Interests: anime, comics, and games culture / gender / space / intellectual history. An observer at the margins, overflowing with empathy.
Approximately 8,000 Chinese characters in the original.
The following contains extensive spoilers for Three Days of Happiness, I Want to Eat Your Pancreas, and Aozora to Kumorizora (“Blue Sky and Cloudy Sky”). Read at your discretion.
Introduction
Japanese jun’ai, or “pure-love,” stories remain an inexhaustible topic. If pure-love comedy offers us an aesthetic space from which moral seriousness and the finitude of life have been excluded, tragedy is always too willing to let morality intrude brutally. It continually reminds readers that limits exist, drawing us into negotiations over what makes love genuine. In “Toward an Analysis of Relational Forms (Part One),” I proposed the “Byakuyakō” model of character relationships: a romance between lovers bound together under threat of death, sharing both joy and hardship.1 Drawing on Baudelaire’s aesthetics and a structural perspective, I offered a rudimentary explanation of what makes such relationships moving. The relationships in mainstream pure-love tragedies can be seen to fit this framework.
Yet although I established a framework for analyzing the Byakuyakō relationship, I did not explain it in detail, much less attend to its emotional life. The model still has philosophical implications worth exploring—and, more importantly, it is closely connected with the existentialist aesthetic of Japanese popular narratives. Only by bringing it into closer contact with representative works can we grasp that aesthetic’s strengths and shortcomings. Sugaru Miaki, a writer active on blogs in recent years, has been growing in popularity. The film adaptation of the light novel I Want to Eat Your Pancreas, released in China not long ago, has also attracted attention. These developments lend a certain topical interest to revisiting the Byakuyakō model.
That is the approach this essay takes. Beginning with the stories and motifs of several works by Miaki, I will discuss the boundary situations their ordinary protagonists encounter: death, freedom, isolation, and meaninglessness. I will explain why these situations are crucial to the Byakuyakō relationship, and consider the question “What is love?” that arises from them. Finally, I will turn a critical eye back on Miaki’s “formula fatigue” and do some “nitpicking” over certain missteps in Pancreas.
I. Boundary Situations
It is only in the face of death that man’s self is born.
—Saint Augustine2
For a Byakuyakō relationship to endure, its two subjects must face pressures they can scarcely overcome. Strictly speaking, Miaki’s works do not entirely avoid the occasional “abrupt romantic leap” out of despair. Their understanding of “reality” remains confined to relations between marginal individuals, without an overall understanding of marginalized groups—though it would seem harsh to compare him with writers such as Hikaru Sugii. As representative instances of the model, however, Miaki’s texts are particularly apt, since they consistently revolve around four fundamental existential questions: death, freedom, existential isolation, and meaninglessness. In his best-known work, Three Days of Happiness, we encounter a somewhat shopworn premise: pawning one’s lifespan. From the outset, this premise shows readers the limits of the protagonist’s life. It successfully captures the “boundary situation” concealed beneath the ordinary: a catastrophe that suddenly descends upon a subject and that, because of the subject’s inherent finitude, cannot possibly be overcome.
An individual subjected to collective condemnation encounters the limits imposed by isolation; a hero who has lost the Demon King encounters the limits of existential meaning. Three Days of Happiness, meanwhile, enters the discussion of the value of existence through its depiction of an individual living in a contemporary city. Its male protagonist, Kusunoki, feels that life is meaningless, so he sells the remaining thirty years of his lifespan, keeping three months to enjoy himself to the full. During this period he lives with Miyagi, his monitor and the female protagonist, who has pawned her own “time.” As they work through his outstanding wishes, they come to understand each other more deeply and fall in love. Eventually, he emerges from the shadows and rediscovers the meaning of his existence. Near the end, he resolutely sells the valuable few dozen days he has left to buy Miyagi’s freedom. She, in turn, does as he has done and sells her remaining decades of life, simply to become a girl whose love can receive everyone’s blessing and spend her last three days with Kusunoki.
Text in the image:
…
Clack…
Selling my CDs and books really hurt.
