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.

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.

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

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 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

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 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

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

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.

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