This morning, I observed a visual hallucination of a woman lying beside me, immediately decayed from one of her eyes and disappeared during waking up. It is not so rare to observe a visual hallucination, due to disordered work of my brain during a moment of waking up.
On December the 30th 2019, I watched an animation movie “In This Corner (and Other Corners) of the World”. It is an extended version of the movie I watched previously, “In This Corner of the World”. It is a collection of varieties of episode in Kure and Hiroshima cities, Japan, mainly during the World War II period. The number of episodes involved is increased, especially related to the heroine Suzu, her husband, and a woman, which depict how a man would be regarded by women.
The story vividly portrays what would happen when a normal life is contaminated by battleground episodes. The music also expresses a gradual transition from harmony to dissonance, a characteristic of modern compositions. Although the story is outlined by some sorts of magic realism, sound effects of machine-gun fires or bomb explosion are sudden, realistic, and instantaneous, not like avoiding the orbit of a bullet in slow motion movie. This direction brings the audience back to the reality. I also liked an insertion a humming by Lesser Cuckoo (Cuculus poliocephalus). There are quite a lot of episodes concerned with this bird species (https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E3%83%9B%E3%83%88%E3%83%88%E3%82%AE%E3%82%B9).
It is remarkable that “an ordinary life” explained in this story is for some aspects also true for nowadays, but for the other aspects it is not. What the people think “ordinary” largely depends on the cultural background people are/were embraced. For example, although the tragic notes emerged after succession of comical episodes, the heroine Suzu not so quite frequently expressed her feeling to attract people. People let the flow go whatever happened, not so much with the expression of emotion. This is very traditional Japanese culture, not like Western. The movie integrated all these lines for expression in excellent ways. This extended version surely is a milestone of the movie that records a culture in a certain historic stage.
