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kaigouNOTE: images may be missing, lost in journal-transfer. sorry.
[It might help to read the previous/lead-in post on this topic, or the points in here might not make as much sense. Erm, I hope they do, but just in case. Also: a handful or so of images behind the cut. None that massive -- I sized them all down -- but still. Just in case you're on a reallllly slow dialup.]
When last you heard from this unrepentant bastard, I was busy prefacing another lengthy think-out-loud with a comment that I didn't actually chase anywhere in that post: most stories have a pantheon of some sort -- whether this be a competitive one (set against a backdrop of generic monotheism) or completely supplanting real-world religion.
Now I'm going to... so here we go.
Granted, 'pantheon' is usually taken to mean a system of belief in which there are a multitude of gods, but I'm with Tillich on this one, which is why I tend to use 'pantheon' to mean a multitude of beliefs. Diverging slightly (but not entirely a tangent), let me explain my comprehension of the stricter definition of a belief system, with a host of nods to Tillich: that we must remember there are two words in that phrase. The system, then, is the dogma and the observation and the ritual (however slight to overweening) that one participates in, observes, or acts out -- and the belief is focused on one's understanding of the ultimate. That should be ultimate with a capital U, but I'm not that reverent.
Suffice it to say that for some, this may be a single god, a collection of gods, no-god, or even material things like money, technology, or even another person. It's whatever is the center of your universe; it does not necessarily have to be that which created your universe so much as that which has ultimate power over you. SF, especially harder SF, tends to have belief systems focused on an ultimate of technology -- and here I find myself thinking of Bladerunner, or even William Gibson's earliest works, in which technology has ritual, dogma, and definite power over a person's life.
Stories grounded in today's modern life (and here I speak mostly of US-as-west, although to some degree this seems true of Europe-as-west, as well) will invariably have, somewhere in the background, a cultural belief system that is mostly-to-strongly theistic. I make no distinctions between names of gods, or names of religions; the point is that, generally speaking and in the US especially, authors and readers are working within a theistic framework, and that the default mode of this framework is strongly judeo-christian.
(This does, if you're wondering, does include the islamic branch, and to some extent we could throw judeo-christian forerunners into the pot -- zoroastrianism and its like -- and not really go that far off base, at least in terms of the concepts I outline below).
Now, not every story even mentions a god(s), a dogma, or names the characters' religions. Such things are -- excepting those religio-cultist-conspiracy stories like what's-his-face and that holy-blood-holy-grail rip-off -- mostly left unsaid, unless it's a plot point or somehow of impact on a character's motivations or on understanding a character's attitudes. But part of the reason it's left unsaid, too, is because it doesn't need to be said: both reader and author stand in the same framework. We don't need to say the sky is blue when we've already agreed, or at least accepted, that we will mutually call the sky blue. La la la la, etc.
Yes, that seems like a big fat duh, but there's a reason I'm spelling that out. Whether we realize it or not, this theistic framework that permeates the western culture(s) has a massive impact on our understandings of fantasy and magic. I don't just mean the triumvirate of American cultural folklore -- angels, demons, and ghosts, as mentioned in that last post -- but in terms of how we expect such non-natural things to behave, and the protocols we expect to have to follow.
Before I get into considering two Japanese series that are (to date, at least) among the best examples of alternate frameworks, let me run this plot-line past you. CP and I have spent the past day or so thrashing this out, even if he now comes at these things from a religio-philosophical slant and I prefer the literary even if I can still talk the talk, damn it. Anyway. Let's say, hrm...
Let's say it's a time period maybe around the middle ages, maybe on the eve of the Renaissance. Late enough that books are not unheard of, if uncommon; that medicine is still rudimentary, and that if presented with unnatural or unexpected phenomena, people were more likely on average to jump to the conclusion that divine mischief is ahappening. (Although now that I consider it, this kind of pattern holds just as true for urban fantasy, albeit with the so-called twist that omg, it's not actually a human who did this, it's a demon, oh noes! or the reverse move, even though neither are much of a twist when you already know the genre is labeled 'urban fantasy' but whatever.)
In that setting, let's create a premise: someone is being poisoned, and perhaps at least one person has already died. Strange symptoms, no clear perpetrator, even some doubt as to human agency being possible at all. Oh, noes, could it be a demon? (Such fear, itself, is universal: "I don't know how this could have happened, so I'll say such incomprehensible acts must've been caused by an incomprehensible critter, aka, Mister Demon.")
Into this scene comes that much-repeated figure of lore, the travelling peddler. People who go long distances, bearing news and unfamiliar treats and wisdom gleaned from all over, just seem to naturally (the world over) become associated with a bit of the Other, and that would make him/her an expert, more so than any of us locals running around with our heads cut off over this mysterious spate of poisoning... right?
Under the genre's veneer of traditional/historical fantasy, the story is fundamentally a murder mystery: a whodunit. If it's historical fiction, the 'who' will eventually be revealed to have a human agency -- even if the original suspect was not (ie, Name of the Rose, or The Inquisitor, or some of the Cadfael books). If fantasy, it's probably a non-natural agent in some manner; because I'm talking about the SFF genre, we can expect this story's resolution to reveal/involve a non-natural actor in some way.
What's the first thing a detective-peddler is likely to do? Well, in any culture's murder mysteries that I've read, the human inclination is pretty consistent. Look at the dead body (if any), find out the symptoms of the dying person, talk to neighbors, see the crime scene, sniff at the cup of wine left on the table, ask about enemies or grudges. The detective-peddler is trying to discern the motivations, back story, and possible scenarios: for the sake of argument, let's call this aspect the truth of the crime. How was it done? What triggered the murderer to finally act?
And, in most cultures, this also contains a sense of degrees, too, because ambiguity makes for a better story, plain and simple. Yes, Alice hated Jonah and would've been happier if Jonah had croaked, but why did she hate Jonah? What if, for years, Jonah had abused Alice's friendship by borrowing and breaking every single one of her power tools? What if Jonah had shanghai'd Alice's sons into the Navy?
The bottom line is that the detective-peddler is going to ferret out the Truth of the murder, including all its sordid backstory.
Now, let's pin this down into a solidly Western religio-cultural framework, in a story where demons/Other are actively involved. Our intrepid peddler -- despite seemingly unassuming and even somewhat ignorant or hapless or uninterested at first -- soon reveals him/herself to be quite the sharp thinker, and figures out the likeliest demon-perps, and our western theistic framework has a very clear and consistent protocol for the next step.
And that, dear readers, would be the power of the name.
Rumplestiltskin, anyone? The peddler may be a priest -- defrocked or just itinerant -- or maybe an alchemist, or a sorcerer, or a true seer -- it doesn't seem to matter. At some point, the power of the name [I can't help it, I write that and I want to add "grayskull! I command--" *shoves inner 10-yr old back into the shoebox* errm, sorry] is invoked. Names are massively powerful in the Western tradition: what you can name, you can control, and what you can control, you can defeat.
If we're talking a full-on exorcism a la that pea-soup movie, or a more traditional-fantasy venue set in vaguely 'olden times', it doesn't seem to matter. The creature's name is gonna be a pivot point in some way; I'm not saying this to make everyone run out and find the first or best example they can of any exceptions. Those literary exceptions do exist but they're mostly proving the rule: for whatever reasons, our Western culture finds names to be so crucial, so integral to our system of theistic belief, that we don't even blink when yet another character in yet another story exclaims, "ahah, so it's Eugene the demon of broken toasters! alright, kids, let's go get Eugene!"
Alternately, the path is more formal/istic, even if the peddler is an alchemist or sorcerer. It doesn't matter that 99.9% of us have never, and likely will never, personally meet a poisoning demon in charge of appliances. When an author taps into our theistic framework (intentional or not), it feels right to us; it's part of our shared cultural heritage. The vast majority of us may not even be Catholic, for crying out loud, and the name-use will still probably feel like: "well, of course that's what comes next, because everyone knows that trolls live under bridges, I mean, that demons have to obey once you know their True Name."
Thus, the author comfortably follows the Catholic tradition (or pop-culturized version): In the name of whomever, I command you, Mister Eugene of the dominion of broken kitchen appliances, to get your ass inside this damn circle and start talking, because I wanna know where you were on the evening of May twenty-fifth, and make it snappy. ... and we readers say, yup, that's how it works. Power of the name, dude, etc.
Sure, not all stories make a big to-do out of using the demon's (or generic Other's) name in a big hoedown, but the vast majority of stories will at some point determine, deliver, or even bestow a name on the opposing party as part of the process of gaining control. I am trying to think of a story where, from start to finish, the non-natural creature is never named -- and for that matter, it doesn't have to be the True Name (TM) but it does have to be a name of some sort. I mean, there's Mister Eugene, and that (might) be a True Name, or might not, but Eugene might still answer to the nickname of Eugene even though his real name is Clarence.
That's compared to, say, deciding the perpetrator was some giraffe. Which one? Oh, y'know, it's a giraffe.
Naming the demon(s) is just a variant on this theme, even if name-the-demon has a long and colorful history of hard-working monks in obscure Catholic monasteries dutifully cataloging the seventy-seven princes of hell. Basically, they were listing all possible butlers for future reference: because saying "some generic servant did it!" just doesn't have quite the same ring. Or power.
Nope, the "it's some giraffe" doesn't satisfy in our cultural scheme. That durned giraffe is gonna be named, whether it likes it or not. (In fact, if you read through some urban fantasy stories, authors don't always focus on the 'true name' issues but they still give the character/culprit a name. That is, our hero will get a name of some sort -- Joe, Bob -- or in lieu of formal introductions, the author tags the character in some way. "Slim," or "Mister Gruesome," or "Scary Spider Lady". Part of that is because as readers we do need handles for our visuals as we read along... but I think it's also because we are inculturated to expect some kind of specific, personalized, name to satisfy that calling-out step.)
