Translator’s note: Subahibi is the fan shorthand for the adult visual novel Subarashiki Hibi, released in English as Wonderful Everyday Down the Rabbit-Hole. The game’s numbered chapters are distinct from the three parts of this essay; player choices open different narrative routes. Japanese names below follow family-name-first order.
This essay contains major spoilers for the game’s prologue and Chapters Two and Three. Read at your own risk. It is long. Subarashii means, roughly, “wonderful.”
If I were to write about the things I watched or played when I was sixteen, galgames—games built around beautiful girl characters—would probably take up 70 percent of the space. The other 30 percent would go to assorted obscure new anime and Kakusansei Million XXX.
Back then, the normies preparing for prestigious universities were still sweating blood and tears, clutching English papers with scores over 120 and wailing that they had flunked. I gave a cold little laugh and devoted myself to playing galgames under the covers and in the toilet. But it was a lucky break, really. If I had never got hooked on galgames, those damned, mind-warping denpa games might never have “taken over my brain.” I might never have abandoned science for the humanities at university, studied sociology, and still failed to get a girlfriend. I might never have written these endless theoretical screeds. Nor would I be likely to recognize that the pleasure I took at sixteen in secretly playing adult games and overstepping the rules was a kind of “perversion.”
Most importantly, of course, if I had never opened Memories Off 6, not only would I never have encountered the grotesque, sadistic works that followed; I might well have missed out on sociology and philosophical thought altogether.
As products of the culture industry, galgames certainly have limited influence. Yet they are undeniably also a genre with a small audience and relatively closed fan circles. Many are full of their creators’ idealism, dissatisfaction with real life, and abuse directed at it. Fictional utopias and “revenge on society” share the stage in a “dream collaboration” within their brazen narratives. This ideological “enclave” has already created new possibilities for interpretation. Rediscovering the value of galgames does not mean returning to them to uncover previously unnoticed merits. It means opening up a new practice through “misreading,” opening possibilities for reality, for social justice.
I want to bring what I now know and have experienced to a fresh analysis of the work that influenced me most. At least that way, I will have no regrets about that accidental encounter at sixteen.
Preface to the Series: Gender
Gender is hardly an uncommon topic in two-dimensional culture—the world of anime, manga, and games. As its consumer culture flourishes, gender signs, with their sign-value and their function in symbolic exchange, cannot escape the commodity carnival either. One familiar example springs readily to mind: “Someone this cute has to be a boy.” It may sound a little dated on today’s internet, but for a time, together with the term xiaojiejie, “cute young lady,” it formed a glorious spectacle of otaku culture, setting off ripples well beyond the otaku crowd. Another very common example is our fixation, regardless of our own gender, on female characters, especially female bodies—breasts, legs—and femininity, in the form of particular moe attractions. The pleasures of two-dimensional culture give that fixation full expression. Gender, then, is now unavoidable in any discussion of this culture.
The consumption of femininity is not entirely a product of patriarchal alienation. When approaching a particular work, let us set our ideological baggage aside for the moment and take our reading experience as the basis for an intervention from the sociology of gender. Gender, in other words, is one of many variables through which we explain society and the individual. To make it our principal variable means considering not only economics and politics, but also race and the identities through which individuals understand themselves. The politics of sex involves more than situations in which men “gain power” and women are “castrated”: we must also consider reversals of power between men and women, and the marginalization of sexual minorities, under the influence of multiple factors. Within a patriarchal reality that oppresses women, the subjectivity women exercise in saying “no” also deserves attention. Finally, our starting point is a “gender perspective,” not a “women’s perspective,” because the postmodern horizon has torn apart the thin veil separating the concepts of man and woman. In the radical sense, men and women are no longer sharply divided, still less endowed with some fixed masculinity or femininity. So let us see how these relations take shape in the work, and how we find ourselves immersed in their aesthetic contradictions.
Introducing the Work
The “protagonist” of this essay is a bishōjo game, or galgame, that is practically a household name within the community. Its Chinese fan translation is titled Meihao de mei yitian (“Wonderful Every Day”), though fans generally call it Subahibi. It attracted considerable attention from the day of its release: it took both the overall Bronze Prize and the Gold Prize for Scenario at the 2010 Moe Game Awards, scored in the nineties on ErogameScape, and had only a dozen or so rivals on Bangumi’s game rankings. It headed the Galgame Tieba forum’s list of “Twelve Sacred Treasures.” Readers can look up further details themselves. These achievements have much to do with the philosophical and literary depth of its story. Remove Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, its central axis, along with the embellishments supplied by Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Cyrano de Bergerac, and neoclassicism, and the whole work would lose its luster. Wittgenstein’s early account of the relation between world and language is indeed not only obscure and difficult but open to multiple interpretations, its mystical aura exerting a powerful fascination. It also helped shape the “linguistic turn,” so consequential for contemporary philosophy and sociology. Reading the characters and plot through Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language and philosophy of mind has consequently become the dominant approach to Subahibi.
