Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord

Front 242 - Headhunter

Anton Corbijn who made the video misheard Headhunter for Egghunter which is the reason for all the eggs. Apparently Front 242 found that so hilarious and the result so good they went with it anyway.

The Pínakes of Callimachus

Watch Box

The 39 Steps Radio Adaptation

The first nine books of the Danish history of Saxo Grammaticus

The Voyage of Bran

Long ago in Ireland, there was a High King named Bran. He was not much interested in being High King, and one day, during a feast, Bran slipped away to get some peace and quiet.

As he was walking, all alone, he began to hear this beautiful music. It was haunting and like nothing he had ever heard before. Bran hunted high and low to see where it was coming from, but no matter what way he turned, the music always seemed to be coming from just behind him. At last, the sweet music lulled him, and he fell asleep. While he slept, he saw a vision: a beautiful woman of the Otherworld, who sang to him about the Land of Women, where everything was pleasant and joyful, and there was never any grief or treachery.

When he woke, Bran found in his had a silver branch with golden apples on it. Not really knowing what this meant, Bran brought it back to the fort with him. That evening, at the feast, the same woman from his dream appeared, but this time, all those present in the hall could see her. She spoke to Bran, and told him to come and find her in the Island of Women. Then the silver branch leaped out of Bran’s hand and into hers, and she was gone.

Bran wasted no time in building a ship. His three foster brothers came with him, and each of them brought nine men. They set sail out west into uncharted waters that no one had ever been to before. As they were sailing, Mananan Mac Lir, the god of the ocean, came riding towards them in his chariot. Bran and his men watched, dumbstruck, as the god reined up beside them and stopped to talk. He told Bran that their skiff was sailing, not through waves, but through an orchard, and that where they saw sea-horses and sea foam, he could see a grassy plain, covered in flowers, with warriors going to and fro across it. He sang to them about all the wonders of the Land Under Wave that he ruled over, and then he took his leave, telling them that he was on his way to meet the wife of a king, to father a child that would be called Mongan.

Bran and his men rowed on, and before long they came to an island, called Moy Meall, or the Island of Joy. There were a great number of people on the shore, but when Bran and his men called out to them, to ask if they were near to the Island of Women, the people only laughed and gaped at them. So one of Bran’s men jumped out of the boat, and waded to shore to see if he could get any answers out of them. But as soon as he landed, he started to laugh like a fool and gape at them, as if he didn’t know them. Bran and his men circled the island, over and over, calling out to their companion to come back to them, but he ignored their calls, and only laughed witlessly.

Downhearted, Bran and his men continued on their way. They came to the Island of Women, and saw the woman from Bran’s vision. But Bran and his men were wary, because of what had happened to their friend, and they kept their distance. Then the woman threw a ball of yarn at Bran’s head, and he put up his hand to stop it. The ball of yarn stuck fast to his hand, and the woman on the shore started to reel the boat, with all of the men in it, in to shore.

When they landed, the men were taken to a beautiful house, and a plate was put before each one. No matter how much they ate and drank, their plates always remained full, and their cups never emptied. When they had eaten and drunk their fill, a woman led each man to his own room, richly appointed, and let them sleep there.

The men stayed on the Island of Women for what seemed to them to be a year. Every day was restful, and easy. All they had to do was to play sports and games, to eat and drink and enjoy themselves, and the women took care of all their wants. But one of Bran’s men, Nechtan, began to feel homesick. He started to pester Bran about going home. The other men shushed him, but he spoke to each of them in turn, reminding them of home, and the people they had left there, until at last Bran relented, and they prepared to go back to Ireland.

The Queen of the Island took Bran aside and warned him that if he returned, he would get only grief. But Bran could see no other option. So the Queen told him that if he must go, he should pick up his companion from the Island of Joy on his way, and when he got to Ireland, he must make sure not to set foot on the land. Bran agreed to this, and off they went.