The by-product of this emphasis on names -- and more accurately on True Names -- means that you can probably expect that finding this name is going to take the first half or so of the book. Maybe longer. But it sure wouldn't be the opening chapter: oh, this crime? Clearly done by Eugene. No doubt about it.
I don't know about you, but with the exception of political or legal dramas where you go into it pretty sure you know the culprit & it's just a matter of proving it, most stories take their own sweet time with a side-dish of red herrings, before you get to the True Name. What's really important in terms of my argument, here, is that the story does not move forward until the perpetrator is named: that's the spoken or unspoken intention of learning the truth, to thereby deduce the name. And upon having the name, one has the power to command/force the resolution. The butler did it! And poor Wilmington makes a break for it, is stopped, and eventually breaks down and admits what he's done: but that step cannot come about until he has been named.
Get the truth, call the name, accept the regret.
Then you get the showdown, or whatever goes down, and the final step -- the emotional pay-off for the reader -- is the murderer's reason. But in this case, 'reason' is a paltry word, because part of our expected emotional pay-off is seeing some kind of contrition, maybe even hope of making amends, but definitely guilt. We wanna see the guy is not just guilty but admits he's guilty, and we wanna see someone grieve for the crimes committed and the victims hurt.
When we learn the truth behind a murderer's actions/motivations, that provoking sympathy (better yet, empathy) is a powerful page-turner. The murderer may be pathetic, or petty, or ludicrous, or terrifying, or even righteous, and this determines our reactive-emotion, but a story that skips the final step is a story that does so at its peril, I say. For this crucial component of emotional catharsis (of having the truth hereby confirmed by the one named), bear with me when I call this the regret.
Whatever it's called, it shows up in just about every story I can think of: even the most generic cops-and-robbers Hollywood-style story has its scene of regret. Yeah, so the bad guy was named and fingered and hauled off to jail and shows not a single spot of conscience -- so some how it just seems proper, necessary even, to have a scene with the two cops standing over the victim's grave, mourning (in both relief and lingering bittersweetness) the poor girl done wrong.
Less commonly, the regret may be expressed by one of the good guys for the bad guy, especially if -- in this perception of degrees -- the crime may have been a righteous one. She killed the guy who attacked her, and yeah, his family's all torn up about it, and yeah, she's gotten manslaughter because the system sucks like that, and the cops or lawyers or whomever pause for a moment of regret on the murderer's behalf. We've all seen it, read it, a thousand times.
And there ends the story, usually, barring any other subplot wrap-ups. The major discoveries of the story are those three things: the truth of how/why, the name of who/what, and the regret of knowing that such horrible things can happen, or that one has done these things, or just plain witnessed them. (I think, too, the regret is often used in mainstream fiction as a way to illustrate the protagonist's humanity -- the ability to feel compassion -- over and above the antagonist's inhumanity of committing the crime in the first place.)
Now, let's step away from the West, shall we?
But first, about peddlers.
The peddler is a crucial detail to the story. It's someone who's travelled enough that s/he just might have seen this kind of thing elsewhere and be aware how to resolve it, but the peddler is always "merely a peddler", for a very specific reason. If the person wandering into town had no obvious job and no obvious social role, the person is pretty much a hobo: and would probably have about as much credibility as we'd grant any homeless person who showed up and started poking around in a crime.
The peddler is also someone who, for the purpose of his/her job, is going to go door-to-door, and talk to a lot of people, and with any degree of charm may encourage the gossip, or with basic wit be sure to be in the right place at the right time. Most folks aren't going to talk to a homeless person who shows up on their step, and it doesn't matter if we're talking right now or a thousand years ago. Human nature hasn't changed that much; we're invariably much freer on the tongue with someone come a distance with a good/service that we require and who may bear gossip for us in turn (and therefore our own is offered as exchange).
So the peddler can't be too low a social stature, in that the role is working-class; at the same time, the peddler is undoubtedly lower than the locals, because the peddler by definition is landless. (In cultures where land is not an issue, it's probably because the peddler doesn't have a wife, or enough camels, or whatever.) That working-class front grants the peddler some respect, but the landless aspect means he's not a threat, per se. He's not an authority sweeping in to take over; the peddler is, if anything, an authority within his specific areas but no further -- and when done, he'll be moving out with the next dawn. Really, the peddler stands outside the social strata, so can maneuver more freely than a local, but he's not a wild card, by dint of having a working-role.
Well... he's not a wildcard, at first.
When I was turning over the peddler aspect in my head, I tried to think of other situations where a traveller might show up, re/solve, and then move along. In east and west, there were travelling bards; there's one example. But these weren't usually the type to mingle with Joe at the local dirt-bar on the way to the next patron; the corrollary to that is that when a travelling musician does hang with Joe at the local dirtbar, the musician probably doesn't have a patron and thus is little better than a hobo. The peddler is a service, and thus unnoticable; the musician is a luxury, and thus obtrusive in the routine landscape.
A travelling monk or priest is another option, but again it also depends on whether there's a service provided, a kind of exchange, or if the monk/priest is, say, begging for alms on his next pilgrimage. (In which case, he's a luxury because he's asking for additional support not expected by the residents, even if they do grant him more kindness than they would the average bum.)
I can think of a fairly large share of stories in which the traveller is a monk-priest of some degree, but most of those still have the monk on the way to somewhere else: that "I'm not from around here, and won't be staying" remains in play. Plus, a monk is (usually) educated, but in west and east, the average monk traditionally doesn't go around looking like a million bucks. Those drab robes, the alms-bowl, the oversized berkenstocks, the inattention to personal beauty...
But the peddler, I think, remains the best of the options, because his role as a service provider lends him an ambiguity that (readers may assume) does not exist in the well-meaning monk/priest, for instance. The peddler straddles the line between the hobo -- who wants your money for as little as possible -- and the priest-monk, who may not even take alms and even then not for his/her own ultimate benefit. Sure, there are selfless hobos and selfish priests, but the peddler is unnoticeable because his role, superficially, is obvious. He has pots and pans you could use; you pay him the coin, and he gives you the pot. End of the exchange. You doled out X, and in return you got Y, and most people (and characters) are satisfied to look no further, and likely don't even realize what else may have been exchanged (information, that is).
It's only human nature to be a little bit distrustful when we're asked to make an exchange and we're not entirely sure what we're getting for it. When we think we're getting a return equal to our outlay, the defense mechanisms tend to shut off and we may miss other exchanges on a subtler level.
In our modern world's stories, this still applies: look at Jessica Fletcher and her kin, who haven't been invited back to Thanksgiving since Auntie Clementine kicked the bucket, so now she's reduced to showing up in other people's towns and incurring dead bodies there: yeah, but everywhere Jessica shows up, the story always gives her a reason. Her 'exchange' is clearly stated at the forefront, such that -- as she begins to investigate -- more often than not she's able to take the unassuming cloak of the unnoticeable peddler as she pursues the truth.
Obviously this kind of vehicle is useful for those storylines in which the main character must move from place to place -- short of a major metropolitan area, you're just not likely to have demons, or dead bodies, happening on your block on a regular basis. What I find most curious, though, is that when a story is told from the point of view of the locals/natives, then the mysterious person who shows up and divulges the right info at the right time gets immediately labeled some kind of deus ex storia; if the character is unlucky enough to be a person of color, woah, look, it's the magical negro! Or, it's the magical old person! Or, it's the magical [and inscrutable] asian!
(These really annoy me on some levels, because I can't help but think: why is it that any helpful person who is also of color is automatically a token solely because of their color? ...especially when I see "magical indian" or "magical negro" leveled as a complaint against stories in which the magical-insert-here is only one of many in the cast with that color of skin. Sheesh, people.)
The two series, Mushishi and Mo No No Ke, have a lot in common on the surface. Hell, they've got a lot in common with a whole host of stories from around the globe. Something horrible strikes a resident, and there's either no one around who understands what's going on -- if anyone even believes something is going on. Enter the wandering peddler, who is either preceded by reputation (whether personal or of his 'kind') or quietly comes in through the back door and just happens to be there when it all goes down... and upon the end, is off again.
Both series are purely episodic, with no arc at all. Each does unravel a slight part of its universe; Mushishi gives a few hints about its peddler's backstory, while Mo No No Ke elaborates on the peddler's actions just a bit more with each story.
Outside some small glimpses and sideways looks, a lot of any comprehension about who, precisely, the peddler really is... is mostly conjecture. But the peddler's backstory isn't the biggest part of this particular post (though I may get into more of it for the latter story, in another post); you don't need to know the peddler's life story to see how the culture's theistic framework informs the peddler's actions.
Mushishi is 26 episodes, broadcast a year or two ago (oh, can't recall now); the episodes are out on DVD, I believe. It's based on a manga by Yuki Urushibara. Ginko, the peddler of the story, is also a mushishi, a term that kinda requires stopping and pausing for a moment. Usually mushi is translated as 'insect' or 'bug', which is accurate to some degree, but... not really.
While wandering around the intarweebs awhile back, I came across this translated comment about mushi and their deeper meaning on Iwanihana. (I removed the japanese kana, however, because I wasn't sure if this file-uploader would turn it into gobbedly-gook. If you want to see the original quote, click the link for the blog.) This is the blogger's own translation of an excerpt from "Mushi ga ii" by Morimoto Tetsurou, in Nihongo Omote to Ura.
