A bitter yellow drop for thirty years

Some memories are body memory even when the mind cannot recall them. A child holds a ladybird on her index finger – a small dome with black dots, legs paddling the air. The ladybird drops. In the same instant the finger bends to retrieve it, a car drives past. When the child looks down, all she finds is a dark smear with yellow streaks rubbed into the asphalt. Her finger goes reflexively to her mouth. The taste is oddly bitter, not what an adult would expect. Closer to a confession from the world – through that single drop – that everything is fragile, and that fragility has a taste.

The girl walks home and tells nobody. There is nothing to say. She killed the ladybird and didn't quite kill it; she is guilty and not quite guilty; the bitterness on her finger has passed; the memory has stayed. In all the years that follow it returns to her not as a nightmare, though it has something of the nightmare about it. Not as remorse, though it is also remorseful. And not as nostalgia, though with time something sweet, something almost yearning, grows clearer inside it. Thirty years later that same girl, now a woman living in Astoria, Queens, sits over a board with ink and a pencil. Fifteen drawings for every second of animation, by hand. Several thousand drawings. All of them so that this exact moment can be told. And then, after thirty years of remembering, finally crossed.

The question that opens up in her work is not about childhood or about art. It is a question of language. How does one name that state in which the memory of something small, distant and faintly awful returns, carrying with it at once anxiety and sweetness, regret and warmth, fear of oneself and something that almost wants to be called longing? Polish has no word for it. Neither does English, nor French. Freud, in 1919, just after the war, wrote about the Unheimliche – but that is the dread of the repressed returning, a fear bound up with the skin of something long forgotten. This is something else. Something that is not a pathology but rather the consistency of a certain experience, a thread running through the everyday life of a conscious person. Japanese has a word for it. Four syllables, meaning nothing concrete, looking unserious. It lies on the floor of the everyday language like a small pebble that adults have stopped noticing. It took thirty years of one woman's work to show how much can be built on that pebble. KiyaKiya (きやきや). Let us see what it means by going deeper into the strangely unsettling visual art of Akino Kondoh.

A word from the floor of the language

Kiyakiya (きやきや) – that is how this strange word sounds. In its natural, everyday context it appears most often in verb form (and even in Japanese, that form is unusual):

胸がきやきやする

(mune ga kiyakiya suru)

“my chest is going kiyakiya”

Nobody translates it literally, because the word is onomatopoeic and doesn't really mean anything. It describes a state – an uncomfortable, slightly stifling, tightening feeling in the chest, with no clear source. Dictionaries suggest: “after déjà-vu”, “nostalgia mixed with anxiety”, “remembering something partially, but ambiguously, uncertainly”. All these translations are correct and all of them are incomplete.

Akino Kondoh (近藤聡乃) is forty-five years old today. She was born on July 3, 1980 in Chiba, the prefecture bordering Tokyo to the east. She grew up in an artistic family – her father and brother architects, her mother trained in design. She didn't watch television. Instead, her parents read her picture books and took her to museums. She studied graphic design at Tama Bijutsu Daigaku, popularly called Tamabi, one of Tokyo's leading art schools. In her third year, in 2002, she made her first animated film and won the Grand Prix at NHK Digista. Since 2008 she has lived in New York – first in Chelsea, then in Astoria. She works in animation, manga, drawing and oil painting. She is represented by Mizuma Art Gallery in Tokyo. She has collaborated with John Zorn, designing a cover for one of his albums and later an animation for his music. In 2010 her film “Ladybirds’ Requiem” (てんとう虫のおとむらい) made the final twenty-five of YouTube Play – the video biennial at the Guggenheim Museum.

Now a paradox worth “working through” right at the start. In Western media, especially the kind written quickly and in a hurry, Kondoh tends to be slotted as a kawaii artist. After all, she draws a girl with narrow eyes, raven-black hair, pale skin, smiling discreetly, looking a little like a character from a delicate shōjo manga. The mistake is so coarse it barely needs correcting. It's enough to watch any of her animations through to the end. Eiko, the figure Kondoh has been drawing since 1998, is beauty as a trap. She looks at the viewer from under her fringe, smiles, extends a hand. A second later the viewer notices that in the background a sequence is unfolding in which Eiko is being strangled by tree branches. That her body is multiplying under the pressure of guilt, as in a nightmare that keeps coming back. That she is holding on her lap a little theatre in which a script is written that exists in no language on earth (we will return to this scene). “Eiko invites and rebuffs at the same time, seduces and unsettles” – wrote a reviewer in Nishikata Film Review, and it is hard to put it more precisely. Kawaii is the aesthetic of fleeting sweetness. In Kondoh, sweetness rests on something boiling underneath.

