'kwaidan' and /or the ghost of the eternally japanese

since i had promised myself no blogs for a while after my blog roll over the weekend, this one to break that vow.. to note the japanese ghost story ‘kwaidan’ told through a korean artists eyes -a story involving a faceless woman, a blind artist, a haunted lake and an army of ghosts in superb drawings and water color like renderings.. an ‘adult’ comic book it is with a sex scene thrown in to underline the point. it was so much of what i expected it to be and extremely satisfying as such.

but can the imagination of japan or korea or china or the ‘oriental’ in the movies and books that i have seen (kurosawa to tarantino) ever go beyond samurais in robes, mysterious spiritual forces and archaic codes of conduct that are followed with such great rigor. can a contemporary love story set in japan ever capture our imagination without it being couched in the rhetoric of the japanese conservatism or its strangeness to an outsiders eyes?

kausik says that tadao ando is famous in the west because his work is quintessentially ‘japanese’ in the way that the west would like to imagine japan. all tatami mat austere minimalism.

i wish i could also accept it as such and not fall into the trap of wanting to see beyond but be absolutely unable to break the caricature of a people that gives me such a sense of power over them.