There is no indication that Ginko is of anything but human origin; the few notes indicating some kind of backstory for him seem to imply he's just as human as the rest. He's rather unassuming, pretty laconic, low-key. Sometimes grumpy or withdrawn, but still in relatively laid-back even in his rare crankiness.
There's a footnote in UK/EU folklore that the Otherfolk can't stand tobacco smoke, and I guess that might go under the list of "near-universal", since that protocol shows up in many cultures. Including this story -- notice the ubiquitous cigarette. Ginko smokes to keep the mushi at bay, but at the same time, they gravitate towards him. While he can walk the fine balance in dealing with the tiny creatures, the more they're collected around him, the more risk there is of mushi paths intersecting with humans. So he's got to keep moving.
What makes him of use to people is also what alienates him from normal society, because he can never be anything but landless in some fashion.
Despite this level of alienation, he's not entirely isolated. There are long segments of Ginko hiking through the mountains of Japan (which probably deserve second billing for this series, at least), and he seems to be a character who's relatively comfortable in his solitude. He's not a blank slate, though, and he's not distant with people. He's really altogether a very human person, and humane, and not above showing his reactions... Whether slightly surprised, or showing his attitude about having to put up with two old women gossiping (and keeping him from his business).
If the pack -- which announces his business as a peddler -- makes him approachable, it's also the characterization that rounds this off. The guy may be able to see, and sense, things that aren't entirely human, but he retains his own humanity in the process.
(It's not really relevant to what I'm saying here, but if you get a chance to see any of the episodes, they're worth it as works of art in their own rights. The use of color and soundtrack to denote season and place is just breathtaking.)
In general, if I were to characterize the entire series as a whole, I'd say it's wistful, with touches of melancholy. And here's where I finally work my way around to explaining why I started all this off talking about theistic frameworks that gird our storytelling: if there were any story I might point to and say, this has a fundamental shinto feel, my vote would be for Mushishi.
There is no doubt that in a number of the episodes, mushi cause significant problems for humans (and vice versa). Some characters are scarred irreparably as a result; some don't survive. Some do, and some -- even with Ginko's forewarning -- still fall head-first, willingly, into that vast sea of strange and alluring mushi. Yet not once does Ginko -- as the story's expert -- give any indication that the mushi are, or even can be, inherently evil. In fact, he repeats a number of times that mushi are not, in and of themselves, malicious.
Damage comes not from ill intentions, but from the simple intersection between two opposing forces. For that matter, sometimes the opposing forces are things utterly independent of human agency: an earthquake, a forest fire, seasonal flooding. Some of the stories give the impression that certain mushi, once roused, do have malicious-seeming traits, but are these malicious or are they as protective-defensive as the human actions are in the course of protecting one's house and livelihood?
Each story follows approximately the same path (although some we're dropped in mid-stream): Ginko arrives, learns of a situation, figures out the mushi involved and places that hypothesis against the evidence, and then tries to restore the balance. Most of the plots that I can recall, Ginko postulates the likeliest mushi-culprit almost immediately, though sometimes it's a question among two or three, that must be narrowed down with further information. It'd be rather like the detective being gut-certain it's either Jack or Eugene, and then looking for the right evidence to support that.
Of course, in the western mystery tradition, this would certainly violate every expectation we have of detectives being open-minded and, too, the mid-story twist that reveals it wasn't Jack after all, but Veronica. We tend to play looser in the fantasy genres, or are willing to accept a bit looser approaches. A detective-peddler-sorcerer declaring it's a demon and then going about...
Well, that story we've already gone over. Ginko's version is a little different. There is no calling out of a demon (or mushi). It might even be more like, say, the crime/event was done by an animal, but we need Ginko to tell us which animal. And after getting the basic gist, Ginko pretty much knows right away -- thanks to a massive collection of information in his head, and an additional pile of texts shoved into his travelling pack -- that this particular crime was perpetrated by a horse.
Which horse? That's not what matters. Horse, the generic horse, all horses or none or this particular herd, there is no formal naming and calling-out. Even in cases where it's a ghost (as I recall, a few are), these are human-spirits who upon death got tangled up with mushi and thereby have remained instead of drifting off as proper ghosts should.
Ginko may identify the mushi involved, and then realize the ghost's identity, but there's no dramatic point of commanding a spirit by name to shape up or ship out.
The pattern, instead, is: first, to deduce what general power created the situation. That's the form of the culprit, be it 'horse' or 'ghost' or 'mushi brand X'. Next is to delve further to learn the full Truth of the situation, because it's the Truth that informs how the balance may be restored. And finally, restoration of the balance involves acknowledging that the balance was off, was wrong, was out-of-whack.
That would be this story's kindler, gentler (and far subtler) form of Regret. But for all that, there are maybe only one or two stories in the series where a human expresses regret for actions, as in specific guilt-caused regret, and that's because in a lot of the stories there isn't truly a clear culprit.
No one is particularly, always, truly to blame: many of the circumstances are due to the intersection of two opposing forces. If they'd run parallel, we'd never had had this problem and the twain would never have been aware of the other.
In the end, the goal is to return the world to its status quo, to a pre-conflict point in which the involved parties may go about their business peacefully once again. That doesn't always happen, and sometimes the consequences are severe and unyielding; human agency can misfire despite even Ginko's sincerity or educated advice. But for all that, Ginko never seems to harbor a grudge against these creatures, even if they are what keeps him moving, makes it impossible for him to stay in one place for too long.
Nor do I mean to give the impression he'd entirely without ambiguity, because he is a peddler. Once or twice he barters over selling mushi (which he also collects, sometimes, for a friend), and it seems calculated, unexpectedly cold on his part, doing this to get a buck.
Yet he is a peddler, and he is a salesman, and like most in sales, he's not above making a dollar or two where he can, sometimes with fewer scruples than one might like. Thing is, after awhile I came to the conclusion that to some degree, his actions are by virtue of his business, his nature, and life-demands (have to pay for food, f'instance), and not because he bears ill-will towards something. If a mushi comes out the loser in the intersection, this is only the course of the world and not something personal.
That, too, is some of the reason (I think) that the idea of 'calling out a specific name and thereby binding' is irrelevant in this series. It's not personal, in any direction, at heart. It just is.
Also, in Ginko's world, everything contains mushi, contains spirit. There are mushi that live and die in the course of a morning, trapped in the dew that falls on autumn leaves; there are grand streams of mushi that flow down the mountains in an annual exodus to the sea where they'll give birth and die, and let the newly-hatched young begin the trek back to the mountains. There are mushi under rocks, in trees, in the rafters of homes, in bowls, in drink, in the air, stuck to your shoes.
It's not really that even inanimate objects are sentient in some basic fashion -- it's not that kind of pantheism -- but that there are so many of these peculiar, microscopic to macroscopic, invisible ineffable creatures that they permeate every possible space.
If there are microscopic creatures living beneath the colored glaze in your soup bowl, your soup bowl is hardly 'alive' -- but with enough tenants, the soup bowl just might start displaying behaviors like a living thing. Sort of like if you got everyone in an apartment building to jump up and down at the exact instant. You just might shake the building, but it doesn't make the building alive.
What it does do is prove that no matter how small the individual force, the combined power can rattle even things that outweigh us by a tonne to the fifth power.
The other important thing about regret, in this story's quasi-theistic framework, is that it is not a... how to put it. Hrm. It is not an issue of punishment. Still using the analogue of murder mystery, readers do eventually want to see a pay-off. We want to see the bad guy pay. It doesn't even always whether he breaks down and admits he was a really bad boy; we still want suffering in some degree equal to what we perceive to be our own level of suffering.
Sometimes, the humiliation (because that's what it really is, on a social level) of abasing yourself in prostrate apology and regret... sometimes, that's enough. Sometimes, it's not, and readers demand blood, demand pain, demand punishment, demand retribution.
There are stories in Mushishi in which I could reasonably see -- if translated into a Western framework -- that readers/viewers might be left dissatisfied. First, the overall tension is incredibly low-key given the subject matter(s). Second, the specific identities of a culprit are a preliminary, and even sometimes academic, kind of question. And most importantly, the goal of the story is to restore the balance... and not to 'right the wrong' in a strict sense.
I guess it would be something like a detective figuring out the murder methods, determining that "some teenager with a grudge" did it, and then asking the question: how do we make things peaceful again? Ignore, sometimes altogether, the issue of whether or not the wrong-doer should pay, but instead focus on 'how do we get back to a place where everything is in balance'. I suspect most western readers would throw that book against the wall, if not follow it up with a rant about bliss-ninny peacenik touchy-feely hippy types being ill-suited to detective work.
I'm not going to go into the full details of Shinto in the modern age, and if you want to read up on it, I'm sure there's a library near you and a helpful librarian just waiting to show you the stacks. The one major point here is that within this Shinto-influenced story, punishment is not really part of the picture -- and that, I think, is a big reason why it doesn't matter on a bone-deep level which specific, individual mushi caused/exacerbated the situation.
Or the human, for that matter; Ginko seems to be, from what I recall, reluctant to bear down on people after-the-fact. He does warn of severe consequences if a wrong action is taken, but he does not gloat nor even imply a "told you so" -- not in so many words or gestures, at least. The punishment one receives are the consequences one is due, and it's not only not Ginko's place to cause (or alleviate) those consequences, it's not his task, either. The universe itself will mete out consequences; Ginko is predominantly focused on restoring the balance.
