Call me Ryōta. As I watched Kakegurui, it struck me how similar it felt to Herman Melville’s book Moby Dick. Let me summarize each and then we’ll jump into how an anime about a compulsive gambler feels similar to a story about a man obsessed with a white whale. Kakegurui follows Yumeko as she gambles through…
Tag: literature
The Role of Satire: Crayon Shin Chan as an Example
As Shin drops his drawers and does another “ass dance” to delight his kindergarten classmates and horrify his teachers, I’m struck by the show’s sophistication. How can an “ass dance” be sophisticated? It’s not, but the satire of Crayon Shin Chan is. Satire cuts at ideas we often fail to see, and it is, perhaps,…
Musings VII: On Monkeys in Japanese Culture.
Story: Three in the Morning, Four in the Evening. In the times of the Song Dynasty[i] in China lived a man they called Sokō, which means monkey trainer. He loved monkeys and reared a whole horde of them at his house. Sokō understood the monkey’s minds quite well, and likewise the monkeys understood their master….
Musings IV: Japanese Idioms, and why it is a good idea to know some.
Perhaps you’ve been so lucky never to have prayed into a horse’s ear (uma no mimi ni nenbutsu), but I bet someone has once looked at you with white eyes (shiroi me de miru) until you felt like your stomach was boiling (hara ga nie-kurikaeru yō). Yes, those are Japanese Idioms. I’ve had a class…