How Can I See You? Let Me Count The Ways

This is a wonderful essay by a gifted writer who has an eye for beauty that few people have. Essentially blind from birth, he has a way of describing things that many of us never see, though we may be looking right at them. As you read, you might wonder how any of us might function without this most precious sense.  Professor Stephen Kuusisto does us a great favor by giving us incredible insights into the world of the “other sighted”.

What follows is a thread of e-mails between friends that examine in some detail what the individuals understand about vision, and how they perceive the world.

November 23, 2011

Stephen Kuusisto

What does it mean to have not seen, and then see? Put aside the neurology of brain function and think of beauty hidden behind a cloudy screen. Think of the blind man or woman as an ancient Chinese courtesan who sits all day behind a draped terrace. The world outside passes: the silhouettes of birds go by; you see a strange flittering darkness; the sunset comes; you see something like a failing lamp. When the moon rises over the willows you go out walking, feeling your way, and you are navigating by means of remembrance.

But seeing anew you are no longer wandering the planet by memory. When guide dog Vidal and I walked Mannerheim Street in Helsinki we followed the vines of memory. Here is the botanical garden; here’s the city museum with its old copper doors; a path through lilacs. Now, seeing things, I discover the sighted world is more insistent and fast than the reveries of blind dream-walking. Was the world always this fast? My skin quivers, a stray piece of paper blows across the sidewalk at my feet. I want to get down on my hands and knees and grab it. I want to hold it up to the light and read with my one eye the letters that probably signify nothing. The blind self would imagine a written plea from a far island. The sighted man sees it’s just the gibberish of our economy. Up the street he goes. A teenaged boy on a skateboard flips backwards, falls on his ass, his Ipod flies into the air, his arms and legs are busy as a hundred men. His skateboard lands in a fountain. Vision tells me there’s a world unaffected by the self. I can’t tell you how thrilling this discovery is. I feel like Ralph Waldo Emerson, though without his visionary immanence–I’m not crossing the park and seeing something cosmological, instead I’m seeing the frosted leaves in early autumn and a boy flying.

I look out over the forest of maples. The primacy of colors in October is flat-out killing me. The red is an arrow that strikes me in the seat of my sentiments. I think heaven must be red. Heaven must be nearer. A red maple leaf has fallen on soil and it is the downward tip end of eternity. God help me! How do seeing people live this way?

I see that the color red is the magnifying lens of god. I have to sit down.

I see that all the colors in the world stand against locality–there can be no “local” because colors take it all away. A girl walks by with the world’s most perfect green hair. She is a citizen of no country.

Now an old man comes down the street, a kind of scrawny angel, pushing a bent bicycle. He’s a war veteran and his medals are flashing in the sun. Compared to him everyone else in the world is motionless.

GARY MAWYER

I have spent a lot of time speculating about what blind people see. Sometimes I think I can almost imagine it and sometimes I am quite sure I cannot imagine it at all. I’m a desperately visual person and have over-cultivated that one sense to a deplorable degree, but I share this writer’s question how we even go on this way. The world of light and shadow really does force us to stop and look–it may be a fungus and a piece of moss, or twenty-five miles of mountain range under an incandescent sky, but it does just stop you there. Sometimes it itches and sometimes it really just hurts. The world is like a severed limb we want back so badly we hardly know what to say. People try to deal with it by reaching for a camera or a paintbox or their chalks, others by trying to say something or write something, but the stupendous hint has already passed by then, and indeed, the singling out of specific moments or visions is an esthetic distraction rather than a revelation, because all time is like that.

MICHAEL REILLY

As an optician working with people with various visual problems, the one group that always affected me most were children…and the youngest were the most moving. It seemed that the most common problem I would see were kids with muscle problems that affected the way the eyes would align. If the eyes did not align properly (usually because of muscle imbalance), then the visual fields of both eyes could not be made to fuse properly in the brain. By fusion, I mean that there would be no central area of overlap of the two fields. When this condition exists, the brain will often get data from both eyes, but will be unable to process that data in a way that will make sense of both, or combine that data into one unified view. What happens then is that the brain will ignore, or quit processing one of the data feeds. When this happens, that child has a certain time (not sure how long) within which corrective action needs to take place, or the rejection of data by the brain seems irreversible. This is a problem when it only involves one eye, but is catastrophic if it involves both. Even when corrective surgery occurs, if the brain has existed in the data rejection state for too long, the eye affected may be able to sense at somewhere near a normal level, but the brain will not have built-in the structures necessary for visual data processing. Apparently, the brain loses a certain amount of plasticity over time, making recovery of sight a near impossibility. This phenomenon is different for people who have had normal vision for a certain period of time before losing it. Apparently, the brain structures have developed, and the data processing abilities are conserved in some cases, as there are some startling stories of folks who went blind at some later time in life, and been able to see again after, for instance, having a photoreceptor chip inserted into the optic nerve!

The most rewarding experience I ever had in making and fitting glasses involved a little girl, maybe 8 months old. She was so nearsighted, she could not see outside of her eye! The focal length of her eyes was well within the eyes themselves…she was blind. She was a docile little girl, and sat patiently (well, for an 8 month old) while her glasses were being prepped for trial. It fell to me to fit her with her new glasses some time later. They were difficult to make, because they were of such strong power. Anyway, several weeks later, the same little girl, docile, and really kind of unresponsive, came into the shop. Because I had been working with her all along, I took her on again. She was seated in her mom’s lap, and looked like a doughy dumpling, no curiosity, no facial animation…a very sad-looking little girl. The glasses went on, and came off quickly, so that I could fit them so they wouldn’t hurt her…because if they hurt, THEY WILL NOT BE WORN! After making the adjustments necessary, I put them on her again, and stepped back to see what would happen. It was like a miracle. She looked at mom, and screamed and cried and wailed. For at least a half hour, she sat there, and cried. Finally, she calmed down, and started looking around, and it was such a heartwarming experience. You could tell she could see, because her little head was swiveling around so much, she could have hurt herself. She was looking at the world for the first time! And she was seeing what all of us take for granted all the time. Her mom, her fingers, the floor, the walls, out the window…I will never forget that little girl, and she will always be a reminder to me that the ability to see should never be taken for granted, but treasured.

GARY MAWYER

Theoretically as I understand it, depth perception is caused by a slight parallax which of course is not shared by monocular people. But I’ve never met a monocular person who really appeared to lack the necessary perception. The brain will promptly learn or generate laws of perspective that seem to compensate apparently just about for monocular vision. But then how far does this mild parallax really go in binocular people? I don’t have a clue but I am going to guess it doesn’t make much difference beyond an arm’s length and that we’re all enjoying “consensus perspective”.

This has obvious art implications. Older (and much modern) Japanese woodblocks and other landscape or scene pictures are in flat perspective and some Japanese painters call the use of the vanishing point and parallax in art “Western perspective” to distinguish it. Some medieval art is also flat and I believe I can risk saying all cave painting was in flat perspective, like later Picasso’s. You could speculate this was an imaginary overhead viewpoint like early PC fantasy games (SSI’s Dungeon’s & Dragons for instance) which always reminded me of Persian paintings, which often seem to have a vantage point about 20 feet off the ground.