The story opens with Kusunoki’s memories of a childhood classroom discussion about exchanging life for money, establishing its central theme. When the scene shifts to the “present,” we encounter a university student going nowhere, telling his own story. His home is bare, his desires few. His only hobby is collecting secondhand CDs, yet the demands of making ends meet repeatedly force him to part with them. He has considerable talent for painting, but reality has made him abandon that dream. Potentially distracting information, such as his family background, is deftly withheld, while his circumstances stay close to real life. He has ordinary interests such as reading and listening to music; his difficulties—trouble at work, false friendships—are things we readily encounter in everyday life. Someone living with this moderate deprivation, without having been pushed entirely to the margins, has a natural affinity with the audience.
Text in the image:
But in the summer when I was nineteen, anxiety drove me to pick up my brush again in haste.
That was precisely the “worst possible time to try to create.”
As a result, I lost my ability to paint.
This psychological state of moderate deprivation under late capitalism also indicates a modern transformation of boundary situations. The human catastrophes Jaspers lived through have left the stage; large-scale war has disappeared from Japanese soil, while a subjectless, rhizomatic consciousness spreads and branches among the urban citizenry. Existential questions have shifted from collective resistance in desperate circumstances to individual questioning of being. Isolation and meaninglessness gradually take over the ontological position once occupied by death. The “everyday world” discussed by Heidegger has likewise evolved from industrial society’s “myth of progress” into consumerism’s illusory subject. Depicting boundary situations against this social background sometimes requires recourse to the absurd events and marginal circumstances of modernity: indiscriminate killers, K-drama’s stock trio of melodramatic devices, alienated labor, and so on.3 Before pawning his lifespan, Kusunoki confronts an existence whose meaning he cannot comprehend. Such “self-indulgence” would have been unimaginable in an age of revolution, but today it makes perfect sense. As “ordinary people”—the “they” of das Man—we all feel an impulse to evade our finitude: once we confront our limits, the stable self through which we once “believed in ourselves” collapses. The immediate way to evade existence at its limits is to throw ourselves back into imagination: either to fall wholly into the world of the “they” (Verfallen), or to rely on worldly fame and gain just enough to sustain that sacrosanct private space. Through Miyagi, we learn that without the occasion afforded by pawning his lifespan, Kusunoki would have spent his remaining thirty years in precisely this inauthentic state.
Dialogue in the image:
“When we’re twenty and we’ve achieved great things… If, by then, we both have something we’re ashamed of—like not being able to find anyone to marry—then… if we’re both left on the shelf… why don’t we just get together?”
The romantic set pieces of romantic comedy serve precisely to sustain the self in imagination. Miaki’s works move in the opposite direction, exposing life’s insufficiency to readers and viewers. Because of the resemblance, readers equally sunk in everyday life can readily understand and accept the protagonist’s undistinguished existence—as though recognizing their own defeated, listless side. His reason for selling his life to escape a meaningless existence thus becomes persuasive. Once he has pawned thirty years, however, Kusunoki confronts the three months remaining to him and finally encounters the boundary situation of death. The fact that he will die in three months becomes a matter of ultimate concern. Later, we learn that his sense of meaninglessness arose from realizing that he could neither become an outstanding painter nor marry his childhood friend Himeno, while remaining unable to compromise with or make concessions to his own childhood experience. So he had gradually come to eke out his existence through insubstantial hobbies. It is precisely by acknowledging his own death that Kusunoki at last finds an opening toward reconciliation with the “self-grasping” of his childhood, beginning a journey of stripping away what obscures his life.
Text in the image:
I knew all of this perfectly well.
“Me? I’m just a living corpse now.”
But…
“So, a few days ago—”
I just couldn’t stop.
