Written by Xue Xibai
Last week, Bai Sir recommended two works of Japanese love master Junichi Watanabe - "Blunt Feeling" and "Lover", and saw the emotional world of Watanabe Junichi's "mature man and mature woman", and this issue of Bai Sir recommended a classic Japanese pure love novel "Calling for Love in the Center of the World". Because Bai Sir found that it was really a long, long time since he had seen a good pure love novel and movie.
"Calling For Love in the Center of the World" by Kyoichi Katayama
"Call for Love in the Center of the World" sold more than 3 million copies as soon as it was released that year, and was hailed as the best-selling pure love novel in Japan's history. The film adaptation of the same name and the Japanese drama have a score of 7.6 and 8.4 points on Douban, respectively.
"Call for Love in the Center of the World" Japanese drama aired in 2004
The film Call for Love in the Center of the World was released in 2004
The story of "Calling for Love at the Center of the World" is simple: Shotaro meets the popular cute girl Yaki at the school's community activities, and in the pure relationship, the two have their first love. They talk about the true meaning of pure love, kiss for the first time under the stars, envision a good married life, play together, and plan a trip to distant Australia. However, at the beginning of all this life's sweetest and unforgettable beauty, Yaji fell ill with leukemia and died soon after, and Shotaro could only take Yaji's ashes to Australia alone, sprinkling the ashes in the vast red desert of Cairns...
"Call for Love in the Center of the World" Movie Clip The heroine Yaji is a school track and field athlete, and her young body shines in the bright sun.
The leukemia terrier is old-fashioned, but in Kyoichi Katayama's pen, these life-and-death encounters are not hysterical. Kyoichi Katayama handles the story passage that is easy to fall into the clichés lightly and subtly, he inserts leukemia as anemia, and every character in the book does not show hysterical pain, including Yaki's parents, everyone is just faintly sad, which clearly reflects the beauty of material mourning unique to Japanese culture. When describing Shotaro's feelings after Agi's death, the heaviest sentence in the novel is nothing more than "Wake up in the morning and find yourself crying." And "Ayagi is gone, and I am indifferent to anything I see now." Going to any place in the world is like that, and no amount of spectacular scenery can impress me, and no amount of beautiful scenery can make me happy."
One of the life problems that each of us cannot escape is that the opposite of love will always stand dead. It doesn't really matter what kind of illness Yaji has, what matters is death, it is a forced departure, it is to give this first love a cherry blossom-like bloom and a gray regret. So, in addition to love, this work explores two other eternal things—time and death.
"Call for Love in the Center of the World" Movie Clip The heroine Yagi suffers from cancer because of the treatment to shave her hair, but the disease cannot prevent the two young people from falling in love
Whether in the Japanese version of the movie or the original novel, there is another best interpreter of love, that is, Shotaro's grandfather. Grandfather had a love affair that lasted for fifty years, but the beloved person had died, and the lover could not keep their wishes before they died, so that they could be buried with her after death, the grandchildren went to rob the tomb and steal the ashes of the lover. At this time, the situation of the two grandchildren is strikingly similar: the loved ones have been burned to ashes, and love and death stand on the opposite side of eternity. So, can death stop love?
In the novel, my grandfather has such a passage: "If we think that what is visible and what is tangible is everything, then has our life not completely become a tasteless thing?" The person I once liked, the appearance of the person I once knew, could not appear in front of me again as it was. But if we think out of the physical considerations, then we are always together. For fifty years, there has not been a single moment of not being together. ”
Sounds slightly paranoid, but isn't love a hopeless paranoia? True love never dies out of material death, love only dies because it is no longer loved. Love is never trapped in the flesh itself, it is trapped only in the heart of the longing.
Stills from the movie "Call for Love in the Center of the World"
Unconsciously, this classic pure love novel has passed 16 years, over the years we have seen more of the youth literature and film works are dog blood love, showing off wealth, abortion, to last year's hot sexual assault and school bullying theme, the lack of pure love theme, does it also show that modern people for pure love "collective unconscious lack"?
Love, in addition to being a spontaneous instinctive need, must also have an ecological environment. In today's tainted love, we need an unpolluted love, a pure love without impurities, which is the compensation for the shortcomings in our emotional life, the repair of the love nerves worn down by the rough reality, and the caressing and watering of our thirsty hearts that thirst for love. I remember watching an NHK documentary, probably about Japan has now entered the "loveless era", and the younger generation does not want to fall in love, let alone get married, because they feel that the feelings are too cumbersome, too time-consuming, and hurtful.
Times are changing too fast, the younger generation is carrying unprecedented social pressures, while human emotions are never evolved, primitive, and eternal. We can never suppress the instinct of love.
Kyoichi Katayama uses the Greek letters α (alpha) and omega (omega) to describe falling in love with a person, "falling in love with a person is a person's α, and it is also a person's omega." α and omega are the beginning and end of the 24 Greek letters, which Westerners use as a metaphor for the beginning and the end of things. Therefore, love is man's α and omega, in other words, love is also the beginning and end of man. For the living, "death" is a completely unknown world. It is precisely because we are uneasy about the unknown, so we are uneasy about "death", so we desperately pursue the meaning of "life". And the meaning of "life" may be human α and omega.
A clip from the movie "Call for Love in the Center of the World"
Love is an ability that does not require cost and gain. In this day and age, each of us is a master at talking about interests, because interests are realistic and can be cashed out instantly. In this era of impetuousness, money first, and increasing class solidification, interests sound more reasonable, more reliable, more secure, and seem to have no face to hate. Love, on the other hand, has an illusory, nihilistic face, which inevitably makes people sigh and even feel sad. We all collectively become "love impotents," but we are all interest-seekers.
Nowadays, many people look at these pure love novels and movies again for a kind of feeling, just like nostalgia for the smell of instant noodles in college dormitories, nostalgia for the cool air in the school corridors, nostalgia for the ignorant love that is desperate for themselves, nostalgia for all that is childish but beautiful... I miss it because I don't love so desperately anymore, because I know I can't go back, so I miss it very much.
Who called the adult world always so tired and awkward. If one day we lose the ability to love and can no longer stand in the center of the world and call for love, it doesn't matter, as long as we don't stand in our own lives and spill dog blood.