The Rags Drum 2020 annual results list this essay as a qualifying Eve Festival entry.
I
Darker than Black (hereafter DTB) is an anime for adults. There are plainly many kinds of adult anime, however. In what sense is DTB one of them?
If we judge by explicit content, DTB is not particularly extreme: it contains no sex scenes and is not especially bloody. Nor does it trade in fan service. In this respect, DTB is considerably more chaste than most anime of its time—or of our own.
Its adult quality begins instead with the ages of its main characters. Hei, Huang, and Mao are neither high-school age nor high-school minded. Hei may pose as a Chinese exchange student, but he never sets foot in a school throughout the series. The irony becomes clear beside a contemporary work such as Code Geass, which stages events on a global scale yet still requires its characters to attend high school, in the usual manner of Japanese anime and manga. High school as subject matter takes growth as its theme. In formal terms, however, Japan’s ingrained attachment to high school has turned it into a rigid setting. Every story of growth that ostensibly unfolds there conceals the fact that high school itself never grows.
DTB avoids the high-school theme almost completely. The anime has very little to do with growth. Its first opening theme, with lyrics about no longer desiring anything and no longer feeling as one once did, establishes an atmosphere of stagnation: a stubborn refusal, a negation of the past, and an affirmation of the present—though “acquiescence” might be a better word than affirmation. Here, growth is not merely unnecessary. It is no longer possible.
To see why, we need only examine the definition of the so-called Contractor.
The Contractor, DTB’s central conceit, is a stagnant being. Once a person becomes a Contractor, it is as if they have always been one. A period of inner conflict is rare, if it exists at all. Contractors can wield supernatural powers, feel no “guilt”—as Huang explains in Episode 1—and may lack emotion altogether. Without emotion, there can naturally be no torment. In Episode 4, for example, a girl who was once an ordinary high-school student shows no emotional response even to the fact that she seems to have killed many people after becoming a Contractor.
This is one of DTB’s most important and innovative features. A comparison with other anime of the same broad type makes it easy to see. Parasyte and Tokyo Ghoul, for example, likewise posit a species different from humanity. When their protagonists change from human into one of those beings, however, the conflict they undergo is typically among the anime’s central themes. It dramatizes the conflict we inevitably feel while growing up. However extreme the dramatic circumstances, it remains an extension of the coming-of-age story: the protagonist simply grows in an extreme environment. Or perhaps, in Japan—that rigid “bad place,” that stagnant country—only an extreme transformation can make a person grow.
DTB omits that conflict. In Hei, it appears only as fragmentary memories so sparse that they are almost nonexistent. Yet this is also the logical consequence of the Contractor concept. Contractors are rational beings. They do not dream; they only think rationally and make rational judgments.
Curiously, the core of a Contractor’s existence is precisely the irrational thing called remuneration. To use an ability, a Contractor must pay a price. Each Contractor’s remuneration differs, but all share one quality: they are irrational and meaningless.
As noted above, the protagonist Hei is always carrying out some task—and rarely complains, “Why should I have to do this?” While working, he occasionally reveals a little of his “humanity”; apart from that, he suffers little inner conflict. He is independent both psychologically and physically. A representative moment comes in Episode 1: after completing an assignment for the Syndicate—which is to say, after killing someone—Hei cooks for himself to the sound of gentle music. In every sense, Hei can take care of himself, both at work and in private life.
That gentle music is Hei’s inner life. It is his stagnant state of mind.
This stagnation does not belong to Hei alone; it seeps into the anime’s form. The first season’s episodic structure seems to have no beginning, no end, and no goal. Hei merely handles one assignment after another. Although he sometimes defies the Syndicate in the course of an operation, he has no grand objective such as overthrowing it. I am not claiming that DTB has no main plot. Even if we take its existence as given, the feeling of fragmentation and looseness never disappears. If one insists on calling something a main plot, its ambiguity remains visible to the naked eye.
Hei does have the explicit aim of finding his younger sister Bai. Yet his search is purely rational rather than anxiously emotional: if an opportunity appears, he looks; if not, he waits. Love for his sister underlies his actions, but throughout the search his feelings are suppressed almost to the point of nonexistence.
Hei’s appeal lies in the guileless simplicity he displays while “playing” an ordinary person, as well as in the humanity that occasionally appears while he carries out a mission. Now and then he asks Mao, almost melancholically, “Do you believe the real stars will come back someday?” But the question remains only words. Just before asking it, he has inquired what will happen to a woman he met during the mission. The reply is that her life will not change.
