Satoshi Kon’s Final Blog Post and the Nature of the Creative Spirit
The specialest of thanks to Makiko Itoh, who in 2010 did the English-speaking world a huge favor and translated Kon’s final blog. Though I know nothing else about you, I hope, 14 years on, you still enjoy his films from time to time.
In 2010, at the age of 46, Satoshi Kon died, and left behind not only an incredible corpus of inspired animated works, but also a very long blog post.
For the uninitiated, Satoshi was the director of the movies Perfect Blue, Millennium Actress, Tokyo Godfathers, and Paprika, the final of which falls within my top fifty films of all time. Each of these films shows incredible artistic vision, playing with genres and points of view like putty: they are films that would be incredibly thought-provoking regardless of medium, and their animated style lends visual amazement and interest only possible in two dimensions. Kon died suddenly of pancreatic cancer as he was working on another film, Dreaming Machine.
Many movie directors are very important to me, but Kon is special. After I first watched Paprika, I could feel the very literal presence of a kind of ghost, such was its power. The film had a complete understanding of a concept only gestating within my conceptual imagination, that of the real life effects of shared memetic dreams and nightmares, and the film’s confidence in regards to this idea gave me a visceral, existentially horrified reaction that I haven’t experienced before or since. I could feel my ideas in the room with me. Because of the nature of my ideas at the time that was a dark experience, however since then I have been able to wield the concepts the great director conveyed to me like a scalpel, excising meaning and piercing layers of societal distraction that envelope fundamental trends. Once you know how concepts spread, virus-like, through groups until they physically manifest in the form of action, many aspects of life in a society become more clear. In short, Satoshi Kon, through his cinema, gave me an important revelation in the development of my (unimportant) thoughts on many of the topics I write about here on Idea Overflow Box. My assertion, as arrogantly follows, is that he was a genius.
Not only that, however. Kon, like all animation people, had an incredible creative work ethic. In the past I have drawn motivation from Hayao Miyazaki, Kon’s fellow Japanese animation genius (along with others like Anno and Takahata), because animation seems like an incredible labor of creative passion. These masters and their many disciples draw until their fingers are numb, they draw late into the night, they draw hundreds of pictures in exchange scarce moments of film output. That kind of creative productivity is amazing to me, it’s inhuman. I want it, in a way, though certainly not for drawing, and acknowledging that wanting such a killing thing is perhaps some sort of yearning for the abyss. But the ability to shed blood like that to make something so beloved: how can you not be intoxicated by it?
That is my breathless ode to the great director’s work. However, Satoshi Kon’s final work, a blog post on his site Kon’s Tone, has two further themes that stuck out to me. The first comprised incredibly profound and messy thoughts on life and death.
It was so heartbreaking to tell my parents.
I'd really intended to go up to Sapporo, where my parents live, while I was still able to, but my illness progressed so unexpectedly and annoyingly fast that I ended up calling them on the telephone from the hospital room as I was closest to death.
"I'm in the late stages of cancer and will die soon. I was so happy being born as a child to you, Father and Mother. Thank you."
They must have been devastated to hear this out of the blue, but I was certain I was going to die right then.
But then I came back home and survived the pneumonia. I made the big decision to see my parents. They wanted to see me too. But it was going to be so hard to see them, and I didn't have the will to. But I wanted to see my parents' faces one last time. I wanted to tell them how grateful I was that they brought me into this world.
I've been a happy person. Even though I must apologize to my wife, my parents and all the people that I love, that lived out my life a bit too faster than most.
(…) as a member of society, I do accept at least half of what society in general holds to be right. I do pay taxes. I'm far from being an upstanding citizen, but I am a full member of Japanese society. So, aside from the things I needed to do to prolong my life from my own point of view, I also attempted to do all the things necessary to "be ready to die properly". I don't think I managed to do it properly though.
The blog, as it stands preserved today.
The great director, unsurprisingly, knows how to bring tears to my eyes when talking about his final days. The second theme, however, was what amazed me and spurred me to write something. In the middle of it all—his battle with illness, the preparations for death, the logistics, begging the hospital to just let him die at home—he reflects on an unfinished project.
My biggest regret is the film "Dreaming Machine". I'm worried not only about the film itself, but about the staff with whom I was able to work with on the film. After all, there's a strong possibility that the storyboards that were created with (our) blood, sweat and tears will never be seen. This is because Satoshi Kon put his arms around the original story, the script, the characters and the settings, the sketches, the music...every single image. Of course there are things that I shared with the animation director, the art director and other staff [members], but basically most of the work can only be understood by Satoshi Kon. It's easy to say that it was my fault for arranging things this way, but from my point of view I made every effort to share my vision with others. However, in my current state I can only feel deep remorse for my inadequacies in these areas. I am really sorry to all of the staff. However, I want them to understand, if only a little bit. Satoshi Kon was "that kind of guy", and, that's why he was able to make rather weird anime that was a bit different. I know this is a selfish excuse, but think of my cancer and please forgive me.
I haven't been idly waiting for death, even now I'm thinking with my weak brain of ways to let the work live even after I am gone. But they are all shallow ideas. When I told Maruyama-san about my concerns about "Dreaming Machine", he just said "Don't worry. We'll figure out something, so don't worry."
I wept.
I wept uncontrollably.
I have put these extended passages in to give you a sense of what I am talking about here, but I would very much encourage you to read the entire thing for yourself. In fact, go watch Kon’s filmography for yourself, if that needs to be said.
At the end of his life, Satoshi Kon revealed so much about his work, perhaps more than a surface-level reading of his words would let on. He shows such care for his process, his colleagues, his fans, but ultimately for the fierce pride of making something. Kon knew that, in short, creativity is life. His relationship with his own art is also something tangible, it is both his raison d’etre and great passion, as nothing but a confluence of both could have made his achievements possible. He values his own work, which is crucial. Valuing one’s work, whether it be “artistic” in the narrowest definition (I would assert that so many more things are art than we think), is the only way to ensure deep quality, because no one will ever have the exact depth of vision you have for your own work. It is not in pursuit of his fans’ acclaim that Kon is building something, though as with all creatives I’m sure it helped; he creates to bring the creation into being, the most honest version of artistic endeavor because it dispenses with exterior pretense.
The realm of ideas, the impossible and what is made possible, is the metaphysical spark and/or galactic nebula-caused accident that allows humans to feel, exist, and live with such subtlety and purpose. It is the only thing that will preserve humanity through each self-inflicted trial; all that we have built between ourselves and the profane chaos around us. Every built object, social construct, even personal identity, is the result of millennia of iterative ideation. This is an overwhelming thought, but also shows how well (and poorly) the great machine of humanity working is able to work towards self-improvement.
Creative work draws on the most fundamental and inherent force people can bring to bear: the memetic connections created by ideas. Regardless of the purpose of the medium, all art teaches, and teaching always lies somewhere between being a societal construction worker and civilizational artisan craftsman. A piece of creative work, even something which is not always seen as a creative work but was in fact created by one or more people, conveys information, which then feeds our brains, which output new creative works that convey new combinations of information. This is why all art is derivative of other art. All ideas are derivative, full stop, because that is what ideas are.
Kon put everything into his creative work, and his work itself often deals with themes about the nature of creativity and entertainment-art, because he understood these things and more. I sat down to write this post because writing is the creative work I feel most at home with, and I had thoughts to share. I share thoughts because the grand creative work of civilization at large is not finished, and will not be for a long time, and I want to contribute, in some meager way.
Satoshi Kon taught me how.