Kondoh found the word kiyakiya in Shibusawa Tatsuhiko (澁澤龍彥), in the volume “Shōjo korekushon joron” (少女コレクション序説 – “Introduction to a Collection of Girls”), published in 1985. In the chapter “Yōji taiken ni tsuite” (幼児体験について – “On Early Childhood Experiences”) Shibusawa describes a state from his own childhood. Anxiety, nostalgia, expectation, as if something were about to surface from the depths of memory but kept getting stuck, unable to break through. And he gives the reader the word he used to call it in conversations with himself. Kiyakiya. Kondoh, who for over twenty years had been unable to find a name for what she wanted to show in her work, read that chapter and understood: the word exists. It hasn't yet entered psychology, there is no scholarly literature around it. But it is in the dictionary. It is in everyday language. Nobody had simply pulled it to the surface.

One could say that what Kondoh has done over the next thirty years is an attempt to do for the word kiyakiya what Freud did for the word Unheimliche: pull it from the dictionary, lay it before the reader, show that it describes a category of universal experience and not the eccentricity of a single person. The difference between the two undertakings is, however, concrete. Freud wrote an essay – analytic, speculative, built on Hoffmann and on the etymology of the German heimlich. Kondoh draws. Her “essay” runs at fifteen frames per second, lasts six and a half minutes, doesn't use words in the sense in which we use them. And, without rhetorical exaggeration, it is more precise than many an academic paper.

Shibusawa himself is a troublesome figure. Born in 1928 and dead in 1987, he is one of the central figures of postwar Japanese avant-garde. Translator of the Marquis de Sade, Georges Bataille, Jean Cocteau. A connoisseur of eroticism, black magic, alchemy, demonology. His translation of “Juliette” triggered, in 1960, a famous obscenity trial that dragged on for nine years. At the same time – and this is part of the paradox Kondoh could not have failed to work through consciously – “Shōjo korekushon joron” is a book whose opening essay treats girlhood as an ontological category. Shibusawa writes there that a girl is in herself always, to some extent, an object. There is no need – he argues – even to objectify her; she already is one. A contemporary female reader and, I hope, a male one might want to put the book down at this point.

Kondoh returns to the same book and takes the word from it. But she does the opposite with it. In Shibusawa, shōjo (a category covering teenage girls and young women, literally “little woman” – 少女) was the object of a male collector's fantasy – fixed, frozen, available to the gaze. In Kondoh, Eiko is movement. A presence that looks back at the one looking. A subject in the process of examining herself. Shibusawa places the girl in a glass case; Kondoh sets her free and asks her to tell her own story. The gesture is not a comment on Shibusawa – Kondoh is not polemicizing with him, she treats him as the source of a word. But the effect is that thirty years after that book the same concept fills with entirely different content. Language is generous to those who know what to do with it.

Ladybirds and buttons

“Tentōmushi no otomurai” (てんとう虫のおとむらい – literally “Funeral Prayer for Ladybirds”, English title “Ladybirds’ Requiem”) was made in 2005–2006. Five minutes thirty-eight seconds. A black-and-white world with rare patches of red. The music was composed by Chiku Toshiaki, a former member of the underground band TAMA, who had collaborated with Kondoh from her first film. “Ladybirds’ Requiem” is a remake of her diploma piece. The first version, from 2003, ran two minutes fifty seconds. Kondoh deemed it a failure, started over from scratch and worked on the new version for a year and a half.

The story, reduced to plot, looks modest. A girl – Eiko – accidentally kills two ladybirds. She gives them a funeral. She returns home. A button on her blouse, when she touches it with a finger, turns into a ladybird. Then another button. Then all of them. Eiko, in panic, stitches dozens, perhaps hundreds, of buttons to the inside of her skirt. Eiko's body begins to multiply – there are two of her, then three, then a whole rain of copies whirling across the screen. At one point a red ladybird with black dots and a black ladybird with red dots embrace and spin together like a couple. The film has no traditional ending. It has a fading-out instead.