This stagnant repetition is interrupted once, midway through the story, when the heroine Yin disappears. First, we need to introduce her. Yin is still more melancholic and stagnant than Hei. She is a Doll, supposedly without emotion. She wears a black-and-purple Gothic Lolita dress, both of them melancholy colors. At a kiosk as gloomy as she is, she signals Hei by exchanging objects with him. 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, and in the most literal sense a stagnant being. A Doll’s task is to stagnate and receive. Nothing more. Dolls do not act; they are acted upon. They receive without responding. They can sense, but they have no feelings.
Yin disappears under a Contractor’s influence and wanders the streets like a ghost. She begins to remember her life before she became a Doll. In her memory, she plays the piano beneath silver moonlight and recalls her mother being struck and killed by a car while saving her. Yin tells the pianist who finds her that she has not been able to see the silver light since then. In other words, she no longer dreams.
When teaching Yin to play, her piano teacher once told her that if one first masters the form, one can bring forth emotion from it: smiling when one is sad can help to ease the sadness.
The words correspond to one of DTB’s best-known scenes, in which Yin uses her fingers to pull her mouth into a smile. Yet that “form” does not allow her to “bring forth emotion.” We must reverse the teacher’s claim. Smiling when one is sad brings no relief at all.
At the end of this two-part story, Yin rejects her teacher and chooses to remain with Hei. She instructs her teacher by the very gesture with which he once instructed her, lightly placing one finger against his lips. He asks her not to remain bound by the past and to return with him. Yin, however, chooses not only to remain bound by the past, but also to bind herself to the “present.” She says that she remembers everything—all of it. On that basis, she chooses Hei—chooses her “companion.” At the end, Hei asks, “Is this all right?” Yin says nothing. With one finger, she lifts the corner of her mouth to form a smile. This reverses the teacher’s words once again: smiling when one is sad brings no relief, but even so, one must smile.
During the episodes in which Yin disappears, a Contractor says, “I cried every night. At some point, the night sky changed as well.” The same words could be applied to Yin, with one sentence added: because the night sky also changed, she was no longer permitted even to cry as she once had.
II
Yin’s piano teacher believes that she refuses to return because she has “sad memories of home.” Yin replies that she is not sad. She remembers everything, but she does not grieve. Her words apply not only to herself, but to every Contractor. Contractors have not lost their memories of the past. Rather, they have suspended judgment on the past, both ethically and emotionally. All they possess are facts, an inventory of facts, rather than an integral “world.” For them, the only world is the Contractor’s “rational” world. 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 form of stagnation. Yin chooses to grow in order to remain in the Syndicate and continue living with Hei.
The piano piece Yin plays in these episodes drifts like a ghost between past and present, virtuality and reality. The music itself carries an air of stagnation. Indeed, its drifting is stagnation: it obstinately inserts itself into a single space. When Yin cries, when she grows, when she dreams, the music’s tension rises as though attempting to break free of itself. Yet it soon subsides again, just as Yin returns to stagnation by the episode’s end.
After this two-part story, DTB changes its opening theme. The new song casts off the earlier atmosphere of stagnation and assumes a decisionist air, a determination to do something and alter the status quo. Its lyrics resolve to kick away the familiar scenery and cross beyond everyday life. In the plot, Amber, who represents Hei’s past, also arrives at his side; the ending theme turns toward Hei’s childhood memories.
In the latter half of DTB, Amber returns to Hei carrying not only memory, but a utopia, a possibility. She tells him that she can reunite him with his missing sister Bai. Put simply, if Hei belongs to reality, to this shore, then Amber transcends reality and belongs to the farther shore.
In the final episode, Amber tells Hei that Bai is inside him. She can release Bai’s power, but doing so will kill countless human beings. If Hei chooses Bai, the world will indeed change radically, with unquestionably tragic consequences. If he does not choose Bai, however, all Contractors will disappear.
What does Hei choose? Put simply, he rejects both alternatives Amber offers. He gives up two possibilities for changing reality because either would inflict enormous harm on the world. Hei ultimately chooses coexistence between humans and Contractors—in other words, to leave reality unchanged, to preserve the stagnant state. As Misaki says in the conclusion, “Everyday life has returned.” Yet DTB showed from the beginning that this everyday life was itself extraordinary. Now that the existence of Contractors has become known to the public, the extraordinary itself has been rendered ordinary and public. If this reality differs at all from the one before it, the far shore—the ideal—has receded still further, because reality’s contradictions have become clearer.
