An Anatomy of Penguindrum, and How We Achieve Nothing

Flying, flying, spring, summer, autumn, winter,
day, night, without rest,
bright-plumed bird of paradise,
is this blissful wandering,
or everlasting hard labor?
—Dai Wangshu, “Bird of Paradise”

Prologue: When the Apocalypse Becomes the Morning of the Twentieth

Let us begin with Haruki Murakami. In his 1985 novel Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, the apocalyptic imagination of “post-apocalyptic slice-of-life” fiction—which would later flourish in anime such as Girls’ Last Tour—was already fully developed. Likewise, the influence of the Tokyo subway sarin attack of March 20, 1995, which would loom over Penguindrum, had already secured an ominous place in Murakami’s work. As direct responses to that catastrophe, both Underground and 1Q84 reveal a gloom peculiar to Japan at the century’s end.

The catastrophe marked a turning point in Murakami’s writing, bringing an unmistakable change in style. Murakami himself went so far as to describe the two¹ disasters of 1995 as “events of such magnitude that it would be no exaggeration to say, ‘Japanese ideology was entirely different before and after them.’ As twin catastrophes, they may endure as major milestones that no account of our spiritual history can overlook.”²³ As if in response, even Kunihiko Ikuhara, whose style has a distinctly “postmodern” flavor—though it would of course be wholly wrong to treat his work as nothing more than a postmodern accumulation of signs—has not escaped this catastrophe of “modernity.” Penguindrum is undoubtedly a product of his reflections on it.

Looking back, then, the subway attack and its impact on Japanese society come down to two points: ① the persistence of the idea that “the end of the world is impossible,” and, following from it, ② the exposure of everyday life’s fragility. On the first point, we have already seen in Tsunehiro Uno’s account a pessimistic attitude toward “the end of the world” dating back to the 1970s. When an event of such destructive force finally did occur, the sun still rose the next day. The subway attack and its organizers had still failed to bring about the end of the world. Yet countless people’s orderly lives were shattered, exposing to everyone this extraordinarily fragile dimension of everyday life: life can collapse at any moment, yet the world—and you—go on existing. For Japanese society, then, the subway attack constituted two crises: a threat to life and an “existential crisis.”

I dwell on the catastrophe at such length so that readers can see that the subway attack is unquestionably a vast wound—a “trauma”—in modern Japanese society. It is precisely this trauma that Ikuhara confronts in Penguindrum. Before returning to the work itself, we must keep this in mind: in a country of late modernity that has lived through the “end of the world” on the morning of the twentieth, to speak of “love,” surely the most “premodern” of subjects, is also to speak of a distant history. “Love” is both the deeper meaning of the signifier “Penguindrum” and the reason Penguindrum ultimately becomes trapped in a loop of its own making.

I. Everyday Life in Ikuhara and Oshii

Before turning to Penguindrum itself, we should consider an angle that may seem unrelated to its story. Placing Kunihiko Ikuhara alongside Mamoru Oshii produces a curious intertextual parallel:

At the end of Revolutionary Girl Utena, Utena challenges Akio Ohtori and ultimately fails. Peace returns to the school, but Anthy leaves Akio and sets out alone toward the ends of the world.
At the end of Yurikuma Arashi, Kureha and Ginko break through the Wall of Severance, exchange their promised kiss, and are taken away from this world by Kumaria. An unnamed girl finds the abandoned Konomi.
At the end of The Sky Crawlers, Yuichi challenges the “Teacher” despite knowing he cannot win, and dies. Suito, who remains behind, smiles at Yuichi’s new clone.
—Yuban, “The Morphology of Wonder Tales and Its Application to Anime, Comics, and Games: Reading Notes on Morphology of the Folktale and Historical Roots of the Wondertale”⁴

Anyone with even a little knowledge of philosophy can tell that, at this level, both Ikuhara and Oshii are unquestionably describing the Sisyphus of Camus’s The Myth of Sisyphus: his existence precedes his essence, yet his essence in turn exceeds his existence. Indeed, existentialism profoundly influenced a generation of Japanese intellectuals. In this sense, both directors discovered the intolerability of the everyday life they inhabited:

What we call everyday life is heavy, damp, hard to breathe in—the pain of being gently and slowly strangled. In any age, young people probably find everyday life unbearable. The thought that this everyday life will go on for a lifetime is enough to drive you mad.
—Mamoru Oshii⁵

But if we return to Penguindrum here, an obvious difference emerges. Are Kanba, Shoma, and their sister Himari not enjoying the pleasures of everyday life? Indeed, when they stake their lives on resisting fate,⁶ is it not precisely everyday life they are trying to protect?

