After reading the first 100 pages and the back of the novel, I find it interesting that the author is gay as well as he is into very weird sexual fetishes. In a culture having the reputation as the Japanese culture does, I personally would never think about a person in this kind of society. Not saying they didn't exist but I didn't not realize that he could be accepted into such a strict society. The strange thing is honorary suicide was still considered acceptable in the recent past so I find it ironical that he lives his life so differently but ends it not in a fashion that’s so outrageous. At the end of the author’s life in 1970, Japan was no longer a colonizer but rather had been under the control of the United States since September 1945 and society, I would argue, slowly becomes more accepting of outside ideas and anything else that maybe different. Personally, his guy has some serious issues. Finding grotesque images of men dying and the crucifixion of Christ as sexual turn on is plain disgusting and disturbing. Everyone has their thing but this flirts with that line and will turn into something dangerous. Of all the fetishes that turn him on the only one I find somewhat normal is the armpit one. The fact that he lust for blood, even though he fears death, it’s almost fitting that he commits suicide.
Be careful of assuming a direct correlation between life and fiction--many writers begin with their lives in their work but, by making it into fiction/a work of art, it becomes far more than biography.
ReplyDeleteIn terms of the narrator's fetishes, I would argue that he's more attracted to the performance of tragedy, its theatricality, rather than the gritty, dirty reality of bloody death.