macha

re: Dolis, by Maki Kusumoto

ironically billed by tokyopop as a "drama/romance". a kind of deconstruction,
really: an autopsy that lends new meaning to the phrase 'lost in love'. definitely aimed at a grownup demographic: josei or seinen, though? i think
maybe only a woman would write it, even though by the end it's the male voice that by default owns the view. and the tabula rasa described, well-grounded in psychology, knows quite well the territory she
inhabits and can speak for herself. but it's not clinical, this treatment;
instead it pulls the reader into itself, claustrophobic. the interiority of both
characters is sympathetically drawn. and the cut's sharp enough that the reader
bleeds, is not mere audience, pulled in and even complicit somehow in the pain.
also, as befits its subject matter, very beautiful on every page, hard as it
might get sometimes to look.

when Kishi meets Mitsu, he sees her as his ideal woman. he is a musician; she is
a grad student writing a thesis on aesthetics. but Mitsu, he notices, seems to
be waiting for something. and her world seems so internalized she's hardly
there. she asks him, not about himself, but how he sees her. her books include
Hans Bellmer, Helmut Newton, Irina Ionesco: among them Kishi finds a note that
says only DOLIS. he asks her what it means. it's her, she says, as an early
lover will tell him later. she is object, not subject, in her own eyes. the
dolly. Kishi sees beauty. she feels cut off. cut out. twice in the narrative,
she cuts her hair.

the text of the page in Mitsu's PoV is full of blank spaces. Kishi's questions
overflow the panel boxes. the figures are barely suggested. she cuts herself to
feel, telling herself she won't go deeper. but then she must. perhaps she has no
reflection, but in metaphor she is lost inside the artist's need to paint her.
the gorgeous monochromes of the unmoored panels turn red as Mitsu, almost mute,
bleeds out. forks become knives; the world bleeds sharp edges. the panel
boundaries disappear. she lives, he lives, only inside the locked room box which
they both inhabit alone. deep inside Mitsu's depthless but bottomless
environment, the text belongs more and more to Kishi, using more and more words
in an attempt to understand her, meet her, inhabit her. are they really real
inside the Schroedinger box before it's opened? even the sketches almost
disappear, as the real girl disappears forever into the ideal. yet she's the one
who in the end opens the door.

then only Kishi is left, to choose. it's an evocation of a downward spiral. you
can hear the train, but you're in it, cutting, feeling... nothing down to the
bone, that shattering sense of loss inside the Other, that too-full intensity
shown up in relief against too-empty feeling. calculate the weight of it, the
pressure exerted in entropy, in space, in time slammed up against the other side
of the crypt door, the dollhouse. what does it take to open it? to close it? and are we right to
call this - a pathology, two solitudes - the intensity of love?