I recently watched last year’s Japanese drama adaptation of the manga Song of Apollo. Flipping back through my old blog, I realized I read that manga some fifteen years ago — time really does fly… though that’s just a few extra lines of preamble. To keep things short, you can find a recap of the manga’s plot in this old post (Chinese only).

People are divided into men and women, and everyone goes along with it, but few stop to ask why. Why does humanity classify at all? The question, traced to its roots, is complicated. From the standpoint of biological evolution, classification is a cognitive shortcut the brain evolved to save energy. If early humans had to spend hours deeply observing every object they encountered just to judge whether it was dangerous, humanity would likely have gone extinct long ago. So the brain learned to slap on labels, abstracting away the complexity of reality. Psychologically, ambiguity tends to breed anxiety, while classification offers a sense of security.

In modern society, the purpose of classification leans more toward ease of management. If people were sorted into countless intermediate states, the cost of drafting laws, allocating resources, even building public restrooms would balloon. The protagonist, Shogo, is clearly an outlier. Childhood trauma left him deeply averse to love, unable to play the “normal” male role society prescribes — pursuing women, starting a family. Society, through psychiatrists and the law, diagnoses and tries to correct him, attempting to force him back into being “normal.” Shogo’s rejection of women is really a fear of the complexity of love itself; and society’s punishment of Shogo is really its collective fear of an individual it cannot control.

Every view society imposes on an individual runs both ways. Shogo’s resistance is, at heart, a refusal of society’s classification rules. Society’s attempt to “correct” him back into heterosexuality, reproduction, and law-abiding citizenship is itself a kind of violent abstraction. If you can’t manage to be a good man, then become a rogue, a drifter instead. To define your own identity and hold onto it to the end — that is victory. Sadly, in the end, he is “cured.” Once a system of classification shifts from being a tool for survival to a tool of domination, it becomes something frightening.

As for the drama adaptation itself, I’d call it passably competent. As for the long stretches devoted to scenes between the male and female leads (with the “treatment” angle largely left out), some viewers found it tedious, even gimmicky — trading on the name Song of Apollo for something else entirely. I can live with that, though — in the end, giving the male and female leads roughly equal weight is its own kind of generosity toward human feeling.

Adaptations of wuxia novels are notoriously hard to please everyone with — much like how “a thousand readers will picture a thousand different Lin Daiyus,” or how “liking” something is never simple, stirring up a tangle of complicated reactions both psychological and physical. The 1997 series The Romance of the Condor Heroes (雪花神剑) is a rare gem among them. Yang Gongru’s portrayal of Mei Jiangxue, in particular, carries a flavor strikingly close to the opening lines of Wang Daoqian’s translation of Duras’s The Lover: “I am already old. One day, in the lobby of a public place, a man came up to me…”

What left the deepest impression on me, though, was Nie Xiaofeng. What kind of woman was she, really? I keep coming back to this question.

Her family fell into ruin, yet she remained innocent at heart; she could be ruthless and decisive, yet she loved deeply; she was betrayed again and again, yet she never stopped trying. This is Nie Xiaofeng — a sovereign of her own corner of the martial world, quick to settle scores, and yet also a woman undone by her own infatuation, adrift and heartbroken. I feel for her deeply. Everyone pushed her away — the martial world, her own master, even her own daughter. But even the most wretched among us usually has a few loyal “supporters,” doesn’t she? Tian Xiang was utterly devoted to her, wishing only for an innocent love between childhood companions, but her particular brand of obsession had to play its cruel trick — splitting the one she loved from the one who loved her into two different people. The man she loved chose to leave her; the man who loved her, she let slip away, again and again. Unifying the martial world may have been her last dream, but it also wounded her more deeply than anything else. And that same obsession lured her back to Mount Ailao — a sweet, heartbroken place. Of course, that dream, too, went unfulfilled.

She believed her two children would be the continuation of her love, a bargaining chip to hold someone back — a notion both traditional and, frankly, pathological, yet another form of the “obsession” that gripped Nie Xiaofeng for so long. Her whole life was an obsession with love, an obsession with kin, an obsession with martial arts. Her eventual self-destruction, too, was a death born of obsession. You could say her entire life dissolved into that single word: obsession. As the sutras say, “Green bamboo, dense and verdant, is itself the Dharma body. Yellow chrysanthemums in profusion are nothing but prajna.” The rise and fall of Mount Ailao seems to have begun in obsession, and ended in obsession too.

@Filed under “Sea of Romance” —» “Treasures from a Sea of Romance”

Song of Apollo is a work by Osamu Tezuka, Japan’s “god of manga” and “king of manga,” completed around 1967. Everyone knows what kind of era that was — full of youthful, hot blood. It was likely precisely the vigorous energy bursting out of the student movements of that time that inspired this famous manga.