I guess it's sort of like saying, you can't fix what happened, and it did happen, and that's that, but you can prevent it from happening again by removing those crossing intersections. That's a Shinto-influenced 'pantheon' (if we can even use that word when 'pantheon' inscribes a circle large enough to incorporate the entire living world, seen and unseen), and it radically alters the resolution of the storyline.
That's what I mean when I say that our cultural theistic framework informs our stories, on a much deeper level than maybe we really stop to consider, when writing, when reading, when listening or telling. A huge amount of our western theistic framework -- fundamentally, our sense of Good and Evil, really -- is based on a notion of heaven for the good guys, hell for the bad guys, and maybe slightly-reduced hell if the bad guys are really, really, really sorry (but still some bit of hell nonetheless).
The rare stories where the hero has that opportunity to punish, or to push the consequences, on the antagonist -- and then does not, well, those stories aren't nearly as thick on the ground. Matter of fact, many readers I've known find those stories rather unsatisfying.
I can think of a few movies where the hero holds back at the last instant, and in discussions afterwards there's this assumption that this was 'mercy' on the hero's part (and not always a wise mercy, either, in the reader's views). But still, that's different, because that's the hero actively bucking the theistic framework we've got; s/he gets to that point and says, no, I'm not going to deal out retribution.
It's another matter entirely when the hero never even considers retribution -- or makes no attempt to, nor even thinks of, propelling consequences.
A man I once knew used to like to say, the wheels of karma must turn, but sometimes it's awfully good to push them. That, I suppose, would be the halfway point between the style in Ginko's stories versus the western perception. A character who believes strongly enough in universe-driven consequences might be willing to stay his/her own course rather than deviate just to force vengeance down someone else's throat -- but still, when the author/reader is coming at it from a western theistic foundation, I would expect this to be an active choice, not a simple expectation of how life works.
Of course, I guess it should be noted, just to be clear, that this attitude is not always true of all the characters in Mushishi. The only one who maintains it with any kind of consistency is really Ginko, but again, he's the peddler. He's the one who straddles the line between seen and unseen, and by his actions is living demonstration of the hands-off approach.
Some of the characters he meets accept this gracefully; others insist on blaming something, someone, even when it's patently wrong. And in those cases (which is where some of the melancholy comes in), Ginko doesn't really knock himself out to set the people straight. He's done what he can to restore the balance, and if humans actively choose to upset it again, he is not going to martyr himself for things.
He's not even close to a Buddha, not in that altruistic sense, and not just because he's in sales.
And this brings me to Mo No No Ke, and the other hand of the alternate theistic framework: the buddhist perceptions of birth, life, and death. I had planned to cover that in this post as well, but I rambled a bit and I'm tired anyway, so I'll leave that for tomorrow or the day after.
Plus, planning to bounce some symbolism analysis off anyone willing to read... but that post will definitely contain major spoilers, so it'll be set out as its own post, just in case any of you are planning on watching now that you've seen the youtube trailer-AMV I posted.
[It might help to read the previous/lead-in post on this topic, or the points in here might not make as much sense. Erm, I hope they do, but just in case. Also: a handful or so of images behind the cut. None that massive -- I sized them all down -- but still. Just in case you're on a reallllly slow dialup.]
When last you heard from this unrepentant bastard, I was busy prefacing another lengthy think-out-loud with a comment that I didn't actually chase anywhere in that post: most stories have a pantheon of some sort -- whether this be a competitive one (set against a backdrop of generic monotheism) or completely supplanting real-world religion.
Now I'm going to... so here we go.
Granted, 'pantheon' is usually taken to mean a system of belief in which there are a multitude of gods, but I'm with Tillich on this one, which is why I tend to use 'pantheon' to mean a multitude of beliefs. Diverging slightly (but not entirely a tangent), let me explain my comprehension of the stricter definition of a belief system, with a host of nods to Tillich: that we must remember there are two words in that phrase. The system, then, is the dogma and the observation and the ritual (however slight to overweening) that one participates in, observes, or acts out -- and the belief is focused on one's understanding of the ultimate. That should be ultimate with a capital U, but I'm not that reverent.
Suffice it to say that for some, this may be a single god, a collection of gods, no-god, or even material things like money, technology, or even another person. It's whatever is the center of your universe; it does not necessarily have to be that which created your universe so much as that which has ultimate power over you. SF, especially harder SF, tends to have belief systems focused on an ultimate of technology -- and here I find myself thinking of Bladerunner, or even William Gibson's earliest works, in which technology has ritual, dogma, and definite power over a person's life.
Stories grounded in today's modern life (and here I speak mostly of US-as-west, although to some degree this seems true of Europe-as-west, as well) will invariably have, somewhere in the background, a cultural belief system that is mostly-to-strongly theistic. I make no distinctions between names of gods, or names of religions; the point is that, generally speaking and in the US especially, authors and readers are working within a theistic framework, and that the default mode of this framework is strongly judeo-christian.
(This does, if you're wondering, does include the islamic branch, and to some extent we could throw judeo-christian forerunners into the pot -- zoroastrianism and its like -- and not really go that far off base, at least in terms of the concepts I outline below).
Now, not every story even mentions a god(s), a dogma, or names the characters' religions. Such things are -- excepting those religio-cultist-conspiracy stories like what's-his-face and that holy-blood-holy-grail rip-off -- mostly left unsaid, unless it's a plot point or somehow of impact on a character's motivations or on understanding a character's attitudes. But part of the reason it's left unsaid, too, is because it doesn't need to be said: both reader and author stand in the same framework. We don't need to say the sky is blue when we've already agreed, or at least accepted, that we will mutually call the sky blue. La la la la, etc.
Yes, that seems like a big fat duh, but there's a reason I'm spelling that out. Whether we realize it or not, this theistic framework that permeates the western culture(s) has a massive impact on our understandings of fantasy and magic. I don't just mean the triumvirate of American cultural folklore -- angels, demons, and ghosts, as mentioned in that last post -- but in terms of how we expect such non-natural things to behave, and the protocols we expect to have to follow.
Before I get into considering two Japanese series that are (to date, at least) among the best examples of alternate frameworks, let me run this plot-line past you. CP and I have spent the past day or so thrashing this out, even if he now comes at these things from a religio-philosophical slant and I prefer the literary even if I can still talk the talk, damn it. Anyway. Let's say, hrm...
Let's say it's a time period maybe around the middle ages, maybe on the eve of the Renaissance. Late enough that books are not unheard of, if uncommon; that medicine is still rudimentary, and that if presented with unnatural or unexpected phenomena, people were more likely on average to jump to the conclusion that divine mischief is ahappening. (Although now that I consider it, this kind of pattern holds just as true for urban fantasy, albeit with the so-called twist that omg, it's not actually a human who did this, it's a demon, oh noes! or the reverse move, even though neither are much of a twist when you already know the genre is labeled 'urban fantasy' but whatever.)
In that setting, let's create a premise: someone is being poisoned, and perhaps at least one person has already died. Strange symptoms, no clear perpetrator, even some doubt as to human agency being possible at all. Oh, noes, could it be a demon? (Such fear, itself, is universal: "I don't know how this could have happened, so I'll say such incomprehensible acts must've been caused by an incomprehensible critter, aka, Mister Demon.")
Into this scene comes that much-repeated figure of lore, the travelling peddler. People who go long distances, bearing news and unfamiliar treats and wisdom gleaned from all over, just seem to naturally (the world over) become associated with a bit of the Other, and that would make him/her an expert, more so than any of us locals running around with our heads cut off over this mysterious spate of poisoning... right?
Under the genre's veneer of traditional/historical fantasy, the story is fundamentally a murder mystery: a whodunit. If it's historical fiction, the 'who' will eventually be revealed to have a human agency -- even if the original suspect was not (ie, Name of the Rose, or The Inquisitor, or some of the Cadfael books). If fantasy, it's probably a non-natural agent in some manner; because I'm talking about the SFF genre, we can expect this story's resolution to reveal/involve a non-natural actor in some way.
What's the first thing a detective-peddler is likely to do? Well, in any culture's murder mysteries that I've read, the human inclination is pretty consistent. Look at the dead body (if any), find out the symptoms of the dying person, talk to neighbors, see the crime scene, sniff at the cup of wine left on the table, ask about enemies or grudges. The detective-peddler is trying to discern the motivations, back story, and possible scenarios: for the sake of argument, let's call this aspect the truth of the crime. How was it done? What triggered the murderer to finally act?
And, in most cultures, this also contains a sense of degrees, too, because ambiguity makes for a better story, plain and simple. Yes, Alice hated Jonah and would've been happier if Jonah had croaked, but why did she hate Jonah? What if, for years, Jonah had abused Alice's friendship by borrowing and breaking every single one of her power tools? What if Jonah had shanghai'd Alice's sons into the Navy?
The bottom line is that the detective-peddler is going to ferret out the Truth of the murder, including all its sordid backstory.
Now, let's pin this down into a solidly Western religio-cultural framework, in a story where demons/Other are actively involved. Our intrepid peddler -- despite seemingly unassuming and even somewhat ignorant or hapless or uninterested at first -- soon reveals him/herself to be quite the sharp thinker, and figures out the likeliest demon-perps, and our western theistic framework has a very clear and consistent protocol for the next step.
And that, dear readers, would be the power of the name.
Rumplestiltskin, anyone? The peddler may be a priest -- defrocked or just itinerant -- or maybe an alchemist, or a sorcerer, or a true seer -- it doesn't seem to matter. At some point, the power of the name [I can't help it, I write that and I want to add "grayskull! I command--" *shoves inner 10-yr old back into the shoebox* errm, sorry] is invoked. Names are massively powerful in the Western tradition: what you can name, you can control, and what you can control, you can defeat.