When they came to the Island of Joy, they called their companion’s name, and he ran straight out to the boat, and recovered his wits as soon as they had him on board. Then they sailed over the sea to Ireland. But when they came near, they could see that the whole coastline had changed. The countryside looked completely different, all the forests were gone, and the people seemed small and grey and weak. They called out to the people on the shore, and no one had ever heard of them. Then one old man came forward, and said that when he was a young boy, he had heard the story of King Bran, an ancient tale that was almost lost.

Nechtan, the man who had been homesick, could not accept this. He flung himself from the deck of the boat, and landed on the shore. But as soon as his feet touched the ground, he turned to dust. Bran realized then that he and his men had been gone for hundreds and hundreds of years, and they could never return home.

Bran carved an account of his voyage on stone tablets, in Ogham writing, and threw the stones to the people on the shore. Then he and his men turned their ship around, and sailed off to the three times fifty Islands of the Otherworld. And as to what adventures befell them after that… nobody knows!

English Translation of Chinese Poetry

https://28utscprojects.wordpress.com/

Beppo, A Venetian Story

I.
'Tis known, at least it should be, that throughout
All countries of the Catholic persuasion,
Some weeks before Shrove Tuesday comes about,
The People take their fill of recreation,
And buy repentance, ere they grow devout,
However high their rank, or low their station,
With fiddling, feasting, dancing, drinking, masking,
And other things which may be had for asking.

II.
The moment Night with dusky mantle covers
The skies (and the more duskily the better),
The Time--less liked by husbands than by lovers--
Begins, and Prudery flings aside her fetter,
And Gaiety on restless tiptoe hovers,
Giggling with all the Gallants who beset her;
And there are Songs and quavers, roaring, humming,
Guitars, and every other sort of strumming.

III.
And there are dresses, splendid but fantastical,
Masks of all times and nations, Turks and Jews,
And Harlequins and Clowns, with feats gymnastical,
Greeks, Romans, Yankee-doodles, and Hindoos;
All kinds of dress, except the ecclesiastical,
All people, as their fancies hit, may choose,
But no one in these parts may quiz the Clergy,--
Therefore take heed, ye Freethinkers! I charge ye.

IV.
You'd better walk about begirt with briars,
Instead of Coat and smallclothes, than put on
A single stitch reflecting upon Friars,
Although you swore it only was in fun;
They'd haul you o'er the coals, and stir the fires
Of Phlegethon with every mother's son,
Nor say one Mass to cool the Caldron's bubble
That boil'd your bones--unless you paid them double.

V.
But saving this, you may put on whate'er
You like by way of doublet, cape, or cloak,
Such as in Monmouth Street, or in Rag Fair,
Would rig you out in Seriousness or Joke;
And even in Italy such places are
With prettier name in softer accents spoke,
For, bating Covent Garden, I can hit on
No place that's called 'Piazza' in Great Britain.

VI.
This feast is named the Carnival, which being
Interpreted implies 'Farewell to Flesh':
So call'd, because the name and thing agreeing,
Through Lent they live on fish, both salt and fresh.
But why they usher Lent with so much glee in
Is more than I can tell, although I guess
'Tis as we take a glass with friends at parting
In the Stage-Coach or Packet, just at starting.

VII.
And thus they bid farewell to Carnal dishes,
And solid meats, and highly spiced ragouts,
To live for forty days on ill-dress’d fishes,
Because they have no sauces to their stews--
A thing which causes many 'poohs' and 'pishes,'
And several oaths (which would not suit the Muse)
From travellers accustom'd from a boy
To eat their Salmon, at the least, with Soy;

VIII.
And therefore humbly I would recommend
'The Curious in Fish-Sauce,' before they cross
The Sea, to bid their Cook, or wife, or friend,
Walk or ride to the Strand, and buy in gross
(Or if set out beforehand these may send
By any means least liable to loss)
Ketchup, Soy, Chili-Vinegar, and Harvey,
Or, by the Lord! a Lent will well nigh starve ye.

