mister legs

Genzaburo Yoshino - How Do You Live

from chapter 3 to end

I know I had a lot of thoughts about this last week when I read it, but it’s been long enough the thoughts are fading. I can offer nothing close to evidence. Suffice to say: this book is both generally good (in story telling as well as politics), but I find it interesting how it was written in the midst of Japanese military fascism, and how its longest plot thread is about the shame of acting cowardly towards violent nationalists, here allegorized as bullies with a fascinatingly self destructive school spirit. There some bit of folk wisdom (or whatever) about comfortable liberalism gladly bowing down to fascists. This book seems to offer an example of that less axiomatic and closer to truth.

Genzaburo Yoshino - How Do You Live

The book The Boy and The Heron is named after, in Japanese.

This book was written in 1937, in Japan, so you know I'm going to read it in terms of Japanese imperial fascism, because of who I am. That said, since the end of this week I got to a chapter that has much more to say on that topic, so we'll table that for now.

Instead: a thought on the orderliness of children's books. Why is it there? I was thinking yesterday while doing dishes how children are chaos: not personalities unformed and therefore malleable, but rather people before the idea of a complete social self (excuse my abstractness, I write these fast). One can embrace this (imagine the toad children in so many Miyazaki movies) or attempt to push it back, as we find in so many books for children.

In short, my thoughts on the first portion of this book: in order to feel that one's way of going about this life is natural, one writes for themselves and others a book for children, to externalize one's doubts as something sure. If I tell a child this is how it always was, one thinks, before language, one day, while looking back, they will call it the truest state of a now-dying world.