacent in their desires and ambitions, Gotou’s feelings for Mr. Guard helps her to persevere and defy her restrictive gender identity in order to take on the masculine role of the provider and fulfill her own dreams. In this story, love is depicted as an emotional goal that comes with heavy social and financial responsibilities, as opposed to being a naive, unconditional ideal. Gotou’s decision to pursue her love requires her to grow as a person and become stronger and more capable in not just her job, but also in her fortitude as a gendered being who is defying social conventions. With the help of Mr. Guard, she successfully adapts to her job, catches a pervert at work who plants cameras in the women’s locker room, and provides for her family by working hard and diligently. In this story, the woman is not a victim of her own circumstances. She defies her gender role by refusing to be neither a sexual object nor an asexual housewife. She has both financial and social agency within her domestic and professional sphere. In accepting her feelings, she is no longer scared of taking on the intimidating responsibilities that come with the pursuit of her love. Because love is not supposed to be an oppressive force that traps women in their domestic roles. Mr. Guard’s love for Gotou is her emotional support and the spring from which she draws her strength in order to break through social boundaries and pursue higher hopes than she could dream of by herself. Gotou’s trials and tribulations and ultimately her triumph over various forms of institutionalized adversities as depicted in the story are a message of encouragement to young girls to reevaluate their dreams and accept the hard work and social responsibilities that comes with the pursuit of them.

Before I actually picked up the nominally controversial Kodomo no Jikan and read it, I had heard so many interesting things about the series. And most of what I picked up through the grapevines go something like this: child porn, fan service gone too far, immoral justification of pedophilia, cannot be licensed due to being inappropriate for US audiences.

So eventually [inevitably] I got the manga, read it, and found that I have much to say about it.

Kodomo no Jikan [A Child’s Time] is about an elementary school teacher who gets assigned to his first class of 3^rd graders. In the class is Rin, problem child extraordinaire, who develops strong feelings towards him and goes to great lengths to seduce him. Lengths that include (but are not limited to): sexual extortion, nude cell phone pictures, spermy haikus, exhibition of various loli parts, and… you get the gist that series is a step up from your standard ecchi. That’s the synopsis in a nutshell.

So lemme clarify some things before I dive head first into this: Yes, the manga is explicit in that it depicts young children in sexually charged situations. Yes, it is chock full of sexual innuendos and explicit jokes. And there are enough panty shots and tit teases to put a HxC lolicon in a coma from his non-stop nosebleeds and painful blue balls in response to the incredible amount of fan service this series provides.

But wouldn’t all of those things add up to justifying the injurious rumors about the series?

NO. Because if you took the time to read the series, and I mean REALLY read the series [not just ogle at the no-no pictures, although those are really nice to look at too <3], then you will realize that Kodomo no Jikan is so much more than just fan service or fetishization. They’re so fucking stupid, the people who trivialize and condemn it based on the mystique and the rumors. Because they’re so scared of what it could teach them, of what it could mean to them. There is a rhyme & reason to the sexual content.

Take exhibit A:

This is Rin taking a picture of her principal with his fingers in her underwear. See how she’s smiling? It must mean that she likes it.

In a situation like that, when you’re young and stupid and afraid, with an old man breathing down your neck, it’s so easy to get scared and give up the struggle. So why the pretty smile? Instead of being resigned to her role as the passive victim, she uses her age and all that it signifies in order to manipulate societal prohibitions to empower and protect herself from the advances of sexual predators. She knows that she is capable of owning her sexuality and does so by using it to bring down THE LAW on THE MAN. Now tell me how this is a negative message to send out to the masses? Tell me how this will corrupt the youth of the world and lead us all into darkness. Preach to me about your laws and teach me a lesson in propriety, make me understand how a world where children can and should defend themselves against the fallible hierarchies and institutions that adults set up is bad.

But wait, aren’t the children too young to own up to the responsibilities of their own actions? What would happen if they were to abuse their power because they’re too young to know any better?

Well, let’s look at Exhibit B:

We as adults have to monitor and regulate ourselves because unlike the children, we have no excuses for our naivety and ignorance when it comes to pedophilia and child abuse? In-fucking-deed. Therefore the responsibility does fall with a heavy weight upon us to ask ourselves the really hard questions and not run away from our own desires, but to evaluate them and figure out what’s worth it. Because shit like, “She was asking for it!” or “She acted like an adult” don’t fly in court. That’s what the rapists and child molesters say. And you can’t just censor out that part of yourself that twitches and twists when you look at the sexual images in Kodomo no Jikan. You have to work within that taboo, to invert it and examine it, and then admit that: Yes, the underage girls are really, really fucking hot and they make me think of all kinds of wrong. But I’m not going to touch that thing with a 10 foot pole because I know that I’ll end up fucking up a human life. And ultimately I can’t bear the burden of that on my conscience.

This is a manga that far from commodifying children as sexual objects, it takes them seriously and gives them the consideration that they almost never get in normative society. The notion of children’s sexuality brings great shock and disgust to people because they cannot reconcile that with their idealization of the purity and innocence of youth. People need a frame of reference in order to fantasize about “happier days” and “carefree times”. But what comes with those kind of ideals is a horrible oppression that completely subjugates and invalidates a child’s feelings and desires.

I have such awe and respect for Kaworu Watashiya’s prodigious achievement of finding that precious balance between producing kiddie porn and an incredibly intelligent and enlightening discussion about the rights of children to their own bodies and emotions. The “monstrosity” that she has created is beautiful in its versatile capacity to be a mechanism that both appeals to mass demands for lolicon fan service as well as facilitates a complex discourse on the sexuality of children.

Kaworu Watashiya’s Kodomo no Jikan is not just a product of decadent society nor is it an attack on standard moral discourses, but rather a more sincere representation of the sublimated and tyrannically policed world of children.

Highly recommended for all of the reasons stated above.

IKnight was kind enough to share this article with me after giving KnJ a go. This article completely pwns me in articulating all of the points that I was trying to make in this entry. Link here: On Kodomo no Jikan and instigation.

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.

Over this past weekend, I reread Hiroki Endo’s “Hang” from Tanpenshuu, his collection of short stories.

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://coffee-spoons.curry-fury.com/2008/04/21/hiroki-endo-hang/feed/ 3