But as Dover once pointed out–actually he never pointed out anything “once”–he was incapable of “once.” As Dover said for years on end, lots of paintings we consider “realistic” and that use Western perspective have some quite impossible vantage point. A tremendous amount of facile deception has to be deployed to create “realistic” art.

MICHAEL REILLY

Well, I’m no expert, but I do have some insight into this. As I also understand, you need at least two perspectives to see in 3-D. The parallax caused by the proper processing of the 2 data streams allows for a slight, but critical difference in the two data sets, caused by the fused common field, and the distinctly different non-overlapping fields. The common field, bracketed by the different surroundings at either side, gives the brain the ability to make the common field pop out. However, the eyes are almost never stationary, almost never rigidly fixed on a single point. The constant movement of the eyes, and the generated data streams, makes the world in front of us pop into 3-D, and very quickly shows us the object or point of interest in a full 3-D context.

Binocular people who lose an eye have a period of retraining to go through, before they will be able to perform tasks at a level approaching their pre-loss ability. There are many tasks that require true 3D processing, and this will be required at ranges beyond arms length. The most obvious is any kind of targeting task…whether you are a sharpshooter, basketball player, or a football quarterback, you need critical 3D data for accurate performance. Hunting cats can be observed in crouch, assessing prey, and moving their heads laterally, as if to maximize the parallax effect.

I don’t know the following to be absolutely true, but I believe it is. Monocular folk have an ability to navigate in our 3-D world, and perceive things much as binocular folks do, because they know the size of things. They know how big a car is. They know how big trees are. Houses are normally of a certain size, and though there can be obvious size variations, doors and windows are somewhat standard in size. It is also true that with slight shifts of the head, one can generate the necessary change in perspective that will produce enough new data to simulate a 3D perspective.  My point is that the brain has to do a lot of extra processing to see in quasi-3D. It is doing a lot of extra work, backfilling information to give the monocular sighted person the illusion of binocular sight.

This ability to “backfill”, this theory of mine, is based on observations and discussions with binocular people who wear one contact lens. This fitting technique is called mono-vision, and it allows a certain group of people to see with one eye focused for distance vision, and the other eye focused for near vision, theoretically eliminating the need for eyeglasses. I say “theoretically”, because it is not good for eyes to wear contact lenses for long periods of time. The thing is, these mono-vision wearers are choosing to be monocular, and then have to cope with the loss of true 3-D. Some folks have a hard time dealing with the problem of suppressing the unwanted data that floods the brain from the unused eye. Imagine trying to read, and ½ your visual field is out of focus. Successful mono-vision wearers seem to be able to ignore, or suppress the unwanted data stream. Many cannot make the adjustment, and end up in glasses anyway. I have heard many stories about close calls while driving, and some are downright harrowing! The toughest problems are associated with driving, as the criticality of precise visual interpretation can be the difference between life and death.

The close calls tend to cluster in the low light times…dusk, night, and dawn. These are times when the eyes can’t receive much information about the environment, and so there are some real problems with knowing how far away lights are. Lights can be small, and far away, or small, and close up, and when you have to brake in order to be safe, the monocularly sighted person is at a slight disadvantage because of the lack of parallax, as the angular displacement of background when switching from one eye to the other can make the data interpretation more reliable. This is because the closer an object is to the observer, the greater the angular displacement of the background with the object in question will be.

A side note here: many failing mono-vision wearers report getting severe headaches while wearing their contact lenses. The fitting can be right on the money, but the brain is apparently working overtime trying to shut down one data stream or the other. And the requirement for data stream processing can be very dynamic, calling for more dexterity that many brains are capable of. This has no discernible correlation with intelligence, by the way. But it does suggest that for a lot of people, mono-vision is not an acceptable solution.

GARY MAWYER

The mind’s interpretation is as important as anything else. We are calling this “processing” as if it were a data-reading analog to machine intelligence, which is a natural analogy for our wired world, but some of the interpretation is not based on data but on judgment, some of which is esthetic. This seems to be leading me back to the idea of Superflat, Takashi Murakami’s theory of visual art which includes a very old and possibly shaky argument that some cultures interpret vision as a surface rather than a depth field and relate objects on this surface to each other as linear, much the same way we read and interpret a map.

If this sounds unfamiliar or unlikely, consider that the digital processing comparison we’ve been automatically using just as weird, since machines do not see at all and would be making spatial interpretations on a mathematical grid expressed as a binary code. Compared to binary code processing, Superflat practically sounds normal. Murakami suggests it is normal.And why not. If we truck off to the National Gallery we don’t believe that the paintings in the British landscape galleries are 3-D. We well know they’re flat enough, barring some gouache. Their perspective is. The art maven’s brain, after looking at some illuminated Persian manuscripts Asian screens over at the Freer Gallery is now being asked to mentally rotate the direction known as “outward” from the top of the frame to the center of the frame. Then the design stops appearing as a brocade seen from above and starts to enforce a belief in parallax, including an imaginary vertical axis inside the frame. The famous vanishing-point is one of the chief mental tricks to this evolution in perspective but there are many others, including the very noteworthy idea of shading and shadowing. Earlier Japanese woodblocks for instance are shadowless. Woodblock nuts sometimes drool about this. In “western perspective” we expect to know where the light source is. The painter can rotate an imaginary light source to be anywhere he pleases within the frame of his painting by using the appropriate shading. The light in an Utamaro woodblock appears to be intrinsic to the scene, as if the figures themselves were equivalently luminous, or (as in a movie) were the light source. They are meant to be seen in the pure light of eternity where there would naturally be no such thing as shadows. It is interesting to note in passing how many woodblock series were labeled as types and meant to be representative of classes of persons, particular times of day, exemplary fishes, categorical insects, etc. They are literally Platonic.

Humankind has repeatedly struggled away from brocade perspective but it is very old. Cave paintings are typically shadowless up=outward perspective. Ancient Egypt was flat. Greco-Roman discovery and utilization of forced perspective was lost for a millenium, replaced by a gothic reversion to flat land perspectives like the Tapestry. The western Renaissance and the discovery of realism had a good run but relapsed sporadically the older representational school in the 20th century (it is as if perspective is just too difficult to maintain somehow) and now we have Superflat as a further highly self-conscious re-evolution of ideas about how art should relate to how we see.

At bottom we take so much for granted that we aren’t necessarily conscious any involved, but more than one process exists–some are forced by physiology or by injuries or pathology or by corrective lenses and visual retraining, as Mike describes so lucidly, and others are psychological or cultural.

 

True Confessions and Barbed-Wire Hearts

by Gary Mawyer

My plan in recent years of watching random anime series just to see what happens has led to some unexpected self-discoveries, including the remarkable finding that I have a soft spot for heartbreaking romances featuring incredibly sincere young people. No one could have suspected that; certainly I had no idea.

