Channels, Fall 2016

Page 148 Parson • Drawing Is Where the Joy Is experience than the visible swirls of color or the tangible emotions they evoke. Some elements of aware seem to be present as well, especially in Nobuo’s interactions with hypnotized patients. His conversation with one young woman in his office seems almost condescending to her childish giggling and unconnected babble about floating in a white world and wearing bunny ears, but it ends with an attempt to identify with her. By displaying both sympathy and pity, Nobuo experiences two of the significant facets of aware . In fact, it seems to be the aesthetic influence of aware and its focus on the vanishing, impermanent, and helpless that helps Nobuo avoid or navigate the potential monsters in his life. Ishii offers the viewer two parallel instances of day-to-day professional life in the film, and both center on the relationship of a man and one of his female professional acquaintances. The glimpse he offers into Ikki’s studio focuses on the female assistant’s sexuality, her ongoing infidelity to her husband, and her resulting transformation into an embodiment of the monstrous for Ikki. The scene in which Nobuo is shown in his consulting room certainly has the potential to become equally surreal and equally fixated on the sensual, but the beauty of the scene and much of the attractiveness of Nobuo’s female patient lie in the aesthetic of the impermanent. The woman’s pleasant, childish happiness and vulnerability belong entirely to a temporary dreamlike state from which Nobuo must ultimately wake her. This adds a sense of pathos to her attractiveness and keeps Nobuo in touch with the right values or natural order of a world in which everything beautiful is pitiful because it must end. This resignation to ending and change also seems to help him cope with the more pragmatic news that Yoshiko has accepted her new job and that their relationship will change, however slightly, when she becomes a working and providing member of the family. In a similar way, the habitual activities of Ayano and Hajime are best described in terms of traditional aesthetic characteristics. Ayano spends a great deal of his free time wandering the in-between spaces of his neighborhood alone. His solitude doesn’t necessarily give his ramblings the characteristic of wabi , but the way in which he allows intuition and spontaneity to guide his ramblings gives them elements of both choice and naturalism that add to its aesthetic character. Further, the oddness and poignancy of the incidents he witnesses and participates in over the course of his solitary walks lend memorable touches of aware , as in his encounter with an old crush; yūgen , as in his surprise encounter with a mysterious baseball-batter; and sabi , as in the protracted periods he spends simply observing the back yard alongside Sachiko. For Ayano, the solitude is permeated with the vanishing, which helps to connect him both with himself and with the transience of natural things. Ishii symbolizes Ayano’s self-sufficiency through the composition of the wandering scenes. Ayano is almost always placed alone in a wilderness scene and is often viewed in deferential perspective, from below the bridge while he watches the baseball player, or from the edge of the water while he sits on the bank to watch the traveling dancer, or even from the perspective of his shorter ex-girlfriend. By contrast, Ayano is always viewed from above while at work in his recording studio. This perspective seems to correspond with a loss of self. When a coworker asks Ayano why he became a sound mixer, Ayano replies, “It was more like why shouldn’t I, you know,” which seems to imply a lack of personal