To describe this as “an animation about a girl and ladybirds” would be like describing Dostoyevsky as a novelist who had problems with his father. The story being played out here happens beneath the surface of the image, and asks to be named.

First: the button as transitional object. Donald Winnicott, paediatrician and psychoanalyst, described in “Playing and Reality” (1971) the case of a boy who obsessively tied strings around objects in the house. Furniture, doorknobs, chairs, chandeliers. The parents were alarmed. When Winnicott finally observed the family, he understood what was happening. The boy had lived through several brief but intense separations from his mother – when she was in hospital, when siblings were being born. The string was not a symptom of obsession but an attempt to repair a bond. String connects. String is communication in material form. String, Winnicott writes, prevents separation, even symbolic separation. It is a “defence against anxiety”. It is what a child finds for himself when the world ceases to be reliable.

Eiko's button is such a string. Winnicott also wrote about another phenomenon – about a child's first “not-me” possession, the teddy bear, the scrap of blanket, the thing that is neither me nor entirely outside me. It lies somewhere in between. It is meant to protect against the anxiety of separation. Eiko has killed something small and soft. The button, beginning to resemble the dead ladybird, is an attempt to build a reparative skin around something that has fallen apart. Stitching hundreds of buttons inside the skirt is not, in any clinical sense, a pathological obsession. It is a private rite of expiation, performed in precisely the place where Winnicott situated the “transitional space” – not in reality, not in fantasy, but in between.

Second: the multiplication of Eiko. In a classical psychoanalytic reading one might see here a splitting of the subject under the pressure of guilt. But Kondoh is drawing something more interesting. Her copies of Eiko are not fragments of a psyche. They are forms of presence. If something has happened – if the girl has, on a certain day, understood that she is capable of killing, even by accident – then a single Eiko is not enough. There need to be more of them. Each one carries a fragment of that knowledge and does not want to be alone with it. The scene in which the red and the black ladybirds embrace and spin together is the key: different beings, different selves, intertwining in a dance which is not just a figure of chaos. It is a figure of company.

Third: the bitter yellow drop. Kondoh has explained several times – in interviews for Nippon Connection, in conversations at Mizuma Art Gallery, in her essay collection “Fushigi to iu niha Jimi na Hanashi” (不思議というには地味な話 – “A Story Too Ordinary to Call Strange”, 2012) – that “Ladybirds’ Requiem” came from her own memory. The ladybird really did fall from her hand. The car really did drive past. The yellow fluid from the leg joints really did end up on her finger. The taste really was bitter. The childhood nightmares that walked beside her for years afterwards – repetitive, precise, always the same – did not soften with time. They became raw material. This is an important distinction. We are not talking about sublimation in the nineteenth-century sense of the word, an elegant translation of impulse into culture. We are talking about the transformation of nightmare into an aesthetic category, then operating in the viewer in precisely the place where it once operated in the author. The memory does not vanish. It changes the user.

The first grammar of dream

The film in which Eiko first appears in animation is called “Densha kamo shirenai” (電車かもしれない – literally “Maybe a Train”; English title “The Evening Traveling”). It was made in 2001 and 2002, while Kondoh was still a student at Tamabi. The song she animates to is by Chiku Toshiaki, her idol since high school. Kondoh first animates to it without permission, only for herself. Later, when the film begins to win competitions, she sends Chiku the result. He, surprised and amused, gives consent after the fact, and for the next film he composes an original soundtrack.

“The Evening Traveling” is essentially an early exercise. Eiko dances in a surreal rhythm, objects appear and disappear, rooms open up and night spills out of them. But this is where, for the first time, the logic that will return in every later work is established: a domestic scene, realistic gestures, and then a sudden break into something altogether different. The girl goes to the kitchen for bread and is suddenly in another world, from which she will return in a moment, telling no one where she has been. This is exactly the structure of a child's dream, in which the everyday opens onto something enormous and then closes again without trace. Kondoh knows how to record it before she yet understands what kind of structure it is.

The film wins Grand Prix at NHK Digista 2002, the audience prize at Laputa Animation Festival, a recommendation from Japan Media Arts Festival. Kondoh is twenty-two. She still needs another ten years to add a vocabulary to that grammar.

