Where the wind took Akira

(Taken from the Manga 'Akira' and uploaded for the viewing pleasure of the reader)


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So firstly Thank You to the lovely folks at fourdocs who have kindly bought some wheels for our van. Wheels, see, are really quite useful. They allow for far more of a flow on the road than the basic grinding along on spindles. So, really, cheers dudes.

On a totally different note, I (along with various family members) scattered my Grandfather’s ashes this weekend. This experience was in itself pretty interesting. It always struck me that as a guy he was not too great a man to his immediate family and later attempted to change upon realising this (if a bit late). Whilst he was being scattered the Bob Marley line

‘None but ourselves can free our minds’ - Redemption Song

hit me. Can you redeem a lifetime of terrorising people in chilling out prior to death? Perhaps.

So I went home and watched Akira. Obviously.
This film, best known to fans of Manga Entertainment for the sound byte
“What’s Happening?” (used in all Manga trailers after the films release for over a decade), was directed by Katsuhiro Ôtomo (who had been writing it as a comic strip since 1982); Akira was released in 1988 and blew away most of everyone who watched it with its depiction of a Neo-Tokyo.

Many, many people have watched Akira. This is a fact. It is possibly the most one-time viewed Anime around the world. That said, when you talk to people about it, it is often apparent that a lot of them did not quite get the point of the film.

Regardless of a whole hoard of convoluted characters, all very closely linked, Akira has only one protagonist within its plot and that is Akira. The entity of a small boy trapped in suspension of time and space, confused yet all knowing, lost and hurt but loving, without knowing how to love or what it means. Non-human to the point of being utterly alive. When I was younger my Grandfather said something to me that always stuck with me…

- “The future is not a straight line. There are many different pathways. We must try to decide that future for ourselves”.

Really very strangely, this line can also be found in Akira. The likelihood of him ever having watched Akira is beyond fuck all, so that always confused the hell out of me. I had seen Akira before he said this to me, but still, it confuses me to the same degree now as it did then. I was about nine at the time.

Odd.

Moreover, if you type ‘Akira’ into the Internet Movie Data Base, the second plot keyword to come up, after ‘1980s’, is ‘Nihilism’.

I often wonder if people are inherently assholes to people solely due to nihilism, only stopping this Way of being once they realise that life may in fact be worth living.

The film makes a lot of incredible points… and the soundtrack helps.
You can not change the past, you can only redirect it. The future is unknown, so hang onto the ones you love and if you do go the wrong way, you might end up as a cybernetic mutated military experiment made of a hybrid of anti-matter and violent mech-goo. So avoid doing so.

I believe my Grandfather to have found his way just prior to his death. The last thing he said to me was “Go a long way, don’t look back and stay in love”.

I think he might have been a deeply confused romantic at heart.
Hopefully the wind will take him somewhere worth going.