I love ugly and unashamed realism. Onani Master Kurosawa does a wonderful job of capturing many elements of middle school adolescence:
Kurosawa describes himself (and Kitahara) as "One who is not good at expressing him or herself. 'The aloof students.'" It seems like a trope that should be common, and it kind of is. But Kurosawa is one of the few manga characters that feels like one of the aloof students. Kitahara, too. In a "normal" tropish high school story, you'd expect the bullied nerd (Kitahara) to be the sympathetic heroine, and the bully (Sugawa) to be the unsympathetic "bad guy" who gets her comeuppance at the end of the story. But in the end, Kitahara ends up just wallowing in her own spitefulness and becomes unhealthily disconnected from all of her peers, while Kurosawa hits things off with Sugawa and they start dating. The ending is almost the reverse of what you'd expect from a teen movie. I really like that the manga did this, because it feels very realistic. There are some cases when the social outcast nerd is just someone who is preoccupied with their studies and hobbies and doesn't really fit in with their peer group very well, and that nerd is just a "late bloomer" who eventually goes on to achieve bigger and better things. But there are a lot of cases where the social outcast nerd is someone who doesn't socialize very well because they're actually a bitter misanthrope, and they spend their lives lonely and isolated even after graduation. Kurosawa and Kitahara begin the story as "kindred spirits" who are socially isolated and have contempt for their classmates. Kurosawa grows and matures and learns how to be a functional human being who eventually gets along with the people that he butted heads with early on. But Kitahara doesn't have this same growth arc. And that's okay. That's kind of how things sometimes happen in the real world. Not everybody can honestly say that they'll be better tomorrow than they were today. That's life. One moment part of Kurosawa's development that I really liked is his reaction to Takigawa and Broccoli coupling up. At first he's viscerally offended, both because he had his eyes on Takigawa while having little affection fro Broccoli, and because in his eyes they're just so wrong for each other: she's the prettiest girl in class, and he's king of the nerds. But then, one day, he looks at the two of them, Broccoli and Takigawa, and comes to realize that in all of his time in school, completely without friends, there were only two people who ever really came to him and made an effort to connect and engage with him, and these two compassionate souls found each other, and Kurosawa hates Broccoli for stealing her love, and hates Takigawa for choosing Broccoli over him, but most of all Kurosawa hates himself because it's suddenly clear to him in that moment that they're perfect each other: in a moment of self-reflection, Kurosawa sees himself as a pitiful and spiteful human being who responded to those two compassionate souls with hatred and anger, and in that moment of introspection, Kurosawa looks at himself and says "I wanna get better." |
| I can see the argument can be made for it being realistic, and there certainly are evidences to support Onanie being realistic. But I personally couldn't connect to Kurosawa that much, and though his initial conflicts (I agree, being typical of an adolescent) invoked some nostalgia, I'd say they're far from being exceptional in portrayal or atypical in resolution when compared to works from a similar genre: coming of age and psychological works, so to speak. Here's another ambivalent thought I had about Onanie: it accomplishes a lot with its short length, touching upon various sensitive issues and ultimately bring about a sort of an optimistic end, but the other characters concurrently fall flat in development and in making the rest of the manga memorable. It isn't asking too much, to focus on the psychological aspects of a hero, antihero, or heroine, and still have supporting characters that don't heavy-handedly exhibit the message of the manga. Which is something I believe Onanie fails to do in certain aspects: a forced, crude portrayal was to be made about Kitahara, alienated and estranged, coming to a resolution in parallel with that of Kurosawa; Maiko, barring a past of her own, grants hope for Kurosawa to eventually come out of his shell. And sure, it is the people (the characters) in our lives who may catalyze the most impactful changes, but, taken too far, the portrayals of said characters become flat, unconvincing, and simply convenient plot devices for Kurosawa's development. |
StellioMay 19, 2015 10:01 AM
| This post recently crawled its way onto my tumblr dash: When people suffer, it often makes them into worse people. It sucks. I know it sucks. It is quite possibly the single most unjust thing about this universe of ours, which is filled from top to bottom with soul-breaking injustices. If you yourself are suffering, it’s pretty much the most insulting thing you can hear, a cosmic insult-added-to-injury where the authors of your pain are sneering at you for retroactively having deserved it. And yet it’s true, for basically any sane definition of “worse” than can be applied to human beings. This runs counter to a common narrative (both in literature and as an idiomatic cliche) that "What doesn't kill you makes you stronger." That ordeals and hardship ultimately build character and turn us into better people in the end. Though, if I were to phrase the sentiment differently, I would say that denying the narrative that "what doesn't kill you makes you stronger" is actually more charitable to people who suffer in the sense that it gives more credit to who ARE able to come out of hardship as better people. If someone relentlessly bullies you, and after the experience of being bullied you end up becoming a more compassionate person, you managed to become a better person in spite of their torment, not because of it. Your bully doesn't get any credit for making you a better person, the credit for becoming a more compassionate person beings to you. Actually, to argue otherwise can come seem pretty insulting. Can you imagine saying to someone, "You know, it's