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Sekaikei: the word of the World
🕑 Added 2016-08-10 19:03:04 +0000 UTC Sekaikei is written with the katakana for sekai (セカイ, world), and kei (系, story). If Katakana is useful for loan words or transcription of other languages into the Japanese lexicon, then is there a metatextual meaning to the neologism of the term sekaikei?After all, this isn't the first time that the construction of the text is a way to talk about the subject of the text itself - when we get into Hagio Moto, her story Rape Blossoms itself juxtaposes between the furigana of Fukushima and the Katakana of Fukushima to note a distinctly different Fukushima being discussed (in Rape Blossoms, it's referring to Chernobyl). In that story, the term acts as a visual, textual signal that a metaphorical connection is being made across cultures.
Therefore, quite literally, what's in a name? The use of the katakana juxtaposed - quite religiously, as I'm seeing in both Japanese and English texts on it - seems to suggest that 'world' is potentially foreign, or at least it's not as tightly wound with the 'story' being discussed, hence the juxtaposition of Katakana with Kanji.
In sekaikei works, the world itself ends very bittersweet or outright bad. Everyone in Saikano is gone. The wars in Iriya and Voices of a Distant Star aren't clearly resolved, they continue in some unclear way.
What matters, rather, is that the people in which these major conflicts exist have changed themselves. More importantly, what matters is that they did so by themselves, in the context of 'themselves' meaning they didn't have to rely on society moulding them.
For a society so apocryphally understood as 'collective', to have Japanese stories that espouse a "learn to grow up by yourself" message is very interesting. It's illustrative of a mentality of individuality that was never really clearly explored beforehand. But is it an unfurling? Is it a shift? To be honest, I don't know, as much as I read about sekaikei, all I really know is that I don't know that much about it, because there's just so much more to find out about it.
I mean, after all, I'm just looking at construction of the words and I still can't confidently come to a conclusion and say, "Yes, this is what it means." Perhaps like the people in these stories, I have to stop leaning on others and look deep within myself and make some very clear and confident conclusions on where my position lies.
