Yukio Mishima: Forbidden Colours

November 24th, 2010, 20:50 | 4 comments

So I finally finished my second Yukio Mishima novel: Forbidden Colours. It took me a month to read it.

It’s a novel of bold ambitions, dealing with a single theme: Beauty. This subject is represented by Yuichi, a youth whose beauty is so larger than life that I can only compare it to Wilde’s Dorian Gray. Everyone falls in love with Yuichi, but the ageing author Shunsuké takes it a step further by using Yuichi and his beauty in various naughty schemes, thus taking part in the creation of the piece of art that this boy is/becomes to him. To continue the Wilde analogy, Shunsuké would be Basil Hallward, or why not the narrator in Witold Gombrowicz’s Pornografia, where two older men conspire to make ideal beauty happen. There’s also a Lord Henry Wotton in Forbidden Colours: Mr Kaburagi, who despite his age manages to get Yuichi into bed by appealing to his narcissism. Yes, he “takes in” the boy in a way that only an aesthete can – some examples will follow.

Needless to say, I was captivated by the theme. (Yes, I fell in love with Yuichi too!) Mishima is so wise; I keep underlining sentences and writing remarks in the margins. Here’s one quote from the beginning (even from the chapter The Beginning), where Shunsuké first lays eyes on Yuichi. The quote could have been straight out of The Picture of Dorian Gray:

The spring-time of intellect, the time when it begins to grow – that was the poison, he felt, that caused the young man to lose his youth even as he watched. (p. 28)

I turn the page and read Shunsuké’s cynical attempt to convince Yuichi to marry his girlfriend Yasuko:

Don’t take marriage as being anything more than a triviality. It’s trivial – that’s why they call it sacred. (p. 30)

He keeps delivering tasty oneliners:

‘Everybody’s the same. People are all the same.’ Shunsuké raised his voice: ‘But it’s the prerogative of youth to think it’s not so.’ (p. 35)

How very true. In a way.

Mishima both hails and satirizes the common people. The love with which he renders the “common” characters of the book is a way of hailing. When it comes to being critical, he let’s Shunsuké do the talking – and I love it:

The head of the family was insistently filling Shunsuké’s beer glass and repeating: ‘How about that? My family could be made into a novel, couldn’t it? If you took it and described it just as it is – as you can see, beginning with my wife we’re a fine set of characters.’

Shunsuké smiled faintly and looked around at this run-of-the-mill family. Unfortunately, the father’s pride was misguided. There are many such families – families so much alike that there is nothing they can do but read detective stories avidly in order to cure themselves of the sickness of humdrum health. (p. 87)

The book contains extensive reports from the 1940′s gay scene in Tokyo. This description of a gay bar shows how timeless the concept is – this is still true:

Whenever a man entered, all guests would look up. The man coming in would instantly be bathed in glances. Who could guarantee that the ideal sought for for so long would not suddenly take shape and appear through that glass door? Much of the time, however, the light in those glances suddenly faded and went out in disappointment. Appraisal ended in the first moment. When a young guest who knew nothing about the place entered he would be startled to hear, if the jukebox happened to be silent, appraisals of his person murmured at every table. ‘What’s he? Not much,’ they would say, or, ‘That one; he’s been rolled everywhere,’ or, ‘His nose is small; probably his tool is too,’ or, ‘I don’t like the way his lower lip sticks out,’ or, ‘He has good taste in neckties,’ or ‘His sex appeal, though, is in short, zero.’ (p. 93-94)

Hahaha. Or rather: Hah. Hah. Hah.

Then have your laugh stuck in your throat as Mishima analyzes the Homosexual:

Someone once said that homosexuals have on their faces a certain loneliness that will not come off. Besides, in their glances flirtatiousness and the cold stare of appraisal are combined. Although the coquettish looks that women direct at the opposite sex and the appraising glances they direct at their own sex have quite separate functions, with the homosexual both are directed at one and the same person. (p. 96)

And:

Across this world of men only, however, a tremendous female shadow lay. All tossed in nightmare under this unseen feminine umbra. Some defied it; some resigned themselves to it; some resisted and in the end were defeated; some worshipped it from the beginning. Yuichi believed he was an exception. Then he prayed that he was an exception. Then he strove that he might be an exception. (p. 103)

Shudder!

