Looking at the dim, dark gray room before you, nearly devoid of anything, you can only sink into deep despair. This is a shadow forgotten by civilization. The darkness here has substance — it clings to your skin like thick ink. Wrapped in the musty darkness, rust stains, and heavy walls, as long as you still have senses, you’ll realize you are a prisoner. The barred window is the only place where light enters — a small, square grate high above, teasing you. You’d better not dream of escaping through it. The occasional passing guard won’t regard you as human — he is the embodiment of violence. Fortunately, he himself isn’t too keen on frequenting your shabby, miserable little space.

This is a description of a traditional prison. When I try to construct a prison scene …

Born into poverty and a broken family, and having made his way up through elite education, Vance has come to see the hypocrisy and arrogance of the establishment from the inside. As an insider, he wants to tear this system apart, by any means, going all in, a system that presents itself as moderate and respectable while rotting from within. He is driven by a strong sense of mission: to rescue America from its liberal democratic tradition, to free his rust belt homeland from the drain the elite class has put on it, and to build a more powerful national order through whatever necessary evils it takes, Caesarist, Leviathan-like, centered on the family and the domestic worker.

To gain the power to change America and the world, he sold his soul (his conscience, his morals, his honesty). Vance …

Trump is extraordinarily blunt and narcissistic: he says what he wants to say, takes what he wants to take, with no pretense and no shame. Unlike Vance, he grew up pampered, yet was never accepted by old money or the establishment either. Through a formula of deny, attack, play victim, he has managed to convert countless bankruptcies, impeachments, and lawsuits into raw publicity. He is a beast, and he shattered the repression of “political correctness,” connecting with voters and the public through the most primal desires, rage, and fear, and through the instinctive “America First” buried deep in American blood. His worldview has been completely stripped of any illusion about democracy, freedom, and human rights, leaving only the binary of winning and losing, facts …

The current American political moment, the Trump and Vance administration, is America’s Symptom, and also its only truth.

Trump has dragged the Obscene Supplement, hidden beneath the legal and symbolic order, into plain sight, exposing the exploitation, hegemony, and inequality that were always there, giving the public a retributive surplus enjoyment: the pleasure of feeling no shame about one’s own selfishness and desire. Voters do not care about his moral bankruptcy. They experience Trump as the Primal Father, the one who stands beyond the law and honestly shows them the dirty truth of power.

Liberals created this symptom. Yet today’s liberals resemble Hegel’s hypocritical Beautiful Soul: standing at a distance, occupying the moral high ground, taking their …

Le désastre ruine tout, tout en laissant tout en état. ¹
Disaster ruins everything, while leaving everything intact.

Patriotism, and When the Evening Tomb Burns

About the rose that had fallen from the lava, Ken’ichi felt there was nothing to say. The edges of its petals had been vaporized by the magma, the moisture it should have carried long since evaporated, leaving only a dry, curled body. This body reminded Ken’ichi of many people, but he felt it would not be his own. The magma crawled forward slowly, consuming the remains of the rose without a sound. The rose lay still, made deeper crimson by the searing glow; in Ken’ichi’s eyes, it seemed to be floating gracefully into deep space. Steam gradually clouded his glasses. He stood up from the chair, slid shut the …

Ground covered in quicksand. Burial, consumption, and newly exposed surfaces. Every place already seen. Loss. Astonishing silence. Sinking into a golden ocean and the hourglass of the world. Sunrise on the dunes. Books. Gazing, abandonment. Solitude and exhilaration.

To thee, the world is like a tomb, / A desert’s naked shore ¹

Reverse Tide

Blue wings panic,
darting
in arcs,
trembling. The plane cuts across
the low-hanging,
dense
star clusters
floating below.
The cabin hums.
An orange line on the wing simulates dawn.
Dawn crawls toward
the black lake.

The full moon
bleeds open
heaven’s mud.

Filed

“The fate of a unicorn in the desert is…”

The unicorn looked at me. A flash of light surfaced and vanished in its eyes.

“Filed.”

The unicorn drove …

Models, compositions, light, depth of field: César Piette reconstructs painterly reality in a modern, gentle manner. His works are concise and vivid; titles briefly list what appears in the image, mainly modest combinations of portraits, animals, plants, and objects. Viewed from a distance, one might take them for computer-generated models: objects have smooth or glossy textures, like plastic or metal, with backgrounds showing pronounced blur, as if shot with a telephoto lens to produce shallow depth of field, contrasting sharply with the subject. Most of Piette’s works rest on a foundation that is bright, dynamic, and endearingly lively.

To achieve this refined painterly style, Piette first …

Thread a needle through the pupil. Gold leaf, taut, entranced. From one darkness to a temple. You drag the weeping deer to worship beneath the dead tree. I watch you walk slowly into the morning fog, tracing two winding trails of tears. Wind pours into the chipped curb. In this endlessly recurring performance, nothing is extraordinary.

I’ll decline the wine for now. With a steady hand I hold the stitch and pierce upward in a loop, trying to discern every birth and death with the naked eye. The candlelight dims, and I gradually understand that words only cover wounds, coating our decaying bodies in a layer of lacquer. You admire the patterns of this lacquer, gleaming with an affected, defiant silver light. This is our peculiar growth.

I don’t mind you handing me this septic …

It snowed. Snow drifted onto the ground, gently occupying a small patch of territory, and in time claimed everything on the surface: houses, roads, trees. Snow is like shredded paper, words discarded, scattering, losing their shape. I step on the snow. The snow cries out, pressing against itself, leaving a trace that I was here, along with the dirt I carry. This is an order I issue to the snow: it must keep the ground exposed, visible, held in the state of being watched by me.

I step into the snow. This is how I command it. I can adjust its shape, its state, its position at will. I also sense its resistance: the snow collapsing and melting beneath my feet. In their collective state, they even try to engulf or carry me. I look up, and they rush toward me like moths to a flame. They are …

A new mode of speech has appeared: speech composed of short text (fragmented murmurs) and rough imagery (memes, images, and other visual media, distinct from long-form video such as “film” or “serial drama”); or, “speech without body,” a mode of speech from which gesture and facial language are absent.

People often accuse it of “lacking something.” They argue that what is absent alongside gesture and facial language is “warmth of communication,” “cadence of tone,” “bodily presence,” and other emotional detail, using this to distinguish it from “speech with the body present.”