Once he acknowledges his approaching death, Kusunoki begins settling accounts with his childhood experience. The scene in which he and Himeno talk at a festival as children provides a crucial clue. It is the symbolic marker of his childhood fixation, and his turn toward life in the face of death rests on a retrospective return to that scene.4 It shows the expectations each had for the future and the ending they imagined: “If we can’t realize our dreams, we’ll be together.” Yet their uncertainty was not grounded in any actual experience of growing up. It was a playful imagining of the future that produced “truth” too soon. Through just such contingencies, reality shattered their convictions. Already lost under the pressures of reality in high school, Kusunoki entirely missed Himeno’s last cry for help. From that point on, the imaginary relationship formed in childhood was broken. Himeno, too, encountered a crisis in the meaning of her existence. In a story pervaded by this loss of meaning, her eventual suicide attempt acquires weight and plausibility: she, too, has fallen from the pedestal of aloof distinction she once occupied. When Kusunoki and Himeno meet for the last time, the scene resembles not so much a dialogue as separate confessions addressed to a mirror. Hysterically insisting that he has “never changed,” Kusunoki clings to childhood experience, revealing all too plainly how he has fallen into a refusal to acknowledge defeat in reality. Himeno recognizes that he is beyond saving and finally realizes the meaninglessness of “killing herself in front of Kusunoki.” Having resolved this childhood knot, the two hastily end their conversation.
Dialogue in the image:
“Yesterday… you were the one who appraised my lifespan?”
“Yes. Starting today, I’ll be serving as your monitor. My name is Miyagi.”
The search for Himeno and for the childhood time capsule reveals the main characters’ boundary situations. Himeno moves from the defeat of her ambitions into existential meaninglessness. Kusunoki begins to emerge from fallenness and project a future in light of the fact that he is “going to die.” During her conversation with him at the station, Miyagi also speaks of her isolation and lack of freedom: she has sold her “existence”—in the Heideggerian sense. Not only has she lost thirty years of “being-with,” since no one except the person she monitors can see her; she has also lost those thirty years of time in which to experience the world. She is cut off from creation and the workings of the world: not only can she have no effect on the phenomenal world here and now, she is not part of it. Kusunoki’s first-person perspective places certain constraints on how fully this despair can be depicted; works such as CROSS†CHANNEL (C+C) explore it more deeply. The exclusive relationship between monitor and monitored is the opening the author leaves for elevating the story. Through it, he directs the question of the limits of individual existence toward the infinity of the Other. The deeply moving love of the Byakuyakō relationship rests on the pursuit of just such a truth.
II. Existential Communication and the Ethics of the Other
Only by comparing myself with someone else, and with myself, do I discover myself for the first time.
That is “what living means to me.”
—Sakura Yamauchi
We have discussed how boundary situations arise against a background of everyday life far removed from war and widespread catastrophe, and how readers come to identify with these situations. The next question is why two people who both encounter boundary situations can establish a love that is at once unbreakable and deeply moving.
As it happens, Jaspers, who formulated the concept of boundary situations, experienced for himself how love could be elevated and strengthened under such conditions. During the Second World War, he went so far as to give up his teaching position to protect his Jewish wife, suffering the desertion of friends and supporters. Nazi soldiers surrounded his house and demanded that he hand her over. Unafraid of death, Jaspers and his wife sustained each other and resolutely held out. At the critical moment, Allied forces occupied Berlin and rescued them. After the war, their experience became a celebrated story.5
In Jaspers’s terms, two people sustaining each other in such desperate circumstances engage in “existential communication (loving struggle).” This communication takes place through the shared presence of two subjects confronting catastrophe. For someone who has recognized the lightness of life yet must quickly take the next step, the approaching limit makes the protection of one’s inner life pointless. Serious, sincere confession not only sustains the self but also enables the “I” to accept “my lack” as reflected in the other’s eyes. An “encounter movement” between subjects is thereby achieved.6
Today, as grand historical events recede, shared suffering withdraws from center stage. Loving struggle becomes an increasingly distant hope, while the barriers between people’s hearts block the possibility of a common narrative among “ordinary people.” How realist fiction can depict an instance of “Dasein-with”—shared existence—thus becomes a problem. Rather than enter the world of marginalized groups and take a naturalist approach, Three Days of Happiness and Aozora to Kumorizora construct “a supernatural reality without any explanation,” placing “ordinary people” in the category of the marginal. This holds whether the premise is a pawnshop that buys and sells life or the power to control other people’s suicides. In Three Days, the monitors, too, are people who have pawned their time. Existential meaninglessness and absolute loneliness weigh no less heavily on them than on those who pawn their lifespans. This establishes parallel motifs for Kusunoki and Miyagi, but what truly opens an existential connection between them is sustained companionship. Having resolved his childhood complex and returned to reflection, Kusunoki finds that the only immediate focus for his actions is Miyagi, who is there beside him. For Miyagi, who has sold her time of being-with in society and lost her “existence,” Kusunoki is her only dependable, real connection. After only a few days together, she already distinguishes him from the awful people she has previously monitored. The later development and deepening of their feelings begin here: they talk, take photographs, fold paper cranes, and become a couple. Encouraged by Miyagi, Kusunoki takes up his brush again and turns toward positive action for her sake. Through his willingness to confront the world’s doubts, and through his sincerity—foolish beyond belief—Miyagi regains a “sense of recognition,” breaking free of her cold role as a mere instrument.
