Tuesday, November 10, 2015
Tatsumi's Melancholy
In class we proposed various terms and phrases attempting to define the melancholy that Tatsumi's works embody. For me, the most apt description would be stagnation. Many of Tatsumi's characters are trapped in their misery with no clear concept of how they got to where they are and no foreseeable way to change their circumstances. They are stagnant, merely a product of their time. They are the ones left behind by war, devoid of a sense of purpose and bearers of the consequences of disastrous events. The only direction many of Tatsumi's characters seem to find is the fleeting pursuance of carnal pleasure which they are both somewhat obsessed with and guilt riddled by. It is very easy to picture that after being a member of a society at war with a clear objective and common interest, that there would be a societal vacuum in which an attempted return to normalcy would instead result in melancholy. It is within such a society that Tatsumi's characters exist, they are neither moving forward nor backward but are instead stagnant, exactly like the cars in the opening panel of Just a Man.
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In many ways I agree with your interpretation of melancholy as it is presented in Tatsumi's short story comics. I do however, also believe that this melancholy is not only representative of post-war suffering in Japan, but also of Tatsumi's portrayal of the mundane. Much of his pessimism transcends the war to encompass humanity. According to his short stories, Tatsumi sees suffering not only in the face of war, but also in the face of the universal circumstances of life. He poses the inevitability and immorality of internal structure, especially in "Just a Man," "Woman in the Mirror," "Night Falls Again," and "Goodbye," and in doing so poses a condemnation of humanity's cowardice and mental primitivism (despite social constructions). In many ways I find this depiction of a collective melancholy to be even more resonant than the specificity of Japan's post-war tumult.
ReplyDeleteI think another way to categorize Tatsumi's work is "honest pessimism." Hiroshima and WWII are clearly catalysts of the melancholy and stagnation that the characters and the audience experience, but I don’t think they’re the sole cause of such suffering. Tatsumi makes his work extremely relatable, and I think somebody with zero knowledge of history and politics could read these comics and still find them relevant. Life may be easier now than it was at the culmination of WWII, but there are still instances of the mundane and hopelessness in everyone’s life. As a larger picture, nobody really knows what to do with life, and I think these comics symbolize how we get ourselves into messes such as WWII because of senseless social constructions that are theoretically preventable. We’re just too stupid of a race to collectively get along. And Tatsumi recognizes this.
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