This essay was first published by Yuanhuo.
Editor’s note: This essay was a qualifying entry in the Eve Festival of Lab on Roof’s annual Rags Drum 2020 call for submissions.
At the time of writing, ZUN had made nine albums centered on the Secret Sealing Club. Apart from the charity album Unknown Flower, Mesmerizing Journey, each sends its two young women on a new adventure. In 2006, two years after the second album, Changeability of Strange Dream, Bouyuu Toukaidou ~ Retrospective 53 minutes. was unveiled at the Third Hakurei Shrine Reitaisai. Where its predecessor had supplied personal details about Merry and Renko, this album’s booklet chiefly enlarges the world they inhabit. The story remains understated, but it lets us glimpse their not-so-distant future. Its central concern continues the previous booklet’s inquiry into reality and illusion. Unlike the stories before and after it, however, Merry and Renko never use their abilities, while the narrator occupies far more space. The question also moves up a level, from personal worldviews to an understanding of culture. The thoughts that follow may in turn have exerted considerable influence on ZUN’s own creative outlook.
I. An outline of the story and some thoughts on its setting
The story of Retrospective 53 Minutes is really a string of conversations only loosely connected to one another. In his afterword, ZUN writes that it should feel as though someone sitting nearby has happened to overhear the pair talking, giving it the romance of travel. That atmosphere proves exactly right for the questions the text explores.
Tokyo is described as a city that is “spiritually immature.” No one minds the gaps in its barriers, and it retains many “amusements for ordinary people,” including indoor theme parks and food courts. A shrinking population and the abandonment of cars have left its roads overgrown with red spider lilies during the Higan observances. Even Renko calls Tokyo “the countryside.” Kyoto, by contrast, is never described directly, yet it projects the authority of a metropolis, one whose sole remaining diversion is the “New Tea Ceremony.” The story in Changeability of Strange Dream says that Kyoto has studied spiritual science for a thousand years. Merry and Renko’s club is only one commonplace psychic society among many, and even Merry’s university subject is “relative psychology.” Kyoto is therefore a city with a profound body of research into the spiritual and the fantastic, perhaps the mark of “maturity” in Renko’s eyes. Yet the two repeatedly call their club a “delinquent club,” because its excursions to the barriers between different worlds are forbidden. Although they suffer no punishment, the prohibition stands in sharp contrast to Tokyo’s neglect.
Introducing Tokyo to Merry, Renko mentions Shinjuku and Shibuya, calling them “places with a sense of history.” Today they are two of Japan’s busiest districts, at the leading edge of modernization even by global standards. In a country rich in historic sites and comparatively successful in preserving tradition, neither seems readily associated with historical atmosphere. The phrase suggests that the Kyoto of the story is no longer the ancient capital we know, but an entirely new metropolis built upon the most advanced civilization. In such a setting, not only monuments with centuries of continuity but even buildings we now regard as modern may have disappeared. This Kyoto still claims to be a thousand-year capital, but it has erased every material memory that could bear that history. Add the fact that the “New Tea Ceremony” is its only remaining amusement, and the city’s oppressiveness is hard to miss.
A comparison reveals many affinities between this future Kyoto and the Lunar Capital. Both possess an extremely advanced civilization and are spiritually “mature.” Yet one great difference remains. The Lunar Capital is very old, and even its most advanced technology always appears in traditional forms. Reimu, whose own life is steeped in traditional things, finds it strikingly “primitive.” Kaguya, once a Lunarian, believes that humanity will return to such a traditional way of life after technology reaches its peak, but Reimu disagrees. ZUN’s idea of the future is already visible in this album: people forever chase the newest civilized experience, while unconsciously treating traditional culture as a fetter and casting it away. Traditional culture represents inheritance and continuity. To the Lunarians, who seek eternity, those qualities are so important that they may be called the core of Lunar culture. For Reimu, however, such “eternity” is almost unbearable for human beings. No matter how life is prolonged, death remains a part of it: “so that no one would go on living once the heart had rotted.” Yet discarding everything is no answer. ZUN rejects both the Lunar Capital, which tries to make tradition eternal by purging every impurity, and Kyoto, which has erased tradition until only empty form remains. “All who live must perish; heaven’s cycle turns” has always been an important Touhou idea. For human beings, then, neither tradition’s continuation nor its disappearance should run in a single direction. The question is how to find, within a past that is constantly being lost, the core worth carrying forward.
