Words are flowing out like endless rain into a paper cup.
After Baudelaire became an idiot, he used just one word to express his view of life: “vulva.”
—Ryūnosuke Akutagawa1
I
Yoshiyuki Tomino is a remarkably prolific writer. Besides directing anime, he has written twenty-three novels: writing clearly occupies a substantial place in his career. Another fact we should not overlook is that between the two periods commonly called “Black Tomino” (Victory Gundam and earlier) and “White Tomino” (Brain Powerd or Turn A Gundam and later), there is also a period known as “Ailing Tomino” (1994–1997). Studying the works of these years must surely be valuable if we want to understand the course of his thinking, and why his work underwent what looks, at first glance, like a complete reversal in style.
To look back at Tomino’s years of illness, we need to begin with Victory Gundam. A replacement for the canceled Gundam F91 television series, Victory went into production with a core team of young, inexperienced staff from Sunrise and its subcontractors. The work was not merely arduous: directives from above also caused conflict and confusion. Bandai, for instance, interfered to ensure that the Victory Gundam would appear in the first episode, moving what had originally been episode four into the opening slot; Bandai director Katsushi Murakami demanded that the anime include motorcycle battleships, and so on. Only after production had ended did Tomino discover that Victory had actually been a bargaining chip in the negotiations for Bandai’s acquisition of Sunrise. He had been kept in the dark throughout.
Tomino fell ill. He was often too dizzy to stand. For a time, he gave up making television anime. Yet during these bleak years he wrote several novels, among them In Search of Avenir, Garzey’s Wing, and The King’s Heart (Ō no kokoro)—the so-called “illness trilogy.”2 Through fans’ efforts, rare, out-of-print books were unearthed and some 180,000–190,000 characters of text translated. The King’s Heart (1995–1996), this tale of sex and blood, Tomino’s most troubling work, thus became available to Chinese fans. For the study of Tomino in China, this is unquestionably cause for excitement.
As a fantasy novel, The King’s Heart contains no robots. It imagines a planet dominated by deserts and oceans, with kingdoms built around oases. The people of this planet possess a biological energy drawn from the earth, called Aura Energy. Religious specialists known as ajari use the sacred texts of their faith to practice an esoteric art called “levitation energy,” which enables flying craft to take off. The book’s very first sentence—
“In this age, kings dreamed of turning their own countries into floating islands.”
—makes its connection with Tomino’s Gundam works clear. Rising, or escaping gravity, is a recurrent theme in his work. Gravity sends everything in the world falling along its accustomed trajectory; the souls of those on the ground are bound by gravity. These souls are so heavy, weighed down with adult values, ideas, and concerns. “Desire, hatred, clinging to wisdom” prevent anyone from taking flight. To affirm Aura Energy and celebrate life, to leave the planet behind as the kingdom becomes floating land, flying freely and lightly through the vast sky: this is Tomino’s “utopia” in the novel. This is, in effect, a picture of the spirit of gravity set against the will to life.
Interestingly, in The King’s Heart, Tomino seeks on the one hand to affirm life itself by affirming tragedy. Human beings struggle against fate, but no one escapes the tragedy of life unscathed. This corresponds to works from the “Black Tomino” period, such as the inescapable “closed loop” of Space Runaway Ideon: Be Invoked. On the other hand, in the ending, “The Tale of the Three Stars Beyond,” many years later and beyond the events of the main plot, the utopia of floating land is finally realized. The chain of hatred is broken; an “outside” emerges to break the closed loop. This transcendence corresponds to “Golden Autumn,” the final episode of Turn A Gundam.
Nor should we forget the political nature of “utopia.” “If you subjects work diligently, your biological energy will become the power that sends the land of Karodda flying through the vast sky, carrying us to new lands. If you fail to be diligent and upright, Karodda will fall to the scorching earth, never to rise again.” Karodda’s land floats through the resonance (unity) of its people’s heightened Aura Energy. Tomino has not forgotten the danger implicit in this: fascism. In the first volume, King Guran of Karodda is killed in a plot, and the regime left behind seeks to rule the continent’s other countries through its power to make land float. This expresses Tomino’s longstanding pessimism about forms of government. In Hathaway’s Flash, he has Gigi say:
“If there is a course of action that never goes wrong, it is to establish an ideal dictatorship.”
