This essay was an award-winning contribution to the Rags Drum 2021 Pre-Festival, originally published on Bilibili.
Suppose people used always to point to objects in the following way: they describe a circle as it were round the object with their finger in the air; in that case a philosopher could be imagined who said: “All things are circular, for the table looks like this, the stove like this, the lamp like this”, etc., drawing a circle round the thing each time.
—Wittgenstein, Zettel1
One of the great lessons of philosophy in the past century is that logical structure typically does not lie on the surface of how things seem. The theory of descriptions, the theory of speech acts and the theory of intentionality are all examples of how you start with how things seem, but then have to dig deeper to get at the real underlying structure.
—John Searle, “Limits of Phenomenology,” final version, January 12, 1999
1 Is the Haruhi series “sekaikei”? Yes—and no
We tend to stick all sorts of labels on a work. Such classifications supposedly help us explain what different works have “in common.”2 One label frequently attached to the Haruhi series is “sekaikei” (セカイ系). According to Hiroki Azuma, the term refers to:
A group of works in which problems within the small-scale relationship (“you and I”) centered on the protagonist (“I”) and the heroine (“you”) connect directly, without concrete intermediaries, to large, abstract problems such as “a crisis of the world” or “the end of this world.”3
Azuma repeats this definition in A Birth of Gamelike Realism: Animalizing Postmodernity 2, adding:
…Works such as Nagaru Tanigawa’s The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya all possess the characteristics of sekaikei character novels.
This is not the only formulation of “sekaikei,” but the definitions do not differ very much. Consider, for instance, the other formulations Satoshi Maejima supplies in What Is Sekaikei?, including:
A group of works in which small, everyday problems (“you and I”), centered on the relationship between the male protagonist (“I”) and the heroine he loves (“you”), connect simply and directly to large, abstract, non-everyday problems such as “a crisis of the world” or “the end of the world,” without any concrete (social) context or intermediary.
Also known as “post-Evangelion syndrome”: setting nation and society aside, these works apprehend as the “world” whatever falls within the reach of “one’s feelings” and “self-consciousness.” A range of “otaku” works with this worldview are called “sekaikei,” including Voices of a Distant Star and Saikano.4
We can therefore assume, roughly speaking,5 that when different people say “Haruhi is sekaikei,” or something similar, they use the term in the same sense as these definitions. This includes giving a response to the Disappearance film the title “A Sekaikei Love Story,”6 or calling Tanigawa “an author with an exceptionally strong sekaikei consciousness.”7
One purpose of this essay is to work out whether the Haruhi series really is a “sekaikei” work. (It is worth noting that Yutaka Yamamoto reportedly said the following at Otakon 2009: “I don’t want to go deeply into the definition of sekaikei, but Tanigawa thinks it [Haruhi] isn’t sekaikei. The SOS Brigade is an anti-sekaikei concept. It stands between reality and fantasy, adding a distinctive flavor to the story. I agree that Haruhi isn’t sekaikei.”8 But even if Tanigawa really does think this, his opinion alone will not persuade those who classify the series as sekaikei. Some might also argue that, if we are discussing the anime, what the author of the original novels says has no bearing on the matter—although, as we shall see, the anime and novels do not differ greatly on the particular question of whether they are sekaikei.)
To make the analysis easier, I have reformulated the definition of “sekaikei” as the conjunction of three conditions:
(1) The relationships between the protagonists are central.
(2) The “world”—its crises and so forth—is used solely as a means of expressing (1), and is abstract rather than concrete. (“‘Sekaikei’ works often lack a fully developed account of their fictional world.”9 A more radical formulation runs: “What matters most is the basic configuration: aliens invade, the world is destroyed. As for what the aliens look like, how humanity responds, and how the world meets its end, the treatment of these details is astonishingly slapdash.”10)
(3) The “social” level between the individual and the “world” is not portrayed—in technical terms, “desocialization.”
(It is worth noting that these three conditions correspond to the three domains of “individual,” “society,” and “world.” Supposedly, these domains bear some marvelous correspondence to Lacan’s “Imaginary,” “Symbolic,” and “Real.”11 We shall return to this.)
Among the stories, large and small, in the twelve volumes of the Haruhi novels, a few seem to satisfy all three conditions in exemplary fashion: “The Boredom of Haruhi Suzumiya” (I use Boredom for the third volume and “The Boredom of Haruhi Suzumiya” for its opening story, and will follow this convention below), the ending of Melancholy, the whole of Disappearance, and “Endless Eight.” Of these, “The Boredom of Haruhi Suzumiya” is the clearest example. Haruhi, the heroine, is disappointed by Kyon’s performance in a baseball game—a “problem within a small-scale relationship.” This directly causes closed space to expand: an abstract world crisis, since, unlike Melancholy, this story does not even offer a concrete description of closed space. The problem is finally resolved by Nagato’s supernatural powers, not by “society.” Similar exercises in “plot summary” would seem to confirm that the other three stories also satisfy all three conditions.
English-edition note: Despite the original caption’s reference to adaptations, the image shows only publication information and collected volumes. Dates are retained as printed. Open the image to enlarge the small text.
An attentive reader will immediately notice, however, that all four stories belong to a relatively “early” phase of the series. “The Boredom of Haruhi Suzumiya” and Melancholy were the first two stories published, followed by “Endless Eight.” Even the latest of the four, Disappearance, appeared in August 2004, only a year after Melancholy. By contrast, the “later” stories—taking Disappearance as a provisional dividing line—generally struggle to satisfy the three conditions:
First, a “world crisis,” or any other large-scale problem at the level of the world, seems never to appear again. Even the “crisis” facing the SOS Brigade in “Snowy Mountain Syndrome” is confined geographically to the mansion on that snowy mountain and, in the people it affects, to the Brigade’s members. It falls very far short of the scale of the “world.” “The student council takes back the clubroom” in “Editor in Chief, Full Speed Ahead!” or “Asahina is kidnapped” in Intrigues are still less plausibly “world crises.”
There is a possible objection: don’t Dissociation and Surprise still feature a “world crisis”? As Koizumi says:
This is the result of Suzumiya unconsciously exercising her powers. She split the world to establish a line of defense. On one side is the world that ought to exist; on the other, a world that ought not to exist. Though she was entirely unaware of it, she still had some sense of danger and protected this world.