The kamishibai gap

The animation “KiyaKiya” was made in 2010 and 2011, already in New York. Kondoh had returned there after a brief stay in Tokyo, with a new visa, and started work on a new film. It took her over a year. Six minutes thirty-nine seconds. Once again fifteen frames per second, by hand. The music is by John Zorn, with whom Kondoh had become friends while working on the cover of his album “The Goddess: Music for the Ancient Days” (2010). In 2012 the film makes Japan Media Arts Festival, receives a Jury Recommended Work, is shown at Nippon Connection in Frankfurt, at Mori Art Museum in Tokyo, in museums on several continents.

The opening scene. Eiko sits curled inside a wooden cupboard, narrow, with the doors open. On her lap she holds a miniature kamishibai (紙芝居 – “paper theatre”), a Japanese invention that experienced a renaissance in the 1930s as a street form of storytelling for children. The narrator shows the audience successive picture cards and tells a story alongside them. It is to this very technology that Kondoh returns in her film, because she finds in it a metaphor that becomes the philosophical core of her work.

Eiko begins to tell the story. That is, she opens the first card of the kamishibai and looks at the text. Except the text is illegible. Kondoh designed for this scene a pseudo-script – a mixture of hiragana with small Latin letters. It looks a bit as if someone who had seen both alphabets only once in their life were trying to reproduce them from memory. The viewer immediately sees this fracture. Eiko reads from the illegible card and the film carries on.

In the next three sections, divided by title cards, Eiko passes through a series of images that are, in a sense, this very kamishibai. Eiko lying as if dead in an overturned cupboard. Eiko being strangled by tree branches growing out of the floor. Eiko splitting in two – red and blue – and then catching in her hands little creatures, half-girls, half-ladybirds. Eiko naked, stretched along a long branch above an abyss, smiling at us from a position of dangerous ease. Zorn's music, built mainly on high female voices and rhythmic percussion, repeats motifs in loops. At moments it sounds like a stuck record. The images, accordingly, also repeat – slightly altered, slightly displaced, like a memory returning in another nightmare, no longer identical.

Now about the kamishibai itself. It is a simple device – a wooden frame, a dozen or so illustrated cards. The storyteller slides them in one by one, image after image. The audience sees the pictures. The narrator reads the text. But – and this is the heart of the matter – the text for the picture the audience is currently seeing is not on the back of the card with that picture. It is on the back of the preceding card. The storyteller is looking at himself in the opposite direction from the audience. He sees the text for what the audience is watching. The audience sees an image they have not yet heard about. The image and its commentary are offset by one card.

Kondoh has said in interviews, plainly, that for her this gap is an image of another dimension lying just behind the everyday. The philosophical extension: we never see the present. We always see a moment that has just passed, with a commentary still earlier than that moment. Consciousness arrives with delay. The narration about what is happening pertains, in fact, to what has just happened. Husserl, in his phenomenology of time, called this retention, presentation and protention – the holding-on of the moment past, the presence of the moment current, the anticipation of the moment to come. In every instant of consciousness all three are present at once. In the kamishibai Kondoh shows that structure materially. The image is presentation. The text matched to it is the retention of the previous card. And what is about to be revealed will shift forward by one card before it gets its commentary.

All this can be said in more difficult words, but it would not be necessary. Kondoh says: there is a gap between the image and its story. And in that gap, kiyakiya happens.

Because kiyakiya is exactly that: the moment in which the body already knows something and the mind has not yet had time to name it. Déjà-vu is its extreme case – the recognition that we have been here before, when we have not; but kiyakiya is broader. It covers all states in which sensation runs half a step ahead of the narrative about it. Childhood trauma – this same ladybird, this same yellow drop on the finger – returns in precisely this way. The body remembers before the girl can name what is happening. And by the time she can, the text already describes a different image. The British psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas calls this the unthought known – the presence in the structure of feelings of something that has not yet become a thought. Kondoh perhaps does not know this term. But she draws something exactly on this subject.

Zorn's music as a stuck record has its function here. Traumatic memory, as we know from neurobiology and clinical observation, does not encode itself in narrative form. It does not say: “this happened, then and there”. It says: “sound”. “smell”. “a gesture of a hand I do not understand”. It returns in loops, in motifs, in somatic repetitions. Kiyakiya, before we even know that it is kiyakiya, returns with that rhythm.

