I finally managed to pick up two things that I had purchased more than a year ago: Kokoro and Seven Samurai. Maybe this month im feeling the need to actually pick these things up, especially since I left them a long time out of sheer laziness. It's kind of funny how I picked up both of these things almost recently. I remember finishing The Alchemist and thinking I really needed a book that was more contemporary and even post modern in some of it's outlook - Murakami got me on that whole wavelength with Kafka. The surrealism in that book is perhaps it's biggest
draw - you just get sucked into this world of bizarre occurances and essentially complexities of the human soul: trying to survive but trying to understand and comprehend complex feelings and difficult situations. Murakami isn't overly optimistic yet neither is he overly pessimestic; he just sits in the middle :P.
Kokoro is an interesting read though because you can see a number of things. The first is its impact on Murakami's own writing - Soseki's writing shares themes such as the nature of friendships and relationships as does Murakami but I think Kokoro isn't so gritty about it. That's not a bad thing at all, on the contrary you get both sides of the friendship told. You have the student who remains nameless throughout explaining why he's so intrigued by Sensei (the other main character) and how different he is to what he's been raised up with. Sensei on the other hand plays a very introverted character who retains a sense of mystery about his past and his views on love and life and as a result has fascinated the student. It doesn't read like a "classic" novel; it feels so contemporary that when I imagine the events I see them in present day rather than turn of the 20th century which is roughly when Kokoro was written.
Secondly, what kind of ideas does the book try and address? like i mentioned the nature of friendship and the perceptions of participants in those friendships. The student is really interested to learn from Sensei and feels that he won't be disappointed by who Sensei really is and as a result wants to find out the truth, whereas Sensei on the otherhand has trouble trusting many people after a fateful event in his life which caused a gradual change in his personality and his outlook on life to become more cynical. He is an isolated man because of lack of trust and the student looks to seek out the answers. Their friendship seems fragile but grows as the novel progresses but you always get the sense that while the two begin establishing a connection, there is a wall between the two which Sensei erects until the climax, fundamentally depicting the isolation we feel in everyday life to other people and how we seek to find a connection that is sustainable and deep enough to mean something to our core. It's rather ironic that Sensei finally let's his wall down completely but finds his own demise in it. The person the student finds the most inspirational is Sensei - who is a character that doesn't hold a "rank" in society, but has his own ideals of life and of love which makes the student more and more intrigued with him and I think that Soseki's portrayal is really a modern outlook on how are parents may assume we should see things in one way because they want it for our benefit but in reality we don't accept it because they do not offer anything that really addresses the heart or "Kokoro" as the book's title is labelled.
Soseki also tries to look at the gap between two generations and how what we want maybe different to what our elders want or think of what we've achieved. It's kind of interesting because the student has a balance of filialness yet disagrees with his parents even though he may not openly admit it out of respect. But it really highlighted how different times have changed during the last century and how that has affected generation gaps that have usually kept rather similar ideologies.
Soseki also looks at women's place in society and how although at the time they may have "certain roles" he tries to explain that we should look beyond that. I think if we translated that into a more modern context it could be tolerance of not just women but of race too so it's interesting to see a classical novelist trying to look at an idea such as this.
All in all though, it's really worth reading and I was surprised at it. I remember trying to read it a year ago and thinking "what the?!" because I was so used to a fantasy like novel, but if you are open about novel form than it's worth picking up definitely.
Seven Samurai was awesome as well. At first watching it I was kind of like "meh" but the second half really picked things up. It's an interesting look on caste differences between farmers and samurai and how people were "born" into these families. Kikichikoyo was my favourite character by far - his brazen and rough nature was funny but he had a real history as to why he was like that, why he tried to become a samurai and his understanding of the situation better than any of the other samurai because he was a farmer. He makes this really passionate plea about how farmers are miserly and lie but do so because of samurai. It really hit home the sense of oppression that caste systems had and still have on people. One thing Kurosawa is really into is the idea of cycles. Throughout the film he has these shots of the watermill just spinning but it depicts this idea of calmness initially, but you see some of the darker aspects of the idea of cycles. Especially when they farmers are defending the village from bandits and Kikichikoyo grabs this child that is crying with that watermill behind just carrying on spinning whilst the accompanying house is burning down and he is screaming out and crying about how the child was him when he was younger - It contrasted the earlier scene that had the peaceful spin of the watermill by a mile. The ending was really class though: that final shot really highlighted the futility of war; how nothing had changed for the samurais looking to seek a way out of their role and how different the farmers were to the samurais.
A very good film, but you need patience to watch it: clocks in at 207 minutes spread over 2 discs.
On that note, here's that closing scene shot. Peace out!
(Note: this is not the full pic - here's a link to the full thing: http://i39.photobucket.com/albums/e189/drunkenmaster42/SevenSamurai6.jpg)