The insurmountable obstacles a boundary situation places before a protagonist indicate that, faced with finitude, the subject must reorganize personal experience in order to live with the approaching limit. Existential questions always arise through “being-with” others, and this is the motivating force of the Byakuyakō relationship. Generally, amid the eternal recurrence of everyday life and a reality in which people grow increasingly isolated, what connects two solitary beings is a symbolic marker of a boundary situation. Within the narrative structure, it not only links the work’s time and space; it also takes the form of a defining action or object through which the two enter each other’s lives. It appears through a special status—monitor and monitored, controller and controlled—or through symbolic objects such as Sakura’s diary, Living with Dying, and “7F,” the seventh-floor terminal-care setting in narcissu.
Unlike Jaspers, Levinas—himself profoundly unfortunate, his family nearly annihilated by the Nazis—gives the “Other” ethical priority. In doing so, he supersedes a false philosophy of intersubjectivity that examines relations between subjects solely from the subject’s perspective. In short, the Other is not a tool we use to confront “Transcendence,” but represents infinity itself. Although he, too, acknowledges the Other’s infinity, he differs from Sartre, who regards other people as hell and proposes “negative alterity” from the subject’s standpoint. Levinas turns instead toward an affirmative attitude to alterity. He calls this gateway to infinity “the face of the Other.” Suppose a passer-by accidentally meets the eyes of a beggar beside him. This means that the passer-by becomes aware that the beggar is aware of him. At that moment, however brief, he faces a question: should I give alms?
The encounter between the male and female protagonists of Aozora to Kumorizora faithfully enacts this interplay of the ethics of alterity. As a “cleaner” who controls people’s suicides, Kumorizora expects the Other to “resist.” Once a target resists, it means that they realize something terrible is happening and are struggling against it; it also indicates that they have not identified Kumorizora as the person controlling them from behind the scenes. By taking up this voyeur’s position, he can turn the Other into a puppet and an instrument. As long as the process continues, he will never recognize the finitude of his own existence, but will remain absorbed in the fallenness of his work—because in the brutal process of controlling other people’s suicides, he is God. He can go on “cleaning” to evade the meaning of life, to evade that inexplicable “there is” without a subject.7
Dialogue and sound in the image:
“What’s this supposed to mean?”
Gulp.
“… Could you change it to ‘Everything in this world is utterly hateful, so I’m going to die’?”
Aozora’s appearance completely breaks this cycle of fallenness. She does not resist her body’s involuntary movements at all. By continuing to observe her, Kumorizora discovers that her life was already beyond saving. She has almost none of the vitality needed to connect positively with the world, no lingering attachment to everyday life, and a fatalist’s certainty about death. In the way she exposes her own lack, she is too “perfect.” When she first resists him, it is, astonishingly, so that she can make her suicide note more thorough. When, in an icy voice, she asks Kumorizora—whom she plainly cannot see—“Aren’t you going to kill me?”, he finally recognizes his own finitude retrospectively: this Other, who has given up on everything, has seen through his trick of controlling people’s suicides. The one whose lack is truly laid bare here is not Aozora, the girl who confronts death and thereby manifests infinity, but Kumorizora, who can do nothing except control whether others live or die. In an attempt to escape, he falls into hysteria.
Dialogue in the image:
“It’s you, isn’t it? The one controlling me.”
“… Ah. Yes.”
