#fumio mochizuki

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Character Introduction - Fumio Mochizuki

Age: 29 Pronouns: He/Him Height: 6'0 Idol Attribute: Lovely Specialty: Visual

Bio: Alias "Mofuko". Part of the duo unit STATIC//MISCONDUCT. Normally keeps to himself but will blather on about completely unrelated nonsense if asked a question or spoken to. He is incredibly intelligent, but due to his violent nature and easily provoked 'cute aggression' he has been demoted to 'henchman' by fellow unit member Fang. Mofuko is skilled with his hands and is very good at sewing or repairing things that are broken. Suffers often from 'post rage clarity' where he has to sit down and fix whatever he gleefully destroyed moments ago. His glasses are the number one victim of this.

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Street of Love and Hope (1959)

[byneddiedingo]

Kyoko Kagawa in Sansho the Bailiff (Kenji Mizoguchi, 1954)

Cast: Kinuyo Tanaka, Yoshiaki Haniyagi, Kyoko Kagawa, Eitaro Shindo, Akitake Kono, Masao Shimizu, Ken Mitsuda. Screenplay: Fuji Yahiro, Yoshikata Yoda, based on a story by Ogai Mori. Cinematography: Kazuo Miyagawa. Production design: Hisakazu Tsuji. Film editing: Mitsuzo Miyata. Music: Fumio Hayasaka, Kinshichi Kodera, Tamekichi Mochizuki. 

It's rare to see a film whose title character is the villain -- unless you count monster movies like the many versions of Dracula -- but Sansho (Eitaro Shindo) is decidedly that, the slave-driving administrator of a medieval Japanese manor. (It's as if Uncle Tom's Cabin had been called Simon Legree.) But in fact, Sansho serves as a catalyst for the story that centers on an aristocratic family. The father displeases his feudal lord by being too merciful to the people he governs, so he's banished to a distant province while his wife, Tamaki (Kinuyo Tanaka), and their children, Zushio and Anju, remain behind with her brother until the children are old enough to make the dangerous cross-country journey. But when they set out, they are betrayed and sold into slavery. Tamaki is forced into prostitution and separated from the children, who grow up as slaves on the estate administered by Sansho. One day, Anju (Kyoko Kagawa) hears a new slave, brought from the island of Sado, singing a song about a woman who mourns the loss of her children named Zushio and Anju, and learns that her mother is still alive. Meanwhile, Zushio (Yoshiaki Hanayagi) has decided that the best way to survive in slavery is to go along with Sansho's demands, which include punishing an elderly slave by branding him on the forehead. Anju is appalled by what her brother has become, because he has turned against the principles of mercy and human equality that their father taught them, but when the opportunity to escape presents itself, she persuades him to do so. Staying behind, and facing the wrath of Sansho, she drowns herself. Eventually, Zushio wreaks revenge on Sansho and liberates the slaves, then goes in search of his mother. This reworking of an ancient fable is one of the most miraculous of films, an exquisitely photographed (by Kazuo Miyagawa), designed (by Hisakazu Tsuji), and acted work, radiating Mizoguchi's deep human sympathy. Tanaka, who starred in Ugetsu (1953) and The Life of Oharu (1952), the other two films usually ranked alongside Sansho the Bailiff as Mizoguchi's greatest works, has a smaller role than in the others, but her final scene in this film is one of the most heart-breaking performances in all movies.

[historyhermann]

Fictional Librarian of the Month: Fumio Murakumi in "Girl Friend Beta"

Kokomi Shiina (left) thanks Fumio Murakami (right) for giving her information about the whereabouts of Chloe Lemaire in the first episode of Girl Friend Beta

Hello everyone! In order to ensure I have enough posts on here, hopefully one for every week, I'm starting this new feature, which I like to call "Fictional Librarian of the Month" with one post of a fictional librarian every month, prioritizing those in currently airing shows, but also covering those in older shows, only focusing on the ones which are not problematic in one way or another, whether falling into stereotypes or something else. [1] Without further ado, let me begin with my first entry, Fumio Murakami (voiced by Kaori Nazuka), in the 2014 anime series Girl Friend Beta which I'm currently watching.

About the librarian

Murakami is a third-year student on the library committee who has partly braided silvery-blue hair. As such, she is a librarian of color, and is friends with many people in this Japanese high school. She works at the library only two days a week, Wednesday and Friday.

