The Girl in the Clouds
Sun: Written by Hitomi Kanahara
Translated by Jiang Wei
Published by Zhejiang Literature and Art Publishing House
Compared with Hitomi Kanehara's previous works, "The Girl in the Clouds" undoubtedly touches on the more hidden and difficult dilemma of contemporary youth - how can you really grow up in the digital illusion woven by virtual reality and surrounded by the rapidly changing information flow?
The "girl writer" of the era
After winning the Ryunosuke Wasagawa Literature Award, the highest honor in the field of pure Japanese literature, for his debut work "Split Tongue", Hitomi Kanehara won a number of literary awards for his follow-up works depicting the lives of young people in the city, and was sought after by the media as the leader of the trend of "girl writing".
Benefiting from the enlightened family atmosphere, Hitomi Kanehara followed her father, a professor of literature, to live in San Francisco, breathing a free air that was very different from that in Japan; after returning to Japan, she unable to adapt to campus life, took the initiative to take a leave of absence from high school and devoted herself to literary creation in her first year of high school. Obviously, Hitomi Kanehara has a determination and maverick disposition beyond her peers, and not being tamed is her true personality background, just like the rose in the field, but another thorn embellished by flowers.
Although Hitomi Kanehara started her career as a writer early and showed adult calmness in media interviews, part of her mind is undoubtedly still a girl. At the ceremony of the Wasagawa Literature Prize, Takashi Murakami, a senior writer who spoke on behalf of the jury, gave Hitomi Kanehara this assessment: "She captures the pure emotions that occasionally flash from the indulgent lifestyle of young people today. She not only uses words to construct a mysterious world of strangeness, but also profoundly conveys the mood of a woman born in this world. Among them, the highly praised "sense of the world" comes precisely from Hitomi Kimhara's real, unpretentious girlish mind, and it is the girl's mind that separates her from the writers in the ivory tower and the study. In her writing, young girls are vivid, straightforward, chaotic and repressive; they are keen on fantasy and are also seduced by sensory pleasures; they walk in the streets with flickering lights, walk in the ocean of people, inevitably wrapped in popular culture, and also attracted by virtual online social networking; they are eager for love, but they are often trapped in extreme emotions and emotions that cannot extricate themselves... The girl is the "epitome" of urban life, and is the group portrait of hitomi Kanehara who is most keen to write. But they are not the others to be observed, and they are not the objects of processing, cutting, and even domination—because they are also her, in them, Kanehara Hitomi sees herself, and sees a possibility of her fate playing out in them.
The strong empathy with the urban youth generation makes Hitomi Kim's creation have a reality that transcends value presuppositions and moral judgments, and a reality that lies within the times. It is also this precious truth that makes Hitomi Kanehara have an unusual understanding and feeling of modern urban life. From her first work, "The Tongue Split," she insisted on writing about the alternative experiences of young people beyond worldly values—fighting against numb body transformation, resisting nihilistic carnal infatuation, and pursuing extreme aberration—which inevitably drew criticism from some of her predecessors in Japanese literature.
In 2011, a new mother, Hitomi Kim, based on her parenting experience, completed her novel "Mothers", and since then her work has slowed down, and even the essay column has been suspended. Just when readers thought that the rebellious "girl writer" was brewing transformation or even retreating, Hitomi Kanehara returned with a new work "Cloud Girl" to continue her best alternative youth writing.
Hitomi Kanahara
The memory of youth "delete after reading"
Time had not allowed Hitomi Kanehara to become docile, nor had it clouded the girl's mind. Although the theme and writing of "Cloud Girl" seem to be much milder than that of the famous work "Tongue Splitting", the whole novel still points to the key question of the classic youth narrative - how can a person spend his youth in order to achieve real growth? Around this topic, the ancient Greek sage Socrates once gave an admonition that the so-called "unexamined life is not worth living"; the German writer Goethe in "The Troubles of Young Werther" solidified the purest enthusiasm with the death of a teenager and shouted the strongest voice of the era of wild rapid progress; the French writer Modiano's "Youth Café" let the enigmatic girl carry the dreamy and sad youth memory of a generation, completing the look back and lyricism of the middle of the 20th century. However, for hitomi Kim, a "post-80s" writer who grew up at the end of the 20th century, the above answers have been invalidated.
In "The Girl in the Clouds", Hitomi Kanehara portrays two young girls with very different personalities, Apricot and Riku. The beautiful sister Xingxing does not agree with the continuity of memory and even history, and only wants to live in the present and pursue immediate satisfaction. Witnessing the childhood trauma of her mother's death is her deepest fear, and her repeated fallen into chaotic love affairs is nothing more than a scar of memory covered with new chaos. The steady sister once escaped from the suffocating growth environment, but in the end she lacked the courage to transform herself and return to a step-by-step life. She constantly looks for "rationalized" excuses for her mediocrity, weakness, and escape, but she has to admit that the so-called "rationality" of life is actually fragile and vulnerable. Apricot and Liyou undoubtedly represent two seemingly different ways of life of young people today, the former seeking moments of pleasure and stimulation, and the latter trying to maintain the rationality of the whole life, but no matter what choice is made, the two are always plagued by nihilistic emotions and emotional scarcity.
