Far from one another
Yet never ceasing to think of one another
Shall we take our ceaselessly busy souls with us?
—Paul Claudel, Break of Noon1
I. Love Made Everyday
“Love is war.” Hearing this as ordinary passersby, we could hardly avoid thinking not just of Kaguya-sama: Love Is War but also of Mr. & Mrs. Smith, which likewise mixes romance with deadly combat. Of course, the two works are entirely different by any measure. First, Kaguya obviously will not be reaching for loaded guns. Second—and this is where we must begin—“love” itself occupies a different position.
In Mr. & Mrs. Smith, we see a couple whose marriage lacks passion finally acquire the passion of “love.” In other words, the ritual of “love”—marriage—enters first; only afterward does love’s “filling” arrive. (As an empty outward form, it has more in common with Nisekoi: False Love.) In Kaguya-sama, the reverse holds: what we see is “love” in its naked reality, but the usual forms of “love”—dates, kisses, and, most importantly, “vows”—are missing.
We encounter a paradox here: are Shirogane and Kaguya in love with each other? In formal terms, they are not “a couple” but “cherish each other as friends.” Yet they really are “in love”—even more so than many couples. Recall Kaguya-sama’s long-winded title,2 and we discover that “love” has yielded the story’s center to the “battle of wits between geniuses,” while love itself has become the work’s “atmosphere.” In other words, “love” has become something “everyday.”
If we borrow the theory of a “non-everyday simulacrum of everyday life,”3 then of course we are looking for an ideal form of love in Shirogane and Kaguya’s relationship. But one point must be made: our enjoyment comes not only from imagining ourselves within this perfect relationship, but even more from watching it develop. As we gaze at their unfolding romance, are we not taking the perspective of Freud’s “disturber of love” (Liebesstörer), or of the “chimney sweep” in the threefold division into “officials, maids, and chimney sweeps”?4 Once love’s presence is taken for granted, our enjoyment as chimney sweeps entails no risk either: we are certain to see their romantic relationship finally established, in both form and content.
Ultimately, in Kaguya-sama, love made “everyday” becomes scenery in which “the romance is certain to end happily” (we arrive at the same conclusion in the romance-advice installment), and so becomes our object of consumption. This is the story’s inevitable tendency, though it is a little contemptible when you think about it.
II. Love Made Entertainment
In Kierkegaard’s theory, “love” is divided into three stages. At the aesthetic stage, “love” is a solipsistic experience of enjoyment, exemplified by Mozart’s Don Juan. At the ethical stage, “love” is a serious experience, an everlasting commitment directed toward the absolute. Kierkegaard’s own long-standing romantic relationship with his fiancée Regine is a good example. At the highest stage, the religious stage, marriage affirms the absolute value of commitment in “love.” Marriage is thus seen not as a strengthening of social ties against love’s fickleness, but as something that can direct true love toward its authentic calling.
Returning to Kaguya-sama, we noted in the previous section that Shirogane and Kaguya’s “love” lacks the usual “forms,” or “rituals,” of a romantic relationship. This undoubtedly means that their love lacks “seriousness”: it does not move beyond the dimension of “ontology.” Notice that even when Kaguya actually admits she likes Shirogane, her almost unconscious “tsundere” reflex still clings to the pride of “wanting to make him confess,” and she delights in attaining this ridiculous nobility. Kaguya has not transcended narcissism. In the end, “love” turned into a battle of wits remains nothing more than relating to oneself through another person. As Lacan asserts, the other serves only to disclose the enjoyment of the Real. (This is the specific meaning of “ontology” above.)
Recall the previous section’s conclusion: we are looking for scenery in which “the romance is certain to end happily.” This actually means two things. At the end of the story, Shirogane and Kaguya’s romance will inevitably reach a point where “ritual” and “content” coincide. At the same time, to prepare for that ending, Shirogane and Kaguya must remain in a state where either “ritual” or the meaning of ritual itself is absent. This, too, is the “everyday” we want to see. In the fireworks sequence, don’t we take pleasure in their watching the fireworks together exactly like lovers while still refusing to acknowledge their love? As Baudrillard puts it:
Everyday life as enclosure (Verborgenheit) … its tranquility requires a sense of dizziness before reality and history. Its tranquility must be sustained by violence perpetually consumed.
