When we are dreaming up a story, our desire for a rich plot often leads us to build an expansive setting. As our imaginations roam further afield, the locations multiply and the timelines stretch, until we find ourselves struggling to bring the story to an end.
Rather than keep adding more, many creators deliberately impose limits on a work to keep its development under control.
The most basic approach is one we encounter in familiar categories. Labels such as “youth” or “Republican-era China” confine the story to a particular stage of the protagonist’s life or a particular historical period; settings such as “school” or “America” place it within a particular everyday environment or country.
Broad restrictions like these are already commonplace, so creators go on to narrow down “time” and “space”: a general premise such as “adolescence at school” becomes “the year the protagonist is seventeen,” with “all the action taking place in a single school building.”
But you will find that further reductions in “time” and “space” are much less common.
Apart from short stories, whose length is already limited, longer narratives rarely confine their time span to a day or less, or their setting to a single building or a smaller space.
Recent years have certainly brought quite a few works focused on small settings and little rooms: Chio’s School Road concentrates on its protagonist’s journey to school; How Clumsy You Are, Miss Ueno on a laboratory after class; Comic Girls on a girls’ dormitory, and so on…
But these, too, tend to be serials made up of short, lighthearted slice-of-life episodes. They cannot tell profound stories with a complete overarching plot.
A story needs a certain amount of space and time to unfold. When those bounds become too narrow, making something exciting happen becomes a test of ingenuity.
Some resourceful creators strike a balance by “shrinking one as far as possible while expanding the other as far as possible,” producing something entertaining in the process.
There are other techniques, of course.
Today I want to share and discuss a few representative works from the world of anime, comics, games, and novels—ACGN—in which space is compressed and restricted, yet the plot remains richly eventful. Let us see how some wildly inventive creators tell stories by “limiting space.”
The Basics: Leaping Between Dimensions
If Inuyasha, which began in 1996, was the progenitor of “time-travel manga,” then Tsubasa: Reservoir Chronicle and xxxHOLiC, both of which began serialization in 2003, pioneered and developed “interdimensional-travel manga.”
In Tsubasa: Reservoir Chronicle, CLAMP brings in all the characters from its twenty previous works as inhabitants of parallel dimensions. For instance, Sakura and Syaoran, familiar to many of us from Cardcaptor Sakura, appear here as “Sakura, Princess of the Kingdom of Clow” and “Syaoran, the son of a traveler.”
The story unfolds as the protagonists keep crossing between “dimensions,” arriving in different periods and settings to embark on adventures. Events in the concurrently serialized xxxHOLiC interconnect with those in Tsubasa: Reservoir Chronicle, setting off chain reactions.
In CLAMP’s conception, there is only one world, but countless dimensions. Everything that happens in those different dimensions interlocks, each event both a cause and a consequence of others, ultimately bringing about “inevitability.”
This distinguishes such works from travel-centered stories like Kino’s Journey, Kaiba, ACCA: 13-Territory Inspection Dept., or RobiHachi, new this April. Although both kinds of story continually shift from one space to another, in interdimensional stories each new space the protagonists reach is not separated from the previous one by geographical distance or time: these are parallel dimensions.
“Leaping between dimensions” showed people that space could break free of geographical and historical constraints. It also inspired many creators, subsequently giving rise to an “infinite-space” mode.
Seemingly Small, Actually Large
Creating Infinitely Extending Space or Time Within a Single Building
In works such as The Tatami Galaxy, Hyakumanjou Labyrinth—literally, “Million-Tatami Labyrinth”—and xxxHOLiC: A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the protagonists remain inside a single building: a four-and-a-half-tatami room, for example, or a Western-style mansion. Tatami mats are a Japanese measure of floor area; four and a half mats amount to roughly seven square meters.
Yet the building’s interior contains infinitely extending space. Different worlds may be nested within its rooms, or different exits may lead into new spaces.
This is what I call the “infinite-space” mode.
In Takamichi’s Hyakumanjou Labyrinth, the two heroines, who work as game testers looking for bugs, accidentally wander into a labyrinthine building. They move through rooms with all kinds of layouts, entering new rooms simply by opening a cabinet or a window.
The reader can plainly sense that the rooms’ combined floor area far exceeds the space the building’s exterior suggests it should contain.
The author attempts to use this space as a metaphor for games.
In the end, by “finding game bugs in this space,” the girl makes a happy life for herself in the maze.
This is somewhat like the suspense thriller Escape Room, released this January, or the classic French horror film Cube.1 The protagonists pass through a variety of rooms, each containing a vast interior setting that plainly “cannot be called a room,” and each giving rise to a different story.
