Revisiting CARDCAPTOR SAKURA Pt. II

All right, so I've finished all of the Cardcaptor Sakura manga! It was incredible. The more I read, the more I remembered how important Sakura was to me when I was younger. I've always loved witches, and any stories about witches, and Cardcaptor is a classic. Sakura as a character is naive and smart, embraces her emotions, and uses them to be strong, without letting them cloud her judgment. I would say a central theme of the manga is coming to terms with your emotions and your relationships, and embracing them as strengths. It is a manga for young girls, so this theme is not surprising. 

Though, what is surprising, as I talked about in my last post about Cardcaptor Sakura, is the amount of underage student-teacher relationships. Holy shit are there so many. By the end of Cardcaptor we have:

1. Fujitaka and Nadeshiko: Sakura's parents. Fujitaka was Nadeshiko's teacher. When they married, she was 16 and he was 25.
2. Rika and Terada:  Rika is Sakura's age, aka 10 years old, and Terada is their teacher. He gives her an engagement ring.
3. Toya and Kaho: Toya is Sakura's 15 year-old brother. He had a relationship with Kaho while she was a substitute for his class in his first year of high school.
4. Eriol and Kaho: Eriol is a transfer student to Tomoeda Elementary, and at the end, he and Kaho confess their love to each other. Eriol is not a typical 10 year-old, but either way it's creepy.

A lot of manga tend to have very questionable relationships, but it is really pronounced in Cardcaptor Sakura. This is still an important manga to me, and a classic, even though the mythology is kind of ridiculous, and the arc of the whole series is very contrived. This is a series to read to find joy in the ridiculousness of it all.

Revisiting CARDCAPTOR SAKURA

Can you tell I took photo this with my
phone considering the terrible dimensions
of this photo? Why would anyone think
these dimensions looks good?

For the past few months, I feel as if I've been having a renaissance of sorts in terms of my interests. I've been listening to all of my middle school and high school music, full of angst and screaming and overly earnest, potentially creepy lyrics. It's been bringing me pure joy to listen to such songs as Paramore's 'That's What You Get', The Spill Canvas' 'This is For Keeps', and Alexisonfire's '.44 Caliber Love Letter'. Aside from music, I've been revisiting some of the manga I used to read, and anime I used to watch. I recently decided to pick up the Cardcaptor Sakura manga from Kinokuniya, since I've only ever watched the anime, and wanted to try out the manga. I picked up a beautiful omnibus edition (meaning there are four volumes of the manga in one book), in order to test whether or not I'd still enjoy the series, because in revisiting anything beloved from your formative years, there is the large possibility that you will not enjoy it, and maybe even hate it - I'm looking at you Halloweentown, you let me down! 

I am so happy to say that reading Cardcaptor Sakura was awesome. I felt joy the whole way through, and have subsequently bought the next three omnibus editions in order to finish the series ... woops. 

So for those who have maybe never heard of Cardcaptor Sakura, it's about a girl named Kinomoto Sakura. She's in the 4th grade, and secretly has magical powers. Sakura's mission is to collect the Clow Cards, magical cards that each have abilities, originally created by the sorcerer Clow Reed. Cerberus, a magical beast and guardian of the Clow Cards, helps Sakura to collect the cards after they escaped when Sakura accidentally set them free when she found the book holding all of them. 

As I said, this series did not disappoint. It was joyous to read, and I felt so proud of my younger self for loving this series. Sakura is a really great character. Though she's young, she's powerful, and the vast spectrum of adolescent emotions are part of her strength. Another reason this series did not disappoint was because of the surprising adult content I did not remember at all from the series. Now, I watched the anime of this in my first year of high school, so I wasn't totally naive, but I feel like I would have remembered some of the scandalous aspects of this manga. For example:

1. There is an alarming presence of student-teacher romantic relationships. For example, Sakura's parents married when her mom, Nadeshiko, was only 16, and her dad, Fujitaka was 25. Fujitaka was Nadeshiko's teacher! Like, maybe that could be okay? But not really ... The truly alarming thing is ....
2. ... the relationship between Sakura's classmate Rika and their teacher!!! Who legit gives Rika an engagement ring ... whaaaaaaaaaaaaat. This is a ten year-old and at least an early twenties dude. 