The descriptions of Mount Fuji and the Kaleido-screen make this clearer. In ZUN’s Music Room comment for Imperishable Night,1 he writes: “The real reason Mount Fuji was not selected as a World Heritage site is that it is so sacred that even the world could not choose it.” Mount Fuji’s position as a symbol of Japanese culture and national spirit needs no rehearsing. Even in the near future of Retrospective 53 Minutes, the Japanese government regards boring a tunnel beneath it as an act of “great irreverence,” so the mountain remains an object of veneration. Renko, however, admits that she has barely noticed the real mountain and shows no special reaction to passing beneath it by train. Together with the observation that few people climb it anymore, this reveals how far Mount Fuji has receded from ordinary life. Its recognition as a World Heritage site has therefore become an important symbol: the mountain, and the culture it represents, have died in practical terms. The Roman Colosseum is a World Heritage site. Its cries and bloodshed vanished more than a thousand years ago, leaving only a shell and limitless fantasies of past glory, while Roman law, which helped lay the foundations of human civilization and still exerts a deep influence, will never enjoy that “honor.” Mount Fuji’s change from a “sacred peak beyond human judgment” into an “ordinary” World Heritage site likewise marks the loss of its spirituality, or its cultural meaning. The scenery on the Kaleido-screen, repeatedly praised as “quintessentially Japanese,” is merely false scenery. To Merry it is even “boring visual stimulation.” The so-called Japanese spirit has vanished from life and survived only as fantasy.
Mount Fuji’s “death” is not in itself frightening. What is frightening is that Kyoto, the new spiritual symbol built by those who abandoned the mountain, offers no new hope. In Renko and Merry’s world, natural food is hard to find, and even liquor made with real alcohol has become a luxury. Technological concepts continually constrain how people see the world. A new civilization and culture, a “synthetic civilization” made by people who discarded their cultural core, Mount Fuji, cannot help them rise to another level and perceive the real world. Creating new cultures is how humanity survives, and the gradual forgetting of old ones need not be feared. But once culture’s core has been discarded, no new culture can possess genuine vitality.
II. Chōnin culture
ZUN offers no explicit answer to a question as vast as what should remain and what should pass away in traditional culture. The story nevertheless provides a number of clues.
In Renko’s account to Merry, Tokyo teems with young people in strange clothes. The city may count as “the countryside” beside elegant, severe Kyoto, but it seems as rough and alluring as the American West, the setting of countless adventures. Gensokyo still retains the appearance of Japan before the Meiji Restoration. It is hard not to think of the bizarre yet hopeful Edo period led by the chōnin.
In Japan, chōnin is a specific historical designation, usually referring to the social group formed by wealthy merchants under the Edo shogunate. The word itself appeared as early as the Heian period. At that time chō did not denote an administrative unit so much as a fixed area resembling a shop or marketplace.2 Chōnin then had no special meaning beyond “people of the chō,” but because chō was often associated with shops, the word acquired a subtle connection with merchants.
After the Heian period, the decline of official merchants opened space for private commerce. Resident merchants appeared around temples and harbors, forming districts such as the temple towns known as jinaimachi. It was during this period that chōnin began to enter history as a distinct group.3 Large quantities of metal currency from the Asian continent stimulated the commodity economy and encouraged towns to form around markets, ports, and other busy sites of exchange.4 To strengthen the military and economic power of their domains, daimyō of the Warring States period built castle towns, jōkamachi, beneath their fortifications as political and economic bases. Artisans and merchants increasingly gathered there. Previously scattered handicraft production, goods, distribution markets, and commodity flows followed them, gradually turning the castle towns into each domain’s military, economic, and transport center and giving rise to the jōkamachi chōnin.5
Nurtured by these new conditions, chōnin finally took shape as a distinct group in the Edo period. Yet Christianity, an “uninvited guest,” played a subtle but important part in the merchants’ eventual creation of a culture of their own. Christianity began spreading in Japan with the arrival of missionaries in the Muromachi period. To ward off political instability, the shogunate suppressed its believers and tightened spiritual control by widely building Buddhist temples and Shinto shrines, teaching Cheng-Zhu Neo-Confucianism to the warrior class, closing the country, and censoring publications. In practice, however, the spread of commoner education through terakoya schools and the arrival of Western books, especially Dutch learning and culture, supplied chōnin with some of the conditions needed to make their own culture.
