Review - Movie - The Hidden Blade

 Since around June/July, I've been working on a new fantasy WIP which takes place across a sizeable chunk of Japan's history. And one of the films that helped solidify my liking for it, and that I've watched recently since I'm suffering from a horrendous variety of the common cold, is The Hidden Blade, a 2004 drama film directed and co-written by Yoji Yamada based on the stories of Japanese author Shuhei Fujisawa.

Image credit: IMDB

Set during the 1860s, the late years of the Bakematsu when the Tokugawa Shogunate was in the process of falling apart under encroaching Western influence and growing Imperial pressure, the story follows the life trials of low-ranking samurai Munezo Katagiri. From the forbidden feelings he has for his servant Kie, the social burden of his father committing seppuku following a financial debacle he was not directly responsible for, to ending up pitted against a former student of the blade Yaichiro Hazama by his clan's retainers, Katagiri's struggles in his small town existence are real and a lot more relatable than a wandering swordsman defending a town or the noble (quasi-fictionalised) plight of forty-seven ronin.

An interesting element to this story is that, counter to the typical samurai shown in the work of Kurosawa and a number of others, . Multiple films during this time, including Yamada's two other notable samurai films Twilight Samurai and Love and Honour (and Takashi Miike's 13 Assassins) seem to tear down the mythology built around the Edo-period samurai. The Hidden Blade is a slow-paced deconstruction of the laws and codes which trapped samurai, the corruption of their lords during the late Bakematsu, and the growing discontent and disconnect among different factions with the increasing influence of Western martial techniques. There is a real sense of the suffocating social rules that by this point were creaking at the seams which must be attributed to the actors and their peerless performances.

I must also mention the PEAK HISTORICAL ACCURACY to be found in this film. The setting is on point, the armour and fabric and cloth colours are on point, the smaller details are peak, and in an interesting example of the time's culture clash a retainer sent to teach Western military tactics is shown blending Japanese and Western dress styles in his clothing that makes him stand out as an almost-alien presence. There is also no modern locality names to spoil the mood (there is mention of "Ezo" rather than its modern name Hokkaido, which would've been a big gaff), and the architecture and long camera shots show little to no modern elements to spoil the illusion that this is late Edo Japan. Combine that with a mixture of contemporary-style musical elements and an admittedly ahistorical orchestral score by Isao Tomita, and you have...probably one of the best modern Japanese films.

Is this film a must watch? Yes, absolutely. This should be on the list of every true Japanese film fan, regardless of genre. The writing is engaging, the story slow but entertaining, the atmosphere is peerless, the acting is great, and the score is heartwrenching. Please, please find a way to watch this film.

9/10

Life events = story ideas?

 On Monday, I had to go to a local hospital. It was nothing serious as it turned out, but it did provide me with something every author should be able to have: an eye for people. And today, I was reminded strongly of that quality when I heard/saw a small little scene play out between a nurse and someone I assume was an outpatient.

For the sake of privacy and decency, I won't reveal this person's name or gender or appearance. I will say that they had a cornucopia of medications to deal with a number of simultaneous conditions, and two people close to them were afflicted with permanently debilitating ailments: one increasing blindness, and one progressive dementia. It was sad and strange hearing those bits from them while talking to a nurse over necessary procedures that would require them to stay in the hospital overnight, and not being able to avoid hearing them since we were in the same waiting area on a quiet day in the hospital.

This isn't the first time that real-life events have stuck in my mind. Getting pseudo-lost in a shopping centre when I was less than ten years old, hearing a train refreshment steward advertising "soft drinks for the saints, hard drinks for the sinners", being briefly manhandled by a flustered hotel employee one BristolCon because he assumed I was part of a rowdy group of young men whom he had been directing away from the convention rooms. But this also applies more broadly to a recurring piece of writing advice to write what you know. Now, I've always considered that advice in part reductive, especially as you may think you know something and be completely wrong. I prefer to think of that advice as "write what you can learn about and what you're comfortable writing about".

