This time I want to discuss the relationship between the English subtitle of Kara no Kyōkai and the novel itself, and what the English and Japanese titles mean.
When Kara no Kyōkai was first published as a dōjin work, its subtitle was still ……Is nothing id, nothing cosmos. By the time the bunkobon edition appeared, it had become the Garden of sinners, a title taken from LUNA SEA’s 1993–94 concert tour.
This essay aims to analyze the relationship between that English title and the novel, as well as the meanings of the two titles. If we want to summarize the theme of Kara no Kyōkai, we might as well quote Nasu’s own assessment directly: the story of Souren Araya opposing 「 」; the story of a “normal person” healing an “abnormal person”… The novel may contain a profusion of elements and intertwined incidents, but the author’s own views and inclinations are hardly hidden. I will cut the two titles into pieces, bring in a few outside texts, and combine them with the story of Kara no Kyōkai itself in an attempt to answer the question.
I. sinner
In the New Testament, the Greek ἁμαρτία (hamartia) corresponds to “sin” in English translations. Its original Greek sense is roughly that of an archer going wide and failing to hit the center of the target; by extension it can be interpreted as an error produced by action taken in ignorance, and it is often treated as one of the necessary traits of the protagonist in Greek tragedy, as can be seen in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. For New Testament usage, see Romans 3:23: “For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God.” Here “sin” means that human beings have failed to reach the goal ordained by God.
In early Christian thought, “sin” was considered unrelated to human free will. Only the Messiah’s teaching could serve as the foundation of goodness; only by following Christ could one remove the “beam from one’s eye.” The only freedom we possessed was the freedom to believe or not believe.
If we take Augustine’s doctrine of original sin as our basis—Augustine was not the first thinker of original sin; the doctrine was gradually constructed by Christians in order to emphasize the necessity of the Messiah’s “redemption,” and I choose Augustine’s comparatively complete and coherent account here—then after humanity’s first ancestors were enticed by the ancient serpent in Eden to eat the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil, we, their descendants, were already born contaminated by “sin.” We disobeyed God’s will and “ate the fruit of the tree that I commanded you not to eat.” Human action based on “free will” disobeyed God; this is the highest form of “actual sin.” “Sin” is the abandonment of “eternity” in pursuit of things that are “earthly/worldly”—that is, “ethical evil”—and belongs to an irreversible result.
The sense of sin Kierkegaard experienced as a solitary individual before God should, one might think, have disappeared along with the contest among rival powers in the supersensible world and ideal realm. Yet that ancient fear and anxiety produced by the individual’s limitless capacity to choose has not vanished. After all, if we do not believe that twenty-one grams of soul-stuff, chemical substances, or electrical signals can disprove the existence of the soul in the traditional sense, then discussion of “sin” will not end with law or ethics either.
“The double-bodied one who floats by depending on death, the misfit who touches death and finds pleasure, the one who flees death and awakens an Origin that grants a self”; “the murderer who is both perpetrator and victim”; a monk who stands against primates… In Kara no Kyōkai, abnormal people walk beneath moonlight pregnant with death and mystery, while those tuned to another frequency move through alleys doing evil without a sense of guilt… Except for Mikiya, who is involved in the incidents yet somehow feels like an observer, most of the cast can be called “sinners”: people burdened with crimes who are also, in relation to the title’s “emptiness,” seekers unable to attain what they seek.
“That’s right. Common sense is no longer in you. In the world called common sense, abnormal people are not guilty. It is only natural for an abnormal person to do things that violate ordinary reason, so good and evil cannot be judged by common sense.” (Murder Speculation: Boundary Shiki)
II. The Concept of “Emptiness”
The kara Nasu chose roughly means hollow or empty, with nothing inside. After encountering the work, it is not hard to see that this “emptiness” also conceals the sense of garan (伽藍). Beyond the similarity in sound, the two correspond in other ways as well. Shiki describes herself like this: “Inside my body is empty like a cave. Not only air—sometimes it feels as though even the wind could pass through it… It is an overwhelmingly strong unease… an overwhelmingly strong loneliness… I am so empty that I cannot even find a reason to live.” (Garan no Dou) Seen this way, the so-called “hollow shrine” is a metaphor for a place where the feeling of emptiness gathers. Nasu names both Shiki Ryougi’s sense of void and Touko Aozaki’s workshop with the word garan. Beyond his enduring taste for inventing abstrusely suggestive vocabulary, this may consciously or unconsciously imply that the work’s concept of “emptiness” cannot be entirely severed from its Buddhist matrix. And if one considers the image of a monk’s dwelling, it also finds correspondences in the various forms taken by Souren Araya.
