Spreading meaningless love in an age without a world.
The paired terms schizophrenia/paranoia, popularized by the Japanese philosopher Akira Asada, the “god of the young,” won bronze in the new-word category of the 1984 Buzzword Awards. To put it simply: paranoiacs are modern people competing to “catch up and overtake,” believers in History and Order with capital letters; schizophrenics are the postmodern people who “run, run.” Run from where? From the established order, of course. Asada calls these postmoderns “schizo-kids,” because all children are schizophrenic: they are forever doing things that adults see as meaningless and unnecessary, and can never concentrate. (Translator’s note: Here “schizo-kids” is Asada’s cultural-critical label, coined in 1984 Japan, not a clinical description of schizophrenia.) Asada champions “schizo-kids,” champions our becoming “children.” This means not simply that we turn into children, but that, as we become children, the very concept of the child changes too.
By Kōjin Karatani and Akira Asada.
What a true player needs is to live not in a home in the traditional sense, but in a wandering home on the move—to live in deserts, in the mountains, in the sea.
This looks like a good moment to introduce Teekyu. Its four heroines are high-school girls—JKs: Yuri, Kanae, Marimo, and Nasuno. Kanae’s grandmother lives in the Egyptian desert. By the second episode, Kanae is already treating a stranger’s home as her own, sliding along on a swim ring with Marimo and into someone else’s house. Nasuno is so rich that everywhere is her home (or rather, part of her property holdings). As for Marimo’s home, a cute alien girl has moved in, and it has been twisted into some freaky space. In season four, the four JKs drift out to sea together and live there for a long time…
Teekyu looks like a genuine schizo-kid anime. The girls can never concentrate and are always doing meaningless things. But one point needs stressing: this does not mean the anime itself has no meaning, no narrative. Teekyu has an obvious theme: tennis. This is where its narrative begins. When we say that it has a theme, we are already tacitly operating within the paranoiac framework of Order and History. In fact, this is precisely Teekyu’s point of departure. The anime opens just as the manga does, with a tennis match between Yuri and Kanae. “Here I go, Senpai,” says Yuri. Kanae takes up her stance, her face serious, and says, “Bring it on.” This is exactly the posture of Asada’s “catch up and overtake” moderns. Seen from this angle, Teekyu addresses precisely the problem of how “catch up and overtake” modern people become “run, run” postmodern schizo-kids.
Atsushi Sasaki notes that a certain subtle uncertainty still lingered in Asada’s Structure and Power, but had all but disappeared by On Escape (Japanese Thought). Asada seems to have had too much faith in schizo-kids. He gave little thought to their regression into paranoiac moderns, nor did he think concretely enough about the process by which paranoiac moderns become schizo-kids.
By Akira Asada.
This essay, then, is by no means simply an exercise in imposing philosophical concepts on anime. It is a two-way process: examining anime through concepts, then returning from anime to reflect on thought itself.
There seems to be a consensus within Gintama’s fandom that the series has failed. Why? Gintama used to be one of the most popular anime, with terrifyingly high ratings on Douban. I am a devoted Gintama fan myself, but I have little time for other fans’ comments bordering on mindless fan worship. As for Gintama itself, I dislike most of its “hot-blooded” storylines. It is hard for me to understand why so many people love this hot-blooded side of Gintama. Most of its fights follow the same speech-powered formula. You preach, then the preaching powers you up and you beat the crap out of the other guy: “Because I have something to protect, you know.” From the start, I never found in Gintama the rejection of feel-good life lessons that some of its fans expected. Look closely and we find that much of Gintama’s preaching follows the logic of Japanese TV dramas and hot-blooded manga. A glance at Gintama’s episode titles is enough to reveal the author’s powerful urge to preach. Here are a few at random: 17, “Fathers and Sons Even Hate the Same Things”; 22, “Marriage Means Keeping a Mistake Going for a Lifetime”; 25, “Hot Pot Is a Microcosm of Life”; 28, “Good Things Never Come in a Row, So Why Do Bad Things Keep Coming One After Another?”
The preaching in Gintama’s titles is very interesting: on the one hand, the content preaches; on the other, the tone does not. The tone is approachable, and this approachability comes precisely from its offhand disregard for us: “I’m just saying. Don’t take it seriously. I don’t give a damn about you anyway.”
We cannot take this synthesis to be Deleuze’s disjunctive synthesis: we are dealing with two internally related elements. It is precisely the non-preachy tone that makes the content easier for us to accept. We do not see the speaker as an elder far removed from us, but as someone close. “Close” has two senses here: first, his sensibility is close to ours; second, he puts on no airs—there is no barrier between him and us.
