Preview of New Lore Document (And my own extrapolations on it!)👀
To be discussed at length in yet another Youtube interview Director Nakamura and producer Shoji to be released this Saturday!
Transcript and Google auto translations of the doc, as well as my thoughts are below the cut. @sarahwatchesthings This might be an interesting one for you to sink your teeth into!
Kai Sequel Idea Memo
3) The Peak of the Collected Self
[The seat from which all things are born, the seat to which all things return. The seat of the origin, which has been expressed as "God" by various religions since ancient times.
Omniscience resides there, and it is the very thing that many saints have tried to touch and approach while living in the "duplicate world" through "meditation" and other practices.
It is what psychologist Jung calls the "collective unconscious," the "Akashic Records" that prophets access, and is also called "Hannya," the wisdom of the other shore in Buddhism.
Time is also folded in, so everything from the beginning to the end of the universe is there.
Knowing "the self" is "enlightenment" for humans, and has the same meaning as "clearing one's mind and seeing one's true nature" in Buddhism.
There is a concept of depth that measures the distance from the world of reflection (in reality there is no such thing as distance, but it is referred to as such for convenience and clarity), and it is counted as the first karma, the second karma (ichigoume, nigoume).
The more the number, the deeper one is sunk into karma, which would be like being deeply dead and in a more decentralized state in human terms (the normal state). When a person approaches death, they embark on a journey that slowly sinks them into the self.
🧠My Thoughts
So we finally get some much-needed context as what this realm of Shuuga (蒐我) is like. As a refresher, the previously published lore document says that the medicine seller's headquarters, called the Jyu-Yoku (じゅうよく) resides unevenly between the human world and this Shuuga in a state of perpetual non-existence and existence– Schrödinger's cat is a rather apt metaphor for it.
Based on my (rather sleep deprived) ramblings about the Asian philosophy of the universe which the hexagram paradigm resides in, I believe that Shuuga is part of the broader realm of Mukyoku (無極) which is the primordial zero which all of existence originates from.
From here, I form another hypothesis. Kusuriuri stated in the Umibozu arc that he fears is (according to fan subtitles) "the knowledge that the edge of this world exists without Form, Truth, or Regret." Whether that describes the Shuuga or Mukyoku, I believe this may be a reason why he may be reluctant to make trips to the Jyu-Yoku headquarters.
His journeys in the human world are always driven by the pursuit of knowledge to purify Mononoke from that realm. In a place like Shuuga, where all of existence and non existence and time coalesce into pure omniscience, his purpose for existing, and thus his physical form, would be utterly eradicated.
So he is very human in that he wants to keep his individuality and not become just one small drop in the collective unconsciousness and/or hivemind that I'm beginning to think the Jyu-Yoku "headquarters" is a manifestation of.
There are probably hundreds of other entities similar to medicine sellers residing there, but only the ones who earn the right to wield one of the 64 exorcism swords have the privilege of getting personhood and freedom to roam the mortal realm.
But even then, only a handful of these swords are "on duty" at a time depending on the state of the world. I bet becoming a wielder of one of the 8 the powerful trigram swords is a much coveted position, because they are the most likely weapons to be deployed into the human world, and thus the key to freedom from the Jyu-Yoku.
In the transformation sequences, we see Hyper and Kusu exist in a strange pocket dimension between the grounded human world and fantastical mononoke domain. Thus, I believe the key to entering and exiting the Jyu-Yoku's liminal space is the exorcism sword (though I imagine clever entities that know what to look for can become a stowaways/hitchhikers in the brief window of time when that gateway's opened).
Thus, the existence of all medicine sellers is rather contradictory. While they seek knowledge to eradicate mononoke from the world, their existence in the human realm simultaneously confirms that they are actively running away from an enlightenment which they can easily access should they return to Jyu-Yoku.
This level of enlightenment is embodied by the exorcism sword - how else can it know when to clank its teeth when a medicine seller correctly deduces a Form, Truth, or Regret?
Medicine sellers are the walking embodiments of the individual valuing their sense of self over the more efficient collective. Why else would you do something as impractical as picking off one mononoke at a time, when you can effectively exorcise the lot of them from Jyu-Yoku?
Let's consider this from a different perspective. In the Jyu-Yoku, I imagine it is all-too-easy to fall into the trap of looking at the "bigger picture" and let the "lesser" issues of insignificant individuals fall on the wayside.
Those who become medicine sellers feel compassion for the entities that fall below the notice of the Jyu-Yoku. Although there are much bigger forces at play in the universe, these "trivial" pockets of suffering, left unchecked, can grow into something much more dangerous: mononoke.
If the entire universe is represented by the human body, the Jyu-Yoku could be considered the immune system. It works with the intricate internal workings of the body which goes through the endless cycle of cell death and regeneration. In theory, it should be self-sustaining.
The medicine sellers, by comparison, are quite literally that: the peddlers of medicine that the body consumes or uses to expedite the healing of superficial injuries or illnesses that with time, the Jyu-Yoku could have eventually taken care of.
Or perhaps a better metaphor for the Medicine Seller is vaccines - they collect knowledge of the pathogens (the mononoke) which are rendered mostly inert (purification via exorcism sword) to train the body (Jyu-Yoku) how to better combat it. And like vaccination development in the real world, it's a never ending task ensuring that it is capable combating the evolving sicknesses of the world.
Anyways, thank you for attending yet another one of my Mononoke TED talks!
僕が最近翻訳の難しさを感じたのはアニメ『葬送のフリーレン』の「葬送の」の訳だ。
日本人からしたらその意味を完全に理解しておらずともなんとなく字面でその曖昧なニュアンスが理解できるが、そのニュアンスを完全に翻訳するのは難しい。たとえばタイトルを英語で直訳したら「Frieren of the funeral」になるが、これはいってみれば「お葬式のフリーレン」であり、感覚的にはダサくなってしまう。
英語版タイトルは直訳ではなく作品のテーマを優先し「Frieren :Beyond Journey’s End」、「フリーレン:旅の終わりの先」となっている。一方、作品に登場する魔族たちがフリーレンのことを指して「葬送のフリーレン」という時は、Frieren the Slayerと訳されている。こっちはこっちで葬送のニュアンスは消えてしまっているので、なかなか難しいところだ。たとえニュアンスが失われても直訳で簡潔にか、より正確にニュアンスを優先して長くか。翻訳家は常に難しい選択を迫られる。