all about lily chou-chou: the fine art of bruising
I finally saw "All About Lily Chou-Chou". What can I say? I'm in so much love, I really am. *draws hearts everywhere*
the fine art of bruising
01 - blend
It's 2001; Yuichi is 15 and doesn't know Chopin from Strauss, but Debussy is still pretty clear (or maybe just the tune of "Arabesque").
02 - stain
In school everyone has moved on, and Yuichi gets a funny haunted feeling, like he's the only one who still remembers all the awful things that happened.
03 - island
Someone has blacked out Okinawa on the classroom map.
04 - apple
(But why did he give it to me?)
05 - paper
Eventually he discovers that most of the accounts of Hoshino's death are digital.
06 - relax [1]
At the start of the new term, Yuichi stays after school for the kendo club and goes home bruised and sore all over from practice, the result of the first hour or so in months spent not thinking about the winter of last year.
07 - leaves [2]
Dubiously, he considers "a new start".
08 - proof
The slowly rotting apple is next to the broken "Breathe" CD, both hidden under old magazines and comics, buried under old clothes, old tests, old school print outs.
09 - ugly [3]
Yuichi smiles shakily, trying to get his baby brother to stop staring at him.
10 - book
"You can have those, if you like," Hoshino's mother offers with a slight hitch in her voice, "since no one is going to use them anyway."
11 - brood
Maybe one day they would forget him and Tsuda and Kuno and Hoshino; maybe one day they would forget even Lily, and the Ether, and the beautiful world that had brought them together only to mindlessly and cruelly tear them apart.
12 - mesh [4]
Kanzaki threads her fingers together and throws them up against the sky, saying almost accusingly, "But I bet you don't miss him at all."
13 - soft
At someone's birthday party he touches a girl for the first time, and even though he knows she doesn't like him, she kisses him, just like he always thought two people should.
14 - shelf
There are many ways to kill himself.
15 - alone
The nice thing about spending time with Kuno is that she doesn't really have any friends either; the weird thing is that that makes Yuichi feel a little bit better.
16 - fall
When did reading about teen suicides in the morning newspapers (school building roof, parental pressure, grades, a delicate personality) stop making him shiver?
17 - knot
Everything feels wrong now, but it occurs to Yuichi that maybe this is how everything was supposed to be; maybe Lily's garden of Eden--beautiful, and seamless, and pure--was never meant to be.
18 - crowd
On the street he sees one of Tsuda's former clients, a graying businessman that probably was paying for some other junior high girl to let him touch her with his wrinkling, fattening fingers, and he tries to imagine being that old.
19 - denial [5]
That day, through the haze of Lily's voice, he had barely heard Hoshino screaming.
20 - train
Yuichi falls asleep coming back from school listening to the comforting rhythm of the tracks under the wheels, steady and repetitive; it has been at least half a year since he's given up CD players.
21 - fur [6]
Onda worriedly takes a sip of his tea before telling Osanai, "But when he held that baby rabbit, his eyes-- it was like he was going crazy," and she looks out of the window into the soccer fields, frowning.
22- chrome
His mother finally gets him a new bike, though he has yet to tell her how his old one got ruined.
23 - heart
It's true: he did cry at Hoshino's funeral, the way he cried when it happened to Kuno, rubbing his sleeves into his eyes, nose congested so he had to breath through his nose, all the while seeing the orange bloom of Hoshino's cigarette smoke touched by the dying afternoon light as he whipped away.
24 - intention [7]
"It was me back then, before everything, I was the mean one, I thought awful thoughts, I was always-- I assumed things, I..."
25 - push
Shinichi's father haltingly starts a conversation about Yuichi's grades over dinner; Yuichi nods to each statement, but doesn't respond.
26 - "look
," Osanai-sensei says, "there's still enough time before the exams," as he closes his eyes.