In this passage, Yuichi does some cruising in a park, and experiences the timeless attempt of gay men to look like teenagers:

Silently, Yuichi handed him his cigarette. The youth turned his oval face. Seeing that face more distinctly Yuichi shuddered. The veins in the man’s hand, the deep wrinkles at the corners of his eyes, were those of a person well past forty. The eyebrows were meticulously blackened; the ageing skin lay masked beneath the theatrical make-up. His unnaturally long eyelashes, too, could not possibly be genuine. (p. 64)

Thomas Mann’s fop in Death in Venice comes to mind.

Now the gay theme was more of a curiosity to me. What really caught me was the theme of beauty. Shunsuké elaborates on it in long monologues almost every time he enters – which makes me cherish him! Here is a passage from a speech he held, in which he criticized criticism:

‘Beauty has become a stimulus to garrulity. It has gotten so that on confronting the beautiful one feels duty-bound to say something in a great hurry. It has gotten so we feel we must convert beauty right away. If we don’t convert it, it’s dangerous. Like explosives, beauty has become a difficult thing to own. The power of possessing beauty through silence, this majestic power for which one would lay down his life, has been lost. (p. 112)

On the next page, at the gay bar again, he’s being more concrete:

How beautiful Yuichi is! the old author thought, watching him from a distance when he left his seat again. Among these four or five beautiful boys, he alone stands out. Beauty is something that burns the hand when you touch it. (p. 113-114)

Or even more so here, where he describes beauty’s short passage as a true connoisseur:

Shunsuké got into the habit of appearing with young homosexuals in various teahouses and Western restaurants here and there. He became aware of the subtle shift in years from adolescence to maturity, with momentary changes in colour like the evening sky. Maturity was the sunset of beauty. From eighteen to twenty-five years the beauty of him who is loved subtly alters its form. The first glow of sunset, when every cloud in the sky takes on the colour of sweet fresh fruit, symbolizes the colour of the cheeks of the boy between eighteen and twenty, the soft nape of his neck, the fresh blueness of his shaved collar line and his lips like a girl’s. When the sunset glow reaches its peak and the clouds blaze many-coloured and the sky goes mad with an expression of joy, one thinks of the blossom time of youth, from twenty to twenty-three. Then his look is somewhat fierce, his cheeks are taut, his mouth is gradually making plain the will of the man. At the same time, in the colour still glowing shyly in his cheek, and in the soft streamlining of his brows, traces of the evanescent moment of a boy’s beauty can be seen. Finally, the time when the burnt-out clouds take on a grave complexion and the setting sun tosses its remaining beams like hair is comparable to age twenty-four or twenty-five when, though his eyes are replete with pure gleams, in his cheeks are seen a beauty transcending the severity of its stern masculine will. (p. 147-148)

Another theme that appeals to me is the contrast between the “real” life and the “representation” of real life. Real, as in the ordinary life that most people live, its representation as the way artists depicts it and the way homosexuals imitates it. It’s ironic, how each side admires the other. The homosexual, for whom the “real” life is out of reach, becomes obsessed with it. And the ordinary “real” person instead admires the representation, since it’s purer and more beautiful, not realising it’s the representation of the life they already lead without thinking about it. That’s how I interpret it anyway, and this is how Shunsuké puts it:

Compared with representation, reality is tremendously abstract. In the real world, mankind, men, women, lovers, the home, and so on live higgledy-piggledy and that is all. The world of representation, on the contrary, presents humanity, manhood, womanhood, lovers that are worthy of being lovers, homes that have been made homelike, and the like. Representation seizes the nucleus of reality, but it is not carried away by reality. Representation reflects its image in the surface of the water like a dragonfly; it skims that surface. Before one knows, it has laid eggs on the water. Those larvae are brought up in the water in preparation for the day they will fly about in the sky. They become conversant with the secrets of the water, but they hold the world of the water in contempt. (p. 152-153)

How about that, artists, homosexuals and other outcasts as dragonfly larvae?