Role in the story

Murakami debuts in the show's first episode when the show's protagonist, Kokomi Shiina, comes there in hopes of finding Chloe Lemaire, a French exchange student, at the school, as Lemaire dropped a photograph and Shiina wants to return it to her. In the second episode she helps Kokomi when she wants to ask about dieting but do in such a way that it doesn't embarrass her. In the third episode, Erena Mochizuki tries to recruit her to be a model, but her friends describe Murakami as introverted and hard to approach. This backfires as it gives Mochizuki her more motivation, with Murakumi tentatively accepting it, and later regretting this choice. She later tells Mochizuki that she can't be her model as she feels the photographing of her throughout her life is too disruptive, although she believes she said it the wrong way. She continues to be close friends with Mochizuki, who tells her she has many expressions and there are wonderful things about her she hasn't even noticed. She ultimately is glad she agreed to model as she got new friends while photos of her won a contest.

Does the librarian buck stereotypes?

In some ways she does in that she does not shush anyone, is dedicated to her work, and is willing to help patrons by answering requests. She also is much more than a librarian, not chained to her desk, guiding patrons to the resources they need and not trying to assume what they are asking for in terms of book selections. She also is introverted and her favorite hobbies are reading and pressing flowers, so in that way you could say it might be stereotypical, although there is more to her character than these traits, however. She clearly doesn't like people invading her personal space, like Mochizuki who thinks of her as a model in the show's third episode, and that sentiment is understandable. She says that she is alone because she gets absorbed in her books, not that she doesn't want to connect with others. She does ask Mochizuki to be quiet, while others are in the library, saying she will disturb people, but doesn't shush her. She may also be a lesbian, as she seems to show some attraction to Mochizuki, who asks her out on a date in the show's third episode. Both are close friends.

Any similarity with librarians in other shows?

As Girl Friend Beta is a romance anime set in a school, it is different than something like Library War, but there are other librarians like Murakami who work in school settings like Hisami Hishishii in R.O.D. the TV, Yamada in B Gata H Kei, Anne and Grea in Manaria Friends, Azusa Aoi in Whispered Words, Fumi Manjōme in Aoi Hana / Sweet Blue Flowers, and Chiyo Tsukudate in Strawberry Panic!. This makes Fumio Murakumi the twenty-fifth Japanese female librarian featured on this blog, including those in Library War, the unnamed librarians in that Cardcaptor Sakura episode, and many others.

© 2021 Burkely Hermann. All rights reserved.

Notes

[1] For instance, Himiko Agari, a librarian who appears in Komi Can't Communicate, will not be included in these lists as she is a masochist who wants to be the "dog" of the protagonist, Komi, which is just...weird and makes me uncomfortable to write about, as it also feeds into lesbian stereotypes.

Reprinted from Pop Culture Library Review and Wayback Machine

[clemsfilmdiary]

The Best of May 2020

Best Discovery: Night on the Galactic Railroad

          Runners Up: Career Girls, Diane, Drowning by Numbers, In the Name of the Father, The Last Picture Show, New York, New York, Petulia, Sid and Nancy, The Talented Mr. Ripley, Taxi Zum Klo, Vera Drake, Yumeji

Best Rewatch: The Love Witch

           Runners Up: Cheatin', La Dolce Vita, Hannah and Her Sisters, Jurassic Park, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Quintet, A Safe Place, The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea, Sansho the Bailiff, Twenty-Four Eyes, The Vanishing

Most Enjoyable Fluff: Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home

          Runners Up: A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge, Octopussy, Pretty Woman

Best Documentary: Crumb

           Runners Up: How to Survive a Plague, The Times of Harvey Milk

Best Male Performance: Matt Damon in The Talented Mr. Ripley

           Runners Up: Timothy Bottoms in The Last Picture Show, Raul Esparza in Company: A Musical Comedy, Daniel Day-Lewis in In the Name of the Father, Gary Oldman in Sid and Nancy, Frank Ripploh in Taxi Zum Klo

Best Female Performance: Mary Kay Place in Diane

           Runners Up: Katrin Cartlidge and Lynda Steadman in Career Girls, Liza Minnelli in New York, New York, Samantha Robinson in The Love Witch, Imelda Staunton in Vera Drake, Alison Steadman in Abigail's Party, Hideko Takamine in Lightning and Twenty-Four Eyes, Rita Tushingham in A Taste of Honey, Chloe Webb in Sid and Nancy

Best Supporting Performance or Cameo: Jeffrey Vincent Parise in The Love Witch

           Runners Up: Mark Benton in Career Girls, Michael Caine, Mia Farrow, Barbara Hershey, Max von Sydow and Dianne Wiest in Hannah and Her Sisters, Phil Davis in Vera Drake, Murray Melvin in A Taste of Honey, Bernard-Pierre Donnadieu in The Vanishing, Earl Rhodes in The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea, Kinuyo Tanaka in Sansho the Bailiff, Emma Thompson in In the Name of the Father

Most Enjoyable Ham: Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman

           Runners Up: Antonio Fargas and Anne-Marie Johnson in I'm Gonna Git You Sucka, Nico in La Dolce Vita, George Takei in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, Kristina Wayborn in Octopussy

