Questions without answers
How do you refer to a person who is not there? How do you explain the intricacies of the past to a person who has only ever seen the present, and only the present? If the world was once a wonderful place full of mysteries, is it possible that even in our modern times there are still just as many mysteries as ever? Or are we too “grown up” for mysteries, in a world where we harness energies and materials to do all sorts of things? Just because we make tools and instruments doesn’t invalidate the mysteries. They are still there; it’s just that people no longer see them. They’ve trained themselves in the art of blindness– the art of not seeing God’s work.
(We have instruments, we have tools, but we still have as many mysteries as ever, and we still rely upon the mysteries as much as ever. If you were to look at yourself from the proper perspective, you would see yourself as a tiny tiny being in a vast world in an incomprehensibly large universe. Those stars– why does their light stretch out over those distances, so far away, to touch our eyes and our minds? Why should visible light affect us so? Why is some light invisible… and it goes right through us in the form of radio waves. They fly through our bodies and touch cell phones. They heat our food. They cause tires to turn, fan blades to spin, propellers to rotate, pinwheels to sparkle with the light. And yet, God is also– somehow– our size. God became one of our fallen race, so that he could make us holy and acceptable for the eternal life that he had planned for us from the beginning, before the sin of our first parents. God saw that there was nobody able to save mankind, so His own hand interceded on His behalf, for His glory. The Gospel. The Good News. Simple, yet stunning in the thoughts it should provoke in human beings. Utter foolishness to the wisdom of this world. Scoffers continue to fill books with their scoffing, wondering where is the coming that God promised. They want a sign of God. They actually want a sign of God’s love. What ignorance! What blindness covers their eyes! It should move us to compassion and mercy, for that is how Jesus responded to us. It should move us to worship, but we are so weak and addled by physical pains and we use excuses as our failsafe crutches– and even so, God loves us. Truly, God is good and loving, in that He stays faithful when I have shown myself a traitor many times over.)
If you lost your identity, how would you rebuild it? Would you tune into fantasies and fall into a reverie in a beautiful world of your own creation? Or would your world be the real world– meaning that everybody else is in a state of utter fantasy, unable to see the reality which you have discovered?
This show invites the viewer to consider these concepts by presenting the lives of two teenagers as the main characters: Makoto, and his cousin Erio. Not only is adolescence a time of changes, but this is shown to be the subject of the story by the charactersdialogues .
Erio is a female hikikomori (social recluse who rarely interacts with people or goes outside of the house) and a high school dropout due to what appears to be mental problems. Makoto is trying to be a normal, average high school student, so as to fulfill his parents’ and his own expectations. They are very different. What they have in common is that the two of them have no identities, and both are trying to find a purpose and form friendships with others.
Makoto is new to the town and as such is a transfer student into the high school there. A transfer student is a curious thing– a person labeled with both a blessing and a curse. They enter a world where they know nobody, but because they know nobody that gives them the opportunity to attempt to make friends with anybody or any clique or club they so desire. He is befriended in short order by two girls (seemingly without any effort on his part, which might cause one to wonder if the motivations of the girls are merely to test his reactions.”
Erio stays home all day and her mother Meme seems to ignore her. In fact, Meme seems to be trying to overlook the fact that her daughter exists.
This peculiar shunning of what is so obvious to other people is a commentary on the way many Japanese mothers react when one of their child becomes a recluse. It is shameful to admit to harboring a hikikomori, so they don’t talk about it or ask for help. And the recluse remains a recluse, growing even more cut off from society and dependent upon the parents.
By Episode 3 we learn that Erio has disappeared in the past and that those several months are missing from her memory. It’s amnesia, and nobody can tell her where she was or what happened to her. According to Aunt Meme, Erio feels that a part of her life– her identity as a human– is missing, and she wants to recover it. She became oddly antisocial and later dropped out of school.
Makoto’s Aunt Meme meets him at the train station. She strikes Makoto as a happy and energetic woman. They take a taxi from the station to her home where he will live from then on. On the drive there they pass by the sign welcoming people to the town. The sign proclaims that this is the town where aliens coexist along with humans. Meme explains this to Makoto without a hint of derision in her voice, and Makoto wonders if she is one of those people who believes in aliens– indicating that he doesn’t believe.
