Hiroki Endo's Shorts - Platform (of love that can never be)

Aion

Aion

Time-Traveller
Last night/morning, I couldn't get to sleep. I just lay there because images of manga I'd read earlier kept jumping to the front of my mind. The manga in question is called 'Hiroki Endo's Tanpenshu' - the short stories of Mr. Endo.

Was it an image of a girl getting her head blown off as she tried to protect someone? No. Was it images from the story of a school girl's descent into insanity? No. Instead, the images in question were from the final (two chapter) story, called 'Platform' - a story of a love that was doomed from the start.

Imagine this scenario: as a child, you see a girl at your local train station holding the hand of her mother. You fall in love at first sight, not knowing the mother of the girl is the woman of your father - a yakuza boss. As a child, you hang out with and get to know this girl because of her mother's relationship with your father.

...But the girl's mother dies, leaving the care of her daughter to your father. Your father pays for her keep and, as she gets older, uses her for sex... meaning the daughter basically ended up replacing the mother.

As a result of this, your relationship with the girl sours. She, who once told you she didn't want to be like her mother and wanted to be equal to men, changes, and you're full of jealousy and anger yourself, which makes your relationship full of nothing but pain. You hate yourself for being too weak to do anything.

How would you deal with such a situation? Really, I can't imagine a much worse situation for someone young and in love - to have to deal with his father screwing the girl he loves two times a week. In the story, the lead doesn't know what to do, and he ends up watching as his father has sex with the girl, putting a (fake gun) to his father's head and asking, "Can you keep going with a gun at your head? You're yakuza, aren't you - a real man?" Then, when taken home by his brother, he can only cry.

Having been spoiled by the huge amount of childish manga/anime, where a hero usually saves the day and good wins over evil, I'm not used to seeing stories involving love leaving me feel so depressed. For a romantic, there wasn't a happy moment in the story. Even the sex scene with the lead and his love seemed wrong; her asking him to "**** her hard" rather than make love to her - trying to turn him more like his father... which she did, because after that he attempted to set up the murder of his father.

And the last scene, at the train station - where the lead first fell in love - did nothing to change my mood. There was no happy ever after. Instead, the lead decided to let her go live her life, away from him and his father. He recalled the time as a child she'd asked him to release the insect he'd captured in order to let it be free as he let her go, and then pondered if she would've stayed had he asked her to.

Endo is amazing. After reading his collection of shorts, I have to say that. It's very rare for anything to leave me feeling like this, and I have to tip my hat to him for pulling it off. However, you should never, EVER read anything done by him when you're in a good mood because, by the end, you'll feel like throwing yourself off a cliff.

I want to buy Tanpenshu, and I would do so if not for me needing to pay £8 x 2 for 200 page books. What a rip-off! Grrrrrr.
 
Yeah, read all that and only comment on the last sentence; about the price. :/

Let me put it another way: if I could get mint, as new copies, I'd pay £8 x2. I wouldn't be happy when the first two Eden books cost me half of what it'd cost to get Tanpenshi, but I'd do it. The final story is just too good not to own.

The thing is, TBD have the best price, and a 10% off code. With me having a ton of TBD orders, a record of damaged books and one TBD missing atm, I don't want to risk spending another £16 until I get some of my orders through the door. I could order from Amazin, but that'd cost more... and I still wouldn't know about the condition.

You can't say £8 is a fair price for a 200 page manga volume.
 
Aion said:
Yeah, read all that and only comment on the last sentence; about the price. :/
Click to expand...
Come on dude, I did at least read it. :p

I also for some reason hadn't looked into any of Endo's other stuff, but your post has made me decide to pick this up.
 
I've read some of Eden and It's an amazing manga. This Tanpenshu seems to be something else. Then, I went to TBD to order it and my credit card rejected the transation. must be fate telling me not to pick this one up =S
 
Eden's good but the story's all over the place. That, along with the glacially slow release schedule, made me lose interest. He's a fantastic artist, though, no question. There are some hugely disturbing scenes as well; he's another one that seems fond of depicting violence against women.

Regarding Tanpenshu, I'm never quite sure what Endo is trying to say. I get the impression that he's not entirely sure himself. Or maybe I'm just dense. In his Eden afterwords he always sounds as though he's on the verge of suicide.

Even the sex scene with the lead and his love seemed wrong; her asking him to "**** her hard" rather than make love to her
Click to expand...
I'm not sure what translation you read, but she doesn't say this in Dark Horse's edition. She says something like "A man is a thing that lives to **** a woman". It seems she wanted him to embrace his desires for some reason.
 