Best Cinematography: The Love Witch (M. David Mullen)

           Runners Up: The Baby of Mâcon (Sacha Vierny), La Dolce Vita (Otello Martelli), Eyes Without a Face (Eugen Schüfftan), The Godfather (Gordon Willis), Lola (Xaver Schwarzenberger) New York, New York (László Kovács) Petulia (Nicolas Roeg), Portrait of a Lady on Fire (Claire Mathon), Quintet (Jean Boffety), Sansho the Bailiff (Kazuo Miyagawa), A Safe Place (Richard C. Kratina), Sid and Nancy (Roger Deakins), Twenty-Four Eyes (Hiroshi Kusuda), Yumeji (Jun'ichi Fujisawa)

Best Locations: Quintet

           Runners Up: Drowning by Numbers, Petulia, The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea, Sansho the Bailiff, A Taste of Honey, Yumeji

Best Score: Quintet (Tom Pierson)

           Runners Up: Diane (Jeremiah Bornfield), Drowning by Numbers (Michael Nyman), Night on the Galactic Railroad (Haruomi Hosono), A Nightmare on Elm Street (Charles Bernstein), Petulia (John Barry), The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea (Johnny Mandel), Sansho the Bailiff (Fumio Hayasaka, Kinshichi Kodera, Tamekichi Mochizuki), Twenty-Four Eyes (Chūji Kinoshita), The Vanishing (Henry Vrienten), Yumeji (Shigeru Umebayashi)

Best Hunk: Bernard Hill in Drowning by Numbers

           Runners Up: Mario Adorf in Lola, Bernd Broaderup in Taxi Zum Klo, Jim Brown and Keenen Ivory Wayans in I'm Gonna Git You Sucka, Trevor Cooper in Drowning by Numbers, Bernard-Pierre Donnadieu in The Vanishing, Raul Esparza in Take Me to the World, Dennis Farina in The Case of the Hillside Stranglers,  Gian Keys and Jeffrey Vincent Parise in The Love Witch, Matt McCoy in The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, George Segal in A Touch of Class

Assorted Pleasures:

- Elegantly muted, dreamy background art in Night on the Galactic Railroad

- Surrealistic nightmare imagery in A Nightmare on Elm Street

- Use of pastels and florescents in Lola

- Richly textured ice, general production design in Quintet

- Phantasmagoric flights of fancy, vertiginous warped-perspective animation in Cheatin'

- Raul Esparza's silky-smooth rendition of “Someone Is Waiting”, chamber-style orchestrations by Mary-Mitchell Campbell in Company: A Musical Comedy

- Josh Groban's surprisingly touching classical-crossover version of “Not While I'm Around” in Take Me to the World

- Profusion of dad bods on display in Drowning by Numbers

[ao3feed-p5-boyslove]

by Musical_life

Words: 1337, Chapters: 1/?, Language: English

Series: Part 3 of Bloody Shadows

Fandoms: Persona 5, Persona 3, Persona 2

Rating: Mature

Warnings: Underage

Categories: M/M

Characters: Akechi Goro, Niijima Makoto, Morgana (Persona 5), Mochizuki Ryoji, Arisato Minato, OC - Fumio, OC - Hakuoh, Sakura Sojiro

Relationships: Akechi Goro/Kurusu Akira, Arisato Minato/Mochizuki Ryoji

Additional Tags: Goro's in a coma, The Metaverse takes on a different form, Helios is injured but healing

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color pallet challenge

[byneddiedingo]

Masayuki Mori and Machiko Kyo in Ugetsu (Kenji Mizoguchi, 1953)

Cast: Machiko Kyo, Mitsuko Mito, Kinuyo Tanaka, Masayuki Mori, Eitaro Ozawa. Screenplay: Matsutaro Kawaguchi, Yoshikata Yoda, Isamu Yoshii, based on stories by Akinari Ueda. Cinematography: Kazuo Miyagawa. Production design: Masatsugu Hashimoto. Film editing: Mitsuzo Miyata. Music: Fumio Hayasaka, Tamekichi Mochizuki, Ichiro Saito. 