At the same time, Tomino also recognizes the masculine character of war: “Once war begins, women’s logic becomes entirely useless. Women, too, have to become men and fight according to men’s logic.” It is precisely this distinctive reflection on politics—or, rather, organization—and war that leads him to give Turn A a feminine male protagonist, and to place two women in leadership, one on Earth and one on the Moon, in its final episode, “Golden Autumn.” Another interesting detail is that it is Joseph, a man, who takes on the responsibility of looking after a child. Here, then, it is obvious that male and female as genders, and so-called masculinity and femininity, are nothing more than social and cultural constructions. (What we will discuss below is precisely gender as a social construction, and the social prejudices tied, with almost idiotic directness, to the physiological characteristics of sex.) The cultural and political distinctions built upon this biological basis of sex thus gradually dissolve: women can take center stage in politics, and men must also shoulder domestic work. Guin, an opportunist who styles himself a progressive politician, tells Lily, “We’ll have to wait a while before the age comes when people in skirts can bring about an industrial revolution.” Yet Lily bids him farewell with an unequivocal reply:
“Take care. I can govern Ameria perfectly well, skirt and all.”
But The King’s Heart, written during the “Ailing Tomino” period, remains a predominantly tragic novel. What it actually depicts is failure, and above all “women’s failure.” This might invite a reading of it as “misogynistic”: through its images of women, or its depiction of their failure = inability, it gives men fantasies of wholeness and power, reestablishing a male-dominated order and hierarchy. Yet, in light of the genealogy of Tomino’s work traced above, I think this is undoubtedly a misreading. In fact, women drive the narrative of The King’s Heart: their subjectivity, desire, and agency occupy its center. Moreover, in “The Tale of the Three Stars Beyond,” set many years later, the people on the floating land give the three stars into which the sun has transformed the names of the novel’s women—Akaiā, Raira, and Eisheto—and believe that these women gave the land its power to sail through the sky. This utopia is a women’s utopia. The truth is precisely the reverse, then: what Tomino depicts is the end, or impending end, of men’s social standing and their control over women.
I therefore think that Tomino, as a writer, clearly recognizes women’s need to go beyond male discourse. Women must place themselves outside it, seeking an independent existence through transgression and desire, determining their identities for themselves. How absurd that one’s identity is not one’s own to determine—that one must find a gender identity within a socially constructed binary opposition, an active/passive relationship bound directly to the reproductive organs… But matters are not so simple; simply taking a stand does not settle it. What Tomino persistently investigates through women’s failures is, in fact, the responsibility men cannot evade, just as King Guran repeatedly stresses his own “karmic burden” in the novel, of which his polygyny is one part. The King’s Heart is a narrative of women’s inevitable failure under patriarchal ideology, within this symbolic order. This failure is inevitable because, contrary to appearances, women’s predicament is not simply a binary opposition between men and women. Or, rather, what women need to confront is not men as concrete individuals, but the black hole of an ideology that has absorbed women themselves—one of its chief characteristics being that those who believe themselves outside ideology are often within it. Women have already entered the symbolic order; they are already divided, already sexed. Any resistance here—any pursuit of subjectivity that would take them beyond men—seems first to require women to become men, to use male discourse. This is especially so when, to enjoy power in the reality of capitalism and consumerism, they seem to have to play the same game as men; those without capital cannot even make themselves heard. Inescapably, they are drawn back into the patriarchal circuit.
Mesujia in The King’s Heart is just such a case. She challenges male entitlements in the public domains of work, politics, and power, demanding access to men’s desires, pleasures, and happiness. She defies boundaries, positions, and rules, disrupts identity, system, and order, and attempts to get beyond the male closed loop. Paradoxically, however, she must adopt a masculine model to gain “initiative.” She has to use masculine strength to hold patriarchal power at bay, while using femininity as a masquerade. Complicit and resistant at once, she has no choice but to oscillate between the two gender identities—assuming herself to be a man while disguising herself as a woman. Mesujia is self-contradictory. This contradiction also manifests itself in her body: Tomino depicts her as infertile, unable to “produce.” Readers may not immediately understand this contradiction; only at the end of the novel, with the words “I like the Mesujia who fights Nejia,” does it dawn on them.
