![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
labingiAt long last, I've read all of "Gunjou" and now must gush about it. I was dubious, when I started it, about reading an entire volume devoted to the Houjou with virtually no appearances by our heroes, but I was soon so caught up in the Houjou action that Naoe and Kagetora themselves would have been an unwelcome intrusion (except in the sweet epilogue). Moreover, everything in this volume is highly germane to the main plot and themes. More on that later. (Expect SPOILERS for Gunjou to follow.)
First, many blessings upon![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
asphodel for the spectacular translation, complete with old-fashioned English for the folks recently arrived from the Sengoku. I felt like I was reading the language of the Shakespearean era (which is just about right, time-wise), and her skill in rendering that discourse has only gotten more polished over time.
On the subject of language, Asphodel's use of the two distinct types of English discourse drove home to me a realization that, I suppose, should be obvious but that never gelled with me before: very, very rarely do we see old onshou. That is, we see onshou who originated a long time ago but very rarely ones who have been living as onshou for anything like the 400 years of the Yasha-shuu. The Houjou, we're told, were resurrected just a few years ago. Their discourse bears this out, and indeed, this seems the norm for vengeful spirits. My knowledge of MoB is, of course, spotty, but when I try to think of other onshou I'm fairly sure have been around as long as the Yasha-shuu (or even for a couple of hundred years), I come with Kousaka and... Kousaka... And Kousaka has an agenda that, to avoid spoilers, is not typical for a vengeful spirit.
This makes perfect sense because anyone who is not insane who has been knocking around for a few centuries should come to the realization that the Yami-Sengoku is stupid. For one thing, it's doomed to failure, irrespective of any interference by the Uesugi. The best that a clan like the Houjou could hope to achieve might be conquering Japan by sheer spiritual force at the expense of killing a large percentage of the population and enslaving most of the rest--because the modern Japanese are not going to have it. And even if this enslavement were accomplished, Japan would instantly earn a number of militarily more powerful international enemies, not least its 1.3-billion-citizen-having, nuclear-arsenal-holding old friend just to the west. The Houjou don't understand this, not because they aren't intelligent men but because their cultural context is outdated. Ujimasa thinks his biggest threat is Kagetora because Kagetora appears the most dangerous general in Sengoku terms. And though Ujimasa thinks he understands that the modern world is a more civilized place (and, thus, more suited to his strengths than the Sengoku), even he can't wrap his mind around the fact that, in modern Japan, Sengoku rules no longer apply. The Houjou think they know they're living in "the future"; after all, they know about business suits and industry and how to drive cars and what nuclear weapons are. But while they've acquired a truly impressive academic grasp of how to get around in the modern world, they don't have the lived experience to process this information on the level of deep cultural assumption.
A case in point is Ujiteru's attitude toward Naoe, whom he chiefly hates (at least prior to the mirror arc) because Naoe drove Saburou to his death at the Otate-no-Ran. For Ujiteru this wound is still new. And while he knows that Saburou and Naoe have been around for an additional "400 years," he can't grasp how long 400 years really is. Now, Naoe and Kagetora have their problems, good Lord knows, but the Otate-no-Ran is no longer one of them. It was in the beginning. Indeed, in the flashback in Volume 20, Kagetora tells Naoe that he considers himself a true onryou, that he has returned from the dead not primarily to protect Kagekatsu but to bring peace to his own followers by exorcising them rather than letting them linger on in misery as onryou. While this is an unusual attitude for a general in the Yami-Sengoku, it is certainly normative in being oriented around the circumstances of his original life and death. Naoe's concern for Kagekatsu's safety, likewise, springs directly from his initial life. But time evolves people, and as little as decades later, these issues feel far away. Onryou (generally) don't last that long: if they aren't destroyed or exorcised, they outgrow it, like siblings outgrowing their rivalry. The onryou who make up the vast majority of the Yami-Sengoku really are a bit like children compared to the Yasha-shuu. And they are very much out of their time, and by and large, doing their plucky best to be active agents in a world they do not comprehend.
So much for general onshou/onryou commentary. On to character analysis...
