Button’s Reviews > Masks > Status Update

Okay, spoilers below. You've been warned.
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Mieko and Yasuko orchestrated the rape of Ibuki, who had "no conscious part in it all." Beyond that, Harume's unnamed mental handicap (paired with Mieko's outright prompting) make an unwitting victim of her too. It's rape. Both were raped.

Interesting that both Mikame and Ibuki unconsciously imbue a close mother/daughter relationship with lesbianism. Envying Mieko's closeness with Yasuko, they can't help but sexualize it, thereby translating the closeness to mirror their own desires.

'Mieko's face blurred into an ever more indistinct white. It seemed a face untouched by either sorrow or regret. The sight of that indestructible face had the effect of setting off in Yasuko a release of her deepest self-destructive urges. A violence shook her, as of ocean waves crashing against a huge, immovable rock.'

Modern Ryo no onna, the mountain to her Masugami daughter-in-law.

'[The power women exert over men by sheer existence] is a stream of blood flowing on and on, unbroken, from generation to generation.'

'Blood' as creation, as the power beyond the grasp and control of men.

...but who can carry out her will only by forcing it upon others--and that indirectly, through the possessive capacity of her spirit.

whereas Fujitsubo and Murasaki are women who dissolve their whole beings in the anguish of forgiving men, and thereby create an image of eternal love and beauty in the hearts of the men they love, the Rokujo lady is instead a Ryo no onna: one who chafes at her inability to sublimate her strong ego in deference to any man...

Anyone have a lead on Motoori Norinaga's "The Armpillow"?

'That the beginning of Genji's romance with the Rokujo lady alone should be missing [an encounter aligning her with a particular flower] seems odd indeed, and leads one to suspect that it may have been lost. Motoori Norinaga found the omission so disturbing that he himself wrote a chapter entitled "The Armpillow," based on deductions from later chapters.'

The secrets inside her head are like flowers in a garden at nighttime, filling the darkness with perfume.

She has a peculiar power to move events in whatever direction she pleases, while she stays motionless. She's like a quiet mountain lake whose waters are rushing beneath the surface toward a waterfall. She's like the face on a Noh mask, wrapped in her own secrets.