actually a GOOD thing that you experienced this trauma, because it made you a better person," the implication being that if they hadn't suffered that trauma, they would be a worse person, and the further implication being that the person who inflicted that trauma on them was actually doing them a favor by doing that, because hey, the trauma made them a better person! That sounds, well, kind of wretched. I don't want to be in the position of saying, "It's good that this bad thing happened to you," or saying, "This person who did this wretched awful thing to you actually is responsible for making you a better person in the end." So as much as it might suck, on a certain level, that suffering tends to leave you worse as an individual, acknowledging this seems preferable to the alternative in some ways. (Also, acknowledging this makes it all the more imperative that we do everything we can to alleviate the suffering of others, and I don't think you'll have any trouble defending the assertion that we ought to try an alleviate the suffering of others wherever possible.) Some time after letting my thoughts on this marinate, I found myself thinking about this manga, and how it seems remarkably true to life, reflecting the uncomfortable truth about how the victims of torment often end up worse than the tormenters. On my first read of Onani Master Kurosawa, during the early chapters I figured this would be one of those stories where protag-kun befriends the bullied girl, and together they learn to be better people. I'm sure you can imagine a different version of this manga, where the bullied girl gets revenge on her bully, and the bully sulks off into the night to live a miserable existence and the bullied girl gets a happy end. And it comes as a big surprise when it's Sugawa the bully, not Kitahara the victim, who gets the "happy ending." Except, on a certain level, it's not a surprise. When you look at the psychology of these characters as they're presented in the text, the outcome seems to make perfect sense. Kitahara has spent her entire adolescence isolated from her peers. Even worse than the direct bullying is the fact that she has no friends. She has spent years suffering and becoming bitter and angry and fantasizing about extracting revenge, and that's exactly what she comes to Kurosawa for. She's a broken, damaged, bitter, angry, tortured girl whose heart is full of malice. So is it any wonder that in the end, she breaks down and isn't able to have a normal school life? Sugawa is flawed, and the story makes no attempt to deny that. (Bullying isn't cool, kids.) But on a certain level, her bullying of Kitahara is not born out of any real sense of hatred. In fact, one of the frustrating things from Kitahara's perspective (that we're shown early on) is that she makes fun of Kitahara just for the hell of it. From Kitahara's perspective, it would be so easy for Sugawa to just not be shitty to her, and so that makes it all the more frustrating that Sugawa decides to be mean. And, in a way, Kitahara's right: it is possible for Sugawa to just stop being mean. She doesn't exactly turn on a dime, but it's not like her redemption is that far out of reach when she finally decides to turn things around. If you're being mean to someone because you've spent years being angry at the world (as Kitahara was when she conscripted Kurosawa to enact her fantasies of revenge), that "anger at the world" can take a long time to untangle and recover from. But if you're mean to someone "just for the hell of it," then you might just as easily stop being mean "just for the hell of it" when you step back and realize just how much you're hurting them and, wow, that was kind of fucked up of me, wasn't it? Sugawa can choose to become a better person. Kitahara, on the other hand...it's not clear that she can "just choose to become a better person." She's been pushed into a deep hole, and it's the kind of hole that might take her years to crawl out of. On a certain level, it seems immensely unjust. It's unfair that Sugawa gets the redemption arc, and Kitahara is only driven into further isolation and has a breakdown and will probably spend years (perhaps an entire lifetime) recovering from everything that's happened to her. And yet it's immensely true to life. I know plenty of people who were mean to other people "just for the hell of it," and at a certain point, just stopped. In fact, when I moved to a new school in third grade, I was a target of bullying by several classmates several weeks at the start of the school year. Why did they bully me? I suspect that to them, it was kind of just a game. And at a certain point, the bullying stopped, and I ended up becoming friends with some (not all, but some) of the bullies, and those friendships continued for the next decade or so of our lives until we graduated from high school together. As it turns out, the kids who bullied me weren't "evil people," they were just misbehaving kids, and as such their redemption arc ended up being incredibly short. But that fact was little comfort to me during the several weeks that I was bullied, and I suspect that if the bullying had lasted for years instead of weeks (as it did in Kitahara's case), it might have left me deeply damaged in a way that would have made me less capable of compassion, less capable of making friends, and less capable of having healthy relationships (in the same way it did for Kitahara). In my previous post in this thread (over 3 years ago, wow) I praised the manga for being realistic. I didn't think to articulate this specific thing at the time, but on a certain level, I'm sure it was on my mind. And this dynamic isn't something I see portrayed in a lot of other stories. I've seen a lot of people describe the ending of this manga as a "twist," and I'm not sure that it's a twist so much as a subversion of the expectations that we've built up from a lifetime of seeing stories where the underdog always triumphs and the character who's presented as villain in act 1 of the story ends up being defeated in the final act. But if the ending is a twist, then it's absolutely the best kind of twist: surprising, yet inevitable. |
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