Over at Journalista, Dirk very kindly joins the roundtable discussion. More specifically, he thunders his fist down upon our placid roundtable and accuses us all of being insufficiently mellow:
I must confess that it’s a bit weird reading multiple reviews of the series from people who don’t sound as though they’ve enjoyed many quiet moments in their lives. That sounds like a value judgment, but that’s kinda the impression I’ve gotten this week. None of these reviews found the critics connecting the work to anything in their own experiences, which tells me that the stories didn’t work for them the way Hitoshi Ashinano intended them to work.
Alternate theory: My own perspective is off-kilter by comparison, and I shouldn’t be so goddamned presumptuous. I suppose the reason that I enjoy YKK so much is that I spent a great deal of my childhood outdoors — and since I’m from Arizona, “outdoors” meant “way out in the middle of the fucking desert.” …..
The need to get out and wander has never really left me. I recall one of the ways that I pulled myself out of my post-adolescent funk was to grab a thermos, a pipe and a bag of marijuana and jump into the car around 1AM. I’d drive up to Flagstaff, stop at a convenience store and fill the thermos with coffee; then I’d get back on the highway and keep driving until I was in the middle of Monument Valley, where I’d pour a cup, light up and wait for the sun to rise. I did this three or four times in the space of six months. It was glorious.
Dirk has me dead to rights, at least; I’ve never really smoked pot. (Though Pink Floyd was my favorite band for a while back there…so maybe that counts.)
More seriously…it is true that landscape as such doesn’t play a huge, huge role in my childhood memories in quite the way Dirk describes. My most important meditative recollections involve, not looking quietly at the desert, but thrashing repetitively through the water — I was on a swim team for much of the time I was growing up, and the sense of isolation, of time as elastic, and of connection to a very physical reality which was also spiritual is probably my closest analogue to the kind of romantic sublime that Dirk (and many others) link to contemplating nature.
So is it because I lack the requisite personal experience that I’m not as into YKK as Dirk? I don’t know…I tend to mistrust the kind of aesthetic argument that says “if you’d only been there, you’d understand.” Experience does shape one’s aesthetic responses — but aesthetic responses also, and perhaps even more thoroughly, shape experience. Which memories define you and which get forgotten or seem less important — obviously that’s partly out of your hands, but I think there’s some dialogue there as well. If you’re going to admit free will at all, you’ve got to leave room for the possibility that you make your memories, not just that your memories make you.
Anyway, where I’m going with this is that, to me, it seems like the issue isn’t necessarily what experiences we have or haven’t had, but how we see YKK intersecting with those experiences, and what it seems to be saying about that. And in that context, I think the important factor may not necessarily, or only, be where we’ve lived, but what our ideology is. Which is to say, Dirk’s a good bit more conservative than the rest of us in this conversation, and I think that may matter a fair bit. Bill’s explicit about this when he says of YKK that:
I find it reactionary. Compared to other manga like Hanashippanashi (TCJ #280), which deals with the tensions between a feel for nature and actually living in Japan, YKK feels like a retreat. It’s a fantasy of a return to simpler times and does away with urban complexities with a flood.
Miriam’s less direct, but what she calls her mild “impatience” with the book seems to have at least something to do with feminism and with the portrayal of the main robot female character. Tom’s too; as he says in his post “Fulfilled fantasies tend to be banal and that goes for fantasy girls. Alpha’s a mannequin doll who’s there to make the old guys feel good. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it is a limiting thing.” Certainly for me, at least, the way the romanticized past seems to hinge on the infantilization and (literal) objectification of the female lead is one thing that makes it hard for me to embrace the series fully. (I had similar problems with the similarly nostalgic Ugetsu; though, as I said in my own post on YKK, I also have at least some sympathy for reactionaries.)
LIke Dirk, I don’t want to be presumptuous. I don’t necessarily think that politics wholly determines aesthetic reaction any more than experience does. Moreover, I have a healthy respect for Dirk’s politics in general and for his take on gender issues in particular, not to mention for his understanding of manga. I’m much more inclined to read more of YKK knowing that it’s Dirk’s favorite series ever I was before he said that. But I do think one reason for, at least, my relative lack of enthusiasm is that, whatever my flirtations with C.S. Lewis, I find YKK’s determined idealization of a conservative traditionalism hard to swallow without at least a couple of murmurs of protest.