Connecting one arc to another is a major problem for any long-running manga. How do you get from one arc to the next? What kind of transition do you need between them? Gintama has a clear main plot, a plot of History with a capital H: the Jōi patriots against the Amanto, the nation against foreign enemies. Don’t forget that many early episodes opened with the same footage to explain the setting: “It has been a long time since our country was known as the land of the samurai.” (A little-known detail: this footage turns up in an episode of Futurama’s final season that pays homage to/parodies Japanese anime.) Gintama’s first few episodes are not “especially” outstanding; they take some getting used to. Then the backdrop of history = main plot gradually recedes, the everyday-life arcs occupy an ever-larger place, and Gintama becomes more and more popular. Few viewers still remember that Shinpachi was originally supposed to revive his dojo.
But the main plot still returns from time to time. Then the atmosphere of the everyday-life arcs is abruptly interrupted, and a sense of seriousness seeps into the story already in progress. Once the main plot reaches a stopping point, the protagonists enter the everyday-life arcs again. The Shinsengumi and the Odd Jobs crew can queue together to buy a game, squabble as rival fans cheering for Otae, get stranded together in the snowy mountains, go swimming together with the shogun. Then back to the main plot, over and over. Here we face what Deleuze calls the connective synthesis: “and . . .” “and then . . .” […] “Every ‘object’ presupposes the continuity of a flow; every flow, the fragmentation of the object.” (Anti-Oedipus, cited from the Japanese edition, 『反オイディプス』.)
Gintama’s failure lies in its refusal to give up the main plot, its refusal to give up History, and its unwillingness to give up the everyday-life arcs either. In the end, the two become less and less compatible. For viewers, the protagonists’ lines come to feel increasingly empty. It really is like that baby who wants everything, the one Deleuze mentions while explaining connective synthesis.
Now let us return to Asada’s schizophrenia/paranoia. Gintama’s problem is a regression from schizophrenia to paranoia. From the end of history back to History. Asada initially underestimated the danger of such a regression. He forgot that the schizo-kids he liked could, through the games he liked, produce a History he feared. For this History never really disappeared. The entire movement becomes History’s self-relating movement: this “cunning of reason” is a textbook Hegelian nightmare. No amount of fooling around in Gintama’s everyday-life arcs diminishes the seriousness of the main plot. What really diminishes it is the main plot itself: after getting so very serious, it still intends to carry on with everyday life as though nothing had happened. It is like a corporate drone who goes to work in a suit by day and wears women’s clothes at night. At first everyone can accept it, until one day the day job leaves him exhausted and he puts on his maid outfit before he has even shaved properly. Like Master Reigen in Mob Psycho 100 trying to sneak into a girls’ high school…
To make our present topic clearer, we might bring in the concepts of tree and rhizome from A Thousand Plateaus. The tree symbolizes a shared grand narrative, while the rhizome symbolizes an individual’s small narrative. The everyday-life arcs in Gintama bring countless small narratives under the umbrella of its own grand narrative. Countless rhizomes (the everyday-life arcs) are cut from the tree (the main plot), then return to the main plot (the tree). Tsunehiro Uno is quite right on this point: small narratives do not necessarily oppose grand narratives; often they reinforce them.
But here is the paradox: the more the grand narrative is reinforced, the more fragile it becomes. This, too, is a lesson Gintama teaches us. Grand narrative is like the paranoiac: the further it progresses, the heavier it gets. That weight produces subsequent “difficulties of connection”—the difficulty of moving into the everyday-life arcs.
We have to say that Gintama’s failure is not a failure in its handling of grand narrative, but the failure of grand narrative itself. Just look at the decline of traditional Jump manga with their tournament-and-power-up format, and this becomes perfectly clear.
Gintama’s main plot (the tree) keeps cutting itself open to connect with the everyday-life arcs (the rhizomes). But one everyday-life arc connects to another, then returns to the main plot. This is precisely what Masaya Chiba calls a world of “excess connection.” The first principle of the rhizome in A Thousand Plateaus is the principle of connection: any rhizome can connect with any other. Yet this excess connection may lead to “an imperialism of all-pervasive transformation that levels all things, and ontological fascism.” To avoid this world of excess connection, of too much meaning, we need to look again at the two kinds of cut Chiba describes: the cut from tree to rhizome is the first cut; the cutting of the rhizome itself is the second. Chiba acutely recognizes how difficult it is to become a “schizo-kid”: flight must therefore accelerate at least twice. Gintama made the first cut, but never dared to make the second. Instead, it remained in a world of excess connection.
The lyrics of one Gintama ending theme go roughly like this: memories that once burned make melancholy build up; perhaps only by forgetting what happened that day can you grow up. These words profoundly reflect Gintama’s narrative logic. Its characters never forget the past and are always thinking about growing up. Granted, Gintama’s initial premise largely sidestepped the question of growth: as a “mature” adult man, Gin needs neither mental nor physical upgrades. But the people in it have wanted to return to the grand narrative all along. This also shows how difficult it is to become a schizo-kid. In the ending sequence for that same song, Gin, Shinpachi, and Kagura each get their own close-up with a serious expression. On one side, the smile of the postmodern schizo-kid; on the other, the gloom of the paranoiac seeking growth and longing for History. These “two faces” embody Gintama’s contradiction.