Now, there are some authors who did nothing but use real people for inspiration. Looking at you, Ian Fleming, who stole his most famous character's name from an ornithology book and based all his female leads on this one girl he had a ding-dong with back in the day. There needs to be a line drawn between randomly plucking events and names without consideration. But it is also true that authors draw on real-life events to put in bits of their story. Sometimes events that seem wildly improbable are actually traceable back to very real events. Agatha Christie notably drew on two real-life tragedies as the basis for two of her mysteries: it's commonly accepted that the character Marina Gregg in The Mirror Crack'd from Side to Side is at least inspired by actress Gene Tierney, who suffered greatly in her personal life, while her long-running play The Mousetrap was explicitly inspired on the O'Neill case, a horrifying example of domestic abuse. And lest we forget the creators of K9 from Doctor Who, with one of the writers of his debut story inspired by the recent loss of his dog in a road accident.

This is absolutely not intended as a justification for using real-life incidents in this way. I wouldn't advise it, I wouldn't want to do it myself except in a very broad way or if I was referencing them within the context of a real world/real world-adjacent setting. And even then, you wouldn't be exactly paralleling something. Juliet McKenna's Green Man's Quarry highlights some real social and judicial issues without making direct references, and Xiran Jay Zhao's Iron Widow is more inspired by the life of female emperor We Zetien than directly paralleling her life in a sci-fi setting.

All this comes back to that story I heard. As I heard it, I freely admit my author's brain went into action. I was playing the thing out as a scene in a book, whether from my perspective as onlooker or in the person of the patient or the nurse. It was a scene I had met multiple times in more melodramatic dressings, but this one was so raw and emotive that I might've found myself taking notes on it without thinking. I already was doing in taking mental notes. Sometimes I can find myself shocked at how much my brain takes things as 'copy'. Odd phrases, incidents, scenes, weather conditions, sequences of events. There are some events that are going to make an impression no matter what. The circumstances surrounding the deaths of my father, my grandparents, a dear friend in a local singing group. Or on a lighter note, meeting my cousin's young child, getting to have a good talk with relatives, making connections and friends that persisted, seeing a place for the very first time.

There are some ideas you can take from life. But there are others you shouldn't, or at least not without suitable obfuscation. Especially so in this age of intolerance, defamation, legal actions, and extremism where people are more likely to take the violent route, be that abuse, legal destruction, or actual physical harm. And when you think about it, that self-imposed or societal restriction can in itself be inspiration for stories and characters.

So, a final question for you if you've reached this far. If you could, would you turn something from your life into a story scene? And what changes would you consciously or unconsciously make?

Recommendation - Our Child of the Stars/Our Child of Two Worlds

Image source: https://stephencox.co.uk/

 This isn't going to be a full review. Just a brief opinion piece. I'm already pretty busy today, as I'm partaking in a reading session and a panel at today's Rainbow Space Magic Convention (please if you can register and catch today's events, starting from 17:00 GMT/9:00 PST/12:00 EST). So allow me to recommend two sci-fi novels written in a classic yet accessible style, from someone I only recently met but thoroughly appreciate having met and known. The duology Our Child of the Stars and Our Child of Two Worlds.

The author is Stephen Cox, and these are his debut works. Our Child of the Stars and Our Child of Two Worlds are set in 1969, a time of great social, political, and scientific change. Molly and Gene Myers are in the midst of a struggling marriage, not having the ability to have children, when a child literally falls into their town from above. An alien child whom they love and care for as their own. The story, spanning two books, follows the Myers and their adopted child Cory as they face prejudice, paranoia, and eventually the very real possibility that Cory's people would come to find him.

