This essay was a prizewinning entry at the Rags Drum 2021 Eve Festival and was 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 twentieth-century philosophy is that logical structure does not usually surface in “how things seem.” The theory of descriptions, the theory of speech acts, and the theory of intentionality are all cases in which you take “how things seem” as your point of departure, but must then dig deeper to bring out the real underlying structure.
—John Searle, “The Limits of Phenomenology”
1 Is the Haruhi Series “Sekaikei”? It Is, and It Isn’t
We are always sticking labels of every kind onto a work; classification of this sort, we are told, better illuminates the “commonalities” among works.2 For the Haruhi series, one common label is “sekaikei” (セカイ系). According to Hiroki Azuma, “sekaikei” refers to the following class of works:
Works in which a small relational problem (“you and me”), centered on the protagonist (me) and the heroine (you), is directly linked—without any concrete intermediate term in between—to abstract grand problems such as “the crisis of the world” or “the end of this world.”3
In The Birth of Gamelike Realism (Gēmuteki riarizumu no tanjō, subtitled “The Animalizing Postmodern 2”), Azuma restated this definition and remarked:
… works such as Nagaru Tanigawa’s The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya all display the characteristics of the sekaikei character novel.
This is not the only formulation of the definition of “sekaikei,” but the alternatives do not differ much from one another. On this point, see the several other formulations collected in Satoshi Maejima’s What Is Sekaikei? (Sekaikei to wa nani ka), including:
A group of works centered on the relationship between the story’s male protagonist (me) and the heroine he loves (you), in which a small, everyday problem (you and me) is plainly and directly connected—without any concrete (social) context (intermediate term) in between—to abstract, non-everyday grand problems such as “the crisis of the world” or “the end of the world.”
Also called “Post-Evangelion Syndrome”: setting aside nation and society, these works grasp as “the world” the range reached by “one’s own feelings” and “self-consciousness.” The series of otaku-oriented works possessing this kind of worldview are called “sekaikei”—works such as Voices of a Distant Star and Saikano.4
We may therefore assume—roughly5—that when different people say “Haruhi is sekaikei” or something similar (this includes titling a review of the Disappearance film “A Sekaikei Love Story,”6 or calling Nagaru Tanigawa “an author with an extremely strong sekaikei consciousness”7), the word “sekaikei” is being used in the same sense as the definitions quoted above.
One purpose of this essay is to work out whether the Haruhi series really is a “sekaikei” work. (It is worth pointing out that Yutaka Yamamoto is reported to have said the following at Otakon 2009: “I don’t want to go deep into the definition of sekaikei, but Tanigawa holds that it [Haruhi] is not sekaikei. The SOS Brigade is a concept opposed to sekaikei; it stands between the real and the illusory and adds a distinctive seasoning to the story. I agree with the view that Haruhi is not sekaikei.”8 But even if Nagaru Tanigawa really thinks so, that alone will not persuade those who believe the Haruhi series is sekaikei. Moreover, some might say that if what we are discussing is the Haruhi anime, then the words of the original novels’ author have no value as reference—although, as we shall see below, on the single point of “sekaikei or not,” the anime and the original novels do not differ much.)
For ease of analysis, I have rewritten the definition of “sekaikei” as the conjunction of the following three conditions:
(1) It centers on the relationship between the protagonists;
(2) “The world (its crisis, …)” is used merely as a means of presenting (1), and is abstract rather than concrete (“‘sekaikei’ works usually do not come with a very complete depiction of their worldview”9; a more radical way of putting it: “‘Aliens invade, the world is destroyed’—this composition is what matters most, while the details of what the aliens look like, how humanity responds, and how the world goes to its destruction are astonishingly slapdash”10);
(3) It lacks any portrayal of the layer of “society” between the individual and “the world” (in technical terms, it is “desocialized”).
(It is worth noting that these three conditions correspond respectively to the three domains of “individual,” “society,” and “world.” These three domains are said to stand in some marvelous correspondence with Lacan’s Imaginary, Symbolic, and Real11—a point we will come back to below.)
Among the stories large and small across the twelve volumes of the Haruhi novels, a few seem to satisfy all three conditions in textbook fashion: “The Boredom of Haruhi Suzumiya” (I use The Boredom to refer to the third volume of the novels and “The Boredom of Haruhi Suzumiya” to refer to that volume’s first story, and likewise below), the ending of The Melancholy, the whole of The Disappearance, and “Endless Eight.” Of these, the story “The Boredom of Haruhi Suzumiya” is the most typical of all: Haruhi (the heroine) is disappointed by Kyon’s (the protagonist’s) performance in a baseball game (“a small relational problem”), which directly triggers the expansion of closed space (an abstract world crisis—unlike The Melancholy, “The Boredom of Haruhi Suzumiya” contains no concrete description of closed space whatsoever), and in the end the problem is resolved by Nagato’s superhuman powers (and not by “society”). For the other three stories, a similar “plot-summary” operation seems able to verify that they, too, satisfy all three conditions at once.
But an attentive reader will notice at once that these four stories all sit in the relatively “early” part of the Haruhi series as a whole. “The Boredom of Haruhi Suzumiya” and The Melancholy were the first two stories of the entire series to be published; “Endless Eight” came next; and The Disappearance, the last of them to appear, came out in August 2004—a mere year after The Melancholy. The somewhat “later” stories (taking The Disappearance provisionally as the dividing line), by contrast, generally have trouble satisfying the three conditions above.
First, the “world crisis” (or any other world-scale grand problem) seems never to have taken the stage again. Even the “crisis” facing the SOS Brigade in “Snowy Mountain Syndrome” is confined in extent to that snowbound mountain villa and in scale to the members of the SOS Brigade—nowhere remotely near the level of “the world”; as for “the student council repossesses the clubroom” in “Editor-in-Chief, Straight Ahead!” or “Asahina is kidnapped” in The Intrigues, these count as “world crises” even less.
Here a possible rebuttal arises: doesn’t a “world crisis” still appear in The Dissociation and The Surprise? As Koizumi says:
This is the result of Suzumiya-san exercising her power unconsciously. In order to set up a line of defense, she made the world split in two: on one side, the world as it should be; on the other, a world that should not exist. Though she is entirely unaware of it, she nonetheless harbored a certain sense of crisis, and she has protected this world. (Itsuki Koizumi, the novel The Surprise of Haruhi Suzumiya [Part Two], Taiwanese edition)
Yet even setting aside Yasumi Watahashi’s rebuttal of this talk of a “world split” (“they merely have slightly different stretches of history; the time and the world are still the same”), from the standpoint of the writing alone, the real crises Tanigawa presents to the reader are “Nagato falls ill,” “Asakura comes back,” “Haruhi’s divine power is about to be transferred to Sasaki”—none of them crises at the level of “the world.” He makes no attempt to portray the “split” as “world-scale” (Koizumi’s remarks quoted above clearly do not count as “portrayal”), and never even writes the “split” itself up as a “problem” (compare how the “looping of the world” is written in “Endless Eight”). We should not, then, take the “splitting of the world” in The Dissociation and The Surprise to fall under the kind of “world crisis” meant in the definition of “sekaikei.”