Here, however, I want to explore what those readings leave over, returning the focus to the relation between characters and plot. Although most critics likewise start from a “study of character” to interpret the story and its world, they display a certain “insensitivity” when it comes to the characters’ genders. To my mind, apart from philosophy, precisely what most deserves interpretation in Subahibi is the gender and gendered dispositions its characters present. To explain away all the cross-dressing, futanari, feminine boys, and school bullying as nothing more than Futa-ji’s taste for sadistic material would hardly do the work justice.1 Its central themes of resistance and redemption—leaving aside the “End of the Sky” ending—correspond remarkably closely to its characters’ practices of gendered subjectivity. The discussion that follows will principally take a character-centered approach, considering the gendered dispositions of the key figures and their practices as subjects.
Given the complexity of gender, this essay will appear in three parts. Its tentative exploration of gender in the original work will follow the axis “female unconscious subject → desiring subject (gender performativity) → social individual (sociology of gender).”
I. Imagination and Female Narrative
Any discussion of the female Imaginary must address Lacan’s account of the Oedipus complex and the “three registers”—as well as his successors’ “sublation” of his theories. We can glimpse these issues in the game’s third chapter. After the baptism administered by Chapter Two’s grandiosely deluded cult leader, Chapter Three shifts to Takashima Zakuro’s perspective. Her transformation over the course of the chapter and her ruinous end are wrenching. Yet from a certain perspective, it is precisely the final eruption of delusion and hysteria that makes her subjectivity leap off the page. She thereby occupies an ontological position above the other characters, annulling that of the male characters in particular. Chronologically, too, Zakuro is the foremost force driving the entire plot.
The chapter opens unremarkably. Its protagonist, Zakuro, is a quiet, literary girl: innocent, fanciful, with literary tastes few others share, awkward with words, and sometimes clumsy. She has a secret crush on another protagonist, Mamiya Takuji. So far, she resembles the protagonists of any number of other works. But in a work full of plots and schemes, Zakuro’s candor and simplicity bring disaster upon her. The opening establishes the school bullying she faces, for reasons amounting to her inability to read the room and her connection with Tachibana Kimika, who has previously been bullied herself. As the story progresses, Zakuro and Kimika remain alternately close and distant. At the crucial choice, whether Zakuro stops to consider her relationship with Kimika determines the split between the chapter’s main and alternate routes.
If the player chooses to think about Kimika, Zakuro subsequently helps her and forms a deeper emotional bond with her. During the restaurant incident, she then rises up and makes common cause with Kimika. If the player chooses “Go into the classroom first,” Zakuro takes Kimika’s place as the target of Megu’s bullying and is left completely powerless at the restaurant. Unfortunately, the game’s main route is precisely the one in which Zakuro does not consider making things right with Kimika. In what follows, the boys and girls at school torment her to within an inch of her life. Graffiti, cutting up her clothes, forcing her to perform naked—they stop at no means of exploitation. The first-person narration gives full force to this shift from gentleness to cruelty. At the climax, Zakuro is forcibly drugged and sexually assaulted, plunging her into mental collapse.
One could say that the worthwhile empirical analysis of Chapter Three’s main route stops abruptly here. Psychological analysis takes its place. Players see directly the distorted reality that Zakuro perceives in her severely contaminated mental state. Chastity, as the big Other of the symbolic order, takes concrete form as a god, appearing in her phenomenal world and relentlessly pressuring her psyche. It is an extraordinarily sensitive depiction of a sexually assaulted woman’s psychological terror and struggle.
The latter half of the story offers something worth pondering. On a website devoted to adolescent fantasies of secret powers, Zakuro finds two volunteers who have suffered misfortunes of their own. One, a girl named Usami, spouts mystical nonsense about all three of them being reincarnated goddesses from another world, forever battling the “physically specialized talisman insects” on the other side. She even concocts an entire grandiose plot about goddesses fighting the demon realm. Zakuro, now mentally shattered, actually accepts this wild tale in its entirety. Profoundly inspired, she rationalizes all her delusions and elaborates her delusional cosmology still further. At the end of the chapter, she lays out the whole of this imagined world. In a state of extreme mental disturbance and hysteria, she pulls the other two volunteers with her as she jumps from a tall building, “returning to the milky-white planet.” Chapter Three ends on this oppressive scene.