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In comments to Miriam’s post, Derik B says that Alpha avoids the fantasy/girl trope. I think what he means by that is that she doesn’t have a relationship or isn’t explicitly sexualized. I’m not sure that that would really allay my concerns entirely, though. There are different stripes of fantasy girls; some like the subservient sexual plaything, others prefer the idealized eternal innocent. I can believe the book avoids the first, but I have trouble, giving what I’ve read and later plot summaries, that it avoids the second.
Though I should probably read more before I crawl further out on that limb…not that I usually let mere ignorance stop me, but still….
Update: Bill and Derik both have thoughtful responses in comments, so be sure to scroll down….
Beat me to it, Noah. I'll add this:
One of my favorite days ever, which YKK did remind me of though I thought it too much of a tangent to mention, was at this NGO/hippie commune in rural Japan, and me and this Irishman and this Englishwoman went out to dig bamboo shoots for frying. We bumped into five smoky old farmers who spent an hour each giving us their version of the Right Way to dig, resulting in a bunch of holes. Walking back, clouds were rolling in and for some reason we all laid down on the road and fell asleep.
Also, I greatly enjoyed Dirk's evocation of landscape. My landscapes are thick forests, hills & streams, and mountains, which is probably why I like Japan so much. Someday I'm gonna write about nature & landscape in manga, with Miyazaki's version of mycorestoration and whatever it is clouds mean, because islands have great clouds.
Nature and especially landscape in YKK's is postcard pretty, beautiful even. I can't trust it. It reminds me of the utterly depressing fantasy at the end of the Ghibli movie Pom Poko, where the raccoon-dogs use their magic powers to turn back urban development and make Japan rural again, to bring back their dead loved ones, and it only lasts for a second and disappears and they're back to dodging cars.
Except YKK provides the fantasy without the hitch? I want landscapes with more complexity. Prose has John Muir, Wendell Berry, Anne Whiston Spirn, films have Eureka and Tarkovsky. Comics have precious few evocations of landscape. Porcellino, whom both Dirk & Derik mentioned, but his landscapes weave personal history and American Transcendentalism with his own version of Zen. Other than that there's Storeyville, Hanashippanashi, Nausicaa, Kampung Boy… Palomar? Comics have mostly been urban: Chicago, Paris, New York, Tokyo, Seattle. To me, YKK feels like an urban version of landscape: something you go to look at that's pretty and then leave.
(Finally, if I can expand on the reactionary bit, it seems like a certain kind of Japanese conservatism which isn't necessarily political. Sure, there are guys in sound trucks barking, "kick out the Brazilians, Great Emperor I Wanna Get All Up On" You blah blah. There's also a sense that Japan lost something to Westernization, basically a version of Perennialism, that turns up in a lot of the agricultural writers I like, such as Masanobu Fukuoka (and more often in Western observers of Japan). Western greens are perfectly reactionary, too, but in Japan they often tap into the VERY strong isolationist/exceptionalist impulses in that country. So you have Fukuoka, a super-conservative agricultural genius who believes Western science is a plague, with a bunch of longhaired American hippies on his farm in the mid-70s, all likely wishing for the collapse of modern government/financial systems.)
I’m going to have to muddle these ideas further. I consider YKK one of my favorite series. I don’t have the landscape childhood/memory that Dirk is talking about, but neither am I conservative (on numerous levels).
What really appeals to me about the series is the the structure of the narrative. The use of time, the lack of big moments, and the everydayness of so much of the goings on. The way the events are often disconnected yet as the series goes on, previous events are recalled (there is a memory).
Of course it helps that it is all rolled up into lovely artwork, that does make you want to linger a bit.
Yeah; I didn’t think you were especially conservative. There are ways to be liberal and reactionary too, of course (as Bill indicates, environmentalism is one.) Or you can like it for other reasons, obviously — or just disagree with me about the series’ conservatism….
I lean toward DerikB’s view of the series; the way time shows up later in th erun sounds very interesting. Disagree about Alpha, though.
Conservative vs progressive … I don’t know enough about Japanese politics/culture and will have to leave this angle to Bill. I don’t know much about Dirk’s politics either. In general the US right seems more nostalgic for small-town society than for landscapes before factories, but there’s lots of room for argument here.
Unless we start a new post on the cultural politics of recent apocalyptic stories, I’m done on politics.
