Puppy Shoes, Never Worn

This is partially about Kentaro Miura’s passing, I promise. But it’s about other stuff too, and I haven’t updated the blog in a while so I have to keep you up to date.

I try to avoid publishing something that’s either a bummer or connected to my mental health, but I kinda have to do both to express what has happened to me.

My twin brother was in the process of adopting a puppy, he bought absorbent training pads for it and everything, but out of the blue the puppy he was adopting drowned in a pool before he could bring it home. The Dachshund puppy was a girl, he named it Lady, and became attached to it fast. Apparently there was a woman near the pool but she had some trauma related to water and she couldn’t jump in to save it. I was looking forward to raising that puppy with my brother, and we were robbed of the opportunity to bring some light into our home. Being diagnosed with bipolar disorder on top of my high-functioning autism a while back was rough, and I’ve been recovering from a major manic episode which scared my family enough that they considered sending me to the psych ward if it got worse. Now I’m managing my condition with new medication that doesn’t make me want to die like the old stuff I was on. That puppy was going to be the first pet I would interact with since my black and white cat Gidget got put down because she got sick. My brother and I had plans, we even went to the pet store to get supplies for this new arrival. He got a whole box of training pads for housebreaking this animal, which now sits on his leather couch unused.

It all reminds me of that super-short story, attributed to Hemingway, “FOR SALE: baby shoes, never worn.” I wanted my brother to bring home the puppy he showed me pictures of so bad. It was going to change our lives, for better or worse. But the puppy drowned, and the next thing I know, my brother has invested in a scooter instead of a dog. He’s not ready to consider adopting any new puppies any time soon, and I respect his emotional distance from the subject. I couldn’t help laughing when I first heard the bad news, because it was so ludicrously sad, I couldn’t cry over it. There was a lengthy screening process for adopting this puppy, three prospective owners failed the test of the breeder, and my brother met the requirements only for the puppy to die before he could drive back to Wollongong to claim the creature. My belief system is perhaps different to most other people like atheists who don’t believe in a soul or that you go anywhere when you die,, my Taoism teaches that this poor puppy perished and is headed to a speedy reincarnation. I don’t cry like I should at funerals, because part of my brain feels these people aren’t truly gone, they’ve gone somewhere else and that’s not really sad to me. The absence of these people who die from their loved ones’ lives, that’s the sad part and even if I can’t cry over it I get the picture.

I have reasons for believing what I do, especially since dead people have appeared to me in dreams when I wasn’t having that manic episode where I was shouting at my gods through the ceiling and getting my parents all worried, when someone famous dies I always remember that dream where Cliff Burton appeared to me at Christmas and asked why metalheads treated him as some sort of god, when he’s just human. I told him, tears in my third eye, that he’s the reason we picked up bass as an instrument. But I was taken aback that even Cliff Burton admitted he’s no god. He was just a human, and a damn good bass player. Nothing more. That’s a cold fact that stuck with me, our heroes are just human instead of the deities of craft we imagine them to be.

Which brings me to the untimely demise of Kentaro Miura. I haven’t cried over him passing away due to aortic dissection, and I don’t think my tear ducts will co-operate with that unless I’m blasting the Guts theme from Susumu Hirasawa’s Berserk OST at three am when I’m emotionally vulnerable enough to cry just a little. I didn’t know Kentaro Miura personally, but I do know that had Twitter existed when Osamu Tezuka died we’d be awash in Astro Boy fan-art tributes and memes. As an anime fan who’s only seen maybe three episodes of the 1997 Berserk series, even I knew this man was legend because of his draftsmanship and gift for dark fantasy storytelling. Comparisons to George R. R. Martin both for the complexity of his fiction and his long hiatuses were made when Miura was alive (I won’t call him Kentaro because I wasn’t family to the man, as per Japanese custom), and I couldn’t help noticing that people stopped making as many Idolm@ster hiatus jokes at Miura’s expense once he left this world. He wasn’t regarded as the god of manga like Tezuka was, however it was clear that one of the greatest mangaka of all time had shuffled off his mortal coil. For days, my Twitter feed has been filled with Miura tributes. I never read a page the man drew until he was no longer with us, and even I know a titan of the manga industry has fallen.

We don’t get artists like Miura every day, and I’m humbled by what output he left behind while I struggle to revise my novel manuscripts with a goal towards professional publication. Writing novels is perceived as easier than drawing comics on the scale Miura did, especially given the demands of the manga industry unique to Japan’s culture of working yourself to death. I noticed people weren’t cracking jokes at the mangaka behind Hunter X Hunter either, because their own health problems are contributing to the delays in new chapters. We shouldn’t treat artists as monkeys who crank out content for us, we need to ensure they’re taking care of themselves.

At the moment, I’ve been marathoning the Shrek movies just because I’ve never seen all of them, I’m learning bass and classical guitar with help from my father teaching me music. You don’t know what an artist may be struggling with behind the scenes, and I sure struggled this past three years. It amuses me that fans of Berserk call themselves “strugglers” and encourage each other to “keep on struggling”. Various projects I’ve put on hold to take care of myself and my family like The Enchanting Existential Dread of Aussie Theme Parks are still part of my schedule, but that doesn’t mean I don’t take breaks and look at TikTok memes of cats I find cute or amusing. I might not be able to afford the deluxe editions of Berserk to remember Miura by, but I bought the Blu-Ray set of the 1997 anime and will watch it with my twin brother when he’s available to share that with. The epic tragedy of Berserk, although unfinished, will stand as a monument to fantasy fiction and someday we might even get a half-decent anime reboot with proper production values. A man can dream, can’t he? Kentaro Miura has left us with a wealth of visual storytelling to enjoy, and his legacy is felt across pop culture with video game franchises like the Dark Souls series which I’ve never played because I’m not that good at video games even though I’m interested in them as a medium. Miura wasn’t on my radar much when he was alive, and I respect his draftsmanship, but you can bet your bottom dollar the day Ralph Bakshi carks on us I’ll be even more saddened by it because of how familiar I am with Bakshi’s works compared to Berserk. I’ve heard people haven’t been this devastated by a death in the anime/manga family since Satoshi Kon, and I believe the hype, the weebs are in mourning and their enthusiasm for Berserk is endless. May we not have to deal with a loss of this magnitude too soon after this, may our heroes hold on here a bit longer. Keep on struggling, as the Berserk fans say, we’ve got lots to do on this planet yet.