We can pose several questions: what does “warmth” refer to here? Is it a phantasmal nostalgia, or does it …

Water (I)

She woke in the water. Her body soaked and bloated beyond recognition. From her vantage she could see the gray, hazy sky. She knew she did not want to look down at her trembling reflection in the water, and so she lay like that, not watching the direction of the current, eyes fixed straight at the sky. What flowed through her brain was probably not water but sky. The sky stretched itself out with brute force, filling the entire world, blocking the far end from view. She wanted to see the flesh of the sky peeled away, spilling out dark water.

Camera

Don’t look at me.
I leaned in close, trying to pierce through its hostility, still as a mantel clock, with my nearsighted eyes.
Are you awake?
But I found that when it drew near, my eyes blurred, and its gaze slipped into the …

Splitting. From idleness, pointing back at idleness. All the pleasure of alcohol is produced in the crevice: vertigo, adhesion, myth.

More than alcohol itself, what demands vigilance is the drinking space and its panoptic ritual: the ritual of drinking hovers vaguely over the underage phase of lived experience as a collectively mythologized narrative of ideological control, then lands upon the trajectory of life with an exaggerated, heavy throw (début). Through its covert yet effective evangelism, it infiltrates the minds of everyone, and with its promise of the state of exception (stato di eccezione), it delivers life back to bareness (nuda vita), pushing the individual to the edge of social rules, exposing them without reserve.

Behind them stand the power structures, moral systems, and …

I toss out a sentence, and the sentence bursts open in the air like fireworks (étoiler). Its sparks fall on distant land, and as for whether they ignite a flame, I can only silently pray. I have no grip on the sentence, as if the sentence were itself a body without organs.

The pleasure of conversation is accomplished in this tossing and catching of sentences. It must be turn-based. At the same time, the content of each sentence is suspended, discussed lightly as a present absence. It is not an exchange of information (échange): conversation is a fine, covert, fluid vibration, forming a richly textured fabric (tissu / hypho).

Shingo and I climbed to the rooftop. Smoke escaped from the chimney like fleeing birds. They dissipated so fast I couldn’t tell whether they had slipped into the sky or been strangled by the air.

“What time is it?” I asked Shingo. He had been scrolling his phone the whole time. “Eight o’clock.” He peeled his back from the white wall behind him and slipped the phone into his pocket.

“Let’s do it.” I kicked the black bag in front of me. The bag moved, let out a faint moan. Shingo stood to the side watching this unnerving bag, frowned, then with one smooth push sent it off the edge. The speed of his chain of movements startled me. I turned to look at him and broke into a smile I hadn’t worn in a long time. He was crouching on the …

Love’s not time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle’s compass come. ¹

Synopsis

After losing his wife, David falls into despair, haunted by thoughts about time. In an accident, the dock in front of his studio collapses, sending a fisherman into the water. David rescues the fisherman in time, only to find him showing no signs of life. He calls for Dr. Boyle, and the fisherman miraculously revives, recalling a detail from his childhood. David hopes the doctor can replicate this miracle of resurrection for him, but is refused. So he devises a secret plan: pretend to suffer a minor illness, lure the doctor over, then induce his own near-death state, forcing the doctor to save him. The plan proceeds smoothly, but when David enters the near-death …

And you know
I only feel you through
The scent
Of the waveFinding the key
While touching the air
Soft odyssey
Delusive is the view

Parfum thérémine is a song that belongs to Shanghai’s gloomy, rainy days. It reminds me again of that night when I was writing poems for the people underground in the rocking of a train car. When the windows on both sides sank into shadow, sealing out all sound except the singing; when a city film drove into its winding low growl; and the people around me put on their masks, lodging a mute, mournful protest against this compulsory removal. Then the waves came surging from both sides of the car, a natural disaster encircling people who could not possibly be closer, yet the current repelled them from one another, injecting a buzzing interlude into the …

“Don’t make a sound.”

Andō Masaiku carefully cut a small piece of flesh from Uchida Noriko’s thigh. The piece was about the size of the first knuckle of a thumb, resting lightly and quietly in Masaiku’s hand. Its surface was stained with blood; before this, it had been smooth, fine-grained, and white. Masaiku leaned in and could see the pores on its surface.

Noriko sat in a dark blue foldable iron chair, her eyes wide as the full moon. She truly hadn’t made a sound. She chewed on a strand of her hair, dyed red-purple, watching with indifference as Masaiku, trembling slightly, removed a part of her body. Saliva dripped from the corner of her mouth, falling into the pool of blood, becoming a negligible diluting agent. Her nails were long and extravagant: …

In our Vallée de la Sanaon, neon light flowed like milk and honey over the ketchup and plastic, but what did it matter! ¹

The billboards of Times Square cluster, blink, and flow, constructing a grand altar of signs with their dizzying slogans, product images, and models. This mode of encirclement by images has surpassed the traditional glass display case: a static display merely emanates seduction from its place, but the moving image is violent.

It dismantled the territory in which observation could freely unfold, bringing things alarmingly close and rushing them toward us, the way a car on the cinema screen grows enormous and charges at us. ²

The images on Times Square’s billboards possess the dual face of the imperative and the indicative. ³ They create an …

Mawaru Penguindrum is an original anime from 2011, directed by Ikuhara Kunihiko. It is also, after Revolutionary Girl Utena, another work by Ikuhara that pushes the boundaries of the animation medium. Its nonlinear narrative, theatrical techniques, and exploration of the concept of “destiny” create vortex after vortex of meaning, opening the work to multiple interpretations.

Destiny is what you experience, that
Is its name and definition, and is your name, for
The wide world lets down the hand in shame:
Here is the human shadow, there, of the wide world, the fame.

Robert Penn Warren, Island of Summer, XV. The Leaf

Note: At the time of writing, I had only watched half the series (12 episodes).

Surreal Autonymy of the Penguindrum

The penguins appear at the start of the …

I sat in a café listening to garage rock. The vocals were gritty, muffled, like ambient noise in a shopping mall. If you sat on a sofa at the crossroads of a mall’s corridors and tried to carefully listen and distinguish the specific words and melodies within that mass of sound, all you’d get in the end would be a buzzing headache, like having your head surrounded by bees or flies. The garage rock was making him a little dizzy too. He paused the playback, and the sound switched to the café’s Christmas hymns and jazz from old films.

