So lazy they haven’t written a thing.
The protagonist of Penguin Highway is Aoyama, a schoolboy who loves science and exploration. He is close to the Lady, a young woman who works as a dentist, and is so fascinated by her breasts that he vows to marry her. One day, penguins suddenly appear in large numbers in the small town. As he investigates, he discovers that the Lady is the one making them. Up to this point, I thought this was simply a tale of summer revelry very much in Tomihiko Morimi’s style. But the enormous sphere of water called the “Sea,” the penguin-eating monsters, and the crisis facing the town take the film in an unexpected direction. Without attending to its symbols and metaphors, we will be left bewildered by all these fantastical happenings. This essay is an attempt at a Lacanian reading.
The Lady is the key to understanding Penguin Highway. First, call to mind your image of her: a dentist, someone who teaches Aoyama chess, goes for days without eating, turns things into penguins by throwing them, and so on. Yet all this is so insubstantial that it cannot give us even a basic sense of the character. She does not even have a name. Our attention therefore falls on the landscape in the image below. For our protagonist Aoyama, whose phallus is still small, this landscape is like no other. It is the object of his sexual fantasies; it even makes him decide to marry her. She is a mystery, as she herself says. She cannot be symbolized; she embodies his many desires and is a composite of all his symptoms. We can therefore say that it is not the landscape below that appears on her, but she who appears on that landscape. She has been fantasized into existence.
In fact, just as in the wallet analogy Aoyama’s father offers him, the outside of the world and the inside of the pouch are reversed: reality slips into imagination. The entire world is actually a product of Aoyama’s unconscious imagination. Within this world, a subject produced by fantasy is given a special position. She has a complete psychic structure, and when that structure begins to reveal itself to Aoyama, the Lady’s nature as a fantasy will be exposed, and strange changes will begin to overtake the world.
The first revelation comes with the penguins. When an animal found only in Antarctica and its surrounding islands (actually, penguins also live in South America and South Africa) begins appearing in large numbers in an ordinary small Japanese town, this life of fantasy begins to be disrupted. Later, Aoyama’s classmate Hamamoto takes him to an enormous sphere of water floating above a grassy clearing in the woods, which she has named the “Sea.” Only with the subsequent appearance of monsters that specifically prey on penguins does the psychic structure become fully visible.
The world first begins to fall apart when the penguins and the “Sea,” two apparently unrelated anomalies, come into contact. The Lady uses penguins to stop the water spheres leaping out of the “Sea” from touching the others. Strangely enough, the spheres disintegrate when the penguins touch them, as though the penguins counteract them. Later, we see that both the penguins and the Lady become exceptionally weak when they move away from the “Sea,” as though it were their source of energy. And their guess is right: the “Sea” is indeed the center where the Lady’s psychic energy is at work, an expanse of the Real marked by lack. (It is later revealed that the “Sea” has no material substance; it is merely a hole in the world.) This “I” is foreign to the ego, so even when the Lady sees it, she does not recognize this.
Yet the encounter between the Lady and the “Sea” reveals how the psychic structure works. The penguins destroy the “Sea”; we can understand this as the death instinct (death drive) destroying life energy, leaving the Lady with no desire to eat for days. To keep her alive, another kind of monster—the life instinct—is produced to check the death instinct and begins preying on the penguins. When this process becomes visible, the world’s order is disrupted.
Meanwhile, there is a clear break between Aoyama’s research into the penguins and his research into the water sphere. Once he begins studying the sphere, he seems to lose the need to see the Lady. In fact, the “Sea” is the Lady’s Thing. Under cover of scientific language, he is unconsciously exploring his own desire, so her presence is no longer necessary. The turning point comes when Suzuki discovers their secret. This predicament arouses castration anxiety in Aoyama, ultimately calling forth the Lady once more as a fantasy. Earlier, when Aoyama was bullied, she said she would never interfere in children’s affairs. Now that principle is easily broken. She uses penguins to rescue Aoyama and his friends. Having previously had no dealings with anyone but Aoyama, she begins to intervene in reality. This is an outward manifestation of Aoyama’s neurosis, and a sign that the world is falling apart—a psychic crisis urgently needs to be resolved.
