Ambivalence (3)
Rustle, rustle. I could feel the audience shifting in their seats. There were probably two reasons for it.
One was that they had expected critical words to come out of my mouth.
The other was that even they did not romanticize the samurai.
"Could you explain that in a little more detail?" the reporter asked.
"Of course." I began my explanation. "First, I think this work succeeds in analyzing an old tradition—if not a culture itself—from a modern point of view."
The reporters scribbled furiously, and one of them even switched on a recorder.
"There is definitely a critical gaze toward the old culture of the samurai. It strips away the image created by countless manga and dramas and exposes the samurai's objective reality. But that is not all."
"If that's not all, then what is it?"
"There is something like... affection in the director's approach."
"Affection?"
"Yes. Affection." I went on. "In another word, you could call it pity."
Affection and pity.
The two emotions sat so close together that, at times, they were impossible to tell apart.
"If you've studied history, you'll agree that the Japanese regime of that era was changing rapidly and, at the same time, was deeply unstable. The fact that armed samurai played such an important role says as much. A country where force still mattered was never far from instability. And the samurai were a class that rose and fell in status, which only made things more uncertain. How anxious must they have been amid all that social upheaval?
"That is why I found the interview with the head of the samurai research institute so striking. For samurai of that period, the only thing they could cling to was bushido, the spirit of the samurai—in other words, an intangible 'spiritual culture.' And the more provocative that spiritual culture became, the more seductive it must have been. Seppuku, for example."
The theater went quiet.
"In the end, they were only people trying to survive in a chaotic world and leave behind some proof of their own worth, just like the rest of us. The same goes for the samurai leader who forgave a subordinate for vowing seppuku without actually doing it. It wasn't the man's life that mattered; it was enough that he had displayed bushido to the people around him. That alone says how desperately he clung to it. And the gaze this documentary casts on that side of them is... romantic. Because it understands those samurai." I had more to say, but I decided to stop there.
I hadn't been the only critic invited, after all. But then the director suddenly took the microphone. "You are Mok Hyunsun, is that right?"
"Ah, yes. I enjoyed the film, Director."
He was a stocky middle-aged man with a thick beard growing in bristly patches all over his face.
He stared at me with widened eyes and said, "I've shown this film to many people, but you're the first person who has interpreted it like that. Most people thought I was simply criticizing the samurai. Especially the part where the samurai leader forgives his subordinate—they said that showed how soft the samurai spirit had become."
"Interpretations can differ."
"That's true, of course—but your analysis matches my intentions almost exactly." Ah. I see. "I'm deeply surprised by that. You're not even Japanese, and yet you understood our culture so profoundly."
Nationality really didn't matter.
If anything, a film like this might reveal even more when seen through a foreigner's eyes. Then, all at once, the director asked, "May I ask how you found the other films at this festival?"
"...I thought this was a place to talk about Samurai," I said, pretending to be flustered.
Laughter rippled through the crowd.
The atmosphere lightened considerably.
"That is true, but I'm curious how you saw our Japanese films, Critic. If we don't ask you now, we may never get the chance to meet like this again, ha ha...." He laughed, perhaps a little embarrassed to ask the question at a screening for his own film. And perhaps I was glad he asked.
I had already felt something while watching the films I'd seen since yesterday.
And Samurai, too.
"Yesterday, I watched two films that left a strong impression on me: Lovers on the Bridge and Toy Box. Lovers on the Bridge is a film about a geisha in the Meiji era, and it vividly traces the life of a genius geisha. Toy Box is an animated film that follows the daily life of a hikikomori who still hasn't managed to enter society even at thirty."
People around me began whispering to one another.
It seemed those two works had been fairly popular at the festival in their own right.
"It would be difficult to explain every plot in detail, but taken together with Samurai, I thought there was one characteristic that runs through Japanese cinema."
"And what's that?" the director asked, as if bewitched.
He looked genuinely curious.
"Ambivalence."
Ambivalence.
The term refers to two contradictory feelings arising toward a single object.
To hate an overbearing parent and love them at the same time.
To feel anxious even when things are going too well and should, in theory, make you happy.