Kimikiss Pure Rouge

Most recently I dipped into Kimikiss: Pure Rouge (JC STAFF, 2007) based on a dating simulation PC game and featuring various matchups between a fairly standard assortment of high school seniors: the jock, the girl jock, the normal guy, the artistic outcast guy, the very sweet shy girl, the amazingly intelligent girl, the childhood friend, the cute little sisters, the witness girl (a witness girl is an eccentric-looking but still rather cute girl whose purpose is to be standing near the major characters as a witness of their victories and tribulations). Sixteen episodes later, I declared this to be a thoroughly watchable but not fundamentally exciting True Confessions love tangle. But it did seem that plot movements were afoot, so I didn’t exactly abandon the series. I put it aside for a month and then, one night, decided I would watch the next episode for lack of any other scheme of life. Four hours and 8 episodes later it was 2 AM and I had ruined half a box of tissues. Does Kimikiss demonstrate anything new about our world or life in general? Nah.  It is a slow-buildup nest of love triangles that are just random enough to keep the viewer from guessing who pairs up with whom. The very long windup serves to shake off any viewer who does not honestly like these characters or the animation style they are drawn in. If, however, you get as far as the last third of the series, that would imply you had volunteered to be emotionally walloped in a literally ruthless jerking around by the heartstrings. It’s masterfully done. It’s not very intellectual. It did make one über-point that is sometimes missed: the rejected can rise to unique dignity—indeed there’s maybe no better moment for real character to show through. Any fool can be happy. It is rather a triumph to work successfully with misery. I came away feeling that the romantic losers in Kimikiss: Pure Rouge were in some ways strangely preferable to some of the presumed winners.

K-On and the Way of Tea

Which brings us to the question of how an old, ugly and rather stern silverback like myself, who mainly communicates in snarls, wound up watching K-On (Kyoto Animation, 2009). K-On is the story of a group of four girls, later five girls, plus a cute younger sister, a sexy but addled teacher/advisor, and an eccentric but kawaii witness girl. They pick up the abandoned torch of their high school’s Light Music Club and become a rock group, eventually named After School Tea Time since chado rather than music would appear to be their real passion. I have not been privileged to see the second season. We old-timers need to watch what we eat and drink, exercise frequently and go in for regular checkups so we will still be around for the US release of the sequel, since K-On is an example of what many of us really watch anime to see. The American DVD industry is, shall we say, a bit business-challenged when it comes to Japanese things and it may be a while before the next act.

The wry humor is considerably deeper than it looks and the insights into J-pop roots seem to have the ring of authenticity somehow. I’m not sure how to review it musically except to say the group only has four songs of which the core song is called ‘Sweet and Fluffy Time’ and is loosely based on power chords from the Ramones, who probably rolled over in their graves. K-On is not really all about music but it is also not really all about anything else either. To be fair, it is not not about things. It is about things. Am I clear—I mean to be!

The wintery melancholy of the two post-show OVA episodes suggested to me that the constructors of K-On were not just having fun. This show is rich in the unspoken and its theme is fundamentally about transience and groupness and caring for people and the real value of tea. Half a millenium on, and with the whole concept of social ceremony redefined in so many unpredictable ways, it is beyond our powers to guess what Sen No Rikkyu would have thought of this show but he would have thoroughly understood the importance of the tea.  K-On is quite hilarious in non-overt ways but the humor is thoroughly understated and always under control. Understandably, there is a huge K-On literature in existence, which makes it unnecessary to say very much more here. But K-On is in fact a mature work, as we would say of The Wind in the Willows or Moonfleet or other children’s classics that quietly speak far more to adults than they do to schoolchildren, and carry a freight of time and time’s losses that does not actually need to be spelled out. You watch it thinking you surely aren’t seeing very much; then it grows on you and then, like a lot of Japanese art, it grows right through you.

I Love You Horribly: I”S and I”S Pure

The I and S in I”S and I”S Pure (2002 and 2005-6 respectively) stand for Iori and Seto, characters whose reticence is exceeded only by their ability to fall prey to just about anyone’s transparently misfortunate schemes. I”S probably deserves more description than it will get here—it is a two-episode OVA which deploys a narrative technique using staggered flashbacks embedded in a split storyline. The effect is complex, possibly too complex, but it does draw one’s attention—it reminded me quite a lot of the old avant garde approach back in the day, Luis Buñuel here we come! The story itself seems experimental, a sort of melange of violence and childhood nostalgia with a stalker-like anti-romantic sensibility. This may sound peculiar but then, think of how When They Cry (Geneon, 2007) is constructed. The technique and the elements have a lot of promise for horror purposes if the goal is to thoroughly creep out the audience. However,  I”S is creepy for an hour without ever abandoning its premise as a romance or moving forward into fully conceived horror. It is boxed with the 6-episode I”S Pure and thus worth watching, because I”S Pure has the same split storylines with layered flashbacks, done a little more subtly, and preserves the same main characters.  It’s also important to note that these anime videos are spinoffs from a long manga series and if they seem less coherent than they might be, it could be because the show presumes the viewer is already familiar with the world of I”S.

In I”S Pure, Seto’s bete noir is the practical joke. His pals repeatedly set him up for one embarrassment after another, year in and year out. He is easy prey, and this as much as anything else feeds his acute sense of inferiority and his maddening inability to even speak normally to the apparent love of his life, the spectacularly talented and beautiful Iori. Iori’s problem is much worse; she attracts stalkers and sexual predators, and more than once finds herself on the brink of Victorian ruin, due to her propensity to say yes to all manner of sketchy propositions involving hidden cameras, that gang of nasty guys in the abandoned building, etc. She too is easy prey, but she has a toughness and ability that Seto lacks. The fraughtness of Iori’s life and Seto’s often violent attempts to defend her are a little unfunny and form a separate issue from their mutual romantic inability, something Seto’s childhood friend Itsuki recognizes but cannot jolly them out of. Despite the high school and post-school setting, and the basing of the narrative construct on the school-type love confession, the real issues of I”S Pure seem to belong to adult life, and do not actually have believable resolutions.  Maybe it isn’t a spoiler to say “lives happily ever after” since the show claims it. But to me I”S Pure seemed dominated by a sense of mindless social threat that just happens to be inherent in the world and can only be desperately fought against, not really defeated. The parallel topic is equally disturbing, the idea that beyond some superficial social level people cannot really communicate. Iori’s long silences and Setos’ incoherence and Itsuki’s interesting problems being understood at all suggest narrow limits to what can be said, raise the question whether anything really important can fundamentally just be stated at all.

I”S Pure steps outside its teen school romance genre. It has the outer shape (and if anything, an excess of swimsuits if that’s not an oxymoron), but the contents are a xenomorph. Such gasps of humor as it has are almost painful. We are shown situations and told they are trivial but also that nothing could be more important to the characters. You learn to recognize that Seto is psychologically a stalker. He hangs on, skirts the fringes of Iori’s life, spies on her, follows her, cannot speak to her intelligently, cannot even answer her plainest questions. Seto, indeed, could have been framed as the villain of the piece if Iori didn’t love him. In short, I”S Pure is a rather strange fruit whose main concerns are adult and ontological and complicated and arguably not really solved within the frame of the story.