As a story built upon what Nasu calls the mystery of magecraft, “inside the story there exist only complete reason and absolute maturity.” Magi are inhuman seekers of mystery, while those with supernatural powers are abnormal people capable of receiving multiple channels. In Kara no Kyōkai there is no negotiation or persuasion, no understanding or forgiveness. An “Origin,” functioning as conviction, can easily devour a “personality,” so mutual understanding and conversion scarcely arise. Abnormal people exist by leaning upon concepts, consciously or unconsciously pursuing an unattainable ending and a place where truth converges. Meaningless people follow meaningless rules, seeking a destination where all things are present yet everything is empty and chaotic. Kirie Fujou, who longs for freedom, gains a body only to obtain floating. Fujino Asagami, searching for pain, finds temporary joy in killing. Satsuki Kurogiri, having lost himself, remains trapped in other people’s pasts. Lio Shirazumi, craving his own kind, submits to the desire to devour… Unable to obtain pleasure, unable to fix a goal anywhere, knowing neither direction nor method, they simply race about in delirium under the drive of emptiness… This way of existing in “emptiness” rather resembles Heidegger’s inauthentic existence: a helpless abandonment and exile of the self, racing down a forked road whose shape one can hardly glimpse even for oneself.
In a more positive sense, “emptiness” can also be read as a description of the disposition or certain qualities of Mikiya and the fortune-teller known as Mifune no Haha: a state that should perhaps be called “peaceful.” They neither demand from others nor reject what others ask of them; they are not truly shaken by the outside world, nor do they wish to impose their own opinions and ideas on those around them. They point out others‘ defects and shortcomings and teach through words. Having witnessed countless abnormal people possessed of extraordinary qualities, they remain satisfied to live as their unchangingly “ordinary” selves; even when they glimpse the direction of the future, they have no desire to flee the arrangements of fate.
As noted above, the “emptiness” of Kara no Kyōkai is neither entirely the Buddhist concept of emptiness viewed from a transcendent perspective nor the complete and absolute nihilism discussed by philosophers. It is a concrete description suited to the characters‘ actual condition of existence, embodied in their sense of void. “That kind of yearning does not exist in me. Because I have no sense of really being alive, I also do not know the pain of living.” It is enacted in what the characters do and sinks deeply into the viewer’s experience. This is a story attempting to interpret emptiness, but unlike Macbeth’s speech, it is not merely “sound and fury, signifying nothing.”
And the so-called “boundary”—the “garden”—is at once a stage and a wall, a promised land and a contingent place, where divinity undergoes an inevitable fall and suffering, then by chance is reborn and departs.
III. “Boundary” and “garden”
“I once heard that in Shugendō, or on mountains treated as sacred ground, there are barriers stretched out to forbid women from entering, and that if a woman enters she will turn to stone. But a barrier is only a kind of boundary. What lies inside a circle is not, in itself, the barrier; the barrier is merely a wall of magical power that keeps others out. So—if I erase that line, the force will disappear as well.” (Paradox Spiral)
“A barrier is something that separates inside from outside. If you want to create a world completed within itself, you must first complete yourself. Araya, who possessed no special talent, completed himself through accumulated years and conviction.”
A barrier separates. Common sense lies inside and mystery outside; the ordinary is within and the abnormal stands beside it. This makes it easy to understand what Touko says to Shiki in Garan no Dou: “A conjurer (a magus) cannot fill the hole in your chest. Only an ordinary person can fill it.”
When Shiki and Satsuki Kurogiri first confront one another, Shiki forces herself to attack him on the grounds that “he is a person from the other side of the boundary.” The position is explicit: on the far side of the ordinary person’s boundary lies the domain of monsters. Common sense does not apply there. They are moral foreigners, unpredictable and incomprehensible in action; trying to erase that difference is like grasping at the wind.
“Every human being is a creature with a completely different meaning. We gather only because we belong to the same species, and live only in order to turn the differences we cannot understand into the boundary of emptiness.”
As a “barrier,” a “boundary” separates inside from outside. For the abnormal person, that boundary appears externally as the strange discomfort of coexisting with the community of common sense; within the self, it appears as an unbridgeable gap in individual consciousness. And because this double barrier exists both within and without, abnormal people in the world of Kara no Kyōkai naturally incline toward their Origins. This is the process described in the quotation above as “completing oneself through accumulated years and conviction.” Whether twisted, evil, or contradictory, we should admit that Souren Araya’s inner being is fuller and purer than that of most characters in the work. On the two sides of the “boundary” formed by the opposition between Araya and Shiki, we find Shiki Ryougi, returned from 「 」, descending in her attempt to become human, and Souren Araya, driven by his longing to see his ideal human being, climbing in an attempt to reach 「 」.
But “boundary” also has the sense of a “domain,” and here we should discuss Shiki’s domain. Shiki is, after all, the protagonist of Kara no Kyōkai, and the plot unfolds around her. From the perspective of “domain,” the story of Kara no Kyōkai is the story of how Shiki handles her own domain: how she responds to the disappearance of her masculine personality—the bearer of negative emotions, whose loss breaks the complete symmetrical spiral structure; how she adapts to the overflowing emptiness of an existence that retains memories without their corresponding emotions; how she regains human dignity and a sense of reality, and acquires a reason and meaning for living; how she applies to life the social experience and ethical norms she can actually understand; and how, as someone whose Origin is 「 」, she is guided and shaped, finally succeeding in breaking through the boundary (barrier). As the only person whose Origin awakens without devouring her, her circumstances differ from those of the other abnormal people, and that difference is the root of the outcome. All of this takes place within Shiki Ryougi’s domain—her “boundary.”