This history calls to mind Touhou’s “outsiders.” From the Moriya family in Mountain of Faith to Sumireko in Urban Legend in Limbo, and even the Secret Sealing Club itself, people from the Outside World bring fresh colors to the traditional spirit symbolized by Gensokyo. With the addition of characters from other worlds, including the Lunar Capital and Hell, ZUN even treated the “immigration problem” with mock seriousness in Alternative Facts in Eastern Utopia. Yet the arrival of these characters and the cultures they represent did not deprive Touhou of its “fantastically retro” aesthetic core. Instead, they allowed it to develop in more approachable forms. As Zhu Xi’s verse asks, “How can the channel run so clear? Fresh water comes from the source.” Perhaps the phrase “Gensokyo accepts everything” is ZUN’s first answer to the question of how a tradition may be reborn.
As noted above, Edo-period Japan was strictly stratified. Each estate had its assigned function, and without an examination system comparable to China’s imperial civil service examinations, social mobility was slight. Samurai held domains and lived mainly on rice stipends drawn from them. Yet Japanese society was already heavily commodified, so even warriors had to sell their stipend rice to merchants and exchange it for money to spend. The Edo shogunate also imposed the alternate-attendance system, sankin kōtai, upon the daimyō. Lords of the Kantō region had to attend the shogun every six months, while those elsewhere alternated residence between Edo and their own domains. This both secured the shogunate’s control and weakened the daimyō economically by forcing them to change residence continually and spend their wealth on travel. Merchants provided their goods and services along the way, further stimulating commerce.
Merchants amassed enormous fortunes, but they could not directly turn wealth into political power, and the shogunate prohibited the sale of land. Consumption was their principal outlet. Craftspeople, artists, and performers living in the cities gladly made a livelihood from that demand. Kabuki, jōruri, haiku, ukiyo-e, and many other forms arose through this process, eventually constituting what we now call chōnin culture. Unlike the aristocratic culture of the Heian period or the warrior culture that prevailed from the Kamakura shogunate onward, this was genuinely a commoners’ culture. Its makers and consumers were alike drawn chiefly from ordinary people, and popular forms such as rakugo and kabuki flourished. These performances and artifacts were thoroughly commercial. Their development drove further urban prosperity and commodification. Woodblock carving and related printing technologies supplied the necessary technical support. Before works could circulate widely, artists had depended on samurai and other powerful patrons for their survival, a dependence that constrained what art could represent. Once works could be reproduced in quantity and distributed among commoners, the themes and images of urban culture flooded into them. Their makers could loosen the rulers’ control and claim greater room for artistic creation.6
The rise of chōnin culture challenged traditional ideas on many fronts. A social ethos built on money and consumption made self-liberation and self-satisfaction into parts of the spiritual life. The refined might have dismissed such conduct as unbearably vulgar, but they could not arrest the appeal released by this way of living. The ukiyozōshi and kōshoku literature led by The Life of an Amorous Man, together with the enormous number of erotic shunga in ukiyo-e, make the point plain. The “amorousness” contained in the floating world did not simply mean surrender to carnal desire. It asserted love as the highest pursuit and the release of feelings suppressed within the heart.7 The appearance and wide circulation of these works registered a popular affirmation, even a celebration, of human desire, feeling, and vitality itself. They stood in sharp contrast to the Cheng-Zhu Neo-Confucianism honored by warrior culture, with its maxim to “preserve heavenly principle and eliminate human desire” and its suppression of desire’s free expression. The pleasure quarters centered on courtesans, the performing arts exemplified by kabuki, and the visual arts exemplified by ukiyo-e all used abundant urban subject matter to dissolve warrior culture’s inherited judgments of refinement and vulgarity, beauty and ugliness. They quietly established a new morality not founded on power. In a society that proclaimed the order of warriors, farmers, artisans, and merchants immovable, this amounted to a revolutionary call for equality and openness.
