From the Bookshelf: Qualia the Purple
Mar. 26th, 2024 08:50 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerIn some fashion or another I became aware of a “light novel” named Qualia the Purple translated from Japanese, but long enough ago I don’t quite remember the specifics. I do have the impression some brought up Last and First Idol while mentioning this new release, which would have got my attention. There was also a bit of “positive recommendations that tried not to give too much away,” which I suppose always has me wondering if I just wind up being vague. Still, when I did get around to picking up the novel at last from where I’d had a copy waiting, I read it with growing interest.
The back cover of Qualia the Purple mentions that Marii Yukari (who has purple eyes) “sees all humans, aside from herself, as robots.” That’s also mentioned by the first-person narrator, Manabu “Gaku” Hatou, at the start of just about every one of the short chapters the first section of the novel begins with. I did begin to wonder if this section had been serialized to start with. The original copyright date of 2009 did have me contemplating impressions of “the way things were done back then.” I supposed it was something the novel was being translated after so long, but also thought a bit of that “you had to be there” phenomenon from just a few years before that, Haruhi Suzumiya. (I was only almost there, aware of the “fansubs” but, so I thought, just a little too slow to determine which translation of many was “the best,” much less watch along with everyone else.) In Qualia the Purple, at least, there’s no real sense of some fundamental joke amounting to someone being oblivious to the actual science-fictional goings-on folded into a more ordinary high school life.
The back cover also had a “girls’ love” label. I was conscious of the interest “Gaku” took in Yukari and how she’d hug the smaller, longer-haired girl hard to try and make up for the distancing way Yukari sees other people (while supposing this wouldn’t work as well if one of them had been a boy, or indeed if both of them had been boys). In a simultaneous way, though, I did seem to be both a bit detached from “pushing what I was getting too far” and thinking wry thoughts about “now if ‘changing clothes’ would be described as ‘modifying outer plating,’ then...” (There is a comment about how photos of people also look like robots to Yukari but drawings “look like her,” and there I thought that could get tied into that dread term “2D complex”...)
I also thought a bit that the concept was fun, but I’d insist on the existence of an objective reality, in light bouncing off physical objects and delivering specific wavelengths to eyes regardless of what processing goes on inside a particular brain. A bit later on, though, I was looking up “qualia” if in the simplest way of going to Wikipedia, and noticed that sort of insistence being dealt with there. Later on, I looked back at the novel and noticed similar comments being made right at the start, long before the word qualia comes up. In any case, I’d already got to considering how different people have different perceptions of works of art.
Before the first section was complete, there was a moment where Yukari’s perceptions do get outside her and things went far beyond philosophical concepts. The second section was longer, and happens to invoke more than mention early on a particular work of science fiction; this did have me thinking of Last and First Idol again even if the invocation wasn’t quite as strong now. Yukari isn’t around much in that second section, but she can be seen as driving the ever-trippier, ever more intriguing action. The book did wind up impressive, but left me wondering about how there’s also a manga of the same name, translated and released in one thick volume. Whether the prose descriptions and internal monologue of “Gaku” can be worked into visual form is something I’m wondering about, but left until after I had these thoughts together.
The back cover of Qualia the Purple mentions that Marii Yukari (who has purple eyes) “sees all humans, aside from herself, as robots.” That’s also mentioned by the first-person narrator, Manabu “Gaku” Hatou, at the start of just about every one of the short chapters the first section of the novel begins with. I did begin to wonder if this section had been serialized to start with. The original copyright date of 2009 did have me contemplating impressions of “the way things were done back then.” I supposed it was something the novel was being translated after so long, but also thought a bit of that “you had to be there” phenomenon from just a few years before that, Haruhi Suzumiya. (I was only almost there, aware of the “fansubs” but, so I thought, just a little too slow to determine which translation of many was “the best,” much less watch along with everyone else.) In Qualia the Purple, at least, there’s no real sense of some fundamental joke amounting to someone being oblivious to the actual science-fictional goings-on folded into a more ordinary high school life.
The back cover also had a “girls’ love” label. I was conscious of the interest “Gaku” took in Yukari and how she’d hug the smaller, longer-haired girl hard to try and make up for the distancing way Yukari sees other people (while supposing this wouldn’t work as well if one of them had been a boy, or indeed if both of them had been boys). In a simultaneous way, though, I did seem to be both a bit detached from “pushing what I was getting too far” and thinking wry thoughts about “now if ‘changing clothes’ would be described as ‘modifying outer plating,’ then...” (There is a comment about how photos of people also look like robots to Yukari but drawings “look like her,” and there I thought that could get tied into that dread term “2D complex”...)
I also thought a bit that the concept was fun, but I’d insist on the existence of an objective reality, in light bouncing off physical objects and delivering specific wavelengths to eyes regardless of what processing goes on inside a particular brain. A bit later on, though, I was looking up “qualia” if in the simplest way of going to Wikipedia, and noticed that sort of insistence being dealt with there. Later on, I looked back at the novel and noticed similar comments being made right at the start, long before the word qualia comes up. In any case, I’d already got to considering how different people have different perceptions of works of art.
Before the first section was complete, there was a moment where Yukari’s perceptions do get outside her and things went far beyond philosophical concepts. The second section was longer, and happens to invoke more than mention early on a particular work of science fiction; this did have me thinking of Last and First Idol again even if the invocation wasn’t quite as strong now. Yukari isn’t around much in that second section, but she can be seen as driving the ever-trippier, ever more intriguing action. The book did wind up impressive, but left me wondering about how there’s also a manga of the same name, translated and released in one thick volume. Whether the prose descriptions and internal monologue of “Gaku” can be worked into visual form is something I’m wondering about, but left until after I had these thoughts together.