They betray, and everything is based on their own judgment and choices.
Because I give them freedom, they must also retain their freedom, and even enslave themselves.
- Milton
Questions that have always been a big hit, but have never been able to get a unified answer:
"What will you do when you meet true love after marriage?"
Cheating betrayal? Repressive maintenance?
Or is it the seemingly "best" treatment – showdowns, heart-to-heart talks, or the joys of each of them?
It seems that there is no relatively affirmative and consistent answer to this question, and it all depends on the individual's choice.
For example, many years ago, under the pen of Junichi Watanabe, the "love master" who abandoned the medical profession, he captured the keen thinking of "human nature" in that turbulent 90s and wrote "Paradise Lost".
In the eyes of the world, it is full of taboos and unbearable, but it can be called a perfect extramarital affair, and finally receives a "death retribution".
It gives this question the idealized beautiful answer to the ultimate love that one aspires to.
In the story, their second half of their lives from encounter, fellowship, and acquaintance to death are reproduced into a legend that gives the meaning of ideal exhortation:
At that time, Adam and Eve followed their instincts to go to Paradise Lost and stole the forbidden fruit from the Tree of Wisdom.
So God punished them for never being able to return to Paradise, to enjoy the eternal fruit of the tree of life beyond life, old age, sickness and death, to give Adam the original sin of working endlessly to feed himself, and to give Eve the original sin of bearing the pain of conception and childbirth before she could reproduce.
Since then, this fate has been inherited by human beings.
One day in March, a special calligraphy exchange class was held.
A part-time calligraphy teacher, Rinko fatefully meets Nagagi, a publisher who has been invited by a friend to give a lecture (distraction).
At the age of 54, Hisagi is at the end of the family's realization of happiness and happiness, and his career is destined to go downhill.
No longer have a trace of enthusiasm for reality, fall into a premonition that your future life will be like a pool of stagnant water, an unchanging decadent powerlessness.
But this time he was pulled by his friend to relax, just like the arrangement of fate, so that from the moment he saw Rinzi, his heart was inexplicably excited.
The 37-year-old RinZi, so elegant in temperament, from the first glimpse of the curtain, made him difficult to extricate himself.
Soon, Rinko, who was also caught up in Kugi's elegant and humorous liking at the beginning, couldn't help but have frequent interactions with Hisaki.
The process of fellowship with Hisaki is a "human being" experience that is very different from the lifeless family life of the past.
The husband, who works as a doctor, has a serious and uninteresting personality.
When she was young, she may be proud of this, feeling that although such a family life is ordinary, it is better than stable, but more and more than ten years into the "zero contact" dead and asexual marriage, so that she feels more and more deep anxiety and suffocation.
It wasn't until she couldn't bear to go out of the house and come to the long-lost "society" that she found that her life could have another "personal" choice.
Especially when she meets the "destined" Hisaki, the natural adult communication that gives them a taste of the release of long-lost lust.
This fit, like "You're my ribs," leaves them dead.
They will date like a little couple in love, feed each other sweetly, and be satisfied just by looking at the scenery.
It will also be like a pair of mature male and female friends kissing, physically touching, and having one sex after another that makes the body and mind get a refreshing sex.
However, the reality of chai rice oil and salt is the "Garden of Eden" that they cannot avoid by turning a blind eye.
When the price that must be paid for stealing the forbidden fruit comes:
Hisagi is caught in a difficult choice in which he is found, his wife wants to divorce, and the defendant fa is forced to resign, but he cannot let go of both sides.
And Rin Zi was resolutely rejected by his parents and his husband's crazy revenge, and he entered the abyss of "one touch is death".
So much so that the two were forced by secular "moral condemnation" to run away from home and live together until they decided to die and be martyred.
Countless times of stimulating and extreme lust release joy, so that even if they feel the guilt and loneliness of "betraying" their families and society again and again, they do not hesitate to firmly accompany and identify with each other.
Until that time, it seemed that some kind of fate in the underworld pulled them to premonition the arrival of the "ending":
"It's terrible..."
Rin Zi, who was about to reach the peak of happiness, muttered this sentence unconsciously.
Lusting from all the shackles that bind women's bodies and minds, gaining the pleasure of liberation and running to orgasm.
"What's terrible?"
Kuki hugged her even harder, letting her struggle desperately but inescapably clinging to her, letting the exhaled heat come close to the root of his ear, searching for the answer that made him afraid and urgent.
It's almost six o'clock and it's time to leave...
The story ends with death —
"Honey..."
The short cry that swayed like a whistle with a tail note was the last call and singing of the two people left in this world.
When they committed suicide by drinking poison at the peak of happiness, they hugged each other tightly and smiled to meet death...
In 1667, the dynasty was restored, the "revolutionary" Milton was arrested and imprisoned, and soon after, out of humanitarianism, blindness was released, lamenting the "failure" of his life, eager to obtain the true "freedom" of the ideal, wanting to release his heart, trying to reconstruct the story of the Garden of Eden, and writing an epic long poem "Paradise Lost".
In the 1990s, Japan was in a "difficult era", with economic bubbles and crises going hand in hand, unemployment becoming the norm, and struggling jobs that did not bring people a sense of security.
This further makes men who think of themselves as "pillars of the pillar" feel unprecedentedly weak, increase the proportion of "zero-contact" sexless marriages, and force some women who have no comfort in family life to go to society.