Second, the relationships between the characters are not the story’s only center, precisely because “the world,” too, is treated as an object of depiction in its own right. One striking manifestation: the “theories of the world” held by the three factions—aliens, time travelers, and espers—are all deepened further. (The whole of “Wandering Shadow” and the whole of The Intrigues can be read as supplements to the alien and time-traveler theories; the esper theory receives less space, but it does include the introduction of “Gnosticism” in The Surprise, arguably the greatest breakthrough on the esper theory since The Sigh—see my earlier essay “A Hymn to Humanity: A Framework for Reading The Dissociation of Haruhi Suzumiya and The Surprise.”12) All this shows how much ink and care the author has spent on depicting the laws of “the world”—for if “what the world is like” can have any concrete rather than abstract content at all, one major part of it is the lawlike element, not the cosmic monsters who take the stage one after another. What kind of world, exactly, is that “world” which serves as the stage of the Haruhi series? Which (natural or supernatural) regularities does it obey? The posing of this question, and the attempts to answer it, reach their peak in The Surprise, in the conversation between the older Asahina and Fujiwara about “rewriting the future.” This shows that “the world” here is not discharging the task of an abstract “place where the crisis happens”; on the contrary, its concrete configuration is precisely one of the centers of what the work sets out to depict. (For contrast, compare the “Tarsians” and the “UN Space Army” in Voices of a Distant Star, a work universally acknowledged as representative sekaikei: they come much closer to being abstract devices charged with the plot tasks of “triggering the crisis” and “responding to the crisis.”)
Finally, even the easiest of the three conditions to satisfy—“desocialization” (creators are, after all, under no obligation to consciously reflect “society” in every single work)—has become hard to satisfy. From the Tamaru brothers driving a police car in The Intrigues to the student council president installed with a colossal outlay of funds in “Editor-in-Chief, Straight Ahead!,” the Agency’s organizational workings at the level of society break the surface more and more (an entertaining fan story, “Four Moments in Haruhi,”13 lays this before our eyes); and the detailed backstory given to T’s and Tsuruya’s family backgrounds in “Tsuruya’s Challenge” (possessed of wealth and position, and investing in research and development across all kinds of fields) goes further, pushing the element of “capital” from backstage to front stage and hinting that a fourth power—beyond science, magic, and religion—is about to join the plot. If a view like “the involvement of the town-mayor father in Your Name touches on society, so strictly speaking it doesn’t count as sekaikei”14 can escape ridicule, then by a similar method we can argue that the Haruhi series is not sekaikei.
“Fine, you have a point. But on your division, we could perfectly well say that early Haruhi is sekaikei and later Haruhi is not; and since this division almost coincides with the division between ‘already animated’ and ‘not yet animated,’ why not keep it simple and just claim that the Haruhi anime is sekaikei and the novels are not!”
—This is indeed a fine countermove, and it reminds us that we must face head-on the question: is the Haruhi series sekaikei in its early period and not in its later period, or was it never sekaikei at all, this merely growing more obvious the later the series runs? My answer, of course, is the latter. Let us examine the following two passages from The Sigh—which belongs beyond doubt to the early period, and exists in both the anime and the novels:
“About the things Koizumi-kun says—um, it might be better not to trust them too much… When I say that, it sounds as though I have something against Koizumi-kun…15 um, I don’t like that either, but…”
“You mean the business about Haruhi being God?”
If that was what she meant, I wasn’t going to believe it anyway.
“I, um… I think differently. That is, um… differently from Koizumi-kun’s interpretation.”
Asahina let out a breath and raised her eyes to look at me.
“Suzumiya-san undoubtedly has the power to change this ‘present’ (この『現在』). But I don’t think it is a power that changes the structure of the world. This world has been like this from the very beginning. It was not created by Suzumiya-san.”
Come to think of it… her view is the exact opposite of Koizumi’s.
“I think Nagato-san sees it differently as well.”
…
“For me, Asahina-san’s view is easier to understand than Koizumi’s.”
Asahina gave a faint smile. If a sweet bean could smile, I thought, it would probably feel just like this?
“Mm, thank you. But I myself have no complaint against Koizumi-kun. Please understand that too.”
Having delivered this delicate remark, she glanced up at me, then turned and left as if fleeing. (The novel The Sigh of Haruhi Suzumiya, Taiwanese edition, with emendations)
“Itsuki Koizumi and Mikuru Asahina have taken on different missions with respect to Haruhi Suzumiya. They will never accept each other’s interpretation. For each of them, the other’s theory can only shake the very foundation of their own existence.”
Wait—Koizumi said he only came into his powers three years ago.
Nagato answered my question at once:
“No one can guarantee that what Itsuki Koizumi says is true.” (The novel The Sigh of Haruhi Suzumiya, Taiwanese edition)
From these two passages we can draw three conclusions:
(1) The “theories” of the three factions—aliens, time travelers, espers—stand in substantive (and not merely verbal) conflict. The three different theories of the world and of Haruhi’s power offered by the three factions in The Melancholy might leave one feeling that “these are just three different ways of putting the same thing”; The Sigh, however, tells us explicitly that the time travelers’ and the espers’ theories, at least, cannot be reconciled, and that Kyon—and we readers—can accept at most one of them. (We can even go a step further: at most one of the two theories is correct. For unlike the faithful of the coherence theory of truth and of pragmatism, what Kyon cares about is not merely “an explanation of what has happened to me that sounds rather plausible,” but “the correct answer.”16)
(2) As for the “theoretical conflict” described in (1), the author hopes we will not understand it as “a device for expressing conflicts in the characters’ relationships.” The dialogue between Kyon and Asahina above goes out of its way to remind us that the theoretical conflict and the conflicts of personal relationship exist simultaneously and relatively independently of each other; it is not that one is “appearance” and the other “essence,” or the “core.”17
(3) This point is a natural corollary of (1) above: the theories must not be treated as mere worldbuilding. The three factions’ theories are not one and the same piece of background lore repeated three times through different characters’ mouths. Rather, the author has given us three different accounts and left us to guess which, if any, describes the world as it really is. “Setting” of this kind no longer deserves the name: it is the greatest mystery in the entire story, the “final riddle” the author has set.