—Itsuki Koizumi, The Surprise of Haruhi Suzumiya, second part, Taiwanese Chinese edition
But even setting aside Yasumi Watahashi’s objection to the claim that the “world split”—“They merely have slightly different histories; the time and the world are still the same”—consider the narrative treatment alone. The actual crises Tanigawa presents to readers are “Nagato falls ill,” “Asakura comes back to life,” and “Haruhi’s divine powers are about to be transferred to Sasaki.” These are not crises at the level of the “world.” He makes no attempt to depict the “split” as “world-scale”—Koizumi’s statement above plainly does not count as such a depiction—and never even makes the split itself a “problem.” Compare the treatment of the “world loop” in “Endless Eight.” The “world split” in Dissociation and Surprise should therefore not be counted as the kind of “world crisis” specified in the definition of sekaikei.
Second, characters and their relationships are not the story’s sole focus, because the “world” is itself something the story seeks to represent. One conspicuous sign is the further development of all three factions’ “theories of the world”: those of the aliens, the time travelers, and the espers. The whole of “Wandering Shadow” and the whole of Intrigues can be read as supplements to the alien and time-traveler theories. The esper theory receives less space, but this includes the introduction to Gnosticism in Surprise, arguably its greatest breakthrough since Sigh; see my earlier essay, “A Hymn to Humanity: A Framework for Reading The Dissociation and The Surprise of Haruhi Suzumiya.”12 All this shows how much space and care Tanigawa devotes to describing the laws of the “world.” If “what the world is like” can have concrete rather than abstract content at all, a major part of that content lies in its lawlike features, not in a succession of space monsters. What kind of world is that “world,” the one in which the Haruhi series takes place? What natural or supernatural laws does it obey? This question, and the attempt to answer it, come to a head in the conversation between the older Asahina and Fujiwara about “rewriting the future” in Surprise. The “world,” then, does not merely perform the abstract task of being “the place where a crisis occurs.” Its particular constitution is itself one of the work’s central subjects. (Compare the Tarsians and the United Nations Space Force in Voices of a Distant Star, widely acknowledged as a representative sekaikei work. They come closer to abstract devices assigned the plot functions of “causing a crisis” and “responding to a crisis.”)
Finally, even “desocialization,” the easiest of the three conditions to satisfy—creators are under no obligation to represent “society” consciously in every work—becomes hard to satisfy. From the Tamaru brothers driving a police car in Intrigues to the student council president installed through lavish spending in “Editor in Chief, Full Speed Ahead!”, the Organization’s operations at the social level become increasingly visible. An interesting fanfic, “Four Moments in Haruhi,”13 makes this especially clear. Meanwhile, the detailed family backgrounds established for T and Tsuruya in “Tsuruya’s Challenge”—wealth, status, and investment in research and development across various fields—bring “capital” out from behind the scenes. They suggest that a fourth force, alongside science, magic, and religion, is about to enter the story. If an argument such as “The involvement of the father, who is mayor, brings society into Your Name, so strictly speaking it isn’t sekaikei”14 can escape ridicule, then we can use a similar method to argue that the Haruhi series is not sekaikei either.
“All right, fair enough. But by your own division, we can simply say early Haruhi is sekaikei and later Haruhi isn’t. And since that division almost coincides with ‘adapted into anime’ versus ‘not yet adapted,’ why not make things easier and say the anime is sekaikei but the novels aren’t?”
—This is indeed a good way of answering the argument. It reminds us that we must confront the question: “Was Haruhi sekaikei early on and not later, or was it never sekaikei, with that becoming clearer as the series went on?” My answer is, of course, the latter. Consider these two passages from Sigh, unquestionably an early work, present in both the novels and the anime:
“About what Koizumi says, um, you probably shouldn’t believe too much of it… Saying this makes it sound as though I have something against Koizumi…15 Um, I don’t like that either, but…”
“You mean what he says about Haruhi being God?”
If that was it, I wasn’t going to believe him.
“I, um… I think differently. I mean, um… my explanation isn’t the same as Koizumi’s.”
Asahina let out a breath and looked up at me.
“Suzumiya undoubtedly has the power to change this ‘present’ (この『現在』). But I don’t think it’s a power to change the structure of the world. This world has been like this from the beginning. Suzumiya didn’t create it.”
In that case… her view was the exact opposite of Koizumi’s.
“I think Nagato has a different view too.”
…
“Your view is easier for me to understand than Koizumi’s, Asahina.”
Asahina smiled faintly. If a sweet pea could smile, I imagined it would look something like that.
“Yes, thank you. But personally, I have nothing against Koizumi. Please understand that too.”
After this delicate remark, she glanced up at me, then turned and hurried away as though escaping.
—The Sigh of Haruhi Suzumiya, Taiwanese Chinese edition, amended by the essayist
“Itsuki Koizumi and Mikuru Asahina have different missions concerning Haruhi Suzumiya. They will never accept each other’s explanations. For each of them, the other’s theory would undermine the foundations of their own existence.”
Hang on. Koizumi said he only acquired his powers three years ago.
Nagato answered my question immediately:
“No one can guarantee that what Itsuki Koizumi says is true.”
—The Sigh of Haruhi Suzumiya, Taiwanese Chinese edition
We can draw three conclusions from these passages:
(1) There is a substantive conflict—not merely a difference in wording—between the “theories” of the aliens, time travelers, and espers. The three accounts of the world and Haruhi’s powers offered in Melancholy might leave the impression that “these are just three ways of saying the same thing.” Sigh, however, explicitly tells us that at least the time travelers’ and espers’ theories are incompatible. Neither Kyon nor we readers can accept more than one of them. (We can go further: at most one of the two theories is correct. Unlike believers in the coherence theory of truth or pragmatism, Kyon cares not merely about “finding a seemingly sensible explanation for what has happened to me,” but about “the correct answer.”16)
(2) The author does not want us to understand the “conflict between theories” in (1) as “a means of expressing conflict between characters.” The conversation between Kyon and Asahina goes out of its way to remind us that theoretical conflict and interpersonal conflict coexist and are relatively independent. It is not a case of one being the “appearance” and the other the “essence” or “core.”17
(3) This follows naturally from (1): theories must not be treated as established fictional premises. The three factions’ theories are not the author stating the same premise three times through different characters. Rather, he seems to offer three different accounts and leave us to guess which supplies the actual premise—perhaps none does. But a premise of that kind can no longer be called a “premise”: it is the greatest unresolved mystery in the entire story, the “ultimate puzzle” the author has set.
