To whom it may concern,

This is the profile page of Bong Bong Bong.

I don't know how to write. Maybe I know how to read a bit, but I guess that's it. My strengths lie elsewhere.

Before I leave, I would like to have written a bit of everything.

Perhaps the best summation of my own attitude to most of whatever I've written falls in the pen of Wittgenstein:

"It is not impossible that it should fall to the lot of this work, in its poverty and in the darkness of this time, to bring light into one brain or another -- but of course, it is not likely. I should not like my writing to spare other people the trouble of thinking. But, if possible, to stimulate someone to thoughts of his own. I should have liked to produce a good book. This has not come about, but the time is past in which I could improve it."

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In other words, what is called “literature” in the realm of the Chinese classics and what is called “literature” in English must belong to different categories and cannot be subsumed under a single definition.

Natsume Soseki

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To write a novel is to betray it.

Michael Chabon

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Truly creative writing involves [...] discovering something in yourself, not dreaming up some formally satisfying story.

Yasuoka Shotaro

CURRENT FICS

SHORT-FICS

Variations on Kiss The Rain

Inspired by CITRON (Yamada Ako)'s doujin, Kiss The Rain, and the Goldberg variations.

A new transfer students enters Madoka's class. Who is she? And why can't Madoka seem to take her eyes off her?
A sweet story of two girls, not so close yet not too distant, as they pass the rainy days softly cozed up in the library with no greater comfort than each other's nervously silent presence.

闇祭 (Walpurgisnacht)
(日本魂）The Soul of Japan
（子どもの神様）The God of Children
（天国画）Alina's Best Artwork
(月様太陽様) The Sun and The Moon
（イブリス）Iblis
(ある馬鹿の一書）The Life of a Stupid Woman
Noi
(少女記）An Account of A Young Girl: My Summer Holiday Assignment
（夢夜々）Dreaming Nights
（何が彼女をそうさせてか）I Dream of the Future

All the world's a stage.

"Everything in this world is fake. My life is nothing more than a drama that you penned. Please, prove it. "Faust" is on show."
（この世界はすべて嘘でした。私の人生はあなたの書いた戯曲にすぎません。それを証明して下さい。「ファウスト」が上演中）

"Life is more hellish than hell itself."
My next short-fic set. Currently writing.

MEDIUM-FICS

Summer Grass (夏草）

Timeline X. It is the summer holidays. Walpurgisnacht has been defeated. There is nothing more left to do.

Hence, now that they can finally relax, Kyoko and Sayaka go on a vacation.

They take a train to Fukui, the summer country covered in summer grass.

A haiku novel, so to say.

A medium fic, probably totalling to 50k words.

3 parts
confessio
serena ira
and i'm home

Stalled. Not in a Miyazawa mood.

ふゆぐさ wintergrass

Timeline X. It is the snowing. Walpurgisnacht has been defeated. There is nothing left.

Kyoko and Sayaka go on a journey.

They take a train to Fukui, the snow country covered in winter grass.

A haiku novel.

A medium fic, probably totalling to 50k words.

3 parts
decretum
conturbatio
symposium magarum

Stalled. Not in a Kawabata mood.

LONG-FICS

Country of Sweets

Status

A difficult Post-Rebellion fic; a frigid elegance rooted in the beauty of shadows, a minor sacrament of daily life, and little else, if but a minor wickedness somewhere in between. Slice-of-life chock to the brim with understatement.

I hope to eventually bring this fic to a close, no matter how many years it takes me. Next update should be around September.

Next Chapter

orfn

Mami, Kyouko, Nagisa: three orfns playing house.

MISCELLANEOUS-FICS

The Goddess and The Lizard and Other Stories

For a long time now, I've wanted to write a series of fairy tales and other short stories on PMMM.
Updated whenever a new idea strikes my fancy.

Waiting for Homura

Status

A Pre-Rebellion fic.

The summary says it all. Quite minimalist, I feel.

It'll come in three parts; but as yet, I have no plans to write it very frequently.

PLANNED FICS

円満へ (Towards an Absolute State)

A series of three fics. Titles are rather tentative.

