loneliness

First of all, a bit of housekeeping; I am currently enrolled in the MA program at the University of Hawai'i Manoa. I'm quite excited about this being that this means I'm going to be able to pursue my passion as a sociologist. Hopefully this will reflect in greater quantity and and quality of work in this blog.

With moving in and limited access to the lifeblood of mine that is the internet, I've had alot of time on my hands to look over a few of the things I have downloaded and never gotten around to consuming.

Lililicious an excellent scanlation team has a few of Ebine Yamaji's work translated into English. Being that this novel is not likely to be picked up by any of the US publishers, this is perhaps the only way her work will reach an English audience. Hopefully this will drum up enough attention for a US publisher to pick up her work.

I finally got the time to finish "Free Soul" this morning. This was an excellent story that gracefully reaches out to troubles we all have about love, relationships, parents and careers. I find myself reflecting on my own insecurities about relationships and self image and find some strong emotional bond between myself and the Keito. In an interview with Ebine Yamaji, she discloses that it was "more fun to write about two girls"

Up to that point, I had never really enjoyed telling straight love stories. I just felt that my heart wasn't into it - I didn't get the same feeling of satisfaction from working on them. But once I produced a girl-meets-girl piece, I just realized that it was so much fun - I loved it! So, actually, recently I've been thinking to myself that if I try to approach working on straight love stories the same way that I do gay ones, then they may go better (laughs).

I wonder how common this concept is to people. I find myself agreeing with her sentiment, but I wonder why I do, and what goes on in the minds of those who don't feel the same way. Are there events or experiences which lend themselves to be able to see relationships beyond the gender borders. Or even which perspective has the blinders on? Those too caught up in fixed ideas of gender to see the relationship or those too caught up in the relationship to see the gender?

One of the things I have found distinctly different between the US and Japan is the idea of romantic friendship. Americans now have difficulty reading Tennyson's "In Memoriam A.H.H" without finding it extremely "gay". However, I find many people of the same sex able to openly hold hands or show some physical affection without raising any real suspicion. I once found one of my male students sitting in the lap of another male student all the while one was casually stroking the other one's chin. When I asked why he was doing that, he replied that it was "interestingly pointy". What the "civilized" world finds appropriate in terms of public displays of affection between humans are odd and inconsistent. Perhaps there needs to be more study into how such changes in shame and love came to be. One thing seems to be clear in my mind is as we further curtail and compartmentalize appropriateness in intimacy this seems to create nothing but loneliness.