Here we can see the greatest difference between the “world” of Haruhi and the “world” of sekaikei. From the beginning, the “world” in which Haruhi’s events take place is not directly, absolutely, and transparently “given” to us, not “placed” before us as a “device” serving artistic expression alone. The author has filled it with substantial, abundant content that remains for us to understand and explore. If we want to take the Haruhi series seriously, we cannot confine our attention to characters’ inner lives and relationships while setting aside thought about the “world” itself. This is a fundamental difference from genuinely typical sekaikei works. (In other words, both Haruhi and genuine sekaikei works may be read as sekaikei, but that does not mean they both are sekaikei. The latter intrinsically require that reading and guide readers toward it; the former does not. A reader who stubbornly insists that the world is merely “supporting scenery that allows the protagonists to exist”18 will forever be reading an incomplete, diminished Haruhi.)
(There is another piece of evidence available here: the “aliens” in Haruhi are highly atypical “aliens,” and its “espers” still more atypical. Tanigawa has plainly done this deliberately. The former point emerges in Sasaki’s wry observation:
Ever since I was little, I’ve imagined what aliens would look like if they existed. In novels and manga, the usual assumption is that their physical form can be observed optically and that some degree of communication is possible. They might understand the concept of prime numbers, for instance, and convenient devices such as translators often turn up. …But Nagato’s Information Integration Thought Entity and Miss Kuyō’s Sky Canopy Dominion seem completely different from the images of aliens in the easily understood stories humans invent.
—Sasaki, The Surprise of Haruhi Suzumiya, first part, Taiwanese Chinese edition
The latter emerges in Kyon’s exchange with Koizumi:
“You said you had supernatural powers, right?”
“Yes. I would put it a little differently, but as a simple description, that isn’t wrong.”
“Then show me some and I’ll believe you. Bring this coffee back to its original temperature, for instance.”
Koizumi smiled happily. It seemed to be the first time I’d seen him smile sincerely.
“I’m afraid I can’t. My powers aren’t that easy to understand. Under ordinary circumstances, I have no special abilities. Several important conditions have to be met at once before I can use them. I’m sure you’ll have an opportunity to see them someday.”
—The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, Taiwanese Chinese edition
Such “atypical” premises also draw some of the reader’s attention toward “aliens” or “alien-ness,” rather than leaving it focused solely on “this Nagato, with her ‘alien’ moe-element” or “this Koizumi, with his ‘esper’ moe-element”—moe being the particular attachment or attraction a character evokes. This undoubtedly makes it harder to read the work as sekaikei.
In fact, “atypicality” in the Haruhi series deserves an essay of its own. Space prevents me from pursuing it here.)
At this point, let us look back once more at the opening of Melancholy. When Tanigawa wrote the following in 2003, was he following and paying tribute to sekaikei, or reflecting on and parodying it? I imagine you now have your own answer.
I really wanted to rescue girls abducted by aliens and imprisoned in giant transparent pea pods; to take a laser gun and use my wits and courage to fight off time travelers bent on rewriting history; to dispatch evil spirits and monsters with a single spell; or to fight psychic battles against espers from a secret organization!
Wait. Calm down. Suppose aliens and so on—etcetera, etcetera—attacked me. How could I fight them without any special abilities? So I imagined the following:
One day, a mysterious new student would suddenly transfer into my class. He would actually be an alien or a time traveler or something of the sort, with unknown powers. Then he would fight the bad guys, and all I’d have to do was find a way to get caught up in the battle. He’d do the main fighting; I’d be his little sidekick. Ah, perfect. What a genius I was!
Or else it could go like this. One day, some incredible power would suddenly awaken in me—telekinesis or psychokinesis, something like that. And there would actually be plenty of other humans on Earth with supernatural powers, so naturally there would be an organization that took them in. Before long, the good organization would send someone to collect me, and I’d join them in fighting evil espers who wanted to conquer the world.
—Kyon, The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, Taiwanese Chinese edition
2 The Haruhi series and the “postmodern perspective”
I have now given a detailed answer to whether the Haruhi series is sekaikei. But to my mind, this is only the first step of the inquiry—if the inquiry is to mean anything at all. The well-known light-novel critic Kuangkuangkuangzi once said, “Rather than listen to you bunch of ** argue about definitions, I might as well make up my own.”19 The remark was widely mocked at the time, but it undoubtedly contains an insight. Now that “sekaikei,” once such a fashionable word, has long since fallen out of fashion, what is the point of arguing at length over whether a work that has itself long since fallen out of fashion belongs to it? More broadly, how important is this dated concept, manufactured by a small group of people, today? Do we need to care whether any particular work will, or should, be called “sekaikei”?
There may be many answers. For me, at least, what matters about “sekaikei” is not only its definition but also the postmodern, cultural-studies perspective that it implies and presupposes. The tension between Haruhi and the word “sekaikei” lies not just in the series’ failure to satisfy the definition, but in its incompatibility with the context and perspective on which the word depends. This section will concentrate on “the postmodern”; “cultural studies” will wait until the next.
In fact, the word “sekaikei” itself arose in a postmodern context. As Tsukasa Takase writes:
Azuma [Hiroki] says: “We live in a world where the Symbolic has collapsed, where a secure sense of reality has vanished, a world full of falsehood. Expressed as a system, this feeling takes the form of a time-loop game; expressed as a story, it becomes sekaikei.” The Symbolic mentioned here is a concept from the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. It can be understood simply as “society, history, or the nation”—that is, “grand narratives.”20
“Grand narrative” is an expression Azuma particularly loves. In Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals, he writes:
Modernity was an age governed by grand narratives. In postmodernity, however, grand narratives have broken down, causing social cohesion to decline rapidly. In Japan, this decline accelerated in the 1970s, with the end of the period of high economic growth and the “political season,” the oil crisis, and the United Red Army incident.
In A Birth of Gamelike Realism: Animalizing Postmodernity 2, he writes:
Under postmodernity’s relativist and multiculturalist ethics, even if we believe in a particular “grand” narrative, we cannot think that everyone else must believe in it too. …In other words, in postmodern discourse, every “grand” narrative can only be regarded as one among many different narratives, permitted to circulate only as a “little narrative.” Postmodern theory calls this situation “the decline of grand narratives.”
Here Azuma follows the French thinker Lyotard’s ideas in The Postmodern Condition, producing the logical chain “postmodern condition → decline of grand narratives → sekaikei works.” It extends postmodern theory into the study of ACGN—anime, comics, games, and novels. This is what I mean by the “postmodern perspective.” (Just as postmodern theory was the dominant intellectual formation in the Western humanities during the second half of the twentieth century, the postmodern perspective is the dominant perspective in ACGN research today.)