Nao Tsukiji, a manga artist adept at playing with spatial settings, also uses this technique in “The Girl in the Box,” chapter nine of Adekan. It tells the story of a family of box-makers who build their home from stacked boxes and live inside boxes of all kinds. (Tsukiji has also drawn a story about a girl who lives in a drawer.)
In the xxxHOLiC film A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the creators confine the story to a mansion. A curse, however, keeps its layout constantly changing.
Entering a summer-night scene.
The mansion’s owner, a spirit, is a collector who specializes in collecting “collectors” (that sentence is a bit of a tangle).
Every collector invited into the mansion is eventually turned into a collectible by the spirit, adding another “collection room” to the mansion.
Each room behind them belongs to a collector. Together, these rooms make up the mansion owner’s “collection.”
An especially ingenious example is The Tatami Galaxy, based on Tomihiko Morimi’s novel and directed by Masaaki Yuasa. Here, time loops that repeatedly start over create infinite space within a room measuring just four and a half tatami mats.
Dissatisfied with his university life, the protagonist keeps reliving his first three years. Each time, he moves into his four-and-a-half-tatami room, joins a different university club, and has a different university experience.
Attentive readers will notice that, although each loop tells a different story, the actions in them overlap and affect one another, much like the view of “interdimensional travel” discussed at the beginning.
In the final loop, the protagonist simply does nothing, staying shut away in his four-and-a-half-tatami room for all three years.
Eventually, he discovers that he can no longer leave this space. Every door he opens leads to another four-and-a-half-tatami room—as endless as the university years he keeps reliving and never finds satisfying.
Even smashing through a wall only reveals another four-and-a-half-tatami room.
The author calls this chapter “Adrift in Four and a Half Tatami Mats.”
Only when the protagonist breaks out of this four-and-a-half-tatami cage, overcoming his preconceptions and anguish about university life, does time begin to flow again.
Morimi has always enjoyed these time-and-space games. “Old Rihaku’s train” in his The Night Is Short, Walk On Girl and The Eccentric Family is another “prop for conjuring with space”—
Not only is its interior furnished with the old man’s bizarre collectibles, but its top level contains a bamboo grove and hot springs. It far exceeds any ordinary conception of a train.
Note: The Night Is Short, Walk On Girl is an interesting example of storytelling through “limiting time.” Four stories taking place in one night leave the audience feeling as though they have lived through all four seasons: spring, summer, autumn, and winter.
Linking Small Incidents
Interlocking Stories Within a Single Building
I really do love collecting stories in which every small incident constrains and influences the others, together creating the entire main plot.
Reading such stories feels like unrolling a long, pieced-together picture scroll, little by little. Each scene could stand as a picture in its own right, yet placed together they form a magnificent, thought-provoking kaleidoscope of a world.
Some creators strive to achieve these ingenious connections between incidents within an extremely small, finite space—
They center the story on a building, recounting the lives of different people in its various corners, or things that happen there in different eras. Eventually, these small stories form a tightly bound, closed loop, with each event bringing about another.
This narrative approach in fact originates in “coordinative thinking,” a distinctive worldview shaped by Eastern culture, which runs directly counter to Western “subordinative thinking.”2
In Eastern coordinative thinking, things are “parts in existential dependence upon the whole world-organism.” They act upon each other less through mechanical force or causal relationships than through a “mysterious resonance.”3
Let us begin with Masakazu Ishiguro’s Skygrazer (Getenrou).
The first two chapters—a battle over porn magazines and a story within the story modeled on live-action special-effects shows—make you think this is simply a light comedy packed with laughs.
From chapter three onward, robots, a scatterbrained detective, and an artificial-life specialist begin to appear. The work keeps its light comic tone, but the plot takes increasingly outrageous turns—only to bring its ever more far-flung story deftly back to the first chapter.
Clues concerning every character in the building have been planted early on. Who would have thought that the ice pop in this little girl’s hand at the beginning was an important clue tying the whole story together?
All the stories revolve closely around the single building called Skygrazer. The kids who grow up there each go their own way, and when they meet again after a long absence, they have become very different people. Talking about the foolish things they did when they were young may be a way of remembering their friendship, but the changes in each of them are always plain to see.
Only at the end do you realize that this story, just nine chapters long, explores ethics, robots, artificial life, and the pressures of urban living. Every character has a part to play; they cannot act as they please, and their actions resonate with one another.