The everyday that cracks

The gap that Kondoh opens in the animation “KiyaKiya” works differently in her manga. There is no time for film – there is the page, one or two of them, and one has to be quick. The characteristic stories from the series “Tsumekiri monogatari” (爪切り物語 – “Nail-Clipping Tales”), from “Hakoniwa-Mushi” (箱庭虫 – literally “Insect in a Miniature Garden”, 2004) or from “Insects in Me” (2009) all have the same composition. Eiko does something perfectly ordinary. Cuts her nails. Pulls underwear out of a drawer. Buys an umbrella in the rain. Combs her hair before a mirror. And suddenly – with no fireworks, no dramatic music, no exclamation marks – the drawer turns out to contain a city. The mirror, a forest. The clipped nail, a small living insect. Eiko, not unduly surprised, walks into that city, into that forest, spends a moment there and returns to her room as if nothing in particular had happened.

The Western reader reaches reflexively for “Alice in Wonderland”. But it is not the same. Alice falls down a rabbit hole and travels in another space; Eiko stays in her own room, the room simply expands. Alice has an external rabbit; Eiko has herself. Alice returns to reality with knowledge gained; Eiko returns and says nothing about it, because there is nothing to say – it was inside her all along.

Psychologically these are stories about the body. A woman grows up in a cramped Tokyo apartment, begins menstruating, begins to notice that under her skin there is a whole system of smells, rhythms, secretions which no one had previously described to her, and which require a daily ritual of attention. Eiko in Kondoh's manga performs these rituals without commentary. Cuts her nails. Wipes herself. Applies cream. During these minimal, almost dull activities she experiences the fact that her interior world is several orders of magnitude larger than her exterior one.

Eiko as a character was first drawn in 1998, when Kondoh was eighteen. “I drew her as an image of my ideal girl” – Kondoh tells Yellowtrace in 2011. “At the time she was the same age as me. But then she started behaving more freely. Sometimes she looks like a child, sometimes like an adult woman. Sometimes she gains weight, sometimes she loses it. She is my ideal and my symbol of childhood at the same time”. She is not, contrary to possible suspicion, a Jungian anima – there is no overarching theory in Kondoh according to which Eiko would represent the female aspect of the artist's psyche, the collective unconscious, the shadow. Eiko is something humbler and more interesting. She is a stable object of introspection. A figure through whom an adult woman has, for twenty years, been looking at herself in different phases of her life. The twenty-year-old drawing Eiko looks at her ideal self. The forty-year-old drawing Eiko looks at herself-as-a-child, who has survived inside her. Eiko does not grow with her. Eiko remains, so that one can check where one is, currently, in relation to her – the constant.

Garo, Saeki and the thin line from Edo

Kondoh came into the world of manga from an unusual direction. Not from the mainstream, not from the magazines for girls, not from the great tradition or popular culture. She entered through “Garo” (ガロ) and “Ax” (アックス) – two monthlies of alternative manga which since the nineteen-sixties have been the main channel for experimental, political, personal work by unconventional artists. “Garo” ran from 1964 to 2002. “Ax” continues that tradition to this day. Kondoh began publishing in it in 2000, and in 2002 received the Encouragement Award at the AX Newcomer’s Award for the manga “Kayoko Kobayashi”.

In the same tradition worked those Kondoh names as her inspirations. Toshio Saeki (佐伯俊男) – an artist of dark ero-grotesque, drawing equally on the nineteenth-century woodblock prints called muzan-e (無惨絵 – “cruel images”) and on contemporary fetishism. In Saeki, the woman is the object of male fantasy. An object often subjected to violence, eyes closed, silent. Kondoh acknowledges this lineage but reverses it. The woman in her work is a subject – looking, reacting, remembering. Saeki draws from the perspective of a sadistic observer; Kondoh draws from the perspective of the girl, watching what is being done to her, and working with it on her own account. The language of avant-garde manga need not be only a male language about a female body. It can also be a female language about the self. Kondoh’s predecessors in this tradition are Kuniko Tsurita (1947–1985) and Murasaki Yamada (1948–2009) – both published in “Garo” as early as the seventies, both recently published in English by the Canadian house Drawn & Quarterly. Eiko has her sisters.