Unfortunately, beyond citing Lyotard and Baudrillard, Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals does not explain “the postmodern” in detail. It merely says, in general terms, that “postmodern” means “what comes after the modern,” and that people have a “commonsense intuition” of a cultural rupture in recent years, which they call “postmodern.” I must therefore supplement this with a passage from Terry Eagleton’s The Illusions of Postmodernism:
The word postmodernism generally refers to a form of contemporary culture, whereas the term postmodernity alludes to a specific historical period. Postmodernity is a style of thought which is suspicious of classical notions of truth, reason, identity and objectivity, of the idea of universal progress or emancipation, of single frameworks, grand narratives or ultimate grounds of explanation. Against these Enlightenment norms, it sees the world as contingent, ungrounded, diverse, unstable, indeterminate, a set of disunified cultures or interpretations which breed a degree of scepticism about the objectivity of truth, history and norms, the givenness of natures and the coherence of identities. …Postmodernism is a style of culture which reflects something of this epochal change, in a depthless, decentred, ungrounded, self-reflexive, playful, derivative, eclectic, pluralistic art which blurs the boundaries between “high” and “popular” culture, as well as between art and everyday experience.
English wording restored from Eagleton’s preface, p. vii. The Chinese quotation renders “derivative” as “imitative”; the omission and bold emphasis follow this essay.
Azuma places particular importance on Eagleton’s distinction between “postmodernity” and “postmodernism.” In A Birth of Gamelike Realism: Animalizing Postmodernity 2, he repeatedly emphasizes:
“The postmodern” refers broadly to social and cultural changes since the 1970s. “Postmodernism” refers only to one current of thought arising in that period. …This book’s claim that “light novels are postmodern novels” does not mean that their authors are consciously aware of this postmodern dimension. …What this book attends to is the mechanism through which they reflect a postmodern spirit. This also means that we approach the postmodern character of light novels not through the content of the novels themselves, but through the environment around and between novels.
Azuma makes a rather crafty move here. He declares, in effect: “Even if the author is not consciously postmodernist, the work was born into and inhabits a postmodern environment, and is therefore still postmodern.” This gives him license to project the postmodern perspective outlined above onto any light novel—selecting a few to call “sekaikei” is one example—regardless of whether its content or its author’s intentions contain an explicit postmodernist position. He thereby defuses the accusation that “this work contains such-and-such, and therefore does not lend itself to a postmodern perspective.”
But the accusation I am about to make will be harder to deal with. I will argue from two directions that Haruhi is a more unusual case: its content is not consciously postmodern at all; in a certain sense, it is consciously anti-postmodern! If my argument holds, describing Haruhi with “sekaikei,” a term born of the postmodern perspective, is not merely an “error” but a “culpable lapse.”
The first passage worth attending to is the conversation between Sasaki and Kyon at the end of the first part of Surprise. It is extraordinarily rich in information, and many passages have no obvious function in the plot. It can therefore be read as a strong expression of Tanigawa’s own thinking. To my mind, it is the “key” to understanding Surprise, and indeed the entire series. In this conversation, Sasaki displays an acute awareness of postmodern problems, discussing a number of thoroughly postmodern social phenomena—
The pluralization of values (it is worth noting that Tanigawa connects “the pluralization of values” here with “information,” a central concept in the aliens’ theory of the world. On the one hand, he observes that values are pluralized in today’s information-rich environment; on the other, he argues that when information is lacking, even greater diversity in social life will not pluralize values, but instead lead to their homogenization):
“Kyon, what matters most to you?”
I couldn’t come up with an answer on the spot.
“Nor can I. In modern society, where information (情報)21 is so intricately entangled, values cannot be quantified.”
Sasaki’s expression and tone remained unchanged.
“For example, some people would say money, some would say information, and some would say feelings. Since everyone has entirely different standards of value, we cannot judge everything in the world by our own values alone. You and I both understand this, which is why you couldn’t answer my question immediately.”
Probably.
“But I don’t think people in the past agonized over this sort of question so much.”
Probably.
These days, information is practically there for the taking. But a hundred years ago—no, even ten years ago—the information you could obtain was limited. Go back to the Warring States period or the Heian period: were they more hesitant about their choices than we are? Even if they wanted to choose, their options must have been limited.
Increasing diversity may increase freedom of choice, but if it leaves us agonizing over what to choose, wouldn’t that be a drawback of the choices diversity brings? When people lack information and don’t know what to choose, surely they choose what most other people choose. That turns the whole thing upside down. Instead of diversification, you get concentration at two poles—in other words, the homogenization of values.
—The Surprise of Haruhi Suzumiya, first part, Taiwanese Chinese edition, amended by the essayist
The loss of meaning for individual human beings (of the following two passages, the second can certainly be read in plot terms: “This era becomes important because Haruhi Suzumiya is in it,” for instance. Yet in context it still feels very abrupt. Some researchers therefore see it as a point of entry into Fujiwara’s motives; I am more inclined to think Tanigawa is using Sasaki to express his thoughts about our age):
“I think that even if single-celled organisms or bacteria acquired intelligence equivalent to ours, they would surely have the same reaction: ‘What on earth is this bipedal mammal thinking when it acts?’ What do human beings (人間) live for? Perhaps that would astonish them before they even asked, ‘What does humankind (人類) intend to do with this planet and this world?’”
However hard I thought about it, I couldn’t work out what I lived for. But I believed that, across humankind, people like me were the overwhelming majority.
—The Surprise of Haruhi Suzumiya, first part, translated into Chinese by the essayist
“Perhaps the problem we face is simply proving the meaning of our existence. Perhaps everyone, whoever they are, is striving only to secure definite proof of their own existence. Whether alien, time traveler, or esper, perhaps each acts on the same single, simple principle: ‘I really exist, and others recognize my existence too.’ Kyon, you recognize that Miss Kuyō, Mr. Fujiwara, and Miss Tachibana are here now, don’t you? Even if they disappeared from here this very instant, you couldn’t forget them, could you? At this moment, they unquestionably exist in this world. Perhaps their only wish is to convey a short, sad message: ‘Don’t forget us.’”
I still didn’t get it. Why did they have to come to this era and do that in front of me? Sure, I would remember their faces and everything they’d said and done till the day I died. So what? I wasn’t some court official obsessed with keeping records, or the editor-in-chief of a history book. If they wanted to make a fuss, why not go back to Tacitus or Herodotus? Failing that, there must be someone in this era with similar interests.
—The Surprise of Haruhi Suzumiya, first part, Taiwanese Chinese edition, amended by the essayist
Yet the solutions Sasaki chooses for these “postmodern” problems are emphatically “modern”: her rationalist inclinations, her pursuit of meaning, her praise of progress, her preference for grand narratives.
