Love & Pop

[Dunn Brian]

(from the review)
>Rather than trivialize his subject and trash his story, however, Anno's 
>methods serve as an witty running commentary on a
>world in which nothing lasts, nothing is what it seems and the only value 
>is the gratification of appetites that have grown monstrous and absurd. For 
>all its funhouse distortions, it is world that we recognize and, more than 
>we may want to admit, symbolizes what we are in danger of becoming.


I also got this impression from the book.  But in the book, Murakami had a 
lot of commentary on how society views enjo-kousai and how the whole thing 
is a product of society.  Was Anno able to bring anything like that out in 
the movie?  I realize that print and film are completely different mediums 
and that one can't really translate one medium to the other perfectly, but 
I'm just wondering if any of the social commentary on this aspect of society 
comes through in the movie.

Just to give an example of what I am talking about, here is part of a 
translation that I did for a lit class of a couple of pages from the book 
that really spoke to me, that I thought was at least part of the main point 
of the book.  It's not a real great translation, but anyway:

--(pg 89-90)
  Having sex with a complete stranger didn?ft seem real to Hiromi.  I guess 
it?fs wrong, she thought.  Her mother seemed to know about Hirokazu Takami.  
One time her mother had said, do it right!  Hiromi thought she was probably 
talking about condoms.  Her father didn?ft know about Hirokazu Takami.  
Having sex with Hirokazu Takami wasn?ft a bad thing, so why would sex with a 
complete stranger be bad.  A societal ethics teacher, who would sometimes 
speak during church services, had said twice now up until this year that 
this thing we call sexual morality is divinely ordained.  The weekly 
magazines old men read generally have nude photos of women, and articles 
like which soapland is the cheapest, and where the pretty fashion massage 
girls were.  That societal ethics teacher doesn?ft know that there are 
company presidents who try to pay high-school girls 80,000 for sex, or that 
there are men in expensive suits who covet half-chewed grapes from the 
mouths of high school girls.  Despite the fact that the magazines old men 
read have nude pictures and stuff about soaplands, there isn?ft even one 
single line about why it?fs not right for high-school girls to have sex with 
men who are complete strangers.  There isn?ft anybody on the TV or on the 
radio who will say anything like that.  There are more people than you can 
shake a stick at who say that it?fs wrong.  Not one person says why it?fs 
wrong.  This is Japan, not the Vatican, so if you try to say with a straight 
face that God established sexual morality, even elementary school kids would 
laugh.  Even without knowing why it was wrong, Hiromi felt that it was 
definitely wrong.  Since the others had left, Hiromi searched for some kind 
of grounds that would show her that doing enjo-kousai to get that imperial 
topaz ring that she wanted so bad was really wrong.  She searched inside 
herself, to see if maybe there was something more important to her now, 
something even more wonderful for her if she could go without doing the 
enjo-kousai to buy the ring.  She searched through all of it, through the 
things her parents and her teachers had said to her since she was little, 
through things written in books and newspapers and magazines, things she 
heard on the radio, lyrics to songs, things she had seen on TV or at the 
movies or on video.  There was nothing.
---


Brian Dunn

b1dunn at hotmail.com
University of Washington
Dept. of Asian Languages and Literature

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