Read Touhou’s stories from this perspective and a street life full of desire and everyday warmth appears, unobtrusively, everywhere in the works. ZUN has never supplied a detailed monetary or socioeconomic system for Touhou, but money’s importance in its stories is undeniable. The poverty of the Hakurei Shrine is not only a consensus among fan creators; it appears repeatedly in official works. Kappa are perennial business operators. Even in Hell, the shops on the Road of Liminality form an important source of revenue. Money and commerce may matter in Touhou not only at face value but as an acknowledgement of actual life. The girls may not be merchants by occupation, yet from the festivals held at every opportunity to the fierce struggles over faith, they already possess much of the merchant’s temperament.
Money is bound to consumption, and consumption is driven by desire. Yet this desire ultimately seeks the pleasure and development of body and mind together. In a poll message for Mokou, ZUN once wrote: “The foremost basis for being human is the conviction that one is human. DNA comes second.” Mokou can no longer be compared to an ordinary human being, but her deep fixation on death allows her to retain human desire. This sharply contrasts with ZUN’s rejection of the “purity” represented by Kyoto and the “eternity” represented by the Lunar Capital. Kyoto has discarded everything. However keenly it searches for shadows of the past, it only adds more “boring” vexations. If one clings to tradition and lives where every “impurity” has been excluded, meanwhile, endless time wears every desire away. Only a desireless being can attain true eternity. In Silent Sinner in Blue, even the Lunarians must treat spiritual fulfillment as an important problem. Reimu may be called a “yōkai shrine maiden,” but the powerful air of the marketplace about her makes her thoroughly human. Her epithet “shrine maiden of the five desires” confirms it from another angle. The girls care about money without being bewitched by it, and lacking money never plunges them into real deprivation. They are therefore spared the corrosive side of a money society. From one perspective, this may be ZUN’s blessing upon these chōnin girls.
The Tokyo Renko describes in Retrospective 53 Minutes does not materially surpass Kyoto. Rather, it holds fast to the “Japanese spirit.” Its vast shopping centers, freely accessible amusements, and fashionably dressed crowds may lie far from traditional forms, but they carry more of Edo’s blood than the New Tea Ceremony confined to a “sealed room.” In our own world, Kyoto is conventionally treated as the representative of Japan’s traditional spirit, while Tokyo symbolizes the troubles of modern Japanese society. If Kyoto is read not as a city but as a symbol of that traditional spirit, the track “Retrospective Kyoto” becomes easier to understand. What the two women remember is not the historical city of Kyoto, but the stubbornly vital Tokyo toward which they are traveling.
At a more fundamental level, the desire to enjoy life, the ties people form through “consumption,” and the question of how to regard tradition in a changing world all express a powerful and distinct will to live. This does not merely mean surviving bad conditions without abandoning hope, nor does it mean withdrawing from the world and scraping by within one’s own enclosure. It is an active process of creation and enjoyment because one is alive. Its force is affirmative: dissatisfaction leaves room for something new to be born. The incidents stirred up by yōkai, the fairies’ endless daily pranks, and the struggles around the Human Village or Gensokyo itself all share this quality. Participants and makers of “trouble” alike are enjoying themselves. The revelry and drinking after an incident is resolved make that clear.
