"I have tasted the sweet and spicy taste of the world, and I know that it is cold and warm outside the words."
--Natsume Soseki
Born in 1867, Natsume Soseki is known in Japan as the "Great National Writer", 15 years older than our great writer Lu Xun. In addition to translating novels, Lu Xun lived in Natsume's former residence for more than half a year while studying in Tokyo.
Lu Xun also had a high opinion of Natsume: "His works are rich in imagination, exquisite in words, brisk and free, full of wit, and are the mainstream of shin-Edo art in the Meiji literary world. ”
This graphic novel "Ten Nights of Dreams" retains the ten short stories of the original book, but asks the illustrator Shikimi to reinterpret and interpret the dream of 113 years ago in the form of modern comics and online games.
The thinking in the dream, the order of appearance of the language are different from usual, vertical, and seem to intentionally break the conventional daytime way of thinking, creating an illusory dream. This arrangement and appearance method reminds me of the dream of the virtual bamboo and the dream girl in the ice cellar of the Western Xia Palace in Jin Yong's "Tianlong Babu", where dreams and reality are intertwined, and true and false are also intertwined.
The clueless background color and font changes in the book are not allowed to change the color to fantasize about what to express and what to suggest.
Maybe it's the tip of the first night: "Please wait a hundred years." Please sit by my tomb and wait for a hundred years. I will definitely come to see you. ”
Perhaps this is the best part of the image novel, restoring the illusory beauty of the dream, but also focusing on and staying on the beauty, other clues, after 100 years, jump out of that era and slowly solve, slowly look. Maybe it's like the Dream of the Red Chamber, but it's just an illusion.
If you only read the text, you will feel that "Ten Nights of Dreams" cannot be understood, or it is the analysis of psychological dreams. However, when the "manga image" encounters the text of 100 years ago, an unexpected explanatory chemical reaction occurs, causing the skeleton of the story to retract back into the manga world and see the practical significance hidden by the author Natsume Soseki.
Such a manga-style bone reduction skill, like the cute Sakuragi of the Japanese anime slam dunk master who has changed into a villain, is not responsible for the disturbances in the real world, but only vents the depression in his heart and adjusts it.
Through comics, try to open up a hidden world.
The first night is a dream about love and time, the second night is his enlightenment of responsibility and thinking, and the third night is a cycle of cause and effect. The fourth night through death, thinking about who I am, where I am going. The despair of the fifth night is the hope and despair after the defeat, the choice of compromise or continuing despair. On the sixth night, through sculptures, do modern people still have anyone to protect the Dharma? The seventh night is written about wandering, is the West in the dream sunset or hope? The people in the eighth night mirror dream are numb, varied, and like Lu Xun's wandering. The ninth night is prayer, and the metaphor of the pig on the tenth night is as if he were cursing like Lu Xun.
Is this the world he hid? Or ten social phenomena? In a place where the times and culture are at war, can he not be realistic, but can only tell future people through dreams?
Is the story of the first night a story about men and women? It seems not, more like the code hidden in love--- "Please come and see what I said about the strange state of society in 100 years." ”
Natsume Soseki did not want to say that expressing his attitude through metaphor was very similar to Lu Xun, and also like Lu Xun's "Farewell to the Shadow" in Lu Xun's "Weeds":
"When people sleep until they don't know the time, there will be a shadow to say goodbye and say those words—
There is what I am unwilling to go to heaven; there is what I am unwilling to go to hell; there is what I am unwilling to go to; there is what I am unwilling to go to in your future golden world. ”