Once upon a time I wrote a review about Oyasumi Punpun pretty far back. I think it was neither good nor bad. I threw out some stuff about a movement I had only a hazy knowledge of and linked it to a bunch of stuff that had nothing to do with the story and threw out some names definitely in order to appear smarter than I really was. I think it was probably stupid to try and categorize anything like Oyasumi Punpun like that.
I think a review should be more than just a momentary exchange of what is good or bad because, well, the old belief is that everybody derives something different from even the crappiest work of art. There’s the pragmatic side to it. You’re only gonna live here for a few decades. At most you’ll be here for a hundred years. I don’t think transhumanism is going to take off while you’re around. How are you going to spend it? Thankfully you have people who’ve treaded the same ground before you and they surely have a lot to say about life and about what to read and not to read. Since they’re kind enough to have an opinion you might as well just go and take it. What’s more the more streamlined it is the better because, hey, why read a review in the first place. I just need the verification that my choice is correct with a few brief words like ‘the art is good’ and ‘the story is amazing’ and I can be on my way, experiencing that work of art that is so much better and greater than that crappy review.
So of course the review, in this instance, becomes the platform for people to jump at a work of art. This is completely okay of course. Like I said we don’t live forever and we’ve got stuff to do like actually reading a work rather than reading about someone talk about a work. But you know in between that work of art and yourself is this human being, who, after being moved by said work of art so immensely, decides that he has to say something about it. And that person himself is a person with completely different circumstances from yourself and he’s also a creator in a sense because he’s thinking about how best to convey that feeling of ‘must-read-this’ to you. And yet this person isn’t just satisfied with placing his feelings on a scale because he thinks that its utterly insane to lump together all the feelings invoked into a rating or a set of lines about ‘characters being likeable’ or anything like that. In fact he’s also a greedy person because he craves attention and he wants to be able to convey the same nexus of feelings that the artist of the work he just read was able to convey to him. This greediness prevents him from ever being a mere spectator to this reader-Manga divide and he feels he has to get his dirty paws into this ‘transaction’ between the two parties. So his review becomes, not really a review, but kind of a half-essay partly-autobiographical partly-stupid thing that in the end becomes so completely obscure that it eliminates any ‘must-read-this’ that was conveyed in the first place.
It gets even trickier when you have a Great Work. Something in the 10s scale in your subjective rating system. Something that you feel you have to tell, no shout, to the world about from the rooftops just because it happens to be so good and you experienced not just great beauty but great empathy and everything that is good about living in the world. Something that sticks to you and you have to crown it in your little head with all the other Great Works out there as the thing that, because you read it, proves to you that human life is not completely worthless or useless or unkind or relentlessly stupid; and that the very existence of such Beauty is validation for the whole thing. It’s a work of art that cleans up the whole human slate, of all the pent up longing and worthless lingering that seems to go on in everyone’s life. A work that tells you that in the end great things to appear and you should go on hoping and desiring and keeping your ambitions inside you because maybe “you are here—that life exists” and that “you may contribute a verse”.
Because hey life didn’t deal you a bad card. You came far enough to be able to read Oyasumi Punpun in all it’s entirely and really understand it and get into it and for a few hours your brain was fried with the fuzzy despairing love for humanity that seems to emanate from the computer screen as you soak in the pages. And afterwards Punpun and Aiko and Seki and Harumi and Sachi and Midori and Yuuichi are all real live breathing moving figments that live and breathe in your head because of how all their troubles and worries and actions seems to just absolutely strike this indefinable deep chord within you. You’ve gotten this far. You haven’t been killed in a freak accident before 12 and you haven’t become so completely hopelessly broke that you can’t even afford to read Oyasumi Punpun in the first place. You may not be an artist who can absolutely capture everything great about life in 147 chapters but hey you still made it far enough to say that you tried or you’re going to do it one day no matter what because that’s the only thing to live for now.
And when you read this Great Work you just can’t write anything normal anymore and your heart is pounding and you can’t think of anything but convey convey convey the complete experience to someone else, even a sliver of it, something that can be shared, that can be burning on inside their hearts, even if it’s just a flicker, for the years to come. You want to be able to do that magic that he did over so many pages and you want to want to want to have that level of observation and imagination and experience that he had but you’re so hopelessly young or inexperienced and you’re so hopelessly deluded most of the time and you have to ornate your words with the speech of dead kings in order to hide this small insignificance as an artist growing within you.
And this anxiety is making you sick to the stomach but it’s also making your brain churn and you just have to get something down onto writing because that’s the way you react to something so utterly and stupendously beautiful, and reading it twice makes it stronger and your brain is now absolutely overflowing with that raw painful ambition which is so so far away from your current state of affairs.
And you can’t stop thinking and living and your senses fall into hyperactivity and your brain latches on to memories of the most insignificant small bits of conversation going on with your co-workers that day, or the way your parents probably think you’re too detached from being cooped up inside all the time seeking Great heart-shaking Works and how it’s close to impossible being able to convey anything at all even to your own family, unless you had even an ounce of the virtuoso skill and throbbing empathy that Inio Asano had while making his magnum opus. You think about how many years left you have to live, and what you’re going to do in the meantime, and how you should be kinder and be on the look-out for the small powerful things in life and you should have a greater sense of self-esteem and keep watch of all your dreams and seek always to be empathetic to other human beings because, as Inio Asano so eloquently proved, they are all dissonant chords breaking off one another, but there’s a reason and a music flowing behind the scenes. That you may never understand even your closest friends and that the momentary complete connection between two people may be so transient and illusory and yet so awe-inspiringly shattering that some people spend their whole life looking for it. That many people are enclosed and solipsistic but that in some ways this can also make them strong at certain times. That it’s easily to fall into a cycle of misguided self-despair and ruin yourself, but it’s also never too late to be saved and to extract yourself from the pit, no matter how far you’ve fallen. That whether you’ve been dealt a good or bad hand, you’re still beautiful anyway so you should live on in as great and honest a way as possible. All these musical notes and scales falling behind the scenes where we can’t see them and even if you become mad trying to grasp the music you should still try anyway because what else is there left to live for but to connect with other humans? And that even if they aren’t mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, at least they’re still mad enough to be here and to pass them, for a moment, in this endless stream of life, is just about the greatest thing in the world.
But really who gives a shit? Because in the end you’re still alive and life hasn’t dealt you a bad enough hand and you’re either going to or have already read Oyasumi Punpun, so maybe you should be happy about that.
