Karakuri Babble is a daily column by the editors of i360.com, usually on topics tangentially related to anime and cosplay.

In the past we have endorsed many things; in the future we shall support many others.

Sometimes the old memes are best. For example, 「K」 by BUMP OF CHICKEN is the story of a cat, and I've always considered it one of the saddest things I've ever seen.

Watch:



There are a bunch of things I like about it, but I think it's mostly in the fact that the cat dies in a way that defines him -- and, furthermore that it defines him as something different from what he was. This is how you should aspire to kill your characters, in ways that, beyond showing, effect their development.

Let me illustrate this point with an old favorite piece of text, from Mishima's The Decay of the Angel. A mouse that believes itself a cat encounters a real cat, and is aghast when the cat starts to eat it. It runs and drowns itself in a bucket of soapy water. The cat licks at the mouse's corpse, finds that the suds taste terrible, and leaves it floating in the bucket. The character telling this parable explains:

The mouse committed suicide to establish itself. It doesn't of course make the cat recognize it as a cat, and it didn't think when it killed itself that it would. But it was brave and perceptive and filled with self-respect. It saw that there are two parts to mouseness. First that it is a mouse in every physical detail. Second that it is, for a cat, worth eating. Those two. It has long ago given up in the first matter, but in the second there is still hope. It dies in front of the cat without being eaten, and it establishes itself as something that cats don't eat. . . . And so the suicide is a success.

The fact that the cat in 「K」 is trying to define someone else (the artist) makes it all the more poignant, of course.

The other main thing I like about it is that there's an ambiguity about what the cat's original name is. He believes it's one way and is buried under the other, and they never come out and say which the artist had in mind. I prefer to think that the cat was wrong, that he lived without knowing his true name, and that we as listeners to the song must bear witness in his stead.

words from chris, 2009-04-22 00:40:23, los angeles