Ujimasa! I always knew he was cool, but I think I'm falling in love with him. [1] What a far cry he is here from the conniving "villain" the anime gives us. Here, Kuwabara spares no pains to fully explore his character: his emotional awkwardness, his high moral precepts, the difficult position he occupies as leader of his clan yet not really because he's really just a regent for his father. Ujimasa (like his little brother, Kagetora!) is unusual among onshou in that he is not very ambitious but more morally driven. He wants power not for himself but for his father. He views himself as an agent of his father's ascension (as Kagetora views himself as a servant of Kenshin), and he promotes that ascension, and his own concomitant rise to power, because he truly believes that his father is the best ruler for the Japanese people. We are told that, in his original life, he refused to submit to Hideyoshi, knowing that this decision meant his clan would be destroyed, because he did not respect Hideyoshi's regime and chose destruction before compromising his values. (This moral high ground, again, is eerily close to Kagetora's decision-making process throughout the novels.)
A conscientious and responsible man, Ujimasa cultivates his much remarked coldness out of love and regard for his clan, remaining aloof to forestall rumors of any conspiring with his brothers to seize power. The text suggests that the unusual unity of the Houjou brothers is owed, in part, to Ujimasa's careful maintenance of unobjectionable, even-handed relations among all family members. Like Kotarou, he keeps a cool demeanor, but while Kotarou is genuinely affected by logic and duty alone (for now), Ujimasa's calm facade hides a great deal of personal pain: of the loss of his wife, the destruction of his clan (under his leadership), and the lingering self-doubt that he was not meant to govern the Houjou and was, in fact, an inadequate replacement for his elder brother who died young.
The anime mentions Ujimasa's regarding Saburou as the ill-omened eighth son whose birth precipitated the eldest brother's death. Here, we see this idea strongly linked to Ujimasa's own fears of inadequacy: the ill of which Saburou is a supposed omen is nothing other than the ascension of Ujimasa himself. But we also see that Ujimasa's discomfort with Saburou stems from more than superstition. He doesn't trust Saburou, and he is right. While Ujiteru loves Saburou more, Ujimasa understands him better. Ujiteru assumes that Saburou has been coerced into serving Kenshin for 400 years. Ujimasa doubts 400 years of service can be won by coercion. He's right. Ujimasa always suspected that Saburou was not really "one of them" after returning from the Takeda. He remembers a moment when young Saburou wandered into Ujimasa's garden chasing a butterfly and, running into Ujimasa, looked terrified: who can blame him? But again, Ujimasa's right: Saburou didn't have the innate Houjou trust in his brother. Ujimasa doubts that Saburou will willingly return to the Houjou. Right again. Instead, he suspects that Saburou will become their principal enemy. Bingo.
If Ujimasa is the head of the Houjou, Ujiteru is its heart. He feels everything deeply: love, betrayal, indignation. He weeps over his fallen samurai and even hugs them (aren't they incorporeal?) in a scene reminiscent of Kagetora vowing not to abandon his own thirteen generals. Ujiteru is the soul of loyalty but loyal to too many things. His tragedy, which he articulates elegantly, is that he adores both Ujimasa and Saburou and cannot choose between them. Ujiteru blames himself for not reaching Kagetora in time to save him in the Otate-no-Ran. He had vowed to return to rescue his brother, but Kagetora died before he could keep his promise. (Hence the very personal Naoe hatred.) His dedication to Ujimasa is no less than to Saburou.
The two brothers' dynamic is beautifully illustrated in the assassination plot against Ujimasa. Ujiteru flies to his side to protect him. Ujimasa, not wanting the next in line to lead the Houjou to be killed along with himself, commands him to leave. Ujiteru ignores this command. Ujimasa ignores the fact that Ujiteru has ignored it. This very... flexible chain of command is, again, reminiscent of the Yasha-shuu, who not infrequently blithely disobey Kagetora's orders, secure in the knowledge that they follow him when it counts and that he knows this (which he usually does). The Houjou, thus, like the Uesugi, are a holographic team, capable of functioning as a single unit but also of functioning as individual divisions; they work together, yet each is an active agent capable of independent decision making. It's an extremely strong management model that serves both clans well until Ujimasa and Ujiteru finally clash over Saburou. Brotherhood unites the Houjou and destroys them.
Ujiteru is right that the brothers are inextricably tied together. They're family; they spring from the same root. Indeed, as I've intimated, Kagetora shares personality traits with both Ujimasa and Ujiteru. He has Ujimasa's gift for moral abstraction and Ujiteru's hyperactive emotional attachment to his family, friends, and colleagues. If Ujimasa tends to favors ends and Ujiteru to favor means, Kagetora skillfully negotiates both (indeed, volumes 21-40 appear to be one big, long, tangled negotiation between his duty to Japan and his love for Naoe). This may, in a nutshell, be what makes him such a phenomenal leader.
