There are generally two views of Satoshi Kon’s Tokyo Godfathers. One regards it as an “atypical” Kon film: no Susumu Hirasawa, no interweaving of reality and illusion, no dazzling camerawork or editing—compared with his other three films, Tokyo Godfathers is practically a family-friendly road movie with a realist bent. The other sees it as deeply religious: this story of redemption, saturated with biblical metaphors, is really a covert rewriting, in a modern setting, of the ancient myth in which the Messiah is born and leads the lost sheep back to Canaan.
The first point to correct in the former view is that the realism of Tokyo Godfathers, relative to Perfect Blue, Millennium Actress, and Paprika, is only on the surface. Its narrative core is, if anything, more magical, driven almost entirely by deus ex machina. Whenever Miyuki, Hana, and Gin reach a dead end in their pursuit of a lead and have no choice but to give up, a miraculous coincidence supplies another. This happens again and again until, at the end, an actual miracle occurs: Hana leaps from a tall building to save Kiyoko and is about to be smashed to pieces when, without warning, a great gust of wind rises with the dawn sun and bears her up. Bathed in holy light, Hana slowly descends through the air with Kiyoko in her arms, coming down among the people gathered below, gazing upward. (At this moment, Hana’s image coincides with that of the Virgin Mary: Hana, a yinyangren,1 receives the strongest possible affirmation of her identity as a mother from the big Other and becomes Woman with a capital W.)
As a rule, repeatedly contriving coincidences to stitch up breaks in a story invites criticism from audiences—and some people do indeed scorn this film for it. More viewers, however, will naturally recall the concealed biblical story supplied by the second reading and use its mythic framework to rationalize the film’s “miracles.” Isn’t Kiyoko in the garbage heap precisely Jesus in the manger? Aren’t these marginal outsiders—a transsexual, a debtor, a parricide—precisely the “Three Wise Men from the East” who bring blessings to the Son of God? Haven’t the three members of this false family, through Kiyoko’s redemption, returned to their true families as their Promised Land? From this perspective, the miracles and the mythic background unexpectedly corroborate one another. It is hardly surprising, then, that some viewers simply regard Tokyo Godfathers as a Christmas comedy like It’s a Wonderful Life.
Unfortunately, let me say at once that this is a misreading, one that misses far too much. Yet this very misreading reveals that Shakespearean dramatic metaphor often governs a certain “motivation” that sets a mythic narrative structure in motion—or perhaps the metaphor is governed by that motivation. In short, the very process of rationalization undertaken to accommodate the “reality principle” smuggles in a symbolic satisfaction of the desire for magic. In a reflexive structure, this in turn highlights how, within the discourse of modernity, the realm of the fantastic is confined to an absence at the heart of the secular world. (Where It’s a Wonderful Life brings an angel on screen outright, all the biblical elements here appear obliquely. This keeps the film from sinking into the former’s flat, didactic comedy and allows it to retain considerable internal interpretive tension.) Once we grasp the basic framework that this misreading does usefully reveal, we can turn to the crucial information it leaves out. To judge by the film’s title, the reading seems too concerned with “Godfathers” and not concerned enough with “Tokyo.” And from Kon’s interview, we learn that the religious atmosphere constructed through Christianity is actually a metonymy for nature worship directed at the city:
“Perhaps the buildings and roads of a great city each have a soul dwelling in them. I see these ensouled elements of the city as an ‘otherworld.’ So the protagonists are not walking into an ordinary city; they enter an otherworld superimposed on the city itself.”
(Thus, in a sense, Tokyo Godfathers not only retains Kon’s characteristic motif of crossing back and forth between reality and illusion, but pursues it far more radically than his other three films. Here the crossing can occur directly and imperceptibly, without even needing schizophrenia, memory, or dreams as a medium.)
Following this lead, we return to the beginning of the story, before the trio finds Kiyoko and enters the otherworld of Tokyo. At this point, the city is a repository of painful memories for them. These homeless people have been banished by the order of reality called normal city life. Through abjection in the Lacanian sense, they seem to have become the city’s excrement, signifying a trauma of the Real in the city as a whole. A lilting, ethereal saxophone, cool-toned lighting, and long shots of neon-lit neighborhoods cutting at a steady pace construct an empty cityscape. The scene’s unnatural neutrality stands in silence as an emblem of the modern fantastic, revealing a world of things: a world forever suspended at the edge of meaning, forever ready to receive a revelation of good or evil.