I don't want to say much more about this duology. If there is another book that turns it into a trilogy, so be it. But in my opinion, it doesn't need a third. It is a tightly-written duology that tackles social and personal issues that are as real now as they were in 1969. The irony is that the first book Our Child of the Stars wasn't meant to be Cox's breakout, but it has ended up being so. Do give them a read. As someone who started with the second book Our Child of Two Worlds, I can say you can jump in with either, although there's bound to be more satisfaction knowing what came before.

Please follow Stephen on his socials, and visit his website which houses pages for these two works.

What happened, what will happen

Hello, everyone. Happy September. So...why the title? Truth be told, I had something more "meaty" written up, but I felt like this week was better for an overall update on the world of Thomas Wrightson, new author and anxious person.

This is pretty much an update, since things are going to be happening over the next several months and I've been VERY busy one way and another. It's not exactly an update like other posts on this website, but it's something along those lines.

One thing about this year that's been different is that I have been studying with the Open University, taking the first steps in getting myself a BA (Hons) in English Language and Literature. It's been sometimes difficult acclimatising myself to this new part of my life, but it's not something I regret. I've completed the first module out of six, and due to timing the next one starts in late September/early October.

Secondly is the fact that the last several months have been difficult. Last year around the time of my debut book's launch, I had a bit of a mental...episode due to a combination of stress and some very VERY duff tea. A combination of neonicotinoids and mould will do very strange things to one's head. On top of that, and unrelated to the latest spike in COVID, our family was stuck with a conga line of illnesses that meant a lot of things couldn't be done. It means that my recent WIP only got properly started in June, and I wasn't able to get starting on writing anything properly between mid-September 2023 and then.

On a brighter note, I have two things coming up. One of them is BristolCon, obviously. And I shall be taking a mask along, and I advice others to take any and all precautions necessary because the new COVID variants are sneaky. The other is something that hasn't been officially announced yet, so I'll hold off on that for now. But also my second book's launch has come and gone, and while stressful, it wasn't the crumpling at the knees and sobbing kind of stressful the last one was.

Also also, I'm in the process of FINALLY getting myself a passport. It's ideally for a planned trip to the continent, but it opens the doors for me to be able to just...do things if and when I want. The coming few years will likely be busy with my continued writing, continued OU degree pathway, and hopefully continuing to grow both an audience and my network of contacts and those I might hope to call friends.

Also also also, there will be things happening on my Spotify and YouTube channels in relation to my podcast Author Talks. The latter especially, as I'm hoping to do commentary videos on some games, not only just talking but the things an author could conceivably do with a story: talk about it, analyse it, be surprised by it (slightly difficult for me). I'd hoped for it to be Visions of Mana, but that just won't run properly on my machine without looking like a Monet painting before he got his eyesight fixed.

And that's finally it. Everyone take care in these trying times, best wishes to Brazil for going cold turkey on Musk, here's to the next four months of 2024, and...anyone who's going, see you at BristolCon.

What I find disturbing...

 Fair warning, this is going to be pretty introspective, and potentially unsettling.

I recently experienced something that made me want to write this post. It was a Japanese detective visual novel, Emio – The Smiling Man: Famicom Detective Club. The ending, and a final portion detailing some of the backstory related the titular Smiling Man, is--to say the least--extremely disturbing. To dance around explicit spoilers, it's a story with a backdrop that involves familial abuse, childhood trauma, social pressure, self-mutilation, and delusional insanity.

I have a deep fear, pretty much a phobia, of things going wrong with your mind. There's an actual phobia for that, demontophobia: demento, from the Latin meaning to make crazy or deluded, and phobia meaning an unreasoning or abnormal fear. There is some in-family reason for me to have some deep-seated fears, as my late grandmother suffered from dementia during her final years. But my fear, I think, is grounded in something a little more unsettling.