The novel contains several references to other texts, and I was happy to have read several of them, for example Plato’s Phaedrus, which is quoted extensively, and Strato’s Musa Paidica, which I recently read in Daryl Hine’s interpretation, called Puerilities. So let’s compare the one verse that is quoted by Mishima (through Shunsuké) with Hine’s version. In Forbidden Colours, Strato’s verse is translated this way (p. 419):

Let the cheek be fair
Or dipped in honey shades,
Of flaxen hue the hair
Or black with every grace;
Let the eyes be brown
Or let me disappear
Into those flashing pools
Of deepest black.

Now Hine’s interpretation (p. 5 in Puerilities):

Pale skins I like, but honey-coloured more,
And blond and brunette boys I both adore.
I never blackball brown eyes, but above
All, eyes of scintillating black I love.

And what would this book be without a reference to the celebrated 17th century poet Ihara Saikaku?

Nobutaka Kaburagi was a master of seduction. Until today, in his forty-third year, he had been intimate with about a thousand boys. What was it that attracted him? It cannot be said that it was beauty that excited him and drove him to debauchery. Rather, it was fear – trembling fear – that held him captive. In the pleasures of that street, everywhere a kind of sweet corruption followed one. As Saikaku said so eloquently: ‘Making love to boys is like the sleep of a wolf under a flower whose petals are falling.’ That is the charm of it. (p. 164)

Hah. Hah. Hah. Charming indeed, Mr Kaburagi. Anyway, my point is that it adds tremendously to the reading experience to be familiar with many of the references. One I wasn’t familiar with but should read: Euripides’ Hippolytus.

Ok, time for some more wisdoms and observations:

The homosexual’s hell and the woman’s hell are the same – namely, old age. (p. 167)

A homosexual’s Sunday is pitiful. On that day, all day, no territory is theirs. The daytime world, they feel, takes over completely. (p. 184)

Maybe the book’s most beautiful passage occur when Mr Kaburagi and Yuichi meet alone for the first time, and the old man woos the youth by appealing to his narcissism. The content of what he says, the way it is written, the way you’re surprised by the last word – this is pure beauty and it makes me sigh in awe, over and over again, when I read it. Hold your breath:

Yuichi wasn’t bored. Far from it. Why? Because Nobutaka’s monologue was about Yuichi and nothing else: ‘Your eyebrows are so cold and clear. Your eyebrows are – how shall I put it – they exhibit pure youthful will.’ When he ran out of comparisons, he stared silently for a time at Yuichi’s brows. It was a hypnotic technique. ‘Not only that, there is an exquisite harmony between those brows and these deep, sad eyes. The eyes show your fate. The eyebrows show your will. What lies between those two is struggle. It is the fight that must be fought by every youth. Your brows and your eyes are the eyes and brows of the most beautiful young officer on the battlefield. His name is youth. (p. 171)

…

Does it never end? No, it doesn’t. You have to read this book with a pencil in one hand. It’s more of a lecture than entertainment, to be honest – you learn for life!

Mishima also elaborates on death, suicide (“in general a suicide in which the subject does not think too much does not exist”, p. 228), the immorality of art (p. 299), and the “illness of perfectionism” (p. 189). Yuichi is also described as cruel and cold (p. 225), yes, a Destroyer – like when he gets out of bed (with Kaburagi) and stirs the coals in the fire: “It sounded as if he were stirring bones.” (p. 219) Mr Kaburagi’s bones, of course.