Junichi Watanabe
At that time, Junichi Watanabe, who was "in love", stumbled upon a love death many years ago in 1995, "The Abe Ding Incident".
Inexplicably, in the interweaving of dreams and reality, I perceive a deep sense of crisis, and find that the more highly developed the civilization of modern society, the more it buries the basic cognition that human beings are "animals" after all.
In the general environment of the times, ethics and morality are generally needed to use the way of extreme oppression of human instincts in exchange for the development of modern civilization, people who have been suppressed for a long time actually urgently need the soothing of the soul, and people need physical and emotional mutual warmth to confirm the true existence of "self".
As a result, the writer Junichi Watanabe, known as the "master of love", was keenly aware of the problem of inner anxiety and emptiness that prevailed between people and husbands and wives in this modern society, thus outlining an idealized gender story of the ultimate pursuit of ultimate love, and paid tribute to Milton's "romance" and wrote this dream called "Paradise Lost".
Yes, in his opinion, the extramarital affairs of Ryoko and Hisaki should not be blamed, and the pursuit of physical pleasure by individuals with primitive instincts is more important from the level of human nature than "ethics and morality".
Even if he, out of the universal "ethical" pressure, he designed various crises from the inside out to "make things difficult" for the two of them.
But what he wants to express is precisely this kind of idealized expression inherited from the aesthetic Japanese "material sorrow"—the dreamy beauty of not seeking the same life, but seeking the same death in pursuit of the ultimate love.
"Please forgive us for our last willfulness, please bury us together, and wish."
Just like the Japanese version of "Paradise Lost", based on the visual interpretation of the people of their own country, which is always caught in the contradiction between prudence and secret boldness:
The cover is a raging flame, symbolizing burning lust, indulging and extremely destroying everything;
On the back cover are the cherry blossoms in full bloom, with their beauty when they bloom and their determination when they wither, making people feel the impermanence of the world and the splendid transience of love.
Junichi Watanabe said:
"I write about sex to write about life...
From a medical point of view, I see the most physical things of man;
From the writer's point of view, I see the most essential thing about human beings.
Of course, both need to have love for people, and they must have a deep concern for people. ”
He uses a delicate and cold scalpel to cut into the back of this hot question, the most difficult to let go of the desperately desired "comfort" core - "is there true love in an extramarital affair?" ”
An adult's infidelity, in the final analysis, is mostly based on sex that stimulates his physical and mental.
So is this "love" true love?
In Junichi Watanabe's understanding, yes.
Because if people reach middle age, this age that is destined to be deeply entangled in the complex and sophisticated web of social morality and ethics, they can still break through the sense of shame caused by violating moral and ethical norms, and they can still insist on bearing all kinds of burdens from spiritual constraints such as family affection and friendship, and get pure love.
More importantly, in his view, in fact, the pursuit of ultimate physical pleasure is not a sublimation and eternal embodiment of spiritual love between people who love each other.
What is more expressive of the so-called "true love" than the fit of love in the soul and the fit of love in the flesh?
Therefore, the inevitable result in the end is to sublimate this "love" to the absolute exclusivity of non-injury and death, until the "love" is fixed in death into eternity.
"We are already in hell anyway, what destruction are we afraid of?"
To tell the truth, when I watched "Paradise Lost" when I was young, I would be enthusiastically stimulated by it to the rare and uncut straightforward description, and pull back and forth with the constraints of the actual moral and ethical norms, and I felt an indissoluble sense of shame.
This is because at that time it will be affected by the "moral and ethical rules" that have not yet developed, or opened, modern society to maintain family stability, restrain individuals and maintain social order, and thus be shackled by collective consciousness and cannot be broken.
However, after growing up to have to independently navigate society, if you look at this story again, you will find the brilliance of humanity and humanity that Junichi Watanabe injected into it.
On the surface, this is a story that narrates a retributive "extramarital affair", but inside it is actually a kind of affirmation and reflection on the glory of love that transcends the times and gives attention to the brilliance of love.
The so-called "marriage", this kind of modern legal system, is actually only the product of gradually standing in the perspective of the "collective" in the past one or two hundred years, using ethical order to improve and standardize.
The history of human beings living by primitive instincts is far more than the "animals" who rely on "rules" to constrain time, and the concept of "marriage" may not exist in the subconscious, but is only an ethical sexual instinct.
Spurned by modern society, eager to use "death" to interpret the extramarital affair of retribution, objectively speaking, this is more like a compromise product for the better development of modern social civilization.
The more "civilized", the more developed;
The more "barbaric", with backwardness.
History is sifting through mankind, pointing out the "glorious road" of human beings who have and only one way to rush to higher and farther development.
But he always sacrifices and ignores the independent spiritual will of this person, the instinct of human nature that may not be consistent with the social system.
As a result, the martyrdom of Rinko and Hisagi is more like a deeper sense of affection and reason, a fierce conflict between individual consciousness and social system.
The result of not giving in and choosing uncompromising resistance, in the modern society of the present life that Junichi Watanabe feels, the only end is actually death.
Or from the perspective of a Japanese "cherry blossom aesthetic", the martyrdom of both seeking the same cave after death is not to sublimate love and freeze in the most beautiful, romantic, purest eternal moment...