Chino was a traveler around the world, and her companion was called "Erumes", a talking motorcycle. Chino and Erumes traveled to various countries, spending only three days at a time, learning about the country's customs and customs, and after three days she left for another place. Chino was originally an unknown maiden in the "Land of Adults", a country that required children to undergo surgery to become "adults" at the age of 12. Because of the influence of the traveler Chino, she did not want to become an "adult", so she fled her country on the horse of Erumes, and began to travel around the world in the name of Chino...
This work is an alternative fantasy fable genre, in the form of a unit drama, telling the story of Chino's travels. The audience travels to various countries with Chino, and behind the seemingly absurd customs of each country is the author's thinking and questioning of his own world. This anime is based on Keiichi Shiyukizawa's light novel Journey to Chino.
Most of the early works of the original novel are very outstanding, such as "The Country of Peace", "The Country of Majority Voting", "The Country of Free Speech", "The Country of the Same Face", "The Country of the Unforgettable" and other stories are quite allegorical, and some of the works are wonderful and can be called the world's famous works, but the later they are, the more entertaining the color is (even the author himself does not deny this), and even occasionally there will be a phenomenon of bad taste. Although there are some more brilliant stories in the later period, the overall quality has declined a lot compared with the early days, and there are not a few stories that lack novelty.
As a result of this situation, I think it has a considerable relationship with Shi Yuze's own creative mentality. At the beginning of the creation of "Chino Journey", Shi Yuze wrote stories entirely based on personal interests, and the work contained a lot of his personal social values, whether his views were worthy of admiration or not, this spirit of independence and autonomy was still commendable, but later, as the popularity of this novel increased, independent creation was gradually replaced by commercialization, and the purpose of profit overwhelmed the reflection on society, so sloppy coping began, and the regularization and quantification of the work eventually led to a decline in quality...
For Benjamin, the fable represents "a non-totalized world of death and decay." "And "Chino Journey" through the eyes of the walker, such a world full of death and decay is vividly presented to us, this is not a story full of irony that makes us laugh, nor is it an empty and irrelevant world, this is our world, real and cruel but beautiful.
"Chino Journey" is the representative work of Japanese light novel writer Keiichi Shi yuzawa, and there are currently 11 novels, which are still in serials. Published by mediaworks electric shock library. The work was adapted into a 13-episode TV anime and a 1-episode OVA in 2003, and the first theatrical version was released in 2005, and the second was released in Japan on April 21, 2007. It has been strongly praised by readers in electric shock novels. It's worth noting that Chino's Journey seems to be different from some light novels that win with plot or gorgeous characters. The stories in the book are more like fables one by one, using the broken world and the unique perspective of the traveling storyteller to make the reader think about the existence and alienation of human beings.
The story tells the story of a traveler traveling through various strange countries, the story is similar to a separate shot, there is no flowery rhetoric, no ups and downs of character conflict, in fact, at the beginning of each story we see the disillusionment, a world destined to be abandoned, satirized, and disillusioned. The traveler embarks on a journey to realize her dream of traveling the world, accompanied by a talking motorcycle, Elmes, who travels through various countries and sees all kinds of strange phenomena, "a country that obeys the majority", "a country of heartache", "a country of peace", "a country that can not work", no country has its own unique customs, but what they all have in common is tragedy, the disillusionment of a distorted world of individuality. Chino only stayed in each country for three days, no matter how beautiful and rich the country was on the surface, she would leave, "because I'm a traveler." "For her, travel is life. Of course, she can always see the tragedy of the country she left in ruins or falling into madness.
The chino journey's worldview is hollow. As a unit drama, it successfully gets rid of the monotonous repetitive pattern, and naturally tells the most hidden pain of the human heart like a babbling water. Each chapter begins with a thought-provoking title that seems to convey some kind of empirical conversation, such as "the world is not beautiful, therefore, its beautiful." A kind of real reflection on the world, and "what is right?" Questions the boundaries of what we believe to be good and evil. We can think of it as a proverb full of complex connotations, and the story that follows shows us this "proverb". Benjamin argues that the novel is not meant to tell us a truth or experience, but represents the diversity of the world, showing the many possible horizontal extensions of the world, and that the story "will contain something useful, and there are three situations: the first useful may be an ethical idea, the second may be implicit in some practical suggestion, and the third may be contained in a word or aphorism."