From this we can see the greatest difference between “the world” of the Haruhi series and “the world” of “sekaikei”: in the Haruhi series, the “world” that serves as the stage where events occur is, from the very beginning, not “given” to us directly, absolutely, and transparently; it is not “placed” before our eyes as a “device” serving purely artistic expression, but has been filled by the author with rich, substantial content that awaits our knowing and exploring. Because of this, if we want to take the Haruhi series seriously, we cannot attend only to the characters’ inner lives and their relationships while setting thought about the “world” itself to one side. In this it differs at the root from the genuinely typical “sekaikei” works. (To put it another way: although the Haruhi series and genuine “sekaikei” works can both be read as “sekaikei” by readers, this does not mean they both are “sekaikei,” for the latter intrinsically demand and direct the reader to read them as “sekaikei,” while the former does not—if a reader stubbornly insists that the world is merely “a foil that carries the protagonists so that they may exist,”18 then what he reads will forever be an incomplete, mutilated Haruhi series.)
(There is one further usable piece of evidence: the “aliens” of the Haruhi series are highly atypical “aliens,” and its “espers” all the more so—and Tanigawa is evidently doing this on purpose. The former shows in Sasaki’s wry commentary:
Ever since I was small, I have imagined what aliens would look like if they existed. In novels and manga, the premise is mostly that an alien’s outward form can be observed optically, and that some degree of communication can be achieved—they can grasp the concept of prime numbers, for instance, and convenient tools like translation machines appear all the time. … The Data Overmind over on Nagato-san’s side, or the Sky Canopy Dominion over on Kuyou-san’s side, seem utterly unlike the image of the alien in the easy-to-follow stories human beings make up. (Sasaki, the novel The Surprise of Haruhi Suzumiya [Part One], Taiwanese edition)
The latter shows in Kyon’s:
“You said you have esper powers, right?”
“Mm—I would put it somewhat differently, but simply speaking, that’s not wrong.”
“In that case, show me some of that power, and then I’ll believe what you say. Say, bring this cup of coffee back to its original temperature.”
Koizumi laughed cheerfully. It seemed to be the first time I had seen him laugh from the heart.
“Sorry, I can’t do that. The power I possess is not something so easily understood. In an ordinary state, I have no special abilities at all. Several important conditions must be met at once before I can use my power—I trust you will have a chance to see it in the days to come.” (The novel The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, Taiwanese edition)
“Atypical” premises of this kind also draw part of the reader’s attention to aliens as such—to what it means to be alien—rather than letting it fasten solely on “this Nagato equipped with the ‘alien’ moe-element” or “this Koizumi equipped with the ‘esper’ moe-element.” This certainly discourages a sekaikei reading of the series.
In fact, the “atypical” in the Haruhi series is a topic that deserves an essay of its own; for reasons of space I will not expand on it here.)
Having written this far, let us look back once more at the opening of The Melancholy. Is this passage, written by Nagaru Tanigawa in 2003, an act of following and homage toward “sekaikei,” or one of reflection on it and parody of it? By now, I trust, everyone has an answer of their own.
How I truly wanted to rescue a girl abducted by aliens and shut inside a giant transparent pea pod; or to take up a laser gun and, with wit and courage, drive back time travelers scheming to rewrite history; or to dispatch evil spirits and monsters with a single incantation; or else to fight esper battles against the espers of a secret organization!
Wait, calm down. Supposing I were attacked by aliens or whatever (and so on, omitted), how could I, with no special abilities of any kind, possibly stand against them? And so I fantasized as follows—
One day, a mysterious transfer student suddenly joins my class. He is actually an alien or a time traveler or some such being, and he possesses unknown powers. In time he battles the bad guys, and all I have to do is contrive to get myself swept up in that war. He does the main fighting, while I tag along as his little sidekick. Ahh, that would be wonderful—aren’t I clever!
Or else it goes like this. One day, some uncanny power of my own suddenly awakens—fetching objects through thin air, say, or psychokinesis. And it turns out there are actually many other humans on Earth possessed of esper powers, so naturally there is an organization devoted to taking such people in. Before long, the benevolent organization sends someone to welcome me, and I become one of its members, joining the fight against evil espers who scheme to conquer the world. (Kyon, the novel The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, Taiwanese edition)
2 The Haruhi Series and the “Postmodern Lens”
With this, I have completed my detailed answer to the question of whether the Haruhi series is a “sekaikei” work. But in my view this is only the first step of the research—if, that is, this research is to have any meaning at all. The well-known light novel critic 框框框子 once said: “Rather than listen to you ** wrangle over definitions, I’d sooner define one myself.”19 The remark drew collective mockery at the time, but it undoubtedly contains a certain insight. Today, when “sekaikei,” that fashionable word of its day, has long since gone stale, what exactly is the point of a lengthy disquisition on whether a long-faded work belongs to “sekaikei”? To push further: how much importance does “sekaikei,” a stale concept manufactured by a small handful of people, still carry today? Do we need to care at all whether some particular work will be, or should be, called “sekaikei”?
There may be many possible responses to these doubts, but for me at least, the reason I care about the word “sekaikei” is not only its definition but, still more, the postmodern, cultural-studies lens that it implies and presupposes. And the tension between the Haruhi series and the word “sekaikei” lies not only in the series’ failure to fit the definition of “sekaikei,” but even more in its unsuitedness to the context and perspective on which the word “sekaikei” depends. In this section I will concentrate on “the postmodern,” leaving the discussion of “cultural studies” for the next.
In fact, the word “sekaikei” was itself born of the postmodern context. As Tsukasa Takase puts it:
Azuma (Hiroki) states: “We live in a world in which the Symbolic has fallen, in which any assured sense of reality has vanished, a world filled with falsity. Expressed as a system, this feeling is the time-loop game; expressed as story, it is sekaikei.” The Symbolic mentioned here is a concept of the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan; it can be understood simply as “society, or history, or the nation”—that is, the “grand narrative.”20
“Grand narrative” is a phrase of which Hiroki Azuma is especially fond. In Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals, he writes:
Modernity was an age governed by grand narratives. In postmodernity, however, the grand narratives have come apart, and the integrity of society has consequently declined at speed. In Japan, this decline accelerated further in the seventies—the decade of the end of high economic growth and of the “season of politics,” of the oil crisis and the United Red Army incident.
In The Birth of Gamelike Realism: The Animalizing Postmodern 2 he writes again:
Under the relativist and multiculturalist ethics of the postmodern, even supposing we believe in some “grand” narrative, we cannot hold that everyone else must believe in the same narrative. … In other words, in postmodern discourse, every “grand” narrative can only be regarded as one narrative among diverse others; it is permitted to circulate only as a “small narrative.” Postmodern theory calls this state of affairs “the decline of grand narratives.”
Here Azuma is following the ideas of the French thinker Lyotard in The Postmodern Condition, and from them he derives the logical chain “the postmodern condition -> the decline of grand narratives -> sekaikei works,” which extends from postmodern theory into the field of ACGN research. This is what I call the “postmodern lens.” (Just as postmodern theory was the reigning body of thought in the Western humanities in the second half of the twentieth century, the postmodern lens is the reigning lens in ACGN research today.)