 

Naoko Takeuchi’s Epic Bildungsroman

Our grip on reality may be a bit more vague than we think. Consider Sailor Moon and her Sailor Senshi colleagues, for instance. The normalcy they defend is the world we thought we were familiar with—the world of six-day work weeks, schools and shopping malls, commuters, restaurants, theaters and well-tended parks surrounded by miles of suburbs. We failed to notice that the Azabu Juban District of Tokyo is the intersection of cosmic forces involving countless dimensions of time and space, parallel lives and mirror existences—in fact, a precarious battlefield in a Shinto-Buddhist architecture of superposed heavens and hells. How could we have been so unaware? Well, in short, we were desperately eager to be unaware. Peace, prosperity and order depend on the belief that everything is under control and in its proper place. The Sailor Warriors and their wars must then remain somewhat secret; that is, safely vague, for the people who are being protected to actually feel secure.

If reality is as illusory as that, then why does Sailor Moon defend it? Well, initially, because a cat told her to. Only later did she gradually become aware how many lifetimes she had spent defending an entire succession of realities over the eons. Somewhere among the ramifications of five TV seasons and 200 episodes, three movies, the tall stack of manga volumes undergirding the anime, countless spinoffs, and all the products of what might as well be called the Moon Kingdom on Earth, a higher teleological principle took over. We might call this principle “the equivalence of all realities.”

No problems are posed if the dead past would stay dead, if the parallel worlds would stay parallel, and if all the otherwheres and time-variants kept their fuzzy boundaries to themselves. If the Dark Moon Circus would stay in its own dimension—if Queen Beryl could somehow refrain from exporting monsters—if alien vampires from the outer void could be less vampirish…but why go on? There are a limitless number of outer voids, and architecturally they cannot help but intersect with the temporal Flatland we call ‘here and now.’ The crime of the creatures from beyond is the disturbance they cause; the loss of harmony; in a way, the injection of unwanted knowledge. In social life, the active expression of this principle is the unstated “please allow me to ignore that.” For disturbing our peaceful day, “In the name of the Moon, I will punish you!”

FLCL: Hit-and-Run Knowledge

“Nothing amazing ever happens here. Everything is ordinary.” In Kazuya Tsurumaki’s FLCL, a surreal paean to the multiplex nature of realities, Naota Nandaba, a somewhat precocious child, tells us life is like that in the small town of Mabase, whose skyline is dominated by a weird ‘medical factory’ that periodically shrouds the landscape with strange vapors, doesn’t seem to employ anyone, and may actually be a hostile starship. Possibly this explains why Haruhara Haruko, a creature not of this earth, appears on her Vespa one day and brains him with a guitar. After that, robots erupt from Naota’s skull from time to time, obviously using his head for a portal into our world, which ought to be fatal. Haruhara even moves into his house, which probably also ought to be fatal.

The motives of adults, be they parents and teachers, adult robots or space creatures like Haruhara, seem more enigmatic than they are. Haruhara is not just chaotically portalling robots from otherwhere and elsewhen through Naota’s cranium on a whim. Well, OK, maybe it is a whim, but she’s definitely looking for one particular robot; or rather, the biosoftware in one particular robot: Atomsk, the slickest star-system thief in the galaxy. Atomsk, who brings new meaning to the word kleptomaniac, is quite likely to pilfer the entire planet unless someone diverts him. Assuming the planet survives destruction long enough to be stolen, that is, since Atomsk is by no means the only threat in the galaxy. It is left up to Naota’s somewhat indifferent skills to rise up and defend the planet, averting a sticky ending to life as we know it, one way or another. This is something he can do, either because of or maybe in spite of the wreck Haruhara has made of his emotional life. When the cosmic dust finally settles, Naota makes one last fateful decision: to want to be a bored, idle punk trudging the concrete reality of the dull little town of Mabase. It’s what he’s best at. Perhaps things just have to be that way when literally everything is ordinary.

And again we might wonder, why defend this reality? Mabase is ugly and corrupt and for the most part rather poor. It’s beyond pollution; nothing remains of a natural world but the weed patch next to the river, by the highway overpass, where the dropouts gather to drop out. But the threat of Atomsk and Haruhara’s skull-busting robot extraction experiments are even worse than drudgery and ugliness. Things were at least a little better before they showed up. All the ordinariness involved in flunking out offers at least some prospect for a little modest hope. Day-old curry bread, anyone?

Defending Yourself from Reality:
Welcome to the NHK

We’ve all said it: “Gosh, if only my household appliances would stop talking to me!” But then, would you have any friends at all? And yet… what if they’re not telling the truth.

Fortunately this is the least of Tatsuhiro Sato’s problems. The huge, vague and inexpressively sinister jinbo known as the Nihon Hikikomori Kyokai (or, more exactly, not known, since it’s supposed to be a secret) that both comprises and threatens social existence is absolutely certain to get him whether he accepts the warnings or not. Maybe he can hold the inevitable at bay a little longer if he stops leaving the apartment. Maybe the best option is to turn off the lights and curl up in a ball. But does that really help anything?

Possibly Tatsuhiko Takimoto, creator of Welcome to the NHK, is implying that the NEETs of the world (Not in Education, Employment or Training), more simply called hikikomori or total dropouts, should consider moving forward, NHK jinbo or not. However, it’s the very nature of reality to slip and slide around you, so even your most bright-eyed, optimistic, promising schemes are quickly absorbed into the NHK conspiracy. It all started right before Tatsuhiro dropped out of college, when the first girl not to be his girlfriend, the eerie one, turned him on to the thrill of hunting for conspiracies in the vast Information Sea of modern electronic reality. Alas for her, and shortly also alas for him, it was no game. Little conspiracies are eaten by bigger ones, and so on ad infinitum until you get all the way up to the NHK itself. Yes, it was all chuckles until the terror set in.

Then there’s the other girl who isn’t his girlfriend, Misaki, who offers to rescue Tatsuhiro by resocializing him. Is she from the NHK too? Or is she another NEET hikikomori dropout who’s just pretending to be normal? If so, it’s not working because she’s not even slightly normal. At any rate, under her inept and panicky tutelage, and aided by his former schoolmate Kaoru, who has risen to the very top of hikikomori anti-society by training himself to leave his apartment in broad daylight and walk all the way to the comic book store without freaking out, Tatsuhiro takes the first steps toward defending himself from reality. He and Kaoru will design dating-simulation software and become very rich. They will be able to afford huge, luxurious new apartments and never come out at all. Kaoru will write the code. Tatsuhiro will lay in the shrubbery with a camera and stalk girls to provide research material. No, wait, that’s a dangerous waste of time. The internet is already full of girls. Six gigabytes of porn later, Tatsuhiro’s computer crashes. Don’t try telling him there is no NHK jinbo.

The list of things that are only funny because the viewer is not a NEET evolves and deepens throughout this series in ways that deserve not to be spoiled by a mini-review. The comic potential in two guys who have never actually been on a date writing a dating sim seems obvious, but have a heart—this wouldn’t be funny if it happened to you. The idea of funding a software development enterprise by earning and selling virtual items to other players inside World of Warcraft seems quite hysterical, but that’s because your idea of funny is sort of cruel. In fact you’re probably part of the NHK too.

Final Exam

• How many completely dysfunctional people does it take to start a pyramid scheme?
• Have you ever been invited to an Offline Meeting? If yes, then (a) did you actually show up? If the answer to (a) is yes, then (b) did you make it back?
• If Sailor Moon is the defender of reality, does that mean Sailor Moon works for the NHK?