You cannot help exclaiming, in the spirit of the woman judge in The God of Cookery: “What am I going to do if I never find another manga this good?”
If Ishiguro uses “limiting space” to explore dark humor and philosophical questions, Douman Seiman’s The Voynich Hotel reveals human love, sex, and madness.
The author depicts an old hotel on the little island of Blefusco, where every guest has a distinctive story: a detective club of boys and girls, a manga artist, a gay nonconformist, a female assassin, drug dealers, an elderly virgin cook, ghosts, demons, and more. Even the hotel’s maids have secrets stretching back a thousand years.
The work is divided according to the number of days the protagonist has spent at the hotel. Each day brings a little everyday comedy, yet as time passes, invisible threads connect everyone staying there, and each helps bring about the others’ endings.
The same method also applies in literature. Nabokov’s novels are an example.
Nabokov builds a sense of space through language, structure, and the psychology of reading. He deliberately eliminates reflexive reference between passages of the text, slows the narrative’s chronological progression or weakens it, and emphasizes patterns and details, as well as “cosmic synchronization”: the capacity to grasp these patterns and details together as an organic whole.4
He breaks with readers’ conventional left-to-right habits, emphasizing repeated reading as the basis for constructing a unified space of meaning through the text’s intricate system of reflexive reference.
For example, in The Annotated Lolita, Alfred Appel Jr. suggests that, besides consulting the notes while reading the novel, readers can place his annotations alongside it and read the two in parallel (LO, Preface, xiii). Kinbote in Pale Fire recommends a similar spatial mode of reading that departs from convention (PF, 28).
All these works try to lead readers to discover the countless connections between stories through repeated rereading, constructing a harmonious “picture scroll” of the whole.
Seemingly Large, Actually Small
Spatial Contrasts and Metaphors
Those are the first two narrative techniques for “limiting space.”
One expands the content by extending space infinitely inside a small building;
the other tells a good story by connecting a small building’s many characters and the passage of time.
The third method uses the building—or space—itself directly, through analogy, transformations of form, and metaphor, to express the creator’s feelings.
This narrative technique often involves striking disparities in size between a building—or space—and the thing it is compared to, making a powerful impression through sharp contrasts.
In Mōryō no Hako, adapted into anime from Natsuhiko Kyogoku’s novel, the heroine lies in a boxlike medical research building after a traffic accident, with everything but her head covered by bedding.
Later, a man secretly in love with her breaks into the research building. Before everyone’s eyes, the heroine suddenly disappears, and no one can find her.
Only at the end does the reader suddenly discover that her heart and lungs, damaged in the accident, could no longer keep her body functioning. The doctor amputated her limbs and connected the brain remaining in her head to the medical building, using machinery and electrical circuitry to sustain her bodily functions.
So the place where everyone had been standing—the medical building shaped like an enormous box—was the heroine’s body.
The man secretly in love with her had simply put her head in a little box and eloped with her.
Building—body—box—head—life—box—desire—box: repeated analogies, enlarging and shrinking their terms, create multiple metaphors.
Ryoko Kui, who is equally adept at spatial metaphors, also uses this jarring contrast in “The Drawer” and “A Rich Person’s House,” two stories in her collection Terrarium in a Drawer.
A scene inside a drawer links up with a drawer inside that scene, giving a sense of what Boyd calls “multiple spaces”: “worlds within worlds within worlds,” “possibilities within possibilities within possibilities.”56
An eccentric genius like Shintaro Kago can even exploit the multiple dimensions of three-dimensional space to present a story from several angles. In “Abstraction,” he turns the panels themselves into buildings to express emotion.
Postscript: Talking to Myself
In Kant’s self-proclaimed “formal science,” space and time, as a priori forms of sensibility, are the modes of existence of everything we call “appearances.”7
In his view, “space,” as “outer form,” orders the shapes of external things in our minds so that they can be intuited. “Time,” as “inner form,” further arranges the spatial determinations of those things into sequences of “before and after” or “simultaneity.” This completes sensible cognition and, through schemata and imagination, makes the transition to understanding.
This is the most authoritative explanation of space and time in the history of philosophy.
On this account, verbal narrative, as a temporal sequence, already contains external things that have been ordered by space. In other words, if there were a narrative not ordered by space, its listeners would not know what it meant.
Discussion of spatial narratology has continued for nearly seventy years, beginning with Joseph Frank’s 1945 essay “Spatial Form in Modern Literature,”8 but research has remained centered on the novel.
Among the immense variety of narrative genres in human culture, the novel is only a drop in the ocean.