The sound made you drowsy. Outside, the sky was darkening bit by bit. The café was like a self-enclosed little space. Had the people who walked in really considered the possibility of walking back out? It felt as if everyone here could live …

Tomorrow is so long. Tomorrow extends to infinity, like the creases on a paper bag. The creases create slopes, slopes produce shadows, shadows define the spectrum; everything is constantly becoming. Under contingent branching, everything about tomorrow generates possibility.

The interior of the paper bag has no content, or rather, is continuous. It is not divided by creases and objects; it transitions today smoothly from today into yesterday. Continuous space, continuous nothing, continuous time. It waits for content to be packed into it. It stands there, silent in the posture of being carried along. I can barely see it, but it tangibly exists; it modifies the properties of everything around it. I must open the paper bag to see its interior space; before it is opened, it contains nothing, …

Act One

Around four in the afternoon, early winter. Sannomiya Yū and Itō Chiharu are walking through a park.

Sannomiya Yū: But don’t you feel that life, this massive column, is slowly closing in on us?

Itō Chiharu: Is that so? Do we still have a chance to hide in the basement?

Sannomiya Yū: I don’t think so. Streetlights, handrails, trees, everything has become a column. These immovable columns! Damn it, look at that, what is it?

Itō Chiharu: Is that love?

Sannomiya Yū: Love! Love has become a column too! An Ionic column adorned with a floral wreath, giving off the fragrance of wheat and clouds.

Itō Chiharu: The sun is setting. Aren’t you going home?

Sannomiya Yū: If I go home, do we just let love, the streetlights, the water pipes, the flute, and the fire extinguisher …

Leaping from the azure ecstatic night.

Angel wings fall, driving into the ground like a cruciform spike. Through the crisp crack of the racket, the shuttlecock plunges downward. The shuttlecock, strictly speaking, is not a sphere: only half of its body is curved, while the other half is vertical, decisive, and sharp. Yet it stubbornly claims its place among ball sports. In appearance, the shuttlecock seems like a deformed modification of an animal body. Its head has been replaced with an artificial prosthetic, the skirt forming a ring that mimics a ghost’s garment or an artificial flower. In rotation, the whole thing becomes a cone. Surrealist memes have cautioned us: “Don’t worry, it’s just a cone.” But who can say where in the cosmos the cone might appear …

1. A thermometer with musical notes engraved at both ends. Mercury has overflowed past everything related to the heart. Bring in the ventilator.

“You’re so quiet today. Are you unhappy?”

He said to her. Some people nearby were doing other things, laughing. He took a sip of water after speaking. She didn’t seem to hear, then lowered her head again, as if thinking about something. That was when he noticed she was wearing earphones. Their taste in music was not the same. So he put on his earphones too.

2. The afternoon is a white flag. A drop of ink is tearing through the inertia of white, diving toward the end of days.

When he stood up, his hand accidentally poked a stranger. He apologized immediately and hurried away.

The weather was cool and overcast. He noticed …

幸江と七原〜毒薬

From head to toe, the diseased bud unfolds its anticipated variation. The anchored routine of daily labor produces the illusion of a summer nightmare, but the distortion in my ears, which cannot be interrupted, reminds me of time’s dislocation.

Night. A North American night. A night mid-crossing.

Heatstroke is the syndrome of sleep deprivation, self-deprecation, powerlessness, and resentment. Friday’s heatstroke no longer needs a diagnosis; the ritual goes on, step by step carving out the wasteland of the eardrum.

I’m sorry. Even though I can already see the traces of your rigor mortis bleeding through from the back of the bedsheet, I still want to extend today’s farewell.

I am certain that the border of madness lies at the junction of the esophagus and the …

I Am Here

The length of the long night: a ball formed by winding a tape measure around itself. From one of its markings, the number inscribes me clearly.

What wraps around me is the sensation of silence, soft and viscous, forming the sticky tide that turns the world, devouring my sensitivity to light almost tenderly. In the hours of deep night, I have nothing. I have no pain, no hope, no anything. I rise and fall with the tide, and I am also a part of it.

In This World, Your Mind

Order and learning float above the world, no different from those stale, self-assured discourses. The desire to probe the Real provokes divine mockery. Understanding never exists, like the universe in the film The Great Buddha+.

You mean to cut people apart ruthlessly, to disassemble and classify human bodies and …

With no one around, I flipped open the cover of the emergency brake.

A wisp of red smoke drifted out from under the cover; a sharp, acrid smell flooded my nasal cavity. It was like someone pushing a bundle of needles slowly into the inside of my nose from the outside. My brain crashed for a few seconds, but I pulled the emergency brake handle anyway, without hesitation.

Sound disappeared. The sullen buzzing cut off abruptly, and I woke as from a dream—though even then, the sound of overlapping conversations still surrounded me on all sides. If the buzz had kept my brain perpetually on the verge of detonating, its absence kept it perpetually on the verge of shrinking. The conversations were too dense, too chaotic, layered on top of each other; I couldn’t find their source. Those …

The lightning illuminated the bathroom for a moment, exposing the corner where I’d been holed up to nature’s eye.

The bathroom had always leaked a little; I couldn’t tell anymore whether that was the sound of drizzling rain or water dripping somewhere. As long as it wasn’t dripping on my head, I didn’t really care. I’d anticipated the lightning in advance, and I imagine the others in the office probably thought the one incandescent bulb they hadn’t swapped out yet had glitched, infected by the flashbang’s violence, or maybe figured the retinas they’d been destroying staring at screens all day had finally given out. The weather forecast had, predictably, failed to forecast the lightning. If weather forecasts were actually that useful, …

“Thirty-three of me form a circle, speaking to each other without connection.”

I severed a road and grafted it onto my post-trauma vessels. Its daily throbbing is like a drunken pulse.

When I fell from the windowsill, Shinjuku lost power, and then the echo of sirens flung me into a night sky full of moons. I want to answer your questions about me with a sentence covered in paintings.

You ask whether or not I should move into the eye on the light bulb.

I walked steadily down the stairs, and as I watched the steps inexplicably circling back, extending downward without end, the bell rang. It was the bell of a maid cleaning a room. I was completely lost.