Reality: Where Does It Come From?
The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya

If you’re going to defend reality, it might make sense to establish the first line of defense right at the source. Basically, when half-assed things like reality go wrong, they often go wrong out of the gate. But what is the source? Well, you might not believe it, even if you were told. Like Kyon (an apparently uninteresting high school freshman whose sang-froid turns out to be almost superhuman), you will have to be shown. That is the premise behind Tatsuya Ishihara’s The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya (also translated as The Boredom of Haruhi Suzumiya on my internet pirate copy). It turns out that the source of reality is Haruhi Suzumiya. Now it may be that’s only true for the moment. Presumably it wasn’t true before Haruhi was born—one supposes—and reality or some version of it may evolve different sources at another time. But those possibilities are beyond the scope of The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, which is only concerned with the reality at hand.

Haruhi doesn’t know she’s the source of existence. All she knows is that she is frequently bored and/or sad. She’s tried every club in school. All very dull. So she founds her own club, the SOS Brigade (Suzumiya Haruhi’s Brigade To Greatly Enliven the World). The purpose of the SOS Brigade is to seek out and enjoy things that would not be dull: aliens from outer space, time travelers, and individuals with extraordinary ESP powers, for instance. No one seems likely to volunteer to belong to any such society, so Haruhi, mainly by force and intimidation, shanghais enough people to found her brigade, beginning with Kyon, who is too indifferent to resist.

In addition to being quite unaware that she is the source of reality, Haruhi is too busy being the president of the club to notice that her abductees are actually not what they seem—that they are in fact plants, secret agents sent across the depths of space and time specifically to join the SOS club in order to defend reality from the consequences of Haruhi’s boredom. It seems that when Haruhi gets sad enough or bored enough, she tends to re-imagine the universe—which of course makes the old universe simply go away. In fact, the abandoned universes tend to have never existed from then on, which is dreadfully inconvenient for the sentient beings that might have inhabited them in what we might call BHM time (Before Haruhi’s Melancholy).

So that is why, on long slow rainy afternoons in the SOS Brigade club room at the high school, you will find shy and bookish Yuki, who in reality is a very high-ranking Data Integration Thought Entity sent by the Integrated Data Entity that controls the universe, with the specific mission of keeping Haruhi from getting bored and accidentally replacing both the universe and the Integrated Data Entity with some other arrangement. Mikuru is also there, sent back from the far future, whose inhabitants would, if possible, like to continue to exist. Poor Mikuru, she had no idea how hard this mission would prove to be—but reality must be defended, whatever the cost. And there is Itsuki, on behalf of “The Agency,” a shadowy organization whose ESP-endowed members have a preternaturally vast awareness of reality. His extrasensory perception is of a magnitude that can detect the sorts of cheese-holes that develop in reality whenever Haruhi’s mood starts to deteriorate, so he can battle the monsters therein, in hopes of avoiding the sudden collapse of space and time. Yes, everything that exists and much that doesn’t is poised on the knife’s edge in that room; the tension is palpable as Haruhi sighs and taps her pencil eraser and wonders why life is allowed to be so very, very dull.

Apparently the newest release of The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya has strung the episodes of the series in chronological order, for the benefit of American viewers. I don’t suppose that will hurt anything, but it was a very arbitrary decision. Fortunately the Wikipedia entry contains the real order of the series episodes.

Gary Mawyer

 

The Strawberry beneath the Nettle

Strawberry Panic! began as a series of three serial short stories by Sakurako Kimino and subsequently fanned out into a franchise including manga, light novels, and a role-playing game as well as the 26-episode anime directed by Masayuki Sakoi which aired in Japan in 2006.  Readers of anime reviews and wikis will no doubt have noticed the mediocre reviews this series has sometimes received. Probably the explanation is the slight collision of intellectual properties with Maria-Sama Ga Miteru (Lady Mary Watches Us), which also began as a series of short stories in 1999 and reached anime in 2004. Maria-Sama Ga Miteru (now in release in the United States as Maria Watches Over Us) and Strawberry Panic (sometimes called Ichigo Panikku) share quite a few structural and plot features. A careful parallel study of the two would make an excellent doctoral dissertation. Strawberry Panic is a reiteration but there are many motives for reiteration in art.

Maria Watches and Strawberry Panic share a similar premise to a quite different effect. Maria Watches goes to great lengths to rationalize the peculiar institutions of Lillian Girls’ Academy. The result is a highly formalized “rose politics” which affords the plots of the episodes. The affections of the heart are played out against the rules and rituals of the academy and against the secrets behind the rules. The innocence of the power struggle does not detract from its seriousness in this closed world. The sexuality of Maria Watches is acute but deferred. The artistic result is intricate, subtle, slow-developing, and rather intellectual.

Strawberry Panic adapts the idea of the (nominally Catholic) closed society of the girl’s academy, in this case Astraea Hill. Astraea Hill is divided not into rose sororities but into the three schools of St. Miator, St. Spica, and St. Lulim, sharing a triangular central dormitory, Strawberry House. Here the fagging system of Victorian public schools is still in full swing, along with an annual election in which pairs of girls compete to be elected as etoile, in this case meaning ‘ideal pair.’ Though theoretically based on the mastery of etiquette and demeanor, in practice the etoile election is based on popular adulation for the most vehement outbreaks of passion at Strawberry House.

The affairs that seem to be providing the inevitable candidates for the next etoile election provide the core architecture for the long plot of Strawberry Panic. But the core architecture, like any good cathedral, divides into transept and nave and spires upward into beautiful gothic crenellations.  Each of the affairs is in fact a love-triangle with an “odd girl out.” There are Hikari and Amane of St. Spica, who fall head-over-hooves in equestrian love at first glance, and Hikari’s bold and passionate roommate Yaya for whom this poses a lot of heartbreak. Also in St. Spica are Kaname and Momomi, whose torrid, not to say abandoned coupling is complicated by Kaname’s rape fantasies about Hikari and yet other more secretly buried longings. In and out of everyone’s dreams wanders the current etoile, Shizuma. Shizuma’s fellow etoile Kaori tragically died after long illness, leaving Shizuma the surviving half of an ideal pair, suffering from inconsolable grief. Shizuma is a broken etoile in a still-active triangle, caught between her memories of Kaori and her former roommate Miyuki, St. Miator’s student council president, whose complex relationship with Shizuma and Kaori is still an open wound.

Into this hotbed of lively emotions comes Nagisa, the protagonist of Strawberry Panic. No sooner does Nagisa arrive than she gets lost in the wooded grounds of Astraea Hill, only to be bushwhacked and vamped by Shizuma, wandering the forest in no ordinary state of mind. Shizuma has only to look into Nagisa’s eyes to paralyze her like a rabbit, and it would be a very slow viewer indeed who did not realize immediately that the other infatuations bid fair to seem tepid by comparison with Shizuma’s white-heat emotions and Nagisa’s insensate flammability.

Nagisa and Shizuma are destined to set off a romantic tangle involving Nagisa’s delicate and sensitive roommate Tamao, along with Kaori’s ghost and Miyuki’s foiled hopes. Indeed, the shock waves of longing and loss from this pair inevitably ripple through the entire school, all the way down to the freshman class hugging their stuffed bears.