This is, of course, a narrative trick, and its crux is “everyday life” itself. Clearly, the “everyday life” the three siblings wish to protect is the signifier pointing toward home, love, and a life of warmth. Yet, taking the work as a whole, the true everyday life of Penguindrum consists in the repetition and misery of the Child Broiler, the flat, repetitive passersby, and an invariably unjust “author.” In this sense, as the story unfolds, we move ever closer to the traumatic core of everyday life. “Love,” the key to the entire story, once again serves as a “suture”: Kanba tries to use “love” to conceal what life is really like—dark and oppressive—but ultimately fails, and we witness the complete disintegration of “the everyday.” It is just like what we see in Blue Velvet: the camera passes through the lawn and exposes the filthy life writhing beneath it. This, too, is what Oshii describes: everyday life for the middle class and the proletariat is never beautiful.

II. The Violent Dimension of Order

In response to the preceding section, consider an ironic fact: in Penguindrum, this family of just three siblings first comes into being through an exchange of “apples.” Notice: this is not a selfless offering. It carries an unspoken demand: I offer you my “apple”; you must live on and love me. We enter into a transaction to obtain “love”: “The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation.”⁷ Does this logic not make the “failure of love” we have mentioned inevitable? What sutures the tear is the tear itself—with late modernity upon us, everything outside capital has become impossible.

Now that we have touched on ideology, let us turn to another, still more obscene apparatus: the Child Broiler. Perhaps we can describe the machine differently. We never see any of the mechanisms inside that pitch-black opening. All we know is that the father⁸ sends “human beings not yet formed” into this bottomless hole. And the result? The remains, almost dripping out—or spurting out—lie sprawled there, “lovely bodies on display,” taking on an unsettling beauty through Ikuhara’s lens.

Is the machine’s destructiveness, its lifelong effect on all who have ever “escaped” it, not another version of the assembly line in Revue Starlight? Is it not an “ideological state apparatus” in Althusser’s sense, one that need not even conceal its coercive character? On the one hand, the crushed children become “transparent,” assembling themselves, “of their own accord,” into the machinery of social existence. On the other, the children who escape will spend their entire lives longing for “love” and fearing its loss. It is no coincidence that Tabuki and Himari form a curious intertextual pair: only through “love”⁹ can they go on living.

To borrow a familiar interpretation, “love” here is the means of resisting ideology’s threat to subjectivity—a reading that also fits Yurikuma Arashi very well. But we must point out: has “love” not once again become a compulsory prerequisite? Is the absolute demand for “love”—you must love, and you must be loved—not also the product of an ideological apparatus at work? Of course, we now know perfectly well what this ideological apparatus is called: “Japan.”

III. The Two Sides of a Möbius Strip

Obviously, a Möbius strip does not have two sides. The ecosystem of that lawn in Blue Velvet cannot be divided into an aboveground one and an underground one. Similarly, Japanese society has no such division between “surface” and “underside.” Here we must turn once more to Murakami. In his discussions of Underground and 1Q84, he repeatedly stresses the idea of an “open narrative”: a rejection of the binary narrative of “ordinary people—good / organizers of the subway attack—evil,” in favor of recognizing that good and evil on the two sides form a unity. This is especially evident in the preface to Underground:¹⁰

Most unfortunately, the blameless “victims” of the Tokyo subway attack must endure not only the injuries inflicted by the attack itself, but also this cold “secondary victimization”—in other words, the violence produced by the ordinary society that surrounds us everywhere. Why? Why can no one around them stop it?
Before long, I came to think of it this way: as for the two forms of brutal violence inflicted on that unfortunate young employee … for him, there could be no dividing them into this side and that side. The more I thought about it, the more they seemed to me to be of the same nature. Their visible forms might differ, but both grew from the same root underground.
—Haruki Murakami, Underground

Likewise, in sympathizing with Yasuo Hayashi,¹¹ Murakami in some sense welcomes this lost child back into the fold. This is especially apparent in 1Q84: no one is truly hated. Thus, in violence as much as in “gentleness,” all Japan achieves a kind of harmony. Even a murderer is merely a good person who has lost his way, and everyone is loved. Except that “everyone is loved” is also equivalent to¹²—“those who are not loved are not human.”