IX.
That is to say, if your Religion's Roman,
And you at Rome would do as Romans do,
According to the proverb,--although No man
If foreign is obliged to fast, and you--
If Protestant, or sickly--or a woman--
Would rather dine in sin on a ragout--
Dine and be d____d! I don't mean to be coarse,
But that's the penalty, to say no worse.

X.
Of all the places where the Carnival
Was most facetious in the days of yore,
For dance, and song, and serenade, and ball,
And Masque, and Mime, and Mystery, and more
Than I have time to tell now, or at all,
Venice the bell from every city bore,
And at the moment when I fix my story,
That Sea-born City was in all her Glory.

Zabrocki Dragon

Dr Pozzi at home

Having difficulty with Chinese? - the rise of the vernacular book in Japan, Korea and Vietnam

Hearts of Iron 3: Black Ice

In Memoriam A. H. H. OBIIT MDCCCXXXIII: 7

Dark house, by which once more I stand

                Here in the long unlovely street,

                Doors, where my heart was used to beat

So quickly, waiting for a hand,



A hand that can be clasp'd no more—

                 Behold me, for I cannot sleep,

                 And like a guilty thing I creep

At earliest morning to the door.



He is not here; but far away

                  The noise of life begins again,

                  And ghastly thro' the drizzling rain

On the bald street breaks the blank day.




-Tennyson

Folding @ Home

https://foldingathome.org/

Defoe - A Journal of the Plague Year. Being Observations Or Memorials of the Most Remarkable Occurrences, As Well Publick As Private, Which Happened in London During the Last Great Visitation in 1665

Peace

Now, God be thanked Who has matched us with His hour,
And caught our youth, and wakened us from sleeping,
With hand made sure, clear eye, and sharpened power,
To turn, as swimmers into cleanness leaping,
Glad from a world grown old and cold and weary,
Leave the sick hearts that honour could not move,
And half-men, and their dirty songs and dreary,
And all the little emptiness of love!

Oh! we, who have known shame, we have found release there,
Where there’s no ill, no grief, but sleep has mending,
Naught broken save this body, lost but breath;
Nothing to shake the laughing heart’s long peace there
But only agony, and that has ending;
And the worst friend and enemy is but Death.

Rupert Brooke

The First Battle for Scottish Independence: The Battle of Dunnichen, A.D. 685.

Beijing -1987

Kele - Tenderoni

Marquez- Death Constant Beyond Love

Interpretation of Celestial and Environmental Phenomena in the Irish Annals

The Renaissance - Walter Pater 1873

Cui Jian - Nothing to my Name

Eijanaika

Yosa no Buson

kagero ya ajika ni tsuchi wo mezuru-hito

The shimmering heat
…soil in a wicker basket
someone dear

Think of haiku as mirage. What you see isn’t what you are seeing. What you see vanishes before your eyes. You say earth is being heaped into a straw basket? I say its being hauled upon an old woman’s back. You say “someone dear” is an allusion — a loved one who has died? I say it’s the worthy old woman herself, pushing on gamely through the rising heat. Who’s right? Who’s to say? Neither of us? Both of us? Yes. No. I don’t know. The essence of haiku.

Yosa no Buson (1716-1783) was one in a triumvirate of haikai immortals of the Edo era in Japan: before him came the master, Matsuo Basho (1644-1694), and after him the “humanist” Kobayashi Issa (1763-1826).

We know very little of the early life or parents of Buson, and perhaps that’s just as well. Chronicles of youth are invariably dull. We do know that he was born at Kema, a village which has been swallowed up by the present-day city of Osaka, but beyond that we have only rumor, anecdote, and supposition — until suddenly, at the age of twenty-one, he pops up in Edo (Tokyo), apprenticed to the haikai master Hayano Soa (also variously known as Hajin and the Master of Yahantei).

