Every year in the summer vacation theater, there is such a TV series that we have seen countless times and are still happy to watch, especially CCTV will be broadcast every summer vacation, that is, the classic work of the sixth teacher "Journey to the West".
If you are the favorite character among the four Tang monks and apprentices, Sun Wukong will definitely be the first to get the vote, and the most hated character, the delicate and incompetent Tang Monk, will definitely stand up.
As long as you eat a piece of Tang Monk meat, you can live forever, Tang Monk's meat is the elixir of immortality in the mouth of male youkai, and it is also the ideal lover of white and tender in the heart of female youkai, both to be eaten and to be strong, Tang Monk is also the most pitiful and saddest one.
"Journey to the West" can also prove that people have been pursuing immortality since ancient times, but they can only exist in fantasy, and many stories will also have the hypothesis of immortality.
The introduction to you today is to use mermaid meat as the secret medicine of immortality as a clue, telling a heavy and poignant fantasy story about life thinking-
Mermaid Forest
The original work of "Mermaid No Mori" was serialized in 1984 by Japanese manga artist Rumiko Takahashi in Weekly Shonen Sunday, which is a very old work.
If Inuyasha is the pinnacle of Rumiko Takahashi, "Mermaid No Mori" is another peak of her extreme style, and is considered to be the highest level of Takahashi's storytelling ability.
Rumiko Takahashi is one of the very few successful female manga artists, and in her nearly 40-year manga career, she has created classic long-form manga such as "Fuxing Kid", "Get Together", "Garbled 1/2", "Inuyasha", "Reincarnation of the Realm", as well as dozens of short comics such as "Mermaid Forest" and "One Pound Gospel", and his works are very prolific.
Countless classic manga characters were born from her brush, and the delicate, profound and touching story was created from her unique perspective as a female manga artist, with insight into human nature and heavy thinking that most male manga artists do not have, and Rumiko Takahashi is unique in this regard.
"Mermaid Forest" takes mermaid meat as the clue to immortality, telling the story of the male protagonist Who ate mermaid flesh and obtained eternal life, Yongtai, who lived in this world for 500 years, and the long years made him think about the ultimate meaning of life.
He gained eternal life and lost his happy life as an ordinary person.
The people around him will die, everything will change, only he has always maintained the appearance of youth, so he does not know when to embark on a journey to find mermaids, hoping to restore the life state of ordinary people.
Mermaid meat is actually a kind of poison, ordinary people will not be able to bear to turn into ugly monsters when eaten, and only a very small number of people can obtain the ability to live forever.
In order to find mermaids, Yongtai traveled to different places, wandered for hundreds of years, met many people, and had countless stories about mermaids, and later he met Miss Makoto, a young girl who was imprisoned by a group of old women who ate mermaids in a mermaid village.
Yongta risked his life to rescue the real fish from the old woman, and later found that the real fish and him had the same fate, in the mermaid village experimented with hundreds of humans who ate the flesh of the mermaid and survived normally, they embarked on a long journey together, continue to look for mermaid traces.
Along the way, they saw many people who had tragic accidents caused by mermaid flesh, and because of people's pursuit of immortality, they used the highly toxic mermaid meat as a panacea, resulting in tragedies that harmed others and harmed themselves.
"Mermaid Forest" is based on Rumiko Takahashi's "Mermaid Series", recommended to watch the 2003 version, divided into "Mermaid Village", "Mermaid Forest", "The End of Dreams", "Sarihime", "The Last Face", "The Promised Tomorrow" and "Mermaid Injury" 7 chapter stories, a total of 113 episodes.
In the story, Yongtai was originally just an ordinary fisherman, kind, righteous, brave and affectionate, 500 years ago and his companions ate mermaid flesh, the other two companions all turned into monsters and died violently, and he became an immortal.
He spent 500 years alone in this way, saw countless lives and deaths, died countless times and resurrected countless times, and could not die normally like ordinary people.
Yongtai can only keep wandering, looking for a way for the mermaid to get back to normal people, and the old woman in the mermaid village tells him that there is no way to change back to normal people.
The heroine, The Real Fish, is a human caught from humans by the mermaid wives of the Mermaid Village, who imprison her with shackles and give her the meat of the mermaid to become the surviving immortal maiden.
The real fish is only 15 years old, not the world, is an ignorant girl with an incomparable curiosity about the things of the world, a beautiful and fresh appearance, a simple and kind heart, and an occasional grumpy temper that adds a little cute color to the role of the real fish.
The real fish travels with Yongtai to find the whereabouts of the mermaid, and they meet the people who caused the tragedy because of the mermaid meat.
Twin sisters who have eaten mermaid flesh and hated each other for a lifetime, the lonely and tragic human monster "Big Eyes", the maiden who has waited for the resurrection of mermaid ash for 60 years, the child who has lived for 800 years has used mermaid meat to harm the human world... Every person who eats mermaid meat basically has no good home and is headed for a tragic ending.
A series of painful stories, gloomy, dark, terrifying, and bloody elements are presented in the work, around the theme of "eternal life", the reflection on the meaning of living, and Qian Zhongshu's "Siege of the City" have similar meanings:
The immortal is looking for a way to become an ordinary person, and the ordinary person is constantly looking for the secret of eternal life.
With a delicate brush, Rumiko Takahashi depicts the suffering of life, the loss of precious people due to greed, and the current situation of wanting peace and not being able to do so in the hearts of people in modern society.
The protagonist can not control the helplessness of life and death, compassion for the beautiful and vulnerable people, and has to fight against the evil people for this, each story makes people feel heart-wrenching and lamentable, and at the same time gives people a poignant and eternal meaning, which is the charm of classic works.
Someone once commented on Rumiko Takahashi's work: she makes you squirt when she is funny, and she makes you despair when she sinks deeply.
"Mermaid Forest" depicts the theme of "eternal life", which is often compared with Osamu Tezuka's "Bird of Fire", "mermaid meat" and "firebird blood", both of which are people's worship of immortality, which is actually a tribute to Osamu Takahashi in this work.
"Mermaid Forest" is also a work that can most touch people's hearts and arouse people's deep thoughts, compared with "InuYasha", this work is more heavy and gloomy, and it is more unique in depicting the contrast between darkness and purity of human nature, which is a good story with artistic atmosphere.
I believe that after watching this old fan, you will also have a deep thinking about life, understand the true meaning of a long life, and find the warmth and enthusiasm of life.