Forum › Brides of Iberis discussion
Aaaand the classic Akiyama Churn™ manifests. I had a feeling it'd show up soon, because in Octave as well, nothing was ever simple, no issues so facile as to be dispelled by a simple change of space or attitude. There's always this creeping, encroaching tension between the eagerness of people to forgive, forget, adjust or compromise on the one hand, and on the other what AH seems to view as the fundamental capriciousness of human nature. The principal characters here, much like in Octave, seem obsessed with deferral, with emotional displacement, with a suspicion equal parts terrified and obsessive that there's a Something Out There that might make them happier than they are now, some secret key that they haven't yet found, eternally cooking up golden pasts, hopeful futures or alternative presents to distract them from the growing emptiness of the now, from this gnawing dissatisfaction that they can never shake for long. The momentum of the narrative is the hunger of characters for that Something, the force of that obsession, which shall inevitably be disappointed when it is attained, only to spur a new one, a new phantom from a body that never was that must be verified or exorcised.
Here and in Octave, Akiyama excellently captures the anxiety of ennui, the terror that at 20-something, you've might already peaked and there is nothing ahead but a cavalcade of greying days that blur into each other like the smoke from a million cars on the streets of a shitty town you'll never get to leave. Akiyama's drama is her skill in the construction of the threat of a looming anticlimax, in her insightful portrayal of the lengths that people will go to, both in order to feel and, vitally, to stop feeling. Both here and in Octave, there seem to be no saviors, no Manic Pixie Dream People to bear all your burdens- if you happen to be a queer person grappling with depression and profound alienation by every segment of society in the orifices of a soulless urban hellscape, asks Akiyama, why on earth would you expect someone similar to you, someone who perfectly understands how you feel, to be any less fucked up after suffering the same things?
In lieu of dreams, paradise or solutions, the only solace offered to her characters is to stop thinking, to pull for one seconds their minds free of this churning, yawning abyss of unease. They try to drown themselves in jobs, hobbies, relationships and, most prominently, in sex- the petit-mort in Octave is no amusing euphemism, because it's the only thing that blanks out the jagged, grayscale oppressiveness of Tokyo, letting Yukino and Setsuko melt into each other in seas of blankness, so close that they feel like the same person, returned, if only for a moment, to some manner of primordial Platonic unity, before the ugly edges of Personality arise from orgasmic hazes and plunge them back into the damnation of individuality- a similar sentiment to Tsuzuki's desperation to dispel the irritation that seems to haunt her even in the seeming freedom of her open arrangement. Wedding rings, antique books, blooming flowers, daily planners- frantically, people try to ward off the nothingness with symbols, with bookings, with values. But it presses inward, and all they can do is keep running into ever shifting sets of arms, in webs of bodies with nothing to stand on. Akiyama's worlds are so very raw, so very earnestly, unpretentiously bare... I love them.
That goes without saying. We can feel the love just by looking through your post.
I wish Akiyama could read this. It would certainly warm her heart. 
I see what you did there.
