May 20, 2023
Kyoko hoped the sun would never rise.
...
If the sun never rose, they wouldn't have to let go of each other. If the sun never rose, we could stay on this hard wooden bench without saying anything. We might as well end our lives like this. If the sun never rose, we could simply remember endlessly the time when we were happy.
If the sun never rose, night would last forever. We would be freezing but we could warm up against each other. We could stay together, simple as that. We could stay together, forever. If the sun never rose.
Our pupils and the palm of our hands would not be tinted green like before, in the early Summer.
Your thin and white fingers were always joined by sadness. But it was you they were hiding. You are now in a moist obscurity from which I get the sign of separation.
Love is a book filled with sorrow. That you and I finished reading. Our hearts knotted with tears will never be joined again. We will not be able to read what is written in it anymore.
Set in the 1970s, Dousei Jidai is often considered as Kazuo Kamimura’s magnum opus, instantly becoming a best seller and a very influential work among students, mainly because it was published around the end of the Zengakuren protesting movement and Dousei Jidai perfectly encapsulated their remaining anxiousness and their troubles prospecting the future.
While it is in essence a love story, it is quite far apart from your traditional romance. It takes upon itself to tell of a passionate love in its rawest form, in everything it has of violent and impulsive. Having met at a drinking party, Kyoko and Jiro immediately fell in love with each other and decided to move together 3 days later while still unmarried, which was quite rare and badly perceived at the time and in fact, the whole narrative focuses on this couple constrained by outdated conservative rules of how a perfect fulfilled couple should be and of how happiness can be achieved with having a baby as the center of it all.
Jiro is an independent comic writer not affiliated with any publishing company, taking work when it comes and struggling to make a name for himself. Kyoko works for a small advertising company and while it seems she’s doing better off than her partner, she’s constantly undervalued and looked down upon for being a woman, only being used for serving tea and coffee despite her qualifications as a graphic designer.
The first part of the story is focused on representing daily life in Tokyo but primarily on Kyoko and Jiro’s passionate love and the consequences of their sudden life spent together. Each chapter offers a different glimpse on their life and brings about different questioning on one another. Each of them contrasts wildly with each other, in some they try to kill each other with metal bars taken from a construction site or commit suicide together while some others are more contemplative, taking a walk around the beach or in the streets, cherishing the present time. They’re constantly on edge but that’s their way of life and even when it’s hard, they know they can count on each other; this dichotomy builds at the same time their unstable but also eternal love relationship.
Or that’s what we’re led to think but everything’s not as rose-colored and convenient. Everything falls apart when Kyoko becomes pregnant and decides to abort their child in secret in a gut wrenching scene that will leave her traumatized and scarred and eventually completely destroying their couple. Suffering from dementia, she’ll try to slit her wrists and end up in a psychiatric hospital reclused in the mountains. Separated from each other, this second part has Kyoko and Jiro trying to piece their life together for the better or the worse, trying to move on, to forget each other, without ever succeeding in doing so.
In due time, Kyoko is able to leave the hospital and the last part has both of them trying to live once more together, going back to a life simpler roots, to live a “normal” life. As if to echo back to the first part, now that they’re not living in the moment anymore, now that they’re not doing anything exciting, now that their life has become dull, their relationship gradually deteriorates and becomes tense until they’re not able to stand each other. Realizing that their love was only meant to last for but a fleeting moment, they finally manage to break up while reminiscing the happy days they spent together.
Dousei Jidai, through the depiction of this couple, is also about depicting the city and its inhabitants, each character presented in the mini stories are forging the unstable personality of Kyouko and Jiro. Murderers, prostitutes and all kind of people having lost their aspirations or their sense of ethics can be encountered in a quiet park, in a small bar or even in the neighborhood. Violence is never hidden and is an entire part of Tokyo who behind its apparent tranquility is in fact cruel and barbaric for those residing in it. It seems even more violent in that it’s rarely overdramatic and often subtly balanced, even in the extreme cases. Of course they’re not the only kind of characters presented in it, Kazuo Kamimura has to heart to display every stratums of the society present in Tokyo and even the regular or upper class citizens are atypical, often putting up fronts to hide their respective misery such as Kyoko’s boss who wants her to pretend she’s his wife so his mother can finally be relieved on her deathbed. The idea of outcasts is pretty broad here as they’re most likely hidden in plain sight and doomed to suffer from the solitary confines of their home.
While being published in a magazine with radically different purposes, Dousei Jidai shares a lot of themes present in Garo and especially with Yoshihiro Tatsumi but Kamimura takes a completely different stance from him. The inhumanity and ferocity present in this urban setting contrasts wildly with his delicate and graceful style, mixing up acrylic painting and traditional Japanese etchings to a more contemporary style with an also brilliant composition. The writing and the prose contained within it are also of note, almost every chapter is concluded with a poem, composed in free verse or in haiku, serving to establish a moral and give more substance to the characters or simply to reinforce the aesthetics or the mood of the story. With both of them combined, Kamimura is most certainly at the summit of his art.
It’s not surprising how this particular story is still fondly remembered and how it managed to be the symbol of a generation, embodying all their doubts and struggles and encouraging them to live their lives to its full extent while ignoring the worn down standards of right thinking.
Reviewer’s Rating: 10
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