"If you work by reason, you grow rough-edged; if you choose to dip your oar into sentiment's stream, it will sweep you away. Demanding you own way only serves to constrain you. However, you look at it, the human world is not an easy place to live.
And when its difficulties intensify, you find yourself longing to leave that world and dwell in an easier one -- and then, when you understand at last that difficulties will dog you wherever you may live, this is when poetry and art are born.
The creators of our human world are neither gods nor demons but simply people, those ordinary folk who happen to live right there next door. You may feel the human realm is a difficult place, but there is surely no better world to live in. You will find another only by going to the nonhuman; and the nonhuman realm would surely be a far more difficult place to inhabit than the human.
So if this best of worlds proves a hard one for you, you must simply do your best to settle in and relax as you can, and make this short life of ours, if only briefly, an easier place in which to make your home."
- Kusamakura, translated by Meredith McKinney
These are words that I have come to be able to recite from my memory with time, for their meaning and significance has been etched into my brain through experience.. And it is not entirely false when I say that these opening paras from Kusamakura entirely paraphrase "Onani Master Kurosawa"'s plot.
Our protagonist Kurosawa, is an otherwise sharp-looking middle school student who has amassed a great deal of self-consciousness and supposedly human understanding of the immediate community he lives in - his class. However, his self-consciousness and a lack of actual relationships with fellow humans have made him crooked as he resorts to alleviate his sexual stress in a girls' toilet every day, using his fellow femal classmates as fap material. In most of the "material" he fantasizes to help himself cum, Kurosawa makes sure that he dominates over the girl, not just sexually but also psychologically - he imagines them feeling helpless from having the features/mannerisms that define them, being deemed ineffective and useless before him.
yes, this is Hikigaya from oregairu in his early days but certainly more edgy and well.. interesting.
Things start changing when he ends up "responding" to the world around him for the first time. What moves him is pity for a frail, sheepish classmate, who could be mistaken for a squirrel if one's not careful. When he witnesses her being bullied by other classmates, and others putting up a facade of non-chalance, driven be a sense of middle-schooler justice, he "judges" them and hands them over the punishment they deserve - their PE clothes smeared with his cum.
What follows is a chain of events that makes Kurosawa realise the what the cubicle in the girls' toilet meant for him, the place he had in his surroundings and most importantly, the desire to have feelings.
Onani Master Kurosawa has a very realistic plot and given its length of 31 chapters, it relies on displaying "response" each time. What I mean is that whenever someone does something in this manga, there is always a response - and it's there for a good reason. The authors have made it clear to get across a message, loud and clear.
However, if there is anything that is unrealistic in this manga, then it is the fact that it does not show how a community could be totally irresponsive to stimuli. Even if you try to change or do sth unusual or great, it is quite possible that nothing happens.
We are the protagonists of our world, but this world is born only when we realize that we are not alone. Wallowing is self-pleasure, self-loath, injury, etc - all of do this. But the moment we stop thinking about the world we live in, stop actively engaging with it, we grow detached from it. And yes, while there might be clear advantages of doing so - you might end up discovering a new result, cook up a crazy idea for a novel or partake in pleasure by looking down people around you. But nevertheless, eventually if you end up getting detached from the world around you and drown in a non-human world you've created for yourself - then you cease to be a social animal, you lose many things - things that might end up driving you crazy. The authors call forth the need to have a strong heart and sense of pride in oneself, to live the individual you want to be, to keep an eye out for the present and to not loose sight of opportunities dangling right before your eyes.