There are reasons why they did not name this series Strawberry Subtlety. Directness of approach is probably the unmet need that inspired it. Obviously this sort of thing is not for everyone, but few things are. The world of Astraea Hill may be a fantasy requiring the viewer to take for granted things that have no easy explanation. But like other great fantasies it is logically coherent and from first to last it remains true to itself. As with Pride and Prejudice, the only possible way to enjoy Strawberry Panic is to jump all the way in. However, there will be no Mr. Darcy because this is a world without men—and a world in which no one misses them.

GARY MAWYER

 

Ghost Hunt

Anime is replete with alternative educational systems, idyllic but imaginary high schools, and school-themed sentimentality, and it goes without saying that just like Ron Howard in Happy Days or American Grafitti, this represents a coping mechanism or surrogate reimagining for what most people experienced as a weird mixture of boredom, unpleasantness, and occasional terror mixed with a lot of longing and occasional moments of hysterical amusement. They’re very effective. When Azumanga Daioh ended with its last episode “10,000 Emotions,” I almost cried and I’m not even a 14-year-old Japanese schoolgirl. How it would have affected me if I had been, I can only imagine. Ghost Hunt is framed as a supernatural show and can readily be viewed as one, but it’s a bit hard to miss the obvious social significance of the so-called ghosts. The ghosts are explicitly the Japanese media unmentionables (such as are mentioned in Dogs and Demons, plus others). We have one story arc focused on the plight of the children of “guest workers” (i.e. third- and fourth-generation descendants of Taisho-era Korean immigrants, who have their own segregated school system and are excluded from the civil rights of other Japanese), the brutally unpleasant high school and its suicide ghost who leaves a note reading “I am not a dog” and returns as a spectral hound to punish his repulsive former teachers; a vampire tale that is a scarcely disguised reference to the horrible “scientific” experiments carried out on POWs and Chinese in Japanese torture camps; a Chinese member of the ghost hunt team who finally admits that though he does not hate his Japanese friends, he viscerally feels creepy all the time because he cannot forget what happened to his family in World War II (which amusingly ends with a round of “I’m sorry”—”I’m more sorry”—”I feel your sorrow but I am even more more sorry”—”I am sorrowful that you are sorry” etc.—the endless chain of bowing). Total institutional failure, the impotence of moral systems based on the powerful cheating the weak, and the premise that any worthwhile person will become a social dropout as soon as he or she possibly can are taken for granted in the premise of the show. Ironically, it’s a very lighthearted show with a great deal of effective comedy and watches cleanly and effortlessly, like a drink of spring water. As with other first-rate anime, to be very serious does not mean to be very heavy or difficult, and there are multiple tracks of understanding on offer so the viewer can accept or decline given readings and avoid unpleasantness. A magnificent show and noteworthy in that relatively few anime–hardly any–step out into the real world to this degree. Though it seems strange to say that about a show featuring all kinds of traditional Japanese ghost fare straight out of Lafcadio Hearn!

Ghost Hunt also has lots of odd features—such as its mix of religions—when the team is assembled it includes a Buddhist monk (actually he’s in a band, but his parents own a shrine), a Shinto shrine maiden (whose maidenliness is open to question), a Catholic priest who is apparently a seminarian dropout, a spiritualist who is actually a TV reality star, a Taoist who doesn’t want to talk about it, a leader who uses electronics as a scientist ghost hunter, and a high school student who is there to make tea. In an early episode one of the characters sums it all up, “So much for religion.” In particular the writers seem to believe Catholic exorcisms involve saying the Lord’s Prayer and then reciting the first chapter of the Gospel of John. Initially I found this totally mysterious until I realized–they probably saw The Secret of Kells. So the first couple of lines of the the Lord’s Prayer and the opening verse or two of John were convenient to hand and their character is a sort of not-priest anyway, besides which he wears Buddhist prayer beads. It’s a total hoot.

It’s also uplifting; redemption is possible, says this show, and even the worst can be purified. I came away feeling strongly that the real ghost being hunted here is the ghost of the first half of the Showa Reign. Americans ought to be able to resonate with this fairly easily; we have our own ghosts, some of the worst of which are tied to the Pacific War as well, and we also have no real plan for how to deal with them.

GARY MAWYER

 

They Cut Up My Heart and Used It for Bait: True Tears

Is Shinichiro Nakagami really all that fabulous a catch? Well, he’s handsome and athletic and very smart, genial, loyal and caring. He has excellent manners and a splendid personality, and comes from the town’s leading family. He’s highly imaginative and also artistically talented, and would leap out of bed and rush into a midnight blizzard to help a pal. He instinctively puts other people’s needs first. And he has no idea he’s exceptional. He thinks of himself as a very ordinary fellow. No wonder practically every girl in the small Toyama town in True Tears (PA Works, 2008) feels wistful about Shinichiro. Most small towns don’t even have a guy like that.

Despite the long odds in the Shinichiro lottery, three girls have already started campaigning along the frontiers of his more or less unguarded heart: childhood friend Hiromi Yuasa, moody and tragic and practically a sister-figure in his family; yet another childhood friend, Aiko Ando, working the well-known “chirpy pal” vein of affection; and the fascinating odd-girl-out, Noe Isurugi, unconventional, almost reckless and perhaps a bit too young for such wars of affection but also possibly the strongest personality of the three.

True Tears (PA Works, 2008) is also the tale of two chickens, Raigomaru and Jibeta. Raigomaru and Jibeta are just as significant as the human characters, and share the same narrative ambiguities. Raigomaru and Jibeta have their own stories; they also have their stories as interpreted by Noe; and they ultimately have their formal literary interpretation at the hands or talented brush of Shinichiro. Raigomaru in particular is a difficult character to manage, since he does not survive the first episode. Raigomaru is eaten by a tanuki almost at once, so his role is rather in the vein of “what we might learn from his fate” and “what Raigomaru might have become had he lived.” It is a bold storyteller who makes a dead chicken a central character in a 325-minute, 13-episode serial. I can’t think of a comparable example and this sort of deranged risk-taking is what keeps some of us coming back to anime when we could be watching paint dry on the Home Repair channel.

Within its rural Japanese high school setting, the world of True Tears seems to owe a great deal of inspiration to Jane Austen, perhaps particularly Emma, well seasoned with Emily Brontë. It would be wonderful if the authors had never heard of Austen and Brontë but this is probably too much to hope for in our sadly hyper-educated age. However, the realism of the story and the intricacy of its narrative are not ultimately conducive to literary romance. True Tears is arguably not a romance at all, but a tragedy of the mundane. Truly happy endings only exist as illusions for people who don’t actually care about the vanquished un-lovers. The beautiful young people in True Tears are not yet capable of that level of selfishness, though they can fearfully recognize it in their elders. Much like Raigomaru and Jibeta in their broken cage on the edge of the tanuki-haunted forest, they have nothing they might need for self-defense—neither claws nor wings nor anywhere to hide. Even Shinichiro’s excessive niceness inflicts wounds. He defers too much; he makes well-intentioned arrangements that turn into sharp-edged quandaries; he can’t say no, or yes. Sometimes it’s actually the nicest and most decent guys of all that hurt you the worst.

