reviews without much coherency; both longer form writings after contemplation and journaling & shorter form immediate thoughts after sitting with the work for a day or two
reviews without much coherency; both longer form writings after contemplation and journaling & shorter form immediate thoughts after sitting with the work for a day or two
asami in 'birth' by yumiko ooshima goes through a series of interruptions, again & again in rapid successions where the characters do not leave her room to breathe, leave her explaining herself to everyone in those short moments where she is being argued with or made understood. the characters are absorbed in their own pasts and presents, thinking alone for themselves and how they stand in relation to asami's predicment, but never beyond what they have made their primary life-narratives -- a way of disclosing their own anguishes and a way to understand their personhood within the family that can only come through deciding what they can do for asami.while none of them remain successful or even doubtful, in the end it is the decision of asami and rei's fathers that takes precedent over any other, decisions that keeps changing again and again, from maintaining the respectability of their own families to maintaining the respectability of their daughters, for asami by 'giving' her to be married, and for rei to be fitted into society as a daughter.
it is for rei's late-realized wish to live in the world as a part of a family that brings asami the relief of keeping her child. even though the sequences sometimes were too quickly ran over with to be given depth, by placing them all together within one work i think ooshima was perhaps getting towards portraying a girl's place in the world, where everyone's insistences and expectations are piled up on her, and her own 'sanity' and 'normalcy' as a part of this world defined by the family-form can be maintained only through internalizing her role as a girl and then as an imagined woman who she has embodied at that moment of her life, who keeps the house, who wants the child, who deeply and sometimes hysterically wants what she has always been expected to have [as her mother says, she had wanted her to get married like a proper woman, a desire that comes onto her from outside but one that she makes her own through the child] ; one cannot escape the institution of marriage & a girl is only made a girl when she fantasizes what becomes of her as a mother and a wife ... i am still not sure what ooshima wanted to get at with keeping abortion as the central theme, something i have to read more about as positioned in its sociohistorical context, perhaps that a woman is tugged at between everyone such that her own desires are complicated in all the push and pull
predictable, easy [plays with a lot of tropes too, especially noticeable -- greed for the desired object that the main character recognizes too easily and thus fizzles out to a lukewarm ending just as easy] ... the enclosed spaces and tightened framing of expressions was nice though ...
the tightened framimg also [perhaps] puts into perspective the narrow-need to be exclusively depended on > desiring to see the object hurt and vulnerable [thus conflict arises only when hiroto shuts himself up from that < which is the primary desire for nagi]
when your desire comes from restraint ... very dazzling to me how mamiya's character becomes more distant the more intense her feelings get for sena, the longer she stays hesitant to express externally & to sena about the rising intensity of her feelings the more the distance strengthens but it never diminishes their connection, or the undercurrent of melancholy that i think remains enmeshed very close to the narrative.
[guy who loves mirrors] & these feelings are almost a mirror of sena's own feelings for her sister which are confusing & lead her to removing herself from her sister's life ... so when sena reaches out to mamiya it feels so deeply fulfilling.
sena's feelings for her sister read to me as an exploration of dependency because of a lack of proper family structure [insert comment: no family structure can ever be maintained with propriety] that entangles & thus merges familial and romantic feelings; yuuna pulls away from that dependency & the loneliness and burden it causes through a heterosexual relationship [< need to think on that] while sena resorts more into closing herself up as yuuna tries to make a coherent family structure first with kiku, her and sena & then herself, her fiance and sena ... both which because of their reliance on the exclusivity of the family form do not really work [as sena's feelings become an interruption to that].
mamiya's stillness, her almost-passivity and patience then become the force which, while doesn't break the foundations of the family, creates a different space of thinking of the couple-form and family-form without drawing a line between them --> as in they both become places which circle similar determinings of endurance & tenderness without demanding the negation of sena's feelings for her sister, whatever vague or understoof but unsaid form they may take in mamiya's mind; for sena whose feelings for her sister become an abyss of confusion, it is love from outside that then brings some kind of coherent understanding to how her relationship with her sister can exist within similar circle of feelings as they do for mamiya.
In Water (wr. kiriko nananan) relationships feel muddy, and perhaps watery as the title entails -- they're devoid of anything heavy in them, they evoke a sense of the defeated, a repetitive consistency to remain in place, to not let go, to let go and ignore, to horrify oneself with the inconsistencies of the consistent. Nananan imagines the world in the everyday sense -- its sexual and social and emotional productions and happenings, they remain open to disposal and rectification, and yet are too self-absorbed to see into anything beyond their own selves. who mimics, who fights, who starts, who absorbs the other into the self. what sense of falsity and sedation invade the everyday lives of these characters, their horrors and their self-inflicted uncomfortableness. perhaps i read the works in this because of my own discomfort with intimacy, perhaps these larger emotions that dwell and are seamless are a part of intimacy which elides me. is deception intimacy? is unseeing intimacy? is belonging into each other intimacy? why do nananan's characters persist and insist into their relationships when its clear to the outsider that there's a thread in there that has fallen apart, or been broken. what form of desire keeps these people together, and keep orbiting each other despite either codependency, abuse, humiliation, dissatisfaction, depression, or anything else.
currently reading yuria-sensei no akai ito and it's such an interesting (while not new) take on heterosexuality + aging (while in a heterosexual relationship being the focus of the story) -- it's a new perspective for me since a lot of narratives focused around the woman left behind by her cheating husband focus on their mental+emotional collapse without focusing on other aspects of their lives ? and while the story stays true to that aspect it doesn't shy away from exploring other emotions - from rage, to surprise, to exhaustion and the continuous feeling of this burden when you're living in your husband's family house and the responsibilities stacked upon you are numerous and unending
i also love how it portrays these seemingly harmless misogynistic ayuriactions + comments from goro and yanai but they truly build up to show how isolated/alienated yuria is from everyone around her - and it's barely shown as some form of self imposition but rather how it just gathers up over the years; she's the one who has to take care of the household, of his mother, of everything else really while goro wanders around the city every night (and was presumably absent even in the daytime) ...
thinking about where the story will take the plot with the younger guy -- his genuineness is there, but his straightforwardness about his wife's reasons for leaving him paralleling yuria's situation is so crude and emotionally distant that it reads lackluster to me, it depends on where the story goes then we'll see how it was being framed as, currently to me the framing is just this guy feeling bad about something he's done to his wife (unintentionally but he has) and yuria feeling that someone cares for her because of the delicacy of the situation + her physical attraction (and gradual emotional attachment) to him
also thinking about cheating as a whole, to see framed as a part of life that has different consequences in different circumstances + relationships without being overly moral about "the weight of cheating" ... how much burden gets left behind on the wife when the husband cheats+is away from home most of the time / is emotionally cheating and/or providing for another family a form of cheating or is it something else / what feelings arise from how yuria is not gendered in many character's perspectives and how she is in certain character's perspectives and how that shapes her relation to romance as/and labour + responsibility