27 - weight
--like roughed up asphalt, remembers the sound of that voice, the sound of it low and threatening and the sound of it bright and sharp with misunderstanding, broken with laughter and windy speed, fearless and stoic and unaffected in the dark, remembers how he didn't cry even with his--
28 - spider
Kuno catches it in her hand, and Yuichi hesitates, wiping his palm off on his pants, before opening the window for her.
29 - robe
Some girl calls his name at a kendo tournament, frightening him so much the grip on his stick slips and he loses.
30- umbrella [8]
"So it's not true?" the boy asks belligerently as he wipes the last of Kuno's name and the handle from the board, assessing Yuichi with a critical eye.
31 - surface
When the rice plants cover the fields again, Yuichi goes back; it's summer and he cuts his fingers against a particularly sharp leaf.
32 - idea
If he was really serious-- if he really wanted to learn-- (he touches the sheet music--)
33- diamond
He takes his new bike to the fields and spreads himself out onto the rough, uncomfortable grass, smelling the warm earth and watching the stars blink in and out of existence, like planets exploding, like friends forgetting each other.
34 - blind
"I didn't know he liked Lily Chou-Chou either," he mutters in response to Tsuji's mocking, wicked "right?"
35 - flow
"I'm trying to be normal again," Yuichi whispers to her, "but it's really hard."
36 - movement
The note Kuno passes back asks, "What if this is normal?"
37 - more
This will be the last time, Yuichi promises silently, touching himself in the dark and thinking of Hoshino.
38 - honey
Sometimes through the ordinary gray fog of the everyday, he would see a streak of color, or a brief, unadulterated moment of warmth, and it would be so sweet he wanted to chase it down, grab a hold of it, or even cry.
39 - weather
He doesn't have money to go anywhere this year either.
40 -blue [9]
The piercing color of sky outside makes him shade his eyes when he crosses the road; it scares him that he still feels the stirrings of exhilaration just seeing at it, even though the ether was cremated along side Hoshino.
41 - double
He panics (--how? --what would he say? --it wasn't him! --maybe he was still--) but the boy is in a different school uniform, has different hair, a different face, didn't look like him at all, wasn't Hoshino after all.
42 - braid [10]
Kuno's hair finally grows past her ears by the end of their summer vacation, and Yuichi thinks of the way it looked in the sun behind the factory grounds as she turned towards him, as if asking, "Over there?"
43 - thread
((what happened to philia?? from: chouchoulover))
44 - angles
"It won't hurt," Hoshino had told him, touching him but not kissing him, and was gone by the time Yuichi woke, covered in sand and saltwater, to the gray Okinawa sunrise.
45 - daydream
Sometimes Yuichi tries to pretend that Okinawa was the only thing that ever happened.
46 - nightmare
Other times when he comes to, screaming and crying, he wonders what would have changed if they could meet for the third first time.
47 - honor [11]
"You know, it's really nothing, but she told me she liked you," Sasaki says, bravely passing the hot sauce so it's right next to Yuichi's ramen bowl.
48 - palm
The touch of Kuno's fingers is light when fixing the arch of his wrist as she instructs him to play the simple chords again; Yuichi hastens to comply, meekly wondering if she would smile at him if he did it right.
49 - screen
In the music room, the windows and doors filter the light in and everything else out, making its own enclosed world of dust and sound, the one place Yuichi knows that hasn't changed.
50 - warmth
It just means he's still alive.
notes:
[1] I say this but I'm not actually sure if it's a new school year or if it's just a new term I'm talking about.
[2] A horrible reference to "turning over a new leaf"
[3] Though we are never sure of the gender of Yuichi's new sibling...
[4] Kanzaki is the rather pretty girl who is the leader of the other girls that run out during the practice of the class song; she's also the one that gets Yuichi to drag out Kuno for the rape.
[5] I've always assumed that Yuichi was there the day Hoshino screams in the fields; the way the scene is cut makes me think that way, but I'm not actually sure.
[6] Onda is the baseball coach who shows up to tell Yuichi's mother about the shoplifting.
