The Rags Drum 2020 Annual Essay Competition Results list this essay among the accepted Pre-Festival submissions.
I
Darker than Black (DTB from here on) is adult animation. But adult animation obviously comes in many varieties. In what sense is DTB adult?
If we judge by explicit content, DTB does not go very far. There are no sex scenes, and it is not gory enough to qualify on that score. In its refusal to serve up sexualized fan service, DTB is far more innocent than most anime, then or now.
What makes DTB feel adult begins with the ages of its main characters. Hei, Huang and Mao are neither high-school age nor in a high-school state of mind.1 Although Hei passes himself off as a Chinese international student, he never once goes to school throughout the series. Set beside a contemporary like Code Geass: Lelouch of the Rebellion, where characters still have to go to high school amid events on a global scale—a typical Japanese anime setup—DTB is sharply ironic. As subject matter, high school is about growth. As a formal device, however, it has become a rigid setting through Japan’s ingrained attachment to it. All the stories of growth that apparently take place there conceal the fact that high school as a setting never grows.
DTB avoids the subject of high school almost entirely. This anime really has little to do with growth. With lyrics about no longer craving anything and no longer feeling as one once did, the opening theme conveys an atmosphere of stagnation: a stubborn refusal, a rejection of the past and an affirmation of the present (an affirmation that might also be called a kind of “tacit acceptance”). Here, growth is not merely unnecessary. It is no longer possible.
Why is it impossible? Just look at the definition of a Contractor.
Contractors, the most important premise of DTB’s world, are stagnant things. Once someone becomes a Contractor, it is as though they had always been one. There is little inner struggle over the change, if any. Contractors are humans who can use supernatural powers and have no “sense of guilt,” as Huang puts it in episode 1—or even no emotions at all.2 Without emotions, naturally, there is no inner struggle. Take the JK—a high-school girl—in episode 4. She was an ordinary JK, but after becoming a Contractor she has no emotional response even to the fact that “I seem to have killed a lot of people.” This is a crucial innovation in DTB, and a comparison with other anime of the same kind makes it plain. Parasyte and Tokyo Ghoul, for instance, also posit a species distinct from humans. In these anime, the protagonist changes from a human into one of these other beings, and the inner struggle involved is usually a major theme. This struggle dramatizes the turmoil we inevitably experience as we grow. However dramatic it becomes, it remains an extension of the story of growth: someone has simply been placed in an extreme environment in which to grow. Or rather, in this rigid bad place, Japan—in this stagnant country—only extreme change can make people grow.
DTB leaves out this struggle. In Hei, it exists only as fragments of memory so few as to be almost nonexistent. But this is also a logical consequence of the Contractor premise. Contractors are rational beings. They do not dream. They think rationally and make rational judgments, nothing more.
Interestingly, at the very core of a Contractor’s existence is something irrational, called a price. To use their powers, Contractors must pay a price. Each Contractor’s price is different. The only things they have in common are irrationality and meaninglessness.
As I said, Hei keeps doing things, without the familiar complaint, “Why do I have to do this?” Occasionally he shows a little “humanity” while doing them, but otherwise there is little inner struggle. A characteristic scene establishes his independence, mental and physical: in episode 1, after completing an assignment for the organization—in other words, just after killing someone—Hei cooks for himself to soothing music. In every sense, he is someone who can take care of himself. At work and in his private life alike.
That soothing music is Hei’s inner life. His stagnant mood.
This stagnation is not confined to Hei. It permeates the form of the entire anime. The first season’s episodic structure seems to have no beginning, no end, no goal. Hei simply deals with one assignment after another. Although he sometimes acts against the organization’s wishes, on the whole he has no grand ambition such as “I’m going to overthrow the organization.” (Of course I am not saying DTB has no main plot. It is just that even if we take the existence of a main plot as a given, the sense of fragmentation and looseness will not go away. If we insist that DTB has a main plot, its ambiguity is plain to see.)
And Hei does indeed have a clear objective: to find his younger sister, Bai. But his search is purely rational, not anxious and emotional. Given the chance, he will find her; without it, he waits for one. His love for his sister is the premise of his actions, but throughout the search his emotions are suppressed to a minimum, to the point of almost ceasing to exist.
Hei’s appeal lies in the guileless simplicity he displays when “playing” a normal human, and in the humanity he occasionally shows on assignments. Sometimes he asks Mao, wistfully, “Do you believe the real starry sky will come back one day?” But it goes no further than talk. Before saying this, he asks what will happen to a woman he met on an assignment. Mao replies, “Her life won’t change.”