If we're talking a full-on exorcism a la that pea-soup movie, or a more traditional-fantasy venue set in vaguely 'olden times', it doesn't seem to matter. The creature's name is gonna be a pivot point in some way; I'm not saying this to make everyone run out and find the first or best example they can of any exceptions. Those literary exceptions do exist but they're mostly proving the rule: for whatever reasons, our Western culture finds names to be so crucial, so integral to our system of theistic belief, that we don't even blink when yet another character in yet another story exclaims, "ahah, so it's Eugene the demon of broken toasters! alright, kids, let's go get Eugene!"
Alternately, the path is more formal/istic, even if the peddler is an alchemist or sorcerer. It doesn't matter that 99.9% of us have never, and likely will never, personally meet a poisoning demon in charge of appliances. When an author taps into our theistic framework (intentional or not), it feels right to us; it's part of our shared cultural heritage. The vast majority of us may not even be Catholic, for crying out loud, and the name-use will still probably feel like: "well, of course that's what comes next, because everyone knows that trolls live under bridges, I mean, that demons have to obey once you know their True Name."
Thus, the author comfortably follows the Catholic tradition (or pop-culturized version): In the name of whomever, I command you, Mister Eugene of the dominion of broken kitchen appliances, to get your ass inside this damn circle and start talking, because I wanna know where you were on the evening of May twenty-fifth, and make it snappy. ... and we readers say, yup, that's how it works. Power of the name, dude, etc.
Sure, not all stories make a big to-do out of using the demon's (or generic Other's) name in a big hoedown, but the vast majority of stories will at some point determine, deliver, or even bestow a name on the opposing party as part of the process of gaining control. I am trying to think of a story where, from start to finish, the non-natural creature is never named -- and for that matter, it doesn't have to be the True Name (TM) but it does have to be a name of some sort. I mean, there's Mister Eugene, and that (might) be a True Name, or might not, but Eugene might still answer to the nickname of Eugene even though his real name is Clarence.
That's compared to, say, deciding the perpetrator was some giraffe. Which one? Oh, y'know, it's a giraffe.
Naming the demon(s) is just a variant on this theme, even if name-the-demon has a long and colorful history of hard-working monks in obscure Catholic monasteries dutifully cataloging the seventy-seven princes of hell. Basically, they were listing all possible butlers for future reference: because saying "some generic servant did it!" just doesn't have quite the same ring. Or power.
Nope, the "it's some giraffe" doesn't satisfy in our cultural scheme. That durned giraffe is gonna be named, whether it likes it or not. (In fact, if you read through some urban fantasy stories, authors don't always focus on the 'true name' issues but they still give the character/culprit a name. That is, our hero will get a name of some sort -- Joe, Bob -- or in lieu of formal introductions, the author tags the character in some way. "Slim," or "Mister Gruesome," or "Scary Spider Lady". Part of that is because as readers we do need handles for our visuals as we read along... but I think it's also because we are inculturated to expect some kind of specific, personalized, name to satisfy that calling-out step.)
The by-product of this emphasis on names -- and more accurately on True Names -- means that you can probably expect that finding this name is going to take the first half or so of the book. Maybe longer. But it sure wouldn't be the opening chapter: oh, this crime? Clearly done by Eugene. No doubt about it.
I don't know about you, but with the exception of political or legal dramas where you go into it pretty sure you know the culprit & it's just a matter of proving it, most stories take their own sweet time with a side-dish of red herrings, before you get to the True Name. What's really important in terms of my argument, here, is that the story does not move forward until the perpetrator is named: that's the spoken or unspoken intention of learning the truth, to thereby deduce the name. And upon having the name, one has the power to command/force the resolution. The butler did it! And poor Wilmington makes a break for it, is stopped, and eventually breaks down and admits what he's done: but that step cannot come about until he has been named.
Get the truth, call the name, accept the regret.
Then you get the showdown, or whatever goes down, and the final step -- the emotional pay-off for the reader -- is the murderer's reason. But in this case, 'reason' is a paltry word, because part of our expected emotional pay-off is seeing some kind of contrition, maybe even hope of making amends, but definitely guilt. We wanna see the guy is not just guilty but admits he's guilty, and we wanna see someone grieve for the crimes committed and the victims hurt.
When we learn the truth behind a murderer's actions/motivations, that provoking sympathy (better yet, empathy) is a powerful page-turner. The murderer may be pathetic, or petty, or ludicrous, or terrifying, or even righteous, and this determines our reactive-emotion, but a story that skips the final step is a story that does so at its peril, I say. For this crucial component of emotional catharsis (of having the truth hereby confirmed by the one named), bear with me when I call this the regret.
Whatever it's called, it shows up in just about every story I can think of: even the most generic cops-and-robbers Hollywood-style story has its scene of regret. Yeah, so the bad guy was named and fingered and hauled off to jail and shows not a single spot of conscience -- so some how it just seems proper, necessary even, to have a scene with the two cops standing over the victim's grave, mourning (in both relief and lingering bittersweetness) the poor girl done wrong.
Less commonly, the regret may be expressed by one of the good guys for the bad guy, especially if -- in this perception of degrees -- the crime may have been a righteous one. She killed the guy who attacked her, and yeah, his family's all torn up about it, and yeah, she's gotten manslaughter because the system sucks like that, and the cops or lawyers or whomever pause for a moment of regret on the murderer's behalf. We've all seen it, read it, a thousand times.
And there ends the story, usually, barring any other subplot wrap-ups. The major discoveries of the story are those three things: the truth of how/why, the name of who/what, and the regret of knowing that such horrible things can happen, or that one has done these things, or just plain witnessed them. (I think, too, the regret is often used in mainstream fiction as a way to illustrate the protagonist's humanity -- the ability to feel compassion -- over and above the antagonist's inhumanity of committing the crime in the first place.)
Now, let's step away from the West, shall we?
But first, about peddlers.
The peddler is a crucial detail to the story. It's someone who's travelled enough that s/he just might have seen this kind of thing elsewhere and be aware how to resolve it, but the peddler is always "merely a peddler", for a very specific reason. If the person wandering into town had no obvious job and no obvious social role, the person is pretty much a hobo: and would probably have about as much credibility as we'd grant any homeless person who showed up and started poking around in a crime.
The peddler is also someone who, for the purpose of his/her job, is going to go door-to-door, and talk to a lot of people, and with any degree of charm may encourage the gossip, or with basic wit be sure to be in the right place at the right time. Most folks aren't going to talk to a homeless person who shows up on their step, and it doesn't matter if we're talking right now or a thousand years ago. Human nature hasn't changed that much; we're invariably much freer on the tongue with someone come a distance with a good/service that we require and who may bear gossip for us in turn (and therefore our own is offered as exchange).
So the peddler can't be too low a social stature, in that the role is working-class; at the same time, the peddler is undoubtedly lower than the locals, because the peddler by definition is landless. (In cultures where land is not an issue, it's probably because the peddler doesn't have a wife, or enough camels, or whatever.) That working-class front grants the peddler some respect, but the landless aspect means he's not a threat, per se. He's not an authority sweeping in to take over; the peddler is, if anything, an authority within his specific areas but no further -- and when done, he'll be moving out with the next dawn. Really, the peddler stands outside the social strata, so can maneuver more freely than a local, but he's not a wild card, by dint of having a working-role.
Well... he's not a wildcard, at first.
When I was turning over the peddler aspect in my head, I tried to think of other situations where a traveller might show up, re/solve, and then move along. In east and west, there were travelling bards; there's one example. But these weren't usually the type to mingle with Joe at the local dirt-bar on the way to the next patron; the corrollary to that is that when a travelling musician does hang with Joe at the local dirtbar, the musician probably doesn't have a patron and thus is little better than a hobo. The peddler is a service, and thus unnoticable; the musician is a luxury, and thus obtrusive in the routine landscape.
A travelling monk or priest is another option, but again it also depends on whether there's a service provided, a kind of exchange, or if the monk/priest is, say, begging for alms on his next pilgrimage. (In which case, he's a luxury because he's asking for additional support not expected by the residents, even if they do grant him more kindness than they would the average bum.)
I can think of a fairly large share of stories in which the traveller is a monk-priest of some degree, but most of those still have the monk on the way to somewhere else: that "I'm not from around here, and won't be staying" remains in play. Plus, a monk is (usually) educated, but in west and east, the average monk traditionally doesn't go around looking like a million bucks. Those drab robes, the alms-bowl, the oversized berkenstocks, the inattention to personal beauty...
But the peddler, I think, remains the best of the options, because his role as a service provider lends him an ambiguity that (readers may assume) does not exist in the well-meaning monk/priest, for instance. The peddler straddles the line between the hobo -- who wants your money for as little as possible -- and the priest-monk, who may not even take alms and even then not for his/her own ultimate benefit. Sure, there are selfless hobos and selfish priests, but the peddler is unnoticeable because his role, superficially, is obvious. He has pots and pans you could use; you pay him the coin, and he gives you the pot. End of the exchange. You doled out X, and in return you got Y, and most people (and characters) are satisfied to look no further, and likely don't even realize what else may have been exchanged (information, that is).
It's only human nature to be a little bit distrustful when we're asked to make an exchange and we're not entirely sure what we're getting for it. When we think we're getting a return equal to our outlay, the defense mechanisms tend to shut off and we may miss other exchanges on a subtler level.
