Currently reading The Vision of the Anointed by Thomas Sowell and the book I finished before it was Knellers Happy Campers by Edgar Kenet which is a short story that was adapted into a movie in like 06 called Wristcutters about a guy who kills himself and goes to an afterlife for all the people who committed suicide. I learned it was based on the short story so I found it for cheap and read it
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Was reading Welcome to the NHK again the other day, but had to stop when I realized I have read it so much that I was preemptively recalling lines due to soft memorizing the book. Because something like 200 reads will do that to you.
My last prior was earlier this year (I get too caught up reading Manga to do text readings regularly) was the good ol' classic Lolita. Everytime I read it I catch another little tell about how deceptively framed the entire story is. Its really such a perfect teaching tool for how someone can craft a narrative and manipulate people into thinking something absurd and unbelievable is reality, that when you get the twist revealed (or don't fall for it in the first place) you can go back and find dozens of questions you didn't ask before.
I have Lolita but haven’t read it yet. I saw the movie a while back. What is welcome to MHK about?
The Lolita movies aren't nearly as good because the deceit is a lot harder to hide when you can visually see the events.
Welcome to the NHK is a modern classic Japanese light novel (though it lacks basically all the cliche common to those beyond how it was printed) about the literal garbage human Satou. He lives off his parents in a one room apartment, having dropped out of school and being unable to work to extreme anxiety/agoraphobia. His life is basically completely empty and worthless, to the point where he sometimes will wake up somedays and stare at the ceiling until he goes back to bed hours later. He has no plans or future, and without the intervention of the supporting character would just have meandered until he got evicted and then died as he openly states.
The plot involves the odd girl Misaki trying to take on the task of "curing" his hikkikomori problem, through absurd manners that he barely takes seriously and uses as something to get through his boredom. There is also the subplot of his neighbor trying to create an indie VN through sheer force of rage and hatred of normies, showing a different form of the same broken character who is the "hot" (angry) instead of the "cold" (emotionless).
Its got that classic Japanese apathetic detachment in its writing style and encompasses the lost and broken nature of a lot of young men who basically lose any motivation to escape their spiral, chronicling the self defeating nature they build up that keeps them trapped.
It has a manga and anime adaptation, which are fine but lose a lot of the power of it through both expansion and censorship. The novel shows how easily someone like Satou can fall into a pit of both drugs and lolicon obsession (its Japan), and both are a constant demon hanging over him. The manga cuts out most of the drugs and treats the loli thing as a funny one off thing, just like it does MMOs and MLM scams. Whereas the anime cuts all the drugs and recontextualizes basically everything as a funny romcom with sad moments.