Interpretation of the Dilemma of Love and Ethics in Junichi Watanabe's Paradise Lost

The Japanese novelist Junichi Watanabe 's " Paradise Lost " conveys a different concept of love, that is, the admiration for the ultimate love. The solution to life has always been an eternal and profound topic. The hero and heroine try to use the so-called ultimate love to support their lives, but this kind of love is limited to physical instincts and does not help solve people's spiritual predicaments at all. Such a solution to life is destined to be illusory.

1. Respect for the ultimate love

Watanabe Junichi's "Paradise Lost" narrates a common extramarital love story. Its uniqueness lies in that it conveys a distinctive concept of love through a large number of delicate descriptions of the sexes, that is, the admiration for the ultimate love.

Frustrated in his career, Hisagi and Rinko, a calligraphy teacher, were also disappointed in their lukewarm family life. They soon derailed and fell into an "extramarital affair". In the love of men and women, the two become more and more in harmony, deeply immersed in the ecstasy and experience of discovering the body. Hisuki himself began to see through the world after being dismissed from the post of publishing director and sent to the investigation room, and plans to live as he pleases from now on. Rinko in Paradise Lost is a woman with a strong sense of self. She is strong-willed and daring to act, tired of life without passion, and pursues the life she wants without hesitation. Her relationship with Hisagi started out as a spice of life, interacting with each other in a cynical manner. With the increase of intercourse, from restraint to indulgence, gradually to active and whole-heartedness, thinking that only she knows the dazzling pleasures that those who are sensible people do not understand, and for the sake of I am proud of myself and feel that I am a one in a hundred sexual leader. Finality became the backbone of her life, the whole and only life.

The work depicts a lot of the sex between Rinko and Hisagi, letting the two protagonists have sex in different times and places, and vividly depicts the sex scenes and psychological experience of the two. For example, in the sad days of the death of Rinko's beloved father, he still has a rendezvous with Hisagi in the constant remorse in his heart, and obtains a new sexual experience. Another example is to use red shirts, strangling the neck or strangling the neck with straps to stimulate erotic desire, so that the joy of sex reaches the extreme, reaching a state of madness, so that the passion of their life is continuously released, and the original desire is fully vented. They indulge themselves, degenerate themselves into the original state of human beings, experiment with all kinds of primitive and civilized sexual experiences in human history, and sink deeper and deeper into sensual pleasure. So sex becomes the whole content of their life and the only thing they can do, the sustenance of their life, the only life, whatever civilization, upbringing, whatever morality and ethics, they are all thrown out of the sky.

Watanabe Junichi made no secret of his admiration for the ultimate love. In an interview with reporters, he admitted that the struggle between social ethics and personal sex has always been the theme of his works, but the two can never coexist: "I have been writing love ethics novels. But I think my love novels are actually the same. Anti-social ethics novels." In 2010, when he was questioned by a reporter from the Beijing Morning Post, he admitted that "after people reach middle age, sex accounts for a larger proportion of love. The pursuit of sexual pleasure is innate." . As we saw in Paradise Lost, the adoration of the ultimate love in pursuit of physical pleasure is evident.

2. The background of extreme love

Hisa and Rinko's close relationship began when Hisa was frustrated at the workplace. Hisagi used to devote himself to his work vigorously, like his college classmate Yuikawa and his colleague Mizuguchi, and he was not equal to each other in terms of career achievement, becoming a figure in the social elite. However, due to unforeseen circumstances, Jiumu was excluded in the middle, lost the ladder of advancement, was dismissed from the position of publishing minister and was sent to the investigation room to spend his life. As a result, Hisuki's values have changed, and he plans to live as he pleases from now on. Before he died of cancer, Mizukou deeply regretted the pursuit of life he had never had before. Mizuguchi also expressed to Hisi many times that he wanted to find a good woman and have a good relationship with him. Their denial of the normal life situation invisibly strengthened his value in life. The concept also prompted him to strengthen the pursuit of love life. Jiumu has an impeccable wife, they have a daughter, and they are a happy family in the eyes of others, but this cannot replace Jiumu's fascination and pursuit of love life. When Hisagi found the happiness he wanted in his extramarital affair with Rinko, he began a desperate love journey.

Rinko has a husband who everyone envies. He is a professor of medical school, has a successful career, and is an outstanding talent. He was a workaholic, however, and often plunged headlong into the lab, ignoring other things, including his wife. It can be said that he is the representative of "instrumental rationality". He lives a typical "rational life", ignoring the various needs of his wife Rinko, causing Rinko to easily fall into the quagmire of love after getting to know Hisuki. .

Hisagi and Rinko feel more and more compatible in their love experience, and their recognition of the life value of love is also amazingly unified. On the basis of this unification, the two abandoned their original family and the responsibilities and obligations entrusted to them by law and morality. Hisagi and Rinko's even childish obsession with love can be explained by Freud's theory. Freud believed that: Personality is a whole, which includes three parts: id, the most primitive part of the personality structure. The components that constitute the id are the basic needs of human beings, including hunger, thirst, sex, etc. When a need arises in the id, it needs to be satisfied immediately. So it is the pleasure principle that governs the id. The superego is the highest part of the personality structure, which is the highest part of control, and the components that constitute the superego are social moral norms, individual conscience, and self-ideal. The superego is the moral part of the personality structure and is governed by the principle of perfection. Ego - the result of the combined action of the id and superego in real life. Various needs generated by the id, because of the limitation of the superego, cannot be satisfied immediately in reality, and need to learn how to meet the needs in reality. The ultimate reality state is the ego. Therefore, the ego is between the id and the superego, and it is the reality principle that governs the ego. The love between Hisagi and Rinko reflects the power of the id. The love between them is based on the desire of the flesh, and there is almost no element of spiritual love. Return to my physical happiness. Regardless of the right or wrong of their choice, and no matter how shocking the choice is, we admit that this is their choice, and love reflects their solution to life.