Here, it is clear that the author uses proverbs as the main theme of each story, so such a work cannot be called a real novel, it is more like a fable, unlike the story of Aesop's Fables, the author does not tell us at the end what to do, he just shows us a series of disillusioned scenes, distorted human suffering, from which we can even see our own shadows, one by one righteous or correct, which may be what Benjamin thinks." The appreciation of the perishability of things, and the care for their salvation to eternity, are the strongest motivators of fables. "Beautiful nations are shattered, but our hearts are redeemed.
Xin Di explains Benjamin's fables as "an absolute, universal expression, and an organic mode of observing the world, which uses irony and metaphor to express abstract concepts, pointing to the inherent truth of history, the melancholy expression of the darkness of the world, the decadence of nature and the degeneration of human nature, "In the world of Chino, we can see this world full of metaphors and irony, and the melancholy of the darkness of the world and human nature that can be experienced in that country."
"Chino's Journey" is not a single story with moral admonitions as a metaphor, it does not tell us what is right, or who is wrong there, we see only phenomena, such as in the "country of the minority obeying the majority", the people who overthrew the feudal rule formulated the national policy of minority obedience to the majority in order to prevent the emergence of dictatorship, and everything in the country adopted the method of referendum, which on the surface seems to be democratic, and perhaps even became some hot ideal world. But the narrator of the story finally tells us: I am the only one left here. The first people, believing that it was too much of a single effort to vote directly on everything, hoped that a referendum would elect a leader, and that person would entrust the operation of the state to that person for a few years. As a result, this man's decision was rejected by the principle of the minority obeying the majority, and then some people felt that they must be dangerous people with such ideas, and suggested that these people be sent to court, so these people were sent to the guillotine by the minority such as the principle of the majority, so one after another, the people who put forward opinions and were rejected were sent to the guillotine in batches. In the end, there were three people left in the country, one of whom asked to leave this, only to be rejected and sent to the guillotine again, while one of the remaining two also died of illness.
The story ends with Kino leaving the country, asking for the motorcycle's opinion on the three-forked road that chooses his own path, and finally deciding to continue traveling to the left, but after starting the car, he chose to the right, and the motorcycle complained: You lied to me, and Chino's answer was: "If you want to try, isn't it the same on either side, did I say it wrong?" In a seemingly absurd world, why can't we see the truth of history, didn't the crazy rabble-rousers during the Cultural Revolution also represent the ignorant majority, and rationality is sometimes really represented by the majority? The ideological world demands the unity of people, but because of the dark side of human nature. Between the strong majority and the weak minority, there will always be some tragedy beyond imagination. The end of the story has never been a child's fairy tale of singleness or innocence, Chino, as she travels through various countries, is always only a bystander, thinking of us from her point of view to show us the irony of the world, she does not want to teach us anything, but from the distortions and fragments of the freedom she represents and the people she represents, we see our own yearning and limited expectations. It's not so much what she tells us, it's that we see what we really want.
In "A Nation Without Discrimination," we see another kind of truth behind the ruins. Chino was driven out of the country because he asked about people of a certain profession whose names were inherently discriminatory. The people of the country, angry at the words mentioned by Chino (the article does not explain what the word is), began to make comments, accusing the immigration censors of putting such people into their own country, and then said: "They (censors) are born barbaric, barbarians are not fit to live in forests and wilderness." "Then the slander against the Censor intensified, and the sentence was full of discrimination and indifference." The irony of "a country without discrimination" began, and after Kino left the country, he met the censors of the so-called "perverted barbarians", in fact, the life of the country existed in a dirty ruin, and the country was shrouded with a dome, and the life expectancy of the people in the country would not exceed 40 years, and only the immigration examiners who lived outside the state could see the real blue sky and live the life of a healthy person.