García Márquez smiled discreetly, and a magical hurricane swept above the rooftops. The market had its mast …

For me, the world is upside down.
Oxygen-thin and dripping.
Melting the displayed butterfly bones,
churning the low-growling turbid earth.

One pupil absorbs all light.
I face it.
I sink toward it.

A pretentious, half-finished journal of solitary living, written in a juvenile style. I may never get the hang of writing fiction. Maybe something that language needs is simply missing from me. Honestly, I don’t think I can write anything well.

Step One: Prepare Your Roast Duck

001

“One sliced roast duck set, and a Coke.”

The chandelier lit up the fine textured relief on the dim ceiling, and the customer’s order drifted through the hazy glow. Nine o’clock at night, past the dinner rush, the restaurant had gradually fallen quiet, leaving behind only a scattering of pop music and the scraping of kitchen utensils.

In moments like these, slightly off from the ordinary, Hirosue Kiyoharu would typically narrow his slanted eyes at the scene before him and let his …

To the only self I have

I pick up that blurred image of you, the moment I was most lost in the cosmos. You had the same deep purple crop as me, standing with classmates in white shirts, shyly saying the ordinary things people say in ordinary life, introducing everything I already knew. Why did you film it? Did you already know that two men, a child, and a dog would find a machine that could play this tape? I can no longer find the mountain behind you. The waves behind you broke every white day into fragments. Behind me there is only night and stars.

In the late 15th century, Johannes Gutenberg of Europe created an epoch-making invention: the movable-type printing press. This invention fundamentally transformed the landscape of information in Europe, breaking the church’s and higher authorities’ monopoly on knowledge and thought, and opening space for the free development of science. People began to put their faith in science, and growing doubt toward God gradually shifted the forms that literature took. Classical works—Beowulf, the Bible, the Divine Comedy—were rooted in the beliefs of their own times, composed largely in long verse, celebrating grand ideals and imagined worlds. After the press became widespread, literature underwent a visible shift in focus from the divine and supernatural to the human: protagonists moved …

One day, Les 400 Coups suddenly began to loop inside my head, as if overcome by a fierce desire to narrate my life. I sank my body down, plunged abruptly into the cosmos, like a swan blowing saxophone in silence. The projector shuddered through my week: I stood in the JazzItaliano Live venue, staring blankly at a spotlight with no one in it. In my stomach, 120,000 French characters faded out like a dissolve shot, drifting away from me. In a flash, they became Antoine’s body, coat on, turning to face me, watching me coldly with those caged eyes. I had nothing to say; I watched him coldly back. He stood at the river’s edge, the sound of flowing water washing over the violin melody. Was that a river or the sea? I couldn’t tell, but then he was in a corner of Paris, taking a …

I no longer wish to reproach the sky that only knows how to rain. It falls on new shoots and bricks, tracing the marks of life across dazzling red light with exhausted hands. Single-file water stirs, turns inward, is buried alongside white doves in April’s floral cemetery. It dissolves into a saint’s tears, into nerves and blood, into the endless rain of Shanghai’s Minhang. A translucent Madeleine Elster falls, leaving a ring of melancholy spiraling behind her. Benjamin in his fish tank breathes the murky air of post-graduation, water seeping into the lungs of memory, splicing reality hard against reality. Water overflows the basin, holding back the fresh foam of beer on the floor. If América Vicuña dies in despair, charge that death to God, and throw in a camellia—the …

thin as salted paper
Xianyang, playing coy
a trombone at winter’s end

Look—the visible trembling of that carriage is like a column of life’s synapses. Every time I step onto this familiar yet ever-changing train, it’s like moving through the intimate but unknown transitions between miniature worlds. It’s both absurd and reassuring that so many people, heading to completely different destinations, ride the same train as me. What a random event—and this is exactly the daily life of this spinning city. The crowd pouring in brings the slightly monotonous carriage back to life again. The seats receive your quiet murmuring and mine; you watch your reflection in the window—does your silhouette feel somehow adrift? Ah, time to transfer. Come on, the next world has arrived. Have you ever thought that everything here is nothing but an interlude …

I’m about to say goodbye to this place. I’ll probably miss the mountains.

Those mountains that swallow the sunset like a symphonic wave, those that after the fireworks stand lonely alongside me, working to match the color of the dark sky. You are neither at the road’s end nor at the other side of the stars.

It suddenly occurs to me: isn’t what I’m standing on right now a mountain? Aren’t we, these mustard-seed creatures, part of what makes up the mountain? When I speed past and the trees ahead blur into a great fissure at the edge of vision, have I truly escaped from this towering dust of years? The mountain is only there, turning its eyes to watch us, absorbing the wounds we bring it. I can’t help wondering: can it really be reached? Or perhaps at …

grey dusk, and the concrete road, the tunnel lights
power lines, and the foggy county, a roadside signs
roadside trees, the signal lights turn, a new years
murky chimney smoke, the ink bloomed, an old shrine
the sky’s clarity gone, pitch lowered, stray clouds
road extends, Gantang, the black stone, pine dreams
tears blur sight, the hills asleep like bright gods
nightfall, man-made starlight, the tremble elm rows
see the wildly surging thousand-year brown falls so
without a bell, the mute earth shall never yet stir
red lights, and the beams from a far high tower now
why must you pierce the circling mountain mist, so?
long night now plays Minyue’s most wistful old song
waiting for the ancient beast and its gut to awaken
late winter froze the shack’s playsong and blossoms …

This place is full of noise and human warmth, and yet a quiet seeps through it, impossible to name. I notice that the lights surrounding everything only reach the ground floor; above them is a frightening darkness and emptiness. The windows sink inward one after another, like Angkor Wat stripped of its statues, left with nothing but wind-worn, effaced marks. It is hard to imagine what they once held, tragedy or comedy, but whenever I look at these gray-brown ruins of an era, I cannot help feeling a sorrow that seems to come from some other time and place, like hearing an elegy in a hallucination. The ground-floor lights still burn, casting the shadows of passersby. I know my place is unlikely to be here, on this land where reality feels thin. The car passes through Qiyun Road. I say …

You left behind on the screen
stains of water that won’t wash off,
like snowflakes in the depths of winter.

I returned to the familiar tavern,
cradling the warm, steaming air,
the light before me spreading and dimming.