This extraordinary life without end recalls the exchange between the two Contractors hunting Yin in Episode 14:
“They say a lunar eclipse symbolizes atonement.”
“Does that make this moonless present an eternity of atonement?”
The prophecy in DTB’s final episode answers that extraordinary condition without end: “That’s right. Take them with you—the fallen stars, the stars streaming on, every last one of them. Yes, far, far beyond, to a future no one has ever seen.”
Hope thus remains in the very distant future, while reality is summed up in one line: “After that, incidents involving Contractors continued to increase.”
III
Let us again consider Hei, who leaves reality in a state of stagnation. His choice is stagnant. He does not want the transcendent farther shore offered by Amber. He chooses reality, this shore. That is to say, he does not place his hope in an unreality beyond reality, but stakes everything within reality itself. He places his hope in this reality. It will not become better, and yet he chooses it all the same.
This essay follows the original anime in one respect: I did not reveal at the outset that Hei is not actually a Contractor. Only in the final episode does the series make clear that Hei is not one and has no “remuneration” to pay. In Episode 20, a Contractor denies that what separates humans from Contractors is their special powers, since humans can kill just as readily with weapons. She says, “The greatest difference between humans and Contractors lies in their mental structure—in what we call rational judgment. Human society rewards those who pursue only their own interests, unbound by the feelings and common sense of human society.”
Hei’s powers are therefore only a secondary matter. First and foremost, he must possess the “mental structure of a Contractor.” He must suspend “the feelings and common sense of human society.” Hei stands not only between human and Contractor, but between emotion and emotionlessness, consciousness and the unconscious. Amber points out that to live an ordinary life, Hei must kill in an extraordinary way. For the sake of his bond with his sister, he becomes devoid of feeling. To become an unconscious—or, more precisely, subconscious—Contractor, he must consciously control himself.
Rather than saying that Hei is both Contractor and human, it is more accurate to say that he is neither. When he tries to be human, the Contractor within him emerges to restrain him; when he tries to be a Contractor, the human part emerges instead. He cannot simply choose between Contractor and human. Better to say that he is chosen—chosen by human beings and by Contractors alike. Hei’s very condition is therefore stagnant.
At this point we must reconsider the Contractor. What distinguishes this conceit is the ambiguity of the boundary between Contractors and human beings. By comparison, the ghouls of Tokyo Ghoul and the parasites of Parasyte are fundamentally external, transcendent things in relation to humanity. Contractors, by contrast, are better understood as internal to it. The clearest example is their exclusively “rational” thought. Contractors have not transcended humanity; rather, they are more human than human, the result of carrying humanity’s own reason to its conclusion. Reason grows from sensibility and then strangles its source. From this angle, DTB also offers a “critique of pure reason”: human sensibility can go wrong, but so can human reason.
Return now to another of DTB’s great premises. The real night sky suddenly disappeared, so people constructed a false one whose stars represent the Contractors. This further demonstrates that Contractors are the result of human development, artificial creations that replace nature rather than anything superhuman. They are internal, not external. Once nature ends, reason begins its infinite rule; human history replaces history itself. This is the stagnant age that forms DTB’s setting. It is not that change is no longer possible. It is that whatever has been lost remains lost forever, even if change occurs.
Hei’s fate is condensed into his mask. DTB’s posters emphasize the bond between the two: Hei holds the mask as though holding his own destiny. The fate of humanity is likewise condensed beneath the immense mask of the false night sky.
The first season creates its adult, noir atmosphere because Hei is its protagonist. He is not only the protagonist but the series’ governing tone. Stagnation spreads from his attributes and actions into the plot’s form and the plot itself. Why, then, was the second season received less warmly? Its governing tone changes completely; its atmosphere lies too far from that of the first. Viewers accustomed to Season 1 could hardly avoid finding Season 2 jarring. If the first season, with Hei as protagonist, tells a story of stagnation, the second, centered on the young girl Suou, is plainly a story of growth. Psychological description, almost absent from Season 1, appears everywhere in Season 2. Yet even there, Hei’s stagnant atmosphere often grows stronger: he neither shaves nor cuts his hair and spends his days drinking. He seems to reject not only the reality in which Yin is absent, but the very atmosphere of the second season.