As noted above, the chapter’s sole—and crucial—choice actually entails an important transformation in narrative form. If the player follows the main route after that choice, what they encounter is no longer the “relationship” between two female characters, Zakuro and Kimika, but Zakuro’s “monologue.” The story’s emphasis has shifted from school bullying as a problem of social action to the symptoms of delusion. The abusers, Megu, Satoko, and the others, along with Kimika and Mamiya Takuji, have left the stage. Takashima Zakuro is now the story’s only subject; the world seems to revolve around her. Almost everything in the latter half unfolds within her world. Under the reign of Zakuro’s delusions, even Usami, the creator of the other-world setting, grows frightened. Drawing on her exuberant imagination and her experience of inhuman abuse, Takashima establishes the center of this imagined world, stripping the originator of the other-world story of all authority to interpret it. At this point, tenderly pitying Zakuro as a delicate beauty is sheer presumption. Her madness refuses the player’s transference as a gazer; instead, it elicits a fearful countertransference. The figure of the madwoman breaks away from that of the “sexually violated woman,” showing us a destruction that, though nonmaterial, has an overwhelming impact.
The distinctive character of Zakuro’s delusions emerges clearly from the difference between her madness and Takuji’s. According to Irigaray’s findings in her first book, Le langage des déments (The Language of Dementia), male patients retain the ability to correct syntax and use “metalanguage” even when mad, whereas women often express their symptoms through the “body”—hysteria.2 Takuji’s symptoms are tied to his early experience of being burdened with expectations of becoming a savior. He has accumulated extensive knowledge of occultism and cults. Bullying is merely a persistent trigger, not the sole determining cause. His psychotic symptoms last less than half a chapter before he once again accepts “cult leader” as an anchor, reconstructing a stable conception of totality—cult belief—and calling for divine rule. Thus, when he preaches later on, he expounds his conservative messianism calmly and rigorously. The crux of Zakuro’s delusions, however, is the fact of having been “sexually violated by men.” Right up until her final suicidal leap, that fact remains unacknowledged, replaced by delusions of another world. In her unconscious, “chastity” has always occupied the sublime position of the big Other; the fact of having been “sexually violated by men” is utterly unacceptable. Usami’s incomplete cosmology nevertheless prompts Zakuro’s “flight into” it. It establishes a crucial model and opening, the “previous life,” while the goddess is again associated with an image of chastity. Crucially, Zakuro never organizes her fantasies into a logically coherent account. She remains in a “fluctuating state of madness,” which finally manifests itself in a powerful bodily agitation as she pulls others off the building with her. This is the greatest difference between her madness and Takuji’s.
In discussing the female Imaginary, Irigaray identifies its multiplicity, mutability, and fluidity. The male Imaginary, by contrast, is characterized by sameness and rationality. Both characters invest in “narcissism,” but Takuji’s identification connects with a delusional reconstruction of the real-world order. It signifies the desire for, and recognition of, a passage from the dispossessed to the dispossessor. Zakuro’s identification, on the other hand, displays a mad uncertainty, attempting to escape the constraints of the symbolic order altogether. This ultimately gives her identification a mythical character. Her flight from the Symbolic does not begin after the assault, but long before the experiences the story depicts. She has presupposed a perfect image of herself and long since developed a fastidious insistence on inner purity.
In a move akin to Irigaray’s, Kristeva also attempts to move beyond Lacan’s phallocentrism, associating women with “the semiotic.” In her theoretical framework, the semiotic stands opposed to the symbolic. Its elements—inscriptions, traces, indications, and so forth—contain all the drives associated with the pre-Oedipal stage and the primordial attachments of the mother–infant relationship.3 Women are connected to the primary processes of the “pre-Oedipal.” At this stage, the paternal big Other has not intervened in the formation of the subject. The focus of analysis shifts to the relational field of “mother and child,” elevating the “mother” to a crucial position. If we read the pre-Oedipal stage broadly, Zakuro’s imaginative transference onto a “previous life” is not difficult to understand.