They enter Aunt Meme’s home and Makoto immediately sees a girl lying on the floor with a futon wrapped around her upper body and tied in place– looking like some kind of sushi roll. He wants to ask about this unexpected third resident of the house, but politeness gets the better of him and he finds himself sent off to his new room to take a nap.
Makoto wakes up and is called to dinner by Aunt Meme, who has prepared something of a feast to celebrate his arrival. The “fish roll” is sitting at a chair at the dinner table along with Aunt Meme, who seems not to notice. An odd dialogue ensues between Makoto and his aunt. Aunt Meme, in characteristic Japanese manner, repeatedly dodges the question of just who or what is this “fish roll” sitting in the third chair at the dinner table. Makoto pokes, then punches the fish roll but not even that provokes a response from Aunt Meme. It does, however, provoke a response from the fish roll, who kicks at Makoto’s knees under the table.
The next day Makoto goes to his new school for the first time. After he gets home he manages to talk to the fish roll. He learns that her name is Erio. She calls him “cousin.” She speaks in a very logical manner, a sort of emotionless monotone with many big words and technical terms, as if she were an alien. Not so surprisingly, she tells Makoto that she is an alien! As she sits in a darkened room with a television blaring static, she explains to Makoto about aliens and the world ending and radio transmissions but it doesn’t make any sense to him. She uses the phone to call for pizza delivery for a late lunch, since her mother doesn’t prepare any food for her. It strikes Makoto that Aunt Meme seems awfully blase about the wellbeing of her daughter– if Erio is her daughter at all. What kind of mother treats her daughter like this? No food for Erio– and this after Meme had greeted Makoto with so much food. Perhaps Meme’s overly happy demeanor is a cover for something else– an unspeakable sadness, perhaps? One can only speculate. During the day and much of the night, Meme is away from home, the very stereotype of a “successful unmarried career woman”, “working” or doing something more important than being with her troubled daughter.
Wonder and mystery, faith and belief
Characters indirectly reference the impossibility of living life without reliance upon faith. I think the dialogue is beautiful in its simplicity, but I have to say that I’ve always had a weakness for simple stories such as Of Mice and Men. I get that faith/belief is a main theme of this story since I’ve trained myself to look for themes in stories.
The modern world has a lot of technological items that may suggest that modern man has gotten this world figured out upside downways and sidewards. We like to think that everything has been analyzed and that we can predict the weather or the future (“the future is getting better” is the constant drumbeat of our mass media, with “better” defined as material possessions), but just like Makoto suddenly leaving home to live with his aunt, we must often do things that we didn’t expect to have to do. We can’t predict outcomes or the future, despite our desire to think that everything is explainable. We can’t even predict tomorrow– that is how dependent we are upon employers and institutions and the weather and other people. Maybe it is chance? Maybe aliens? God? Some being we don’t know pulling the strings? How can one know for sure? How can one know anything for certain?
Mystery 1
A girl named Maekawa finds that when she raises her arms over her head and keeps them raised, something mysterious happens with the blood in her body and she gets faint and collapses. Why her? Why does this happen, when it is such an impediment to her present and future “success”? Despite her attractive appearance she has been rejected by three different school clubs, fired from a part-time job, and characterized as “useless” and “frail”. She is a pariah of sorts, since in Japan students are almost universally expected to participate in a sport or an after-school club. As I understand it, clubs and sports clubs are seen as a discipline and a kind of trial run for the demands of adult life. It seems like Maekawa has no friends, and she is quick to befriend Makoto. She seems to represent the sort of person who will experience major problems as an adult in a rigid society. She is a potential hikikomori.
