Goth

After a recent reading of Otsuichi's Summer,Fireworks and My Corpse, excellent synopsis here, watching Goth seemed almost a mandatory thing to do. I've not read the novel so can't compare between the two, although I've read that there are differences between the manga adaption by Kendi Oiwa and the novel so I wouldn't be surprised if there were differences also with the film adaption. Directed by Gen Takahashi and released in 2008, Goth has similarities with Summer, Fireworks and My Corpse, Otsuichi's young characters appear stuck in the confines of the urban, the film opens with a park scene that appears normal enough until a woman notices a woman sitting on the steps of a fountain, she has her arm severed, alerting a passing policeman they discover the woman is dead, a crowd gathers,amongst them a high school girl watches the events. At school the following day the class are told to be on their guard for strangers, especially the girls as the recent murder is similar to a previous murder. The camera follows Itsuki as the class finishes up and he walks to the library, the atmosphere of the film begins to change as he walks, in the library he meets the girl who we saw at the beginning of the film observing the scene at the park, they exchange books, he hands her a volume of H.P Lovecraft, 'Give me your thoughts on it?' he asks. The two meet again at her favourite cafe/bar and Itsuki notices that her appearance is similar to that of the two victims, they decide to begin to investigate the murders, and come to the conclusion that the murderer is displaying his victims like art,and takes their hands as a memento, afterwards he follows her home and we learn from her mailbox that her name is Morino. They visit the scenes where the victims were found and Itsuki asks Morino to lie down in a river where one of the victims was discovered, he visualizes a cut in her wrist opening up, whilst joking around with his friends we learn that Morino had attempted suicide.


The murderer strikes again, the victim is discovered by Itsuki's younger sister, and at the cafe/bar Morino tells the story of the accidental death of her sister whilst the two were playing a game, Morino describes the events of her sister's death against the melancholy reverberations of a distant piano. Morino finds a notebook on the floor of the cafe which is the diary of the killer, Itsuki questions the authenticity of the book, but it contains a map which they follow to the mountain where they find the fourth victim, finding the victim before the police proves the books authenticity, but they decide on not handing the book to the police,'If there's a fifth victim it's our fault.' The notebook leads Itsuki to an abandoned school, meanwhile Morino disappears, Itsuki's sweat falls onto the Kanji of the notebook giving him a clue to the identity of the murderer, the film stars Rin Takanashi and Kanata Hongo. 

Madame de Sade by Yukio Mishima

In his afterword Mishima explains that after reading The Life of the Marquis de Sade by Tatsuhiko Shibusawa the riddle of why the Marquis's wife Renee stayed devoted to him right up until he was released from prison would be at the heart of his play, only after her husband's release did she decide to leave him. This edition is the first in a series of International Plays published by Peter Owen from 1968, translated by Donald Keene, the play (Sado koshaku fujin),was first performed in Japan at the Kinokuniya Hall in Tokyo in November 1965 and directed by Takeo Matsuura, the book also contains photographs from the performance taken by Koichi Yamada. Mishima also states that he wanted to see de Sade from the view point of the women around him. It's a play in three parts, the first opens in 1772 with Madame de Montreuil discussing with Baroness de Simiane and Comtesse de Saint-Fond about the recent crimes and scandals involving de Sade, talking about a recent episode after which de Sade is a wanted man, Saint-Fond talks of de Sade's 'miracles' of evil -

'The miracles of the Marquis de Sade occur only after certainties have been piled on certainties, and all that human beings may learn through the senses has been exhausted. His miracles have nothing in common with the miracles lazy people merely wait for. That day in Marseilles he drove himself to greater and greater efforts. He, Mariette and the man servant joined in a fellowship of pain like galley slaves rowing their banks of oars in a trireme across the sea. The sunrise glowed like blood for I neglected to say it was morning.'.