Takuji accepts “pre-established harmony” and designates July 20 as the day of return to the sky. Zakuro instead chooses to go back, to another life whose reality has not yet been touched by the symbolic order. In that world, she is still a virgin and can still give her first time to the person she loves. More importantly, there she is a “complete self” containing both supreme goodness and blemish. Rather than saying that Zakuro goes mad because she cares about “chastity,” a sign of the patriarchal symbolic order, it would be better to locate her shock in the Thing—the “complete self”—seeping into the signifiers of desire in the Symbolic. It tells her: it is time to overturn things.
II. Female Desire and Yuri
Kristeva associates women with the semiotic, which she considers to contain elements of both the Imaginary and the Real. This brings us to a second topic. In Lacan’s account, the Imaginary is often associated with the narcissistic fantasies of the mirror stage, an important theoretical basis for analyzing love and intimacy. Yet Freud’s and Lacan’s investigations of women have themselves been accused of constituting a “male fantasy.” Feminists turn the “speculum” back upon men’s tireless exploration of women, exposing its narcissistic nature.4 Female desire remains a mystery.
What happens after Zakuro’s suicide is interesting. Connect Chapter Three with the prologue, and the conclusion that “female desire is linked to the Real” is almost inescapable. After her suicide, Takashima Zakuro’s soul enters the unconscious of Takuji, who witnessed it. She eventually discovers that the Takuji she fell in love with was actually the Minakami Yuki personality—the events of the prologue. Even so, she has no qualms about her true feelings and expresses her restrained love for Yuki. The relation of desire thus becomes: wanting to give her first time to Takuji (Yuki) → being unable to accept the assault → seeking a previous life to escape reality → discovering the truth → affirming her desire. In the end, Zakuro accepts that she is a lesbian. She seems an entirely different person from the Zakuro who went mad after losing her virginity.
As Irigaray argues, female desire has greater fluidity, even a tendency to shed gender, than the fixed images of women and projections of desire in the male Imaginary. This theory presupposes the Oedipus complex. We might narrow “desire” to “sexual orientation” to explain women’s receptiveness to yuri—female–female love and the genre depicting it. Boys and girls face different situations in the Oedipus complex, or the Electra-complex phase.
From Lacan’s mirror stage, we learn that in the pre-Oedipal stage, the mother is the object of desire for boys and girls alike. Early in the Oedipal stage, the paternal big Other breaks into the chain of relations. A three-person relation formally takes shape, and the subject’s social construction begins. The boy believes that his mother’s desire points toward his father—although it actually points elsewhere. He consequently develops hostility toward his father and continues his possessiveness toward his mother, pretending to have the phallus that will satisfy her5—the imaginary phallus. At the end of the Oedipal stage, he discovers that his mother’s desire always points toward an elusive elsewhere and accepts that he does not possess the phallus. He begins to identify with the symbolic father, believing that he can find the phallus there—the symbolic phallus.
The female Electra-complex phase—Jung’s term—is more complicated, undergoing two rounds of transformation from beginning to end. Like the boy, the girl does not possess the phallus, but the psychological factors concealing this lack differ. The boy pretends to have the phallus and, in his own estimation, satisfies his mother: this explains his attachment to her. The girl must become her father’s phallus, since he too is in fact castrated: this explains her attachment to him. In the dialectic of negation and recognition, a woman must relinquish “already being the phallus” in order to strive to “become the phallus.” On the question of how to become it, Lacan adopts Riviere’s concept of masquerade: “womanliness” can be worn like a “mask.”6 Under the patriarchal symbolic order, the girl uses masquerade to conceal her masculine traits—the traits that satisfy the mother’s desire—to avoid male retaliation. This, however, draws her into competition with her mother. The boy resolves his competition with his father by identifying with him and distancing himself from his mother. The girl, too, must identify with her mother again to dispel the mother’s “hostility,” yet cannot escape the oppression and constraints of the “Name-of-the-Father.” She is caught in an irresolute dilemma, oscillating between placating her father and placating her mother. For Lisa Appignanesi and John Forrester, this masquerade and feminine essence name the same thing. At times a woman must have the disposition of “having,” her desire directed toward satisfying the mother—homosexuality. At others she must have the disposition of “becoming,” her desire directed toward becoming the mother—heterosexuality. Women and their sexual orientation are thus fluid. Behind the mask there is no real “woman.”