The Child Broiler thus becomes the enforcer of the injunction “everyone is loved.” The machine is responsible for killing unloved “human beings”; those who remain are naturally all alive because of love. To avoid losing our standing as “human beings,” we must become “gentle”; we must “love” and “be loved,” even at the cost of our lives. Does this not take us back to the choice we mentioned earlier: “your money or your life”? Lacan uses this choice to explain the process of identification with the “Name-of-the-Father”: we must give up becoming the imaginary phallus in order to accept the symbolic phallus. This is a necessary condition for becoming a “subject.” Is the situation we encounter here not exactly the same? Kanba chooses imaginary everyday life and, as a rebel against order, rejects the symbolic order. To want to be loved without becoming human is undoubtedly the greatest challenge to symbolic authority; his only possible end is destruction. Himari, by contrast, gives up her imaginary family relations—she ultimately loses her memories—and gains permission to go on living under the symbolic order.

At the end of the story, when everyone once again loves one another, the Child Broiler still exists offscreen, and forces opposed to order are still brewing within that order. In fact, nothing has changed. The only change is that Kanba’s and Shoma’s sacrifice has once again concealed the failure of “love” to suture the tear. Of course, the trauma remains—is that final note not a mockery of the symbolic order?—and we can foresee that until the entire ideological fantasy is broken through, this ghost will haunt Himari, and the order behind her, forever.

IV. Doomed to Fail from the Start

We should acknowledge that the greatest problem with Penguindrum as a whole is not that it is “too fragmented, reaching for meaning and failing to grasp it,” but that it stands too close to ideology. So close, indeed, that the story’s very presentation lays bare both the insane structure of Japanese ideology as a whole and its own attitude toward that fantasy. Here, El Nost Milan (Our Milan), as Althusser reads it in “The ‘Piccolo Teatro’: Bertolazzi and Brecht,” offers a telling contrast to Penguindrum:

Then the stage empties, and the tragedy returns. Nina is sleeping in the shelter. Her father comes to see her one last time before going to prison. He has killed for Nina, for her chastity; at least she understands that … Suddenly everything is reversed: she pours all her resentment onto her father. She hates him for filling her with lies and fantasies, hates him for going to his death for this invented myth. As for her, when there is no other choice, she will save herself alone. She will leave this dark, impoverished world and plunge into the other world of money and pleasure. The Togasso was right: she will pay the necessary price. She may sell herself, but she will live in another world, a world of freedom and truth. A whistle sounds. Her father embraces her and quietly leaves, dragging his exhausted body away. The whistle gives a long blast. Nina walks out, head held high, toward the rising sun.
—Louis Althusser, “The ‘Piccolo Teatro’: Bertolazzi and Brecht”

At the end of El Nost Milan, is Nina, walking out of ideological fantasy, not another Utena Tenjou, another Kureha—or Ginko? In Žižek’s reinterpretation of Althusser, the “subject,” rather than the “human being,” appears where ideology fails, not as the result of interpellation. Conversely, is Kanba in Penguindrum not playing the role of Nina’s father? Yet as the story approaches its end, as Ikuhara stands between Bertolazzi’s second and third acts, Ikuhara does not take the final step. Himari, who should have played Nina’s role, chooses to retreat. She even wants to bring Kanba back into the order: she wants to become “human” by giving up becoming a “subject.”

Here, when Ikuhara’s subject is “Japan” rather than the more enclosed world of a “school,” we can clearly feel his resolve faltering. For if Kanba became another Utena, would it not be “Japan” that was shattered? Unlike Yōzō in Osamu Dazai’s writing, who relinquished his standing as a “human being,” Kanba, as a “man” supporting the entire family¹³ and as the provider of fantasy and order, ought not fail to become “human.” Thus the deepest tear in all of Penguindrum appears in Kanba, the link between “surface” and “underside”:

Kanba is willing to protect this family, to protect the order of “love.” At the same time, he hates the violent side of the whole social machine and hopes to reconstruct society through destruction. Yet, as we noted in Sections II and III, “love” and “hate” are merely the same thing, and the family operates according to the same structure as society as a whole. What he protects and what he wants to destroy are undoubtedly one and the same. He is forced to become a “humiliated father.” To preserve the beautiful fantasy in Himari’s eyes, he and the family must disappear.

