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When you're weary, feeling small, when tears are in your eyes etc etc...

read shounen. It helps though I'm damned if I know why. This week saw me galloping through much of Belne's oeuvre, and I like Belne, I do, even when she isn't drawing singing eggplants or indulging her thing about Salome. But Belne feels like eating egg whites or something. A little FMA (vol 6, when the only other bit I've read is vol 1) fills the stomach marvellously. Possibly just the change in diet. If I did a marathon read of Freeman Hero as I keep intending to I might feel different; equally if I went back to hacking through Onmyouji the manga. ('Something's happening here and you don't know what it is, DO YOU, Mr Jones?') But for the moment, FMA it is.

Otherwise my shoulders hurt and the story is being difficult and the universe continues to unfold as it should.

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I've just been watching Onmyouji II with my mother. She really enjoyed it, and managed to spot several plot points coming. (She fell asleep through part of it, but, um, that is fairly normal for my mother watching movies.)

I'm going to rant some time, really I am, about WTF were they *thinking* of when they made Onmyouji the movies because duude? it *looks* like they were aiming the things at the gaijin market and I swear to God they weren't. (You know, ranting drops about 30 years off your vocabulary. Scary.)

I suppose, she says sourly, all the silliness and two-dimensionality was to appeal to the domestic RPG-influenced market. Or something. Granted the manga, which I'd thought were the main impetus behind the Seimei boom, are unfilmable for reasons of extreme pedanticism and schizophrenia; but the story collections have nice vignettes in them and would make a nice low-key Mizoguchi-type film if one were into nice understated movies. Understated is the last thing one would call the Onmyouji films.

I freely admit that I have seen very few Japanese movies, and would not know whether to tell how gaijinified a movie was, and how it should be.

(I knew there was a reason I try not to rant. 2-year-old speech looks tacky.)

Out of curiosity, if you could pick some of those vignettes for filming, what would you choose?

A courtier has turned monk and retired to a countryside temple to practise his austerities. He's visited by an old woman, still gracious and dignified, who brings a puzzling offering of nuts and leaves to the temple; there's also a very strong sense that she wants male company itself. When the monk comes to visit her home under a huge cherry tree, she begins to act in a strange and violent manner, and two voices speak from her mouth. The monk runs, but the woman comes pestering him at night. In perturbation the monk asks Seimei's help to be free from these visitations.

Seimei investigates the odd offerings, and a chance remark of Hiromasa's allows him to realize that they form the words of a poem. He then visits the woman's house himself and experiences the two personalities that inhabit her. At last it becomes clear that this is the soul of Ono no Komachi the poetess, who has been possessed by the soul of the man who loved her and whose death she caused by telling him to come stand by her door for a hundred nights in a row. He died on the 99th, but his spirit of course cannot find release.

What is more, neither can hers: saying he is powerless to do anything, Seimei leaves as the body containing the two spirits does a whirling dance of passion, obviously recalling the dance in a Noh play. Ono no Komachi and her captain desire to be bound by the passions that held them in life, and freeing them to go to their next lives is impossible. Poets, Seimei says in the manga, cannot be saved: their aesthetics don't permit it.

I like this one because it has the usual mystery story elements, and a certain amount of misdirection: I was expecting it to be the spirit of the cherry tree. Also it has Holmes-Seimei telling Watson-Hiromasa how invaluable his insights are, with the extra fillip that Seimei means it all. And of course the suggestion that poets of course are /different/ appeals to some unexpected Celtic streak in me- bards, you know, however unchancy and unpleasant they may be, aren't bound by the rules of this world or the next. Nope; theirs is a high and lonely destiny; and serve them right, probably. ^_^

And then there's the one about the child's hand that comes out of the pillar, and the reverend monk who's tortured by a pot that's kept in the temple storeroom, and the one, less unpleasant than it should be by rights, about the man and the woman who became 'human pillars' when a bridge was built 30 years ago or so- human sacrifices, in effect, to stop the bridge from being washed away- and whose spirits start looking for replacements when a heavy deluge seems likely to destroy the bridge anyway. That one's mostly notable for Hiromasa's understatement: 'You know, they couldn't have wanted to become human pillars, but all those years of keeping the bridge in place seems to have bred a certain devotion to their job in them. Which is, you know, admirable.' No we are not in Kansas any more. (Seimei tells the emperor to use wooden dolls to keep the new bridge steady.)

Oh, those are lovely. (I actually recognise the name Ono no Komachi, and am now feeling unduly smug.) Yes, they would have made for very interesting films, a la Kwaidan.

I've gotten sucked into the FMA undertow around here as well, manga side at least. (No desire to see anime version.) I'd managed to ignore Queasy pointing to where some of it could be sampled, but then Solaas had oh-so-casually dropped a comment that it incorporates Cute, Silly Shounen Sight Gags. For which I've a long-term, serious, untreatable weakness.

It's difficult to believe that it's the woman's first series.

I don't mind so much because I never chucked shounen to begin with. I watch Naruto, too. *^_^*

Oh, do get into FMA. It's one of the best series out there, hands down. With the caveat that I can't talk about things I like without sounding like Squee The Fangirl or advertising copy - this series has incredible depth, can be both funny and deadly serious, and holds up to repeated rereads. I only wish they'd waited till the series conclusion to animate it.

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