This apprenticeship, which included some practice of haiga, or painting, (an art form for which Buson is now equally, if not better, known), lasted until the death of Soa in 1742. Thereafter began a period of ten years of wandering — and it is here that for us the real life of the artist begins. At the end of the first year he emerges from the pupal stage by symbolically changing his name from Saicho to Buson, a name whose compounds mean “cease to be” and “ village.” And under that name he has given us more than 2500 haiku.

Though attempts have been made by various translators to bring Buson to life, presenting him as a pleasing nature poet, or as a lover of oddities and enchantments, none have really plumbed the depth of him or of haiku. Nor does any exhaustive translation of his work exist. As a primer, R.H. Blyth is pretty good (if one learns to leapfrog the annoying intrusions of English Lit); though with him the oasis isn’t often enough glimpsed.

Perhaps the difficulties of rendering into English, or some other non-ideographic language, that which may not only carry multiple meanings, but which has been highly condensed, have played their part in warning off other potential visitors. Deceptively simple in appearance — after all, each one is only seventeen syllables — haiku begin causing tricks as soon we begin trying to give order to our pathetic little scraps of words. How to cram all of that meaning into seventeen English syllables, when English, with its wave-like rhythms and frequent end stops, its rises and falls, seemingly wants so much more space to move in than the elegantly simple and ascetic, open ended a, ka, sa, ta, na of Japanese? Yet disregard this syllabic constraint, and the rolling prairie seems much too vast a place for a quiet Zen monk.

But good translation certainly isn’t impossible. Our labor just requires a little care.

tama-suri-no zayu ni hiraku tsubaki kana

Unfolding at the
hand of the glass polisher:
a camellia!

Here, twin meanings have survived the throes and pangs of birth in the new language, even somehow managing to come dressed in the requisite seventeen syllables.

Yet, in other instances, it isn’t possible to preserve the 5-7-5 syllable structure while maintaining the integrity of the song:

harusame ya mi ni furu zukin kitaru keri

Spring rain —
Coming down on me again
This hood I’ve been wearing.

Even still, we’re coming closer to the essence of haiku: the framing stanzas tugging at the center, each claiming it as their own.

Perhaps an even sweeter example is:

kogarashi ya hitato tsumazuku modori-uma

A cold winter wind—
it stumbles suddenly
the returning horse

Which leads us to ponder — which is it that stumbles? the wind, or the horse? One can imagine a cold wind blowing ferociously, stopping for a second or two, falling to its knees and catching its breath, then getting up and continuing onward. Or….

What should slowly be coming apparent, like the camellia unfolding, is the depth of Buson’s verse; the way in which multiple meanings are built into the structure; somewhat like those “find the hidden object” games where the picture within the picture only surfaces after you have stared at it long enough. Sometimes it seems with Buson as if a mirror has been placed on one side of an object or a person; a window on the other.

inazuma-ya katada domari no yohi no sora

Lightning!
Stopping at the parched field:
the evening sky.

Here, with the lightning briefly illuminating the whole scene, we can see to the horizon. Even at that we haven’t really rounded out the poem satisfactorily, for if we were able to completely marry sound, sense, symbol, and meaning, we would know that Katada, which has been translated here literally as “parched field”, is also the name of an actual place in Shiga Prefecture, on the shores of Lake Biwa. The second line would then read: “Stopping at Katada”; which in English, as opposed to Japanese, removes the additional meaning of the autumnal parched field that Buson wanted to present, though gives us back the feeling of the poet stopping somewhere for the night. Yet even as it is the poem crackles with layers.

"An Unfinished Project that was Also a Missed Opportunity": Utopia and Alternate History in Hayao Miyazaki's My Neighbor Totoro

By Phillip E. Wegner

What if it were the other way around, however? What if it were the failures of socialism, better still, of socialists and communists, which left in their wake a universal disillusionment in which only consumption and narrow fanaticism seem possible, at least for the present?

--Fredric Jameson, Foreword to Kojin Karatani, Origins of Modern Japanese Literature

No differently will the world one day appear, almost unchanged, in its constant feast-day light, when it stands no longer under the law of labour, and when for homecomers duty has the lightness of holiday play.

--Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia

Even in this global age, it's the most local things that can have a worldwide effect. Yet why doesn't anyone make a delightful and wonderful film set in Japan?
We need a new method and sense of discovery to be up to the task. Rather than be sentimental, the film must be a joyful, entertaining film.
The forgotten.
The ignored.
Those that are considered lost.
Yet I made My Neighbor Totoro with the firm belief that these things still exist.

--Hayao Miyazaki, The Art of My Neighbor Totoro

In the voices we hear, isn't there an echo of now silent ones?

--Walter Benjamin, "On the Concept of History"
1

In what follows, I want to make a case for reading the great Japanese anime film maker Hayao Miyazaki's My Neighbor Totoro (Tonari no Totoro) (1988) as a supreme example of the subgenre of the science fiction narrative utopia know as the alternate history or "what if" story. Many of Miyazaki's films present what will be readily recognized as Darko Suvin's "possible worlds" of utopian narration. [1] Most explicitly, examples of this can be found in the far future ecological dystopia of Miyazaki's first feature film and manga, Nausica of the Valley of the Wind (1984); but also in the young adult fantasy of Kiki's Delivery Service (1989) (itself an adaptation of a novel by the Japanese children's author, Eiko Kadono); the heroic fantasy of Princess Mononoke (1997); the mythic world invoked in Spirited Away (2001); and even the fantastic post-WWI allegory of Porco Rosso (1992). Moreover, a number of Miyazaki's films explicitly deploy elements of the alternate history, including the fantastic alternate nineteenth century imagined in Laputa: Castle in the Sky (1986), and the parallel worlds story of Howl's Moving Castle (2004). [2]

2

However, most critics would in fact exempt Totoro from this list. The film is understood to be at most a beautiful nostalgic evocation of rural life in late 1950s Japan (or earlier, and more intriguingly as I will suggest, of Miyazaki's own childhood in the late 1940s), with some fantastic elements drawn from Shinto, the traditional polytheistic and animistic religion of Japan, injected in it. [3] The pioneering scholar of anime, Susan J. Napier, for example, describes the film as "perhaps the most 'Japanese' of Miyazaki's films" (493), a "nostalgic personal fantasy," and thus an exception to a body of work that "supports the kokusaika [internationalization] side of the debate, as both texts and subtexts of his films clearly advocate a flexible openness to and appreciation of other cultures" (475). [4] Moreover, the film continues to be an inspiration among some Japanese viewers for an outpouring of nostalgia for the more "innocent" 1950s, before the explosive wave of modernization that would sweep the island beginning in the 1960s (although for a devastating critique of the former moment see Kenzaburo Oe's classic novel, The Silent Cry [1967]). This nostalgia culminated in the construction at the 2005 World Expo in Japan of a replica of the house featured in the film, where, as a website for the Expo notes, "everything in the house appears to have come straight out of the 1950s" (Expo 2005 n.p.).

3

The story of Totoro is a deceptively simple one (and I must confess that I was first drawn to this film by my twins, Nadia and Owen, who, as three year olds, requested repeatedly that we watch the film – I thus need to thank them for the inspiration to begin to watch and rewatch all of Miyazaki's films). Two sisters, four-year old Mei and pre- teenager Satsuki, move with their father, Tatsuo Kusakabe, a professor in the department of archaeology at Tokyo University, into a beautiful if run-down house, one that combines traditional Japanese and modern Western elements, located in farmlands modeled on those of Saitama Prefecture outside of Tokoyo. They do so, we soon learn, to be nearer the moutainside hospital where the girls' mother convalesces. (Mei's age and the mother's condition have led some viewers to surmise that the film is in part based in autobiography, as Miyazaki's beloved mother began a nine-year period of treatment for spinal tuberculosis when the boy was only six years old [McCarthy 120]. This too required that the Miyazaki family move frequently.) While establishing themselves in their new home, the children encounter magical beings, first the soot sprites (susuwatari) inhabiting the shadowy regions of the building (and ultimately driven from it by the family's collective laughter); and then, far more significantly, the creature that identifies itself as Totoro (a childish mispronunciation of the phonetic Japanese pronunciation of troll [torru]) and his diminutive companions, all of whom inhabit a magnificent camphor tree that grows near the family's home. In perhaps the most celebrated scene of the film, Satsuki first meets Totoro at a bus stop as the girls wait one rain soaked evening for their father to return from the university.

