We do not often think of Hentai as high Art. There are several reasons for this. Perhaps something inherently cooly robotic and unartistic about the culture that created it? Or perhaps it is a culture-barrier between the East and the West?

There are two main branches of Art, one is the neurotic and should be written art. The other is the psychotic which is meant by-in-large by Art. Though it's origin is psychotic, we need to approach it first from the standpoint of neurosis, as a thing. We are expected to have some fore-knowledge to approach art, which side is up and things like these. From there, the art can carry us further into our neurosis or it can break itself. A self-nihilating neurosis within art is psychotic Art.

Hentai is obviously a neurotic pursuit. Is it seriously neurotic enough to destroy itself --and by that I mean, an atomic explosion from the focal-point of the neurosis that disassembles the ego's world leaving only the learing over a mercury horizon of eternity that is psychosis?

Hentai is a stable neurosis; but no neurosis is perhaps perfect. A thin gape of reality behind one-hundred doors, and someone finds or stumbles on it and goes careening out of his neurotic state.

Are Hentai artists more liable to fly out windows, or commit mass knife homicides?

No.

There are many similarly intense neuroses in Japanese culture, some of which have higher failure rates than being a Hentai fan: education and work related suicides, video game-addicts freaking out, forced bukakke, shopping mall collapses, commuter disasters!

Perhaps Japanese-ization of Western culture is what is most frightening about Hentai?

Hentai is an art from a culture whose grandest illustrative Art never got beyond calligraphy. Hentai is an art from a culture of neo-imperial drones; a culture that devised the rape of Nanking; a culture that still eats with sticks!

Specifically with respect to Hentai as Art, we should direct questions to the deeper meaning-carrying-structures in Hentai.

The colors are predominantly cool as are all color schemes in the Far-East. The brilliant orange that dominates the South-East gives way to Sino/Viet red, pale yellows and blues, and then finally deep within the East, Korea and Japan are grey; the gradual transition is none-the-less dramatic.

This is the Apollonian/Dionysian of Northern and Southern Europe played out in the East. What needs to be seen in this is that for the East and the West, geographically, the marigold-yellow zenith/nirvana of warm color in the world is India. The Art of India is grotesquely erotic and perverse!

And whereas the perverse impressionists/expressionists used graphical blurriness for lack of any better tool to express their Southern longings; Indian Art is exquisitely detailed; there is far too much detail under the sweltering sky of India.

Apollonian clarity of line, 'in the clear light of day,' is the same myth in linear Hentai which obfuscates realism. Hentai lines are symbols -- but these 'words' point only to things in the world which do not exist. This is shewn in the Japanese craze for life-size and living Hentai dolls and models. Insofar as the characters and even the imaginary beings that Hentai art represents are not real, how can anything within Hentai be real?

There is a danger that an unreality from Hentai could feed back into reality as with cos-play; though the act would necessarily be innocent and ignorant. Furthermore, Hentai has all the resources at its disposal that other graphical genres do; and may therefore generally create the innuendo possible in much writing and drawing.

Be that as it may, I would reiterate that so-far-as Japanese neuroses are concerned, Hentai is a stable, moderate neurosis. As an art it is cold and deceptively dishonest, this is its failure and its societal fail-safe; Hentai is not likely to be a medium of psychotic-break, and only with rarity High Art.


Special thanks to F.