“Good grief. Questions about why people live, or what they live for, are nothing more than Zen riddling. They sound as though they have some conceptual (観念的な) significance, but in fact they mean nothing. Still, if I had to answer, I could only say this: the meaning of my existence is, first, ‘to think,’ and second, ‘to carry thought forward’ (継統する). I will stop thinking only when I die. Conversely, to stop thinking would be no different from dying. At that point the individual (個) who is ‘me’ would disappear, leaving only an animal life.”
Sasaki chuckled softly.
“I want to keep thinking, thinking about everything in this world, until I die.”
And what would be left when all that thinking came to an end? Uh, give me an answer other than having children.
“An excellent question, Kyon, and a very human one. If you want to leave something besides your genes to posterity, to prove that you lived in this age, there is certainly no need to confine yourself to a double helix made of amino acids. Throughout recorded history, we humans have left all kinds of things on Earth. Lavish, enormous monuments; small but epoch-making inventions; technologies at the cutting edge of their time; works of national culture and art; entirely new technological systems; even theories handed down to later generations…”
From her expression, I could tell that Sasaki was making a mental journey across the ages.
“The great historical figures we learn about in world history left their names behind because they did things that earned them the title of great. My mind and body may be small and powerless, but my own thinking might yet give rise to a new concept that survives into the future. To be honest, I really do want to leave something I have brought into being and nurtured to posterity. Something other than DNA, of course.”
That’s some ambition.
“Words or concepts—either would do. If you call that ambition, then it is my only ambition. But I want to accomplish it on my own, without help from aliens, time travelers, or espers. My thoughts belong to me alone, and I don’t want anyone intervening. I want to reach my own conclusions. That is the meaning I have defined for my existence. I want to create original words or concepts that arise from within me, without anyone’s interference or influence. So Miss Kuyō and Mr. Fujiwara are actually obstacles. As for Miss Tachibana… I think we could become good friends who talk about anything. She is my one consolation (救い).”
—The Surprise of Haruhi Suzumiya, first part, Taiwanese Chinese edition, amended by the essayist
It is not difficult to see in this passage—especially the parts I have bolded—that Sasaki’s answer to the problems of the postmodern period conspicuously brings together Cartesian–Enlightenment rationalism and Lyotard’s “great heroes, great adventures, great voyages, and great goals.”22 Her answer stands in sharp contrast to postmodern currents that oppose rationalism and grand narratives, and bears a strong stamp of modernity. Certainly, as Azuma argues in his defense, a story “brimming with magnificent flights of imagination” does not refute “the decline of grand narratives.”23 But the forceful, almost manifesto-like speech above is at least a vocal act of resistance. This is not overinterpretation on my part. On the contrary, Tanigawa laid the groundwork for this resistance early on: in Indignation, he names Sakanaka’s dog “Rousseau,” repeatedly stressing that it has “a very philosophical name” and is “named after a French philosopher”; he also chooses Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit as the only philosophy book among “Yuki Nagato’s Hundred Books.”
This is my deeper reason for opposing Haruhi’s classification as sekaikei. Looking at an anti-postmodern work through a postmodern perspective is undoubtedly a more profound irony than calling a non-sekaikei work sekaikei.
A possible objection arises here: the passages quoted above express only Sasaki’s views. At most, we can call Sasaki “anti-postmodern”; what entitles us to extend that term to the whole series, or even its author? True, I have previously analyzed in detail the exceptionally strong connection between Sasaki’s views and the series’ “central idea.”24 But to a general reader, I am still characterizing an entire work on the basis of a few speeches by one character. I will therefore make the argument again from another direction: the Haruhi series’ character as detective fiction.
As Lu Ye writes in “The Dialectic of the Extraordinary and the Everyday: ‘Golden Age’ Detective Fiction and Modernity,” detective fiction is “both one of modernity’s new products and its symbol and evidence”; “to ‘defend detective fiction’ is, in substance, to defend ‘modern life.’” More specifically:
Both the enchantment and the disenchantment of everyday life are modern acts. A puzzle initially arises from an imbalance of information, but solving it leads people to discover that all the answers were there before their eyes from the start. The “dialectic of the everyday and the extraordinary” produced the Golden Age’s narrative principle of “absolute fair play”: the author must not withhold information from the reader; reader and detective alike are confined within a limited narrative and begin at the same starting line. This dialectic clearly embodies Enlightenment reason’s immense self-confidence: however many readings there may be, where there is a problem, there is an answer.
This is not hard to understand. The structure of honkaku, or classical puzzle-oriented detective fiction—“finding the one and only truth through facts and reasoning”—is precisely the mortal enemy of postmodern relativism and anti-rationalism. Haruhi offers direct statements to this effect: “Only by assembling all the information, adding theoretical thought and a rich imagination, and mixing in a little intuition can we arrive at the one and only truth”—Koizumi’s words in “Wandering Shadow.” It also embodies this view of a single truth indirectly in three typical detective stories: “Remote Island Syndrome,” “Where Did the Cat Go?,” and “Tsuruya’s Challenge.”
Let us begin with “Remote Island Syndrome,” the series’ first detective story. Its first half is thoroughly conventional: a locked-room murder in an isolated, closed-circle setting. The second half is not. Koizumi first announces a “false truth”; Haruhi comes up with a “second truth”; finally Kyon exposes the whole thing as a performance staged by the Organization, which is the ultimate “truth.” This produces a “triple solution” structure. Perhaps it was this unusual structure that led Kyoto Animation to adapt the story as a parody of honkaku mystery anime.
But was that really Tanigawa’s intention? Sixteen years later, the publication of “Tsuruya’s Challenge” gave us an opportunity to rethink and reinterpret “Remote Island Syndrome.” At the beginning of “Tsuruya’s Challenge,” Koizumi and T have a lengthy discussion of the “late-Queen problem,” named for Ellery Queen. Put simply, this problem is that, because a detective inside a mystery cannot establish whether the clues are complete, correct, and so forth, “within the world of the work, a person who is ‘the only logically possible culprit’ is a logical impossibility.” This is closely connected to the subject of this section, “the postmodern.” Rintarō Norizuki, regarded as the father of the late-Queen problem, once wrote: “Ideas such as ‘shin honkaku’ [New Orthodox detective fiction], which emerged in the late 1980s, rode the deconstructionist current that followed ‘New Academism.’ …Thus, to examine Queen’s problem of ‘formalization’ here is also to question our own footing. In that sense, one of this essay’s principal tasks is to establish an alibi for the foundations of shin honkaku.”25 As Azuma explains, “Shin honkaku writers reject worldly stories close to reality [the essayist 真紅様’s interpolation: roughly equivalent to the ‘decline of grand narratives’ above], create the symbolic character of the great detective, place their stories on fantastical stages such as mansions, locked rooms, and isolated islands, and devote themselves to the logical character of puzzles.” Norizuki’s point, meanwhile, is that “shin honkaku’s self-contradiction is not merely a problem for detective fiction: it must be connected to the problems of intellectual life as a whole since the 1980s. And this intellectual problem since the 1980s is the loss of philosophy’s grounds for existence.” Thus shin honkaku is a body of work with pronounced postmodern characteristics, and the late-Queen problem, which questions its cherished “logical character,” is itself a postmodern problem.