When Satsuki shares her umbrella with Totoro, he gives her a set of magic acorn seeds – which a few nights later, sprout into giant trees – before climbing on board a fantastic "cat bus," one of a number of such vehicles that race across the countryside while apparently remaining invisible to adults.

4

A crisis arises late in the film when Mei, believing her mother's condition has worsened, attempts to walk to the distant hospital. When they cannot find the child, the family's close friend, Granny, comes to believe she has drowned. After learning this is not the case, Satsuki pleads with Totoro to help her. Totoro comes to the rescue, calling for the cat bus, which finds Mei and then takes both girls to the hospital where, safely perched in a tree, they are reassured by the sight of their mother sitting in bed talking with their father. The girls then leave an ear of corn on the windowsill where it is found by their parents, a sign that moves the film from what Tzetvan Todorov calls the genre of the fantastic, a tale that leaves the viewer hesitating between understanding the events they witness as the children's fantasy or as actuality, to that of the marvelous, "characterized by the mere presence of supernatural events, without implicating the reaction they provoke in the characters" (47). [5] The end credits serve as an epilogue to the film, and assure us that eventually the mother becomes healthy enough to join the family in their new home.

5

A number of critics have read Totoro and the other marvelous creatures in the film as kami or the animistic spirits of Shinto. This interpretation is further strengthened by the fact that the family honors the various shrines they encounter as they move through the countryside. This in turn reinforces a reading of the film as nostalgic for an earlier more "pure" Japanese way of life, a fact that becomes even more problematic when one recalls that Shinto was deployed as a nationalist ideology in the period of military build up leading to the Second World War. Such an interpretation, however, runs counter both to Miyazaki's explicit denial – "this movie has nothing to do with that or any other religion" (qtd. in McCarthy 121) – and to what we know to be the filmmaker's professed early investments in Marxism. (Indeed, although sometimes referred to, much to his dismay, as the "Walt Disney of Japan," Miyazaki served in his earlier days as an organizer and officer in his animator's union. [6])

6

One recent reading that complexifies this interpretation of the film has been advanced by Lucy Wright, who argues that while Miyazaki "is still drawing on the cultural myth of an idealized, paradisal existence in ancient Japan," he also "attempts to distance himself from the significant political and nationalistic implications inherent in any discussion of Shinto." In its stead, Miyazaki develops a "more expansive and global vision" that ultimately brings in elements of other culture to "coalesce into coherent and transnational human traits" (paragraph 3). While moving in the right directions, Wright's reading still elides the deeply historicist, materialist, and ultimately radical political nature of the utopian vision evident in this film. Indeed, I maintain that this is in many ways the most political of all of Miyazaki's deeply political films.

7

In order to begin to shift the discussion then, I want to note one remarkable aspect of the film that has received very little critical attention – the utter absence of "landscape" within it. I take the concept of the historical "discovery of landscape" from Kojin Karatani's landmark book, Origins of Modern Japanese Literature. Karatani claims that landscape is, along with a number of other foundational categories – face, interiority, confession, a signifying sickness, and the child – "an epistemological constellation, the origins of which were suppressed as soon as it was produced" (22). He later expands upon this idea, arguing, "Once a landscape has been established, its origins are repressed from memory. It takes on the appearance of an 'object' which has been there, outside of us, from the start" (34). The rapid emergence and naturalization of this new notion of landscape occurs in the late nineteenth century, the period of a dramatic change in Japanese life known as the Meiji Restoration. Karatani notes, "I would like to propose that the notion of 'landscape' developed in Japan sometime during the third decade of the Meiji period. Of course, there were landscapes long before they were 'discovered.' But 'landscapes' as such did not exist prior to the 1890s" (19). Karatani further contends that while these transformations first take place in the West, "Meiji Japan offers us the key to the nature of that inversion which was specific to the West yet was concealed (since it took place over a much longer period of time) under the facade of linear development" (30).