This stagnant repetition is interrupted once, midway through the story, when the heroine, Yin, disappears. First, a word about Yin. She is even gloomier, even more stagnant than Hei. She is a Doll, defined in the series as having no emotions. She wears a Lolita dress in alternating black and purple—both melancholy colors. In a small shop as gloomy as she is, she exchanges objects with Hei as coded signals. Before she disappears, Hei gives her a piece of candy, not as a signal but to say, “Thank you.”
A Doll is a passive medium. Taken literally, that means a stagnant thing.3 Their task is to stagnate, to receive, and nothing more. They do not act; they are only acted upon. They only receive; they do not respond. They can sense, but have no emotions.
Yin disappears under a Contractor’s influence, drifting through the streets like a ghost. She begins to recall her life before becoming a Doll. In her memories, she plays the piano under silver moonlight. With the sound of the piano, she remembers her mother being hit and killed by a car while trying to save her. Yin tells the pianist who finds her that afterward she could no longer see the silver light. In other words, she no longer dreams.
When teaching Yin to play, her piano teacher once told her: “Once you’ve mastered the form, feeling can grow out of it. Look, when you’re sad, doesn’t simply smiling ease the sadness a great deal?”
These words correspond to one of DTB’s most famous scenes: Yin trying to pull her face into a smile with her hands. But this “form” does not allow “feeling to grow out of it.” We have to turn the piano teacher’s words around: even if one smiles when sad, it brings no relief.
At the end of this story arc, Yin refuses the piano teacher and chooses to stay with Hei. She instructs her piano teacher the way he once taught her—by gently placing a finger against his lips. He tells her not to be bound by the past, to go back with him. But Yin chooses not only to remain bound by the past, but also to be bound by the “present.” She says she remembers everything. All of it. On that basis, she chooses Hei, chooses her “companions.” At the end, Hei asks her, “Is this all right?” Yin says nothing. With one finger, she lifts the corner of her mouth into a smile. This turns the piano teacher’s words around once more: even if one smiles when sad, it brings no relief. But even so, one still has to smile.
During these two episodes in which Yin is missing, a Contractor says: “I cried every night back then. Before I knew it, the night sky had changed too.” These words could also apply to Yin, with one final sentence added: because the night sky has changed too, even crying as before is no longer allowed.
II
Yin’s piano teacher thinks she will not go back because she has “sad memories of home.” Yin replies that she is not sad. She remembers everything, but she is not sad. What Yin says here applies not only to her but to all Contractors. Contractors have not lost their memories of the past. Rather, they have suspended their judgments of the past, both ethical and emotional. All they have are facts, a listing of facts, not a complete “world.” For them, the only world is the “rational” world of Contractors. Memories of the past are necessary, but meaningless.
Yin does grow in DTB. But this is not growth in the usual sense. It is, rather, a kind of stagnation. Yin chooses to grow so that she can remain in the organization, remain with Hei.
The piano piece Yin plays in these two episodes wanders like a ghost between past and present, the virtual and the real. The music, too, has a stagnant quality. Indeed, this wandering of the music is itself stagnant: it stubbornly lodges itself within a space. When Yin sheds tears, at the instant she grows, at the instant she dreams, the music’s tension does intensify, as though it were about to break free of itself. But it soon returns to calm, just as Yin returns to stagnation at the end of the episode.
After the two episodes of Yin’s disappearance, DTB changes its opening theme. The new theme shakes off the earlier sense of stagnation and takes on an air of decisionism: of “doing something to change the situation.” Its lyrics voice a determination to kick away familiar scenery and move beyond the everyday. In the story, Amber, who represents Hei’s past, also comes to him, while the ending sequence turns to memories of his childhood.
In the latter half of DTB, Amber returns to Hei bearing not only memories but a utopia, a possibility. She says she will let him see his missing sister, Bai, again. Put simply, if Hei belongs to reality, to this shore, Amber lies beyond reality, on the other shore.
In the final episode, Amber tells Hei that Bai is inside him. She can release Bai’s power, but if she does, countless humans will die. If Hei chooses Bai, the world will indeed undergo an enormous change, but the result will unquestionably be tragic. Yet if he does not choose Bai, all Contractors will disappear.
What does Hei choose, then? Simply put, he rejects both options Amber offers. He gives up both possibilities of changing reality, because either would inflict enormous harm on the world. His final choice is for humans and Contractors to coexist: that is, to keep reality unchanged, to maintain this state of stagnation. DTB ends just as Misaki says: “Everyday life is back.” But DTB showed from the outset that this everyday life is itself non-everyday. Now that people know of the Contractors’ existence, the non-everyday has itself become everyday—and public. If this reality differs from what came before, it is that the other shore—the ideal—is receding ever further from it, because its contradictions are now clearer than ever.
