Tag Archives: Mary Knighton

Prompt 6

The king of sloppy—and stuplimity

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In “The Sloppy Realities of 3.11 in Shiriagari Kotobuki’s Manga,” Mary Knighton defines stuplimity as

comical stupefaction at the sheer scale of the human-wrought crisis and our own passive impotence in the face of it. (21–22)

Here, we see that stuplimity is made up of three parts. First, a cause: we live within or in the wake of a “human-wrought crisis” of shocking magnitude. Next, an effect: we find ourselves caught in a paralyzing state of “passive impotence.” Finally, a response: we take in the grim reality of this crisis and our inability to resolve it, and we respond with “comical stupefaction.” In this way, stuplimity (a) identifies a crisis and (b) counters human impotence, all the while (c) bringing us to rethink catastrophe, in Shiriagari’s case through sloppiness and humor. It’s the sublime turned inside-out, with the object moving from environment to society, or from the natural to the artificial, and with the affect turning from terrible wonder to ludicrous horror.

By identifying a crisis or network of crises, stuplimity says something about the world we live in today. Sloppiness in particular acts as a reflection of our reality, and one that may be more mimetic than at first thought. Shiriagari argues that “‘sloppy’ things are real,” at least in part because we live and die “sloppily” (Knighton 1). As when the Japanese look for reliable information on the effects of nuclear disaster but find too much data, data that’s contradictory, or data of suspicious origin, sloppiness indicates that a single, objective truth is not possible. There is no one feeling to have or single action to take. Techniques harkening back to realism or a third-person perspective belong to the unreal for Shiriagari, in keeping with a satirical or surreal tone (7). Sloppy drawing says something about the mimetic quality of narratives as well. In life, we find no promising climax, no clean resolution, no villain responsible, and in catastrophe, too, we find that the cause belongs not to a single event or mastermind, but rather to a complicated web of banal corruption and poor planning.

This sloppy reality resonates with many of our readings this semester. Shiriagari’s representation of “malaise” (Knighton 1) and “paralysis and enervation” (8) aligns with the precarious existence Anne Allison explains in Precarious Japan. Although precarity begins with precarious employment, which is “uncertain, unpredictable, and risky” for workers (6), it spreads across all areas of life, infecting every moment and thought until our very “human condition” becomes precarious, a state of being marked by doubt and fear (9). Shiriagari places this state of being in a crisis with no end in sight, much like Robert Nixon’s concept of slow violence, which describes crises that not only unfold slowly and beneath the surface, but which also elude “tidy closure” (6). And, not unsurprisingly, this kind of mounting threat points to problems firmly embedded in neoliberalism, with its “relentless and ubiquitous economization” of everyday life, and in capitalist economies, which demand continuous (and impossible) growth (Brown 31).

Shiriagari does more than just represent these crises; he resists them, and counters the “passive impotence” that results as well. He disregards the dangers of reception, for example. Representing nuclear disaster in fiction draws controversy, especially when the means may be considered disrespectful, as is the case with humor (DiNitto). But humor does accomplish something in nuclear contexts. Comparable to the hibakusha’s struggle to communicate their experience through atomic-bomb narratives, Shiriagari responds to nuclear disaster “with new words or even a new language” through humor (Treat 30). Humor allows for a call to action, asking readers again and again to “wake up” from their malaise (Knighton 1, 23, 25, 31) and stay with the trouble, or learn “to be truly present” (Haraway 1). Without provocative and imaginative approaches to human suffering, we might never find the means to represent it. It would be easier to forget what happened at Tōhoku, and even easier to remain complacent. In Milan Kundera’s words:

the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting. (qtd. Treat 21)

