04 May 2022

Murakami’s Sheep and Post-War Japanese Ideology

Murakami Haruki is one of the most well-regarded yet controversial authors in contemporary Japanese literature. Being the son of two literature professors in postwar Japan, his writing covers a variety of topics from politics, economics, and pop culture. Before he is the author we know now, he dabbled in translation work for Western novels such as F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye. Murakami kept a sense of Japanese locality in his novels with a Western atmosphere which is the base of the paradoxical East-West. For Western readers, the text offers a unique read with a slight touch of nostalgia and for Japanese readers it is a familiar setting with an unexpected twist. Initially aspiring to become an international writer, Murakami soon realized that he had to find his voice in Japanese literature eventually leading him to his unique style of magic realism or whatever.

27 April 2022

Watching a film by ear: An acousmatic approach to cinema

Sound film is commonly expressed as the interplay between the audio and the visual. Since the 1920s, audiences’ cinematic experience has been dramatically transformed owing to the synchronization of sounds and motion pictures. The silent film era highlights its narration performance mainly by the continuous alternation between moving images and intertitles (title cards) while its score is accompanied by a pianist or an orchestra. With more diverse sound elements (dialogue, music, ambient sound, sound effects, etc.) being synchronized to motion pictures, sound film delivers an immersive experience and strengthens its storytelling. Cinematic audiences are required to engage more intensively in the cross-modal perception of hearing and seeing. This progression appears as a breakthrough for filmmakers and, simultaneously, new advanced perceptual challenges for the audiences’ eyes and ears.

10 January 2022

Stages of minimalism on Fumio Sasaki's path to happiness

In recent years, minimalism as an approach to art has given way to minimalism as a lifestyle. Used not only as a means of reducing personal possessions, it becomes a personal quest for self-fulfillment beyond material acquisition. In the Japanese scene, two names emerge: Marie Kondo and Fumio Sasaki. Kondo, often associated with the simple living movement, has a pragmatic outlook that focuses on material detachment and clutter reduction. Sasaki, with a more traditional inclination, infers a conscious insight into socio-cultural values and how some are used to assess happiness. In his perspective minimalism contradicts modern standards of happiness, which are loosely based on consumerism, such as having expensive cars and high-paying jobs and other examples of consumption for the sake of appearance rather than need. By relegating material possessions to the far back of people’s lives he disproves the erroneous idea that the sum of one’s belongings equates to self-worth. This essay explores Sasaki's transition from materialist to minimalist.