The protagonist is a young man utterly lacking in stability — Shogo Chikaishi — who acts on impulse without regard for consequences. When he’s sent to a psychiatric hospital, the case report describes him as a dangerous figure with “severe sadistic tendencies.” His mother’s promiscuity left him with a deeply negative view of love, and so the psychiatrist’s treatment goal is simply to teach him how to love. Yet his fate twists and turns endlessly: because he doesn’t believe in love, no matter how many times he is reincarnated, something always goes wrong right when he falls for a woman, ending things and leaving him “forever tormented by love.”

A friend recommended this to me. He thought it was a youthful, coming-of-age manga that might liven up my brain a little. Having finished it, it certainly did liven things up — but I’d argue this isn’t simply a youth manga at all, but rather a manga about the worship of procreation.

The prologue (“Union of the Gods”) contains an explicit depiction of sexual union: sperm racing in droves toward the egg. In the second chapter (“Paradise”), Shogo learns the broader biological meaning of sex by observing animals mating on the island. Afterward, his mutual affection with Naomi Watanabe, and the clone queen’s vow of love unto death, deepen this worship of procreation into the realm of emotion and thought.

The author’s line of thinking isn’t hard to trace: physiological → psychological; procreation → love. Whoever steps outside this framework gets punished. Some commentary calls this a work about adolescence — I don’t think that’s right. Shogo Chikaishi has someone he loves but cannot have; he doesn’t want to love, yet is forced into it; he despises mating, yet is eventually seduced into it successfully… is all of this really just adolescent business?

Schopenhauer, in The Metaphysics of the Love of the Sexes, wrote that the reason humans mate “lies within the essence of the object itself, beyond the reach of our own deliberation”; a man’s burning desire to sleep with a woman “is, in fact, not so different from sleeping with any other woman — nothing beyond physical union and reproduction is gained.” People who hold this view of love or procreation surely aren’t many — if they were, humanity would probably have gone extinct long ago. But that’s exactly how the protagonist was before his “cure.” And he was indeed “cured.”

I keep hearing a supposedly progressive view on sex education, which holds that when teaching adolescents about sex, more emphasis should be placed on sexual morality, sexual responsibility, sexual civility. But these are merely artificial facets imposed on sex from outside — once sexual pleasure itself is stripped away, sex education becomes a propaganda tool for a certain kind of discourse, and sex itself is reduced to a mere assembly-line lifestyle marching under that discourse’s iron heel — marriage, offspring, family, reproduction once more.

Taking it a step further, beyond the worship of procreation, this manga also carries a worship of the phallus. First, the protagonist is male, and the entire exploration of sex and reproduction unfolds from a male point of view. Second, the side that believes or disbelieves in love is also male — clearly, women have no right to choose love at all: even the clone queen, exalted as she is, still has her life controlled by another male clone. Third, the myth embedded within the story is itself steeped in patriarchy. The all-powerful, handsome, virile Apollo falls in love with Daphne, who has no right whatsoever to choose love or sex for herself, and is left with no option but to turn into a laurel tree, becoming the eternal object of male Apollo’s love.

For a manga, I’ve probably thought about this far too much. What a manga really calls for is simply: charge forward, for the queen! — Ha, that’s still nothing more than the rallying cry of some hairless biped.

Sora Aoi (あおい そら), born November 11, 1983 (Scorpio) in Tokyo, Japan. AV actress and television performer. The reason I’m introducing her in this “Sea of Romance” series is that I recently discovered (well, it was actually the month before last) that every one of her films has something to it.

That film is Sora Aoi: Little Princess. Looking back, it’s still an extremely classic AV: a warm atmosphere, gentle movements, a tight plot. Even more heart-stirring is how Sora Aoi looks in this film. Her face still carries a trace of childishness (see the image above), but once you see her body, no one would call her “childish.” There’s a poem in The Precious Mirror for Judging Flowers that describes Yuan Baozhu like this:

Her dancing sleeves are light, too frail to bear themselves; even moonlit water cannot match her clarity. Ever since she took the name Pearl, her radiance has grown a hundredfold. Her slender waist is so very pitiable; her whole life’s grace came naturally from heaven. Her romantic charm has a soul-stealing place all its own; only then do you believe an immortal walks among men.

The first time I saw Sora Aoi, I felt this was exactly what Yuan Baozhu must have looked like, only with heavier makeup. Visually speaking, I think Sora Aoi is utterly perfect. If AV actresses were ranked into tiers, she would certainly belong to the very top tier (and honestly, even without any ranking system, she still would). Her bright, innocent face, her hair black and glossy, her slender fingers, and her just-right figure paired with her ample breasts (described as “baby face, big breasts, slim legs”!). And then there are her supple, ever-changing positions, and the greedy look on her face as she licks and swallows semen… For an actress in this line of work, what could matter more than that?