One further element is indispensable: openness, though not the indiscriminate acceptance of everything. The culture created by chōnin contains brilliant treasures and coarse, vulgar pleasures of the flesh. These are two faces of the same coin, naturally fused and indivisible. Its works accept reality and depict it without evasion. Their creators have values and positions of their own, but do not partition the world into “them” and “us.” That is why so many colors and styles can express reality in all its breadth. “Gensokyo accepts everything” means more than accepting the “outsiders” discussed above. Every sort of girl can find a place there. From ZUN’s standpoint as creator, both the arrival of new girls and their ceaseless recreation in fan works give them new personalities and continually reshape Gensokyo. This openness may be a major reason Touhou has flourished. The world of the Secret Sealing Club presents the reverse: expelling the “heretical” also means closing oneself off. As Magical Astronomy says, no unsolved problems remain in that world. Like Mount Fuji after it becomes extinct, it can endure as cultural heritage forever, but it can create no new spirit.
III. Ukiyo-e, Utagawa Hiroshige, and Katsushika Hokusai
Another object discussed by Merry and Renko in Retrospective 53 Minutes is the scenery projected by the Kaleido-screen. Its designers presumably used ukiyo-e as a model to accentuate the system’s “Japanese spirit.” In their age, however, repackaged ukiyo-e no longer means what it did when first made. From one angle it is, just as Merry says, no more than “boring visual stimulation.”
As the visual expression of chōnin culture, ukiyo-e makes that colorful era more immediately palpable than words can. Its very name, “pictures of the floating world,” names the contemporary world and the style of the day. Street life and the emotions and desires displayed in everyday existence remain its abiding center.
Early ukiyo-e grew out of the traditional yamato-e. As coloring improved and woodblock printing escaped its narrowly Buddhist uses, ukiyo-e finally became an independent art form. The outstanding artist in this development was Hishikawa Moronobu, later honored as the “father of ukiyo-e.”8 An accomplished illustrator, he gradually gave images precedence over text and even produced independent genre scenes as single-sheet prints, ichimai-e. These works, chiefly woodblock prints, formally announced the birth of ukiyo-e. His many images of courtesans also established bijinga, pictures of beautiful women, as a major subject for later artists.
In ukiyo-e’s middle period, coloring, paper, and production methods advanced greatly. Okumura Masanobu and Utagawa Toyoharu absorbed Western perspective into ukiyo-e, giving scenes greater presence and texture. Suzuki Harunobu and others pioneered nishiki-e, whose vivid, abundant colors earned them comparison to “brocade photographs.” Haiku poets’ enthusiasm for exchanging picture calendars and the flourishing of kabuki supplied a broad market. Economic growth and a professional division of labor among the designer (hanshita-e-shi), block carver (horishi), and printer (surishi) made lower costs and higher output possible. Together these new techniques set ukiyo-e upon a path of rapid development.
Traditional bijinga changed substantially in this period. As artists became better at depicting settings, their “beauties” acquired greater realism. Many women painted by Torii Kiyonaga, Kitao Shigemasa, and others were married, yet their graceful bearing and unadorned feeling conveyed a healthy, natural beauty. The portraits of courtesans and kabuki actors made by Kitagawa Utamaro and Tōshūsai Sharaku exerted an especially deep influence on later ukiyo-e artists.
Left: Torii Kiyonaga, published by Hamaya, Cooling on the Riverbank, eighteenth century. Right: Kitagawa Utamaro, Three Beauties of the Kansei Era, eighteenth century.
Later, figure-centered ukiyo-e gradually ceased to lead the art’s stylistic development. Meisho-e, pictures of famous places devoted to landscape and urban life, came to prominence. Hokusai’s Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji and Hiroshige’s Fifty-three Stations of the Tōkaidō became cultural emblems of Japan. These works are not confined to realism, nor do their makers simply present beautiful scenery. They lodge feeling within the landscape and use scenery to express emotion: an “impressionistic” mode of creation. In composition and color, both artists pursue richness of expression rather than merely foregrounding the pleasures of everyday custom. That is how the works attained such artistic achievement. Their method would later become an important inspiration for Western Impressionism.
Left: Claude Monet, Le Bassin aux nymphéas (Water Lily Pond), 1899. Right: Utagawa Hiroshige, Inside Kameido Tenjin Shrine, 1856.
Left: Claude Monet, La Japonaise (Camille Monet in Japanese Costume), nineteenth century. Right: Hishikawa Moronobu, Beauty Looking Back, seventeenth century.