The lingering Houjou in Kagetora highlights the text's dialogic depth. He is not just Naoe's love interest; he is not just Uesugi. He is a person enmeshed in a complex array of relations with many other complex people. And here, in "Gunjou," we come across a piece of dialogic tour de force: the only person who knows about Saburou's rape (besides those who were present) becomes Ujimasa. It would be easy to make it Naoe and launch us into epic angst and vengeance. It would be easy to make it Ujiteru with fairly similar results. It would be too easy. Life--and psychological realism--is more complex than that. How very much it bears the weight of real life for Saburou to be raped in order to shame the older brother he isn't even close to. How ugly that the first person to see Saburou afterward, perhaps the only person to see him disheveled enough to know that something is seriously wrong, is the very person for whose sake that wrong was committed (and Saburou can probably conjecture this). How unfortunate that that person is, by nature and training, someone who will not pursue Saburou to find out what happened (as Ujiteru would), that their brief encounter sets the stage for 400 years of silence. Yet the revelation of Saburou's rape (400 years later) is one of Ujimasa's great humanizing moments. He is genuinely, viscerally horrified: not just because it shames his clan, not just because Saburou is his brother, not just because it was all done to hurt Ujimasa, but principally (I'd argue) because it is simply such an atrocity that Ujimasa's sense of human decency is nauseated. His calm shatters; he flies into a murderous rage, and the only thing I love him for more is remembering, later on, that day that Saburou came home in a mess and putting all the pieces together. He may not, as Ujiteru observes, have often shown Saburou his smile, but he cared enough to remember. He cares enough to keep ruminating on it after the revelation. Of course, he tells no one else. It wouldn't do any good. And thus, Ujimasa and Kagetora become the unlikeliest of partners in the most understandable of conspiracies: the family skeleton.
[1] A while ago, I was introducing my friend, R, to the anime, and she commented on how incongruous Ujimasa looks in full Buddhist monk regalia with his little granny glasses. She noted that he is the type of person to always look the part, but if anybody suggested he remove the glasses to better complete the effect, he would reply, "No, because it is important to see." I thought that summed him up perfectly.
First, many blessings upon
asphodel for the spectacular translation, complete with old-fashioned English for the folks recently arrived from the Sengoku. I felt like I was reading the language of the Shakespearean era (which is just about right, time-wise), and her skill in rendering that discourse has only gotten more polished over time. On the subject of language, Asphodel's use of the two distinct types of English discourse drove home to me a realization that, I suppose, should be obvious but that never gelled with me before: very, very rarely do we see old onshou. That is, we see onshou who originated a long time ago but very rarely ones who have been living as onshou for anything like the 400 years of the Yasha-shuu. The Houjou, we're told, were resurrected just a few years ago. Their discourse bears this out, and indeed, this seems the norm for vengeful spirits. My knowledge of MoB is, of course, spotty, but when I try to think of other onshou I'm fairly sure have been around as long as the Yasha-shuu (or even for a couple of hundred years), I come with Kousaka and... Kousaka... And Kousaka has an agenda that, to avoid spoilers, is not typical for a vengeful spirit.
This makes perfect sense because anyone who is not insane who has been knocking around for a few centuries should come to the realization that the Yami-Sengoku is stupid. For one thing, it's doomed to failure, irrespective of any interference by the Uesugi. The best that a clan like the Houjou could hope to achieve might be conquering Japan by sheer spiritual force at the expense of killing a large percentage of the population and enslaving most of the rest--because the modern Japanese are not going to have it. And even if this enslavement were accomplished, Japan would instantly earn a number of militarily more powerful international enemies, not least its 1.3-billion-citizen-having, nuclear-arsenal-holding old friend just to the west. The Houjou don't understand this, not because they aren't intelligent men but because their cultural context is outdated. Ujimasa thinks his biggest threat is Kagetora because Kagetora appears the most dangerous general in Sengoku terms. And though Ujimasa thinks he understands that the modern world is a more civilized place (and, thus, more suited to his strengths than the Sengoku), even he can't wrap his mind around the fact that, in modern Japan, Sengoku rules no longer apply. The Houjou think they know they're living in "the future"; after all, they know about business suits and industry and how to drive cars and what nuclear weapons are. But while they've acquired a truly impressive academic grasp of how to get around in the modern world, they don't have the lived experience to process this information on the level of deep cultural assumption.