It means that out of the 'horror' stories I've experienced, the ones I find truly unsettling and disturbing aren't Alien or Predator or even in principle The Thing or Event Horizon. The things that disturb me can be found in Child's Play, Se7en, Copycat, Pandorum, that bit from the Doctor Who episode "Fear Her", the Taxi Killer from CSI:NY, the Avengers episode "The Fear Merchants". Disturbed minds, abuse from those who should trust and protect you: not through conscious malice, but through unreasoning rage or outright insanity. You may be wondering why I've put Child's Play and Event Horizon so arbitrarily, since they could both be on either side of the line. But here's the distinction. In Event Horizon, the darkness and disturbed actions are triggered by an external force. In Child's Play, it is one insane killer refusing to die. And in "The Fear Merchants", it's a clique that specialises in using people's fears to trigger mental breakdowns.

There are a couple of instances that actually walk the line between those two extremes. Things like Dead Space, which feature both externally-created madness and inherent disturbed behaviour. Or several Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers and Ngaio Marsh stories which can feature mentally disturbed individuals, but can also feature people driven purely by malice and greed, but are otherwise legally sane. Put it this way: I don't find Lord Edgeware Dies or Unnatural Death disturbing, while I do find Sleeping Murder and Last Ditch disturbing to varying degrees.

It's why I legitimately can't watch things that involve characters in leading roles who show that kind of disturbed behaviour and madness. The worst aspects of people allowed to build into a frenzied extreme. Especially where madness meets malice, since I don't and doubt I never will believe the two are connected. Films like Speak No Evil, which I've only read a summary of out of curiosity and it's given me goose flesh. Or Joker, which I find both disturbing and highly insulting. That's why the story, and especially the background element, deeply unsettled me: it wasn't some supernatural entity doing everything, but one or more disturbed individuals.

There is another reason I feel more acute fear of this than I do of Cronenbergian body horror ala The Fly, or things like Alien or Predator. I have touched the parts of myself that might be capable of that kind of horror. The rage, the unbalanced self, the detaching from reality that makes me need to touch something to make sure it's really there, the emotional see-sawing that can make me a pain to be around. I have anxiety, and alongside that a biochemistry that seems so delicately tuned that anything can upset it drastically if I let it.

Fear is about personal experience. People who have had serious incidents happen to them at sea can develop thalassophobia, people who are trapped in tight spaces can end up with claustrophobia, there are people who suffer from thanatophobia (dread of death), arachnophobia and musophobia are so common as to be used as the butts of jokes as much as serious plot elements in stories. In my case, I think it's definitely a possibility that without my having a clear and present grasp of who I am, I might well fully experience dementophobia.

Media definitely doesn't help. It rarely shows us normal, everyday cases of mental illness that are able to be functional within everyday life and having full lives even with their conditions, but instead focuses on the either documented or theoretical worst case scenarios. Megalomaniacs, extreme and untreated PTSD or mental conditions, serial killers, unbalanced predators, and otherwise disturbed individuals who end up victimising the vulnerable. If it's taken to enough of an extreme, it stops being scary, such as the madness being augmented with theatrical effects or over-the-top demonstrations, but the current vogue is for dirt and dark filters and blood and swearing and the absolute worst opinions of humanity and society.

That leads me onto another part of mental illness in fiction that is only recently getting acknowledged. I don't need medication to manage my conditions, but I could get some (fingers crossed) if needed. The examples seen in media are people who either don't engage with the system, or are failed by it. While this is a truth, it also feeds into a myth that mental illness is some kind of on-off switch, that having some kind of delusion or compulsion means you ABSOLUTELY WILL DO SOMETHING CRIMINAL. That's just absolute bull****. From my own experience, there are good days, in my case mostly good days, but there are also bad days. Admittedly, I'm not severe, but if I were, my anxiety wouldn't be driving me to commit criminal acts. I'd just be a juddering mess barely able to do anything.

So, that was me getting my thoughts out for however long it took you to make your way through this. I know I can write someone disturbed, someone unbalanced or insane, but I know it also costs me an effort. It may seem strange, but it's easier for me to write about genuine malice or an external factor negatively influencing someone's mind than it is to write about something internal. A madness that is within, a capacity for unbalanced behaviour and cruelty that can't be pinned on anyone but yourself.