Monet’s imitation of ukiyo-e.
With the arrival of the “Black Ships” and the Meiji Restoration, the program of civilization and enlightenment and the popularity of Western photography gradually drove ukiyo-e out of the mass market. Its subjects also shifted toward current affairs in “news pictures” and “enlightenment pictures.” Both output and artistic quality declined, and the work no longer matched what had come before. Ukiyo-e subsequently left the historical stage as a specialized mode of artistic production, but its creative elements and its record of the “Japanese spirit” continued to circulate.
Although a product of a particular historical period, ukiyo-e became one of visual art’s finest records of Japan’s traditional spirit. Two of its most conspicuous artistic traits are line and color. Its compositions generally avoid symmetry. The resulting imbalance gives the image the force of an instant and, with it, a sense of motion. People and things are shaped with fluent lines rather than masses of color. This both reveals their graceful postures and intensifies the picture’s movement. In some sense, it also suggests that the artist does not stand outside the work but merges with the scene.9
In color, ukiyo-e most often uses pure white, red, and blue. Flat coloring lends the picture simplicity while intensifying the “impression” that its places and figures make upon artist and viewer. The broad use of Prussian blue adds further layers and depth to that emotional effect.10 This emotional expression is permeated by the spirit of mono no aware formulated by Motoori Norinaga, and it shares something with the encouragement of emotional expression in kōshoku literature. Mono no aware chiefly means the emotional stir caused by changes in things and human affairs. It is not confined to lamenting life’s impermanence or grieving that beauty fades. It also encompasses delight at life’s emergence and the answering surge of power awakened by a crashing wave.11 This is how ukiyo-e surpasses its depicted subject and aesthetically gives form to a traditional Japan.
Seen in this light, the works of Hokusai and Hiroshige approach the matter differently, yet both possess a powerful Japanese character. Even the booklet of Retrospective 53 Minutes has Merry and Renko briefly debate which artist deserves to represent “Japanese scenery” on the Kaleido-screen. People of the future choose Hiroshige because they can no longer bear Hokusai’s “madness.” Hokusai did frequently call himself a “madman,” but his paintings are hardly as inaccessible as contemporary black metal. The meaning of the choice cannot be so simple.
Born into a commoner’s family, Hokusai led a life as turbulent as his pictures. Misfortune attended both his life and his art. As an apprentice he struggled to learn and lived without a settled home. In middle age, a fire destroyed decades of drawings and materials. When he hoped to pass his later years in peace, a profligate grandson squandered the family property, and Hokusai had to keep working to support himself. None of this extinguished his devotion to art. Late in life he summed up his career:
“Until the age of seventy, nothing that I drew was worthy of notice. ... At one hundred years I will have achieved a divine state in my art.”
Despite a life filled with hardship and regret, Hokusai’s pictures remain full of energy and force. In Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji, he grants ample character and living presence both to Fuji and to the people who live around it. The images move. Their greatness lies not only in the marvel of natural power but in Hokusai’s spiritual transcendence of life’s suffering. The works for which he is best known were made precisely at the lowest point of his life. Hope meant that even at life’s end he wished for a little more time to become a “true painter.” His tenacious hope and optimism in mastering pain raised his art still further.
Hiroshige’s life, by contrast, unfolded amid contradiction and constraint. Born into a low-ranking samurai family, he occupied an awkward position. In name he belonged to the ruling estate and the upper ranks of society. In practice, the shogunate’s financial difficulties and his weakness within the warrior class denied him wealth, and he had to supplement the household income by designing ukiyo-e. He approved of the chōnin’s free and open way of living, yet as a member of the ruling estate he faced many limits on expressing that conviction. His work is consequently restrained and oblique. He often painted scenery encountered on journeys, as in Fifty-three Stations of the Tōkaidō, and aroused homesickness in viewers, earning him the epithet “Hiroshige of nostalgia.” A lingering attachment to nature, moonlight, and wind appears throughout his pictures. Unlike the force felt in Hokusai, Hiroshige’s work is quiet. Yet the people and things within it seem spiritually connected, an affinity with Japanese animism. The many boldly foregrounded motifs in One Hundred Famous Views of Edo place the spectator inside the view and heighten its emotional transmission.