Regrettably, beyond citing Lyotard and Baudrillard, Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals offers no detailed explanation of the word “postmodern,” saying only in general terms that “postmodern” stands for “what appears after the modern,” and that people have a “commonsense intuition” of the cultural rupture of recent years, which they call by the name “postmodern.” I must therefore supplement it 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.
The distinction Eagleton draws here between “postmodernity” and “postmodernism” is one to which Azuma attaches particular weight. In The Birth of Gamelike Realism: The Animalizing Postmodern 2 he stresses repeatedly:
The word “postmodern” refers broadly to the social and cultural changes from the nineteen-seventies onward. The word “postmodernism” refers merely to one current of thought that arose within that era. … This book’s claim that “the light novel is a novel of postmodernity” does not mean that its writers can be conscious of the standing of this postmodern character. … What this book attends to is the mechanism of the postmodern spirit that these works reflect. And this means that we view the postmodern character of the light novel not from the content of the novels themselves, but from the environmental space between novel and novel.
Here Azuma adopts a rather cunning maneuver. He declares that “even if a writer has no self-conscious postmodernism, his work is born in, and dwells within, the postmodern environment, and so remains a work of postmodernity”—which licenses him to project the postmodern lens displayed above, quite legitimately, onto any light novel whatsoever (picking out a few and calling them “sekaikei” is one instance of this projection), regardless of whether the novel’s content or its author’s intentions contain any explicit postmodernist position; and in this way he dissolves the charge that “work so-and-so has such-and-such content and is therefore unsuited to the postmodern lens.”
But the charge I am about to bring is harder to fend off. I will argue, on two fronts, that the situation of the Haruhi series is more special still: in its content it is not merely not self-consciously postmodern—in a certain sense, it is self-consciously anti-postmodern! If my argument holds, then to describe the Haruhi series with “sekaikei,” a word born of the postmodern lens, is not merely an “error” but a “fault.”
The first thing that deserves attention is the conversation between Sasaki and Kyon at the end of The Surprise (Part One). This conversation is extraordinarily dense with information, and many of its passages serve no obvious plot function; it can be taken to carry a strong coloring of authorial self-expression, and so, in my view, it is the “key” to understanding The Surprise and indeed the whole Haruhi series. In this conversation, Sasaki displays an intensely postmodern problem-consciousness, discussing many social phenomena rich in postmodernity—
The pluralization of values (it is worth noting that in this passage the author ties “the pluralization of values” to “information,” the core concept of the aliens’ theory of the world: on the one hand he points out that in the information-rich present, values display a pluralized configuration; on the other he argues that where information is lacking, even an increase in the diversity (of social life) will not pluralize values, but will lead instead toward their homogenization):
“Kyon, what matters most to you?”
For a moment I couldn’t say.
“Nor can I. In a modern society where information (情報)21 is so intricately entangled, values cannot be quantified.”
Sasaki’s expression and tone remained just as they were.
“Some people, for example, would feel it is money; some would say information; some would think it is feeling. Because each person has an utterly different standard of value, no one can judge everything in this world by their own values alone—you and I both know this well, which is exactly why you could not answer my question at once.”
I suppose.
“And yet I think people in earlier times were not so troubled by questions of this kind.”
I suppose.
These days, information is there for the taking. But a hundred years ago—no, even a mere ten years ago—the information one could obtain was very limited. Go back to the Sengoku period or the Heian period: would people then have hesitated over their choices more deeply than we moderns do? Even had they wished to choose, their options must have been very few.
Increased diversity may bring an increase in the freedom of choice, but if the result is instead agonizing over how to choose, wouldn’t it be truer to say that this is the harm diversification does to choice? When people lack information and do not know what to choose, they will presumably choose what the majority has chosen. And that turns everything on its head: far from diversifying, things concentrate toward the poles—that is, the homogenization of values. (The novel The Surprise of Haruhi Suzumiya [Part One], Taiwanese edition, with emendations)
The loss of meaning in individual human existence (of the two passages quoted below, the second can be given a plot-oriented reading along the lines of “because Haruhi Suzumiya is in this era, this era has become very important,” but in context it still comes across as strikingly abrupt; some researchers accordingly take it to be the point of entry for understanding Fujiwara’s motives, whereas I incline to see it as the author borrowing Sasaki’s voice to express his own thinking about this era):
“I think that even if a single-celled organism or a bacterium acquired an intelligence on a par with a human’s, it would surely be struck by the same thought: ‘What ideas move this bipedal mammal to act as it does?’ What, in the end, does a human being (人間) live for? Perhaps before ever raising the question ‘What does humankind (人類) mean to do with this planet and this world?’ they would first be astonished at this.”
However I turn it over, I cannot work out what I live for. But I am convinced that, taking humanity as a whole, people like me are the overwhelming majority. (The novel The Surprise of Haruhi Suzumiya [Part One], translated by the essay’s author)
“Perhaps the problem we face is nothing more than the proof of the meaning of existence. Perhaps everyone, whoever they may be, is simply striving to make the proof of their own existence an established fact. Alien, time traveler, esper—perhaps each of them acts on the one sole and simple principle: ‘I certainly exist, and others, too, recognize my existence.’ Kyon, you have already recognized that Kuyou-san, Fujiwara-san, and Tachibana-san are here right now, have you not? Even if they were to vanish from here this instant, you would not forget them, would you? At this very moment, they exist in this world beyond any doubt. Who knows—perhaps their one wish is to convey a message brief and sorrowful: ‘Don’t forget us.’”
I still didn’t get it. Why did this have to be done in front of me, in this era of all eras? True enough, I won’t forget their faces, words, and deeds to my dying day—but so what? I am neither a court official with a mania for record-keeping nor the editor in chief of some chronicle. If they wanted to make a scene, why not go to the age of Tacitus or Herodotus? Failing that, surely someone in this era shares that sort of interest. (The novel The Surprise of Haruhi Suzumiya [Part One], Taiwanese edition, with emendations)
And yet, facing these “postmodern” problems, the solution Sasaki chooses is intensely “modern,” as shown in her rationalist bent, her pursuit of meaning, her celebration of progress, and her preference for grand narratives:
“My, my. Questions like why humans live, or what they live for, are nothing but Zen riddles. At first hearing they seem to carry some conceptual (観念的な) meaning; in reality they mean nothing at all. Still, if you insist on an answer, I can only reply this way: the meaning of my existence is, first, ‘thinking,’ and second, ‘continuing to think.’ Only death will stop my thinking; conversely, to stop thinking may be said to be no different from death. At that point, the individual (個) called ‘I’ will vanish, and only animal life will remain.”