To conclude this first section, let us turn back once more to the genealogy of anime. Looking back now, wasn’t Victory Gundam (1993) one of the first Japanese anime consciously to discuss women’s issues and make them a major theme? The Zanscare Empire publicly proclaims a mother-centered society, yet retains the institutional foundations through which patriarchal culture controls women. It must therefore fail. Later, Kunihiko Ikuhara’s Revolutionary Girl Utena (1997) tells of Utena’s desire to become a prince, of her venture into a “legendary” story whose discourse men control. Hideaki Anno’s Neon Genesis Evangelion (1995), meanwhile, depicts the psychological predicament of women such as Asuka and Misato Katsuragi as they seek identities of their own. (An aside: its male protagonist’s name, Shinji—“truth”—corresponds directly to Üso—“lie.”)3 In this sense, we can see how far ahead Tomino was, and The King’s Heart can be understood as an expansion and further development of Victory for adults.
We must also recognize Tomino’s distance from feminism. He unquestionably approaches women’s issues from a male perspective, and fantasizes about a transcendent feminine essence. Yet, on the other hand, precisely because he depicts women’s failures, he also offers a male critique of “feminism.” Katejina’s yearning for a mother-centered society in Victory is merely lip service. In practice, she relies on Cronicle, hoping to use a man to satisfy her own selfish desires. But this is because she has long recognized her powerlessness as a woman. She does not truly believe that women can take command of the world; she simply hates anyone stronger than herself. Maria, queen of the Zanscare Empire, abandons her own daughter, Shakti, failing in her responsibilities as an actual mother to become a hollow “holy mother.” At the same time, she is merely used and thrust into the limelight by a group of ambitious men, including the empire’s chancellor; she has no real power. The women in Victory are not constructed like the dazzling female figures of Hollywood-style “myths.” They occupy the narrative center, affirm their desires, act, and keep on acting. Yet, as Katejina remains dependent on a man and Maria is used by men, women still seem to be constructed as the “second sex.” Tragedy arrives on schedule. This is precisely where Tomino’s complexity lies. Distrust of humanity is the defining characteristic of “Black Tomino.” He wants to depict what is possible, but begins with what cannot be done. This grows out of his initial despair at reality.
II
This section will look more closely at two texts, the first and second tales in The King’s Heart, while trying as far as possible not to spoil the reader’s experience.
The first tale in volume one, “Akaiā’s Revenge,” is particularly revealing of Tomino’s creative approach. As in Bazin’s account of Fellini’s Nights of Cabiria, Tomino’s figures are defined not by “character” but entirely by appearances. We cannot, in other words, classify them from their initial descriptions as we can flat characters, whose actions we may even be able to predict outright. Quite the opposite: only at an unpredictable, decisive instant—or perhaps not until the story ends, when we can survey all the ways the character has appeared to us—do we seem, in a flash of revelation, to grasp their core. Take Zeta Gundam: from the outset, its protagonist Kamille leads us by the nose. He acts, and acts again, but we cannot take in his behavior, assemble him, fit him to the model in our heads so that we can form reasonable expectations. No—only when he suddenly climbs into the Gundam, merely to take revenge on a Titans soldier, do his earlier words and actions fall into place. Yet even this seems unable to account fully for everything he does afterward. Only when he goes mad at the end, and we have felt the enormous shock of it, can we finally grasp him as a whole. Tomino’s characters refuse to conform to our expectations. They change shape, then change again; under the rapid impact of a succession of facts and events, they have to make all manner of choices and adjustments. A person, with their countless subtle thoughts and actions, becomes “a project of existence continually being drawn up and erased.” Tomino’s characters are precisely like this. Their possibilities are never fixed; they are subject to all manner of contingencies, and their changes occur at the level where the so-called “basic project” operates. Only when Akaiā emerges from the ossuary at the end of the first tale, or walks across the desert, and Tomino’s contradictory, terrifying, desolately beautiful imagery unfolds before us, can we finally plot her figure on our own axes.
Using her virginity as a bargaining chip, Akaiā goes alone to the ruined church in the wilderness where four knights await her, and follows the men down into the dim underground ossuary. Men, blood, a church, a severed head, a virgin: sex and death take place in this cramped, dark space; in the wilderness, constrained by a princess’s chastity and knights’ honor, yet seemingly beyond the jurisdiction of law; in the ruins of a heretical church, where purity and carnal desire intertwine, the sacred and the sinful reflect one another; underground, in a place one must “descend” to enter. This is precisely the juxtaposition of things that cannot coexist—a heterotopia. It displays reality’s contradictions and filth. There, the men are inflamed by the virginity offered as a bargaining chip—and so are we readers. The scene induces obscene fantasies of rape, sexual abandon, and orgies. Tomino seems to construct Akaiā directly as the Other, an object of masochistic fantasy.