A case in point is Ujiteru's attitude toward Naoe, whom he chiefly hates (at least prior to the mirror arc) because Naoe drove Saburou to his death at the Otate-no-Ran. For Ujiteru this wound is still new. And while he knows that Saburou and Naoe have been around for an additional "400 years," he can't grasp how long 400 years really is. Now, Naoe and Kagetora have their problems, good Lord knows, but the Otate-no-Ran is no longer one of them. It was in the beginning. Indeed, in the flashback in Volume 20, Kagetora tells Naoe that he considers himself a true onryou, that he has returned from the dead not primarily to protect Kagekatsu but to bring peace to his own followers by exorcising them rather than letting them linger on in misery as onryou. While this is an unusual attitude for a general in the Yami-Sengoku, it is certainly normative in being oriented around the circumstances of his original life and death. Naoe's concern for Kagekatsu's safety, likewise, springs directly from his initial life. But time evolves people, and as little as decades later, these issues feel far away. Onryou (generally) don't last that long: if they aren't destroyed or exorcised, they outgrow it, like siblings outgrowing their rivalry. The onryou who make up the vast majority of the Yami-Sengoku really are a bit like children compared to the Yasha-shuu. And they are very much out of their time, and by and large, doing their plucky best to be active agents in a world they do not comprehend.
So much for general onshou/onryou commentary. On to character analysis...
Ujimasa! I always knew he was cool, but I think I'm falling in love with him. [1] What a far cry he is here from the conniving "villain" the anime gives us. Here, Kuwabara spares no pains to fully explore his character: his emotional awkwardness, his high moral precepts, the difficult position he occupies as leader of his clan yet not really because he's really just a regent for his father. Ujimasa (like his little brother, Kagetora!) is unusual among onshou in that he is not very ambitious but more morally driven. He wants power not for himself but for his father. He views himself as an agent of his father's ascension (as Kagetora views himself as a servant of Kenshin), and he promotes that ascension, and his own concomitant rise to power, because he truly believes that his father is the best ruler for the Japanese people. We are told that, in his original life, he refused to submit to Hideyoshi, knowing that this decision meant his clan would be destroyed, because he did not respect Hideyoshi's regime and chose destruction before compromising his values. (This moral high ground, again, is eerily close to Kagetora's decision-making process throughout the novels.)
A conscientious and responsible man, Ujimasa cultivates his much remarked coldness out of love and regard for his clan, remaining aloof to forestall rumors of any conspiring with his brothers to seize power. The text suggests that the unusual unity of the Houjou brothers is owed, in part, to Ujimasa's careful maintenance of unobjectionable, even-handed relations among all family members. Like Kotarou, he keeps a cool demeanor, but while Kotarou is genuinely affected by logic and duty alone (for now), Ujimasa's calm facade hides a great deal of personal pain: of the loss of his wife, the destruction of his clan (under his leadership), and the lingering self-doubt that he was not meant to govern the Houjou and was, in fact, an inadequate replacement for his elder brother who died young.
The anime mentions Ujimasa's regarding Saburou as the ill-omened eighth son whose birth precipitated the eldest brother's death. Here, we see this idea strongly linked to Ujimasa's own fears of inadequacy: the ill of which Saburou is a supposed omen is nothing other than the ascension of Ujimasa himself. But we also see that Ujimasa's discomfort with Saburou stems from more than superstition. He doesn't trust Saburou, and he is right. While Ujiteru loves Saburou more, Ujimasa understands him better. Ujiteru assumes that Saburou has been coerced into serving Kenshin for 400 years. Ujimasa doubts 400 years of service can be won by coercion. He's right. Ujimasa always suspected that Saburou was not really "one of them" after returning from the Takeda. He remembers a moment when young Saburou wandered into Ujimasa's garden chasing a butterfly and, running into Ujimasa, looked terrified: who can blame him? But again, Ujimasa's right: Saburou didn't have the innate Houjou trust in his brother. Ujimasa doubts that Saburou will willingly return to the Houjou. Right again. Instead, he suspects that Saburou will become their principal enemy. Bingo.