[7] This is supposed to be Yuichi speaking. I noticed that during the beginning of the movie Yuichi was actually a sort of typical rude boy-- telling the story about the girl they called Gorilla, trying to comfort Hoshino by making fun of the girls, etc etc. He immediately becomes subdued after Hoshino goes crazy, though.
[8] In Japan, or if I remember correctly, anyway, there's a custom where you draw an umbrella, and under it, if you write your name and the name of the person you like, it's supposed to mean you like them or something like that-- the scenario in this sentence is like this: the girls who are teasing Kuno writes her name with Yuichi's and Yuichi, who has been spending time with Kuno, gets approached about it.
[9] One of the messages written during the closing credits is that "blue ether is hope".
[10] At the end of the movie, Kuno is still wearing her hat, so I have no clue how long her hair has or has not gotten, but it's had to been at least six months at this point, I think! If not, then count this as a physical impossibility and just ignore it because I can't think of another measuring point for growing hair. *sheepish grin*
[11] Sasaki is arguably my favorite character in the movie, because he is so blazingly normal but actually pretty darn nice; I love the way he smiles when Tsuda flips the curtain around to reveal that she's listening to his conversation with Osanai during the class song rehearsal. The "she" in this sentence can be either Kuno or Tsuda, I wasn't even sure myself. Also I swear that he sort of thinks Yuichi is cute. Just listen to him during the bike scene. (Besides, who wouldn't think that Yuichi was cute?)
A/N: Sorry! You probably needed a pretty recent watching of the movie, or a really vivid memory, to remember a lot of what I ended up mentioning in passing. XD I basically played the movie and wrote this fic in pieces at the same time, so a lot of it came from me repeating scenes over and over and picking out little details. But the movie is so so good for that, like finding out that Tsuda was playing Kinki Kids on the train when she takes Yuichi's CD, or realizing that the rice fields reflect the seasons. If you haven't seen the movie yet, definitely watch it. It's long, a bit convoluted, and takes some patience, but it is a gorgeous film.
the fine art of bruising
01 - blend
It's 2001; Yuichi is 15 and doesn't know Chopin from Strauss, but Debussy is still pretty clear (or maybe just the tune of "Arabesque").
02 - stain
In school everyone has moved on, and Yuichi gets a funny haunted feeling, like he's the only one who still remembers all the awful things that happened.
03 - island
Someone has blacked out Okinawa on the classroom map.
04 - apple
(But why did he give it to me?)
05 - paper
Eventually he discovers that most of the accounts of Hoshino's death are digital.
06 - relax [1]
At the start of the new term, Yuichi stays after school for the kendo club and goes home bruised and sore all over from practice, the result of the first hour or so in months spent not thinking about the winter of last year.
07 - leaves [2]
Dubiously, he considers "a new start".
08 - proof
The slowly rotting apple is next to the broken "Breathe" CD, both hidden under old magazines and comics, buried under old clothes, old tests, old school print outs.
09 - ugly [3]
Yuichi smiles shakily, trying to get his baby brother to stop staring at him.
10 - book
"You can have those, if you like," Hoshino's mother offers with a slight hitch in her voice, "since no one is going to use them anyway."
11 - brood
Maybe one day they would forget him and Tsuda and Kuno and Hoshino; maybe one day they would forget even Lily, and the Ether, and the beautiful world that had brought them together only to mindlessly and cruelly tear them apart.
12 - mesh [4]
Kanzaki threads her fingers together and throws them up against the sky, saying almost accusingly, "But I bet you don't miss him at all."
13 - soft
At someone's birthday party he touches a girl for the first time, and even though he knows she doesn't like him, she kisses him, just like he always thought two people should.
14 - shelf
There are many ways to kill himself.
15 - alone
The nice thing about spending time with Kuno is that she doesn't really have any friends either; the weird thing is that that makes Yuichi feel a little bit better.