Here’s another example of the conflict between the homosexual’s and the majority’s life. Yuichi was walking arm in arm with Mr Kaburagi, and they were scorned by a straight couple:

‘Them! Them!’ Yuichi ground his teeth. ‘They who pay three hundred and fifty yen for a lunch hour together in a hotel bed, and have their great love affair in the sight of heaven. They who, if all goes well, build their rat’s-nest love nests. They who, sleepy-eyed, diligently multiply. They who go out on Sundays with all their children to clearance sales at the department stores. They who scheme out one or two stingy infidelities in their lifetimes. They who always show off their healthy homes, their healthy morality, their common sense, their self-satisfaction.’

Victory, however, is always on the side of the commonplace. Yuichi knew that all the scorn he could muster could not combat their natural scorn. (p. 253-254)

Olé! Victory is always on the side of the commonplace!

You still here? Wow. This kind of quote-heavy post I write mostly for myself, in order to remember the highlights of a book and be able to get back to them. It’s a kind of reference post, but if you joined me, it’s great to have you with me.

So did I love this book? You would think I’d give it a 5 out of 5 after reading this post, but I’ll only give it a 3. Why? Because despite the theme of beauty was everything I could ask for, the book at large was too slow for my pace, and I found all the fluff in between the wisdoms boring. I much preferred Mishima’s The Sailor who Fell from Grace with the Sea, because it’s more compressed, more focused on the single theme it deals with: Ideal vs reality.

After I finished Forbidden Colours yesterday, I read a couple of pages in Donald Richie’s The Japan Journals 1947 – 2004. And believe it or not, but I stumbled right upon the diary entry where he meets Mishima for the first time! It’s dated “early winter 1952″, and Richie has been asked by a common friend to guide Mishima in New York:

He wanted to visit every Saint Sebastian hanging in New York, to see the Strauss Salome at the Met, and to experience a real gay bar. He gave as reason for this last that he was halfway through his next novel, Forbidden Colors, which contained scenes in several such locales, and he wished to compare, evaluate, and capture local color.

There were several such in Greenwich Village, I had heard, and so we set out and eventually located one called Mary’s. There we sat over our drinks and watched middle-aged men talk like women. This was something neither of us had expected and it was not very interesting. (p. 47)

Richie continues a bit later:

Next time we met I mentioned our fruitless Greenwich Village quest, ready to smile at the memory, but I discovered that he had already rendered it epic; me as Virgil to his Dante, both dangerously descending into the maelstrom of Sodom. It was no longer a simple single excursion into the pathetic Mary’s, but a perilous quest somehow successfully accomplished. And, indeed, details would be, he told me, incorporated into the continuation of that serious and responsible study, Forbidden Colors. (p. 48)

Aha, so much for the Japanese gay scene … Well, I forgive him.

Okay, let’s end with just one more quote, one of many that displays Shunsuké’s hilarious misogyny. He speaks to Yuichi and says:

‘You’ve forgotten what I said. This is what I told you. You must think of a woman as inanimate matter. Never acknowledge that a woman has a soul. That’s what made me lose out. I refuse to believe you’re going to make the same mistake I made. You, who do not love women! You should have been ready for that when you got married. A woman’s happiness? Nonsense! You feel sorry for her? Nonsense! How can you feel sorry for a bundle of sticks? By looking at her as a bundle of sticks you managed to get married, didn’t you? Listen to me, Yuchan -’

Yukio Mishima: Forbidden Colours (1951, 1953)
Japanese title: 禁色 (Kinjiki)
Translated by Alfred H. Marks
ISBN: 9780141189567

My edition (in case you want to use my page references) was a Penguin Modern Classics in the same design as my copy of Brideshead Revisited.