The endless non-everyday, as in this exchange between the two Contractors pursuing Yin in episode 14:
“They say a lunar eclipse symbolizes atonement.”
“Then, now that the moon is gone, is this an everlasting time of atonement?”
The prophecy in DTB’s final episode answers this endless non-everyday: “Just like this, take me away, falling stars, passing stars, toward that future no one has ever seen, a long, long, long, long, long time from now.”
So hope remains in the far-distant future, while reality is this: “Since then, the number of cases involving Contractors has kept increasing.”
III
Let us take another look at Hei, who keeps reality stagnant. Hei’s choice is stagnant. He does not want the transcendent other shore Amber offers him. He chooses reality, this shore. In other words, he does not place his hopes in an unreality beyond reality. He places his bet on reality. Places his hopes in reality. This reality will not get better, but even so, one still has to choose reality.
This review follows the anime in one respect: I did not explain at the outset that Hei is not actually a Contractor. Only in the final episode do we learn unequivocally that he is not a Contractor and has no “price” to pay. In episode 20, a Contractor denies that special powers are what distinguish Contractors from humans, since humans can kill just as well if they have weapons. She says: “The biggest difference between humans and Contractors is their mental constitution—what’s called rational judgment. Only those who pursue their own interests, unbound by the emotions and common sense of human society, will succeed, won’t they?”
So what powers Hei has is really a secondary question. First, he must possess “the mental constitution of a Contractor.” He must suspend “the emotions and common sense of human society.” Hei is not only between human and Contractor. He is also between having emotions and having none, between consciousness and unconsciousness. Amber points out that, to live a normal life, Hei has to do something abnormal: kill. For the sake of his feelings for his sister, he becomes emotionless; to become a Contractor operating unconsciously (or subconsciously), he must consciously control himself. Rather than saying Hei is both a Contractor and a human, it would be better to say he is neither a Contractor nor a human. When he wants to be human, the Contractor part of him emerges to constrain him; when he wants to be a Contractor, the human part emerges to constrain him. He therefore cannot simply choose whether to be a Contractor or a human. Better to say that he is chosen—chosen both by humans and by Contractors. This makes Hei’s very nature stagnant.
At this point we have to examine Contractors again. What is distinctive about the Contractor premise is the ambiguous boundary between Contractors and humans. By comparison, both the ghouls in Tokyo Ghoul and the parasites in Parasyte are essentially external to humanity, something that transcends it. Contractors, by contrast, are better understood as internal to humanity. The clearest example is that Contractors can think only “rationally.” Rather than saying Contractors transcend humans, it would be better to say they are more human than humans: they are the result of taking the reason humans have developed to its ultimate conclusion. Reason arises from sensibility, yet strangles its own source. From this perspective, DTB is also a kind of “critique of pure reason.” In other words, it is not only human sensibility that can go wrong. Human reason can go wrong too.
Now return to DTB’s other major premise: the starry sky suddenly disappears, and people manufacture a false starry sky, whose stars symbolize Contractors.4 This makes it all the clearer that Contractors are the result of human development, artificial creations that replace nature, not something beyond humanity. They are internal, not external. After nature ends, reason begins its limitless reign. Human history replaces history itself. DTB is set in just such an age of stagnation. It is not that change is no longer possible, but that, even if things change, what was bound to be lost is lost forever.
Hei’s fate is condensed in his mask. DTB’s poster emphasizes the relationship between Hei and the mask: he holds it as though holding his own fate. Humanity’s fate, too, is condensed beneath the enormous mask of the false night sky.
The first season of DTB achieves its adult, dark atmosphere because Hei is its protagonist. He is not merely the protagonist but a governing tone. Stagnation spreads from his nature to his actions, all the way into the plot’s form and the plot itself. Why, then, is the second season less well regarded than the first? Because its governing tone changes completely. Its atmosphere is much too far removed from the first season’s. It is perfectly normal for viewers accustomed to the first season to find the second jarring. If the first season, with Hei as its protagonist, is a story of stagnation, then the second, with little loli Suou as its protagonist, is clearly a story of growth.5 The depiction of inner life, almost absent from the first season, is everywhere in the second. Even so, Hei’s own atmosphere of stagnation often intensifies in season two: he does not shave, does not cut his hair, drinks all day. What he refuses seems to be not only a reality without Yin, but the second season’s atmosphere itself.