As discussed in class, melancholy is a main theme in Yoshihiro Tatsumi's Goodbye. It is an important one because it helps place the situation and setting of the time period after WWII in Japan. Tatsumi did not simply portray what it was like to live in that era, but he was able to create melancholy by giving the audience a view into a character's life. It forced us to empathize or at least sympathize with the emotions and thoughts of the characters, which can be thought to be a metaphor of a larger, real-life population.
This is why the melancholy sticks and hits home for the audience - the feelings are relevant to all people. At one point or another, there are people in the world who live among crowd but just manage to get by. In their perspective, they are stuck living mundane lives with no way out. There is desperation: these people are struggling to survive and can resort to unhealthy behaviors that show that they cannot deal with living anymore.
Specifically in Woman in the Mirror and Goodbye, there are some scenes that took me some time to figure out how they may support the melancholy theme. At the end of Woman in the Mirror, the character who was narrating explained that his old schoolmate must have resorted to dressing up as a woman due to the immense pressure that his mother and sisters were placing on him. This is a plausible theory. But what if that schoolmate was transgender and really felt that he was a girl? The result would still be the same: the schoolmate would not be able to live life as the woman he felt he was because his current life would not allow him to. His sisters would depend on him as the "man of the family" more than ever since their mother died.
At first, I couldn't see how or why the sex scene between the daughter and father had to happen in Goodbye. I realized that it was put there to display the daughter's absolute desperation. It helped add onto the melancholy the audience could feel from observing the Japanese people trying to build their communities back up by just living their everyday lives. We could see that the women had nothing else to survive on and so had to rely on the American GIs. Back to the daughter, she had enough at that point. She probably learned a while back that the American men were there to have their fun and relief and then leave. She couldn't rely on anyone including her only family, her father. However, her father, a person who is supposed to take care of her, relies on her for income that she gets from having sex with the GIs. Without meaning or purpose in her life, she decides that there is no point in having a father who doesn't act like a father and gets rid of him.
I agree. However, if you look at it another way: the daughter sort of looks like an older version of Akemi from "Life is So Sad." Akemi got over her man in prison by having sex with another man. If these two characters are the same person (I know that the professor said that they are separate people), then maybe it would be easier to understand that she had sex with her father so that she could get over him as well. Maybe that may be another theory of why she had sex with her father,
ReplyDeleteI agree that melancholy is a potent theme for the protagonists in Tatsumi's work, but unfortunately the lack of female protagonists makes it much harder to identify with and emotionally react to the characters. Even though the females are shown to have their own traumas and sadness, there emotions are typically present to service the male protagonists in some way. Even in "Just a Man", the woman the male protagonist takes out on a date has her own sadness but is ultimately eclipsed by the man's impotence. While Tatsumi's portrayal of melancholy is effective, it is also, unfortunately, rather one sided.
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