In our modern world's stories, this still applies: look at Jessica Fletcher and her kin, who haven't been invited back to Thanksgiving since Auntie Clementine kicked the bucket, so now she's reduced to showing up in other people's towns and incurring dead bodies there: yeah, but everywhere Jessica shows up, the story always gives her a reason. Her 'exchange' is clearly stated at the forefront, such that -- as she begins to investigate -- more often than not she's able to take the unassuming cloak of the unnoticeable peddler as she pursues the truth.
Obviously this kind of vehicle is useful for those storylines in which the main character must move from place to place -- short of a major metropolitan area, you're just not likely to have demons, or dead bodies, happening on your block on a regular basis. What I find most curious, though, is that when a story is told from the point of view of the locals/natives, then the mysterious person who shows up and divulges the right info at the right time gets immediately labeled some kind of deus ex storia; if the character is unlucky enough to be a person of color, woah, look, it's the magical negro! Or, it's the magical old person! Or, it's the magical [and inscrutable] asian!
(These really annoy me on some levels, because I can't help but think: why is it that any helpful person who is also of color is automatically a token solely because of their color? ...especially when I see "magical indian" or "magical negro" leveled as a complaint against stories in which the magical-insert-here is only one of many in the cast with that color of skin. Sheesh, people.)
The two series, Mushishi and Mo No No Ke, have a lot in common on the surface. Hell, they've got a lot in common with a whole host of stories from around the globe. Something horrible strikes a resident, and there's either no one around who understands what's going on -- if anyone even believes something is going on. Enter the wandering peddler, who is either preceded by reputation (whether personal or of his 'kind') or quietly comes in through the back door and just happens to be there when it all goes down... and upon the end, is off again.
Both series are purely episodic, with no arc at all. Each does unravel a slight part of its universe; Mushishi gives a few hints about its peddler's backstory, while Mo No No Ke elaborates on the peddler's actions just a bit more with each story.
Outside some small glimpses and sideways looks, a lot of any comprehension about who, precisely, the peddler really is... is mostly conjecture. But the peddler's backstory isn't the biggest part of this particular post (though I may get into more of it for the latter story, in another post); you don't need to know the peddler's life story to see how the culture's theistic framework informs the peddler's actions.
Mushishi is 26 episodes, broadcast a year or two ago (oh, can't recall now); the episodes are out on DVD, I believe. It's based on a manga by Yuki Urushibara. Ginko, the peddler of the story, is also a mushishi, a term that kinda requires stopping and pausing for a moment. Usually mushi is translated as 'insect' or 'bug', which is accurate to some degree, but... not really.
While wandering around the intarweebs awhile back, I came across this translated comment about mushi and their deeper meaning on Iwanihana. (I removed the japanese kana, however, because I wasn't sure if this file-uploader would turn it into gobbedly-gook. If you want to see the original quote, click the link for the blog.) This is the blogger's own translation of an excerpt from "Mushi ga ii" by Morimoto Tetsurou, in Nihongo Omote to Ura.
The Japanese characterize such mysteries of the heart as mushi. The heart is what one desires, what one thinks and what one feels. Nevertheless, there are times when the heart does not work the way one would like it to. In other words, there is another heart within one's heart. The Japanese call that 'second soul' mushi. It is believed that, of the two, mushi is by far closer to the depth of one's being. The reason for it is that when one loses consciousness and when one's breathing weakens, the Japanese call that condition 'the breath of mushi'. 'The breath of mushi' means that only the mushi within one's body is left to do the breathing. In other words, mushi is the last thing that supports one's life......and Ginko is one who knows how to -- and has the ability to -- deal with, handle, understand these mushi.
Morimoto also provides examples of Japanese idioms that further illustrate the Japanese concept of mushi. For example, 'mushi's notification 虫の知らせ' means a gut feeling for something inauspicious. ... Mushi in that context are said to be closer to the souce of life than any other lifeforms on earth. They are something between life and death, and between 'things' and 'living beings' (courtesy of Wikipedia Japan).
There is no indication that Ginko is of anything but human origin; the few notes indicating some kind of backstory for him seem to imply he's just as human as the rest. He's rather unassuming, pretty laconic, low-key. Sometimes grumpy or withdrawn, but still in relatively laid-back even in his rare crankiness.
There's a footnote in UK/EU folklore that the Otherfolk can't stand tobacco smoke, and I guess that might go under the list of "near-universal", since that protocol shows up in many cultures. Including this story -- notice the ubiquitous cigarette. Ginko smokes to keep the mushi at bay, but at the same time, they gravitate towards him. While he can walk the fine balance in dealing with the tiny creatures, the more they're collected around him, the more risk there is of mushi paths intersecting with humans. So he's got to keep moving.
What makes him of use to people is also what alienates him from normal society, because he can never be anything but landless in some fashion.
Despite this level of alienation, he's not entirely isolated. There are long segments of Ginko hiking through the mountains of Japan (which probably deserve second billing for this series, at least), and he seems to be a character who's relatively comfortable in his solitude. He's not a blank slate, though, and he's not distant with people. He's really altogether a very human person, and humane, and not above showing his reactions... Whether slightly surprised, or showing his attitude about having to put up with two old women gossiping (and keeping him from his business).
If the pack -- which announces his business as a peddler -- makes him approachable, it's also the characterization that rounds this off. The guy may be able to see, and sense, things that aren't entirely human, but he retains his own humanity in the process.
(It's not really relevant to what I'm saying here, but if you get a chance to see any of the episodes, they're worth it as works of art in their own rights. The use of color and soundtrack to denote season and place is just breathtaking.)
In general, if I were to characterize the entire series as a whole, I'd say it's wistful, with touches of melancholy. And here's where I finally work my way around to explaining why I started all this off talking about theistic frameworks that gird our storytelling: if there were any story I might point to and say, this has a fundamental shinto feel, my vote would be for Mushishi.
There is no doubt that in a number of the episodes, mushi cause significant problems for humans (and vice versa). Some characters are scarred irreparably as a result; some don't survive. Some do, and some -- even with Ginko's forewarning -- still fall head-first, willingly, into that vast sea of strange and alluring mushi. Yet not once does Ginko -- as the story's expert -- give any indication that the mushi are, or even can be, inherently evil. In fact, he repeats a number of times that mushi are not, in and of themselves, malicious.
Damage comes not from ill intentions, but from the simple intersection between two opposing forces. For that matter, sometimes the opposing forces are things utterly independent of human agency: an earthquake, a forest fire, seasonal flooding. Some of the stories give the impression that certain mushi, once roused, do have malicious-seeming traits, but are these malicious or are they as protective-defensive as the human actions are in the course of protecting one's house and livelihood?
Each story follows approximately the same path (although some we're dropped in mid-stream): Ginko arrives, learns of a situation, figures out the mushi involved and places that hypothesis against the evidence, and then tries to restore the balance. Most of the plots that I can recall, Ginko postulates the likeliest mushi-culprit almost immediately, though sometimes it's a question among two or three, that must be narrowed down with further information. It'd be rather like the detective being gut-certain it's either Jack or Eugene, and then looking for the right evidence to support that.
Of course, in the western mystery tradition, this would certainly violate every expectation we have of detectives being open-minded and, too, the mid-story twist that reveals it wasn't Jack after all, but Veronica. We tend to play looser in the fantasy genres, or are willing to accept a bit looser approaches. A detective-peddler-sorcerer declaring it's a demon and then going about...
Well, that story we've already gone over. Ginko's version is a little different. There is no calling out of a demon (or mushi). It might even be more like, say, the crime/event was done by an animal, but we need Ginko to tell us which animal. And after getting the basic gist, Ginko pretty much knows right away -- thanks to a massive collection of information in his head, and an additional pile of texts shoved into his travelling pack -- that this particular crime was perpetrated by a horse.
Which horse? That's not what matters. Horse, the generic horse, all horses or none or this particular herd, there is no formal naming and calling-out. Even in cases where it's a ghost (as I recall, a few are), these are human-spirits who upon death got tangled up with mushi and thereby have remained instead of drifting off as proper ghosts should.
Ginko may identify the mushi involved, and then realize the ghost's identity, but there's no dramatic point of commanding a spirit by name to shape up or ship out.
The pattern, instead, is: first, to deduce what general power created the situation. That's the form of the culprit, be it 'horse' or 'ghost' or 'mushi brand X'. Next is to delve further to learn the full Truth of the situation, because it's the Truth that informs how the balance may be restored. And finally, restoration of the balance involves acknowledging that the balance was off, was wrong, was out-of-whack.
That would be this story's kindler, gentler (and far subtler) form of Regret. But for all that, there are maybe only one or two stories in the series where a human expresses regret for actions, as in specific guilt-caused regret, and that's because in a lot of the stories there isn't truly a clear culprit.
No one is particularly, always, truly to blame: many of the circumstances are due to the intersection of two opposing forces. If they'd run parallel, we'd never had had this problem and the twain would never have been aware of the other.
In the end, the goal is to return the world to its status quo, to a pre-conflict point in which the involved parties may go about their business peacefully once again. That doesn't always happen, and sometimes the consequences are severe and unyielding; human agency can misfire despite even Ginko's sincerity or educated advice. But for all that, Ginko never seems to harbor a grudge against these creatures, even if they are what keeps him moving, makes it impossible for him to stay in one place for too long.
Nor do I mean to give the impression he'd entirely without ambiguity, because he is a peddler. Once or twice he barters over selling mushi (which he also collects, sometimes, for a friend), and it seems calculated, unexpectedly cold on his part, doing this to get a buck.