Even if Shiriagari only manages to provoke readers with the audacity of his approach, this is still an accomplishment of sorts. Indignation and anger, I would argue, are a better alternative to wishy washy feelings of uncertainty, anxiety, or disappointment. Without a catalyst, what Sianne Ngai calls ugly feelings “hum alongside the everyday” without end (Knighton 3). And Shiriagari does give us a catalyst. He combines kakusei (“stimulating humor”) and warawareru (“being reduced to laughter”) to offer readers a “new way of seeing or thinking,” and an outlet for the frustration of an open and ongoing crisis (9). This reminds me of something discussed in another one of my classes this week, on Pseudodoxia Epidemica. In Pseudodoxia, Thomas Browne argues that the production of knowledge depends on the “challenges, corrections, and propositions” of “diverging voices” (West 170). In other words, communities of difference bring us closer to the truth. Maybe the greatest challenge to representing nuclear disaster is silence—that a robust and complex conversation is not already taking place. 

As for the third piece in the stuplimitous puzzle, evoking “comical stupefaction”—well, this is what Shiriagari does best. Shiriagari’s sloppiness pushes against the “idealism” of modes like Cool Japan, and humor disrupts the “arrogance” of powers in both society and fiction (Knighton 8). Shiriagari encourages readers to see and think in new ways by entertaining paradoxical or unsettling conclusions. The family of Defenders, for example, bring us to acknowledge that the conditions of modern life are not safe or in control. The episode “Hope” personifies radioactive materials rather than vilifying them. This reveals the vibrancy of all matter, even nuclear, in its capacity “to act as quasi agents or forces with trajectories, propensities, or tendencies of their own” (Bennett viii). When a character in “The Village by the Sea” protests the return of electricity, exclaiming that “he had never been able to see so many stars,” Shiriagari doesn’t glorify a way of life without technology. He reminds us that we’re forced to encounter and adapt to change all the time, and that any solution to catastrophe may be temporary (Knighton 7).

The twin old geezers confront nuclear realities particularly well, I think. Episode 2 emphasizes that it isn’t nuclear energy that has changed, but us, its keepers and neighbors, who have failed to see nuclear energy (which was once, and in some circles still is, the champion of green energy) to its full potential. And episode 3 prompts readers to recognize that the nuclear crisis is, to put it simply, complicated. As pictured below, the episode imagines reactions on either end of the spectrum as ludicrous, short-sighted, and often counter-productive. The jabbering of birds, nothing more than white noise. The sky may be falling, or everything may be fine, sure, but Shiriagari would have us regard nuclear disaster from somewhere in between, first suspending dis/belief. Like Donna Haraway, he would have us stay with the trouble: at times “stir up potent response,” and at others, “settle troubled waters” (1).

Shiriagari Kotobuki, from Kawakudari futago no oyaji (“The Twin Old Geezers Go Downriver,” Episode 3), in Ano hi kara no manga: 2011.3.11, 2011 (Manga Ever Since: 2011.3.11)
Prompt 6

The Place of Belonging in Post-3/11 Japan

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As I skim through chapters of Anne Allison’s Precarious Japan for the fourth time, I begin to feel like I am standing before a sea of Japanese words and phrases: ryuudouka “the liquidization or flexibilization of work and life” (7-8), muen shakai “the relationless society” (8), genpatsu nanmin “nuclear refugees” (12), ikizurasa “pain in life” (17), kodokushi “lonely death” (19), tsunagari “one-to-one connections” (20), gesenbyou “landsick” (183), ganbaru “working hard together” (187). My sea of words, the very image itself, is Japanese as well. It comes to me from Miura Shion’s The Great Passage (Fune o Amu), a 2011 novel I have not read. Indeed, I have not even seen the 2013 live-action film adaptation. I am, however, midway through the 2016 anime adaptation, which tells the story of Majime Mitsuya, an out-of-place bookish young man who finds confidence and a sense of belonging working with an editorial team to develop a new dictionary. As Majime imagines it, this new dictionary, “Daitokai,” will “cross the sea of words,” (often depicted literally in the anime while Majime imagines it). The anime is at once heartwarming and innocuous, inspiring and mundane. I often forget that it is set in the present. Something about it conveys a certain timelessness. How interesting to think then that this popular and award-winning novel was published just six months after 3/11.

