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"I wished to become a great poet, yet I never sought a master’s guidance, nor did I engage with fellow poets to refine my craft. At the same time, I could not bring myself to associate with common folk either—I found it unbearable.

Both tendencies stemmed from the same source: my cowardly pride and my overbearing sense of shame.

I feared that I was no true jewel, and so I refused to submit myself to the grinding stone of effort.

Yet at the same time, I half-believed that I was a gem, and so I could not bring myself to mingle with ordinary pebbles.

And so I drifted further from society, isolating myself from others, feeding my frustrations and resentments, allowing my own cowardly pride to grow ever fatter."

- The Moon Over the Mountain by Atsushi Nakajima

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"Then I made an utterly unpremeditated slip of the tongue, one so comic, so idiotic that it all but defies description. I said, "I'm going somewhere where there aren't any women."'

-No Longer Human by Osamu Dazai

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When life itself seems lunatic, who knows where madness lies? Perhaps to be too practical is madness. To surrender dreams — this may be madness. Too much sanity may be madness — and maddest of all: to see life as it is, and not as it should be!

Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

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Kōji Yakusho as Shohei Sugiyama in the Shall We Dance ? movie.

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“As long as I can make them laugh, it doesn’t matter how, I’ll be alright. If I succeed in that, the human beings probably won’t mind it too much if I remain outside their lives. The one thing I must avoid is becoming offensive in their eyes: I shall be nothing, the wind, the sky.” - No Longer Human by Osamu Dazai

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“The thought is that the entire work is sustained by a forward-moving drive epitomized in that key word introduced in the “Prologue in Heaven”: striving (Streben).  Faust’s character consists of just this: that he incessantly reaches beyond the satisfactions of the present moment, that he shakes off inherited structures of thought and morality, that his every accomplishment is merely the platform for the next undertaking.” - Introduction to Faust

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一生懸命 (is-shō-ken-mei) "to do something to the utmost of one's ability"

一生懸命 (is-shou-ken-mei) is usually translated as something like “with utmost effort”.

The kanji are:

一 = one

生 = life

懸 = depends (amongst other meanings...)

命 = fate

A more literal translation might be: “doing something as if your life depends on it”.

Fun fact, 一生懸命 is actually a 四字熟語 (yo-ji-juku-go), or 4-character idiom!

This is a special kind of idiomatic phrase, made of 4 kanji as the name suggests.

There are thousands of these in Japanese and they often contain a small life lesson or moral message, similar to English sayings such as “you reap what you sow” and “the early bird gets the worm”.

However 一生懸命 (is-shou-ken-mei) is so common in daily conversation that it’s presented in Japanese language textbooks as just a normal adjective. I'd been studying Japanese for ages by the time I realised that it was actually a 四字熟語 4-character idiom.

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Singin' in the Rain - Gene Kelly

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Utagawa Kuniyoshi (1798-1861), Yoshitsune and Benkei on Gojo Bridge, ca. 1839-1840. Japanese color woodblock diptych, 37.8 x 51 cm. Photo: Egenolf Gallery Japanese Prints.

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"Baldwin sides with Bukowski and argues that the supreme animating force of the writer is the irrepressible impossibility of not-writing:

Something that irritates you and won’t let you go. That’s the anguish of it. Do this book, or die. You have to go through that. Talent is insignificant. I know a lot of talented ruins. Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck, but most of all, endurance.

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Crane Feathers, a Russian puppet film from 1977, is based on a Japanese folktale known as Tsuru no Ongaeshi. In the tale, an elderly man rescues an injured crane, who returns in the form of a young woman to repay the man and his wife. She looks after them, and weaves a beautiful cloth that sells for good money. She is adopted by the couple and they live happily until, in this version of the tale, the couple is approached by a wealthy man demanding another high quality cloth. The girl pleads with them, saying she cannot weave another, but the man becomes very angry and forces them to comply. The girl goes to weave and, after a while, the impatient visitor throws open the door to discover a crane plucking its own bloody feathers to make the cloth. The girl quickly transforms back and is mortified, before transforming yet again into the crane and flying away, leaving the elderly couple to grieve for the daughter they had so little time with.

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What is uttered from the heart alone will win the hearts of others to your own.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

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Phantom of the Opera illustrations by Iren Horrors

This artist on Instagram

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Welcome! This is a blog dedicated to Jack Jeanne, a visual novel by Ishida Sui and Towada Shin, and its many references and allusions. This is only a small fraction of all that's there but I hope you find something that sparks your interest.

Tags

reading list - literary references and allusions in Jack Jeanne (on going)

{reading list updates} - updates to the reading list; may include additional information

musical interlude {songs}

{thoughts} - my thoughts

{misc.}

If you are navigating this blog outside Tumblr, the archive and search are located under the Plus (+) button on the left.

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Added hone-onna and The Peony Lantern