Yet, as in Hitchcock’s films, this too is Tomino’s strategy. When things do not go as we wish, our expectations are overturned, provoking anxiety and thereby exposing our sadistic “will-to-enjoy”: the pathological essence of desire. We seem to identify with Akaiā, the protagonist of this tale, but our position of identification has secretly shifted. We identify our own desires with those of the four knights. Correspondingly, what looks like Tomino’s construction of Akaiā as the Other is actually a refusal to objectify her. Akaiā refuses to become an erotic object, an object to be desired. This breaks the reader’s expectations, killing “men” on both the narrative and the symbolic level.
The second tale, “Ajari Bī,” is structurally the exact opposite of the first, “Akaiā’s Revenge.” Before turning to it, allow me to recount something from my own past. When I was still in primary school, I would go alone to the nearby public bathhouse. Once, after bathing, while getting dressed in the changing room, I overheard two men talking. One said crudely, in dialect, “How about getting a cunt to play with?” I have forgotten many things from childhood, but that sentence, spoken by that fat, naked man—its sounds and intonation—still seems clearly audible today. It shocked me deeply. I had never heard language used this way, yet I quickly understood what he meant: this metonymic use of an organ, the contempt and disdain, and a lewdness almost unimaginable to a child. Another incident took place when I finished junior high school. Our whole class went to sing karaoke at a well-known hotel in town. Perhaps in a spirit of exploration, I wandered into another, empty room. I was going through a bitterly cynical phase then, dissatisfied with every form of worldly entertainment. On the table I found a spinner, something I had never seen before, its segments filled with a series of unspeakably obscene instructions, some long and some short…
These two incidents were, of course, dark sides of the world I happened to encounter. But in ordinary life, too, patriarchy is a framework within which we think, often without noticing the framework itself: its so-called transparency. In this capitalist reality of money = power = sexual resources, consuming signs of femininity—looking at them—has become a tacitly accepted norm. These signs, produced to accommodate the act of looking, surround us and saturate online space. We are trained to derive pleasure from them, and that training is continually reinforced. Again and again, we produce gender identities through binary oppositions, interpellated and defined: “Everyone in their assigned place.”
Within such a symbolic order, woman is man’s symptom, the site onto which man’s lack = the lack in the big Other is projected. Woman attempts to supply (produce) the images = signs the big Other requires, filling its lack with herself. Even when no eyes are present, does a woman still feel the gaze of men = the big Other upon her? Does she feel that symbolic gaze as she looks at herself—to construct her identity—and at others, and does she feel anxious? Or is the split between eye and gaze concealed, the gaze already disregarded: she believes she is the one doing the looking? Some online “feminists” believe they are doing the looking, but this is an illusion; they may instead be lack at its most intense. This belief that they are doing the looking assumes that subjectivity can be gained through opposition to men. Depending on the fiercest male/female binary opposition and socially constructed gender prejudices, it reinforces those very prejudices. Moreover, investing in consumption as a means of gaining power results in self-objectification according to the logic of capital. Women remain absorbed within patriarchy.