Ikuhara’s predicament is now plain to see. To construct the story, he must break Japan’s order within it in order to proclaim Japan’s order. This is undoubtedly a paradox. The only way to keep the whole story from falling apart is for its protagonists to achieve nothing because of “fate.” The story takes a detour and joins the everyday life of its beginning to that of its end—is this not a Möbius strip? And do the note and the vagueness surrounding Penguin Force’s fate not confirm the argument in Section I: that the entire rupture remains? When we see Kanba and Shoma reborn at the end, we also see Ikuhara’s greatest artistic failure in Penguindrum. The absence of the materialist space that appears at the ends of Revolutionary Girl Utena and Yurikuma Arashi is his admission that the entire story has nothing beyond this layer of fantasy. The failure of resistance is instead presented as a beautiful ending. Thus, if Bertolazzi uses non-dialectical time to bring about the “belated” dialectic within the tragic structure, Ikuhara can ultimately do no more in Penguindrum than empty the story of dialectic through a clumsy imitation of it.

V. One Melodrama, or Two

Another point Althusser makes in “The ‘Piccolo Teatro’: Bertolazzi and Brecht” concerns the Brechtian effect of “estrangement” in El Nost Milan. Nina’s break with her father takes her off the stage and prevents the audience from identifying wholly with the father who has devoted his life to constructing fantasies. Meanwhile, the “slow” temporal structure unfolding alongside the tragedy utterly destroys the audience’s ability to “immerse” itself in the plot, forcing it to think about the form of the play itself. We can see a similar structure in Penguindrum. Here, the action on Bertolazzi’s “two stages” is cunningly played out at the same time. We need to set aside most of the principal characters and attend to the protagonists on another level: the “penguins” themselves.

In Bertolazzi’s play, the slow, aimless “poor scraping by in misery, a crowd of destitute wretches dogged by ill fortune”—in short, a lumpenproletariat—reveal the rot of fogbound Italy.¹⁴ Ikuhara’s penguins, these clowns who obey their masters, reveal instead how ridiculous their masters are. Their actions are unmistakably poor imitations of their masters’ actions, magnifying their desires. From their very first appearance, the penguins keep granting Shoma’s wishes, like a genie. The same logic governs the two penguins’ spying on Ringo Oginome. Yet this consistent correspondence also reveals the logic governing the characters on the main stage. Do No. 1’s attraction to “photographs” and Esmeralda’s attempts to please him not embody the impasse in the Natsume siblings’ relationship? Or does No. 2’s repetition of meaningless actions not portray Shoma’s inability to do anything?

This gives us a new way of understanding Sanetoshi, the only one who can converse with these animals. Appearing as a ghost in Himari’s dream, Sanetoshi represents the animalized speech of the unconscious¹⁵ and pursues pure destruction—the very return of the repressed in dreams. Thus, when Sanetoshi connects the protagonists outside their everyday lives, the two stages overlap, and both we and the characters are forced to confront how ridiculous this fantasy is.

VI. How We Achieve Nothing

If we choose a “symptomatic” approach to reading, Penguindrum will undoubtedly expose still more problems. Beyond the problems of the banal story “itself,” the real impasse lies in the ideological dimension outside it: the ideology that binds everyone within it with the lie of “being human.” Ikuhara’s greatest lesson for us—though not necessarily the one he intended—lies precisely in reading Penguindrum against itself: if we refuse to let go of “love,” we too will ultimately achieve nothing.

Do not forget: The Matrix truly begins after the “red pill.” Neo wakes from the machine and sees “the real.” And for the rest of his life, he bears the machine’s connection ports on his body. We must wake from the beautiful dream and confront the rifts and trauma it has left behind. Only then can the “subject” be born, and the story truly begin.

Have you come from paradise,
or are you on your way there?
Bright-plumed bird of paradise,
in the vast blue sky,
do you, too, find your journey lonely?

If you have come from paradise,
can you tell us,
bright-plumed bird of paradise,
since Adam and Eve were driven out,
how desolate that garden in heaven has grown?
—Dai Wangshu, “Bird of Paradise”

References

1. “Imagination after the Earthquake: Japan’s Otaku Culture in the 2010s”, Tsunehiro Uno (Japan).
2. Contingency, Hegemony, Universality, Slavoj Žižek (Slovenia).¹⁶
3. The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema, Slavoj Žižek (Slovenia).
4. “The ‘Piccolo Teatro’: Bertolazzi and Brecht,” Louis Althusser (France).