At the beginning of the novel, the younger sister Xingxing witnesses her boyfriend's betrayal, breaks the mobile phone by mistake, and when she is angry, the first thought that flashes in her mind is still "Did I back up?" ”。 This accurate detailed description undoubtedly shows the high dependence of contemporary people on digital media and information networks, and also conveys Kim's insight into the spiritual plight of young people today: when individual experience can be separated from "here and now" and become "cloud" data that can be copied, copied, backed up and even tampered with and stolen, experience will be greatly devalued, and real emotions and emotions will become scarce. In fact, some fashionable online social networking software is also well versed in the psychology of contemporary people, creating the illusion of "memory" as a gimmick. For example, in the novel, the girl Apricot relies heavily on a mobile phone camera software called Snapchat (Chinese "Serabu"), which uses "delete after reading" as a selling point, all photos only have a "life period" of 1 to 10 seconds, and after the user sends the photos to friends, the photos will be automatically destroyed on time according to the preset time. Apricot is obsessed with this illusion of instantaneous memory, which in her opinion is precisely "because it will disappear, so that we can share that moment". Similarly, the seemingly calm sister has tried to get rid of her attachment to her father and get rid of her mother's shadow, but she has never really changed herself, but is constantly tampering with the memories of the past, imagining that her father is still talking to her through the camera lens, imagining that her mother is still alive in the document. She abhors the hypocritical experience of self-deception, but is compelled to use it as the foundation of "rationality", and even desperately admits that "we coexist with a huge database and can no longer capture decisive lies or decisive truths from them." We who can save all kinds of data such as text, pictures, and images without restriction know that they are all things that can be processed and modified and cannot be relied upon. All we can do is choose which information to use."
By depicting the "cloud" life of the young generation, "Cloud Girl" reveals the close relationship between the highly mediated and information-based contemporary life and the nihilism of modern people - when the memory of the individual is replaced by the data that can be backed up, when the emotional connection between people is replaced by the virtual reality of the digital world, youth will inevitably become a memory fragment of "reading and deleting", and the pursuit of the "rationality" of life is reduced to a self-deceptive performance.
The real-sense experience that is despised
Hitomi Kanehara is good at promoting the plot of the novel with scene descriptions and psychological descriptions of characters. She seems intent on unfolding the narrative in a cinematic storyboard, so the novel has plenty of montage-like cinematic action scenes and near-voiceover psychological depictions. This kind of sound-and-picture narrative is undoubtedly also in line with the perceptual experience of the characters in the novel - in the city full of noisy signals, people have lost the enthusiasm to show their subtle voices face to face in real situations, preferring to listen to the faint cries from the depths of the heart in the moment of sound and light. In fact, in some of the dialogues, Hitomi Kanehara even deliberately canceled the double quotation marks, canceled the sense of situational dialogue between people face-to-face, and processed the dialogue between the characters into their own inner monologues. This subtle treatment creates an atmosphere of self-talk, and also hints at the barrier between the dialogue characters, which in turn presents the living conditions of modern people who are alienated, isolated and lack of realism.
The word real sense is derived from the Japanese word "実感", which refers to the feeling of contact with actual things relative to imagination and fantasy, and also refers to vivid feelings that seem to have been experienced by hand. In "The Girl in the Clouds", both the mother Nakagi Yuriga and the daughter Apricot show contempt for the real sense of experience and daily life. As a novelist, Nakagi Yukika "perfunctory and despises the everyday", stubbornly trapping herself in the world of words, and limited communication with the outside world is often done through documents and e-mails. However, the lingering sense of emptiness caused her to prematurely lose the will to live, and eventually she died of exhaustion. The younger sister Xingxing relies heavily on the instant communication tools in the mobile phone, equating memory and experience with the flow of information, refusing to establish a true emotional connection with others and the external world. Her father had kindly reminded Apricot that all she was obsessed with was the most superficial appearance of things, and that when she talked about "likes" or "loves," she "did not recognize the essence of the thing at all." But unfortunately, until the death of his father, Xingxing could not get inspiration from his father's words and recognize the essence of "like" and "love". The lack of real sense of experience makes them gradually lose their sensitive sense of officiality, lasting passion, and true emotions from the heart, and then miss the possibility of trial and error, tempering, challenge, and then growth in real life.
Obviously, Hitomi Kanehara's writing is avant-garde in both material selection and thought. The "cloud" in the title of the novel refers to the living conditions of modern people who lack a sense of reality, and also refers to the digital survival based on "cloud technology". Compared with previous works, "Cloud Girl" undoubtedly touches on the more hidden and difficult dilemma of contemporary youth - how can you really grow up in the digital illusion woven by virtual reality, surrounded by the rapidly changing information flow? Perhaps, like Icarus, who flew to the sun in Greek mythology, the young boys and girls in the "clouds" could only land if they melted their waxy wings — turned off their computers and turned their phones to silent mode.