Look, the No. 12 train
I used to ride all the time
is unusually crowded today.

You disappeared outside the window,
melting into the pedestrians and the night,
the newspaper crumpled in a ball.

Beneath the pale expanse of deep sky, a colony of giants stands. They are cranes, faded to a dull yellow. Most of them sleep; a few move slowly. This is the only thing I can see when I look up. The buildings haven’t gone up yet; I can still see before a mountain of concrete covers my line of sight and erases the sky, already pale as it is.

This used to be one of the noisiest markets in the city. Building materials were produced and wholesaled here; the smell of hardware, steel, and sawdust was everywhere. In childhood, it sat along my daily route to school, its particular brand of clamor somehow balancing my suppressed spirit. Browns and grays interwove; workers in iron helmets hauling timber beams moved back and forth. They were not the models of our future that our teachers and …

Read Messages

Emptiness leaves me at a loss. This feeling retreats when my attention shifts, but can twist back into my thinking with sudden force, making a grand entrance and blasting out everything else. In that moment something like poetry forms; attention scatters suddenly, explodes, keeps bouncing through a turbulent mind. Silence still lingers between the four walls, but peace has been lost within the compression of the space and emotions that silence creates. This is a particular kind of moment: the helplessness of facing the world’s rapid flux while being unable to grasp or even fully know oneself takes over the mind, and a surge of negative emotion hits. In this moment, silence works by way of the storm it implies, not necessarily a physical one, and the extreme suppression …

ABSTRACT. This study investigates different samurais’ choices and their fates in the anime series “Rurouni Kenshin.” In this study, by analyzing different samurai figures in the anime as they go through the changes from the Edo to the Meiji era, the samurai show different ways of reflecting on their own perceptions and traditional bushido: Himura Kenshin reflects on the situation brought to the people by the times and his own samurai identity, and finally chooses to pursue benevolence and not to kill anymore; Saito Hajime keeps the traditional spirit of bushido but blends it with the new era; Shishio Makoto rejects most of the traditional concepts of bushido and is willing to change from being a samurai to being an emperor through his ability and ambition. Most of the …

1. Introduction

Olga Tokarczuk is a Polish writer, activist, and public intellectual of the highest order. She has twice won the Nike Award, Poland’s highest literary honor, and in 2018 received both the Nobel Prize in Literature and the Man Booker International Prize. Her major novels include Primeval and Other Times, Flights, and House of Day, House of Night. Her writing is distinguished by its beautiful prose, richness of detail, and concern for the world and human nature, as well as its skillful blending of myth, history, reality, and dream. In her fragmented narratives, a gentle and extraordinary force stirs through her fiction, full of imagination.

“Room Number” is a distinctive short story by Tokarczuk, collected in the short story collection The Wardrobe. …

2022/08/16

I saw the sky collapse, gray pouring down and washing away whatever scrap of perception remained in me. A white light flickered from the lamp — not to illuminate the world, but only to sharpen the outline of my twig-like bones. My posture was contorted, my limbs numb, my lips dry; my thoughts had fallen into deep sleep, yet time kept turning, the world kept turning, and I was dragged along without consent by the earth and the second hand; and then my muscles gave out, I dropped my legs and my hands, lowered my eyelids, and in darkness failed at cursing everything I despised; and then the accumulated bitterness surged up, making the dimming of the sky inevitable, making the body disassembled by illness; so I gave up on rising, and so the dream’s final destination pointed …

The illusion stitched together from cut-out youth
We were scorched by a reality grown cold
Dreaming of dismissing the prevailing right answers
Forgetting even the corked-up self
“If I were just normal too”

wotaku — Lemonade

Electric lights, coughing, clouds.
Beside the air conditioner, a strip of vinyl tape is blown and swaying.
Storylessness, the waste of food, a dry throat.
Justified sleep and the non-existence of dreams.
Brain collapse.
King Crimson.
Swimming in melancholy through the sea. Drowning, floating, exhausted — humanity seeking sunlight, the distortion of new life.
Even the inheritance of clouds passes away into the far distance, together with the whiteness of the sun.
Kiyoaki Matsugae, warm sunlight, strong wind.
The accumulation of words, the expelling of …

I

I stepped out of the door I hadn’t opened in half a month and entered a world my senses had grown unfamiliar with.

I seemed to have forgotten how to walk outward. I watched the turning of this world with curiosity. Just across from my door is a small patch of greenery; while cooped up at home I would sometimes look out at it, but I hadn’t felt the intimacy of watching it breathe right before my eyes. I hadn’t paid much attention to the state of the trees during my time shut in, but now their forms were leaping before me, green becoming the breath of life pouring into my suffocated chest. Leaves: an extraordinary vitality and beauty. I handled the leaves, listening to birdsong. Following them upward, sunlight poured out its energy; the blazing bright edges reflected in …

2022/07/10 02:06

Gravel and seawater were cast together into my passion for love. It was born in loneliness, in melancholy, in the void of having lost everything, and then it flows and subsides in rhythms that follow no rhythm. I live each day by a processed version of it, but in its original form it may belong only to some far-off coastline.

2022/07/11 02:26

A piano is moored somewhere inside me, pointlessly repeating the repeated passages while I think. In the void, my soul leaves my body and watches the world, watches the self curled up in hiding. My restless feet grip the pillow; my hands are laid reverently before my phone, and the posture of typing is like offering prayers to a god. But when the last point of light dims, I set out on the path toward dreams; the sounds still remaining …

2022/07/06 21:33

Upon hearing 「彼は醜さに苛まれて、水色裝う君を呪った、互いに穢れたままで」, my eyes went suddenly dark, my wrists withering like oleander. The fatigue that washed over me clouded my consciousness; my body swayed with the movement of the car. Artificial light was no longer in my world — what remained above my consciousness was darkness and indistinct human voices.

2022/07/08 00:21

The helplessness I felt facing the assignment stabbed like a needle into the cracks of my consciousness; sleep coming at the wrong hour erased the gaps between units of time. Exhaustion has finally sprouted. I have to face again the virus that gnaws at my soul — the one that had seemed absent for so long. By the time the pain in my eyes eases a little at midnight, tomorrow will arrive, and I can only fall into chaos once more. …

2022/06/30 14:10

Dreamed. My mother was inspecting me, some strange village custom, a gathering of elementary school classmates, and a mysterious young man in a suit, allegedly a PhD from the University of Michigan, who claimed he was going to ruin my future.