Let me stress again: pointing out Gintama’s flaws does not mean I think it is not an excellent work. Gintama pushes the grand narrative to its limit and makes it implode within those limits. I do not like straight-up “postmodern” anime that simply abandon narrative and go completely abstract. That is why, when I first discussed Teekyu, I stressed that this is an anime with a narrative. Its subject matter destines it from the outset to be a small narrative, and even within that small narrative it keeps cutting itself apart. This makes it an exemplar of schizo-kid anime.
Teekyu has its main characters, but they keep changing. Yuri, who plays the straight woman, is forever having to ask, “Who are you?” Every episode keeps changing; everyone keeps changing. Rapid connections, ruthless cuts: in the installment where Kanae signs a contract with a crab and becomes a magical girl, she is struggling in battle when she is told that the only way to power up is to eat the flesh of her crab companion. Kanae sorrowfully asks, “How could I do that?” even as her other hand has already snapped off one of the crab’s legs… All of this happens within a single panel. “You made that decision way too fast!” Yuri retorts. By the end of the installment, Kanae herself has become a crab. A magical crab. Before being eaten, the crab teaches Kanae about being a magical girl, including “Drink water when you get up” and “Your hands get slippery after you eat crab.” Both the person becoming a magical girl and the very category of “magical girl” are in a process of becoming.
Nietzsche says: “They come like fate, without cause, reason, consideration, or pretext.”
Teekyu must, of course, involve tennis. But for these girls, tennis is x: there is no knowing what tennis is. There are no shared rules. The filthy-rich upperclassman’s rules require you to take your panties off first; Kanae can duplicate herself mid-game, split, become two Kanaes. In the first installment, Kanae suddenly sinks into the ground halfway through a game of tennis. Outside the panel, the author writes: “That’s basically the kind of manga this is.”
There is no growth here, only becoming. In volume 15, the JKs suddenly turn into old women, but they happily exclaim, “Growth just won’t stop!” It is not that I want to grow; it is that “growth” won’t stop. It can’t stop.
It is not without narrative. The creepy art-museum episode is a very good example. The four JKs step into the world inside a painting and get trapped in the labyrinth of some weirdo’s art museum. But then: “Come to think of it, this is only an anime—and one that barely moves at that. Oh, forget it. Let’s go, let’s go.”
In its instant-noodle-length TV format, Teekyu leaves viewers no time to react. Before we can react, it is already over. (Translator’s note: The Chinese label for such micro-short series compares an episode’s running time to the wait for instant noodles—roughly two to three minutes.) Here automatic recognition has broken down. We have no choice but to turn to attentive recognition, actualize the virtual, and reconstruct the whole narrative. Teekyu not only breaks with those slow-paced anime narratives; it also interrupts our perception as viewers.
Asada says that an attachment to “living somewhere” is the paranoiac’s defining trait. We can see Teekyu’s response in volume 15: the three older girls on a school trip want to film the details of their trip for Yuri. Yuri notices that the plane’s fuselage is very short. Just as she starts to worry, the older girls have already sent her a video saying they have arrived safely, though a crashed plane is plainly visible in it. Kanae asks whether this is a foreign country, and Yuri notices that the video clearly shows her own school. A little later, Kanae sends another video saying they have finally arrived. This one clearly shows penguins, and Nasuno says that this is what kangaroos look like. In the end, they come to stay at Yuri’s home… They have not gone to a foreign country; they have turned their own country into a foreign country, and home into a hotel. Home itself thus starts moving. On the other hand, anywhere at all is these children’s home. In volume 10, they go out into the wild for a barbecue and reach the wild after just two steps.
Schizo-kids have no parents, no home. Only in the final volume does Kanae ask Yuri why her parents have never appeared. There is no need for them to appear, though there is no reason they cannot, either. Marimo casually draws two faces for Yuri’s parents, and even draws her own father with a mohawk.
Every season of the TV anime brings forth new JKs in its opening sequence, brings forth delinquent-JKs, Chinese-JKs, Indian-JKs, Hawaiian-JKs, idol-JKs… Homer Simpson says he can go on listing the jobs he has held from the time his wife gets into the shower until she goes to bed—and he keeps talking. The girls can never concentrate on tennis; their national-tournament arc is over in a single installment. Like children, they have excess energy and scattered attention. Kanae says, “Come be Kantō’s number-one punk with me!” Out of nowhere, they start a cafeteria showdown, a bowling showdown, a barbecue showdown, a showdown at a martial-arts tournament, a skiing showdown—and halfway through, it turns into a different showdown. “What you’re doing makes no sense, Senpai!” Yuri retorts. “Only when you’re young can you do what you want!” This is the schizo-kids’ declaration.