In short, women’s original drive to satisfy the mother’s desire lays the groundwork for their homosexual tendencies. Through suicide, Takashima Zakuro escapes the world in which she “was sexually assaulted” and enters a new one of her own creation. With the phallus absent altogether, the Symbolic’s paternal law no longer exists. Zakuro no longer needs to “masquerade” as a chaste woman. She quite naturally accepts that she loves Yuki, liberating her desire. Many contemporary yuri works display a similar feature: to prevent their female characters from being placed at a disadvantage in a comparison of gendered dispositions, they consciously or unconsciously diminish, or even entirely exclude, the male presence, providing a female stage and female narrative. Of course, this is not true “in the fullest sense.” Once we place a work in its actual cultural context, a contradiction appears between the female stage and its audience. When yuri presents only the side approved by capital, it inevitably undergoes alienation.
Reflections and Gleanings
Even a gender perspective alone gives some sense of how important the prologue is to the whole work. It provides a pre-Oedipal “maternal space” in Kristeva’s sense, shutting out the intervention of the symbolic father. Like Chapter Three’s alternate route, the prologue is a world without the phallus’s intervention. Its ideal vessel of a world contains only ambiguous intimacies between women and an overflowing poetics, establishing the world’s completeness. Unlike that alternate route, however, the prologue is presented in a thoroughly poetic form. Its aesthetic achievement resists simple reduction by the social sciences, making empirical analysis feel decidedly stiff. Undeniably, for all the beautiful illusion the prologue offers, it leaves me with a new puzzle: how are we to read this entire prologue-world that belongs to Zakuro? At the level of the work’s creation, there simply is no Real that an author can concretely represent. Such a concrete expression of the Real is questionable. According to Kristeva’s account of the female semiotic, the prologue is undoubtedly bound up with “the Real.” But how are we to understand the nature of this “Real” in the prologue?
Through its beautiful illusion, its adult fairy tale, the prologue summons a dissonance at odds with its beautiful yuri desire. If desire is like that elusive, sublime “quality” in an unreadable biblical text, then the prologue’s depiction of lesbian desire amounts only to parody. It proceeds in a form distinct from fiction, an “as if not,” estranging readers from the text so that the remainder within its intertextual relations can be called forth.7 The prologue’s playful imitation of Night on the Galactic Railroad is a stroke of genius. That fairy tale’s implicit meaning seems to announce that the prologue is merely another narcissistic illusion created by Zakuro. Campanella, the object of Giovanni’s desire, inevitably leaves him for heaven. Giovanni finally realizes that his desire points toward an unspeakable elsewhere, and grows up. The child ultimately leaves the “maternal space” and enters a narrative of attachment to father or mother. The prologue’s ending thus seems inevitable: traversing the fantasy, it returns to the Symbolic. The story moves into the dark and brutal first chapter, the actual, horrifying course of the case.
Within this, the only thing Zakuro can do is refuse what Otonashi Ayana, the figure of the game’s author, imposes on her. In this way she resists the story, creating a hidden meta element. Why this element cannot emerge in a form that deconstructs the entire work may take us back to its governing creative philosophy—to Wittgenstein’s statement: “The world is the totality of facts.”8 Knowledge cannot reach beyond experience.
Looking at Subahibi as a whole, we can say that Takashima Zakuro acts as its center of power, controlling the story’s direction from beginning to end. Without her, the story could scarcely exist, nor would the prologue be likely to reach its heights. So crucial is she to the plot that the game’s manic fan-made music largely revolves around her mental world. Anyone interested can search for the album zakuro recording. Let me venture a bold guess here: did Futa-ji unconsciously glimpse the elusive phallic center of his own writing and, in a futile act of disavowal, make Zakuro hate his incarnation, Otonashi Ayana, as a kind of self-castration? If so, Futa-ji as author makes room for the female subject not by giving or bestowing, but by creating a power vacuum. In mainstream culture, this is often grounds for denouncing “male decline.” Yet perhaps it is precisely such castration that opens the door to male gender fluidity.
So far, this essay has used a rudimentary psychoanalytic approach to outline, from a gender perspective, some aspects of the unconscious subject and female desire. Important as this is to analyzing the work’s gender consciousness, it does not mean we can rest content with these superficial analyses. The questions still to be answered include, but are not limited to:
Some of these questions may be answered by analyzing other characters in Subahibi. In the next installment, I will turn toward real-world action, examining individual–society and action–structure, with particular attention to why gender is performative and to the question of gendered practice. I will try to offer a broad cultural interpretation. Thank you once again for reading. Corrections and suggestions are welcome.
(To be continued)