It is in precisely this sense that, in direct contrast to Akaiā, Ajari Bī is “the Other.” She is the object of the gaze but does not feel it. She is not anxious; complacent in her own beauty, she uses it to fill Darāmieru’s lack (desire), and seems to enjoy a stable, even beautiful relationship with him. Yet she does not recognize the lack that defines her. Even after Darāmieru exposes her lack and calls her “a lie,” she still believes that if only she can get the words out, she can persuade him to return to their former relationship. Such a hateful and pitiable figure. In contrast to his treatment of Akaiā, Tomino goes out of his way to describe her beauty repeatedly and in detail. At first, moreover, she seems mysterious and inaccessible, far beyond Darāmieru’s reach, only to surrender quickly to him in bed after he has pursued her for a time—a spirit of indulgence set against the first tale’s spirit of abstinence. Tomino portrays her as outwardly virtuous and domestically capable, privately utterly wanton; she flatters Darāmieru, even displaying the perverse masochistic tendency to submit willingly to extreme domination and derive pleasure from it. She is the very externalization of male fantasy. Yet the opposite that her idealized beauty, this myth of woman, inevitably brings with it is already concealed within the ajari’s secret:
“The womb, that warm, peaceful, secure retreat, becomes a wet, shapeless pulp, a carnivorous plant, a dark, contracting whirlpool where a serpent lurks, insatiably sucking away male strength.”4
—as though her perfect “Otherness” had finally brought misfortune and tragedy upon her. And Darāmieru? Is he an entirely innocent victim? Quite the opposite: he is the sadistic subject. He has no interest whatsoever in what sort of person Ajari Bī actually is. Like the reader, despite Tomino’s layers of hints, he cannot see beyond the ajari’s flesh. He senses danger but cannot comprehend what the danger is, concerned only with enjoying endless carnal pleasure, immersed in male fantasy. Of course, this asymmetry between “what the lover sees in the loved one and what the loved one knows himself to be” exists in every sexual relationship.5 Here, however, the asymmetry seems to be stressed without limit, because Darāmieru appears to be precisely that lofty male ideal ego, while the ajari—his object-cause of desire—is the projection of his fantasy. Here I offer the basic pattern of a false sexual relationship: on the groundless basis of this contingent reproductive difference (the phallus), the man mistakenly believes—or pretends—that he can bring the woman to orgasm; the woman plays along, pretending that he has made her come. Neither actually knows anything about the other, yet both can find satisfaction for their fantasies this way, tirelessly and happily enacting the arrangement in practice. This is the role-playing game of “Everyone in their assigned place,” reproducing signs. Tomino, however, shatters this fantasy of wholeness, completeness, satisfaction, and happiness in a single stroke. As the myth of woman breaks apart, the male ideal ego—beautiful, whole, powerful—also suddenly collapses at the end. As Baudelaire writes:
When she had sucked the marrow from my bones,
And I turned languidly toward her
To return a kiss of love, I saw nothing now
But a wineskin with slimy sides, full of pus!
I closed both eyes in icy terror,
And when I opened them again to the living light,
Beside me, in place of the powerful mannequin
That seemed to have laid in a store of blood,
A jumble of skeletal fragments trembled,
Giving out, all on their own, the cry of a weathercock
Or a signboard at the end of an iron rod,
Swung by the wind through winter nights.
—“The Metamorphoses of the Vampire”, translated from the French for this edition
III
In the second section, we offered a rough analysis of the first two tales, which make up only a tenth or two of the book. But I have no wish to turn this into a lengthy treatise; I hope readers will think through the whole book for themselves. I feel keenly how much I have left unsaid, but this remains an essay, “and no more than that.” Whatever view one takes of the relations between the sexes Tomino depicts, one thing is beyond doubt: the women in his work affirm their own sexual desires without compromise. This is a line of inquiry that needs to be pursued further. I choose to end with Tomino’s own words.
“I have to portray women not as ‘the kind of woman the creator likes,’ but as female characters who exist in that world. … The women I depict fully affirm their own sexuality—that is, their desire for sex. They have no time to be men’s playthings.”6
Editor’s Note
Since a few theoretically minded readers, rather than only general readers, may have made it this far, the author offers the following statement to avoid misunderstanding. This is simply an informal essay, something like a reading guide, written to analyze Yoshiyuki Tomino’s texts. As a short piece, it hopes only to offer a little interpretive inspiration—though it may offer none at all—and strives to be clear and concise—though it may have gone in precisely the opposite direction. It has no theoretical foundation in any rigorous sense, nor does it attempt to construct a problem-and-conclusion framework. It merely draws “heuristically” on some theoretical resources, without pursuing them exhaustively. For that reason, it also deliberately leaves all the theorists unnamed, although it does in fact quote other theoretical texts and draw on schools that may not be compatible, particularly Sue Thornham’s Passionate Detachments: An Introduction to Feminist Film Theory. The matters this essay touches on may be numerous and tangled, so it is certainly possible to pick out a sentence and subject it to any number of fierce theoretical criticisms. But the author hopes that any criticism of the essay will go further and consider women’s actual circumstances here and now, because that is also where the author began.
Book consulted: Sue Thornham, Passionate Detachments: An Introduction to Feminist Film Theory.