The line itself, Kondoh's drawing, has yet another genealogy – two centuries longer. The narrow eyes, the light stroke, the certain frontality of the gazing figure – these are features Kondoh openly links to ukiyo-e (浮世絵), the woodblock prints of the Edo period. When she draws Eiko en face, with a fringe and slightly raised eyebrows, the composition is one which someone from nineteenth-century Tokyo would recognize at once. The line is not manga in the popular sense of the word. It is ukiyo. In this sense Eiko has something of bijin-ga (美人画), the old painting of “beautiful women”. Except that bijin-ga looked at the viewer the way the viewer wished to be looked at. Eiko looks the way she herself wishes to look.

It is worth mentioning one more thread, which Kondoh herself draws out in conversation with Catherine Munroe Hotes in 2010. When the journalist remarks that Eiko resembles certain works in the art brut collection in Lausanne, Kondoh answers immediately: “Henry Darger”. The reference is to the American hospital janitor in Chicago, who throughout his adult life secretly wrote and illustrated a vast epic, “In the Realms of the Unreal”, about little girls fighting their adult oppressors. It was discovered only after his death in 1973. Darger is one of the central figures of outsider art and the artist Kondoh regularly visits at the American Folk Art Museum in New York. The common ground is not accidental: both create out of recurring childhood nightmare, both use the figure of the girl as the bearer of knowledge that adults do not want to carry. The difference is that Darger worked in hiding. Kondoh emerges. Voluntarily. And takes the viewer with her.

Skin in a different colour

Kondoh arrived in New York in November 2008 on a Bunka-chō (文化庁) fellowship from the Japanese Agency for Cultural Affairs. She spent her first year in Chelsea. Then she moved to Astoria in Queens, where she lives to this day, supporting herself from her work. The first years were still the same Kondoh as in Tokyo – the same Eiko, the same black-and-white palette, the same ladybirds. But in 2015 she begins publishing in the magazine Akichi a series called “Nyū Yōku de kangae-chū” (ニューヨークで考え中 – “In New York, just thinking”; English title “Noodling in New York”). An autobiographical manga-essay. Two-page episodes drawn every two weeks. To date, four volumes. More than two hundred and fifty episodes. Kondoh walks around Astoria, sits in a café, observes. Photographs an alley. Then comes back to the studio and draws the same alley, drawing herself into it. Not Eiko – herself.

In 2023 she opens at Mizuma Art Gallery the exhibition “Noodling in New York” and writes in the catalogue what is, in my view, one of the most interesting sentences of her last decade. She says that for years she had used the white of the paper as the skin colour of her characters – automatically, reflexively, because it was self-evident. Only after a dozen-odd years in New York did she feel that white as skin colour started to cause her a certain discomfort. Not morally, not politically, not as a declaration. Bodily. She saw that the white of the paper is not a neutral non-colour. That it carries information about who is the one being drawn.

In Japan this problem did not exist. Not because Japan is naive about skin colour – it has its own complicated and sometimes troubling discourse about it – but because in a culture in which the great majority of the population shares a similar skin tone, that colour is signalled by the background and accepted without comment. In New York, Kondoh lives in a neighbourhood whose single block contains Pakistani, Egyptian, Dominican, Albanian, Irish, Bangladeshi, Ecuadorian skin. Looking daily at this mosaic affects first the eyes and then the drawing hand. At a certain point the hand refuses to draw everyone with a white sheet of paper. Kondoh's new works appear with skin colour. Skin has pigment. Eiko, white for twenty years – like the paper she was drawn on – in the artist's mature phase loses that feature. She becomes a presence with colour.

This is a micro-drama, but it says a great deal about how migration acts on creative work. Not in declarations, not in manifestos, but in the hand that holds the pencil.

Why we need a new word

One can put it this way: the more names we have, the more reality we have. Language does not create the world but it draws its map; and a map missing important regions can lead a person nowhere. The Polish reader, unarmed with the word kiyakiya, will try to describe the state of Kondoh-as-a-child or Kondoh-as-an-adult through known categories. Anxiety. Nostalgia. Trauma. Déjà-vu. Each of these will catch a fragment. None will catch the whole. The Japanese, having this word in everyday speech, is in a better position. Not because he has a richer soul, more subtle experiences or deeper sensitivity. Because his culture managed at some point to lay on the floor of the language a pebble describing precisely this state – and did not regard it as illness.