Norizuki did not solve this problem head-on. On the contrary, a female character in his work even tells the detective to stop thinking about the grounds for the great detective’s existence and first become an independent person. Azuma was tremendously excited by this treatment. He immediately followed the psychoanalytic line to discover the late-Queen problem’s roots in the so-called “absence of the father” and “hypertrophied motherhood,” and to conclude that Norizuki had solved it by “no longer living with ‘Mother.’”26 Tanigawa’s approach is entirely different. Through Koizumi and T, he points out that an author can have characters issue a “Challenge to the Reader,” thereby actually setting a puzzle for the reader. In other words, drawing on a tacit understanding between author and reader, the author, acting as author, guarantees that there is one and only one truth to uncover and that reasoning can uncover it. This “guarantee” applies not only to Haruhi but to a broad range of detective fiction centered on solving puzzles. Tanigawa here chooses to face the destructive force of the late-Queen problem directly, rebuilding detective fiction’s foundations on puzzles, clues, and answers—as the Mystery Club and SOS Brigade demonstrate in “Tsuruya’s Challenge”—and forcefully defending “the game of wits between author and reader.” All this has the same structure as Sasaki’s remarks above: a modern answer to a postmodern problem.
With this understanding, let us return to “Remote Island Syndrome.” Within its “triple solution,” the first and second truths are “false” and “true” in relation to the detective story’s “stipulated answer”: whatever agrees with the answer set by the author is true, and whatever does not is false. But the first two truths and the third are “false” and “true” in relation to the “world”: whatever agrees with the actual state of affairs in that world is true, and whatever does not is false. Through these three progressively deeper truths, Tanigawa shows that the first pair of “true” and “false” is guaranteed by there being a “stipulated answer,” and in turn by the second pair holding true. The foundations of detective fiction are thereby reduced to the objectivity of the world and the uniqueness of truth. This is still clearer in “Where Did the Cat Go?,” where everyone knows from the start that this is a detective game designed by the Organization, and reasons on that basis. The rule that “however many readings there may be, where there is a problem, there is an answer”—the structure of setting a problem and solving it—can be called a credo running through the entire Haruhi series, and a message Tanigawa wants to convey to us readers. In “Nagaru Tanigawa’s Challenge: A Complete Analysis of The Intuition of Haruhi Suzumiya,”27 I applied this message to the series itself, arguing that Tanigawa wants readers to solve the many puzzles he has buried within it. Now I realize that the message applies not only within Haruhi but can extend into the wider world. The view quoted in “Tsuruya’s Challenge”—“the impossibility of reasoning belongs, rather, to the real world”—likewise suggests that the late-Queen problem and its answer have force beyond detective fiction alone. Of course, such a world could never be the “world” of the postmodern context. Rather, critics holed up within that context will never be able to understand such a world.
3 The Haruhi series and “cultural studies”
Although “Hiroki Azuma, a researcher of Japanese culture” can be parsed simply as someone researching a particular culture, “cultural studies” is also an academic term—
It originated in the 1960s with a group of British scholars—Richard Hoggart (1918–), Raymond Williams (1921–1988), and Stuart Hall (1932–)—who expanded the meaning of culture beyond high culture to encompass the leisure activities of the contemporary working class and young people, popular entertainment, and broadcast media. Their inquiries emphasized the interrelations between cultural phenomena and factors such as politics, economics, and social change.28
Here, however, I need “cultural studies” only in the sense of “regarding the whole of a class of objects as a culture, and conducting research from that perspective.” You can call this cultural studies in the broad sense. Its possible applications are extremely wide: studies of guichu, the culture of rhythmically edited and looped video remixes, such as “Online Video Culture from the Perspective of Youth Subculture: The Case of Guichu Videos”; studies of danmaku, the culture of comments scrolling over videos, such as “Examining Danmaku Websites and Their Users: A Youth-Subculture Perspective”; studies of cosplay, such as “Carnival through Role-Playing: A Cultural Study of the Youth Cosplay Craze”; and, of course, ACGN cultural studies, our subject here. This last means research that takes particular works or types of work as cases viewed at the scale of “ACGN culture” as a whole—or “light-novel culture,” “galgame culture” (games centered on interactions with female characters), and so on. Such a perspective dictates that researchers attend less to “the work” than to “works within a cultural network.” They must consequently strive for a comprehensive, higher-level understanding of intricate, interwoven phenomena. This necessarily produces a strong tendency toward theorization, whether through invoking existing theories or creating new ones. The concept of “sekaikei” discussed above is one such act of “theorization.”
“Theory” requires some clarification here. To my mind, any systematic explanation of phenomena can be called a theory. The “theorization” that necessarily follows from “cultural studies,” then, does not have to reach the intimidating heights of “Lyotard’s postmodern theory” or “Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory” to qualify. Let me illustrate this with a passage from the well-known light-novel critic Qilu Xianzhi (“Crossroads Prophet”):
What a work’s Tieba forum usually does is something like epigraphy or philological exegesis. Of course, you can’t say these things are useless: when you forget some detail of a work’s premises or plot, you need to ask those people. But… personally, I think that if you’ve actually forgotten a premise or plot point while writing an article, that suggests the thing wasn’t very important.
Sorting through a plot in the manner of a work’s Tieba forum requires the assumption that the work is sacred and inviolable. Posts written on that basis naturally cannot be called “criticism.”