It has to be said that “Sea” is an exceptionally apt name, certainly no coincidence. The Lady says she comes from a seaside town, yet has moved somewhere with no sea in sight. Aoyama, “as it happens,” has never seen the sea either. They agree that once he solves the mystery of the penguins, she will take him to see it. Yet we have seen how that turns out. She wants to fulfill his wish before she herself becomes an object of study, but halfway there, too far from the “Sea,” she can no longer hold out. She gets off before reaching their destination. How is that possible! A person cannot return to the town where she was born! (Of course, this also explains that the Lady is not human; it would be far too strange if she were a living human being and still had this problem.) At this point, we have to start questioning the underlying meaning of the sea, the symbol of her hometown.
Only by striving to symbolize the Real, to the point where that effort fails, can we “touch the Real.” In Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, the only evidence that the Thing exists beyond phenomena consists of logical errors and contradictions. Reason falters as soon as it extends the application of categories beyond the bounds of experience; likewise, for Lacan, the “Real of jouissance”1 “can be recognized only through the impasses encountered in attempts to make it real” (ne saurait s’inscrire que d’une impasse de la formalisation).
When Aoyama and the Lady try to symbolize the intangible “Sea” as the sea, they reach an impasse and have no choice but to give up.
The sea can never be reached. Yet Aoyama has several dreams in which he sees the Lady sitting beside it, allowing us to glimpse the true face of the “Sea” (the sphere): it is the Lady’s Real, primordial lack. And because the Lady is a person Aoyama has fantasized into existence, the “Sea” (the sphere) is actually a metaphor for the object of desire within him. Its true face is the pair of peaks he wants, which remain a mystery to him. This is why we said that the Lady has grown upon the landscape in the earlier image. Think back, too, to the beginning of the film, when she pulls out Aoyama’s tooth. What could that gap be but a symbol of lack? The subject can never reach its object a (objet petit a); the relation between the two is impossible. The subject’s movement toward object a can only resemble Zeno’s arrow: apparently moving, but actually still. Fantasy fills the space of that impossible relation. By this point, the “Sea” is also filled with Aoyama’s enjoyment, and any direct attempt to probe it is futile (the swallowed research vessel Penguin). Their efforts to stop the adults from seeing the “Sea” thus acquire a deeper meaning: who would expose their desire directly to the big Other?
At the end, the filmmakers satisfy our curiosity about what lies within. Aoyama and the Lady ride the penguins, which represent the death instinct, into the enormous water sphere in a burst of revelry. The Real is indeed impossible to show directly, so the interior is presented through something resembling the structure of a dream. This is also how the Real expresses itself. Inside, in a place resembling “the end of the world,” they directly encounter the sea that cannot be reached. The sea itself is rendered dreamlike, and when the shot shifts to the twin-peaked island out at sea, I am sure we all share a knowing smile. This is precisely desire expressed obliquely by the Real.
As the penguins puncture the water spheres one by one, the Lady’s existence gradually fades. They sit down to say goodbye at the café where they have always played chess. At this point, I suddenly realized that its name is “Café by the Sea”! It is here that they play their game of signifiers detached from signifieds—the pieces sliding across the chessboard. Sea is also a floating signifier, sheltered by the Symbolic and kept far from incursions of the Real. And when the Lady finally disappears, she chooses to step out from beneath the roof of the Symbolic, smiles at Aoyama, and vanishes into the wind.
This is a story about growing up. What is our protagonist to do now that his enjoyment has been discovered? The Lady is gone, but she is still there. She has lost her embodiment in fantasy and become a purely symbolic image, guiding him along that special road.
“Seeing the end of the world may be sad, but I’ll still run fast toward the end of the world, because the road to the end of the world is Penguin Highway. If I follow that road, perhaps I’ll meet the Lady again.” The gap—the lack—that the Lady has left in Aoyama’s teeth will surely be filled by a new tooth. This signifies adulthood. Once he has overcome his difficulties, he will eventually make his way successfully into the symbolic system.
Editor’s note: The animated film is, of course, a fine, refreshing work.