Miyuki responds to this silent city by spitting—throwing filth back at it. Interestingly, when the unfortunate person below who is hit by her spit instinctively looks up, what he sees is the huge billboard behind which Miyuki is hiding. On it, as it happens, is a weeping angel. Aren’t the tears this angel now sheds the very model of real tears? Through a trick of the camera, Miyuki’s spit becomes the angel’s tear: a performative, theatrical tear publicly shed for the big Other. We viewers know perfectly well that no person or angel is really there, moved to tears by compassion—only a homeless person spitting. The “canned tears” of this nonexistent angel, like the canned laughter of a television show, merely perform a feigned lament over the empty city below: “All living beings are guilty; all things deserve pity.” We should notice that this is a visual motif condensing a certain libidinal investment, something not quite describable as either technique or plot. Haunting Kon’s imagination, this motif manifests itself as a symptom of his cinema. Here it reflexively reminds us of the unbridgeable distance between the realm of the fantastic and the silent, secular city before us.
Yet look at it from another angle. As part of the urban scenery, the angel billboard belongs to the city’s material fabric. In other words, the billboard, and the city it helps constitute, should appear only as the background to actual events—as absence and emptiness. But the angel’s tear really has fallen. We cannot help seeing this as an omen: the city as the Thing threatens to appear in actuality. In Kon’s own words, “The city of ‘Tokyo’ is the fourth protagonist.” And it is about to actualize itself in reality, thereby bringing about the psychic collapse of the cool symbolic space established at the film’s opening—a sign that the protagonists are entering the “otherworld.”
But these three homeless people, expelled from normal city life, have no money to spend. They cannot even afford to take trains between the city’s neighborhoods, nor do they have any need to. In their impoverished daily lives, the idea of Tokyo dwindles to a hollow network of places to visit, to oppressive shacks and distant views of glittering nightlife, to aimless wandering through poor districts. For them, Tokyo is not that sprawling “untotalizable totality” woven from a dazzling multitude of people and their movements—a vibrant, ensouled place and the outward symbol of its “totality.” (Tokyo is not so much dispirited as absent.) To some extent, this foolish view held by the homeless touches something authentic. After all, there is no thing behind the sublime appearance. Fleeing their former lives out of impulse or ignorance and taking to the streets, the three protagonists have also been unwittingly forced through the sublime appearance of urban life. All they have gained is the suffocating, nauseating life of the homeless. Kon himself admits, “Indeed, perhaps homeless people really are unsuited to being the protagonists of films and animation that offer people hopes and dreams.” But with the story already set in these circumstances, directly exhibiting the void itself becomes the only way to reconstruct a minimal structure of sublimation. (It is also the path the story has no choice but to follow.)
This seems to offer an explanation for the fact that Kiyoko is found in a garbage heap. What could better represent the inert side of the city, that boiler powering capitalism, than the garbage it produces and piles up day after day? Looking at these ever-growing heaps of dead, useless “matter,” one can, for once, almost feel that capitalism’s drive has stopped—though this is, of course, a rare illusion.
In other words, when people attempt, through desacralization, to express their sense of modern life’s utter impoverishment and contraction—the interminable wait for the Messiah in the Benjaminian sense—the inert materiality symbolized by garbage heaps powerfully draws the eyes of those waiting. Think of Weber through to the Frankfurt School. It is much the same with the old scavenger in the film who dies among the garbage: he develops a fetishistic passion for collecting rubbish itself and even works it into things that lend everyday life a little charm, making windmills. The reason is that, however the status of “Tokyo,” the fourth protagonist, as a subject may change—whether viewers and director endow it with consciousness or unconsciousness—it refers, through all its historical traces, to a substantial presence, one disturbed by chance events. This is not the substantiality of the subject itself, since we cannot yet really speak of this fourth protagonist. It is the substantiality of its objective counterparts, its excreted remnants: garbage heaps, once also parts of the city, and homeless people, once also its citizens. This substantiality is precisely what sustains and guarantees our possession of that empty, nonsubstantial city-subject. Yet for this very reason, the city-subject’s appearance in the story must also be sustained by a minimal objectal stain of “pathological” contingency: the baby, embodying boundless possibility and life, unexpectedly found among the dead, useless garbage—in other words, objet petit a.
