The Loneliness of Miss Kobayashi’s Apartment

What continues to surprise me, when I walk down a street at night and catch the corner of a bedroom beyond a window’s curtain, or someone flipping through TV channels from the couch, is the longing I feel for these homes I’ll never be invited into—or, maybe more accurately, for the lives I’ll never live. — Kristen Radtke¹

More than the zany antics of Tohru or the endearing naïveté of Kanna, it is Kobayashi’s insights into the aloneness of her apartment that left the deepest impression. After she yields to Tohru’s maid offer, she realizes just how long she had been alone. However, this sentiment is not accompanied by sadness, but pragmatism: she needs a caretaker and a larger space.

Papika, the Manic Pixie Dream Girl

Let’s go adventuring again, okay?

Flip Flappers is the type of anime that invites dialogue—character-driven, stylish, rich in symbolisms, and, perhaps most importantly, darker than its visuals would suggest. However, for all the attention that Flip Flappers has received, surprisingly little has been written about Papika.¹ And for a good reason.

Papika is the literal and metaphorical manic pixie dream girl for Cocona. But little more.

Magic, madness, and sadness

Some photos to note the past year and welcome the new year.

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Memory and Musubi in Your Name

Time will unbind our memory glue
and I’ll be as nobody-ish as all of you. — Marceline

The most beautiful aspect of Your Name (Kimi no Na wa) is how it weaves its various themes to form a coherent labyrinthine story, waiting to be untangled by the unsuspecting viewer. Its take on the body swap plot allows for much more complexity and poignancy. The film also integrates seamlessly two main threads—the struggle against a terrific fate and the love between the two leads.

The Cyberpunk Cities of Tsutomu Nihei’s Blame!

Walk along, and you’re six hundred foot under Manhattan. You’re at approximately 30th street or something. You’re in the middle of the greatest city in the world. Nobody even knows you exist. Nobody has a f-. Nobody has a clue. It’s just… It’s just… Beautiful. — A sandhog, on water tunnels¹

Sometimes, in the dead of night, I would go on long runs. I had been doing so for years. Back when I still lived in Palo Alto, I had two favorite routes that I still recall vividly. One is through the suburban streets, passing by piles of leaves and urban forestry, among the modern-traditional McMansions, Tudor homes, and Bohemian backyards. The second runs along the highway, bordered by endless panels of noise barriers on one side and an expansive desolate marshland on the other.

Reading Ryunosuke Akutagawa: Self-Cultivation, the Plotless Novel, and Nichijou

Take my Akutagawa Prize!

My summer reading included dozens of short stories by Ryunosuke Akutagawa collected in two books. Akutagawa’ position in the topography of modern Japanese literature has been widely acknowledged. Indeed, one of the most prestigious Japanese literary awards is named after him, the Akutagawa Prize. His role in literature—self-cultivation, aestheticism, and intellectualism—cannot be understated.

Re:Zero: Camera Shots and Angles in the Foot Fetish Scene

I’m the foot fuckin’ master. — Jules, Pulp Fiction.

The third arc of Re:Zero -Starting Life in another World- begins with a tedious grind of forced misunderstandings and annoying displays of male chauvinism from the protagonist, but it also contains my favorite scene in the anime thus far: the foot fetish scene.

My Momentary Loss of Humanity

On a Tuesday evening in December of 2015, I was confronted with my ugly inhumanity.

At the time, I was a junior clinical clerk on my night shift in the cardiology department. It was a slow evening in Ward 5C as usual. Patients of less severe conditions tend to be placed here. After all, this is not 5D, just a short hallway away, which houses higher risk cardiology patients.

I was chatting with a fellow junior clerk GL when the intercom calmly announced, “9595, East Campus, 5D.”

Breakaway Phenomenon and Escapism in Amanchu!

McDIVITT: They want you to come back in now.
WHITE: Back in?
McDIVITT: Back in.
GRISSOM: Roger, we’ve been trying to talk to you for awhile here.
WHITE: Aw, Cape, let me just [take] a few pictures.
McDIVITT: No, back in. Come on.
WHITE: … Listen, you could almost not drag me in, but I’m coming.

But he wasn’t. Two more minutes passed. McDivitt starts to plead.

McDIVITT: Just come on in …
WHITE: Actually, I’m trying to get a better picture.
McDIVITT: No, come on in.

— Excerpt from Packing for Mars, Mary Roach¹

Witchcraft and Occult Philosophy in Flying Witch

So witchy!

While performance of witchcraft in Flying Witch is sparse, it would have been enough for executions in the 15th-early 16th century. The defining blueprint for witch-hunts at the time, the Malleus Maleficarum (Hammer of Witches, 1486) traces all supernatural as commerce with demons. The anomalous symptoms of demonic possession is illustrated in three levels: 1. psycho-physiological possession (e.g. infertility, erotomania, epilepsy, melancholia); 2. epidemiological possession (e.g. plague, leprosy, mass hysteria, mob behavior); and 3. climatological possession (e.g. changes in weather, affected livestock or crops, sudden famine or flood).¹ Akane, the most prominent witch in the anime, has at various points displayed her powers in these areas.