For me, just as the most moving story isn't about good-versus-evil but people who are so committed to their beliefs that they cannot find common ground, the most disturbing story is the disturbances that come purely from within and--whether through active malice or misunderstanding--turn the world against them and make them a monster.

Also, fair warning, if any of the pieces of media mentioned intrigue you, PLEASE BE CAREFUL! I wasn't joking about how disturbing they could be.

Mononoke yokai explained -- For Fun!

Image source: Crunchyroll

Mononoke. No, not Mononoke-hime. The 2007 experimental horror series created by Toei Animation, spun off from the final entry in a 2006 anthology series Ayakashi: Samurai Horror Tales. Lauded for its visuals and audio design, Mononoke has seen a recent resurgence with the beginning of a movie trilogy. Since I love this series, and I also love Japanese folklore, I decided to explain each of the supernatural beings that are the targets of the enigmatic medicine seller. For some of the creatures discussed, I will be referring to the work of folklorist Toriyama Sekien, translated and released under the title Japandemonium in 2016 by Hiroko Yoda and Mack Alt.

Also, not so fun fact. This was going to be a video, but Twin Engine--which had the series up on its YouTube channel, took those same episodes down before I could capture any clips for them. So you're getting a 1000-word essay instead. Happy reading!

---

First we must talk about what kinds of creatures the Medicine Seller faces. These beings are drawn from Japanese folklore and often modelled on beings most often called yokai, a term literally translating to “strange apparition” with no direct English localization. But, wait? Aren’t they called ‘mononoke’? Well, yes. And no. Yokai can also regionally be referred to as mononoke and ayakashi, and draw from Japan’s local Shinto traditions of animism, where everything from rocks to animals to humans to your coffee table has a spirit, and with enough time it can gain sentience and in some cases even divinity. The distinctions between divine, yokai, and even between benevolent and hostile yokai are so fluid as to barely exist. The series puts down more hardline rules about what constitutes a Mononoke and an Ayakashi.

Now I’ve got the basics down, let’s begin exploring yokai. (Oh yes, and spoilers will be present for the series.)

---

First and last in the series is the Bakeneko, a cat who has lived long to gain the ability to speak and walk on their hind legs. These cats are often associated with evil happenings, but can also be seen. As recounted in Sekien’s work, a neighbourhood in Nagi City dubbed Neko-cho or “Cat City”, is where a cat loved his samurai master so dearly that when that samurai committed ritual suicide, the cat followed suit.

The Bakeneko depicted in both Ayakashi and Mononoke are housecats which carry on the grudge of a murdered woman, which is a recurring motif in Japanese folk stories: the grudge of the dead manifesting in an act of vengeance on the living who wronged them.

There is some confusion between the Bakeneko and the Nekomata, with the two sometimes being confused or interchangeable. The main difference is that Nekomata grow twin tails when they gain their powers.

---

The second yokai, and the first in the series proper, is the Zashiki-Warashi, a yokai native to Japan's northern Tōhoku region. Literally translating to "parlour child", they are prankish beings who are said to bring good fortune to those who see them. So long as they are treated with due respect.

In the anime, they are the spirits of forcefully aborted children who now haunt the inn, which used to be a brothel under the same manageress. There is a further complication as one of the babies that is hinted to be a Zashiki-Warashi is the living unborn child of a woman staying at the inn.

---

The third yokai is the umibozu, which in folklore is a giant humanoid yokai of the ocean, which can trigger ship-wrecking storms. In the anime, the umibozu is manifested from the darkness of a priest on board a ship trapped within the Dragon’s Triangle.

There is another being which appears in the anime, but it is not the same being as the umibozu. It is an umizato, a being which is superficially similar to the umibozu but depicted as a blind lute player, and in the anime as a fish-like humanoid reminiscent of some depictions of ningyo, or the Japanese mermaid.