保無樂道八夢 (Homura-chan) [苦諦経]
4 sections
Akemi-san and I
Nagisa and I
Akemi Homura
Madoka and Homura-chan

夜明け (Daybreak) [混濁経]
4 sections
風と鳥と空 (The Breeze, the Birds, and the Sky)
海の向こうへ (Towards the Sea)
太陽に (In the Sun)
明けガラス (Goddess in the Morning)

冂子 (Kyouko) [迷妄経]
2 sections
塵労 (Anguish)
彼岸過迄 (And Beyond the Other Side)

COMPLETED FICS

保無樂道八夢 (Homura-chan)

Status

A very serious and sombre Post-Rebellion fic, written in a simple and unassuming hand. First of three in the planned series, 円満へ (Towards an Absolute State).

Something has broken — a thread of life, a last heartstring perhaps. Something horrifying, something irreversible, has happened. But at the same time, something remains, something uncanny lives on, a ghostly presence, a spectral willpower.

"If we turned back time, could we learn to live right?"

What is the right way to live? How do we live right? Many of us spend more than half of our lives struggling against this. And end up only to fail. Fighting ourselves and the world, certainly it must seem like a great irony. It always has been. There never seems to be an answer, if there was ever a question that was all-encompassing enough. No amount of progress has been able to take away the enormous pain that both you and I know, has never changed from ages old.

Where then do we escape to? Faith? Madness? Death? Love?

"If someone tells me that it's wrong to hope, I'll tell them they're wrong every time."

This is a famous line from Madoka.

But what is hope? What is despair? What is love?

Why must we suffer? What then is the antidote to suffering?

If we should procure the cure, then at what price?

This fic is a homage to the burden of life we must all suffer.

If I can touch even one person with this, I will be very glad.

There are 4 parts to this fic.

FYI:

Anyways, this work - being a series of "shishosetsu" - might seem impenetrable at first sight. It's hard to exaggerate the point, since the genre itself does not follow the narrative conventions that govern western fiction. Plot is seen as an unnatural contrivance here, and there is no narrative dynamo to provide some linear, forward-moving thrust. The shishosetsu is sung more by the rhythms of life as experienced, not in representations - concerned more with state than with process, acceptance before reform. Come to think of it, Country of Sweets is also more utamonogatari than lyrical novel. Oh well.

"Shosetsu and shishosetsu —they are both very strange. You see, there is no God in the Japanese tradition, no monolithic ordering authority in narrative—and that makes all the difference."

In a way, this work is also my way of filling in for an alternative interpretation of PMMM's world-view as compared to most others one might find on this site, a more Japanese one, if I may be so daring as to suggest so.

In Rebellion, Gott ist tot. In this work, perhaps He has always been vanished into the clouds like Hikaru Genji.

For more information on this interesting topic of shishosetsu, search for Edward Fowler's The Rhetoric of Confession: Shishosetsu in Early Twentieth-Century Japanese Fiction

cobaltblue

A strange thing.

The Goddess and The Lizard

Pretty much a facsimile of "The Demon and her Dog", but with a sort-of mental twist.

Little Cry of the Abyss

Character study of Kyouko and Sayaka.

Nameless Immortal

Reflections (for those of you bored enough to want to read this)

Inspired by one of Han Shan's poems.

It sprouted from the thought: how far can one stretch characterization? Can we change our nature?

I believe that while it is par for the course to glean about a character's personality from whatever source material there may be, the latent qualities of a character are not so accessible. How can a character change, and following what tangent?

It is probably something very subjective. When we struggle to understand ourselves and those around us, how more so about someone else's fictional character?

So I chose to dabble with Kyoko, who I most associate with a world-weary but rather juvenile hardiness, and a thirst for salvation from the anime series.

What would have happened if she turned blind? It is a frightening thought to be so immediately challenged.

I myself occasionally wonder about this since my eyesight seems to get weaker year after year.

At the end of the day, I just can't imagine any other character from PMMM replacing Kyoko in this fic. Kyoko seems to be the right fit.

Ultimately, I decided to merge it all: the existentialism and impermanence, the iron will to survive, and the presentiment of death.

Thus, that accounts for the bleakness prevalent in the fic.

As for the beauty, as for the hope - I find it hard to explain. I hope readers can take away different insights from it. Be resignation to fate, or defiance of circumstances, I'm happy if it means something to the readers.