In Renko and Merry’s age, people ultimately choose Hiroshige, just as Mount Fuji finally becomes a World Heritage site. They choose him because, in that age, humanity has become spiritually “mature” and will advance no further. Immortal reinforced concrete replaces mutable nature and becomes the new “nature” in collective memory. The ultimate problems of physics have been solved, and no one need explore how to face a question whose answer is unknown. Even metaphysical things such as culture and traditional spirit retain no value beyond commemoration and ornament. The vitality in Hokusai’s work has become too heavy for such people. Only Hiroshige’s “nostalgia” and “remembrance” can find a place in their defense of “eternity.” This may be the second meaning of the track “Retrospective Kyoto.”
Whatever the case, the idea is steeped in self-deception. Mount Fuji does not truly die when it becomes an extinct volcano, but when it is designated a World Heritage site. Only a spirit that no longer lives in everyday experience needs commemoration. To Merry, an outsider, any scenery however “Japanese” is only “boring visual stimulation.” The feeling in Hiroshige’s work comes from the creator’s and viewer’s genuine experience of its scenery, which is the work of mono no aware in creation and aesthetic perception. To advertise a true “Japanese spirit” through false scenery is an exquisite irony.
In his afterword, ZUN says that the story continues Changeability of Strange Dream’s inquiry into “dreams and reality, virtual and real.” When the album appeared, much of this remained fantasy. Now that VR and AR have become practical technologies, its scenes present an entirely realistic possibility. Technology has made the replacement of reality by the virtual into a foreseeable condition. In literature and the visual arts, meanwhile, cyberpunk worlds defined by digital technology have become immensely popular. Tall towers and glaring neon utterly dominate the visual field. “Reality and illusion” here chiefly concerns the loss of our ability to perceive the old natural world after living in such an environment. Retrospective 53 Minutes does not explicitly identify the virtual with a world constructed from information, but a later album, Dr. Latency’s Freak Report, directly raises the problem of information worship. In the future, excessive dependence on information and worlds assembled from it will be the principal forces rendering human beings virtual. Consider one core of the Japanese spirit discussed above, mono no aware. Only the mind’s resonance with an actual thing can awaken genuine feeling. If an image alone is the object, the feelings we experience have been designed and directed in advance. This is especially true in a society saturated by marketing, where gifted artists and propagandists exploit everything from popular emotion to popular thought. Is humanity really virtual in essence? Perhaps the claim is only a satire upon a society overly dependent on information. ZUN is not advocating a return to the past. Civilization has reached the present by continually creating information and using it to build systems that resist risk. Yet instrumental reason shows its danger when the tool itself becomes the substance of thought. Reality and illusion then truly fuse because distinguishing them has lost all meaning.
How can this problem be solved? ZUN’s story gives no clear answer. For Merry and Renko this is simply their reality. They may feel the need to seek another way, but their habits of thought and their vantage point make doing so difficult. Outside the story, we ought to think actively about the condition so that we may avoid the miserable future already beginning to show itself. No projected vista, however beautiful, can replace the color of the actual sky. Even the finest fantasy needs real sunlight to enter it. Human existence is real. It need not be replaced by faith or filled in with information. What matters is finding eyes that can discover reality and a heart that can feel it. As suggested above, ZUN appears to hope that vigorous vitality can persist even in such a society. That vitality is the key to breaking the deadlock because it signifies both desire and hope. New possibilities can be born only within it. Once life loses itself in a world built from information, it can never take another step, and the whole world will sink into a terminal eternity.
In the end, Touhou’s world is only one among countless virtual worlds. The reality we find in its stories may be our own wishful projection. Only by crossing beyond these forms can we truly find their beauty and longing. We take the hope and strength drawn from Touhou, feel this world concretely, join our lives to it, and call forth still more vitality. Perhaps that is the greatest consolation its audience can offer ZUN.