Some of these topics you may not understand the full implications of unless you are familiar with the rigid and status-driven nature of Japanese society, where even minor differences in age or grade demand that deference be shown the “senior” by the “junior”, from the novice to the more experienced, regardless of their actual ability. People who cannot get a job because of mental issues or physical problems are seen by society as non-existent entities and embarrassments to their parents. The hikikomori are people who have skills, but their skills are not valued by the machines of industry and commerce that are looking for a specific sort of person to fill preexisting job slots. The hikikomori may have mental problems but instead of receiving help, they embrace seclusion as a way out from the derision and misunderstanding of other people. It is the cold reality of the modern world.
A fact Japan is not proud of is its very high rate of suicide among young people. For every suicide recorded in the statistics there are probably many more living in isolation and loneliness, lost to the world, living in a world of their own creation, a world of video games and media consumption and apathy and depression and fear.
Mystery 2
How do you see the world? As a place of wonder and mystery? There is another girl who befriends Makoto– as a transfer student it seems he is an easy target– and her name is Ryuuko. She is overenergetic and bumbling. She also has a funny way of talking, some kind of jumble of accents that I don’t get the gist of since I’m not familiar with regional Japanese dialects. (Heh.) After school she challenges him to bike home with her. She puts a helmet on before biking. Makoto doesn’t have a helmet. His bike is an rusting hand-me-down from Aunt Meme– one that probably belonged to Erio. Ryuuko immediately takes a big lead over Makoto, who struggles to keep up with her. They expend far more effort to get to where they would have gotten eventually than they needed to expend. Ryuuko acknowledges this, then says that these are the sorts of things they will later remember and think back on– the out of the ordinary things like biking quickly for no reason. She seems awed that a bicycle can move so quickly.
At a later time they are eating in one of those Japanese “family restaurants”. He asks Ryuuko what she thinks is the meaning of “mystery.” She explains.
Ryuuko’s world is one where bicycles move– and nobody can explain why. (Just thinking about the truth of that statement makes my eyes well up with tears.) Why do bicycles move when you pedal them? Why do they move so fast? Teachers expound on the principles of physics and structures, but what does it all mean? Who can really understand it? It is a mystery– but only to those who see it as such. Ryuuko wonders how much she really understands. She lives in a world where she doesn’t have to know how modern technologies work to use them. People drive cars and use cell phones without even thinking about it anymore. The joy of life has been sucked out of life by the mad modern rush to have the latest and greatest.
To most people a bicycle is just that. Nothing special there. As boring as dirt. But it is special, and so is everything else. Can we grasp the awe with which the creators of the first bicycle tried out their handiwork? How about the Wright Brothers? They must have been thrilled at the precise movement of the gears of their bicycles, then later the flights of their gliders, then the flights of their airplanes. It is the wonder that a child feels at an airshow looking up at those airplanes, those big heavy metal objects that move so quickly through the air at the whim of the pilot. It is the wonder we felt before we realized that those fighter jets were made to kill other fighter jets, in a deadly game where everybody loses, the game of chess at which the rulers of this world love to play. Once we knew what death was, we weren’t able to see the world in the same way. Everything had become less wonderful in our eyes. It had become ugly, something unbearable, like a joke that fell flat. And so it is that as we grow older, as we become adults, we are told to quit seeing for ourselves. We stop believing that mysteries exist, and we resign ourselves to a world devoid of surprises.
Do we know why metals hold together? True, we can say that there are bonds of gravity and cohesion between molecules, but who put those bonds there? And to what end? And if there is really no purpose to it all, then why is there no purpose to something so obviously intended to be useful? Do we know why energy gets sucked up into the bicycle wheels in such a way that there is momentum and speed? What is energy? It is invisible but we know it is real because we see the proof of it. Nobody would dare deny the obvious. Bicycles move quickly. And yet, not just anybody can see it. Not just anybody can see a bicycle as a miracle in action. Not just anybody can see aliens in an otherwise mundane and normal town. Life is infinitely interesting, but the modern way of seeing has made it infinitely boring, a world in which people actually complain of boredom.