Some “Lacanians” on Zhihu who can’t open their mouths without mentioning Žižek represent the opposite extreme. Their articles make so much sense—so much sense that I begin to imagine they could write their criticism without even reading the light novels.29
Qilu Xianzhi is clearly very unhappy with light-novel research that invokes Lacanian psychoanalysis at every turn. But is this dissatisfaction with all “cultural studies,” all “theorization”? No. At most, he opposes “theories of the academic establishment,” not the theories he constructs himself. Anyone familiar with this prophet will surely know his formulations such as the “accessory heroine”30 and “the three unities of the progress bar,”31 as well as the war of words between Qing zhi Wuyu and Lab on Roof triggered by his theory of “attributes and human nature.”32 The reason is that, although he seems not to regard himself as one of those “literary experts” who “analyze and interpret light novels from an overarching perspective,” he nevertheless takes a perspective at the scale of “light-novel culture,” or even “two-dimensional culture”—the broader anime-centered cultural sphere. The essay he enthusiastically recommends, “A Methodology for Reviewing Light Novels (VII),”33 supposedly representing the ideas of his “school,” opens with the question “What is the essence of the light novel?” It also contains such ambitious pronouncements as “We rank light novels so that the kingdom of light novels may approach perfection” and “What you must record and embellish is an era, not an individual.” His research, then—unless it is merely an offhand response to something he has read—must likewise be steeped in theory. His theories differ from those of the Lacans and Azumas only in how refined or crude they are, not in kind.
The defects of this “theorizing” form of “cultural studies” should now be quite obvious. (Please note: I am speaking only of theories within “ACGN cultural studies,” not necessarily extending the argument to every theory in every field. Some philosophers have indeed opposed all theories or even all concepts, holding, for instance, that they are merely “designations/conceptual posits,” useful only conventionally.) Cultural researchers’ sequence of “phenomena → description of phenomena → explanation of phenomena [theory]” is vulnerable at both stages. On the one hand, most cultural researchers spend their time reading large numbers of works or even learning large numbers of theories. They consequently cannot know any particular work in detail, and often arrive at biased or outright mistaken impressions. Both Azuma’s claim that “Nagaru Tanigawa’s The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya series, a major bestseller of the mid-2000s subsequently adapted into a well-received anime, is also often classified as sekaikei. …Such works do not regard the depiction of society as necessary. What matters most is the basic configuration: aliens invade, the world is destroyed. As for what the aliens look like, how humanity responds, and how the world meets its end, the treatment of these details is astonishingly slapdash”34 and Qilu Xianzhi’s claim that “In Haruhi, Haruhi holds almost 100 percent of the discursive power. Every part of the plot serves to develop her character, and the supporting characters exist entirely to observe her. This is especially true of the male protagonist, Kyon: his significance in the work consists entirely in supplying a viewpoint from which to observe Haruhi”35 demonstrate the point. On the other hand, theory naturally operates at a higher level than phenomena, so we cannot demand a hundred-percent fit; a rough fit earns a passing grade. But ACGN cultural researchers habitually apply theories developed in other disciplines and fields mechanically to ACGN works, putting that fit in serious jeopardy. Worse still, distortions from the first stage are inherited by the second. If researchers struggle even to describe phenomena accurately, how can they accurately explain them on that basis?
I am not the first to question the “cultural studies” approach in this way. Seven years ago, in late 2014, someone asked on Zhihu, the question-and-answer platform: “Where is the frontier of ACG cultural research today? What is the current state of ACG cultural research in China?”36 In response, nbht launched a broadside against the entire field. He called Azuma “an anime fan who doesn’t watch anime,” and denounced researchers for “hiding in their holes, unwilling to face present reality,” “merely peering into the room through a window,” treating “books this trashy as gospel,” and “mostly just repeating the same old mistaken views.” Guo Wenfang (@Macro kuo), meanwhile, singled out nbht’s “God’s-eye view from which he takes shots at everyone, prizing production techniques (storyboards, key animation) and despising cultural analysis.” After surveying Eiji Ōtsuka, Hiroki Azuma, and “Tamaki Saitō” (a note: there is no researcher named “Tamaki Saitō” with the surname written 齐藤. Guo presumably means 斋藤; both become Saitō in romanization. To this day, not one person in the comments has pointed out this substitution of 齐藤 for 斋藤), he called on people to “show less contempt for theories you don’t understand, and do more yourselves—start writing DIY criticism.” Clearly, the dispute over whether “cultural studies” is a desirable approach has a long history. Seven years later, the prevailing mood in the community has shifted from “contempt for theory” to “actively studying theory, with the aim of applying it in articles.” Lab on Roof’s “Social Science and Philosophy Translations” and “SEP Translations” sections are one example. At this point, we might examine what Guo Wenfang’s “DIY criticism” has actually achieved.
Let us begin with “The ‘Guardians of Two-Dimensional Culture’ in the Post-‘Otaku’ Age: The Poetics of ‘World-Creation Narratives’ and the Left-Wing Face of ‘Sekaikei,’”37 by Lin Yunke, who holds a doctorate in literary theory from East China Normal University and is an assistant researcher in Nankai University’s School of Literature. I came across it while investigating whether Haruhi is sekaikei. Let us set aside, for the moment, such glaring errors as “Clannad is translated into Chinese as The Big Dango Family”—all seven letters of “CLANNAD” should be capitalized, and The Big Dango Family is merely the name of the anime’s ending theme—or “Kyoto Animation’s 2017 work Hyouka,” which actually dates from 2012. Consider the passage on Haruhi:
This work has virtually no plot to speak of. Its content amounts to nothing more than the male protagonist and the espers satisfying Suzumiya’s various absurd “world-creation impulses” to prevent the present world from collapsing. It brings radically different attitudes toward the “world” together: on the one hand, it decisively affirms the absolute legitimacy of fiction and world-creation, issuing the famous declaration of “two-dimensional culture” that “anyone who seeks a sense of reality in a fictional story must have something wrong with their head”; on the other, all its fictions ultimately serve Suzumiya’s emotional demands on the ordinary human Kyon. This anime, arguably the one most closely corresponding to “database consumption,” expresses the following resolve: only when the “world-creation impulse” is fully liberated, and everyday life’s fictional potential fully realized, is the world of Dasein at its most vivid and complete.
I find it hard to imagine “the Haruhi series has no plot” and “this essay is dedicated to the memory of those killed in the Kyoto Animation arson attack” coming from the same article—unless the eight episodes of August in the 2009 anime had driven its author out of his senses. With such a poor understanding of Haruhi (and this seems not to be an isolated case: another article I found about Haruhi and sekaikei, “From Hayao Miyazaki to Makoto Shinkai: What Happened to Japanese Animated Film?,”38 by Gao Yuanyuan, a teacher at Hebei Normal University, actually summarizes Disappearance as “a romance between an ordinary person and a time traveler”!), all he can do is feebly slap on Continental philosophical jargon such as “Dasein” and Azuma’s “database consumption,” a theory that does not fit the series particularly well either. I find it very hard to see what such “Haruhi research” offers the series or its fans.
