Junkyard

14/5/2021

Disclaimer: This is a Mononoke fanfiction. It is rated T+ due to violence and horror.

What is Mononoke? No, I don't mean the Ghibli movie, Princess Mononoke.

Mononoke is a 12-episode anime featuring the above Medicine Seller who travels around Japan searching for mononoke to slay. However, to be able to slay a mononoke, he must first find its Form, Truth and Reason.

The anime contains many mature and confronting themes, and it is one of my top 3. It is fun to rewatch since the experimental art style is so detailed and beautiful, there's always something I might have missed.

Cluwmp. Fwuhmp. Cluwmp. Fwuhmp.

   A man in a white lab coat strolled down the streets of New York. The rain was coming down in soft sheets and the sky was ever the familiar grey even as an orange glow spread among the clouds. The man's name and identity hung on a plastic tag pinned to his chest. Doctor Michael Tosaka Williams.

   He just could not help attaching a Japanese middle name to complete his English identity. It gave him a sense of nationalism, if not an inkling of nostalgia.

   Fwuhmp. Cluwmp. Fwuhmp. Cluwmp.

   Speaking of, he still could not get used to the idea of rubber soles. He missed the resounding, measured sounds of his geta against timber floorboards or stone pavements. When it came time to move on, he had reluctantly traded for Western shoes in order to assimilate with the often-rugged environments he had to travel through. The shoes he was wearing now covered his entire feet in thick fabric, and the sounds they made when in contact with the ground was indistinct due to their tough rubber soles. Even if he still reminisced, he had been impressed with these inventions. They were a mixture of quality, personality and ingenuity in the use of materials.

   He stepped carefully around a large puddle. In the break between two roofs, rain pittered and pattered onto his hair.

   "Ai-yah," he clucked under his breath as he patted his head. He had forgotten to bring his umbrella and apparently so did many others around him. Not that they seemed to particularly care, more focused on their tiny handheld devices than the harmless droplets from the sky.

   It seemed many things had become smaller over the ages. Compartmentalised, modular, mobile – were the terms that had come to describe these new-age products.

   Cars, phones and televisions monopolised the world. They had become regular fixtures in any ordinary person's life, changing the way people work and entertain themselves over the past few centuries.

   On the other spectrum, there were also things that have grown increasingly: buildings extended towards and pierced through the heavens like thunder. The night skies and its stars are constantly outshone by unnatural lights that stay on untiringly in the city. Borders spanned entire continents and horizons broadened beyond a feudal lord's imagination. The sky is no longer the limit. To think that travelling from one part of a small island such as Japan to another point would take a month on a big ship! In this age, to get to America from Europe was merely a day on a narrow vehicle that soars the skies.

   Expansion and evolution paved the steps for cultures and systems to progress. Countries revised their regulations and surveillance: "Smoking is prohibited inside rooms", "Domestic violence is a serious crime that guarantees jail time", "It is unwise to talk to strangers" gradually forted the picture of a safer society. However, just because of this, free will and democracy flourished, traditional values were fading, and morality became a nuisance to pick apart. Humans had come to love the concept of "getting loose".