But, Derik’s mention of time’s use in narrative fascinates me. Especially since comics isn’t “time-based” like theater or film: no captive audience.
I’ll point again to Eureka by Aoyama Shinji, a four-hour movie whose banal plot serves as an excuse for long, slow shots of landscape; and Pom Poko, in which the raccoon-dogs realize that just because they can smash backhoes with their testicles doesn’t mean they can stop Progress.
Insert joke about Garrison Keillor’s secret support for Pat Buchanan here.
The notion that “escapism=reactionary thought” is one I’ve encountered multiple times in alt-comics circles — the Journal once ran a quiz about comics fans that basically accused people choosing the “wrong” answers of being Republicans. It’s a weird argument, not least of all because this is precisely the sort of argument that movement conservatives throw against liberals; i.e. that liberals want to create some sort of Utopian paradise, whereas conservatives have a more “realistic” view of human nature and therefore value personal autonomy over collectivist fantasy. Boy, I’m being free with those scare quotes, aren’t I?
I should hasten to add that I think both views are essentially bullshit. I don’t think people are so easily tagged.
I suppose one could argue that my nostalgia for open spaces has as much to do with socio-economic class as anything else. Both my parents grew up in the desert, and spent a great deal of time outdoors when they were young for (I suspect) the same reason that we later did as a family: because we grew up working class, and it cost less to spend an afternoon in the desert (or, during the summer, up in the Northern Arizona forests) than it did for five people to go out for dinner and a movie.
But that’s a simplification, too. Couldn’t a sense of nostalgia for the outdoors come from a simple appreciation of the landscape? I like to think that the time I spent in the deserts and forests of my home state would have affected me regardless of my politics or how much money we had. Does everything really need to be explained by socio-political underpinnings? Can’t an appreciation for the glory of one’s own senses supersede who you vote for, or how much you have in the bank?
Bill, I’ll have to look up Eureka, sounds up my alley.
Hey Dirk.
“The notion that “escapism=reactionary thought” is one I’ve encountered multiple times in alt-comics circles –“
I don’t think escapism equals reactionary. There’s certainly leftist escapism as well. Lost Girls, for instance.
Garrison Keillor is an interesting example too. Unfortunately, I can’t comment on him extensively because I can’t listen to more than about 20 seconds of his show without becoming violently nauseous.
Anyway, I think YKK is reactionary not because it’s escapist, but because of the particular kind of escapism it’s interested in: the idealization of a pre-modern past.
“Does everything really need to be explained by socio-political underpinnings? Can’t an appreciation for the glory of one’s own senses supersede who you vote for, or how much you have in the bank?”
That’s a typical reactionary sentiment.
Seriously though; I’m happy to let your appreciation of the manga be linked to the Arizona desert rather than to your politics, if you’ll let my reservations about it be linked to its (for me) questionable politics, rather than to some experiential deficit.
Either way, thanks for throwing your two cents in hat on the roundtable (or something like that). Bill, Miriam, Tom, and I all ended up in similar places (various versions of qualified admiration), so it was nice to have a more ardent defender in the conversation as well.
Oh…Bill and Derik. Speaking of landscape and expansion of time — both of those things are a big part of what I appreciate in H.P. Lovecraft. “At the Mountains of Madness” particularly — funereal pacing, long, endless descriptions of northern wastes and geological formations, moving into catacombs, and then oppressive, ridiculous meditations on massive slabs of time. It’s time as collapsing monolith rather than time as gentle stream, but it’s interesting the way that the experience of both is tied up in particular spatial descriptions…..
Noah:
“I don’t think escapism equals reactionary. There’s certainly leftist escapism as well. Lost Girls, for instance.”
I don’t equate “reactionary” with conservatism, so I take issue with the above statement. Reactionary thought strikes me as quite bipartisan, these days.
Indeed, Lost Girls itself strikes me as a reactionary work of art. Moore clearly approached its pornographic goals from an almost Calvinist left-wing-Anarchist perspective that viewed the enormity of sex through an inflexible set of rules and dogma that would have made any bondage disciplinarian proud. He further piled all of the sexual imagination’s strawman-style villainies upon the characters who Don’t Share Our Values — the bit about soldiers secretly wanting to fuck each other wasn’t exactly what I’d call a nuanced observation. Lost Girls seemed less like an exploration of Dionysus than a series of checklists ticking off the Various Correct Ways To Think About Sex, intent on bringing order to chaos with a determination that Cotton Mathers could only dream of maintaining. Modern porn and its appeal to our baser instincts — this is the future that Moore fears, and he damn well means to roll it back. You could practically feel his anus clench as he plotted Lost Girls out.