If Ujimasa is the head of the Houjou, Ujiteru is its heart. He feels everything deeply: love, betrayal, indignation. He weeps over his fallen samurai and even hugs them (aren't they incorporeal?) in a scene reminiscent of Kagetora vowing not to abandon his own thirteen generals. Ujiteru is the soul of loyalty but loyal to too many things. His tragedy, which he articulates elegantly, is that he adores both Ujimasa and Saburou and cannot choose between them. Ujiteru blames himself for not reaching Kagetora in time to save him in the Otate-no-Ran. He had vowed to return to rescue his brother, but Kagetora died before he could keep his promise. (Hence the very personal Naoe hatred.) His dedication to Ujimasa is no less than to Saburou.
The two brothers' dynamic is beautifully illustrated in the assassination plot against Ujimasa. Ujiteru flies to his side to protect him. Ujimasa, not wanting the next in line to lead the Houjou to be killed along with himself, commands him to leave. Ujiteru ignores this command. Ujimasa ignores the fact that Ujiteru has ignored it. This very... flexible chain of command is, again, reminiscent of the Yasha-shuu, who not infrequently blithely disobey Kagetora's orders, secure in the knowledge that they follow him when it counts and that he knows this (which he usually does). The Houjou, thus, like the Uesugi, are a holographic team, capable of functioning as a single unit but also of functioning as individual divisions; they work together, yet each is an active agent capable of independent decision making. It's an extremely strong management model that serves both clans well until Ujimasa and Ujiteru finally clash over Saburou. Brotherhood unites the Houjou and destroys them.
Ujiteru is right that the brothers are inextricably tied together. They're family; they spring from the same root. Indeed, as I've intimated, Kagetora shares personality traits with both Ujimasa and Ujiteru. He has Ujimasa's gift for moral abstraction and Ujiteru's hyperactive emotional attachment to his family, friends, and colleagues. If Ujimasa tends to favors ends and Ujiteru to favor means, Kagetora skillfully negotiates both (indeed, volumes 21-40 appear to be one big, long, tangled negotiation between his duty to Japan and his love for Naoe). This may, in a nutshell, be what makes him such a phenomenal leader.
The lingering Houjou in Kagetora highlights the text's dialogic depth. He is not just Naoe's love interest; he is not just Uesugi. He is a person enmeshed in a complex array of relations with many other complex people. And here, in "Gunjou," we come across a piece of dialogic tour de force: the only person who knows about Saburou's rape (besides those who were present) becomes Ujimasa. It would be easy to make it Naoe and launch us into epic angst and vengeance. It would be easy to make it Ujiteru with fairly similar results. It would be too easy. Life--and psychological realism--is more complex than that. How very much it bears the weight of real life for Saburou to be raped in order to shame the older brother he isn't even close to. How ugly that the first person to see Saburou afterward, perhaps the only person to see him disheveled enough to know that something is seriously wrong, is the very person for whose sake that wrong was committed (and Saburou can probably conjecture this). How unfortunate that that person is, by nature and training, someone who will not pursue Saburou to find out what happened (as Ujiteru would), that their brief encounter sets the stage for 400 years of silence. Yet the revelation of Saburou's rape (400 years later) is one of Ujimasa's great humanizing moments. He is genuinely, viscerally horrified: not just because it shames his clan, not just because Saburou is his brother, not just because it was all done to hurt Ujimasa, but principally (I'd argue) because it is simply such an atrocity that Ujimasa's sense of human decency is nauseated. His calm shatters; he flies into a murderous rage, and the only thing I love him for more is remembering, later on, that day that Saburou came home in a mess and putting all the pieces together. He may not, as Ujiteru observes, have often shown Saburou his smile, but he cared enough to remember. He cares enough to keep ruminating on it after the revelation. Of course, he tells no one else. It wouldn't do any good. And thus, Ujimasa and Kagetora become the unlikeliest of partners in the most understandable of conspiracies: the family skeleton.
[1] A while ago, I was introducing my friend, R, to the anime, and she commented on how incongruous Ujimasa looks in full Buddhist monk regalia with his little granny glasses. She noted that he is the type of person to always look the part, but if anybody suggested he remove the glasses to better complete the effect, he would reply, "No, because it is important to see." I thought that summed him up perfectly.