Hejdå, Ecpatbanken

November 24th, 2010, 12:21 | 5 comments

SvD publicerar i dag en artikel av typen omarbetat pressmeddelande:

Banker går samman mot barnpornografi

Det handlar alltså om Svenska Bankföreningens så kallade “Finansiell koalition mot barnpornografi“. Jo, man skriver det lite otidsenligt i obestämd form, ungefär som “Kristen Demokratisk Samling”. (Koalitionens ordförande är för övrigt kristdemokraten Mats Odell.) Initiativet togs av Skandiabanken och innefattar numera 13 banker. Idén är att förhindra transaktioner där någon försöker köpa “barnpornografi”. För att kunna göra detta samarbetar man med Rikskriminalpolisen och Ecpat.

Och det är där problemen med detta i grunden lovvärda initiativ börjar, eftersom Ecpat är en ytterst tveksam organisation.

Men den stora frågan är naturligtvis:

Varför koncentrera sig på betalningsströmmarna i stället för att stänga ner sajten och ställa de ansvariga inför rätta?

Det är mycket i artikeln som tyder på att det här inte handlar om barnporr. Till exempel passusen om att man “inte identifierar enskilda betalningar” och att det därför inte “blir problem med integritetsfrågan”. Men integritetsfrågan är väl knappast något problem om det handlar om att identifiera individer som begått ett brott och bör lagföras?

Skandiabankens informationschef Lena Hök säger till SvD:

– Visst finns det folk som tycker att allt ska vara fritt på internet, men det här handlar om kriminell verksamhet och det ska vi inte medverka i.

Va? Det finns väl ingen, inte ens jag, som tycker att barnporr ska vara “fritt på internet”? Det känns som att Lena Hök spelar på något slags “det finns vissa nätfundamentalister som är emot det här”. Men det finns det inte. Ingen har använt argumentet att “allt ska vara fritt på internet” när det gäller barnporr. Om vi pratar “riktig” barnporr alltså, det vill säga de “dokumenterade sexuella övergrepp på barn” som ordet en gång stod för.

Problemet är, som vi alla vet, att barnporr i dag kan betyda lite vad som helst. Serieteckningar klassas till exempel som barnporr i Sverige. Har du en vårdnadstvist kan du ringa polisen och säga att ditt ex minsann innehar en massa snaskiga exemplar av Mystiska 2:an, så kommer de på tre röda och beslagtar barnporren. (Jo, Mystiska 2:an var föremål för en barnporrskandal på 80-talet, vilket jag berättar om i sista numret av Destroyer, som kan köpas på papper här och som pdf här.) Ecpat har gett sitt uttalade stöd till denna tolkning av lagen, och Rikskriminalens barnporrgrupp har sedan länge gjort samma tolkning, dvs att teckningar kan vara barnporr, när de utformar den spärrlista som de största svenska internetoperatörerna frivilligt följer. Listan är full av sajter med tecknade serier, har det visat sig vid de få tillfällen då någon lyckats granska den.

Barnporr i Sverige i dag kan alltså betyda lite vad som helst. Förutom tecknade serier kan också de foton som tonåringar tar av sig själva och skickar till sin flick- eller pojkvän falla inom begreppet. Exakt vad är det som bankerna ska strypa betalningsströmmarna till? Det kommer vi aldrig få veta, och det kommer aldrig någon reporter att våga fråga.

Min egen tidning Destroyer blev troligtvis föremål för bankernas samarbete med Ecpat – det är därför jag intresserat mig för det – trots att den var fullständigt laglig. (Om detta skriver jag i boken Bögarnas värsta vän – historien om tidningen Destroyer – köp t ex på Adlibris eller hos mig.)

Om det är denna form av “barnporr” som bankerna ägnar sig åt att strypa betalningsströmmarna till – eftersom de har Ecpat som rådgivare – får följande text från Finansiell koalition mot barnpornografis hemsida (fast förmodligen direktkopierad från Ecpat) betraktas som i bästa fall vilseledande:

Barnsexhandeln, där handeln med bilder på sexuella övergrepp på barn ingår, har ökat kraftigt på senare år och den beräknas omsätta mångmiljardbelopp. det är den tredje mest lönsamma kriminella verksamheten efter narkotika- och vapenhandel.

