Week 9: Banana Fish & Junji Ito's Shiver

I read a bit of Banana Fish, it feels like a detective drama that I can imagine appeals to female audiences. However, I'm spending most of my time reading Junji Ito's work to prepare for my presentation.This week I read Shiver, a collection of short stories. In Used Record, the story takes a turn for the worse rather quickly. An enchanting record, later revealed to be a dead singer's death rattle, curses the carrier. This causes hysteria in small circles where people kill to obtain the record. Ito says he was inspired to create this story because of a small record shop he lived by in Nagoya. Used Record uses some conventions I talked about that Ito utilizes, but on a smaller scale. Fashion Model is just a visual feast of disgust.

Hanging Blimp was one of my favorites and I'll be talking about it during my presentation. It's about floating heads, dopplegangers of humans from below, that await to hang their helpless doubles. They moan their own names from the sky; searching for their human companions, all while having have dead expressions on their faces. This story felt melancholic because of the progression of the mass hysteria, as it affected personal groups of people like families. It feels like a commentary on how suicide affects people, as the Japan in the story was made aware of the floating heads after a series of copycat suicides kept happening.

The Long Dream is another great one, more Lovecraftian in nature, though, as it relies more on ideas than gore to instill terror. A man is afflicted with a disorder where he falls asleep, and as every dream passes, he feels it becomes longer even though it's only been a night in real-time. He begins to have dreams that feel as though they've lasted months, and they're often terrifying and unimaginable in nature. The man begs the doctor to help him not-sleep. This unsettling cycle begins to affect the man's appearance, and his wife, who is also sick but with a cancer, cannot recognize him. Eventually, the man turns into dust and fades away. The Long Dream was a specifically scary read because of it's discussion of "real time vs. subjective time" as Ito called it. To imagine being stuck in a dreamland, only to awake 8 hours later is beyond human imagination, and definitely worth a read.

Diversity of Gender & Sexuality in Japanese Media

on My Lesbian Experience with Loneliness 

Something that immediately resonated with me is how Nagata sources her feelings of loneliness from having to leave college and finding a place to belong. Nagata describes this tumultuous transition into adulthood in a way where I feel deeply empathetic. I've been struggling with this transition as well, and the distinction between "normal" people transitioning and people with mental disorders is how easy it is for "normal" people to recover from transitional events.

I have anxiety and depression, therefore disordered thoughts are interwoven into my mental framework as if they're normal. However Nagata's short but accurate description of disordered thinking, such as with rejection or trying hard enough, echoed my experiences. Furthermore, when she gets back on her feet in Chapter 2 but is still having anxious thoughts about her part time job not being good enough, it shows her disordered thinking creeping back.
Disordered, untrue, thoughts about yourself are easy to dismiss by a third party, but it is a thinking pattern so ingrained into someone with mental issues. Even when she's having sex with the call girl, her mind wanders to her anxiety! How relatable. Nagata's adventures in her mind are a great representation of mental illness and how they affect the mind and thus how we respond to events, like transitional periods into adulthood.

The art style of the manga is significant, too. The less rendered, doodle-like approach is something I enjoy but it is also effective in that it echoes the scattered mentality of the author and the content of the story.
And some more relatability: when Nagata describes her feelings of, let's say unfamiliarity, with being a woman by saying, "that somehow before I was me, I was a woman, Like I was scared of being overly defined by those expectations I guess." Again, I relate to this heavily as well because I do not strongly associate myself with being a woman. Partially because I don't like to be expected to do certain things and because it's never been an aspect of myself that I've identified with or considered a driving force of my being. Anyway, reading that line helped me properly formulate how I feel about being a "woman" in my own terms.

on My Brother's Husband (Vol. 1)

With My Brother's Husband, we are introduced to a series of diverse thoughts about family; beyond that of homosexuality, and redefining what a family can be. The ex-wife figure is interesting because she represents a new set of values, to co-parent peacefully and prioritize your children. Then there is the additional aspect that the father is a single dad raising a small girl.
The interactions between gay men and other people is normalized. And the emphasis placed on Kana's character is kind of genius because her inclusion requires the "complex" topics of homosexuality to be described in a kind, understanding, non-judgmental way so that Kana can understand. Kana's innocence when being confronted with something different is encouraging for her dad to see. This means that apprehensive audiences with their own prejudices, such as Kana's father, will learn to accept others as well.