In Sora Aoi Collection 1 (a compilation of many clips), there’s a segment where she performs with a male actor in a way that feels remarkably like “real boyfriend and girlfriend.” Snow-white, she playfully props her foot on his back one moment, then sweetly takes him in little bites from top to bottom the next… And in Sora Aoi: Little Princess too, dressed in a princess costume, she’s not yet so forward, her movements still slightly stiff — a classmate told me that was one of her early works…

By age, Sora Aoi is much older than me, so I can’t quite bring myself to think of her as some kind of older or younger sister (laughs). Besides her AV work, I also know about her Weibo, her films, her charitable donations — but I know of no scandals involving her; even if there were any, they probably wouldn’t reach my ears. Maybe in the future I’ll keep an eye on whether she makes more films. The unfortunate part is, there’s no way for me to buy the genuine release to support her!

In pornography, there’s a whole category tailor-made for “uniform fetishists.” Performers can wear all sorts of uniforms — military, police, suits, white socks… it seems anything that signifies a certain identity is enough to send uniform fetishists into a frenzy. And generally, the more formal and solemn the uniform, the better the effect. Actresses wear princess outfits, nurse uniforms, stewardess outfits, police uniforms; actors mostly wear military or police uniforms, doctor’s coats, sailor outfits — and the S&M undertones embedded in all this are plain to see. In some erotic photo sets, there’s even an explicit category for “military/police uniforms” (like this photo of a soldier undergoing inspection). Of course, the evolution of the human species deserves some credit too — some uniform fetishists have shifted their worship of these cold-weapon-era symbols and developed into suit fetishists instead. The countless AVs filmed in office settings cater precisely to the tastes of suit fetishists.

This seemingly abnormal predilection has actually been studied quite extensively. Even the word “uniform” carries philosophical weight, symbolizing constraint, boundary, and authority. Without going too far afield, let’s just appreciate the WWII German Army uniform from the perspective of an ordinary uniform fetishist.

When it comes to the WWII German army, one can’t avoid mentioning their boss, Hitler. The man was a killer, but he was also an artist. He and the rest of the Nazi top brass had no small amount of artistic taste — they were mad for ancient Greece and Rome, mad for the masters of the Renaissance. With such discerning eyes vetting the German army’s uniforms, how could they not turn out well? On the left is the WWII German army uniform — just look at the feel of it: brimming with heroic spirit, commanding and imposing, radiating sheer virile force. It’s an essential prop for sexual flirtation and S&M role-play! Even the designers at Dior or Versace today couldn’t necessarily come up with something like it.

It makes me wonder — if Comrade Hitler hadn’t been corrupted by power, hadn’t ascended to that “throne,” would he have created a Hitler clothing brand? The British artist duo the Chapman Brothers had the creative idea of buying several of Hitler’s sketches at a high price, painting over them in vivid watercolors, and selling them for an astronomical sum. Their imagined Hitler was a hippie (If Hitler Had Been a Hippy How Happy Would We Be).

As the old saying goes, history allows no hypotheticals; but history can accommodate countless flights of fancy. Let’s set aside history’s bloodshed for a moment and dream our way back to World War II.

All images above are from German.Army.Uniforms.of.the.Heer.1933-45

Today, in some group chat full of younger students, I got asked a question about “3P.” It seems we’re all still rather awkward about discussing sex or anything related to it. Since I’m hiding behind the medium of the internet, let me say a few words (you can also check the wiki).

“3P” is slang for threesome, commonly used to refer to sex involving three people. Of course, the configurations are varied: one man and two women, two men and one woman, three men, three women. In English there are other terms for it (some borrowed from French): flesh sandwich, séance à trois, three-hole activities (this one seems a bit off), three-layer cake, ménage à trois, and so on. Compared to Chinese, these expressions are quite interesting. Heh, too bad I haven’t tried it yet.

The image above is an erotic painting depicting a threesome, from The Secret Manual of Mandarin Ducks. Look at it: the man in the long robe gives the woman a flirtatious smile, “inviting” her to join in the clouds and rain together. The other woman lies languidly resting on the bed — perhaps savoring the passion just past, or perhaps waiting for an even more spectacular battle of three! There are actually many such erotic paintings. I think people in ancient times handled sex, in some ways, far more appropriately than we do now — with more “refinement,” and more delicacy.

Which makes me genuinely curious: what did the ancient Chinese call this kind of bound, three-person lovemaking? Surely they didn’t call it “3P” too?

Filed under: Everyone lives within this “sea of romance,” forever surrounded by sound and color. Everyone’s understanding of it differs, so I’ll timidly try to find something interesting within it (heh).