Of course, ambivalence is a basic human tendency, but it seemed more pronounced in Japanese cinema. "Take the very subject of the geisha, for instance. Lovers on the Bridge shows the culture of the geisha and the beauty of its art, but it gives nearly equal weight to the oppression those geisha endured. Their suffocating clothes, their shoes, even their habits of daily life—all of it was controlled. The irony is that even that oppression is made to look beautiful. Beauty and oppression. The geisha seems to contain both values in one body. Toy Box is the same. It lays bare the grotesque daily life of a hikikomori, but at the same time there is a gaze that worries over him and feels pity for him. In short, I would call it 'affectionate criticism.' Samurai belongs in the same context as Toy Box." I wrapped up the long explanation like this. "If someone asked me about Japanese cinema as an art form, I would answer with one word: ambivalence. It has an extraordinary talent for expressing that subtle, contradictory emotion."
The director, the reporters, and the audience all just looked at me.
They seemed to want me to say something more.
"That's all."
That was where I ended it.
I wondered if I had monopolized the microphone a little too much, but then clap, clap, clap. The director suddenly started applauding.
The others followed suit with a low round of applause. Clap-clap-clap-clap-clap-clap-clap-clap! It didn't feel like polite applause to me.
Most likely, they had genuinely resonated with what I said.
And sure enough, the director said, "Those are words worth remembering. When I made Samurai, I spent a great deal of time thinking about how to handle those opposing emotions within the work itself. I'm truly grateful that you understood that concern." He bowed deeply to me.
Samurai ended in a very good atmosphere.
People offered me friendly smiles, and many reporters requested interviews.
I turned them all down.
Then I waited for Yang Yeon-gyu's interview to finish and left the theater with him. "Why didn't you take any interviews? Everyone wanted to get a quote from Critic Mok." I smiled and shook my head. "I need to be careful with my words. Even if they're liking me like this today, the mood will change tomorrow once my article goes up in the webzine."
"...Ah."
"This popularity expires today." Of course, that kind of popularity only needed to last a single day.
The next day, Mok Hyunsun's review finally appeared in the webzine.
The title was Are You Warm? And as if answering that question, Mok Hyunsun's critique began with It is warm.
The essay set off a storm of comments on the webzine.
And so on. More than half of the responses came from people who refused to accept Mok Hyunsun's interpretation.
But some of them...
Meanwhile, the news had reached Gyeongseong Publishing as well.
And it had reached them through internet news. Mok Hyunsun's three seniors and the team leader were enjoying themselves as they looked at headlines like, "Mok Hyunsun, what are you causing over in Japan?"
"Heh heh heh... Japan still has a long way to go, doesn't it? If they can't even accept criticism like that."
"The guys who were bragging about having Nobel Prize winners are even worse. But I'm kind of curious what Mok Hyunsun actually wrote."
"It'll go up in Korean on Pyeong, won't it? I saw a translation someone posted, and the content was pretty shocking. I actually enjoyed reading Spring Dream a lot."
"Oh, the webzine traffic just exploded. Wow. Heh heh."
But then.
"Huh?"
Yang Ho-chan, who had been digging through the news in various ways, looked up in surprise. "Look at this. A U.S. article just ran a piece about Mok Hyunsun posting his reinterpretation of Spring Dream."
He showed everyone his phone.
There was a culture-page article from an American newspaper, and it had neatly translated the headline from the U.S. piece: Critic Mok Hyunsun's Essay Appears in an American Washington Paper.
"An American what?"
"Huh?"
"What are you talking about all of a sudden? Let me see."
The team leader snatched the phone and read the article.
It wasn't a major headline.
Strictly speaking, it was the sort of small item that could have been there or not there at all—something like a brief in the "Around the World" column if this were Korea. The gist was this: "(...) This absurd incident in Japan began because of a famous Korean critic's project of 'rereading the classics.' The innovative argument (...) This courageous yet well-made essay suggests the value of seeing literature already recognized by history in a 'new,' 'again,' and 'exact' way. This lesson, which a new generation should possess when interpreting literature, lands like a sharp rebuke to the rather outdated patriotism of Japanese readers and their devotion to Nobel Prize winners (...)"
The team leader set the phone down. "Well, this is turning into something pretty entertaining...."
But it wasn't the kind of situation anyone could laugh at.
"Won't the Japanese hate this even more?"
"What if people turn over the Pyeong booth?"
"Hisss—I'm getting a little worried. Let me text him."
Kim Ji-woon sent Mok Hyunsun a message.
After a few back-and-forth texts, he said, "They say they only sold Pyeong until yesterday. Apparently they already knew this was coming."
"Huh. So he had a plan all along? Tell him to watch his back."
"Yes, sir."
Kim Ji-woon sent another message, then looked up again.
"Ah."
"What's wrong?"
"Mok Hyunsun...."
Kim Ji-woon let out a hollow laugh, completely exasperated. "They say he left Tokyo. This morning, at dawn."