That is why I have tried to approach the question of “using space to tell stories” from several angles through manga, animation, and film. I also hope to gather a few practical tips for creating stories. (And plug some favorites along the way.)
Comments
Zhong Zimo
Of all the submissions I have read so far, this article’s topic offers the most room for expansion and the richest possibilities to explore. The very proposal of a “limited-space” technique is enough to whet a reader’s appetite. Yet, unlike my immediate understanding of the title’s question, most of the article does not discuss the “spatial” techniques used in creating a work. Instead, it concentrates on concrete spaces within the story. The author attempts to establish a useful basis for classification, connecting the material world to which space belongs with the mental world to which narrative belongs, then returning to analyses of numerous works. He takes a shortcut by beginning with leaps across space and time. Each of these parallel “possible worlds” bears the complete imprint of the subject’s existence, and the points where they converge reveal the theme of the story as a whole. By concentrating on the protagonist’s movements between these “worlds,” we can even avoid the problem of how matter and mind connect. Under this logic, what the “walls” divide is no longer an inside and an outside in space, but a world’s face and its reverse.
Yet this discussion is very likely to stray from its central topic of “space.” We therefore seem to find a contradiction in the subheadings. Although the author intends to return to the extension of the material world, analyzing space through the relationship between “large” and “small,” he inserts a discussion of “linking small incidents” to show how different characters’ “horizons” constitute a good story. The three subheadings do not seem to stand in a directly parallel relationship. I think this part of the analysis remains strongly dualistic: it treats “space” as the purely material side of the divide, neglecting the mental dimension that space encompasses. In animation, the most immediate manifestation of this is the appearance of “spectacle” within an otherwise realistic world. In The Tatami Galaxy, the scenes presented to the audience are not shadows of the protagonist’s inner life. They are physical realities directly connected to the flesh-and-blood body that inhabits them. Nor are they fixed projections of that inner life: they are structures that keep changing with the individual’s experiences. This space contains both the semiotic metaphor of “recurrence” expressed by the overhead view of the four-and-a-half-tatami room and the symbolism of the protagonist smashing the walls of the room his body inhabits to signify an inner breakthrough.
The “large/small” classification has another consequence: the use of Mōryō no Hako in the “Seemingly Large, Actually Small” section is rather tricky. When the body becomes a building that engulfs people, its implications should not be confined to the ingenious spatial transposition of “human body—building.” As the body becomes a building, it also becomes a living space for others. It affects both the subjects living within it and the bodily awareness of the person whose body it is. The body made into a building gives concrete form to abstract reflection on body schema, while turning the separation of body and organs into a spectacle. In a work like this, the cyborg metaphor practically announces itself. Spatial change is no longer a change of shape in the material world, but a change in how a subject actively participating in material life experiences existence. Individuals living within this space may also develop a terror of being “swallowed whole.” The space that shapes our everyday lives presents the image of a mother, yet carries the symbolic order’s paternal metaphor. Escaping or destroying a building becomes a visual expression of resistance to an abstract structure. Tomoe Enjou’s resistance to Souren Araya, for example, lends itself to a Deleuzian reading.9 In the final confrontation, Tomoe learns that what he experienced with Shiki Ryougi was entirely memory and virtuality, already past and “determined.” Yet the essence of existence lies precisely in this constantly changing semblance; the virtual is fundamental to the cone constituted by historical time. Thus the virtual is not Tomoe’s “falsity,” but his living potential—the virtual. When Tomoe learns that his origin is meaningless, he returns to the singular point of the present, which leads him to trust unconditionally in desire’s flight and rebel. Here, the topology of being and the architectural spectacle form an intertextual relation, disrupting the geometrical laws of the material world. This line of thought offers clues for addressing immaterial spaces such as cyberspace. There must be many similar works and analyses; I am merely sharing one perspective. But it should show how many avenues are open to us in discussing space. I very much look forward to the author’s further explorations!
Jingxi
Zhong has put it rather politely. When we discussed the article in the group as I was reading it, I immediately pointed out several glaringly amateurish errors. First, to put it briefly, I think this talk of Eastern “coordinative thinking” and Western “subordinative thinking” is amateur philosophizing. What “East”? What “West”? These are just grand words with no clear meaning. Second, the author is plainly unfamiliar with the subsequent controversies and debates over Kant’s account of space and time. Talk of “the most authoritative explanation” can clearly only be regarded as a reckless assertion. What deserves praise in this article is probably the question it raises and its analyses of a few individual works.