If manga is compared to literary genres, in a world of manga full of novels, "Yokohama Shopping Chronicle" is a prose poem that few people ask about. You may find prose poetry dull, but this one must be an exception.
It is no accident that "Yokohama Shopping Chronicle" has become a famous classic in the history of healing, and through it and a series of other things that can be labeled as "healing", it can be known that the comfort that the world needs is actually very simple.
But it is the return of all things, the road to simplicity.
Song of the End Times
Healing, based on wounds and defects. A complete, sound mind does not need to be healed. In the current era, human beings seem to have achieved their dream ideals, and seem to have kept the future they are fascinated by, but they are getting and losing on the other. Many people feel as if they are trudging in the desert of steel, with more and more tired minds, obviously with colorful wear and tear, but still unable to suppress the internal dryness of the body.
This collective incompleteness, which has the characteristics of the times, is the inevitable price that human beings need to pay in order to promote the progress of the world. And when one day, human civilization comes to an end, and there is no need to chase after the camp, can this lack be automatically returned to its place?
Many, many years later, the earth gradually came to the end of life. Sea levels are rising and large numbers of islands and plains are being submerged. Humanity that has lost its homes has been forced to migrate to the highlands, and the population has plummeted. In the struggle against nature, cities are dissolved, industry and technology are still alive, but they are powerless to return to heaven. As the world enters the countdown to the end of the world, humanity has finally compromised.
The author sets the background of the end of the road for the comic, but also gives people a new worldview that subverts the tradition, and human beings are not as stubborn and stubborn as we think, but in the long time they have learned to be at peace with the world, after all, life will continue until it is completely destroyed. They huddled in the mountains, did not forget to fly, used technology to serve the survival of the present, but no longer because of the mastery of science and technology and empty eyes; they feared nature, returned to farming, remembered the years against the ruins of the town, and also coexisted with nature; they were not hurried, not arrogant, they lived a new rhythm, life seemed to become particularly long, could be squandered between sunrise and sunset, and seemed to become particularly short, and would slip away in a moment of opening and closing their eyes.
The reason why this contrast can make people feel comforted is that it is in a huge balance, calming the crisis with calmness and decorating the end times with beauty, which is the state we all yearn for. It is in response to Gao Xiaosong's sentence: "Life is not only in front of you, but also in poetry and far away." Human beings are trapped by the present, want to cherish, but they can't start; they want to stop, but they can't stop their pace, and some people have depicted a distant place for us, but that distance never seems to have been reached, or that distance is no different from what is in front of us.
When Yokohama Shopping Chronicle came out, the word "cure" had not yet been applied by the system. Therefore, the author portrays the end times so indifferently, it should be out of the tender feelings of the heart, and he gives this gentleness to a robot, which seems logical.
The author is like alpha's never-shown master, and his teaching makes alpha an independent individual who is not dependent on humans. Let her guard the little shop, make her stand on her own, give her a camera, and encourage her to see the world. She didn't know what spiritual liberation was. As a robot, she is a blank piece of paper, but her master has given her enough space to grow on her own. She didn't need to be taken care of, she had no obligation to serve anyone, she just grew freely in the sun rising and the moon setting and the coffee fragrance because she had not been bound as a tool. Readers follow her ordinary life and perceive the process of her increasingly fullening feelings and the gradual independence of the "human" personality. In this process, she is like an honest mirror in the last days, without curiosity or doubt, without fear of the disasters that may occur in the past, and without wandering about the end of the future. Only she can play the soul-stirring moon qin ancient song in the barren smoke and vines, and only she can accompany this end of the world all the way.
In the comics, humans become supporting characters, their immediate emotions weakened, and they may have spent more time than patching up the trauma to smooth the shadows of natural disasters and the pain of losing civilization from memory. It is not to be sad, but to be able to accept and face it. Even if everyone seems to be very laid-back, gas stations and hospitals will never have business, Gao Guang and Xiao Hui never need to go to school, and Wen Fei's beard is getting thicker and thicker. But their minds don't drift because of idleness, and everyone focuses on the present, returning to the quaint labor and simple happiness. The world seems to be a circle, and after walking around, it is found that the end of the technological age is bordered by the original primitive, the two extremes are closely integrated without obstacles, and the human mentality is effortlessly purified. As spectators, we are still in the world of the uphill stage, without the support of the big background, and the soul that does not dare to relax at any time can only rely on imagining the scenery elsewhere.
In addition to robots and humans, there is a third life form in the manga, Mesagar. She is a mysterious legend that has existed since ancient times, she hates adults, only appears in front of children, and this setting of having a female body form and not wearing clothes makes it very obvious that she is a symbol of innocence to embellish the background of the end times. Without the role of Mei Shage, Takahiro and Ma Hui's childhood will probably have some unique memories, and this collision with the memories of the legendary encounter is in line with the appearance of the world returning to its original form, making people feel ambiguous and strange, and jumping out of the sadness of the background of the end times, although there are few creatures, they are not single, adding a simple and beautiful color to the world and human life.
After all, the last days of Ashina Nohito were not a tragic world full of mourning, and the end of the world was not a tragic destruction, but a melting that fell asleep into the ocean little by little. In his last days, there are still brilliant flowers that will bloom no matter how tomorrow, and even if it is ultimately destruction, he will not give up the hope of rebuilding before destruction, so it is a song that human beings sing unconsciously after "letting go" wholeheartedly, the lyrics are flat and not shocking, the tune is mournful but not hurtful, and the afterglow is faint but reverberating...
The beauty of the white space
"Yokohama Shopping Chronicle" does not deliberately turn her life into poetry, and even many times Alpha's coffee shop does not have customers, and she spends the day in silence without a word of dialogue. But that slow breath of life makes people linger for a long time.