Saint-Fond goes on to suggest that immorality is a privilege of the aristocracy, Simiane and Saint-Fond vow to help Madame de Montreuil to clear her son in-law's scandal and seek a pardon for his crimes, de Sade has since disappeared, gone on the run. Renee, (the Marquis's wife), arrives and after the two ladies leave Madame de Montreuil pleads with Renee to leave her husband, but Renee replies that 'God does not permit divorce', thus beginning the argument that runs throughout the play between the mother and daughter, Renee reasons that her mother doesn't understand Alphonse's true nature, 'If my husband is a monster of immorality, I must become a monster of devotion', she reasons. It could be said that like Mishima's earlier play Primary Colours/Sangenshoku from 1955, there are similar dialogues that are testing the social morality of the day, although in this play he's examining these themes by examining an episode from the past, in his afterword Mishima reminds us that this is not strictly a historical play, de Sade's nihilistic philosophy acts as the catalyst in which the dialogues between the women revolves around. Montreuil thinks that Alphonse (de Sade) is deceiving her daughter, 'No woman has ever been deceived by a man,' replies Renee.

Renee's sister Anne arrives and divulges that she has been in Italy with Alphonse after he had forced himself on her, and reveals that he is hiding out in a farmhouse in Sardinia. As the play progresses it jumps forward in years, the third part, set in 1790, sees de Sade incarcerated and two of the main characters revealing that they have been involved in de Sade's strange masses. With the ruminations of the beginning of the revolution, Madame de Montreuil observes that maybe Sade's crimes are minuscule in comparison to what they have begun to hear about what is happening. Mishima's exploration of what might have made Renee decide to leave her husband ends the play, with de Sade himself appearing at the end of the play.   

Where Europe Begins - Yoko Tawada

Bringing together pieces written in both German and Japanese, Where Europe Begins has two translators, Susan Bernofsky, (translating from the German), and Yumi Selden, (translating from the Japanese), the book has three parts, The Bath and The Guest being the two longest and the middle part, Where Europe Begins is composed of smaller pieces. The pieces are linked not in plot, although all the narratives are given from the perspective of someone living in a country and language not of their own, (usually here the country is Germany), or as in Where Europe Begins the narrator is travelling via the Trans-Siberian train into Europe. Tawada's writing through keeping an eye on minuscule observations, (amoebas floating on the lens of the eye), questions perceptions of identity, it's tempting to also include perceptions of nationality, but the perspectives are usually from a point of view that remains slightly indifferent to national stereotypes, the narratives are focused on language, and also by turns interpretation and meaning. Another aspect depicted in the book is that of the initial incomprehension when faced with a new language, the narrators stare at the letters and characters of the alphabet before the decoding procedure begins, Tawada's characters seem to be caught not only between nations but also languages, in a sense they sometimes appear to exist in a language-less state, caught in transition, a linguistic limbo.

In the piece The Guest another theme that lies low in the texts of the previous pieces comes more to the fore, that of the motives of authorship, something hinted to also is the motives of the reader. Here the story seems to be set on campus, or within a student community, the protagonist is a writer who hears a voice, which is interpreted as the voice of the novel the writer is writing, which at first is heard through a series of cassettes played on a tape recorder. The narrator places a classified advert in which she's searching for a book, in the advert she poses as an old woman and that this old woman was willing to pay one hundred marks for a book that had value neither for a passionate lover of literature nor a book collector might have seemed unusual. Comparing her advert with others she surmises book 'The novel didn't interest me. I wanted to own the book in order to lock the voice from the tape behind the bars of the printed letters'. She gets a reply from a man called Simon who has a copy of the book although he's not willing to sell it to her, but he's willing to stay with her as long as it takes her to read it. The prose constantly toys with the readers expectations and will sometimes revise or back pedal with what has gone before. It's difficult to conclude the story without thinking as to the identity of the guest in the story, is it Simon?, the voice?, the narrator?, the novel?, or the narrator's enigmatic neighbour Z?.

At the start of The Bath the narrator observes how much of the human body is made up of water, hence the constantly changing appearance of her face, in the mornings she checks her reflection in a mirror against a photograph of herself hanging next to it, then applies her make up ensuring her appearance is the same, treating the application of her make up to the same degree as of a painter painting a picture. This acute warping of a daily activity soon develops into more surreal-ness in this story, involving an episode where the narrator is a translator at a dinner party, her tongue is bitten off by the sole she eats, she passes out and comes around in a house of a woman who promises that if she returns she'll return her tongue. Tawada's prose is a fascinating journey into language and identity which additionally poses many questions about the author/reader relationship.

Where Europe Begins at New Directions