Unfortunately, your average Buttman video is almost certainly a far more accurate vision of the libido — certainly the male libido — than is Lost Girls. Sex isn’t a series of wholesome, socially liberating poses; it’s the monkey part of our brain in its purest essence, with all the good and bad that this entails, which is precisely why we have so many taboos surrounding it. Lost Girls had no sense of surrender to the Animal Inside Us, a necessary component of good erotica/porn, as well as an essential part of the explanation for why men and women alike so often do things in the pursuit of sensuality that strike others as utterly insane.
Lost Girls had all the eroticism of a Presbyterian sermon on the joys of the marriage act. Nevermind the catalog of kinks and positions that Moore assembled; the story’s biggest flaw is that his sense of imagination never left the missionary position. Lost Girls is a retreat into rigid dogma, which makes it reactionary regardless of the fact that said dogma is left-leaning in nature.
(Adding insult to injury, Lost Girls is also a virtual catalog of unquestioned assumptions once you stepped outside of Moore’s need to present sex correctly. I especially loved the way that Dorothy fulfilled every hick-farmgirl stereotype available to Moore at the time. Kinda dumb? Check! Jacked off a horse? Check! Fucked her dad? Check! I’m surprised that she didn’t come right out and state that her mom was also her dad’s cousin before marching off to lynch her some neegruhs while she was at it. I’d call Lost Girls any number of things, but “progressive” is the last term I’d use.)
Getting back to the subject at hand: I’m not at all persuaded that YKK‘s rural escapism is “reactionary,” but before we have that argument, I think we’d need to agree on the meaning of the term before we could discuss its application.
Dirk,
Can’t an appreciation for the glory of one’s own senses supersede who you vote for, or how much you have in the bank?
Hank Paulson and I both are members of the Nature Conservancy, so yes, I absolutely agree.
Also, did you get the "escapism=reactionary thought" from something I wrote? Perhaps my term "reactionary" was a poor choice. Your (our) nostalgia for nature's rooted in childhood (mine spent working on my grandmother's farm, now gone thanks to a shitheaded family squabble). But in YKK I see a nostalgia for a certain kind of Japanese identity, and since nostalgia's probably the most privileged emotion in their pop, it's hard for me to take at face value.
(& I want a more complex interaction with nature in my art. Cf. Hanashippanashi's give-&-take with nature, even though Igarashi preaches. I also think lawns should be illegal, so maybe this is my baggage.)
I certainly don't have the sweeping view that escapism's bad, not with musicals, hoops and kung fu in the world. I can think of 1 1/2 major critical works on manga/anime culture that convincingly treat fandom as a political act.
All that aside, I'm going to read YKK to the end and think on it again.
Noah, I've never read Lovecraft– sounds like the opening of Return of the Native. With monsters. Have you read Jason Thompson’s Lovecraft comics? I think they're his first work, & I haven't. But I like his work on The Stiff.
I mean, I don’t like Lost Girls either, for many of the reasons you list. (Though if I went solely by the glory of my senses rather than by the more political tack you take, I might be forced to rate it higher, since I found the pornographic aspect at least somewhat effective.) And yes, there’s a left-wing puritanism at work, as is often the case with hippie visions of various sorts. Still — if it’s not an example of progressive escapism, what would be? I guess…Shulamith Firestone? It seems weird to think of violent feminist revolution as exactly escapist though. Maybe escapism does in fact imply some tincture of reaction, whether of the left or right. (Though maybe Michael Manning or Aubrey Beardsley could be seen as progressive escapism? Though both of them reference earlier genres and periods too in a way that could be seen as backward looking….)
Anyway, as I said in my initial post, I don’t even think reactionary is necessarily bad. Traditions are useful and even beautiful things. Nor do I have anything particularly against escapism. And I didn’t dislike YKK. But…are you seriously suggesting that YKK is either not escapist or not reactionary?
Now I’m going to have to reread “At the Mountains of Madness” and Hanashippanashi (what I have of it).
Is YKK escapist? Of course it is, and I’m not sure why you’re asking me this, given that I referred to its “rural escapism” in the very post to which you’re responding.
Is YKK reactionary? Of course not.