Sasaki chuckled softly.
“I want to think without cease—to think on all the myriad things of this world, and to stop only at death.”
And what will be left once your thinking reaches its end? Uh—answers other than having children, please.
“What a fine question, Kyon—a question with real human warmth to it. If one wants to leave posterity something besides genes to prove one lived in this era, there is of course no need to confine oneself to a double helix composed of amino acids. Throughout recorded history, we humans have left all manner of things on this earth: extravagant monuments on the grandest scale, small yet epoch-making inventions, the most advanced technology of the day, national works of culture and art, entirely new technical systems, and even theories handed down to later ages…”
From Sasaki’s expression you could tell that her thoughts were on a time-travel journey across the ages inside her head.
“The great historical figures one learns about in world history, too, went down in the annals only by doing deeds worthy of being called great. My body and mind may be small and feeble, but it is not impossible that, with my thinking as a point of departure, new concepts might arise and be passed down to the future. To be honest, I truly do want to leave to later generations some small thing I have brought forth and nurtured—other than DNA, of course.”
Some ambition you have there.
“Whether what can be left is words or concepts, either will do. If ambition it be, then this is my only ambition. Only, I want to accomplish it by my own strength alone, without borrowing the power of aliens, time travelers, or espers. My thinking belongs to me alone, and I wish no one to intervene in it. The conclusions must be drawn by myself. That is the meaning of existence I have defined for myself. I want to create original words or concepts that well up from within my own heart, free of anyone’s interference or influence—which is why Kuyou-san and Fujiwara-san are, if anything, a hindrance. As for Tachibana-san… I expect she and I could become good friends who talk about anything and everything. She is my one consolation (救い).” (The novel The Surprise of Haruhi Suzumiya [Part One], Taiwanese edition, with emendations)
From this exchange (above all the parts I have set in bold) it is not hard to see that, in confronting the assorted problems of the postmodern period, Sasaki’s answer conspicuously unites Cartesian and Enlightenment rationalism with Lyotard’s “great hero, great dangers, great voyages, great goal.”22 It stands in sharp contrast to the postmodern currents that oppose rationalism and grand narratives, and bears the unmistakable stamp of modernity. True, on Azuma’s defense, “story content brimming with majestic flights of fancy” does not amount to a refutation of the thesis of “the decline of grand narratives.”23 But this exceptionally hard-edged, almost manifesto-like speech is, at the very least, an explicit act of resistance. Nor is this over-reading on my part, for Tanigawa had in fact laid the ground for such resistance early on: in The Indignation he named Sakanaka’s dog “Rousseau” and stressed more than once that the name “has quite the air of a philosopher” and that “his proper name is the same as the French philosopher’s”; and he chose Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit as the sole work of philosophy among “Yuki Nagato’s hundred books.”
This, then, is my deeper reason for objecting to filing the Haruhi series under “sekaikei”: to view an anti-postmodern work through a postmodern lens is, without doubt, a more profound irony than to call a work that is not sekaikei by the name of sekaikei.
Here a possible objection: what has been quoted above are the views of Sasaki alone; at most, then, we can say that Sasaki is “anti-postmodern”—by what right do we widen the term’s application to the whole Haruhi series, or even to its author? True, I have elsewhere analyzed in detail the extremely strong connection between Sasaki’s views and the “central idea” of the Haruhi series,24 but in the eyes of the ordinary reader I am still, in the end, characterizing an entire work on the strength of a few speeches by a single character. Below, therefore, I will argue the case again from another side: the mystery-fiction character of the Haruhi series.
As Lu Ye says in the essay “The Dialectic of the Legendary and the Everyday: ‘Golden Age’ Detective Fiction and Modernity,” detective fiction “is at once one of modernity’s new products and its symbol and its supporting evidence,” and “the so-called ‘defense of the detective story’ is, in substance, a defense of ‘modern life.’” Concretely:
To enchant everyday life and to disenchant it are both acts of modernity. A mystery arises in the first place from an asymmetry of information, yet the process of solving it brings people to discover that every answer had been lying before their eyes all along. The “dialectic of the everyday and the legendary” forged the Golden Age’s narrative principle of “absolute fairness”: the author may not conceal information from the reader; reader and detective alike stand within the restricted narration, on the same starting line. Plainly, this dialectic of the everyday and the legendary embodies the potent self-confidence of Enlightenment reason: however many readings there may be, where there is a question, there is an answer.
This point is not hard to grasp, since the structure of (honkaku) detective fiction—“finding the sole truth by means of facts and reasoning”—is precisely the mortal enemy of postmodern relativism and anti-rationalism. On this front, the Haruhi series contains not only direct statements such as “only by gathering all the information, adding theoretical thinking and a rich imagination, and compounding them with a touch of intuition can one arrive at the one and only truth” (Koizumi’s words in “Wandering Shadow”), but also indirect embodiments of this view of unique truth in its three classic detective stories, “Remote Island Syndrome,” “Where Did the Cat Go?,” and “Tsuruya’s Challenge.”
Begin with “Remote Island Syndrome,” since it is the Haruhi series’ first mystery story. Its first half is thoroughly traditional—a locked-room murder in an isolated mansion cut off by a storm—but its second half is not: Koizumi first announces a “false truth,” Haruhi then thinks up a “second truth,” and at the last Kyon exposes the whole affair as a play staged and performed by the Agency itself, which is the final “truth”—forming a “triple solution” structure. Perhaps it was precisely because of this special structure that Kyoto Animation, in adapting the story, turned it into a parody of honkaku mystery anime.
But was that really Tanigawa’s intent? Sixteen years later, the release of “Tsuruya’s Challenge” gave us an opportunity to rethink and reunderstand “Remote Island Syndrome.” At the opening of “Tsuruya’s Challenge,” Koizumi and T hold forth at length on the “late Queen problem.” Put simply, the “late Queen problem” is this: owing to such difficulties as the detective inside a mystery novel being unable to ascertain whether the clues are complete or correct, “within the world inside the work, a person who is ‘the logically unique possible culprit’ is a logical impossibility.” This problem is closely bound up with the theme of this section, “the postmodern.” Rintarō Norizuki, regarded as the father of the “late Queen problem,” once wrote: “Ideas such as the ‘shin honkaku’ that appeared at the end of the eighties all rode in on the deconstructionist currents that followed the ‘New Academism.’ … To examine Queen’s problem of ‘formalization’ here is thus, at the same time, to interrogate the very ground on which we ourselves stand. In this sense, one great task of this essay is to present a proof of absence—an alibi—for the foundations of ‘shin honkaku.’”25 On Azuma’s gloss, “the shin honkaku writers rejected worldly stories close to reality (真紅様’s note: roughly equivalent to the ‘decline of grand narratives’ above), created the symbolic character-mold of the great detective, set their stages on fantastical stages—mansions, locked rooms, remote islands—and doted on the logicality of the puzzle”; and what Norizuki wanted to say was that “the self-contradiction of shin honkaku is not merely a problem of detective fiction; it must be linked to the problems of the entire intellectual world since the eighties. And that intellectual problem since the eighties is precisely the problem of philosophy’s having lost any ground of existence.” “Shin honkaku,” then, is a class of works with a strongly postmodern character, and the “late Queen problem,” which calls into question the very “logicality” it doted on, is likewise a problem possessed of postmodernity.
