In an interview with KCRW, Michelle Zauner, frontwoman of Japanese Breakfast, quotes Virginia Woolf: “Nothing thicker than a knife's blade separates happiness from melancholy.”
“I wanted this album to capture the moments where that knife slips,” she continues. “When people want too much, when they cede to temptation, when they are seduced and punished.”
Seduced might be a good way to describe my experience with Japanese Breakfast. My first interaction was watching the music video of “Posing in Bondage.” I was utterly struck by the mix of tenderness and violence, of stillness outside and a desperate longing inside, materialized in a shot of someone else’s hand holding chopsticks and pressing the noodles to a bloodstained mouth.
All I remember of reading Crying in H Mart, Zauner’s bestselling memoir, is a deep, bone-eating sadness. In For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women), she makes no distinction between happy and sad, between emotional peace and violence.
I suppose, then, the temptation for me is Zauner’s art — the offering of both an atmosphere of sadness to live in yet also the possibility of a way out.
I find a certain and utterly familiar impossibility of existence spelled out in this album. Many of the songs are instrumentally and rhythmically upbeat, not necessarily happy, but not utterly despondent either. “Mega Circuit,” with its waltz-like tone, has a fluttering, pulsing addition throughout the instrumental. The song is inviting to the point where her words become almost an afterthought to the sonic scape. And yet they pierce through almost violently, with lyrics like “Well, I better write my baby a shuffle good / Or he's gonna make me suffer the way I should.”
Am I a masochist? Is that what swimming in this sadness does? I accept the sonic invitation to a descent into sadness.
“I’m a winter person in the sense that I feel like I must suffer through something to enjoy the coming season,” Zauner said to TIME Magazine.
Is the coming season a respite? Do I deserve it? Is there anything but this — the separation between happy and sad, so thin there’s never a moment where anyone can truly escape the perpetual nothing?
“All I need is understanding,” Zauner pleads as her character in “Little Girl.” Noises spill tentatively in the background of the chorus like an exhalation. The soft pleading offers a small respite from the harsh lyrics of the verses. An aggressive drum rattle pierces through the acoustic guitar fingerpicking, whose sound I can only describe as vulnerable.
Amidst the drums of “Picture Window,” Zauner asks: “Are you not afraid of every waking minute / That your life could pass you by?” and “Do you not conceive of my death at every minute / While your life just passes you by?”
Is it worth it to be vulnerable in this piece? I am typing this while watching my body move and the minutes slide by. I am running from deadline to deadline. My life is passing me by, and I am watching from the sidelines. I am going to die like this, aren’t I?
"I think especially after my mother passed away, I've felt like I've just been running through life trying to do everything I can because I'm so much more aware of how short it is," Zauner said in an interview with NPR. "There's a kind of melancholy in looking out at these unlived lives," Zauner says. "But it's not a violent longing, it's just kind of a melancholic acceptance."
“All of my ghosts are real,” she continues in “Picture Window,” her voice hiking upwards on “ghosts” amidst the swelling of the music. She could be my ghost, her voice fading into the sonic landscape like another instrument. Her repetition is a constant, haunting presence, hovering uncertainly on the spectrum of conviction.
“Here is Someone,” the first song, opens with a twinkling sound. The overall sonic landscape reminds me a bit of Sufjan Stevens’ Illinois. It closes with Zauner repeating: “Life is sad but here is someone / Someone / Someone / Someone.” I can’t quite find it in myself to believe that there is someone. In fact, I feel less and less assured the more she says “someone,” despite the rhythmic swelling and twinkling of the production.
“Honey Water” has a discordant cut in the music right before “So it goes / any day,” as if audibly interjecting Zauner’s attempts at reassurance. She repeats “So it goes / I don’t mind” in the outro repeatedly, and again, I am losing conviction the more she says it. The buzzing outro with the constant heavy drumline has distortions that feel like a soft screaming, like an exhaled whisper-shout that can’t quite bear to have actual volume.
In “Honey Water," the decomposition is drawn-out and faded. It is what it is, as I keep saying. In “Leda,” she layers the stillness of “you wait” repeating amidst the violence of the myth the song is named after. I feel so utterly still. The violence of life is inextricable from the everyday.
Zauner remarked in an interview with Atwood Magazine: “I think of melancholy as a kind of anticipatory grief, one that comes from an acknowledgment of the passage of time, from the recognition of mortality and finitude. In some way, too, I think it marks the artist’s condition, constantly observing through that lens.”
I guess that’s the emptiness — always anticipating a grief that is slow and drawn out, that materializes and never leaves. The metaphorical knife is placed against the soft parts of the body and the slightest push causes a bleed. Maybe the bleeding is cathartic, feels good, is tempting. Maybe Zauner’s album is the knife, or maybe it’s the blood that’s been drawn, spilling warmly down the body.
Pen Fang is a freshman in the College of Arts & Sciences. They can be reached at pfang@cornellsun.com.