UNICEF uppskattar att över en miljon barn varje år faller offer för sexhandeln runt om i världen. En stor del av handeln sker via internet där köpare och säljare försöker använda traditionella betalningskanaler för att överföra pengar mellan varandra.

Enligt polisen stoppas i Sverige 50 000 försök varje dygn för att nå illegala webbplatser med övergreppsbilder på barn.

Stora ord. Stora summor. Ännu större goodwill.

Jag har varit kund i Skandiabanken sedan starten 1995. Nöjd kund, rentav. Så nöjd att jag inte lämnade banken ens när dess vd Fredrik Sauter år 2008 började skriva debattartiklar tillsammans med kristdemokratiska politiker och skicka ut spam om samarbetet med Ecpat. Men det finns gränser. Jag kan inte ta ett företag som samarbetar med Ecpat seriöst, och har därför inlett flytten från Skandiabanken. Eftersom jag har en stor del av mitt finansiella engagemang där är det inte helt okomplicerat. Men det är värt det. Tack för de här 15 åren och lycka till med bekämpningen av omoraliska serieteckningar!

3 months of Japanese studies: This is a sad day!

November 18th, 2010, 13:13 | 4 comments

Dear people,

I’m still on chapter 2 in book 3 of Japanese From Zero. Yes, that’s right. I haven’t studied at all this month.

How did this happen?

First of all, I thought I did it all a bit too fast. I devoted about 3-4 weeks to each book with 12-13 chapters, whereas one week per chapter would probably have been better for deep learning. So I figured I had missed a lot (which maybe I hadn’t!), and therefore set out to repeat old chapters from the first two books.

But it turned out I’m no good at repeating. I love the feeling of conquest. That’s what kept my studies going: The exhilaration of conquering chapter after chapter, book after book. It was a high! Whereas repeating was just plain boring.

I must also blame the books. They mix new grammar with exercises in a way that just become very, well, cluttered. It’s excellent for “conquest learning”, but it would have been easier to repeat from a kind of reference with only the grammar and words, not the exercises. I can suddenly see the point with Japanese learning resources that divide text books and exercise books, as Genki does.

Also, since Japanese From Zero uses the “progressive” method of replacing romaji with kana step by step, chapter by chapter, as new kana is learned, you have to read the romaji when you repeat what you’ve learned, which is irritating after you’ve learned the kana.

But those are just excuses.

Oh, and I have another one: I released my first book and travelled to Sweden for the release party on October 27. It was fantastic, but it took all my energy for some time.

Ok, just one more: I’m participating in this year’s Nanowrimo. But as of today, I’m a whole 9,000 words behind.

Oh, and then I watched some Japanese movies.

But mostly, I just lived like a cat: Sleeping, eating, and going to the cat disco.

Japanese Cinema: 4x Nagisa Oshima

November 15th, 2010, 22:23 | 2 comments

Nagisa Oshima (born 1932) seems to be a kind of enfant terrible of Japanese cinema. His films often have a political edge to them, and at the same time he’s been “accused” of being sensational. Sounds like a good mix to me. I watched these four movies of his:

• 1960: Cruel Story of Youth (青春残酷物語 – Sēshun zankoku monogatari)
• 1969: Boy (少年 – Shōnen)
• 1983: Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence (戦場のメリークリスマス – Senjō no merī Kurisumasu)
• 1999: Taboo (御法度 – Gohatto)

Boy was a very touching family drama that takes child abuse to the next level: A couple earns money by having their 10-year-old son being hit by cars, whose drivers rather pay upfront than deal with the police. The dysfunctional family travels across Japan with this scam, earning over 700,000 yen. After a while, the boy doesn’t need to fake injury anymore …

Cruel Story of Youth, or Naked Youth as it’s sometimes called, had a similar idea for a scam: A woman hitchhikes with a male driver, all the while her boyfriend follows them on his motorbike. She fakes nausea and asks the driver to stop. If he makes advances on her, her boyfriend turns up and threatens to call the police if the driver doesn’t pay them. The film wasn’t bad, but not at all as touching as Boy.