2022/07/08 01:35

The pain of sleep is overrated. So is death.

2022/07/11 19:56

Reading Mishima Yukio’s Spring Snow, I feel those words touching against my sensitive heart. His inner landscape must be just as foreign, delicate, and beautiful.

2022/07/12 02:26

Switching the earphones from transparency mode to noise-cancellation, the wandering soul came back.

2022/07/12 10:24

Sitting in the car, every time a bus pulls alongside me I feel revulsion. This small private space of mine has been invaded again, mercilessly, carelessly, by …

2022/06/27 21:19

Fullness in the belly, a string-bend melody spinning, a natural dryer laying down the bass, the night seeping into the cobblestone lane, plunging toward the shallow bed of a pond and a line of people at rapid speed. Against an oil-painted backdrop, lisianthus slowly wilting, the electric fan fallen still, and suddenly the only thing left in my ears is the slight discomfort of noise-cancellation, along with the lingering voices, footsteps, whistling sounds.

2022/06/29 19:54

Pulling out of a winding, dim parking lot, the windshield suddenly claimed by raindrops, I came to stand beneath the feet of countless concrete giants. I followed the trailing resonance of a strummed chord and kneaded my unease into an imaginary snowball, then hurled it with all my strength toward the …

2022/06/24 02:28

The creative impulse has been persistently absent — another day of mounting fear. Today’s condition has come back a little, but there’s still a jarringly exhausted, disoriented feeling, something like insomnia, blocking me from creating. I don’t want to sit with my phone in the soundless night eulogizing an insomniac’s brooding passion the way I did a year ago, but I keep feeling that sunlight no longer belongs to me. Is it because I’ve been locking myself in my room too long.

My weight seems to have gone up a little, but the stomach problems seem to have gotten worse. I hope this is just my melodramatic imagination.

The loneliness is still gnawing at me. The familiar estrangement again — born from the disappointment of opening social apps …

I

The glaring-white sun laid its glaring-white love upon her glaring-white face. The world was a transparent white. The electric light flickered; its pallid body was covered in last words. This bulb would soon be replaced; it would be dismembered in the process of being discarded, and he would be mixed in among all manner of garbage, until finally he would lose all connection to the electric light and merge completely with the surrounding filth. This was the remainder of the bulb’s life — I watched it strain with all its might to shine, and still its light could never reach a single strand of her hair. The remainder of its life was as pitiful as the thin light it now cast, yet it made me feel it was painful to look at.

Sunlight spread over this boundless land; there was no room for …

Introduction

Victorian British fashion was extravagant and expressive, yet it imposed enormous constraints on the female form — but women’s struggle ultimately ensured that these garments were replaced by healthier silhouettes. This chapter centers on the Victorian and anti-Victorian, alongside the advance of the Industrial Revolution and modernization.

Romantic Era Fashion

This was the period when the divergence between men’s and women’s dress reached its most extreme point. Women’s garments were almost universally low-cut (round, V-shaped, or off-shoulder), high-waisted A-line plaid skirts, with enormously puffed sleeves that emphasized a wide bust and narrow waist. In pursuit of the wasp waist, the structures of these garments gradually hardened, producing a …

Introduction

The fashions of this period feel far more familiar to us than those of the pre-17th century. We recognize the oiran’s dress, the gentleman’s suit, the tartan — and the famous figures born in this era (Newton, Bach, and others whose images appear endlessly in modern films and textbooks) have made us notice their distinctive styles. The world order shifted and new technologies emerged, bringing with them enormous changes in fashion; it is in this period that a recognizably modern fashion industry was born.

Edo Japan

Edo-period Japan was exceptionally prosperous, and the textile and commercial industries flourished. After Miyazaki Yūzen refined the Yūzen dyeing technique, the kimono underwent a great leap in quality. Until the end of Japan’s sakoku …

Introduction

The concept of “fashion” does not have a history of thousands of years. What we call “fashion” in fact only emerged with the rapid proliferation of consumer goods following modern industrial technology and economic transformation; it is closely tied to the idea of “trends” (the etymology of “fashion” reveals that it refers to the prevailing style or taste of a given period). Strictly speaking, the concept of the fashion industry only exists in the modern world — and yet when we speak of “fashion,” we generally include ancient “clothing” within its scope (though it is worth noting that a significant difference still exists between the two). “Fashion” is far more than clothing and its changes; it …

Creative disclaimer: this piece contains fictional elements. Certain events and details have been fictionalized and should not be taken as fact.

I. Effacement

The watercolor landscape dissolves and vanishes in the June rain,
a cry of sorrow beneath an umbrella,
the downpour dyes farewell red.
— スイサイ／アンブレラ／ロクガツ／ドライフラワ

Yang Shukai lay curled in the pellucid early-summer dusk rain, the water flooding his mind until it swelled and swayed, unmoored. Between consciousness and sensation a thin membrane had been laid; in the montage of memory, he extended his left hand to feel the fragrant, dizzying splendor of the world in bloom and the damp, clammy rot of the orchard mud, and his racing heart began to slow.

The sky before him turned murky. Pale light seeped through the gray window glass and …

Preface

After a few months spent lurking on the fringes of fandom, observing online activity, and burning through idol survival shows late into the night, I found — still not finished watching — that Chuang 2020 bore far more visible and clumsy editorial fingerprints than Chuang 2021. My enjoyment took a hit. This may also be one of the reasons its popularity lagged behind every other season of Chuang, as well as Chuang 2021 itself. In this piece, I want to sketch out, from my own perspective, why it left me a little unsettled, and offer a critique using what I currently know.

Keywords: Zombie Land Saga, idol, fandom, Chuang, consumption, animalized postmodernity

Word count: 5,251

Estimated reading time: 22 minutes

Zombie Land Saga and the Shifting Idea of the Idol

Acoustic Guitar of Love …

The ghost of syntax sways down the corridor of lies; the heraldry branded into the body reverberates. The sublimity of violence! I walk toward the drooling beast at the end of the corridor — its sticky saliva creeps up over the bridge of my nose, and I refuse to dissolve in it.