One of these Japanese phrases in my sea of words, “ibasho ga nai,” articulates an affective sense of unbelonging, of figuratively having no home. Allison, who was forced to adapt Precarious Japan to the triple disaster of 3/11 as the project was all but complete, highlights the ways that the disaster plays into ongoing trends of instability in Japanese life. On the ground in Touhoku, she sees signs that, even amid all the loss and displacement, the disaster drove many Japanese to pull together: “Belonging became the new buzzword: belonging to one another, to Japan, to a homeland transformed by mud and radiation. References to connectedness (tsunagari) and bonds (kizuna) gushed everywhere—from a rise in marriage applications to surveys pronouncing its new importance to a majority of Japanese” (198). Perhaps it is in this context that a quaint story of a young man discovering himself and overcoming a sense of “ibasho ga nai” became so appealing.

There is of course a demographic for whom “ibasho ga nai” takes on a much more painful and present meaning; these are the genpatsu nanmin, the nuclear refugees, forced from their homes. Lorie Brau’s account of The Truth About Fukushima arc in the long-running food manga Oishinbo asks us to think too about ways home can be lost even when the government has not forced an evacuation. Describing the arc’s emotional climax, she writes, “Yamaoka’s grief over his mother’s passing evokes and heightens the grief over the truth about Fukushima, both the farmer’s and fishermen’s loss of livelihood, and the inaccessibility of the land as mother—home and source of sustenance” (192). Indeed, for Brau, the manga reminds us how food, tradition, land, and home are deeply interrelated. No amount of “working hard together” (ganbaru) can restore a sense of belonging that is inexorably tied to a particular place– once that place has been rendered foreign through contamination. Tawada’s novella, The Emissary, offers perhaps a telling counterpoint. Faced with a breakdown of traditional forms of belonging, both familial and terrestrial, her imagined future Japan turns to an extreme nationalism centered on isolationist foreign policy. National belonging and shared history attempt to replace what has been lost. Is this merely a more sinister and extreme version of what Allison witnessed in Japan?

If one strain of response to 3/11 has been groping toward a sense of communal belonging based in Japan’s ability to overcome the disaster, mangaka Shiriagari Kotobuki offers a very different strain. His “Twin Geezers” for instance find themselves drifting on a river beset by the challenges that face modern Japan—reevaluating the relationship with nuclear energy, sorting through contradictory opinions and information, deciding what path to go down. Faced with these dilemmas, their ridiculous solution—using one of their penises to point the way—seems no worse than any other. For Mary Knighton, “Shiriagari’s ‘sloppy’ aesthetics thwarts…Romantic idealism by working from within the paralysis and enervation of the endless everyday” (8). As is evident with the Twin Geezers, driven relentlessly down river and forced to confront challenge after decision after challenge, Shiriagari also recognizes “that the quotidian has its own dangers, which include its relentless temporal unfolding and the dictatorial ease with which it covers up or incorporates difference and dissent under repetitive normalcy” (Knighton 8). In some senses “ibasho ga nai” is the starting point for Shiriagari’s art; normalcy itself is revealed as strange and the corresponding tension between belonging and unbelonging emerges as humor.

I am on the edge of suggesting that there is something a little insidious about The Great Passage with all its relentless normalcy, its Romanticization of belonging, and its imagination of a Japanese present without the impact of 3/11. I would never deign to criticize escapism, but what I find perhaps questionable is the way it might dovetail with the PR project of TEPCO and the Japanese Government. When does a belonging predicated on the ability to endure and overcome start to occlude the reality and severity of the ongoing disaster? What responsibility do artists have to resist a government that would be happy for everyone to forget? And what role do I, happily consuming the sanitized products of “Cool Japan,”[1] play in abetting this policy of diminishing and forgetting?

 

 

[1]While it’s no Naruto, I would argue this category includes the anime adaptation of The Great Passage, which is available for Americans to stream on Amazon Prime Video.

(“Site Visits in the Fukushima Prefecture (02811058)” by IAEA Imagebank is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0)