If these examples are confined to Haruhi and therefore unrepresentative, let us consider one from elsewhere: “The Core and Contradictions of EVA: Neon Genesis Evangelion,”39 by @kokeihou, who describes himself as “mainly working in cultural sociology and cultural studies; formerly a teacher at a private cram school in Japan.” He opens with:
Although the work makes use of outward forms such as robots and Angels, and seemingly complicated concepts such as theology, whether you understand things like the story’s chronology or the shapes of the weapons is actually irrelevant to interpreting its core. …The core of eva has never been based on theology; theology was added, rather, to explain the story’s premises. Its core is very simple. But first we must understand the philosophical and intellectual themes of our age, especially the core of this work: Lacanian psychoanalysis. Once we understand that, everything will fall into place.
This establishes the article’s basic approach: interpreting eva through Lacanian psychoanalysis. Lacan’s theories have become increasingly widespread in recent years, even gradually becoming an essential ingredient in the jargon of online political punditry. The approach is hardly new; one example is the 2014 post on Baidu’s eva Tieba forum, “Flowers in the Mirror, the Moon in the Water: Rei Ayanami and the Mirror Stage.”40 But eva is a fairly complicated work, not something Lacan’s theories alone can encompass. Even @kokeihou recognizes that, under his interpretation, at least its theological dimension remains entirely untouched. This is the problem I mentioned earlier: “how well theory fits phenomena.” His solution, however, is simply to declare that whatever Lacanian theory cannot accommodate is “irrelevant.” Like many of his colleagues, even as he “brings out” new content through interpretation, he “interprets away” much of what was already there. Perhaps he sees this as “distinguishing the primary from the secondary” or “keeping the good and discarding the bad.” Ultimately, though, he is cutting the foot to fit the shoe. (Let me tell a contrasting story. I once discussed whether Haruhi was sekaikei with another fan. I asked: “If Haruhi is sekaikei, why does Tanigawa spend so much time on questions like ‘what is the world actually like,’ and why does he write so many hardcore detective stories?” The fan thought this was merely Tanigawa’s personal taste. I replied: “We can’t extract the parts that fit the definition of sekaikei and call them ‘Haruhi,’ then call everything else ‘personal taste’—especially when the latter takes up far more of the work than the former.”) Not only that: @kokeihou also seems to think that applying theories such as Lacanian psychoanalysis as he does is the only correct route to interpretation. Other readings “can neither analyze the story’s text through literary criticism nor understand its outward forms through the context of Japanese society,” and are therefore “subjective,” “without substance,” or even “irresponsible”:
Without understanding the phenomenology of the body, it is difficult to appreciate the intellectual foundations of Kill la Kill; without understanding feminist currents, you cannot appreciate what moves us in Sailor Moon or even Little Witch Academia. Without understanding postmodernism and philosophical currents, you cannot begin to reach the intellectual foundations behind anime such as the SF of Satoshi Kon and Katsuhiro Ōtomo, Puella Magi Madoka Magica, or this eva. Of course, it doesn’t matter if you don’t understand: you can still enjoy them enormously, feel your blood pumping, and that’s fine too. The danger is when certain people use their own pleasure and explanations to define the meaning of an entire work, then limit everyone else’s imagination and sense of self through media dissemination. …If there’s no intellectual substance, that’s absolutely fine! You can immerse yourself in the story and have your own unique interpretation. But if you want others to agree, first go and study until you share the author’s intellectual footing and historical frame of reference!
This is the extreme expression of cultural researchers’ lofty perspective. From their vantage point over “ACGN culture,” they look down on individual works, look down on their authors, and even look down on the entire culture. Naturally, ordinary readers do not escape being looked down on either. (Qilu Xianzhi, mentioned earlier, has even made the astonishing remark: “If your university isn’t at least a 985 university, you’re practically illiterate, aren’t you?”41 “985” designates an elite group of Chinese universities.) Yet how much of value does this lofty perspective actually give us, beyond a short assignment for a course on “Lacanian Psychoanalysis” and a crowd of ordinary fans satisfied with an overview full of yawning omissions? (For example, @kokeihou’s article published a few days ago, “Overcoming Sekaikei: A Brief Intellectual History of Japanese Anime and Manga,”42 tries to summarize “the literary and intellectual history of Japanese anime and manga” as “grand narratives → sekaikei → everyday-life works.” This summary is, of course, another old chestnut; I first encountered it in “Farewell to the Apocalypse: A Comprehensive Reassessment of Japan’s Age of Fiction.”43)
Back to Haruhi. Almost a year ago, when I began thinking seriously about the series, I consulted a great many sources and accumulated a great many questions. Why, when “Is Haruhi God?” is plainly disputed between time travelers and espers, do the overwhelming majority of articles simply assume the espers are right, even comparing Haruhi to the biblical God?44 Why do introductions to the series all sound alike, the only plots they discuss being Melancholy, the eight episodes of August, and the Disappearance film? Why do those praising it dwell so heavily on its popularity at the time and its influence on later works, without even understanding what makes the series itself “god-tier”? Why are there so many fundamentally mistaken descriptions of Haruhi? Defenses such as “an individual anime or manga work has little value in itself anyway; in such cases, having the Six Classics interpret me is far more meaningful than my interpreting the Six Classics”45 do not work here: “having the Six Classics interpret me” concerns interpretation, not description. In my essay of over ten thousand Chinese characters last October, “Is Haruhi Suzumiya God? On Science-Fiction and School-Story Interpretations,”46 I traced these problems to the opposition between the “science-fiction interpretation” and the “school-story interpretation.” I argued that they arose because researchers were accustomed to treating high-school stories as the “essence” of light novels, and wrongly imposed that view on Haruhi. But we can dig further into the causes. As I now see it, these are simply concrete manifestations of the two defects of “cultural studies”: on the one hand, these researchers have not read Haruhi carefully; on the other, their excessive infatuation with “theorization” has distorted their vision. “Sekaikei,” “nichijō-kei” or everyday-life works, “kūki-kei” or atmosphere-centered works, “school-club stories,” or whatever other label—they are accustomed only to discussing the same old subjects, such as “the everyday versus the non-everyday in Haruhi,” over and over within the theoretical frameworks these labels designate. It is hardly surprising, then, that “everyone hypes it, but nobody knows what makes it great.”47
What they fail to realize is that great works differ in what makes them great, just as characters each have their own moe—and neither can be encompassed by Azuma’s “database” of “moe-elements.” That is precisely why, in an age when some believe “a literary critic must first be an ordinary reader”48 and others believe “a literary critic must also be a philosopher,”49 we must stop and ask: what kind of ACGN research do we actually need?