Having already seen through death, Aozora adopts a stance of complete passivity, willing to die. She even relinquishes all free will—giving up both the desire to live and “suicide”—and tells Kumorizora about her weaknesses and shortcomings without reservation. He has gradually defined himself as evil and internalized that definition, coming to regard his work as a “cleaner” as banal. Aozora’s appearance gives him an entirely new perspective: because she is wholly willing to die, the event itself drops out of moral judgment. Once he recognizes his own finitude and that of the Other, Kumorizora turns from evading “shame” toward acknowledging “lack,” moving into the higher religious stage. His love for Aozora now manifests itself in two ways. On the one hand, it is curiosity about the meaning of her existence: what, if anything, could make her linger in this world, and why can she face death so calmly? On the other, it is a movement toward the truth of “caring for human beings” when a subject encounters an entirely new existence: what is she? What does she still “have”? If the subject and the phenomenal world it inhabits are essentially one, then the world’s limits are the subject’s limits. Love lies in the eternally futile attempt of a subject, aware of its own limits, to exhaust the limits of the other. This leads us into a universe of intersubjectivity.
Quotation in the image:
At that moment, you’re looking at the end of the world too, aren’t you?
The sky at the end of the world that you see.
The sky at the world’s limit.
The sky at the very end.
Could I look at it with you?
III. The Shortcomings of Existentialist Texts
In contemporary cities, where grand narratives of catastrophe have left the stage, good writers can often perceive the existential problems ordinary people face: weariness with freedom, fear of loneliness, questions about the meaning of existence. Readers also love these texts because their characters contain another side of ourselves. We long to extract something pure from treacherous hearts and scheming relationships, to break free of alienated labor and seek an altogether different meaning in life.
Yet even with such thoughtful designs, these works can readily fall short in two respects. The first concerns characterization: not every existentialist text about a bond between two people constitutes a “Byakuyakō relationship.” If one person has encountered no obvious limit, but enters the other’s life for a reason such as “knowing a secret,” the relationship becomes unbalanced. The second concerns theme. Popular existential fiction—light novels and related forms of youth-oriented storytelling—rests on a fundamental misrecognition: it reflects the symptoms of contemporary everyday life while also serving the negative function of suturing fantasy.
I Want to Eat Your Pancreas chooses an “ordinary classmate,” the “I,” as its narrator, exposing the imbalance in the relationship. Lacking comparable bodily experience, this “I” responds to Sakura’s actions through empathy, seeming more like a cold narrator. In terms of character design, this reveals how thinly drawn the “I” is; in the reading experience, Sakura becomes a sublime object of voyeurism. Whether running away or playing the King’s Game, Sakura occupies the active position, captured by the male protagonist’s point of view. And this “I”—Haruki—is neither Kusunoki, who has given up painting, nor Kumorizora, who wants to become an older brother. Although his dull life is banal enough, he is content with it, rather than recognizing his own lack as Kusunoki does. Something is therefore always missing from his participation in the relationship. It is as though any character—or any reader—could occupy this empty signifier, provided they were ordinary enough. This asymmetry readily makes their relationship bewildering. As a result, what moves us is not the love between them but the sudden illumination brought by the disclosure of Sakura’s final letter after her absurd, Camusian death. It reveals her actual experience and how she drew on the infinity of this “I” to find meaning in her own existence. Yet infinity must presuppose an acknowledgment of both one’s own finitude and the other’s. Because the “I” is not a subject marked by lack and caught in a predicament, Sakura’s development seems somewhat romantic and accidental.
The thematic problem in such texts is equally plain. Once removed from boundary situations, the logic governing some authors’ characters vanishes. To create the necessary circumstances, these authors must therefore keep devising premises that slightly violate the natural order. To achieve the pure opposition of “the two” and “the world,” the writer discards almost every mediating structure: this is not an avoidance of social description at the level of narration, but a cutting away of ordinary social relations from the characters’ very being, presenting them already “castrated.” Intuitively, this popular fiction seems to develop and extend sekai-kei, the “world-type” narratives that connect intimate relationships directly to world-scale crises. Whereas the Byakuyakō relationship in sekai-kei still retained an aspiration to resolve grand problems even as it turned inward toward the protagonist’s inner world, this popular fiction has long since introduced a parallax: the community’s fate no longer exists. It turns instead toward individual justice, making much of life and death, memory, and bonds. The common limit disappears, replaced by growth and the breaking down of emotional barriers, as each of the two uses the Other’s infinity to fulfill their own wishes.