—Jean Baudrillard, The Consumer Society5
The fact that Kaguya-sama appears as a product of Japan’s entertainment industry gives us another way to read this misaligned love. While welcoming Shirogane and Kaguya’s pure, self-enclosed “love,” we want even more to see them imitate the “rituals” that love at the aesthetic stage does not possess. In this, we are seeking a way out of the symbolic order composed of endless rituals. On the one hand, we laugh uproariously at the farces performed by politicians and company presidents. On the other, we relish talk-show hosts’ deliberately clumsy impersonations of the powerful. Kaguya-sama clearly belongs to the latter category. When “love” appears as this sort of entertainment-industry product, it is no longer noble, still less pure: it exists as surplus-enjoyment. One comment, half joking, urges us not to imitate Shirogane and Kaguya’s battles of wits. That comes closest to recognizing the obscenity inherent in the work.
III. Love as War
Back to “love is war.” Of course love is not peaceful. But love has its own system governing contradiction and violence. The difference is this: in politics, we confront enemies; in love, we confront tragedy—a tragedy arising from an internal conflict between identity and difference. In “love,” we face an experience founded on absolute difference. In other words, there is no true enemy in a romantic relationship, not even a rival in love.
To understand this argument better, let us reverse it: “war is love.” The “battle of wits” itself is also the basis of love’s existence. “War” is for “love”, for the value they create together. We cannot help thinking of:
WAR IS PEACE
—George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four
In Shirogane and Kaguya’s romance, the dialectical relationship between “war” and “peace,” war turned into scenery, and the groundless lust for “power” align almost perfectly with Ingsoc’s distorted way of life. On this basis, the purpose of “war”—the romantic battle of wits—is “to keep war going”—love turned into warfare—so that this surplus-enjoyment can go on forever. Likewise, Orwell’s account emphasizes the privation caused by war while playing down bloodshed and casualties. What we often receive is the propaganda-induced illusion of a “war with zero casualties.” Isn’t this precisely the “risk-free love” we have already discussed? Admittedly, war can never be without casualties, just as love can never be without risk. Here, the risk is transferred entirely to the supporting cast: the student council secretary and treasurer alike bear their portions of the couple’s romantic risk, allowing the story to continue through one climax after another while remaining unruffled—just like Ingsoc.
The end of Oceania—and thus of that never-ending “war”—is, of course, in the hands of the proles. Ending the “battle of wits between geniuses” likewise requires one of the two to relinquish both the lust for power over a lover—a power with no real significance—and the pleasure of matching wits and courage in these battles. Kaguya provides an opening. Through her transformation, “others,” represented by the maid, gradually redirect our enjoyment toward the relationships of those “lovestruck idiot couples” we see everywhere. Returning to the threefold division into “officials, maids, and chimney sweeps,” we “chimney sweeps” increasingly want to see the two abandon their flirtatious expressions of desire and return to the “normal form” of a relationship between “lovers.” By giving up one pleasure, we gain another.
IV. Love on the Assembly Line
On the entertainment industry’s assembly line, we naturally hope that the “simulacrum” can produce our ideal model of love. Whether through rediscovering the content of ritual (Mr. & Mrs. Smith) or building a sense of ritual on a foundation of self-enclosed enjoyment (Kaguya-sama), we can always find sealed packages of “canned love” among the endless products. Even when treating love as a philosophical proposition, we can choose anything from Romanticism’s conception of love and contractual love to Lacan’s skeptical declaration that “love does not exist.”6
But is love packaged this way—a product like Kaguya-sama, entirely unashamed of the logic by which desire operates—really still the love we seek? When we have paid and lie sobbing with our heads in a girl’s lap, listening as she comforts you with a performance of sympathy, are we really experiencing love? Or is it that there is no genuine love at all behind cultural products whose individuality has been swallowed by the homogenizing logic of capital, and we have been deceiving ourselves all along—just as Kaguya deliberately avoids confronting the reality of “I like Miyuki Shirogane”?
The form of love Kaguya-sama presents is undoubtedly ideal. But as a dream-making machine, Kaguya-sama’s own operating logic is far from beautiful. In conclusion, I would call Kaguya-sama an obscene romance that takes shortcuts and makes dissolving love its principal business. Of course, I consider that praise.
Original editor’s note: Let me make the author’s conclusion a little clearer. Don’t let a few bits of specialist terminology make you think the author hates the series. The author still likes it, obviously—eating it up, in fact. The three stages of love are probably an analogy with the three stages of life.