At Blockfabrik (2)

Spoiler alert for Drive My Car (2021).

I couldn’t stop thinking about Drive My Car (2021) this whole week. A friend casually brought up Ryusuke Hamaguchi last spring when I told her that I just finished watching Hibana (2016), a Japanese TV series recommended by this same friend from a further past. Our conversation paused till June 2021, when she suddenly asked if I was going to do a PhD. I replied yes, and she didn’t follow up. We lived our lives, and preserved the silence till the last Sunday—out of the theater the first thing I had to do was to tell her that I finally watched one of Hamaguchi’s works. But I refrained from claiming that I was, too, amazed by his way of deciphering subtexts in relationships: the putrefying corner of self-absorbed affection and if any, the unwithering, growing memories of loss, regret and our universal inabilities; and that “each of us a small human cycle that may feel full of souls or breathless” 1 would almost never cease to wonder: upon what ground of reasoning does our current reality make any sense?

That afternoon I rushed home in perplexity. It was exhilarating but terrifying to realize that I had slowly got used to living in a present stitched together by streams of the past, and that, somewhat resembling Kafuku replaying Oto’s dialogue prompts of Uncle Vanya in his car, I had been commuting and working in a floating reality parallel to alternative ones, some from memories of the past, but more of tilted imaginations about other possibilities, where I, together with virtual characters, can only be present with those absent from the scene.

Thanks to the movie I did not feel as stressed as before when revisiting some bouldering routes at Blockfabrik this Friday night, maybe even a bit distracted by the soundtrack I listened to while climbing. Through every evening all find their own portal to infinity, indeed. With partial concentration on the present, I finished two new routes (!!), made some progress in an old one, and started to recognize the importance of (and very very slowly, to take advantage of) proper/smart body positioning, for which I celebrated at Shokudo Kuichimbo with an Unadon (a little too sweet but overall up to my expectation).