IV. Continuing the Thematic Inquiry and Offering Further Evidence
“Separation” does not appear only in the opposition between common sense and the abnormal discussed in the third section. The opposition, rupture, and division represented by the “boundary” appears throughout the work. It is not enough merely to point out the opposition between common sense and abnormality, or differences of ideas and ways of living. One could say that the whole of Kara no Kyōkai, just as Paradox Spiral reveals, is filled with endless oppositions and partitions. Equilibrium always stands at the edge of being broken, and difference repeatedly arrives at the threshold of erasure.
Nasu says in an interview:
“Yes. I very much wanted to prepare two different things and let them draw a boundary while opposing one another. Human beings, even people who look completely different at first glance, have things in common. Conversely, even when they share something, human beings still contain places where they absolutely cannot understand one another. I tried to put that feeling into the final dialogue scene between Shiki Ryougi and Mikiya Kokutou. Kara no Kyōkai is a story written in order to arrive at that line.” (15th-anniversary Kara no Kyōkai interview)
“Taiji: a concept born in ancient China and represented in the diagram of yin and yang. It conceptually grasps the state of all things: active, moving things are classified as yang (white), and their opposites as yin (black). While symbolizing opposing things such as day and night, light and darkness, male and female, it can also be called a miniature of a world in which the two affect one another and flow into one another.” (Kara no Kyōkai terminology dictionary)
“The black side is yin—that is, female. This figure coils around itself while also overcoming itself: a spiral of black and white.” (Paradox Spiral)
These passages show at least part of the picture. The perfect “Ryougi Shiki” and the perfect “Taiji” are necessarily connected, while the Taiji image is also embodied in the mutually generative and mutually overcoming “Shiki” and “SHIKI” within Ryougi Shiki. Throughout history, countless wise people have suffered over the complexity of the human being. “Two souls, alas, are dwelling in my breast, and one wants to separate from the other” is Faust’s lament. Stevenson directly transformed good and evil in human nature into the two opposing personalities of Jekyll and Hyde, while Hesse depicted the divided condition of the Steppenwolf. Beyond contradictions within individual characters, “contradiction” appears in other forms throughout Kara no Kyōkai: Shiki/SHIKI, two existences sharing one body, opposed to Kirie Fujou, one person possessing two bodies; Shiki, who understands and attaches significance to killing, opposed to Fujino Asagami, who enjoys the pleasure of slaughter; Shiki, who resists letting others come close of their own accord, opposed to Lio Shirazumi, who searches for his own kind; the contradiction of Tomoe, whose Origin is “meaninglessness,” nevertheless managing to destroy Araya’s plan; and the contradiction between Souren Araya, who attempts to destroy humanity, and “Alaya,” humanity’s collective unconscious.
Seen from another angle, beyond the mixing and continuous expansion of contradictions, and as the earlier discussion of “boundary” already suggested, the work repeatedly discusses the relationship between “human” and “god.” Kirie Fujou acquires the vision of a god; Satsuki Kurogiri masters the language of a god. Magi attempt by different means to reach the Root, and Shiki Ryougi scarcely needs mentioning… From a Gnostic perspective, the descent of the human being strips away the characteristics of one’s prior experience; hence the characters‘ sense of being cast into a foreign land, wandering without anything to depend upon. Shiki’s behavior especially makes one feel that the darkness of the cave has damaged the divine one’s eyes. At last the god’s recollection ends. It breaks free from this magnificent “prison” called a “boundary” and a “garden”; the boundary is erased, everyday life and common sense return, and mortals can live.
“A boundary cannot be determined. Although the person who sets it is oneself, what truly decides it is the viewpoint of the outside world. If so, perhaps there was never any boundary to begin with. The whole world is divided by a hollow boundary. The wall that separates abnormal from normal is not society—in the end, it is we ourselves who create the distance.”
Looking back now at our original question, we have more or less explained the relationship between the titles Kara no Kyōkai and the Garden of sinners and the work itself. To summarize briefly: the Garden of sinners is the place where abnormal people walk through the world, observing the abnormalities, sorrows, obsessions, and fantasies of others while themselves being observed and exposed as essentially different from “common sense.” Because the abnormal world is not governed by the ethics applied to ordinary conduct, these abnormal people are like humanity’s ancestors playing in the Garden: they exercise their abilities without much thought and bring calamity into being; only once they recognize good and evil do the fall and the reckoning arrive.
Kara no Kyōkai suggests the relativity of “boundary” as a dividing thing: the “abnormal” can exist only when examined by “common sense,” while the barrier called the “boundary” is hollow, with nothing inside it, and both of its sides are only the same emptiness. Between them lies the stage on which abnormal people act; ineffable existences watch this urban legend alongside us, appreciating its distorted, uncanny, magnificent tale.
Author’s note: In the next article on Kara no Kyōkai, I will discuss why Touko must obtain an “original” through dolls. Beyond Shiki’s prosthetic limb and Touko’s spare bodies, do dolls carry other, deeper meanings and manifestations within Kara no Kyōkai?