I saw Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence some ten years ago (I even bought it on VHS!), and I think I liked it.

Now over to what seems to become Oshima’s last movie, Taboo from 1999. It’s set in some kind of samurai school in the last years before the Meiji era (which began in 1868). The title refers to the homosexual love affairs that the beautiful youth Kanō becomes the object of.

There were several things I didn’t like about this movie. For starters, the constant referring to people having “that leaning” or not seems a very 1990s way of seeing things. According to the texts that I’ve read on the subject (Louis Crompton and Paul Gordon Schalow), people in those ages didn’t reflect on homosexuality as a subject as such. But then again, who knows.

Then some of the acting sucked and the production quality was low. I think this film was shot digitally, and it shows. It might work now, but in 1999, it didn’t. It was fun to see Takeshi Kitano again though.

Funny how I loved one of Oshima’s films and disliked one of them almost to the same extent. The films are really totally different. If I’ll see something more by Nagisa Oshima, it will probably be In the Realm of the Senses from 1976, because of its sexual theme, and because of this image:

Avslöjande: Det är jag som är …

November 12th, 2010, 9:25 | 2 comments

Jag kommer ut! Läs mitt pressmeddelande och förundras.

Trevlig helg!

Japanese Cinema: 4x Hayao Miyazaki

November 11th, 2010, 12:19 | No comments

Japanese Cinema: 2x Takeshi Kitano

November 10th, 2010, 0:02 | 1 comment

Five years ago, I happened to see two films by Takeshi Kitano (born 1947):

• 菊次郎の夏 (Kikujiro, 1999)
• Takeshis’, 2005

The background to the first one, as I put it in my old Swedish blog on January 30, 2005:

I går vaknade jag med en ångest som jag nästan aldrig upplevt så starkt tidigare. Jag köpte med mig två woker och åkte till J. Vi såg den fina filmen Kikujiro – en underbar bakisrulle – och drack en siciliansk Nero d’Avola.

In short, Kikujiro is a wonderful movie to watch with a good friend as the mellow hangover from yesterday merges into the next wave of liquor. (Who is J, you wonder? I tell you: Johan Haza!) I don’t remember much from the story, but there was a man and a boy, random travel and the search for something. Sounds good, right? It was.

Later that year, we saw Takeshis’ at the Stockholm Film Festival. A film written, directed, edited by and starring Takeshi. I hated it.

Japanese Cinema: 3x Akira Kurosawa

November 9th, 2010, 16:24 | No comments

Next up in my personal Japanese film festival is the most famous of all Japanese film makers, Japan’s Bergman: Akira Kurosawa (1910-1998). I watched these 3 films of his:

• 七人の侍 (Shichinin no samurai/Seven Samurai, 1954)
• 用心棒 (Yojimbo aka The Bodyguard, 1961)
• 乱 (Ran, 1985)

All three are included in 501 Must See Movies, a book that isn’t perfect (since A Streetcar Named Desire isn’t in it) but nevertheless works as some kind of reference.

All of them were entertaining, but I liked Seven Samurai the best.

Ran is a 2:40 long epic, loosely based on Shakespeare’s King Lear. The battle scenes are quite spectacular.

Yojimbo reminded me of an American western, and that’s why I liked it the least.

If Ozu shares some light on the modern life of the Japanese, Kurosawa does the same with the way of the Samurai.

Not much more to say about him. I mean, I can see the greatness of his films, but on a personal level I wasn’t that convinced. I prefer Ozu to Kurosawa.

