Postcards to the World - 1 | 2 | 3 | 4

Which medium do you prefer using then: film or comics?

I do like comics better. Maybe it’s just the one I know better, but I feel I’ve gotten used to it like my breath. Sometimes film influences my comics too… especially right after I do animation.

So do you have a favourite film director?

I like Shunji Iwai. His films include April Story, Love Letter and Hana and Alice. The first one I saw was Love Letter. It left a huge impression on me with the way he told the story and the many details. It let me feel the true allure of movies!

Love Letter is a story about how memory deceives. Then slowly we come closer to the truth. What’s worth being happy about is that the ending is a beautiful truth. This is it. We live our lives slowly approaching the truth and I’m glad to describe this kind of life.

I read “Pieces of You” today and what you just said resonates with it perfectly.

Yeah, “Pieces of You” is a short story I wrote for a good friend of mine and it’s about her except for some fictionalized parts. Or maybe you can say I wanted to write about my own things… about our generation.

Young yet no longer young. We possess a lot, but there’s even more that we can’t obtain: material goods, relationships. Life and death. Exactly what will tomorrow be like? Will it be happier? We’re constantly confused during this whole transition but slowly we wade our way through.

During a discussion class in the US everyone read this story carefully but not all of them understood it. (Besides my lousy translation, the ambiguity of Oriental emotions is probably another reason why.) An American guy said, compared to the frustrated male character who can’t find work he sympathizes with the girl more. I said “yeah”, sometimes I feel that Asian girls are really strong. Furthermore they have to be stronger than others… I like realistic themes. I like these fine and fatal threads of tension in reality even more. The greatest sadness is the kind that can’t be voiced and this is the responsibility we must shoulder. Actually I feel that my friend is even stronger than the female character, Cherry. Like they say, people are always stronger than we imagine. They’re also weaker than we think.

So what are you trying to do with “Pieces of You”?

I guess I’m questioning the world.

“Pieces of You” talks about modern Chinese society’s problem. Some of my old stories weren’t bound by time or period, but still they were all feelings that I really felt, things that simply had to be said.

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