From what I've read so far, these relationships aren't a big deal in the story. The only time it's questioned is when we meet Tomoyo's mom, Sonomi, who was Nadeshiko's cousin, and completely disapproved of the marriage, but mostly because she was in love with Nadeshiko and wanted to be with her. So the relationships in this manga get a little complicated ...

More complicated, is that everyone is in love with someone who is in love with someone else. Which is really par for the course for this kind of manga. What is a pleasant surprise in the manga is the emphasis on queer love and relationships. We have the one case of Sonomi being in love with Nadeshiko. And Sakura's older brother, Toya, is in love with his best friend Yukito, who's the guy that Sakura is in love with. And Tomoyo is in love with Sakura, in much the same way her mom was in love with Nadeshiko - which is another questionable aspect of the manga. I could make a chart of who is in love with who, and who ends up with who. Let me say now, if Toya and Yukito don't end up together I'll be pissed, but I think they will, if only for the reason that Sakura is simply too young for Yukito, and he clearly views her as an amusing younger sister. Besides, Sakura has another love interest, whom I do remember, Syaoron Li. Li is kind of her competition in collecting the Clow Cards, and is thankfully her age. 

Please let me know if you've ever read/watched Cardcaptor Sakura, and your thoughts! I'm so happy I'm revisiting this series, and am fascinated to be reading this series as an adult, and much more aware of what is actually going on in the series. I'm also happy to just be reading manga again. It's been years, and I want to have intelligent conversations about them because I think they deserve them. My reading contains multitudes!

Interesting or Stupid/Problematic: Narration in REVOLUTIONARY ROAD

The nonexistence of the American Dream, the crippling loneliness of existence, the crippling conformity of the suburbs. All things associated with what is supposed to make the novel Revolutionary Road an American classic ... I'm half-convinced. 

Revolutionary Road is about April and Frank Wheeler, a young couple who have reluctantly settled down in the suburbs of Connecticut, despite dreams of traveling, and living a bohemian lifestyle. The book explores their extremely flawed relationship, and eventual end of their marriage. What really captivated me about this novel was the amount of acting in the novel, how each character in the novel is attempting to perform and fulfill a role they feel they are supposed to be playing, and in attempting to live up to those roles, no character can really seem to know who another character is, there is no real communication, no real acknowledgement of anyone's humanity. With April and Frank, they are desperately trying to play the roles of wife and husband, and live up to the expectations of femininity and masculinity. The novel is especially preoccupied with delusions of masculinity, and conveys how both men and women play into illusory ideas of what men and women are supposed to be like. For example, the axis of the novel is when April convinces Frank that what they really need is to move to Paris in order to finally live the life they were meant to. One way in which she convinces him is to say that he needs to leave his mindless job, which he got to support their family, and move to Paris so that he can finally have the time to find himself and his ultimate purpose in life. Frank is not so convinced because he has no 'definite, measurable talent' to be successful in Paris, but April says, 'I don't care if you decide after five years that what you really want is to be a bricklayer or a mechanic or a merchant seamen ... it's your very essence that's being stifled here. It's what you are that's being denied and denied in this kind of life' (121). Frank then asks April what is it that he is, and says, 'You're the most valuable and wonderful thing in the world. You're a man' (121). And of course after this, Frank gives in, he feels as if he's had a victory, and he becomes excited. This moment is so ridiculously absurd, which makes it a perfect example of the toxic masculinity the novel conveys. In this moment, too, it does seem like April is really laying it on thick to convince Frank to drop everything and move to Paris, which means there is without a doubt a lot of self-interest here, and that she knows how to play to the right instincts to convince Frank. 