Yet he is a peddler, and he is a salesman, and like most in sales, he's not above making a dollar or two where he can, sometimes with fewer scruples than one might like. Thing is, after awhile I came to the conclusion that to some degree, his actions are by virtue of his business, his nature, and life-demands (have to pay for food, f'instance), and not because he bears ill-will towards something. If a mushi comes out the loser in the intersection, this is only the course of the world and not something personal.
That, too, is some of the reason (I think) that the idea of 'calling out a specific name and thereby binding' is irrelevant in this series. It's not personal, in any direction, at heart. It just is.
Also, in Ginko's world, everything contains mushi, contains spirit. There are mushi that live and die in the course of a morning, trapped in the dew that falls on autumn leaves; there are grand streams of mushi that flow down the mountains in an annual exodus to the sea where they'll give birth and die, and let the newly-hatched young begin the trek back to the mountains. There are mushi under rocks, in trees, in the rafters of homes, in bowls, in drink, in the air, stuck to your shoes.
It's not really that even inanimate objects are sentient in some basic fashion -- it's not that kind of pantheism -- but that there are so many of these peculiar, microscopic to macroscopic, invisible ineffable creatures that they permeate every possible space.
If there are microscopic creatures living beneath the colored glaze in your soup bowl, your soup bowl is hardly 'alive' -- but with enough tenants, the soup bowl just might start displaying behaviors like a living thing. Sort of like if you got everyone in an apartment building to jump up and down at the exact instant. You just might shake the building, but it doesn't make the building alive.
What it does do is prove that no matter how small the individual force, the combined power can rattle even things that outweigh us by a tonne to the fifth power.
The other important thing about regret, in this story's quasi-theistic framework, is that it is not a... how to put it. Hrm. It is not an issue of punishment. Still using the analogue of murder mystery, readers do eventually want to see a pay-off. We want to see the bad guy pay. It doesn't even always whether he breaks down and admits he was a really bad boy; we still want suffering in some degree equal to what we perceive to be our own level of suffering.
Sometimes, the humiliation (because that's what it really is, on a social level) of abasing yourself in prostrate apology and regret... sometimes, that's enough. Sometimes, it's not, and readers demand blood, demand pain, demand punishment, demand retribution.
There are stories in Mushishi in which I could reasonably see -- if translated into a Western framework -- that readers/viewers might be left dissatisfied. First, the overall tension is incredibly low-key given the subject matter(s). Second, the specific identities of a culprit are a preliminary, and even sometimes academic, kind of question. And most importantly, the goal of the story is to restore the balance... and not to 'right the wrong' in a strict sense.
I guess it would be something like a detective figuring out the murder methods, determining that "some teenager with a grudge" did it, and then asking the question: how do we make things peaceful again? Ignore, sometimes altogether, the issue of whether or not the wrong-doer should pay, but instead focus on 'how do we get back to a place where everything is in balance'. I suspect most western readers would throw that book against the wall, if not follow it up with a rant about bliss-ninny peacenik touchy-feely hippy types being ill-suited to detective work.
I'm not going to go into the full details of Shinto in the modern age, and if you want to read up on it, I'm sure there's a library near you and a helpful librarian just waiting to show you the stacks. The one major point here is that within this Shinto-influenced story, punishment is not really part of the picture -- and that, I think, is a big reason why it doesn't matter on a bone-deep level which specific, individual mushi caused/exacerbated the situation.
Or the human, for that matter; Ginko seems to be, from what I recall, reluctant to bear down on people after-the-fact. He does warn of severe consequences if a wrong action is taken, but he does not gloat nor even imply a "told you so" -- not in so many words or gestures, at least. The punishment one receives are the consequences one is due, and it's not only not Ginko's place to cause (or alleviate) those consequences, it's not his task, either. The universe itself will mete out consequences; Ginko is predominantly focused on restoring the balance.
I guess it's sort of like saying, you can't fix what happened, and it did happen, and that's that, but you can prevent it from happening again by removing those crossing intersections. That's a Shinto-influenced 'pantheon' (if we can even use that word when 'pantheon' inscribes a circle large enough to incorporate the entire living world, seen and unseen), and it radically alters the resolution of the storyline.
That's what I mean when I say that our cultural theistic framework informs our stories, on a much deeper level than maybe we really stop to consider, when writing, when reading, when listening or telling. A huge amount of our western theistic framework -- fundamentally, our sense of Good and Evil, really -- is based on a notion of heaven for the good guys, hell for the bad guys, and maybe slightly-reduced hell if the bad guys are really, really, really sorry (but still some bit of hell nonetheless).
The rare stories where the hero has that opportunity to punish, or to push the consequences, on the antagonist -- and then does not, well, those stories aren't nearly as thick on the ground. Matter of fact, many readers I've known find those stories rather unsatisfying.
I can think of a few movies where the hero holds back at the last instant, and in discussions afterwards there's this assumption that this was 'mercy' on the hero's part (and not always a wise mercy, either, in the reader's views). But still, that's different, because that's the hero actively bucking the theistic framework we've got; s/he gets to that point and says, no, I'm not going to deal out retribution.
It's another matter entirely when the hero never even considers retribution -- or makes no attempt to, nor even thinks of, propelling consequences.
A man I once knew used to like to say, the wheels of karma must turn, but sometimes it's awfully good to push them. That, I suppose, would be the halfway point between the style in Ginko's stories versus the western perception. A character who believes strongly enough in universe-driven consequences might be willing to stay his/her own course rather than deviate just to force vengeance down someone else's throat -- but still, when the author/reader is coming at it from a western theistic foundation, I would expect this to be an active choice, not a simple expectation of how life works.
Of course, I guess it should be noted, just to be clear, that this attitude is not always true of all the characters in Mushishi. The only one who maintains it with any kind of consistency is really Ginko, but again, he's the peddler. He's the one who straddles the line between seen and unseen, and by his actions is living demonstration of the hands-off approach.
Some of the characters he meets accept this gracefully; others insist on blaming something, someone, even when it's patently wrong. And in those cases (which is where some of the melancholy comes in), Ginko doesn't really knock himself out to set the people straight. He's done what he can to restore the balance, and if humans actively choose to upset it again, he is not going to martyr himself for things.
He's not even close to a Buddha, not in that altruistic sense, and not just because he's in sales.
And this brings me to Mo No No Ke, and the other hand of the alternate theistic framework: the buddhist perceptions of birth, life, and death. I had planned to cover that in this post as well, but I rambled a bit and I'm tired anyway, so I'll leave that for tomorrow or the day after.
Plus, planning to bounce some symbolism analysis off anyone willing to read... but that post will definitely contain major spoilers, so it'll be set out as its own post, just in case any of you are planning on watching now that you've seen the youtube trailer-AMV I posted.
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no subject
Date: 23 Nov 2008 12:48 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 24 Nov 2008 07:18 pm (UTC)For the dominant western paradigm, I'd say the canonical texts -- in this case -- might be the chicken, and I'd argue the egg came first. That is, the cultural assumptions leaned strongly towards the duality-perception, and away from non-dual influences.
By the 3rd or 4th century, the early church was so completely hellenized, anyway, that it's no surprise things like the Platonic "good/bad, dark/light" crap was solidly embedded. (Oh, and the concept of a heaven/hell, as well, but that's for another day.) It seems to me that Hippo's Synod was to some degree merely confirming the existing cultural trend.
(The early church wasn't my main area of study, though, and my understanding of that time period and its influences tends to be more socio-cultural rather than religio-political... which is why I find hellenization much more interesting than who did what when in the councils. Heh.)
no subject
Date: 24 Nov 2008 08:37 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 27 Nov 2008 09:26 am (UTC)But like I think I mentioned here or elsewhere, can't recall now, I only really studied any early xtian history because I had to squeeze in another two or three upper-level classes... and my first college was limited in the # of classes in an area I did enjoy.
I'm not sure, to this day, whether it's good or bad to have such a radically different view of Paul than the pop culture version, thanks to a professor whose speciality was Pauline developments and some kind of study called 'archaeological theology' or something bizarre like that. He went on digs. And stuff. (Heh.)
What I really wanted to study was the history of Islam, since that's 50% political and, uh, 45% warfare, and, uh, the last bit is people killing each other. Fights! Battles! Intrigue! Assassins! What's not to love?
Smaller colleges suck, in some ways. Sigh.
But on the plus side, I did actually get asked in an interview once just what exactly is existentialism, so I felt validated despite having ended up with a course of study that was in the top five of All-Time Most Useless Undergrad Degrees Ever.
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Date: 23 Nov 2008 03:41 pm (UTC)It occurs to me to ask: which friends or family members does this involvement change her relationship to? Because I presume that in the culture of the story there are some people (the ones she heard stories from?) who believe all this, and others who either don't believe it or willfully ignore it (which depending on the cultural ubiquity of the magical info).
Maybe it would make it easier for people to accept the characters lack of internal struggle about acceptance (omg! am I insane? magic!) if there's more external struggle with changing relationships?
Like, Aunt S. has always been a source of emotional and financial support but now cuts the young woman out of her life for fear of contagion or drawing attention from magical creatures? Cousin T., conversely, always thought of the young woman as a waste of energy but now offers her the occasional helpful whatever? Maybe seeing those relationships change would substitute for the inner struggle with acknowledgement, while still allowing the character to not start out in a state of certain knowledge?
I'm vaguely thinking here of one of Nancy Springer's stories, Larque on the Wing. There the transformations are taken fairly matter of factly by the main character, and its the consequences in her relationships that provide a lot of tension. (Though I know the magical structures are rathhhhhher different than those you're describing, I think the narrative structure might be relevant?)
no subject
Date: 24 Nov 2008 07:20 pm (UTC)Or at least until I've finished the KITCHEN. Sigh.
no subject
Date: 23 Nov 2008 03:44 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 24 Nov 2008 07:22 pm (UTC)Although the point about Guede, hrm, must come back around that that...