Meteors circle around me, and until wreckage rushes into my arms I still feel it has nothing to do with me. Blue terminal nova! Can you slip into those wailing clouds and let the rain fall? Umbrellas drifting through the city, you have toppled in the flower-like expanse of time and space. Water and ripples soothe the canopy; the canopy breathes along the border between the real and the false; the ribs are stepped on by passersby on the soaked pavement. The sanctity of the galaxy! Let the red words be dyed into …

This page is a Chinese translation of an existing English article. To read the original, visit Gainax and the Neo-Kanada Renaissance – Animétudes, part of the History of the Kanada School series.

1.

The night the stove fire roaring, my trachea is burning. Scriptures are written on pillowcases, stifling. My skin warps and blooms and a chrysalis shrouds me as I maintain the right position of sitting. Nightmares chant behind the headboard, transforming into tulips’ bones, burrowing into ossuary. I enter the desolate and solemn fantasy.

2.

砂嵐が仏壇と混ざり合い、埃が私の目を霞ませる、これは開放的だが閉塞的な意識の絵だ。 頭の中ではセントルロイデススコーピオンが噛みつき、瞳の中の有角孔雀は10平方メートルの中に答えを探し出す。そびえ立つ鐘楼! なぜ、それは私と私の惨めな手を鼻で笑うのだろう。 時計の針は見えないところで溶けていく、明日は水で薄めたコーヒー。うそだうそだうそだよ、煙突の沙汰と、土砂降りの心。

3.

Vicious standards! It is the sinister hem that looks flashy but tangles the dancer in bondage.

4.

太陽の光と浮かぶ泡、情熱的なテクストの楽しみ、私を溺れさせる！無意味な読解や麻痺した演説はもう見たくありません。

5.

Remains — the shredded wings of a thousand cranes, tin-foil fish, botanical extracts — all buried …

Carnival of Consumption

International Women’s Day arrives, and China’s online shopping platforms burst into bloom. Discounts, curated product recommendations, advertisements made specifically for the occasion, and promotional copy come one after another. The day is called “Goddess Day” and “Queen’s Day” on e-commerce platforms — women, revered as goddesses and queens, appear to have been granted supreme power. Amid the extravagance and spectacle of social media, words and images discharging emotional satisfaction fly like a flock of crows, dazzling and disorienting. But these crows, for all their gleaming plumage, are feeding on the rotting flesh of women’s disciplined consumer psychology.

Social media functions as a display window. On it, …

This piece was drafted on the night of 2022/01/05 on a whim before bed, then revisited and extended a little on 2022/01/07 at 9:50 PM. It has no real structure or dialectical rigor — pure stream of consciousness.

I. The Holy Trinity of the Virtual Idol

Domestic virtual idols, with A-SOUL as the prime example, are in essence a trinity of idol, streamer, and 2D character. They can have idol-style events (concerts, fan meet-and-greets), the kind of frequent, close interaction with audiences associated with streamers, and on top of all that, the flawless appearance of a drawn character.

They satisfy the public’s love of 2D aesthetics, and within that skin are free to occupy a balance point between streamer and idol — simultaneously serving as a sublime object of worship distinct from …

2022-01-05

The Perishing of Rainwater

Leaves like drops of dark crimson ink splashed on white paper dotted a sky thick with haze. A car drove past; the rain on its tires traced ink-like streaks across the ground, already beginning to dry. Raindrops flung themselves against the windshield, shattered, and were scraped down without mercy by the wipers. Is that ink-wash landscape on the wall beside the road really painted in rain’s blood? How beautiful this dying thing is.

2022-01-13

Ghostkiss 1

The torrent carrying everything swept past me without mercy, and I stood there bewildered, watching — even the tears that fell were swallowed into it.

2022-01-14

Ghostkiss 2

At the end of the day, walking with headphones on, I manually give today its narrative shape in the gradually swelling …

2021-12-11

Cycling home to co shu nie’s first album, For Special You!, the tears just wouldn’t stop. Memories of my past and my endless fantasies came rushing back. I feel it, genuinely — this world is free but indifferent. Sometimes it’s as if reality is being cruelly peeled away in front of me, and I go through my days on autopilot, my consciousness drifting away from the actual world and into my own absurd daydreams. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve cycled through the ideal image of myself in my head. Can the version of me soaking in that fantasy still hold together? In the end, my body will never be worn into the shape I long for through dreams.

Whenever I think about this, sadness rises in me for no particular reason, and sometimes I lose my sense …

2021/10/29

Gold and green leaves overlapped in layers, circling the trees at the school gate like a cluster of fluttering butterflies. A color like ink mixed with clear water spread across the clouds, which slid horizontally across the sky at an imperceptible pace. The pale blue above was so faint and so tranquil it felt almost excessive. Through the gaps in the branches on the other side a faint yellow showed through; at the far edge of the sky, a scorched pink-orange surfaced, the way fire lights a horizon — it made me think of an afternoon four years ago when I was just beginning to feel something for someone, and of a longing that haunted me last year, though both have been swallowed now by the density of the leaves. Above my head, the shattered white and blue stretched out over the …

Once, opening my bedroom door to find a moth I’d crushed flat against it, I remembered a bee from years before.

It was a summer afternoon. I was working on homework, restless and irritable in the glaring heat, when I heard a buzzing of wings nearby.

Already on edge from the work, I quickly found the source: a bee. I looked at it carefully. It had apparently wandered by accident into the gap between two floor-to-ceiling windows and was darting up and down.

I let out a small cold laugh and slid the two windows together. The gap between them closed, and what was left was a sealed glass observation box. I set down my pen and watched the bee wander tirelessly back and forth in that near-flat space, with no sense of where to go.

Its few-centimeter body struck the glass; the vibration of …

Plot Summary

The story of Kakegurui – Compulsive Gambler takes place at Hyakkaou Private Academy (私立百花王学園), one of Japan’s most prestigious schools where, unlike normal schools, the hierarchy is determined by gambling. The main protagonist is Yumeko Jabami (蛇喰夢子), a transfer student whose beautiful, innocent facade hides a psychotic addiction to gambling and high-stakes situations. With a keen intellect able to pierce through the elaborate cheating methods used by the most powerful students to rig games in their favor, Yumeko threatens to destroy the twisted hierarchy of the school simply for the thrill of it.