Digression – Worship
(I find infinite joy in meditating upon the works of my Creator God. I can’t even get past my own body without finding a trillion reasons to praise God. Call it navel-gazing if you want to, but I doubt that most people truly praise God for his handiwork. Every day I recognize more of God’s handiwork for what it always has been, as if my blindness is slowly peeling away, revealing more of reality to my spirit. My hands, my arms– why do they move? Why must they move when I think of it? What is my thought? I cannot see my own thoughts. I can’t see my blood– yet my life is in the blood– yet I can lose some blood and stay alive. The blood is necessary, but not all of it is necessary. If there is a leak of blood from the body (or if I donate blood) I may yet live.
It is amazing that my eyes and arms and feet and body are connected to this spirit that I call myself. And yet, it is so obvious that I am not my own. I am more than a body or a brain– but without this body and the blood pumping through all my organs and limbs and the air exchanging chemicals in my lungs and the food converted into energy and muscle and fat in my stomach and getting sent through the bloodstream to the parts of my body that need repairs, I wouldn’t have a body anymore.
I live in a body that has a mind of its own. I was born into a body that I never asked for. I didn’t choose it from the closet like I can my clothes. I was given this body. My parents had something to do with the shape of my body, but they did not make it. This body– this self-sustaining organism– is not me. It is connected to me and I wouldn’t dare try to separate myself from it. This body is on loan to me, like a bicycle that I ride, my own body is a tool for my spirit to use– so that I might move around and feel this world, touch the dirt, smell the roses, laugh and cry. It is warm; my heart beats– is it because I eat food that I stay warm?
When I get a cut, the skin regrows. Why does it want to do that, anyway?
To fully exist is what I have been called to do, to rejoice with those who rejoice and to share in the sufferings of others. I can do that. I can imagine what it must be like to be another person. I never once imagined this kind of existence for myself. I just found myself, one day, alive, when before that I have no memories of ever existing. I feel uncomfortable in this body, let alone this world, awed at all the things I don’t do to keep myself alive. I don’t do anything more than eat and drink and breathe and let sleep overtake me. But something makes my body go on living. Something makes the plants grow. I don’t make that big ball of nuclear fission we call the sun keep on burning in its incomprehensible violence.
Do you ever think of how God even created space? He stretched out the heavens and will one day roll them up like a scroll. Some scientists theorize that space and time are two dimensions in what we might call the “fabric” of space-time.)
Erio did tell Makoto that she could fly, but Makoto has not seen any proof of it yet. Instead, he ends up taking her out on nighttime bike rides every three days, so they can buy food from the convenience store or go down to the oceanside, where Erio seems to feel some special connection to something related to her disappearance. Perhaps she is looking for the memories that she lost there. She says it has something to do with the aliens of whom she is a representative.
It’s surprising how deep the subject matter is (potentially) for what would appear on the surface to be just another slice-of-everyday-life show with comedic and cutesy undertones. That, and the moe cute character designs seem to be mere sugar to help the medicine go down– in this show’s case, the unsavory subject is that of the hikikomori (social recluse) phenomenon. The dialogue really has a way of getting into your head and provoking thought– if you are the sort of person to think about such things to begin with.
The show
Denpa Onna to Seishun Otoko (in English: Electromagnetic Wave Woman and Adolescent Man) is an anime produced by Studio SHAFT and first broadcast on TV in Japan for the “Spring 2011 season” beginning in April 2011. It is expected to run 12 episodes.
The way this story starts
Lastly, because I find it interesting.
This story begins in a way common to more than a few Japanese anime stories. It begins with a journey away from a familiar place to an unfamiliar and unexpected place, a place where the main character never imagined that he would have to go.
Incidentally, the beginning of this story is also the ending of a previous story. The main character actually alludes to this as he analyzes his prospects using literary terminology.
The main character is an only child. Mom and/or Dad get an unspecified job that requires them to move away from home. For unspecified reasons, they can’t provide a home for their teenage child in the location they are moving to. They decide (without consulting the child) to send their child away to live in the home of an aunt or uncle who the child doesn’t know or remember. The child feels a sense of independence and anticipation about the suddenly unclear future. Incidentally, this also describes the beginning episode of Hanasaku Iroha, another show of the April 2011 season.
After that seemingly stock (yet powerful) setup the main character receives his introduction to his new home and surroundings. This takes all of the first episode; afterwards is when things get interesting.