Oriental traditional painting pays attention to "painting intention without drawing shape", and the most beautiful picture is not to lay out all the figuratives, but the beauty is integrated in the soul of the subject and the object, not to be pretentious or to invite favors. In the pursuit of artistic conception, blank space is one of the most spiritual techniques. This invincible expression can also be found in "Yokohama Shopping Chronicle".
The shallowest one is the blank space of the picture.
Freshness is the common medicine for all healing things. The place where Alpha lives, under the author's description, the blue sea is sunny, the grass and trees are deep, in the daytime, it is almost impossible to see the shadow of the end of the world, even if the old buildings that have been sleeping under the sea level are still clearly visible in the water shadow, but it is only like a chic landscape, everywhere is a scenery that people can't get tired of seeing.
The people who painted the painting searched for thousands of years in the pursuit of giving life to the points and lines to come up with the magic of "counting white as black", and the picture built a framework for you to build a city of imagery, and the rest of the blanks were filled by the viewer himself.
Such a night is always reminiscent of the sentence "The stars are hanging down and the wilderness is wide, and the moon is gushing and the river is flowing", which looks like only the sea in front of you, but it seems that you can see the past and the future. Readers in the city where nature cannot be seen, the comic is guarding the end of the mountains and the sea, if the person in the painting can also see the scene outside the picture, I don't know who will feel who is more lonely, who will feel who is more healed.
Those who go deeper are the blank spaces of emotion.
In "Zhuangzi", it is said: "The tail life and the woman are under the beam, the woman does not come, the water does not go, and the beam and pillar die." "Alpha's insistence on the coffee shop is the expectation of the owner's return date, and there is a kind of insistence on the appointment of the tail life. Because she is a robot, she is not afraid to wait and be lonely, nor does she feel disappointed and disappointed. She maintained a peaceful mood, lively or quiet, and liked it. Waiting is her most essential task. The owner traveled thousands of miles to express the camera, which became the direct driving force for her continuous growth, and her world began to be colorful, with more friendship experiences, family feelings, and more maturity of the worldview. But none of this overwhelmed her initial watch.
So when the hurricane destroyed the coffee shop, she could still sit in front of the ruins and play the piano calmly. She had learned to calmly hide her fear and sadness. The experience has made her world bigger, no longer limited to a small shop and a hill, she wants to go out and see the bigger world, but ultimately to come back to rebuild the coffee shop, for a robot, this is no longer a simple execution of the master's orders, but an emotional inheritance and sublimation. And all this, the author did not mention, but in the time she went out to travel, arranged for CaiXin to visit and did not meet, and by chance temporarily stayed at Alpha's home.
Cai Xin saw that there was a thick stack of paper on Alpha's desk, which read: "To the master" Cai Xin was curious and wanted to open it to see, but he was still overcome by the cultivation and put back in place. This detail is the finishing touch of Alpha's emotional expression.
It was perhaps a diary, perhaps a multitude of undeliverable letters, the thickness of the pages detailing her thoughts, her perceptions, her growth, and the most faithful and sincere friendship she had ever uttered. There must have been reasons for her to return after her horizons had broadened, and she returned to rebuild the café and start a new round of waiting. Alpha's return is like a child's attachment to his mother; Alpha's waiting is as firm and beautiful as a sentence in a poem:
"Water comes, I wait for you in the water; fire comes, I wait for you in the ashes."
The supreme is the philosophical blank.
Alpha's day is really pleasant to the reader. Woken up by the sun, roasted a batch of coffee beans, and drank them in a shop that may not be able to come to a customer for a day. Lie down on the table inside the house and go to sleep again, or watch the sea and mountains outside and wait for it to get dark. In her life without time boundaries, the reader can experience a sense of time, which is a kind of "static" and "flowing" opposite.
Alpha first had a sense of time when Takahiro might never see Mishagar again as he grew older. Alpha didn't know how to comfort him, so he had to say: Everyone is the same. Time is fair, and time flows in everyone's heart, and it does not stop. Life is equal, and meeting with Misaga is an established cycle, which is a balance between "gain" and "renunciation".
Alpha's real realization of the difference between himself and others began with the discovery of high-minded growth. He grew taller and taller, from the little child who still needed to be taken care of by himself to a teenager. The little brother who sold coffee beans at the beginning of the volume was already called the uncle by the end of the volume; Takahiro and Ma Hui were already married, and the child was at the age when Alpha first met them. Humanity is only a moment in this world, but Alpha can accompany the faint world until the end. It is a kind of "eternal" and "instantaneous" filling.
Alpha burst into tears when he first saw the sea of lights. The light that once illuminated many people will still be lit up regularly in the last days, but it has no purpose, making people think of the prosperity of the past and the helplessness of the present. The glowing trees on the way represent the remnants of the former town, and even if they are forgotten, they still stubbornly remember their mission. In fact, robots are the same as them, when the last person in the world disappears, they will lose their original meaning, but they will permanently carry the memory of human beings and become an incomparably lonely witness. This is a collision of "history" and "reality".
Authors don't need us to learn the same dialectics and agree on a worldview from comics. He is simply writing this poem of the last times, leaving a large amount of room for us to pour out our inner clutter. Although we still have a future worth looking forward to, we will inexplicably fall into the yearning for the "despair" in comics. Maybe because we are moving too fast, we need to use "slow" to balance; because we have too much, we need to use "Jane" to choose; because we think too complicated, so we need to use "pure" to purify. When we think that what weighs on our shoulders is the whole world, what we are most afraid of is the straw, and all we need most is a breath of air.
Text: Shen Hang