Please note: only two chapters this week!
(but about the same number of pages)
From the last section I was a bit worried that the long-promised utopia would just be some naked folks and some grass, but I would describe the details in these chapters as significantly weirder.
One night I wanted to sit and read a bunch of this while listening to music, but I really wasn’t sure what would give the right vibe. I ended up settling on one album that I think fit perfectly - a little weird, a little sinister, a little old-timey, a little otherworldy. And while the album’s title 江戸 doesn’t match the setting, it certainly does the author, so hey…
I also looked up パノラマ館, after he talks about them in these chapters. And it seems like a really cool topic (and a lot more literal of a name for the book than I realized).
Gallery
Pretty much exactly as he describes, it seems it was a kind of attraction where you enter a large structure constructed to let you look at the illusion of a wide panoramic view (often of battle scenes).
(I don’t know what the provenance of this pdf is, but it seems super interesting)
When I was a kid for whatever reason my dad would always call a beautiful view on a hike or whatever a “panoramic vista” and I only ever really associated the word with that and the general meaning of a wide view, so this kind of artificial structure never occurred to me until the character started talking about it. Pretty wild!
On a more self-indulgent note, descriptions herein reminded me a lot of the gorgeous backgrounds in the movie 怪談 (Kwaidan). I imagine when it talks about the angles and shapes being illusory and the tree layout and stuff feeling too artificial to be natural this may be something like what it’s talking about.
It’s that vibe of both feeling like a set and feeling like a magical and eerie other world simultaneously that I think reminds me of the island as described in these chapters.
Nevertheless, I think there is an over-representation of the naked folks
Wow, Kwaidan backgrounds are really beatiful!
As for the panorama thing, it was actually explained in the introduction to my translated copy, and I don’t know why I didn’t share this… I think I thought that it’s obvious after it was explained to me and that everybody else probably knows this already
Btw! I see that you only included old-days examples in your gallery, but I’ve been to a modern example of this in person (in Poland). It wasn’t that mesmerizing, though Neat, like a really big painting, but not really tricking you into thinking it is real
Crowds (and stairs) certainly don’t help
For the record, it’s Panorama Racławicka in Wrocław, and the battle is Battle of Racławice. (English Wikipedia links)
To really get into the spirit of that section though, you could have just told us you totally made a gallery, that maybe you would have shown to us if there was time and if we’d shown more enthusiasm for all the preceding galleries, and then told us about your totally amazing gallery in words instead.
Or you would have, but the real enthusiast, the only person worth your time, already got a sense for it from the vague hints you already mentioned. It thus would be a waste of time for anyone who matters in any sort of way.
