On Realistic Romance (plus a little Toradora and Bakemonogatari)

It is precisely because opinions are functions of lived experience that they claim to have a certain knowledge of emotions. Opinions prevail on human passions and their eternity. But one has the impresion that opinion misjudges emotional states and groups them together or spearates them wrongly...a great novelist is above all an artist who can show us a world of new sensations outside our lived experience in the becoming of his characters. - Deleuze

Hard or Soft, how would you like it Goshujin-sama?

Wabisabi once wrote about the words kouha (hard) and nanpa (soft) and their usage in anime fandom. The idea was that kouha refers to hard-hitting minor and difficult works like Ghost in the Shell, while nanpa refers to popular and easily accessible works like erogame adaptations for softies. Personally, I don’t find this elitist distinction very interesting. Although I’m not about to re-define what kouha and nanpa actually means, I do want to share with you the sort of anime I personally associate with when it comes to hard and soft.

Cruel anime II: Sense vs Representation

"Petals were falling like snow. And for a moment, I could not tell where I was." - Koi Kaze

In my previous entry on cruel anime, I talked about one particular aspect of Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty. I’d like to follow that up by delving into more significant aspect of Theatre of Cruelty, which can more or less be summarised by the following:

“[...]Artaud believed that text, such as dialogues used in hollywood flicks, had been a tyrant over meaning, and advocated, instead, for a theatre made up of a unique language that lay halfway between thought and gesture. Artaud’s theatre is made of screamings, cuttings and squirmings.”

left: woman's eyeball about to be slit with a razor in Artaud's clip, right: a boy crushes a puppy into pulps in Midori: Shoujo Tsubaki

Please note that Artaud wasn’t proposing for more eyeballs to be slit in movies. Sadism wasn’t his intention. What’s revolutionary here was the way Artaud appealed to our primal senses through bodily expression instead of resorting to Hollywood’s over-usage of dialogues to convey meanings. We see the blade reach an eye and squirm involuntarily, and immediately perceive and feel. There is no moment to derive meaning, or ponder on its ’symbolisms’. Only experiencing and living that pure sense of squirming. To further illustrate this point,