Whatever he is, he makes me look like Chiaki here.
Shigofumi episode 8 was extremely clever in many ways. We look deeper into the personality of Kirameki, Fumika’s father, at the same time as we get Wacky Sister Hijinks. It’s a win-win situation no matter how you slice it.
Kirameki’s deranged ravings about beauty and truth and glass show him to be a master at stringing words together to form poetic novels of unspeakable beauty, so he’s undoubtedly a genius. However, we see, his waxing poetic has affected many people. Including one girl who decided to take her own life after reading about the beauty of death in one of his books. The girl in question may not have been the most stable of people to begin with (we know nothing of her background, and will continue to know nothing, so speculation is moot), but as wrenching as someone taking their life over words in a book is, what’s even more wrenching is Kirameki’s reaction to the shigofumi.
THAT’S RIGHT.
BURNING IT.
It’s a slightly twisted way to express one’s gratitude to an author for changing their personal belief on death, but Kirameki’s utter rejection of the letter as garbage is probably the more reprehensible act here. The proper emotion concerning a suicide over something you have written is probably quite difficult to put into words–it’d probably be somewhere between pride in your words to move someone so dramatically, if negatively; and utter shame that, well, someone committed suicide over a book you wrote. This is not Kirameki’s emotion whatsoever. He’s seemingly oblivious to the fact that the letter is from a dead person, and he fails to grasp the significance of the letter. Simply because it is not beautiful, he wishes to destroy it.
It’s illustrative of the fact that yes, one may have the potent gift to write beautifully with glass pens, and one can certainly be an unparalleled genius at authorship, but that doesn’t mean you actually get what it means to be human. I think in some regards this is why I’m mistrustful of writers who are advertised by copywriters and quotes on the cover as having “beautiful, lyrical writing” or some other nonense such as that: they’re certainly impressive writers, and it must have taken a long time to arrange each and every word into place so that the whole reads beautifully and poetically, but…it’s hollow. Or, at least, that’s how I feel. It’s certainly beautiful and poetic, and makes for great quotes, but ultimately these works have less power to evoke the emotion and thoughtfulness that they’re supposed to, at least for me. There’s something lacking in them, and in Kirameki: a kind of “naturalness”, a rough-around-the-edges feeling. Kirameki can certainly wax poetic with the best of them (the nigh-on hilarious quotes we get from his books prove this), but he lacks what it means to be human, and so, for all his bluster and lyricism, he’s nothing more than a common psychopath. Or so I think, anyway.
Anime wa Bakuhatsu da! 