16 - fall
When did reading about teen suicides in the morning newspapers (school building roof, parental pressure, grades, a delicate personality) stop making him shiver?
17 - knot
Everything feels wrong now, but it occurs to Yuichi that maybe this is how everything was supposed to be; maybe Lily's garden of Eden--beautiful, and seamless, and pure--was never meant to be.
18 - crowd
On the street he sees one of Tsuda's former clients, a graying businessman that probably was paying for some other junior high girl to let him touch her with his wrinkling, fattening fingers, and he tries to imagine being that old.
19 - denial [5]
That day, through the haze of Lily's voice, he had barely heard Hoshino screaming.
20 - train
Yuichi falls asleep coming back from school listening to the comforting rhythm of the tracks under the wheels, steady and repetitive; it has been at least half a year since he's given up CD players.
21 - fur [6]
Onda worriedly takes a sip of his tea before telling Osanai, "But when he held that baby rabbit, his eyes-- it was like he was going crazy," and she looks out of the window into the soccer fields, frowning.
22- chrome
His mother finally gets him a new bike, though he has yet to tell her how his old one got ruined.
23 - heart
It's true: he did cry at Hoshino's funeral, the way he cried when it happened to Kuno, rubbing his sleeves into his eyes, nose congested so he had to breath through his nose, all the while seeing the orange bloom of Hoshino's cigarette smoke touched by the dying afternoon light as he whipped away.
24 - intention [7]
"It was me back then, before everything, I was the mean one, I thought awful thoughts, I was always-- I assumed things, I..."
25 - push
Shinichi's father haltingly starts a conversation about Yuichi's grades over dinner; Yuichi nods to each statement, but doesn't respond.
26 - "look
," Osanai-sensei says, "there's still enough time before the exams," as he closes his eyes.
27 - weight
--like roughed up asphalt, remembers the sound of that voice, the sound of it low and threatening and the sound of it bright and sharp with misunderstanding, broken with laughter and windy speed, fearless and stoic and unaffected in the dark, remembers how he didn't cry even with his--
28 - spider
Kuno catches it in her hand, and Yuichi hesitates, wiping his palm off on his pants, before opening the window for her.
29 - robe
Some girl calls his name at a kendo tournament, frightening him so much the grip on his stick slips and he loses.
30- umbrella [8]
"So it's not true?" the boy asks belligerently as he wipes the last of Kuno's name and the handle from the board, assessing Yuichi with a critical eye.
31 - surface
When the rice plants cover the fields again, Yuichi goes back; it's summer and he cuts his fingers against a particularly sharp leaf.
32 - idea
If he was really serious-- if he really wanted to learn-- (he touches the sheet music--)
33- diamond
He takes his new bike to the fields and spreads himself out onto the rough, uncomfortable grass, smelling the warm earth and watching the stars blink in and out of existence, like planets exploding, like friends forgetting each other.
34 - blind
"I didn't know he liked Lily Chou-Chou either," he mutters in response to Tsuji's mocking, wicked "right?"
35 - flow
"I'm trying to be normal again," Yuichi whispers to her, "but it's really hard."
36 - movement
The note Kuno passes back asks, "What if this is normal?"
37 - more
This will be the last time, Yuichi promises silently, touching himself in the dark and thinking of Hoshino.
38 - honey
Sometimes through the ordinary gray fog of the everyday, he would see a streak of color, or a brief, unadulterated moment of warmth, and it would be so sweet he wanted to chase it down, grab a hold of it, or even cry.
39 - weather
He doesn't have money to go anywhere this year either.
40 -blue [9]
The piercing color of sky outside makes him shade his eyes when he crosses the road; it scares him that he still feels the stirrings of exhilaration just seeing at it, even though the ether was cremated along side Hoshino.
41 - double
He panics (--how? --what would he say? --it wasn't him! --maybe he was still--) but the boy is in a different school uniform, has different hair, a different face, didn't look like him at all, wasn't Hoshino after all.