When does beauty become a flaw? To put it another way, if beauty is only skin deep, how does an artist present it so that we don't linger on the surface of a work and fail to comprehend its depths? I raise this in connection with a viewing of Kenji Mizoguchi's Ugetsu, a film universally praised for its beauty. It's easy to be mesmerized by Mizoguchi's visual compositions and by the sinuous fluidity of Kazuo Miyagawa's cinematography, as well as the poetry of the screenplay, all at the expense of feeling the coherence of the film's story and characters and ideas with our own lives. I find myself preferring Mizoguchi's less exquisite films to Ugetsu: Sansho the Bailiff (1954), surely, but also The Life of Oharu (1952) and even an earlier film like Osaka Elegy (1936). A case in point: The scene in which Genjuro (Masayuki Mori) returns home after his dalliance with the ghostly Lady Wasaka (Machiko Kyo) is a crucial and mythic one, evoking among other things Odysseus's return to Ithaca. And Mizoguchi stages it memorably: Genjuro enters the near-ruin of his house and finds it empty and littered, the fire pit cold. The camera follows him through the house in a long unbroken take, watches as he goes out the back door and sees him through the windows as he circles the house and re-enters. Only this time when he enters, the room is clean and the fire is burning brightly; his wife, Miyagi (Kinuyo Tanaka), embraces him. Overwhelmed and exhausted, he lies down and falls into a deep sleep beside his son, only to wake in the morning to find the cold empty room he first entered and to learn that Miyagi is dead. It's a magnificent sequence, a tour de force of acting, directing, camerawork and editing. It makes a larger, deeper point: that Genjuro will never escape from ghosts. A less gifted director than Mizoguchi would have used conventional techniques like dissolves or double exposures to make the point. But there's also something distracting about instead employing a long, circular tracking shot with an invisible cut: We marvel at the technique at the expense of sharing Genjuro's experience. There is an art that conceals art, and I don't think Mizoguchi attains it here.

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Kyoko Kagawa and Kazuo Hasegawa in A Story From Chikamatsu (Kenji Mizoguchi, 1954) Cast: Kazuo Hasegawa, Kyoko Kagawa, Eitaro Shindo, Eitaro Ozawa, Yoko Minamida. Screenplay: Matsutaro Kawaguchi, Yoshikata Yoda, based on a play by Chikamatsu Monzaemon. Cinematography: Kazuo Miyagawa. Production design: Hisakaza Tsuji. Film editing: Kanji Suganuma. Music: Fumio Hayasaka, Tamezo Mochizuki.  Kenji Mizoguchi's A Story From Chikamatsu, which has also been released under the built-in-spoiler title The Crucified Lovers, is based on Chikamatsu Monzaemon's 18th-century play The Legend of the Grand Scroll-Maker. It's a romantic drama about doomed lovers that Mizoguchi and screenwriters Matsutaro Kawaguchi and Yoshikata Yoda have expanded into a fable about greed, injustice, and the subjugation of women. The lovers don't even start out as lovers, but circumstances force them together. Mohei (Kazuo Hasegawa) is a somewhat overworked apprentice scroll-maker who is thrown together with his master's wife, Osan (Kyoko Kagawa), almost by accident. The master, Ishun (Eitaro Shindo), is a miser and a philanderer, and the circumstances that initially put Mohei and Osan together are almost the stuff of farce: Osan knows that Ishun has been harassing the pretty maid Otama (Yoko MInamida), trying to persuade her to become his mistress, so Osan hides in the young woman's room one night to try to catch her husband in the act. Instead, Mohei goes to Otama's room and is discovered there with Osan. When Ishun finds out he accuses her of adultery, which as we've been shown earlier in the film is a crime punishable by crucifixion. In addition to this crime, Mohei has also been accused of forgery: Ishun had refused to give Osan's brother a loan, so Mohei agreed to help Osan by using Ishun's seal on a receipt, having been assured that the money would be repaid quickly. When confronted with the forgery, Otama intervenes on behalf of Mohei (whom she secretly loves) and says that she asked for the money. The upshot of all this complex of subterfuges, ultimately caused by Ishun's greed and lechery, is that both Osan and Mohei are forced to flee Ishun's household. They determine that suicide would be more honorable than crucifixion, but when they discover that they are in love with each other, they decide that life in hiding would be preferable to death. Things do not go well, of course, but in the end Ishun gets his comeuppance too. There is perhaps a little too much plot and the outcome is foreseeable, but Mizoguchi's mastery of atmosphere, aided by Kazuo Miyagawa's cinematography, lifts the film high above the melodrama. It's at times a strikingly claustrophobic film, whose boxlike interiors sometimes suggest the grids of Mondrian paintings, underscoring the entrapment not only of the lovers but also of those victims of their own avarice, indifference, or subservience who would punish them. When we're not inside, we're on crowded streets, and even when the lovers escape into the countryside, they're adrift on a fog-shrouded lake or framed by the stalks of a bamboo forest, hinting at prison bars. For some reason, perhaps the overcomplexity of the narrative, A Story From Chikamatsu doesn't hold the honored place in the Mizoguchi canon of Ugetsu (1953), The Life of Oharu (1952), or Sansho the Bailiff (1954), but it's still the work of a master filmmaker.