Norizuki himself never solved the problem head-on; on the contrary, a female character in his fiction even tells the detective: stop brooding over the great detective’s ground of existence—you must first become a self-standing person. This treatment left Azuma greatly excited: following the psychoanalytic line, he promptly diagnosed the root of the late Queen problem as the so-called “absence of the father” and “giganticized maternity,” with Norizuki resolving the problem by the method of “no longer living together with the ‘mother.’”26 Tanigawa’s line of thought, by comparison, is completely different. Through Koizumi and T, he points out that the author, by having a character in the book issue a “challenge to the reader,” can in effect set the problem for the actual reader—that is, drawing on the tacit compact between author and reader, the author in his own person guarantees the existence and uniqueness of the truth and the feasibility of the deduction. A “guarantee” of this kind applies not only to the Haruhi series but to the great mass of mystery fiction whose core is deduction and puzzle-solving. Here Tanigawa chooses to face the destructiveness of the “late Queen problem” squarely, founding detective fiction anew upon puzzle, clues, and answer (just as the Mystery Research Society and the assembled SOS Brigade demonstrate in “Tsuruya’s Challenge”), and mounting a forceful defense of “the game of wits between author and reader.” All of this shares the same structure as Sasaki’s speeches discussed above: to a postmodern problem, a modern answer is given.
With this same understanding, let us turn back to “Remote Island Syndrome.” Within the “triple solution,” the “falsity” and “truth” of the first and second solutions are meant in the sense of the detective story’s “model answer”: a solution that matches the answer set by the author is true, and one that does not is false. The “falsity” and “truth” of those first two solutions as against the third, however, are meant in the sense of “the world”: an account that matches the actual state of affairs in that world is true, and one that does not is false. By arranging these three solutions in successive layers, Tanigawa shows us that the first pair of “true” and “false” is guaranteed by the existence of a “model answer,” and ultimately by the second pair of “true” and “false.” The ground of detective fiction’s existence is thereby reduced to the objectivity of the world and the uniqueness of truth. This is all the more apparent in “Where Did the Cat Go?,” where everyone knows from the very start that this is a detective game designed by the Agency, and reasons on that basis. The law that “however many readings there may be, where there is a question, there is an answer” (that is, the structure of posing and solving a problem) may be called a creed running through the entire Haruhi series, and the message Tanigawa wishes 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 Haruhi series itself, arguing that Tanigawa hopes readers will solve the many riddles he has buried within it. I now realize that the message applies not only within the Haruhi series but equally to the wider world (just as the view cited in “Tsuruya’s Challenge”—that “the impossibility of deduction belongs, if anything, to the side of the real world”—suggests that the late Queen problem and its solution are not confined to detective fiction). Such a world, of course, is certainly not the “world” of the postmodern context; critics huddled within that context will never be able to understand it.
3 The Haruhi Series and “Cultural Studies”
Although the Chinese phrase “日本文化研究者东浩纪” can be parsed as 日本文化 / 研究者 / 东浩纪—“Hiroki Azuma, researcher of Japanese culture”—“cultural studies” (文化研究) is in fact also an academic term—
It originated with a group of British scholars in the 1960s—Richard Hoggart (1918–), Raymond Williams (1921–1988), and Stuart Hall (1932–)—who broadened the meaning of culture to encompass, beyond high culture, such domains as the leisure activities of the contemporary working class and of adolescents, mass entertainment, and the broadcast media. Its lines of inquiry stress the interconnections between cultural phenomena and factors such as political, economic, and social change.28
For this essay, however, the term “cultural studies” need carry only the sense of “taking the totality of some class of objects as a single, integral culture, and conducting research from that vantage” (you may call this “cultural studies in the broad sense”). “Cultural studies” of this kind has an extremely wide range of application: guichu culture studies (for instance, “A Study of Online Video Culture from the Perspective of Youth Subculture: The Case of ‘Guichu Videos’”), danmaku culture studies (for instance, “Seeing Through Danmaku Sites and the Danmaku Tribe: A Youth-Subculture Perspective”), cosplay culture studies (for instance, “Carnival in Role-Play: A Cultural Study of the Youth Cosplay Craze”), and, of course, the ACGN cultural studies this essay discusses—that is, research that takes particular works (or types of work) as its cases, viewed at the scale of the whole of “ACGN culture” (or “light novel culture,” “galgame culture,” …). This research perspective destines its practitioners to attend less to “the work” than to “works situated within the web of culture.” They are then necessarily compelled to strive for a synoptic, higher-order understanding across intricately tangled phenomena, and from this arises a strong tendency toward theorization—whether by invoking existing theories or by creating new ones. The concept of “sekaikei” discussed above is precisely one such “theorization.”
Here the word “theory” calls for some clarification. As I see it, any systematic explanation of phenomena may be called a theory. The “theorization” that “cultural studies” necessarily brings on, therefore, does not begin to count only at the forbidding level of “Lyotard’s theory of the postmodern” or “Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory.” Let me quote a passage from the well-known light novel critic 歧路先知 to make the point:
What a work’s Tieba forum does day in and day out is essentially epigraphy and exegesis. You can’t call this useless, of course; when you forget some setting detail or plot point of a work, they are the ones to consult. But… in my humble view, if a setting detail or plot point could actually be forgotten by you, the person writing the essay, that thing probably wasn’t very important in the first place.
The Tieba style of combing through plot must assume that the work is sacred and inviolable. Posts written on that foundation naturally cannot be called “criticism.”
The “Lacanians” on Zhihu who cannot open their mouths without citing Žižek are the other extreme. The essays they write are all too reasonable—so reasonable that I begin to suffer the illusion that they could have written their criticism without reading any light novels at all.29
Clearly, 歧路先知 is deeply dissatisfied with light novel research that reaches for Lacanian psychoanalytic theory at every turn. But is this a dissatisfaction with all “cultural studies,” with all “theorization”? Not at all. What he opposes is at most “academic-establishment theory,” not the theories he constructs himself—anyone familiar with this self-styled prophet will know his talk of the “pendant heroine”30 and “the three unities of the progress bar,”31 as well as the pen war between 轻之物语 and Lab on Roof touched off by his theory of “attributes versus humanity.”32 For although he appears to consider himself no “literary expert” of the kind who “analyzes and interprets light novels from the height of the whole,” the perspective he holds is still one pitched at the level of “light novel culture,” or even of “two-dimensional culture.” In “A Methodology of Light Novel Reviewing (VII),”33 the essay 歧路先知 recommended as representing the creed of their “school,” the very first sentence is “What is the essence of the light novel?”; and the same essay contains sentences of ample ambition such as “We rank light novels high and low so that the kingdom of light novels may draw nearer to perfection” and “What you are to record and burnish is an age, not any one person.” His research, then (so long as it is not a casually dashed-off reading note), is likewise necessarily highly theorized; between such theories and those of Lacan or Azuma there is only a difference of fine and coarse, not a difference in kind.