This is the first difference between kiyakiya and the Unheimliche – and it is not a difference in the direction of greater depth. Freud's Unheimliche is a clinical concept, with a borderline of pathology. It leads to the consulting room. Kiyakiya does not. It is a category of the everyday. It can accompany looking at an old photograph, walking into a neglected tenement, talking to one's mother on the phone. It does not require treatment, because it is not a wound. It is rather a sign that more than one layer of time is at work in a person at once.

Perhaps this is exactly the lesson Kondoh, drawing fifteen frames per second for thirty years, has drawn from her own childhood and from the language of her culture. There are states in life which need not be cured. Not because they are pleasant – the one with the tightened chest and the bitter yellow drop on the finger is most certainly not pleasant. Because they are part of experience and not a defect of it. Western psychological tradition has a tendency to move such states quickly into the column “to be solved”. In that column, the feelings are to be “worked through”. Kondoh does not cure. She tells. And telling – if it is precise, unhurried, free of moralizing – is an entirely different economy of experience from therapy.

Six minutes thirty-nine seconds, the end of “KiyaKiya”. Eiko lies naked on a tree branch reaching out over an abyss. She is not wounded. She is not rescued. She is simply there. She smiles at the viewer in a way that unsettles, because it says: I have already seen this scene, and I know what comes after. The viewer sees an image whose text has not yet arrived – or perhaps will never arrive. A good moment to ask the question: how many states are in us, waiting only for someone to give them a word?

Sources

1. Shibusawa Tatsuhiko, 澁澤龍彥『少女コレクション序説』, Chūkō Bunko, Tōkyō 1985.

2. Akino Kondoh, 近藤聡乃『不思議というには地味な話』, Nanarokusha, Tōkyō 2012.

3. Akino Kondoh, 近藤聡乃『ニューヨークで考え中』1–4, Akishobo, Tōkyō 2015–2023.

4. Donald W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality, Tavistock Publications, London 1971; polskie wydanie: Zabawa a rzeczywistość, przeł. Aneta Czownicka, Imago, Gdańsk 2011.

5. Sigmund Freud, Das Unheimliche (1919); polskie wydanie w: Sigmund Freud, Pisma psychologiczne, przeł. Robert Reszke, Wydawnictwo KR, Warszawa 1997.

6. Catherine Munroe Hotes, “Interview with Akino Kondoh”, Nishikata Film Review, 28 August 2010; eadem, “Akino Kondoh’s Kiya Kiya (2010–2011)”, Nishikata Film Review, 2 June 2012.

7. Matt Huynh, “Q&A with Akino Kondoh”, Yellowtrace, 19 April 2011.

8. Mizuma Art Gallery exhibition catalogues: “Ladybirds’ Requiem” (Tōkyō 2006), “KiyaKiya” (Tōkyō 2011), “KiyaKiya 1/15秒” (Tōkyō 2013), “Noodling in New York” (Tōkyō 2023).

9. Ryan Holmberg (ed.), Beetles, Cats, Clouds. The Manga of Tsurita Kuniko, Yamada Murasaki, and Kondoh Akino, exhibition catalogue, 80WSE Gallery, New York 2023.

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 An enthusiast of Asian culture with a deep appreciation for the diverse philosophies of the world. By education, a psychologist and philologist specializing in Korean studies. At heart, a programmer (primarily for Android) and a passionate technology enthusiast, as well as a practitioner of Zen and mono no aware. In moments of tranquility, adheres to a disciplined lifestyle, firmly believing that perseverance, continuous personal growth, and dedication to one's passions are the wisest paths in life. Author of the book "Strong Women of Japan" (>>see more)

Personal motto:

"The most powerful force in the universe is compound interest." - Albert Einstein (probably)

  Mike Soray

   (aka Michał Sobieraj)

未開    ソビエライ

 An enthusiast of Asian culture with a deep appreciation for the diverse philosophies of the world. By education, a psychologist and philologist specializing in Korean studies. At heart, a programmer (primarily for Android) and a passionate technology enthusiast, as well as a practitioner of Zen and mono no aware. In moments of tranquility, adheres to a disciplined lifestyle, firmly believing that perseverance, continuous personal growth, and dedication to one's passions are the wisest paths in life. Author of the book "Strong Women of Japan" (>>see more)

Personal motto:

"The most powerful force in the universe is compound interest." - Albert Einstein (probably)

Mike Soray

(aka Michał Sobieraj)

Write us...

Ciechanów, Polska

dr.imyon@gmail.com

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