---

The fourth yokai is interesting because its folklore is something of a spoiler for the story. The Noppera-bo, or ‘faceless ghost’, is a being which manifests as a human without a face. When they feature in legends, it is either hinted to be or revealed as the disguise of kitsune and tanuki to frighten humans. In the anime’s narrative, a complex and prolonged dream sequence has the medicine seller seemingly manifest as the Noppera-bo to help a woman who, after a lifetime of emotional abuse from her family and husband, has herself become a Noppera-bo to escape her inner pain.

---

The fifth and final yokai of the series is the Nue, which in Sekien’s work is described as ‘a strange creature with the head of monkey, limbs of a tiger, and a tail that [resembles] a viper’. Its name came from its cry, compared to the nue thrush. This encounter, and thus the yokai’s existence, originated in the Tale of Heike, as one of the exploits of Genzanmi Yorimasa. In the anime, the Nue’s chimera-like appearance is reworked as the ability to appear differently depending on who sees it.

---

Now on to the movies, where we have two confirmed yokai, karakasa and hinezumi.

Karakasa, featured in the first movie Phantom in the Rain, is one of a group of yokai which can manifest from household objects, from trashheaps to crockery to rugs. The karakasa, or more properly kasa-obake, is an umbrella almost always depicted with one great eye, and varying numbers of limbs. In the movie, the karakasa infests the Ōoku, the women’s only quarters of the shogun’s castle in Edo.

At the moment we know nothing about the next yokai but the name. The hinezumi is a creature borrowed from Chinese folklore. There called the Huoshu, it is a rodent said to live in fire. Its Japanese incarnation first concretely features in the 9^th Century story, the Tale of Princess Kaguya.

Also, fun titbit. There is a superficial similarity between the Medicine Seller’s actions of cleansing the yokai who have begun causing trouble, and the practise of chinkon, where malevolent yokai or ‘ara-mitama’ were changed through a ritual process into more benevolent or harmless ‘nigi-mitama’.

Also if you want to see some further speculation as to the Medicine Seller’s identity, along with a more thorough explanation of the distinctions between mononoke and ayakashi, check out Bonsai Pop’s video which features a compelling theory backed up by the local folklore.

I am very glad this series is getting love again, and look forward to where the next two Mononoke movies go next. So until next time...pray show me your truth, regret, and form.

Review – Novel – Tales from Earthsea

Image credit: Cropped from 2012 paperback edition

A few months back, I put up a large review of the five main books from Ursula le Guin's Earthsea series. I've now completed my reading of this essential fantasy epic with Tales from Earthsea, a compilation of short stories scattered across the history of the Archipelago from its ancient past to a point between the events of Tehanu and The Other Wind.

The advantage and disadvantage with an anthology like this is that the stories can vary wildly in type and style, and also in tone. "The Finder" is a mythic and tragic tale of the founding of Roke. "Darkrose and Diamond", originally from 1999, is a fairly light tale of love under impossible circumstances. The Bones of the Earth tells of an old mage of Gont and his initially unwanted taciturn apprentice. "On the High Marsh" follows an unbalanced stranger who takes shelter in a mild farm. The final story "Dragonfly", originally published in 1998 as a "postscript" to Tehanu, shows the life and fate of Irian, a fiery young woman who confronts a rot within Roke's Nine Mages.

On the whole, these stories are enjoyable and can be read on their own, but there was much rich detail to be gleaned from additional knowledge of the other Earthsea books. Ursula le Guin's writing remains as scintillating as ever, showing her maturity through the years, and she even includes a short essay on the culture and languages of Earthsea. It also shows a pointed reevaluation of the traditionally patriarchal world of Earthsea as established to this point, showing the not insignificant but deliberately downplayed role of women in its history and culture.

If you liked the rest of the series, you will LOVE this book. And now I've finally completed it, I feel a little hollow and might want to read something else. Oh wait, almost forgot the score...

9/10