We might discuss True Tears as a technical masterpiece of literary parallelism. The creative team that produced this anime plainly includes at least one full-blown genius at or near the Austen class. The story is finely banded throughout and polished to a fine sheen of self-reflexivity. The chickens are wonderful. Noe’s henna brother Jun would fit in well at Wuthering Heights. The refractive storyline is exquisitely modern. If this were a novel we would promptly identify it as a beautifully old-fashioned example of the avant-garde. As one who neither holds nor seeks public office, I will spare you the agony of that sort of criticism and say only that, as with all fiction, you will either find these characters appealing or you won’t. If they don’t appeal to you within a precious few minutes, you will never learn what happens to Jibeta in the end because this thing is 6 hours long. If they do appeal to you, you better bring your Kleenex. All of it.

GARY MAWYER

 

Fumoffu

Fumoffu is an anime oddity, a parody of its own franchise. The second season of Full Metal Panic! dispenses with the dramatic settings and concentrates on the absurdist school hijinks played for laughs in the first season. In Fumoffu, Sgt. Sousuke Sagara maintains his utterly implausible cover as a Japanese high school student to protect, or endanger, the sprightly Chidori Kaname (even though there seems to be no further use for any secret technologies she may be subconsciously harboring). Sagara’s school gym bag is a Pandora’s Box of destructive devices, and his acute paranoia and hair-trigger reflexes repeatedly cast Chidori in the role of “comically offended normal person” in the wake of his spontaneous violent reactions to completely unpredictable nonexistent threats. Fortunately Sagara has a lovely personality for a sociopath, so all’s well that ends well in one episode after another as the smoke clears and the scale of the damage turns out to be less than it might have been.

These jokes are old. Still, to put the comic devices of Fumoffu in perspective, more people would read The Iliad if Homer had not opted to play the Fall of Troy straight. There may, in fact, be no such thing as a new joke. However, Sagara disguising himself in a Bunta-Kun suit to become a deranged and heavily armed amusement park mascot who can only speak in muffled tones, comes perilously close. As Calvin Coolidge once remarked, “It was all I could do to keep from smiling.”

Is there any reason to watch Fumoffu? Other than your personality development program as an anime completist, I mean? There may be. Fumoffu is much slyer than its hyper-cute surface appearance. In addition to being pepperminty, Fumoffu also has a certain pointedness and never wanders far from its points.

Full Metal Panic! is partly an anime commentary on the Global War on Terror (GWT for short). Fumoffu is too, with a much sharper wit, though it does not aim to be uncomfortable. Real-world threats have been transmogrified to vague, distant, generic threats. Jindai High School is not really under attack—except by its defender, Sgt. Sagara. Of course Jindai High could be attacked at any moment, just like New York, Buenos Aires or Timbuctoo, but in the post-GWT Homeland Securitized world the average citizen is a million times more likely to be Sgt. Sagara’d in the name of defense than to meet a terrorist. And of course the real Black Technology is not something arcane—it is just a sneak with a cheap bomb, an anti-Sagara in fact, who can scarcely be detected because there is scarcely anything to detect. Under its risible surface, Fumoffu is quietly constructed around just these few points.

We have here a series of parables about a ton of prevention being worth an ounce of cure. A few square blocks of suburban Tokyo can be protected from nearly anyone except the man assigned to do the defending. There is only a little more to say. The source of Fumoffu’s charm is the secret longing to be innocent, and to be protected. For all the wry wit about whether anti-terrorist protection prevents insecurity or causes it, Fumoffu reflects the old paradox that innocence cannot exist without protection—not just physical protection, but protection from knowledge about the fallen world beyond the charmed circle. In the end there can be no defense from sudden awareness, any more than from Sagara’s utterly ridiculous weaponized virus in the last episode of Fumoffu. Once the inhabitants realize Eden has walls, the charmed circle must and will fall. This is the flash of tragedy, the slip of the actor’s mask that distinguishes art, and Fumoffu would be nothing without it.

GARY MAWYER

 

Nostalgia for an Imaginary Past: Ai Yori Aoshi



It’s customary in reviews to discuss the opening of a show and avoid spoiling the ending for future viewers. Ai Yori Aoshi (J.C. Staff, 2002) neatly relieves us of this problem by not having an ending. As if to rub it in, the original 24-episode series was followed by a 12-episode sequel in 2003, Ai Yori Enishi, which made it clear that the stasis achieved in the first series was deliberate.

To call this a classic or an ‘essential anime’ would be pointless; it’s like saying Moby Dick is a book about whales. If you’re actually interested in anime, you have probably already seen it. If you haven’t, you’ll recognize it immediately. Arguably Ai Yori Aoshi stands equal with Love Hina, the two best examples of the paradigmatic “promise girl” plot, which is the most culturally elaborate form of the traditional “childhood friend” romance. In Love Hina, of course, the “promise girl” is a gently funny idea that dominates the protagonist’s thinking because the protagonist is a sweet-natured idiot. In Ai Yori Aoshi, the promise girl theme is played straight and overtly linked to its archaic and completely real roots, the arranged marriage.

The opening episodes of Ai Yori Aoshi are too beautifully done to pull apart. The backstory can perhaps be risked. Kaoru Hanabishi is the son of the heir to the vast Hanabishi Corporation. His mother, however, was merely a concubine. When his father died, Grandfather Hanabishi made Kaoru the heir but threw his mother out. She promptly died of poverty. After many beatings, and as soon as he reached university age, Kaoru retaliated by throwing himself out, renouncing the cruel Hanabishi legacy of wealth and power. Almost forgotten, in the agony of growing up as a Hanabishi, was the brief nursery-school moment when Kaoru became engaged to Aoi Sakuraba, the heiress of the mighty Sakuraba Conglomerate. This engagement, of course, had been canceled immediately after Kaoru’s defenestration. As a stone-broke university student with a sad past, no family ties, and very few friends of any kind, Kaoru has only the vaguest recollection of his long-lost 5-year-old fiancée. It had never been anything but a potential business arrangement, and in fact he wouldn’t know Aoi from anybody else if he saw her again.

How like a male.

Promise Girls, however, never forget anything. Their commitment to destiny is practically a force of nature.

While Ai Yori Aoshi is aggressively and almost defensively Japanocentric, it has not been so very many years since the same tropes of filial obligation and negotiated marriage were common to the West. One might say that wherever some concept of nobility exists in culture, these same patterns recur along with their excruciating paradoxes. If filial obligation is one of the pillars of society, what does it mean when the parents’ intentions change? Do the sternest of original duties simply become empty air if the parents change their wishes? And if ‘honor thy mother and they father’ is one of the sky-graven rules, what does it mean if they do not honor each other, or if one can only be honored by dishonoring the other?

And so forth. This is not the place to add more to the millions upon millions of words and kanji that have been spilled over these important questions. Suffice it to say that for Kaoru, the answer to harsh filial paradoxes is to reject his family. But for a Promise Girl like Aoi Sakuraba, once you are committed you are committed forever. The Promise Girl’s supercargo of social arrangement and family duty makes her love the heaviest and most irrevocable love of all. And in a way, the parents have a higher duty of their own, which is not to change. None of the many generations involved should take it on themselves to unsettle the mandates of heaven.