3. The dilemma of extreme love

The ultimate love of Hisagi and Rinko faces various tests. Externally, they have to endure rejection from the family and society and face enormous pressure; from the inside, the so-called ultimate love cannot be eternal. Die, the world of love between the two will collapse, and life will fall into nothingness. Extreme love will inevitably fall into trouble in domestic and foreign difficulties, and extreme love as their solution of life must be illusory.

Hisagi and Rinko's extramarital affairs were not tolerated by social morals from the very beginning. For the extreme pleasure they craved, they were under enormous pressure respectively. First of all Ashkugi. He got deeper and deeper into his relationship with Rinko and couldn't extricate himself. For this reason, he was repeatedly ridiculed by colleagues and friends. As for Rinko's husband, he is also full of guilt, feeling that even if Rinko is willing, it is too cruel to force her husband into a situation of divorce. And for his wife, he felt even more guilty, because his wife was not at fault. He often asks himself in his heart: Is it appropriate to get rid of the first wife who is not at fault when he has a woman he likes? Before Rinko's husband's anonymous false accusation, Hisuki was irrefutable, and at Rinko's instigation, he chose to resign. But after submitting the resignation, Kumu felt regret again: "I suddenly feel that I have lost too much." After resignation and divorce, Hisagi felt freedom, but the other side of being able to live this free and free life is the loneliness of losing his colleagues in the company, relatives and friends, and even his wife and children. His status, income, and family have all been lost, and only his love with Rinko is left. However, the emotional comfort of this love to his is limited, because "Thinking of his love with Rinko, his heart is more sad than joy, Sometimes there is a sense of distress.”

Rinko's situation seemed more dire. The relationship between Rinko and Hisaki made Rinko sexually awakened and satisfied, and gradually indulged in crazy and even perverted sex. Rinko's parents' family education is very strict, she graduated from a church university, and at the same time is a married wife, all of which make her deeply uneasy about the relationship with Hisagi and have a strong sense of sin. After the extramarital affair with Hisa was noticed by her husband and mother, Rinko was not only abused and spurned by her husband, but also reprimanded by her mother. After she left home and lived with Hisa, her mother, brother and sister-in-law treated her as a sinner. bring enormous pressure. On the night of his father's wake-up call, he made peace with Hisagi again, which made Rinko regret, blame herself, and worry about being punished by God. Reflecting on the pain caused by the actions of the two to the family members of both parties, Rinko said with regret: "We are similar to murderers." "Although we didn't kill people, it caused many people to suffer...". Rinko's mother announces that she has severed the mother-daughter relationship and does not allow him to attend the one-year anniversary of her father's death. Rinko, who has nowhere to go, seems to be more paranoid about the sex between the two. She thinks that if she likes the other, she wants to dominate the other, but it is difficult to completely dominate the other by living together and getting married. She then goes crazy. In order to prevent this kind of betrayal from happening, perhaps only by killing him. After seeing Hisagi's wife, Rinko knew that love is an unpredictable and fickle thing, thus creating a sense of crisis that their love is at its peak at this time and will collapse and die at any time. Indulging in the climax of the euphoric tremors of the body's beloved pleasure was more beneficial than any far-fetched reason and verbal comfort to get rid of Rinko's haunting unease.

In their erotic carnival is always accompanied by anxiety, fear, self-blame, in order to escape all this, to get rid of all this anxiety, they can only plunge into a deeper sex abyss again and again. The man and woman who are isolated from the world around them are still the isolated woman and man who can cuddle with each other in the end. For this lonely pair of men and women, the only way to soothe each other's loneliness is to do whatever they want. The two fell into a deep love that they thought would never come again in this life.

The extreme love that Hisagi and Rinko insist on brings them physical pleasure, which in itself not only cannot eliminate the troubles of their lives, but also is unreliable in itself. Rinko said to Hisagi many times without loss: "Sooner or later you will get tired of me", "Even if you are not tired of me, maybe I will be tired of you". She has seen through human nature - one day she will change from a peach blossom to an old pearl, and the day after day sticking together will eventually consume people's passion, so Rinko said that she "only believes in now". For her, "now" is the repeated, tireless, almost crazy physical enjoyment. Only in sex can they confirm their existence and the value of life. Although they tried their best to confirm their love by physically communicating in different ways and places, Rinko also saw the emptiness of it - that one day the passion will fade with the passage of time. At the same time, the shared death anxiety of human beings makes them sadly aware that their living bodies are aging every year: the skin is sagging and the wrinkles are increasing. These deep senses of crisis make it impossible for them to face them. When the ultimate love goes downhill, when the ultimate love no longer exists, their life support will collapse. In the end, they chose to take poison and die together during the orgasm to maintain their love, ending their restless, empty, and lonely lives, and their lives finally passed away.

Human life is short for the existence of the world, but for the solution of life, the exploration of the value of life has always been an eternal and profound topic. Hisagi and Rinko try to use the so-called ultimate love to support their lives, but this kind of love is limited to physical instincts and does not help solve people's spiritual dilemmas at all. This kind of life solution is destined to be illusory.

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