So the discrimination of others themselves has become the greatest tragedy, laughing at the censors who wear masks all year round, in fact, they do not know that they live in a dirty and polluted environment, this parable similar to the frog at the bottom of the well also wants to exist ghostly in our world, people always want to find their own superiority, and finding the weak makes this more real. But this discrimination is often hidden, hidden under our sense of superiority, in the secular world, some people may hold up the sign against discrimination, but inadvertently, we are likely to lift a stone and drop ourselves. This alternating use of irony and metaphor is an important feature of the allegories mentioned in Benjamin's theory of allegory.
Another important feature of Benjamin's fable theory is the fragmentation of the structure, which we can also see clearly in Chino's Journey, the form of the story is broken, there is no continuous practice between the stories, the relationship between people in the story is also broken, the protagonist of the novel travels through the worlds but does not practice with any world, Keno only stays in any country for three days, and after three days she will not ask about anything that happens in the country. And people in the same country are often broken up between people, and even if there are wise people who see through the absurdities in the country, they will not persuade or tell the truth, because according to the assumption of human nature, this is unattainable. In addition, the rupture of events, the end of the story shows a certain kind of ruin or distortion, "Three People on the Rail" shows the meaninglessness of an alienated labor, human work becomes a kind of mechanical repetition, and "The Country Without Work" is even more said that this alienation is shown to the extreme, although it is a rich and high-tech developed country, there is no need for labor production, but in order to carry out reasonable material distribution, let people get a sense of superiority over others, to do meaningless complex operations on people to the factory, This method is used to measure who will receive more wealth.
This parable has a complex polysemy, and we seem to reflect on the true happiness after equal distribution, because people are not satisfied with equality, and the pursuit of superiority exists no matter what kind of social system, so if we don't have to work, how can we find our own meaning. Here again leads to the reflection on human nature, and the ultimate kind of extreme mechanical labor, as if there is a reality out of human imperfection, alienation to the end, commodities and wealth instead become the weight to measure the value of a person's existence. In this country, the only salvation is the artists, and here it reminds us of Marx's complete theory of man, and only art can free us from this alienation. The author inadvertently conveys such an allegory to us. "Painting" shows the story of an artist who was commercialized by a media-oriented society and eventually eroded his artistic ideals. A fragment of an event, we see the truth in the fragments, and it is also the allegory of our redemption.
The only characters in the story who connect with this broken world are the travelers who travel from place to place, and the characters of the various worlds often hope to establish one kind or another connection with the traveler, (leaving her or killing her) to say that she stays in that world, but all fail. The traveler is just a storyteller or a listener here, never really getting into the story. And what tells her about practicing with the story is an endless melancholy of the world.
"The Land of Peace" tells the story of two countries that were once old enemies and have now become a country of peace, but the hatred between them has not been solved, they are still fighting for resources, and in order to find a way to resolve them, they have concluded a treaty not to harm the people of the other country, but through a kind of "competition", to kill a weak nation, to feel the distribution of resources more than who kills. What appears to be peace is actually built on bloody killings. The fable ends with a monolithic Aesop's Fable, but at the end, when Kino is about to leave the country, he is stopped by the weak people, who want to kill the travelers who are weak to vent their inextricable anger: "Because we want revenge, in order to satisfy our revenge, even if it is a little satisfying." ”
The same revenge we also see in Lu Xun's Ah Q vs. Little D, which is the sadness of the weak and the sorrow of human nature. The melancholy we see in this story is an irresolvable melancholy, whether it is the superficial peace or the superficial weak, and beneath it is the shadow of the melancholy, and the traveler leaves here, she cannot help anyone, the weak, the strong, but the story continues, the fable continues.
With its unique style and narrative style, "Chino Journey" has blown a melancholy and cold wind in the Japanese light novel industry. Online readers rated it as a black adult fairy tale. But in fact, it is not a so-called fairy tale, there is never a boundary between good and evil in the story, there is no beauty and ugliness, there is no so-called truth, we see the disillusionment of one illusion after another, the defeat of an individual's weakness. But the parable allows us to see ourselves and see the selfish us who redeem sin, the way for all. As the text says, "The world is not beautiful, but it is therefore so beautiful." ”