Source: Wikipedia

OST

There are 61 soundtracks across the 12 episodes of the TV anime. The styles are mainly jazz and electronic music.

Jazz functions:

• Creates a …

Rakugo is a traditional Japanese performing art that originated in the Edo period, originally referring to people who told jokes. Over time, it evolved into a form in which a single storyteller (rakugoka) sits on stage — a platform known as the kōza — and performs an extended, intricate comedic story. The art form is called rakugo (“falling words”) because each performance ends with a punchline called an ochi (“fall”), which brings the story to a sudden close in a way that feels both surprising and inevitable. Rakugo emerged to meet the entertainment needs of an urban commoner audience as Japan’s rural population migrated into cities during the Edo period. In its early days anyone could perform, but today rakugo is mostly performed by professional rakugoka. …

I

After career day, I walked out of the noisy street and into a KFC. The warm, quiet light inside let me relax a little.

Setting down my bag at KFC also meant setting down the weight of being team leader for the day. The murmur of idle people around me, the lingering smell of food — I felt a wave of contentment.

I looked out the window. Lights pulsed and shifted; blurred figures moved past. I had an urge to reach a finger out and catch the colors overflowing there, but the transparent glass stopped my hand.

II

The people outside weren’t having an easy time. The low rumble of a drill outside was still grinding away, cutting into my ears. Blurred figures swayed — workers in thin uniforms, I thought, moving in clusters. Maybe beside them were young people in trench coats, bags in hand, …

The lights go out. The world turns. Everything sinks without a trace.

For someone who stays up too late, what lives inside is: disappointment and doubt about oneself, resentment and helplessness over the past, a reaching for life, a fear of unconsciousness.

He wants so badly to hold onto the hours of being alive. He wants to feel life with intensity. He wants to taste everything life has to offer; he wants to prove his existence to this world.

He resists sleep. His hands grip tight around that six-inch screen, the widest world he can hold.

It is late. Outside, the stray voices of lingerers gradually die into the rustling of leaves.

Pressure rises from somewhere inside him. The computer fan hisses softly. Dim light seeps through the curtains.

But he chooses to sleep anyway, carrying the …

December 30, 16:48

Tree shadows, mottled, dragging down the tired sunset from the sky. The most vivid, most sacred ritual of blackened, decaying wood.

The pink in the distance blurs; even the layered forest of identical buildings is softened into something gentle.

A patch of orange-yellow glimpsed beyond the canopy of broad green is refracted in fragmented splashes by the mirrored windows of the tower blocks, scattered across the road where red and green lights stream past.

Cars snake in long lines; pedestrians flow without end, like rain falling sideways.

My hands have lost all feeling.

My mind too, submerged in endless orange-yellow, pink-white, red-green.

Secret of dusk.

December 31, 15:49

Winter sun high overhead.

On the ground, a carton of spilled milk.

The rubble along the roadside …

2020/12/10 18:03

The McDonald’s I’d ordered earlier had been left outside my door by a careless delivery rider. No one told me it had arrived; no one seemed to care. It sat there, abandoned, for almost half an hour.

I suddenly remembered it, went downstairs with a vague sense of worry, and rescued it from the cold wind. I touched the bag lightly — still faintly warm.

I didn’t dare linger. I went back upstairs, laid each item out on the desk, and started eating. Beside it was an iced coffee I’d bought at the school canteen at lunch. I hadn’t gotten a Coke.

The fresh smell of the burger and chicken fillet filled my mouth. My stomach, which had endured hours of painful hunger, finally got its relief — like the first heavy rain after weeks of baking sun. I licked …

I looked out the classroom window, helpless. The sky was gray.

Turning back, that sound was in my ears again. A thick, rotten sound reverberating. I couldn’t settle; I turned my pen restlessly.

He was chewing gum — sticky, filthy gum sticking to the gaps between his teeth. Maybe only the scraps my heart already despised could mix with gum and make a sound like that.

The geography I’d memorized last night was being chewed to pieces by him, mercilessly. He still hadn’t stopped. My pen left no mark on the exam paper. I stared at it, trying to recall what I’d studied, but when I blinked, the black text turned into his bite marks, grinning at me. I couldn’t breathe.

Yesterday’s scene surfaced in my mind and wouldn’t leave.

I turned my head, looking …

I am a gardener.

Looking down at the teeming world below, I am very pleased with myself. I am proud, because I am a gardener.

God gave me a plot of land. I did not squander money and what little life I had on it, the way those wretches do. I created infinite possibility on that plot.

I still remember the first day I came here. Back then I watched the second-generation rich living in their drunken, gilded excess — their magnificent, glittering towers — and I felt a continuous ache. God, why did you put me in such a wretched little place? One hundred and fifty square meters, all told. That was all I had. The plot was not small exactly, but it was barren to an extreme.

I worked day and night. I set aside my pride and went begging from the rich — begging for seeds of cheap flowers, begging for …

By the elevator at Exit 4 of Shanghai Metro Line 12, where almost no one passes, an unremarkable cleaner is asleep. His work jacket hangs open, exposing his loose stomach. His eyes and mouth droop. His arms hang at his sides. The jacket is already a little grimy; the bamboo broom beside him leans crookedly against the wall.

No one around.

Looking at his expression, I can imagine that even he, under the scorching sun, was nearing his limit. So he took shelter inside the metro station, hiding from the glaring light, catching the coolness of the air conditioning for a moment, and leaned against the cool floor and wall and fell asleep.

I looked again at his hair — pale and graying — and felt something soften in me. I walked past him and got on the escalator.

Who knows how many elderly people, …

I picked up a stone.

It was not small. Its edges were clearly defined, but its corners had softened into smooth curves. The planes where light met shadow mapped its history. Blue-gray moss and the sticky mud of fresh rain had crept up its body.

What a world-famous painting, I thought.

I tossed it casually into the murky pond. Clear color splashed up from the surface, along with a beautiful, chaotic noise.

It sank, and slept — slept deeply and completely, and no one knew when it would ever move again.

I had destroyed a masterpiece.

I felt a small, peculiar pride: I could just as easily create a moment of beauty as I could destroy it.

Everything is temporary. Time is the one that quietly, unconsciously wipes everything clean.

It doesn’t just strip the colors from a masterpiece one …