I really DO love these analytic bouts of yours :)
Date: 23 Nov 2008 03:53 pm (UTC)I agree with you, a good portion of the 'power of the name'-concept we see in Western culture is strongly tied down to our background of beliefs, which tend to be Judeo-Christian in origin if not in intent. All the evil spirits are catalogued and must be revealed if they are to be controlled. But this makes me think of an even more crucial fact when it comes to names within the context of this worldview: that God has no name.
Father, Elohimm, God, Yahwe, Jehova, etc. God has a multitude of appelatives which we are free to use, but it is universaly acknowledged that none of these are his true name. There is even an argument originated between those who originally called God YaHVe, and those who called him YeHoVa. I don't remember the exact equivallents, but it basically came down to two factions having 'the consonants in God's name', but no the vowel-sounds that went between.
All that is evil must be catalogued, and man has the names of all things in creation, good or bad, so that he may control them to some degree. But there is one name, within this framework, that is denied to mankind, because it is the one thing they are not meant to control/subjugate or even - as you put it- understand. God must be no understood in this system of belief; it/he/she must be accepted as it presents itself: "I Am that I AM." Take it or leave it, so to speak.
This is a bit of tangent, but I though it was interesting in the light of your discussion on the western belief that names give power/control/understanding.
no subject
Date: 24 Nov 2008 07:39 pm (UTC)Or maybe, "my analysis is acting up this week..."
Ahem.
Yeah, I think Islam has the ninety-nine names of God, though these are titles more than 'names' per se. Sort of like the eighty-something titles carried by Queen Elizabeth, but her actual name is Elizabeth (plus forty other first names because imperial families seem to collect these, but whatever).
However, the residential biblical/hebrew scholar in the house says to clarify that the YHVH issues are an urban (suburban?) legend. The actual disagreement is between YHVH and Elohim, which is why there are two Genesis stories. One has the name YHVH as its main character, while the other calls its main character El, which is an import from the Babylonian. (Elohim means 'lord' but it comes from the Babylonian 'El' or 'Al' which means god.)
That entire thing is a remnant of the political issues sparked when the exiled Jews returned from slavery in Babylonia. They'd had two or three generations, roughly, to... kinda, well, deviate from the original, seeing how they were mostly doing it from memory. (And, too, that a lot of Babylonian concepts and perceptions crept in, as well.) So when they returned, the Jews who took them in were all like, "what the hell are you people doing, and who told you this was 'real' Judiasm?" So naturally the returned exiles were all about arguing that they, in fact, had stayed on the 'truth' path while those folks in the backwater were all wrong, blah blah blah.
Basically, a lot of politics and the upshot is that the Judaic canonical texts ended up being settled at that point, since it was either everyone agrees on one set or they schism into two separate religions. Sometimes you can see where they compromised -- like the two version of the creation story in the same freaking book -- and other places you can identify by word-choice and cultural-context whether it was a text posited/supported by the home-Jews versus that supported/presented by the return-Jews.
It's a really fascinating area of study, I think, and especially because these political battles from two thousand plus years ago still have impact today, moreso with the growing subculture in the West to take the bible literally... and the Old Testament is just as rife with these politically-caused contradictions as the New Testament, really. Go ahead! Ask me which books in the bible are forgeries! Wah.
Okay. That was probably WAY more info than you wanted, but... sorry, my bad, my analysis is acting up this week. Anyone got any advil? A sledgehammer, maybe?
no subject
Date: 25 Nov 2008 01:18 am (UTC)The fact that the text as a whole is being taken literally nowadays strikes me as both fascinating and eerie.
What really got me going about this topic, and your analysis on the power of true names in western culture, was the fact that even if there are many different titles for God, there is still an agreement upon the fact that none is the true name. We can quantify evil as much as we like, and as thoroughly as we please, but we cannot be expected to understand what – following the cultural/religious background – ought to be ‘true good’. As you pointed out, western culture is not about balance, but about drawing a line between what we essentially (culture-driven-instinctively?) perceive as good and bad, and handing out a sort of retribution based on this idea. But if we can gain true knowledge and understanding by the power of true names, then the fact that we can name everything except that which we are – supposedly – aspiring to adhere to is… tragic. There is an inherent assumption there that mankind is incapable of approaching perfection, let alone commune with it. But we are perfectly capable of doing the opposite.
It makes sense that the idea of restoring the balance doesn’t figure anywhere in our understanding of how a story should draw to a close.
But it's too late and I'm not making sense anymore. Curiosity wins over, though; I have to ask… which books in the bible ARE forgeries?
no subject
Date: 25 Nov 2008 04:21 am (UTC)Bloom, Harold & David Rosenberg. The Book of J. New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1990. ISBN 0802110509. Fascinating translation of what they consider the J (Jahwist) "thread" running through the Hebrew scriptures -- incidentally, they claim it is the work of one author, a woman. Gives fundies apoplexy, obviously, but well studied and argued, if not ultimately provable one way or another.
Review of the book: http://prophetess.lstc.edu/~rklein/Doctwo/seitz.htm
Quick overview of the Jahwist vs Elohist discussion:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Documentary_Hypothesis
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jahwist
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elohist
http://imp.lss.wisc.edu/~rltroxel/Intro/hypoth.html
http://www.cs.umd.edu/~mvz/bible/doc-hyp.pdf
http://www.interfaith.org/articles/torah_torah_torah/torah1.php
no subject
Date: 25 Nov 2008 08:42 pm (UTC)That alone is enough to make me curious, for all the wrong reasons.
Thanks for the information and the book rec, I'll most definitively read up on it!
Re: I really DO love these analytic bouts of yours :)
Date: 25 Nov 2008 04:30 am (UTC)AHIH AShR AHIH*
Ehyieh asher ehyieh
The verb (or so I'm told, not being versed--ha ha--in Hebrew) is in the progressive form, and so this can mean:
I am what I am.
I am what I will be.
I will be what I am.
I will be what I will be.
Doesn't really change the meaning that much, especially given the idea that the Deity exists outside of the stream of time altogether, but I thought it was neat.
And really, what other answer is there to "who are you (who who, who who)?"
* Notice that this is related via Temurah, a subset of Qabalah dealing with letter substitution, to IHVH, or Jahweh.
Re: I really DO love these analytic bouts of yours :)
Date: 25 Nov 2008 08:35 pm (UTC)It makes me think of a conversation I had with a friend over a similar topic, a few weeks ago. We got into a really heated argument on whether or not judeo-christian beliefs support predestination or true free will. Since God is understood to be above and outside of time, he has knowledge of all that is and all that will be. Following that line of logic the ‘ineffable plan’ is in fact set in stone, and thus all of mankind’s actions are already catalogued and accounted for. Does that mean in the end that we have no choice but to follow the plan? Or does that mean that God simply knows what we will choose, because he is both now and then.
Regardless of the outcome, it’s still fun to argue about. (Probably made more fun by the fact that there’s no answer. Haha…) I'll have to tell my friend about this. Thank you. :)
Re: I really DO love these analytic bouts of yours :)
Date: 26 Nov 2008 03:24 am (UTC)Two great rival navies are going to meet tomorrow. Either there will be a battle between then, or there won't. Whichever it will be, it is true today that tomorrow that will happen. If there will be a battle tomorrow, then it is true today that there will be a battle tomorrow -- in which case how can it be otherwise? So too for the converse (i.e., if there will not be a battle). So this is a kind of predestination, therefore the Admirals have no free will.
In Christian philosophical debate, the question often centers around the issue of foreknowledge. If God is omniscient, He knows that you will commit a sin before you actually do it. Since His knowledge is infallible, what choice do you have not to commit the sin? Augustine predictably decides that foreknowledge is not causation, and therefore not incompatible with free will. (There's a secondary debate as to whether God knowing you will sin but not preventing you makes Him an accomplice, which also gets debated, in Augustine as well as later.)
This debate continues right up to the present time. (E.g, Robert Kane, "A Contemporary Introduction to Free Will.") Thus proving the slogan on the U.T. Philosophy Department t-shirts:
"Philosophy: No question too trivial, No answer too obscure." };->
no subject
Date: 23 Nov 2008 11:00 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 24 Nov 2008 07:49 pm (UTC)Which I think is one more universal human element in storytelling, really. The general path of the seven plotlines is, where status quo = A and strife/upset = B: A, B, A. Or alternately, A1, B, A2. A story ends not just because the conflict is resolved but because stability has been achieved, whether this is a derivative (A1+B=A2) or a return (A1, B, A2).
I think the key is the means by which B becomes (or returns to) A... whether B incorporates retribution or punishment of some sort as a necessary step to a return to stability.
You're right about the 'fix everything' being only in children's stories. I wonder if that's why, in some written-for-adult books, I find myself dissatisfied when the story has a total-happy, fix-everything ending where it all goes back to being happy like it originally was. It feels to me like the entire book might as well have never happened. Sort of like TV episodes where the entire episode is one character's dream: any development in that episode, then, counts for nothing. It's wiping the slate clean.
no subject
Date: 24 Nov 2008 02:15 am (UTC)formname/regret theme. XD *PRETENDS SHE IS CLEVER YAY*Anyway, more fascinating reading. I think I'll have to look up Mushishi, it sounds really good.
no subject
Date: 24 Nov 2008 07:51 pm (UTC)Eventually, someday, my brain is going to shut off. For at least a few minutes. I can't wait.