In some way the social conservatism of Ai Yori Aoshi seems nearly absolute. Modern society has become quite slack, and the run of commoners simply misbehave themselves by default. But there remain noble protagonists, whose very instincts are sublimely correct. Rules are their servants rather than their masters. Social ordinates were based on the natural behavior of nobles in the first place, back in the fundaments of time. Arranged marriages were often the best marriages after all. If not polluted by the purely modern considerations of industrial society, the first wishes of traditional parents were probably nearly flawless. The original plan cannot be improved. All the alterations in social arrangements that came along with electric lights and telephones are quite likely just mistakes. In short, if we could only go back!

Having reached an astonishingly beautiful impasse between the archaism of Aoi Sakuraba as the Promise Girl, and Kaoru Hanabishi as the Outcast Heir, and pitting their insensate purity against the painfully compromised pseudo-modernity of their ancient families, we would expect this story to rush to a satisfying conclusion. As Lord Byron asserted in Childe Harold, all comedies end with a wedding. It’s quite remarkable that Ai Yori Aoshi never pulls the trigger on a plot resolution. The latter half of the series diverts itself as a harem anime, adding female characters of all sorts one after the other as if to imply that there’s many a fine fish in the sea. In a way, the additional girls vaguely explore permutations on social role-playing and can’t just be dismissed as cheesecake and slapstick. But they don’t clarify the central conflicts of the story, and in the sequel season, Ai Yori Enishi, we are finally presented with an actual magical girl and nekomimi, as if to make it clear that the train has reached the station.

I wonder if the creative team asked itself, “What would happen if this story was true?” The answer would in reality have been tragedy, or at least the rejection of the traditional values the story was built around. These values are things of beauty. They can properly be made the occasion of tragedy in kabuki, but anime is tasked with different goals. We actually needed an “insert cat girl here” moment, and one was provided. Also, what is this Euro-American fixation with having endings on stories! Many a fine story has stumbled over its ending. Enough of endings. Let’s just have beginnings.

GARY MAWYER

 

Kannagi: Crazy Shrine Maidens

What is a god?

An interesting question for mortals (which is most of us), with a considerable variety of answers. It might also be an interesting question for a god. Jehovah is famously quoted as saying “I am that I am,” setting off much theological speculation. Popeye the Sailor contributed his own formulation, “I yam what I yam,” which seems more modest somehow. Yet in that light, maybe Jehovah’s formula was also a statement of limits. Or maybe we just understand it better when Popeye says it because we know Popeye better. In Buddhism this question excites the same sort of vague answer: Tathata, in which thisness or thatness is the font of actuality only to the extent there is one. Aristotle similarly posited in Metaphysics that complete actuality would require the absence of matter because the physical potentialities of material existence would be incompatible with a state of perfect being. But all metaphysics aside, we could ask as a purely social question: would a god have any actual motive to reflect upon his or her specific identity?

Since I am a mortal myself, and thus have “no dog in the fight” as the postmodern cliché goes, I feel prepared to climb out on a limb and suggest that the answer is a definite maybe. This seems to put me on a footing with the writers of Kannagi: Crazy Shrine Maidens (A-1 Pictures/Aniplex).

I am not sure why the title includes “shrine maidens” but when I first heard of this series I resolved to watch it as soon as possible. I was taking no chances—I preordered it. But in fact there isn’t a single shrine maiden in the show. And that’s part of the problem for the shrine goddesses Nagi and Zange-chan. Who or what they are is a lot clearer if you don’t have to ask. Nagi and Zange-chan, the goddesses in Kannagi, are practical workaday kami, not thunder-riders or universe-creators, nor do they claim to be. In fact some suspect they are not goddesses at all, but mere “motley spirits” whose alleged powers are actually about half mischief. For the most part, kami aren’t even believed in now. These are goddesses in trouble.

For an unknown but quite considerable span of time, Nagi lived within a sacred tree and purified the surrounding area. Sometimes it was useful for her to become visible. As the population grew and more people lived on the other side of the river, it was convenient to take a slip off the tree and start a second shrine, with a second sacred tree and a second Nagi. After the passage of a considerable number of years the second Nagi gradually became a different goddess, more or less Nagi’s younger sister.

When Nagi’s shrine was decommissioned and the tree cut down, Nagi’s powers of purification ebbed almost to nothing. The fact that she survived at all may have depended on the fortuitous use of a piece of the old sacred tree in a school art project. There remained just enough of Nagi to make it possible to descend to the level of matter, as a physical being with conditional potentiality. Some might call this implausible; I suggest we call it “Aristotelian” instead, out of broadmindedness. Nagi’s purposes, such as her goal of protecting her surroundings from impurities, remain unchanged. Her fallen state and reduced ability pose quite a challenge and force her to ask, “What am I?” and indeed, “What was I?”

Her younger sister, though still in possession of the tree at the offshoot shrine, took warning from this disaster and commandeered a convenient human body. Realizing that the fashion in religions had changed, she re-branded herself as Zange-chan (“Confession-chan”) and went into business at the shopping mall hearing confessions, accepting repentance and awarding forgiveness, in addition to a little light divination and astrology as needed. As a local celebrity nearly everyone believes in, she is spared from introspection about what she is or isn’t. Her natural purpose as a goddess, to eliminate impurities, carries on effortlessly. Zange-chan could almost pity her overly conservative and nearly powerless older sister—except she doesn’t.

I seem to be seriously explaining this story in detail, probably because on some primal level I find that I believe it. I didn’t mean to believe it. Truth just happens.

The chief source of dramatic tension in Kannagi is Jin, who finds himself unwittingly cast as almost the last believer, or so it would seem, providing just enough spiritual basis to keep Nagi alive and embodied and capable of a fresh start. Except—pity the gods, for their believers are often rather conditional. Jin knows what Nagi is without crediting it. He can only accept her as a goddess between spells of doubt. If those closest to her have doubts and conditions despite all she can do, no wonder Nagi finds herself wondering if she is perhaps only a motley spirit or a self-deluded god-pretender after all. Jin, we fear, is tragically untrained about his duties to the gods. But then, most of us are. Gods are there to serve others, whatever pomps and idiosyncrasies they may have. Nothing is held back. Nature does not stint itself. We seem as a general rule to feel that our proper response is to question it all, seen and unseen. Well, I guess we just are what we are. Luckily even the lesser gods are inherently generous by nature, because the questions we feel we must ask are not much of a return for the universe. Hang in there, Nagi!

GARY MAWYER
____________

Notes

1. One of the central kami in the Shinto faith is Amaterasu. From Wikipedia:

Amaterasu (天照^?), Amaterasu-ōmikami (天照大神／天照大御神^?) or Ōhiru-menomuchi-no-kami (大日孁貴神^?) is a sun goddess and one of the principal Shinto deities (神, kami^?). The meaning of her name, Amaterasu-ōmikami, is “the great august kami who shines in the heaven”^[1]. She was born from the left eye of Izanagi as he purified himself in a river and went on to become the ruler of the Higher Celestial Plain (Takamagahara).

She is also said to be directly linked in lineage to the Imperial Household of Japan and the Emperor, who are considered descendants of the kami themselves.