Aside from great moments like the one I mentioned above, the novel still does not go far enough to make these moments stick the landing, and arrive at a place where, as readers, we can put aside the expectations of masculinity and femininity that are actually very harmful to relationships, and rebuild. I am not convinced for a simple reason: we barely get any of April's point of view. I would say about 80% of the novel is narrated by Frank, 10% by another character Shep, 8% by an omniscient narrator, and 2% by April. Honestly, what the fuck is up with that? In a novel that is about two people and their inability to connect, about, according to Richard Yates himself, the fact that 'human beings are inescapably alone,' why are we offered so little of April's perspective? Is it that the only way to convey how inescapably alone human beings are is by only offering one perspective in a relationship? Does barring April's point of view until there are only 30 pages left, truly, truly convey their estrangement and disconnect, or does it make her a vague figure? And if it was purposeful to make her a vague figure to convey that disconnect, would it not also be powerful to have more of her narration, to make Frank a vague figure to her? And when we finally get a glimpse into her perspective, we get a flashback of her absentee father visiting on her birthday, thus automatically adding a distinct 'daddy issues' flavor to the novel, which no one ever needs. This all seems like a glaring oversight to me. What could potentially be an interesting point about human beings as fundamentally alone and unable to know each other, comes across as a distinct indifference to April's perspective, and ultimately, indifference to the consequences of toxic masculinity on women. So what ends up happening is a half-assed critique of all of those things I listed way back in the first paragraph of this post. The novel doesn't go far enough. Especially with theme of acting, and these roles of masculinity and femininity. 

That's all there is folks.

NORTH & SOUTH (BBC 2004)

LISTEN UP. Watch the 2004 BBC version of North & South RIGHT. NOW. It is incredible, and romantic, and political, and romantic, and EVERYTHING. 

North & South is based on the novel of the same name by Elizabeth Gaskell, an underappreciated, oft forgotten Victorian author. Charles Dickens published many of her works through his journal Household Words. Gaskell was well-known in her time, though her works were considered merely to be 'women's fiction' aka light, stupid, fun, and not at all serious, complex literature. Gaskell is, of course, an incredible author, and her works contain complex themes of class, tradition vs. modernity, and the role of women. Gaskell generally spends her time destroying stereotypes, and it's awesome. North & South is a pretty great encapsulation of those themes.

North & South is about Margaret Hale, a young woman from the countryside in South England, who is forced to move to the Milton, a fictional town in North England. Milton is an industrial town, in which many of its citizens live in poverty, and work in mills. Margaret meets John Thornton, a master of one of the mills. Margaret is compassionate and opinionated. Mr. Thornton is self-serious and brash. You might be able to guess just from the juxtaposition of those characteristics what happens next. [SPOILERS NOT REALLY] They fall in love, and their romance is so beautiful and moving to watch on-screen. Everything else in the show is pretty good, too, but I honestly cannot get over them as a couple. I've been rewatching clips of them together, and listening to this beautiful song on repeat which plays at the very end of the series:

I could say a million other things about this series, and its competency as an adaptation, but all I can say at the moment is that Margaret Hale and John Thornton are my new OTP, and they are beautiful, and you should watch this series. I have been bursting with emotion over these two for the past 24 hours since watching it. Also, I mean, this is Richard Armitage as Mr. Thornton:

COME ON. 

Quick Chat: SOMEONE AT A DISTANCE

You know when you go into a book really knowing nothing about the plot, or the tone, or have any idea about what kind of book it will be, and then as you begin reading the characters seem as if they're falling into certain roles, and if those roles are what you think they are, then the novel will be a particular kind of story, and you don't want it to be that particular kind of story, because then some of the characters whom you have an affection toward will not end up so well, and the one character that you feel might be the interloper, will actually unravel and smash everything good and pure in the world, and as the reader you'll end up feeling stressed and emotionally mashed up by the end of the book? Yeah that is Someone at a Distance by Dorothy Whipple. I mean that in the best way possible because it is a seriously fantastically written book, but as I began to read the novel there were so many small indicators that the novel would be much more than a beautifully written diversion, which I did not want to admit.

Please note that this is another beautiful edition from Persephone Books.

1/3 of the way through the novel, one of the main characters revealed herself to be evil, terrible, and ready to break up a marriage. That character is Louise Lanier. She is a from a small village in France called Amigny. Louise is desperate to get out. She thinks everyone and everything there is provincial and dull. One way in which she does this is by answering an ad placed by Old Mrs. North, a wealthy aging widowed matriarch looking for companionship. Louise goes to stay with Old Mrs. North in her estate in the country. While there, Louise meets Old Mrs. North's youngest son, Avery, his wife, Ellen, and their teenaged children Hugh and Anne. They make up the main cast of characters.