Regarding Tanpenshu, I'm never quite sure what Endo is trying to say. I get the impression that he's not entirely sure himself. Or maybe I'm just dense. In his Eden afterwords he always sounds as though he's on the verge of suicide.
Click to expand...

His messages/themes were pretty clear to me.

First story: A man changed his direction in life as a child because of a small thing; seeing a bird he saved killed by a crow. Until then, he'd let himself be bullied because he was the son of a whore, but then something clicked - he fought back. Eventually, he became a gangster, killing people and whatnot. However, after meeting a strange girl, who saved him after a hitman tried to off him, it ended up changing him; back to how he once was. (A story of change, in short.)

Second story: A high school girl, with no family because her mother and sister had died and her father never came home (he'd even left the care of her dying grandfather to her, as a 13-year-old), slowly edged towards insanity. The title - 'Maybe she's just a sweet girl?' (iirc) - alludes to her disgust with sex. With no-one to turn to, and her friend betraying her by taking the guy she was interested in, she eventually flips, going psycho. (A story about not fitting in with what's normal and insanity. Easy enough to relate to and understand.)

The third story: The last one aside, the most interesting of the lot. A uni play is being made about a serial killer, and the director puts parts of his casts' pasts into the play - turning it into a sort of therapy. One had her brother killed, another was raped and the director himself was beaten as a child.

It was unusual. Rarely do you see a relationship in a manga/anime where a guy hits a girl and it isn't a big deal. Endo presented it in a non-offensive way; a relationship where, like in the case of the play, the two replayed their pasts. I'd have liked to have seen more of it.

The fourth story: This is one I disliked the most, and the one that made me score the collection 8/10. The worrying thing is that it's supposed to sort of be a glimpse at Eden; it being the only sci-fi story included.

Two people are traveling around, one a school girl... as well as her "brother", in a small, round, head-sized machine. Randomly, it's revealed/shown that the girl was raped by her uncle, her "brother" recording it, and no more is said about it (hey, this girl was raped by her uncle - here's a look! Moving on...). Then there's a lot of sex between the lead and the girl... because her "brother" wanted the lead's seed in his sister. And, finally, after a lot of wandering around, it's revealed why there are cables everywhere - all that's left of the world is a small piece of land, held in the air somewow by cables.

It was ******* weird, and the only story I got zero out of. The message, with all the sex, was no doubt that, even in hellish situations, humans will have sex and breed; even if it means making a floating island sink to one side because of over-population. But the way it was presented, in a word, was ****.

The fifth story: With Endo himself as the main character, he reflects on his youth; how he wasn't able to confess to the girl he liked, or do cool things he wished he'd done. Now (in the story), as he nears 30, he wants to turn back the years; having sex with school girls, riding bikes, and being cool. The story ends amusingly; with Endo shouting out of his window, asking how much to a high school girl, and getting a surprised/angry reaction.

Not the best story, but Endo was honest... maybe a little too honest... and it was an easy read.

The sixth story: Covered it already; in my first post. Love that cannot ever be.

fabricatedlunatic said:
I'm not sure what translation you read, but she doesn't say this in Dark Horse's edition. She says something like "A man is a thing that lives to **** a woman". It seems she wanted him to embrace his desires for some reason.
Click to expand...

At first, I thought you were describing two different scenes. That's interesting, though - if the translations are different, it'd make for a better read than re-reading the same lines again. :)

In one scene - where she's standing behind him as he paints - she says how men are no more than power hungry creatures; that's why they desire, touch, abuse and rape women, calling that love, and she goes on to say she doesn't hate men like that, also adding that she likes using power herself (this point is linked into at the end.)

She wants him to give into his desires because humans are selfish creatures. He wasn't going anywhere; too afraid to do anything. So, she challenged him as a man by getting him to be more like his dad. She kept saying his eyes looked like his dad's eyes when jealous because he was holding himself back; not wanting to commit himself to any action.
 
Aion said:
In one scene - where she's standing behind him as he paints - she says how men are no more than power hungry creatures; that's why they desire, touch, abuse and rape women, calling that love, and she goes on to say she doesn't hate men like that, also adding that she likes using power herself (this point is linked into at the end.)
Click to expand...
She actually goes so far as to say that she finds men like that "adorable". Guh? Endo's stories are full of characters making cryptic statements. It annoys the crap out of me, but it does makes me think until my head hurts.