42 - braid [10]
Kuno's hair finally grows past her ears by the end of their summer vacation, and Yuichi thinks of the way it looked in the sun behind the factory grounds as she turned towards him, as if asking, "Over there?"
43 - thread
((what happened to philia?? from: chouchoulover))
44 - angles
"It won't hurt," Hoshino had told him, touching him but not kissing him, and was gone by the time Yuichi woke, covered in sand and saltwater, to the gray Okinawa sunrise.
45 - daydream
Sometimes Yuichi tries to pretend that Okinawa was the only thing that ever happened.
46 - nightmare
Other times when he comes to, screaming and crying, he wonders what would have changed if they could meet for the third first time.
47 - honor [11]
"You know, it's really nothing, but she told me she liked you," Sasaki says, bravely passing the hot sauce so it's right next to Yuichi's ramen bowl.
48 - palm
The touch of Kuno's fingers is light when fixing the arch of his wrist as she instructs him to play the simple chords again; Yuichi hastens to comply, meekly wondering if she would smile at him if he did it right.
49 - screen
In the music room, the windows and doors filter the light in and everything else out, making its own enclosed world of dust and sound, the one place Yuichi knows that hasn't changed.
50 - warmth
It just means he's still alive.
notes:
[1] I say this but I'm not actually sure if it's a new school year or if it's just a new term I'm talking about.
[2] A horrible reference to "turning over a new leaf"
[3] Though we are never sure of the gender of Yuichi's new sibling...
[4] Kanzaki is the rather pretty girl who is the leader of the other girls that run out during the practice of the class song; she's also the one that gets Yuichi to drag out Kuno for the rape.
[5] I've always assumed that Yuichi was there the day Hoshino screams in the fields; the way the scene is cut makes me think that way, but I'm not actually sure.
[6] Onda is the baseball coach who shows up to tell Yuichi's mother about the shoplifting.
[7] This is supposed to be Yuichi speaking. I noticed that during the beginning of the movie Yuichi was actually a sort of typical rude boy-- telling the story about the girl they called Gorilla, trying to comfort Hoshino by making fun of the girls, etc etc. He immediately becomes subdued after Hoshino goes crazy, though.
[8] In Japan, or if I remember correctly, anyway, there's a custom where you draw an umbrella, and under it, if you write your name and the name of the person you like, it's supposed to mean you like them or something like that-- the scenario in this sentence is like this: the girls who are teasing Kuno writes her name with Yuichi's and Yuichi, who has been spending time with Kuno, gets approached about it.
[9] One of the messages written during the closing credits is that "blue ether is hope".
[10] At the end of the movie, Kuno is still wearing her hat, so I have no clue how long her hair has or has not gotten, but it's had to been at least six months at this point, I think! If not, then count this as a physical impossibility and just ignore it because I can't think of another measuring point for growing hair. *sheepish grin*
[11] Sasaki is arguably my favorite character in the movie, because he is so blazingly normal but actually pretty darn nice; I love the way he smiles when Tsuda flips the curtain around to reveal that she's listening to his conversation with Osanai during the class song rehearsal. The "she" in this sentence can be either Kuno or Tsuda, I wasn't even sure myself. Also I swear that he sort of thinks Yuichi is cute. Just listen to him during the bike scene. (Besides, who wouldn't think that Yuichi was cute?)
A/N: Sorry! You probably needed a pretty recent watching of the movie, or a really vivid memory, to remember a lot of what I ended up mentioning in passing. XD I basically played the movie and wrote this fic in pieces at the same time, so a lot of it came from me repeating scenes over and over and picking out little details. But the movie is so so good for that, like finding out that Tsuda was playing Kinki Kids on the train when she takes Yuichi's CD, or realizing that the rice fields reflect the seasons. If you haven't seen the movie yet, definitely watch it. It's long, a bit convoluted, and takes some patience, but it is a gorgeous film.