Yet because mediation has already been severed at the level of the characters’ being—because the connection with social facts that would make them conscious of their finitude has been cut—they must remain in a continual process of exploring the Other’s differences. There is almost no other choice. With the “finite” absent for various reasons, infinity is indiscriminately magnified, making it easy for the subject to fall into metaphysical “bad infinity.” The Other becomes a desired “sublime object,” rather than the hard kernel that discloses the Real. How to recover the historical experience and social imprints essential to human beings may be a question worth asking.
This gives us a new way to understand the position of the “I” in Pancreas. If this narrator’s particularity has been stripped away to present Sakura’s pure goodness and a pure-love relationship, allowing anyone to occupy his position, then the heroine’s resulting transference onto the “I”—Haruki—is no more than an imagining. On this point alone, narcissu, which likewise explores existential meaning under terminal illness, and planetarian the reverie of a little planet, which depicts the human condition at the end of the world, handle matters somewhat better. Their narrative protagonists are not exempted from boundary situations, and both stories leave a blank space around their characters’ fates at the end.
Even if we refrain from imputing bad motives and read such premises as metaphors for urban existence, they are hardly a masterstroke. In literary form, they perpetuate a political failure: people choose to make much of the search for life’s meaning as a way of evading the passion of critique. Of course, asking what life means will never be an outdated theme, nor should that inquiry bear responsibility for a work’s “illusory quality.” After all, it genuinely arises from authors’ own experiences and everyday reflections, from their need to break through this interpersonal smog and find the real thing. For the generation of Japanese cultural workers who grew up after the economic bubble, the social reality available to them both shapes and limits their creative range. The atmosphere—the aura—they experience, and the structures of their relationships, have also been drastically transformed by social media. If major limits disappear, then everyday life’s small but certain happiness is the real phenomenon within their reach, available for constructing their own meaning.
Quotation in the image:
People cannot fully understand one another.
Setting aside those who deliberately hurt others, or even take pleasure in doing so,
do not assume that other people think the same way you do.
Put yourself in their position
and consider how they think: that is how to build relationships with others.—Yoru Sumino
How we should respond to the growing number of such phenomena is the question with which this essay will end. Experience suggests that excessive imaginings of true love produce formula fatigue; much of the criticism readers direct at Miaki comes from this. If the boundary situation becomes a storytelling device, an embodied experience the author cannot get beyond, sublimity soon withdraws from the text. Precisely because real life offers no replica of such feeling, “catastrophe” becomes caught in a “cry-wolf effect.” The risk is particularly pronounced in social work with marginalized groups and in psychological counseling: someone who keeps saying they want to kill themselves yet takes no action will, little by little, exhaust the enthusiasm of those trying to help. Trying to prevent a “death” that may come one day is frightening; more dispiriting still is the prospect that we will remain in this oppressive risk society for a long time. To accuse writers who are still developing of “lacking a sense of responsibility,” and to press them to break through, seems harsh. Yet if they—and their readers—remain wrapped in the phenomenal world of “bitterness and sweetness” depicted by youth literature, practicing their ethnomethodology, they will inevitably have to construct the Other’s infinity through imaginings of marginalized people, continuing to produce this “uninteresting” existence.8 And what we gain from our repeated pursuit of difference is merely a reskinned “bad infinity.”
Perhaps what needs to change has never been this creative device, but the conditions of existence that shape these personalities; perhaps what has always been deficient is not existentialism, but the existentialism we “articulate.” Given the realities disclosed by the phenomenology of technology, what we receive through two-dimensional representations will not be “the face of the Other” signifying genuine infinity, or genuine love between subjects marked by lack; it may instead be Baudrillard’s canned laughter. We will continue for a long time to rely on the feelings these texts arouse, hoping that some unforeseen breach may yet allow the field to break through. Whether in literary creation or interpretive criticism, to “shut ourselves in” among phenomena already within reach, evading what confronts us in existence—new experiences, new theories—is probably not the best course. Maintaining dialogue and communication is very important; surely this, too, is a crucial step in seeking change…
But whatever else, I have to say one thing—loundraw is fucking great!!
(Thank you for stopping to read.)
Editor’s Note
I still need to think this through carefully. Zhong’s analysis is very much on point.