After the above analysis, the defects of this “theorized” “cultural studies” are plain to see. (Please note: what is said here is confined to theories in the field of “ACGN cultural studies,” and need not be escalated to all theories in all fields—though some philosophers in history did indeed hold positions opposed to all theory and even to all concepts, regarding them, for example, as no more than “provisional names / designations,” possessed only of a conventional, worldly utility.) The cultural researchers’ pathway—“phenomena -> description of the phenomena -> explanation of the phenomena (theory)”—goes wrong easily at both links. On the one hand, most cultural researchers spend their time reading works in vast quantity, or even studying theory in vast quantity, so they cannot come to know any one particular work in fine-grained detail, and can usually form only slanted or even mistaken impressions. Whether it is Azuma’s “The best-selling hit of the mid-two-thousands, later adapted into a well-received anime—Nagaru Tanigawa’s Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya series—is also often classed with sekaikei. … Works of this kind do not consider social description necessary. ‘Aliens invade, the world is destroyed’—this composition is what matters most, while the details of what the aliens look like, how humanity responds, and how the world goes to its destruction are astonishingly slapdash,”34 or 歧路先知’s “In Haruhi, Haruhi holds almost 100% of the discursive power; the entire plot exists in the service of shaping Haruhi, and each supporting character exists entirely in order to observe Haruhi. The male lead Kyon above all—his significance within the work is purely to supply a viewpoint from which to observe Haruhi,”35 both prove this point to us. On the other hand, theory naturally stands at a higher level than phenomena, so we cannot exact of it a 100-percent fit with the phenomena—a rough fit earns a pass; but ACGN cultural researchers are habitually given to clamping theories produced in other disciplines and other fields onto the heads of ACGN works, and at that point the degree of fit between theory and phenomena becomes precarious indeed. Worse still, the deviation produced at the first link is inherited by the second—if a researcher has trouble even describing the phenomena accurately, how could he explain the phenomena accurately on that basis?
I am not the first to reflect on the “cultural studies” pathway in this way. Seven years ago (at the end of 2014), someone asked on Zhihu: “Where is the frontier of ACG cultural studies today? What is the state of ACG cultural studies in China?”36 Under that question, nbht let off a broadside at the entire field of ACG cultural studies, calling Hiroki Azuma “an anime fan who doesn’t watch anime” and excoriating the researchers: they “hide in their own burrows, unwilling to face the reality of the present”; what they do “is just peering into the room through the window”; “garbage books like this are enshrined as the gold standard”; “most people are simply repeating the mistaken views of the past.” Guo Wenfang (@Macro kuo) in turn called out by name nbht’s “god’s-eye broadside perspective that prizes industrial technique (storyboards, key animation) and despises cultural analysis,” and—after surveying Eiji Ōtsuka, Hiroki Azuma, and 齐藤环 (note: no researcher named “齐藤环” exists; what Guo Wenfang meant must have been “斋藤环,” Tamaki Saitō. To this day, not one person in the comment section has pointed out this error of writing “斋藤” as “齐藤.”)—called out: “Show a little less disdain for theories you are unfamiliar with, start more with yourself, and take up DIY writing.” The controversy over whether “cultural studies” is an advisable mode of research is thus of long standing. Seven years on, the mood of the scene has swung from “disdain for theory” to “learning theory of one’s own accord, with the application of theory in one’s essays as the goal to strive for”—the “social science and philosophy translation” and “SEP translation” columns opened by Lab on Roof are one piece of evidence. At this juncture, we may as well inspect what the “DIY writing” of which Guo Wenfang spoke has actually achieved.
Consider first “The ‘Two-Dimensional Watchers’ of the Post-‘Otaku’ Era: The Poetics of the ‘Creation-kei’ 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—an essay I found while working out whether the Haruhi series is “sekaikei.” Setting aside for the moment such obvious howlers as “Clannad, translated into Chinese as 《团子大家族》 [Dango Daikazoku]” (in fact, all seven letters of “CLANNAD” should be capitalized, and “Dango Daikazoku” is merely the title of the anime’s ending theme) and “Hyouka, Kyoto Animation’s 2017 work” (in fact, 2012), let us look at the part that touches the Haruhi series:
This work has almost no plot to speak of; its content amounts to nothing more than how the male lead and the espers satisfy Haruhi’s various absurd “world-creating urges” so as to avert the collapse of the present world. The work sets radically different attitudes toward “worldview” side by side: on the one hand, it resolutely affirms the absolute legitimacy of fiction and world-creation, issuing the famous “two-dimensional” declaration that “anyone who looks for a sense of reality in a made-up story must have something wrong with their head”; on the other hand, all the fiction ultimately serves Haruhi’s emotional claims on the ordinary person Kyon. This anime series—arguably the one that best fits “database consumption”—expresses this resolution: only when the “world-creating urge” is fully liberated, and the fictive potential within the everyday brought fully into play, is the world of Dasein at its most vivid and most whole.
I find it hard to imagine the two sentences “the Haruhi series has no plot” and “this essay is offered in mourning for those who died in the Kyoto Animation arson attack” issuing from one and the same article—unless the eight episodes of Endless Eight in the 2009 anime had left the author dizzy with rage. On so poor a level of acquaintance with the Haruhi series (nor does this seem to be an isolated case: another article I found on the Haruhi series and sekaikei, “From Hayao Miyazaki to Makoto Shinkai: What Has Happened to Japanese Animated Film”38 by Gao Yuanyuan, a teacher at Hebei Normal University, actually summarizes the plot of The Disappearance as “a romance between an ordinary person and a time traveler”!), the author can only limply drape over it a bit of continental-philosophy cant like “Dasein” and Azuma’s theory of “database consumption”—and “database consumption” and the Haruhi series do not mesh especially well either. I find it hard to see what “Haruhi research” of this kind could possibly mean to the Haruhi series and those who love it.