8

Karatani goes on to observe, "Of course, I do not mean to say that landscapes and faces had not previously existed. But for them to be seen as 'simply landscape' or 'simply face' required, not a perceptual transformation, but an inversion of that topos which had privileged the conception landscape or face. It was only through such an inversion that the naked face – the naked face as a kind of landscape, took on meaning in and of itself and what had been insignificant became profoundly significant" (56). "Landscape as such," a concept Karatani claims is central to the development of literary realism, depends upon a separation of subject and object: "Both the landscapes and the 'ordinary people' (what I have called people-as-landscapes) that realism represents were not 'out there' from the start, but had to be discovered as landscapes from which we had become alienated" (29). This then marked a profound break from older practices, evident in sansuiga landscape painting, haiku poetry, and, even earlier, medieval European arts:
Medieval European painting and landscape painting share something in common that differentiates them from modern landscape painting. In both, place is conceived of in transcendental terms. For a brush painter to depict a pine grove meant to depict the concept (that which is signified by) 'pine grove,' not an existing pine grove. The transcendental vision of space had to be overturned before painters could see existing pine groves as their subjects. This is when modern perspective appears. Or more accurately, what we call modern perspective had already emerged at some point before this in the form of a perspectival inversion. (27)

9

It is a form of this older transcendental vision of space that we see at work in My Neighbor Totoro. The best example of this is to be found in the figure of the giant camphor tree, home to Totoro, that hovers above the family's home and much of the action of the film.

The choice of this particular tree species was not an accidental one, for as Wright observes, "The majestic camphor tree often plays an important role as signifying both kami and ancestors (paragraph 26). It is her term "signifying" on which I would like to place the most emphasis here, for this fantastic form is clearly not the representation of any existing tree but rather the figuration of a set of concepts signified by this tree: an erasure of the dividing line between humans and nature – at one point when the family goes to greet and thank the tree, the girl's father states that this is a very old tree from the time "when trees and people got along" – as well as a deep rootedness in place, community, belonging, and mutual support. (Moreover, in a brief scene that uncannily seems to nod toward the passage from Karatani I cited a moment ago, Satsuki's classmate and Granny's grandson, Kanta, is shown inscribing the Japanese characters signifying the concept "pine nut.")

10

We also are presented throughout the film brief self-contained lyrical images – raindrops in a rice paddy, a frog crawling alongside a puddle ("Spring rain: as yet/ the little froglets' bellies/ haven't got wet"), a pink sandal floating in a pond with a dragonfly resting upon it – which function in a way similar to traditional haiku.

In describing a work of the great Edo period poet, Yosa Buson (1716-1784), whose "spring rain" haiku I quoted in the previous sentence, Karatani writes, "what this example really reveals is that Buson was fascinated, not so much by landscape, as by the written word" (22). Similarly, I would suggest that in My Neighbor Totoro, as well as in his more fantastic anime, Miyazaki is fascinated not so much by landscape as by the expressive potentialities of the animation medium itself. This is because such a non-naturalistic presentation is especially well suited to animation – and, following Walter Benjamin's lead, we might use Miyzaki's work to begin to think further about the utopian dimensions of animation itself. [7]

The Golden Bough

The Best of Shibuya-kei, Volume One - Neojaponisme

http://neojaponisme.com/

Hjalmar Munsterhjelm Moonlight in Barösund 1870

Tales from the Loop