Louise believes the entire North family is foolish, because they are too rich and too happy. Now for the first part of the novel, she is mostly harmless, or at least I wanted her to be, but the she said something that is a guaranteed sign of her evil nature. In reference to the famous novel by Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary, Louise notes,

It was a book she knew by heart. The only character in literature for whom she felt a profound sympathy, with whom she felt an affinity even, was Emma Bovary. No one, she said to herself, understands better than I do why she did as she did. It was the excruciating boredom of provincial life (132). 

Emma Bovary is a notorious character in literature. No doubt she is an amazing character, extremely well-written and fully-realized. I love her. I love the novel. But she is a terrible person. And the novel is basically her being a terrible person, and using things such as 'the boredom of provincial life' as an excuse to do bad things. So the fact that Louise seems to completely empathize with her is a serious warning sign. After reading that, I froze and said to myself, 'Nooooooooooooo.' From that point on, I was overwhelmed with a feeling of dread, of just waiting to see how exactly Louise would do her damage. And she does all right. The rest of the novel is watching the North family unravel in slow motion, in which Louise is the main catalyst. It is a beautifully written trainwreck, and I love this novel. I just won't have the emotional faculties to re-read it any time soon.

The Lack and Abundance of ONIONS AND CUCUMBERS AND PLUMS

Onions and Cucumbers and Plums is one of those books that is like a one-in-a-million book. One of those books that so few people have read - my review on Goodreads is one of two - that there is no real scholarship on, and you just think, why have I been chosen by the Book Fates to read this? I say that because I loved this book, but in many ways, I am not the target audience for this book, there is nothing I can contribute to its legacy or subject matter, because its experiences are not mine, though I can relate here and there, and can touch the beauty of the poems. In something as intimate and personal as poetry, I want to find myself in them more so than novels, though that is not the ultimate aim of reading poetry. It is an experience, then, to read a collection like this and be so far removed from its origins and heartaches and dreams. All of this is especially important to recognize with this book, because it is partly about the loss of meaning, the loss of culture, the loss of language. Can we get to a point where something in inscrutable?

This book is a collection of poems by Jewish poets that have been translated from the original Yiddish. All of the poems were written in the twentieth century, and were translated by Sara Zweig Betsky for her Masters thesis that she was getting during WWII. She did it in reaction to the war, because she felt she could do nothing else but try and preserve something that was being destroyed. The Yiddish language, once spoken all over Eastern Europe, is a language largely lost - few speak it and study it. Partly lost because so many Jews killed in the Holocaust spoke Yiddish, and partly lost because of assimilation in the aftermath. The poems in this collection reflect the language and experiences that are largely gone. When we have books in translation, we know there is something missing. Not everything can be translated and saved, there is always a gap in understanding, but my profound misunderstanding contributed to my loving this book. There is a comfort in being the other, when it means that I can hear the stories of those I would not necessarily have ever heard before.

An example of a poem that I appreciated more because of the distance I felt from it is 'In Soft Moss, Muted Steps' by David Einhorn:

In soft moss, muted steps,
a whole week of Sabbath rest. 

You light candles every night --
your face in rosy light. 

Between the green pine tree boughs
the blue of God's blue roof top shows. 

There too someone lights Sabbath tapers --
on your face blue shadows vapor. 

So we sit, keeping watch,
waiting for a wonder night. 

Through the forest a rustle goes,
the sky splits apart and glows. 

In soft moss, muted steps,
a whole week of Sabbath rest. 

You light candles every night --
your face in rosy light.

With this poem, we see Einhorn applying the ritual of lighting candles on the Sabbath to the love he has for a woman, to her lighting candles everyday. Her daily candle-lighting is as the Sabbath rest to him. There is an intimacy and holiness to this love that is mirrored in the meaning of the Sabbath. As I'm not Jewish, I don't have this kind of connection to the idea of 'rest,' but this lack of understanding helps me feel the desire for connection in the poem, because I too have this desire to understand and connect as I read the poem.

There are a lot of gems in this collection. Since this collection is a bit hard to find, I would suggest seeking out some of these poets from the collection that were some of my favorites: J. Glatstein, Kadie Molodowsky, and Itzik Manger.

August Books

Here we are again: another month, the summer rolls on, a heat wave is breaking over New York City, I am sweating all day, and my only solace is to gaze upon the beauty of books. And with that, here are the books I bought in the month of August.

All of the books.

Books by women of color.

Books by women.

Books by white dudes.