If it is said that the examples above are confined to the Haruhi series and are therefore unrepresentative, then let us look at an example beyond the Haruhi series: “The Core and Contradictions of EVA (Neon Genesis Evangelion)”39 by @kokeihou, who describes himself as “working mainly in cultural sociology and cultural studies; formerly a cram-school teacher in Japan.” At the very opening the author writes:
Though it borrows surfaces such as robots and Angels, and uses seemingly complex concepts such as theology, whether or not you understand things like the story’s chronology or the shapes of its weapons is in fact immaterial to interpreting the story’s core. … The core of EVA was never based on any theology; theology, if anything, was added in order to explicate the story’s setting. Its core is very simple—but before that, we must first understand the philosophical and intellectual themes of our age, above all the heart of this work: Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory. Once we have understood that, everything will be readily solved.
This lays down the essay’s keynote: reading EVA with Lacanian psychoanalytic theory. With Lacan’s theory spreading ever wider in recent years—even gradually becoming an obligatory component of online political jargon—this has long ceased to be a fresh approach; a post published on the Baidu EVA forum in 2014, “Flowers in the Mirror, Moon in the Water: Rei Ayanami and the Mirror Stage,”40 is one example. But EVA is a rather complex work, not one that Lacan’s theory alone can sum up, and even @kokeihou himself realizes that under his reading scheme at least the theological portion of EVA goes entirely untouched. This is the problem I mentioned earlier of “the degree of fit between theory and phenomena.” @kokeihou’s solution, however, is to pronounce, by fiat, that whatever Lacanian theory cannot accommodate is “immaterial.” Like so many of his colleagues, even as he “reads out” new content, he also “reads away” much of the content that was there; in his own eyes this may be “keeping principal and subordinate distinct” and “taking the best and discarding the worst,” but at bottom it is still cutting the foot to fit the shoe. (Let me tell a story of the opposite kind. I once discussed the question “is Haruhi sekaikei?” with a Haruhi fan. When I asked him, “If the Haruhi series is sekaikei, then why does Tanigawa spend so much ink on questions like ‘what is the world actually like,’ and why does he write so many hardcore mystery stories?”, he held that this was merely Tanigawa’s personal taste. To which I responded: “We cannot pull out the parts that fit the definition of sekaikei and call them ‘Haruhi,’ while calling everything left over ‘personal taste’—above all when the latter takes up a far larger share than the former.”) Nor is that all: he seems to hold, further, that only deploying Lacanian psychoanalysis and the like, as he does, is the sole correct interpretive route, while all other readings “can neither analyze the story’s text with literary criticism nor understand the story’s surfaces through the context of Japanese society,” and are therefore “subjective,” “devoid of substance,” even “irresponsible”:
Without understanding the phenomenology of the body, it is hard to appreciate the intellectual bedrock of Kill la Kill; without knowing the currents of feminist thought, one cannot feel what is moving in Sailor Moon, or even in Little Witch Academia. Without knowing postmodernism and the currents of philosophy, one cannot so much as touch the intellectual underpinnings of the science fiction of Satoshi Kon and Katsuhiro Ōtomo, or of works such as Puella Magi Madoka Magica and EVA. Of course, there is nothing wrong with not understanding any of this—you can simply enjoy the rush and excitement. What is to be feared is that some people use their own pleasures and explanations to delimit the meaning of an entire work and, through the media’s reach, confine everyone else’s imagination and sense of self. … There is nothing wrong at all with having no intellectual substance! You are entirely free to lose yourself in the story and arrive at your own distinctive reading. But if you want others to agree with you, first study until you have an intellectual grounding, and a grasp of the historical context, equal to the author’s!
This is the extreme expression of the cultural researchers’ “view from on high.” Standing at the scale of “ACGN culture,” they look down on every single work, look down on the authors, even look down on the entire culture—and, unavoidably, look down on ordinary readers too. (The aforementioned 歧路先知 has even delivered the startling pronouncement that “a university below the 985 tier is basically no different from illiteracy.”41) Yet beyond a homework essay for a course on “Lacanian Psychoanalytic Theory” and a set of panoramic schemes that ordinary fans embrace even as they mistake a part for the whole (for instance, @kokeihou’s newly published essay “The Overcoming of Sekaikei: A Brief History of Literary and Artistic Thought in Japanese Anime,”42 which attempts to sum up “the literary and artistic history of Japanese anime” with “grand narrative–sekaikei–everyday-kei”—itself, to be sure, a commonplace; I first encountered it in the essay “Farewell to the Apocalypse: A General Review of Japan’s Age of Fiction”43), how much of substance does this view from on high actually give us?
Back to the Haruhi series. About a year ago, when I began to think about the Haruhi series in earnest, I consulted a great deal of material and accumulated a great many questions. Why, when “is Haruhi a god?” is plainly a disputed question on which the time travelers and the espers each hold to their own story, do the overwhelming majority of essays on Haruhi tacitly assume that what the espers say is right—even likening Haruhi to the God of the Bible?44 Why are the articles introducing the Haruhi series all cut from one cloth, the plots they touch on never going beyond the single volume of The Melancholy, or the eight episodes of Endless Eight and the Disappearance film; their praise of Haruhi mostly concentrated on how explosively popular it was in its day and how it influenced later works—without even understanding what is so “godlike” about the Haruhi series itself? Why are there so many descriptions of the Haruhi series that are wrong at the root (defenses here of the sort “a single anime work has no great value on its own anyway; at that point, having the Six Classics annotate me is far more meaningful than my annotating the Six Classics”45 are of no avail, because “the Six Classics annotating me” concerns interpretation, not description)? In last October’s ten-thousand-character essay “Is Haruhi Suzumiya a God? With Remarks on the Science-Fiction Interpretation and the School Interpretation,”46 I traced these questions back to the opposition between the “science-fiction interpretation” and the “school interpretation,” holding that they arise because those researchers had grown used to regarding the high schooler’s school story as the “essence” of the light novel, and wrongly clamped this view onto the Haruhi series. But we can dig still further down into the causes. As I now see it, this is nothing but the concrete embodiment of those two defects of “cultural studies”: on the one hand, they have not read the Haruhi series carefully; on the other, their excessive infatuation with “theorization” has likewise warped their field of view—“sekaikei,” “everyday-kei,” “atmosphere-kei,” “club fiction,” or whatever other label: they are accustomed only to discussing, over and over within the theoretical frames those labels point to, the same well-worn topics like “the everyday vs. the extraordinary in the Haruhi series.” Small wonder, then, that the phenomenon arises of “everyone praising it without knowing where it is actually good.”47
What they have failed to realize, however, is that great works are each great in their own different way, just as the characters each have their own distinctive moe appeal—and this is something the “database” of “moe-elements,” in Azuma’s phrase, can never encompass. For precisely this reason, in an age in which some hold that “a literary critic must first be an ordinary reader”48 and others hold that “a literary critic must at the same time be a philosopher,”49 we must stop and think: what kind of ACGN research is it, in the end, that we need?