One telling piece of dialogue was near the end, when Saki said she might have been jealous of Takayuki's purity, of his ignorance. He was able to distance himself from what his father was doing, both in terms of his criminal activity and taking avantage of women, and took solace in painting. So was it all a game to Saki, just to prove a point? And what message was Endo trying to convey when he made it clear that Takayuki's father took bullets for her? There are so many layers of complexity.

Family, I guess, was the most prominent theme.
 
You have a good memory if you can quote something you read awhile back. I envy you, truly. My brain is useless.

It's hard to judge Saki (I forgot her name!) because not much of 'before' she started havng sex with the the lead's father was shown. The short scene at her mother's funeral, where she said she didn't want to be like her mother and be lower than men, suggested she changed. I saw the comments she made about his father to be proof she'd been tainted by him, and the fact she mentioned rape lead me to believe that maybe, just maybe, the lead's father had his way with her the first time without consent. I agree that it was hard to separate the attempts at angering the lead and her real feelings.

As for the conversation at the platform at the end, it linked into the scene I mentioned above - when Saki talked to the lead as he painted. During that scene, she said that even she - a woman - enjoyed using power. What she meant was, in order to make up for being powerless, she manipulated the feelings of the lead, who angered at the thought of his father having sex with her and her liking it. That was the only way she could express her own feelings; by 'bullying' the pure, unspoilt man who loved her.

As for the lead's dad taking eight bullets for Saki, it was mentioned to highlight that the lead had lost to his dad, no matter what he did. Even though he tried to have his dad killed to have Saki, it was too late - she'd been changed by him and was beyond his reach. His actions were, in the end, pointless since, if anything, he only managed to bring Saki and his father closer together.

What I didn't quite get was when the lead pointed a gun at her back at the end, later throwing the gun away. My only assumption is that, having given into his desires, he was torn between shooting her so that, if he couldn't have her, no-one else could. But I have no idea as to why he threw his gun into the river... maybe it was Endo's way of saying the lead had given up on everything - killing his father and his love?

If Platform had been longer, I honestly feel it would've been a masterpiece - a possible #1 manga. You know how much I love realistic romance, and the depth of Endo's characters - as you said - is amazing. In a fraction of the time others have, he was able to reach out to me, and many others.
 
I get the feeling that the conversation on the platform at the end is key to understanding what the story is about.

Saki said she wanted power to blame others for her problems, as that way she could avoid feeling sorry for herself. She wanted Takayuki to hurt her. Is this why she wanted to him to surrender to his desires, to become a man? So that instead of feeling jealousy of his innocence, she could have someone else to blame him for her predicament?

She also said that she wanted Takayuki to protect her. I think she hated how he remained on the fence for so long, aloof from everything, hence taunting him about how all he could dominate was his canvas. It could be that Takayuki's old man protecting Saki was meant to illustrate how Takayuki himself was powerless to do so. Argh, I don't know. The pointing the gun thing confused me as well, though you're probably right about the symbolic meaning of Takayuki throwing it into the river.
 
clipboard09q.jpg


Whether or not I'd ordered, it would've bugged me. £17.50 to Amazon or £14.50 to TBD with the 10% off code.

My face will be like this if they arrive in the conditon of GTO: TEY 1 and Suiko III 8-11, though not as cute:

clipboard04zu.jpg


fabricatedlunatic said:
She also said that she wanted Takayuki to protect her.
Click to expand...

In my translation, she said (at the end) that, even though she toyed with his emotions, she really wanted to snuggle up with him.

Here are some scans:




The rape mentions are important because I find it odd for her to twice mention it, with no sexual assualt being shown. Even the lead comments that he feels he's being judged by her because of his sex alone. Going on the hints put in, I'd gamble and say the lead's father started their 'relationship' that way, which makes their relationship even more complex. -_-

Also, while posting, I'll add that it's great how Endo puts in nudity and, because of the tone - in the last story at least - it didn't strike me as erotic. He's pretty good at this story-telling business.
 
Hmm. The Dark Horse translation is quite different in places. There's no mention of rape during the sex scene for a start. When asked what she wants power for, Saki replies "to blame others for my problems"--a much clearer response than "to let off steam".

And instead of "I was badly affected; but now you're okay", Takayuki says "I hurt you bad enough; I'm glad you're satisfied", which leaves a very different impression. I'm putting more faith in the professional translation.
 
I'm really enjoying reading this discussion. My husband has these books but I'd not bothered having a look; I think I'll queue them up once I finish my current reads. Short stories which get people thinking/debating are definitely something I want to check out.

R
 
Back
Top