Japanese Cinema: 7x Yasujirō Ozu

November 8th, 2010, 14:28 | 3 comments

Yasujirō Ozu (1903-1963) is one of Japan’s most famous film makers. I recently watched 7 of his films:

• 東京の合唱 (Tokyo no gassho/Tokyo Chorus, 1931)
• 戸田家の兄妹 (Todake no kyodai/Brothers and Sisters of the Toda Family, 1941)
• 晩春 (Banshun/Late Spring, 1949)
• 東京物語 (Tokyo monogatari/Tokyo Story, 1953)
• お早よう (Ohayo/Good Morning, 1959)
• 秋日和 (Akibiyori/Late Autumn, 1960)
• 秋刀魚の味 (Sanma no aji/An Autumn Afternoon, 1962 – his final work)

They all focus on the everyday life of the Family; work, children, marriage, death … The family focus is so strong that it borders on satire. But I’d rather call it obsession.

Three of the films had the same plot: A daughter who doesn’t want to marry, partly out of pity since she lives with her lone parent. The whole film focuses on her acquaintances’ attempts to get her to marry, which she eventually does.

Ozu seems to say: Traditions are important. Change is inevitable and should be embraced.

My favourite was the silent movie Tokyo Chorus, because of the way Ozu shapes the main character, a pretty ordinary guy whom it is impossible not to love.

Ozu uses the same set design and the same actors in many of his movies. Watching the movies so close together almost gave me the impression of a soap opera. (Movie buffs may hate me.) Same plots, same quarrels, same actors – but in different roles. Maybe a better comparison is that of a travelling theatrical company. I couldn’t help but smile when an actress I had “got to know” suddenly emerged in a new role.

The films are all very slow and sport a minimalistic aesthetics. I fell asleep during several of them. But I still liked them, especially to watch on a Sunday when you’re hungover.

Beauty defies definition

November 7th, 2010, 14:39 | 2 comments

I’m reading my second Yukio Mishima: Forbidden Colours (禁色/Kinjiki) from 1951. It’s a thick piece, beautifully and carefully written, in a style sometimes reminding me of what Evelyn Waugh called “ornamental.”

The story centers around a youth called Yuichi. He is so beautiful that everyone, men and women, fall in love with him. But Yuichi is gay. Yes, a real homosexual. This novel from 1951 describes the Japanese gay scene in detail, and yet Mishima became Japan’s maybe most celebrated author. I find that very fascinating.

Shunsuké is an aged author with three terrible marriages behind him. When he meets Yuichi, he decides to use the boy to avenge the women he has grown to hate. Women at large that is. So he makes Yuichi marry the first girl who falls for him. Then he encourages him to flirt with any other woman who shows interest for him, with the result that they fall in love. Shunsuké’s single goal is to make these women unhappy.

I’m not even halfway through the book, and it takes time to read, since I’m constantly underlining sentences and writing comments in the margins. Just now, I was captivated by the way Mishima, through Shunsuké, describes the allure of youth:

In the Tale of Shotetsu, Section 23 says that if someone asks where Mount Yoshino is, a person should answer that when one writes poems about cherry blossoms he recalls Mount Yoshino; if about maple leaves, the River Tatsuta; that’s all. Whether it’s in Isé or Hyuga, one doesn’t know. The information as to where it may be is useless to remember. Even though one makes no effort to remember, however, the fact keeps being remembered of itself that Yoshino was in Yamato. That’s what it says.

When put into words, youth is a thing like that, the old man thought. For cherry blossoms, Yoshino; for maple leaves, Tatsuta – other than that can there be any definition of youth? The artist spends the half of his life after his youth is over searching for the meaning of youth. He explores the native lands of youth. What does that amount to? Cognition has already ruptured the sensual harmony existing between cherry blossoms and Yoshino. Yoshino has lost its universal meaning. It has become a point on a map – or a period in past time: Yoshino, in Yamato, nothing more.

Sigh! So beautiful, so true, so tragic. You may want to read that quote a second time (as I did), slowly, to fully grasp its content.

I keep repeating to myself in awe that Mishima was 26 when he wrote the book. Such wisdom. Such obsession.

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