Esseff

I just watched Sinners! I was waffling about checking it out today because time was a bit tight for me, but I'm glad I did. No spoilers, just music.👍



I did get jumpscared by a song I knew later in the movie, that was fun.

I just think it's neat that a Japanese stage show of Sailor Moon is touring the US (with subs) and is doing very well. When I first heard about the US tour, I thought it would be more of a niche thing? But then I saw clips of decently-sized crowds of adults geeking out, some of whom are clearly overwhelmed with nostalgia and affection, and that's just so nice.♥



I particularly like this shot, of the Usagi actress greeting the audience, and they're into it!

Tan Twan Eng's The Garden of Evening Mists isn't my usual type of book, but a few years ago I was in a struggling bookstore and wanted to get something, anything, so I picked this up. When I finally decided to read it, I got a chapter or so in and realized that it's of that literary genre that has hundreds of examples, of which two immediately off the top of my head are Remains of the Day and The Girl with the Pearl Earring, i.e. literary historical novels set vividly, or one can say lusciously, in a specific time and place in order to attempt to capture the complicated social setting of the peoples in that time and place, and upon which the emotional thrust of the story is pinned upon a heterosexual relationship with elements of complicated forbidden-ness that prevents or will punish emotional fulfilment if that relationship is fully realized.

If you know the vibe, you know it, is what I'm saying.

There's also a movie! The edition of the book I have has a cover that is a still of the movie, and in my opinion said cover captures the feel of the book perfectly. I may check out the movie later, if I'm feeling it. I hadn't heard about it at all, considering it's set here, but as a small indie movie I suppose that's not much of a surprise.

Mainly taking place in Cameron Highlands, the drive of the book is a relationship between Yun Ling, a Straits Chinese lawyer and survivor of a Japanese internment camp, and Aritomo, a former gardener of the Emperor Hirohito who left Japan prior to WWII breaking out (and was thus not involved in the war.... maybe). The novel intercuts between a present day of the 1980s when Yun Ling is a retired Judge reminiscing on the past, and an extended flashback of Yun Ling narrating the events of the time she met Aritomo during the communist Emergency. That backdrop is, to put it lightly, a sensitive time.

I am not the usual reader of literary books, and I cannot speak in depth to the themes and language of the genre. I could be more self-conscious about that, but I won't, and anyway the story was interesting enough despite my side-eyeing tropey conventions of the genre, and the descriptions of home neat in their familiarity be it first-hand or second-hand through the stories I've been told by my parents and grandparents of colonial times.

Unlike the other examples of the genre mentioned above, Yun Ling and Aritomo do start an affair of sorts (after she becomes his apprentice in Japanese gardening), though Yun Ling's narration is so sparse that it can't really be described as a relationship of passion, I think, and of course it can't have a happy ending. But I liked how that played out, I think because I don't mind as much the mining of these difficult relationships of pain in fiction. So Yun Ling's main motivation is to find the internment camp she escaped from, because her sister died there and Yun Ling wants to lay her sister to rest. The maybe-reveal at the very end of the book is that Aritomo may have had something to do with designing that camp (and Yun Ling's suffering), and that Aritomo made a map to said camp for Yun Ling, within the design of his garden and a tattoo he puts on her back, and once both garden and tattoo are done he quietly left her one night, either to death or suicide.

I found the story interesting enough, and enjoyed reveals made through the layers of the past and present portions of the story. I liked its attempts to make the main characters kind and difficult at the same time, even when I disagreed with what appear to be some of the novel's final conclusions (the most obvious one being that anger has to be cleansed). That said, I couldn't connect with any of the characters enough to care as much about how it played out, though that could just as well be due to my own biases. The only way I could understand Yun Ling's falling for Aritomo is that it is a simultaneous form of healing (by being with the only person who would acknowledge her trauma as a camp survivor) and self-harm (because... everything). Which I suppose makes sense as much as anything else.

That said! And this has less to do with what the novel is doing on the whole, and is honestly a tangential bugbear that I just need to get down. I do believe that books cannot be everything to everyone and should not try to be because then no one is happy, so to focus on specific themes or relationships is, of course, better. Yet it is very interesting how, despite the familiarity of the setting, how alienating I found it at the same time because it centers heroic and/or complicated Chinese, Japanese and.... white characters. A few Orang Asli are there, but barely get voices. A few Malays are there, but are either racist or set dressing. Indians are servants who leer at the female main character. (To be fair, there is one Indian character later on who does get a personality, but like in comparison, there are three -- THREE - gay Japanese men who get their sympathetic stories told at length, one of whom is a full-on war criminal.) You can argue that this is all because of Yun Ling's limited point of the view (at an early point in the book she dismisses indigenous gardening as inferior to ornamented gardening with imported plants, i.e. Japanese garden style) but to have that POV unchallenged was OOOOFFF.

I have finished watching Mutya! It's fascinating to watch a TV show that obliterates interstitial moments, kinda like Hayao Miyazaki's worst nightmare of barely any pauses between the bits that "matter", let alone bother with set-up to the point of a scene. Sometimes the show skips those important scenes, too! Like the series-long villain doing the inevitable heel-face-turn, which happened off-screen and, for a show that otherwise didn't elicit strong emotions in me, made me angry that the show expected me to be okay with the villain who had just ten seconds earlier been tormenting a child to tears and screaming, suddenly hugging everyone and asking them to forgive her. There's whiplash, and then there's that.

Through the last quarter of the show I suddenly remembered that the translation tool I have on my phone has an audio translate+transcribe function! I swear, I yelped when I realized I could've been using it all along. But I'm not gonna go back to earlier episodes, so I just used it to follow some of the key scenes through the final episodes, admittedly battling uphill through the show's awful audio mixing. Interestingly, using the tool only added only a little more to my understanding to the show, which means that I was following pretty decently without it.

Is it a good show? Not really, but it tries, though the sincere performances are really not helped by the limited budget that cuts so many corners that whole episodes feel like nothing but seams. Actually, it's not the kind show where you even ask if it's "good", as opposed to if you enjoyed it. And I will say I 100% enjoyed three distinct things about it:

1. The songs are lovely and I did not get sick of them despite them being used over and over again. I did not even get tired of the theme song, which is in practically every episode.


2. I liked the Mutya's adoptive brother, Aries, has an organic emotional arc where he doesn't want Mutya to find out about her birth parents and keeps sabotaging it, because to him that means losing her to her birth family, and this fear in Aries manifests as anger. That made so much complicated emotional sense I was surprised it got included at all, in a show where the good guys react to everything either perfectly, or only imperfectly because they don't have the right information.


3. Yes yes, the kid actress playing Mutya is adorable, but who you know who's legit? The kid actress who plays Chabita, Mutya's foil and thematic competitor. Amy Nobleza as Princess Chabita mugs and snarks and screams and cries and throws epic tantrums, and it's all such broad emotional villain acting from a child that rings perfectly true for the character, and I love it. Amy also sings the opening song, and that's cool!

Thing I did NOT like though, was that Mutya's adopted parents both die, thus removing the otherwise complicated question of who will and how to raise Mutya. Instead of a blended family that acknowledges that her adopted parents are just as important to her, Mutya's birth parents get her outright, though they also adopt Aries. Sure, show.