There’s a little dictionary app on my desktop toolbar. Here’s what I get when I type “reactionary” into it:
Reactionary Re*ac”tion*a*ry, n.; pl. Reactionaries
(-r[i^]z).
One who favors reaction, or seeks to undo political progress
or revolution.
[1913 Webster]
Now, this is how I’ve always understood the definition of the term; when I apply it to art, I generally use it in the sense of “an attempt to roll back some aspect of recent political or cultural change to which the author has objections.”
As an example, I feel myself to be on fairly solid ground when using it to describe Lost Girls, because Moore has explicitly stated in interviews that he finds modern pornography to be crude and misogynist, and created the work with Melinda Gebbie as a response to said porn — as an attempt to elevate the form by returning to Victorian-era pornographic styles and themes, which he has praised in every Lost Girls-related interview that I’ve read.
Now, you can argue the merits of such an agenda, and despite thinking that it ended up harming Lost Girls as a story, I would agree that there’s certainly an argument to be made for Moore doing the work of angels by including said agenda. But it’s obvious, at least to me, that his attempt to push back what are basically the fruits of the sexual revolution to return to some lost age when porn was… “libidinous but genteel,” I guess you’d call it… most certainly resulted in a reactionary work of art, as defined above.
By contrast, I can’t find any manifesto-worthy political or social motivations in YKK. To the extent that it touches on environmentalism, it does so less to make a point than to set a scene — it depolulates the world not as a warning, but to provide a pretty landscape in which Alpha can wander. It’s purpose is not to change minds but to soothe them. I’ve never seen Pom Poko, but Randall’s description of it leads me to infer an explicit political commentary that YKK simply doesn’t possess.
So I fail to see how a reasonable person can describe Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou as reactionary. Then again, having provided the definition that I apply to the term, it’s possible that you may be working from a different one.
Quick correction. I wrote:
“So I fail to see how a reasonable person can describe Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou as reactionary.”
If I want to be precise, I should’ve said “So I didn’t see anthing resembling reactionary sentiments in Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou.” You never know — some argument here could change my mind, I suppose.
I don’t think the difficulty is in the definition. It’s that you’re unwilling to use the term if there isn’t an explicit political statement in the story — or in author’s statements about the story.
I’m not necessarily all that interested in intentionality qua intentionality. For instance, Moore may be making some sort of claim that he’s trying to escape modern sexuality — but to me Lost Girls seems to be almost entirely a product of the sexual revolution. Moore can claim he’s an Edwardian or whatever, but everything about him and that book screams “hippie.” If it’s reactionary, it’s reactionary because it wants to go back to the sixties, not because it’s retro-turn-of-the-century.
Similarly, for YKK — yeah, obviously, it’s not making any articulated political statement — Alpha doesn’t stand up and say “modernity sucks! We’d be better off if most people were dead and we were living in a blissful earlier time!” Instead it, as you say, “depolulates the world not as a warning, but to provide a pretty landscape in which Alpha can wander.” But that’s an aesthetic choice — and aesthetic choices are, among other things, statements about how the world works, how we want it to work, and what we believe. If you wipe out the planet to give yourself a passing frisson of nostalgic sentiment, that makes me think that you’ve got a big jones on for nostalgic sentiment, and some serious discomfort with modernity. As you say, it’s a book of feelings, not manifestoes — but the feelings are reactionary. You don’t have to write a treatise to have a point of view.
Though as I’ve said before — I don’t have to hate it just because it’s reactionary. I’ve got problems with modernity too. I can see the appeal of wiping out everyone on earth. I kind of admire the nonchalant ruthlessness of it, even.
So there you go. You can certainly call me unreasonable if you’d like. My skin isn’t impervious or anything, but I think it’s tough enough to handle that.
I’m putting my part of the ‘YKK=Reactionary’ discussion to bed here.
Man, this takes some getting used to. The conversations here seem to bring up political interpretations pretty often while YKK-related discussions in other places are usually limited to appreciating the pacing and art or speculating about sci-fi aspects of the work.
My personal interpretation is that the manga is simply about universal human experiences and accepting the facts of life. Very general, yes, but the themes are highlighted more clearly in the later volumes.
Anyway, I’ve just included this roundtable discussion to my long list of YKK links (under Forum threads and discussions). I hope nobody minds.
No, of course we don’t mind! Thanks for commenting and linking.