We must therefore see that, within this structure, Kiyoko, as this object, serves as the paradoxical stand-in for the void of the subjectivity of “Tokyo,” the fourth protagonist. Precisely in her otherness to the cold city, she “is” the city-subject itself. This also accords with the divine metaphor the film borrows from the relationship between the Son and God.
Thus, after the trio finds Kiyoko, the lilting, ethereal saxophone music, with its drifting quality, quietly subsides. The moment Hana takes Kiyoko in her arms and cries, “This child is God’s Christmas gift to us. She’s our child!” lively, festive music begins. Carrying Kiyoko, Hana leads Miyuki and Gin out of the dark alley and strides into the colorful neon-lit neighborhood that had initially served only as a distant backdrop. At the same time, something magical appears: production credits on the neon signs—something outside the story lodged inside it, which the characters must ignore. Together, all these elements signal to the audience that the protagonists have finally entered the “otherworld.” The story has truly begun.
If we examine this from a phenomenological perspective, we can clearly see the dramatic transformation taking place: what they enter is, to some extent, the ultimate, Gestalt-like horizon offered by the newly awakened city-subject. In short, this is the inner-worldly experience of Tokyo, the fourth protagonist: the experience within which the world’s objects and phenomena appear. By tacit consent, the “otherworld” seems to coincide with the world as a whole. Yet we must remember that, in the phenomenological sense, it cannot ordinarily become an object of observation in its own right. Perhaps it would be better to say that this “otherworld” is a cinematic space: events within it take place in the infinite space of pure Cartesian extension, stretching endlessly beyond any particular momentary “freeze-frame,” any fixed location, or any more expansive vista or panorama. In this sense, it cannot achieve symbolic identity with the real world, though it can make us feel that the two overlap. Actually, a better example would be to think of how, thanks to the Hollywood film industry’s superb special effects, the Golden Gate Bridge seems to have been genuinely destroyed countless times.
The same structure can be seen in Gin’s lie about his past. With the atmosphere pitched just right, he tells his story with such grave emotion that I unquestioningly accepted this melodramatic tale: he had once been a moderately successful bicycle racer; then his daughter fell ill, and to raise money he went so far as to fix a race. He was found out, his daughter and wife died, and he became homeless. Until the plot exposed the lie, viewers accepted it as factual background—well, I did, though perhaps I’m just a sucker for this sort of thing. That is because, to some extent, the “parallel universe” in which this melodrama takes place becomes visible and palpable in an inner-worldly sense, within the transcendental horizon of our experience. This is what makes the plot’s set-up-and-payoff trick possible.
Of course, considered simply as a lie, Gin’s deception of himself and others cannot stand up to reality. With his daughter before him, his sorrowful story becomes so much empty talk. His wife and daughter never died; he left because of his drinking and gambling. (He does also want to fulfill his responsibilities as a father: he has secretly saved “a few big bills,” but is unable to give them to his daughter.) Interestingly, though, at the very moment Gin is left speechless, it is Hana, in her feigned anger, who in a sense teaches him how truly to deceive. The furious Hana seems to be letting fly with abuse, but is actually playing along with him. She extravagantly stresses the responsibilities a father should bear toward his family, while brazenly acknowledging his past wrongdoing outright. This excessive “radicalism” presents him to his daughter as having made a complete, repentant break with his past—whether sincere or not; in this film, of course, it is sincere. This is precisely the cunning means of preserving his subject position intact while freeing him from guilt. After all, in real life, the wrongdoing of abandoning one’s wife and child through drinking and gambling seems to deserve no forgiveness, however thorough the subsequent self-examination. So, in the fairy tale Hana tells, Gin is the poor Red Ogre who wants to befriend humans but is shunned, while Hana plays the Blue Ogre, who invents a greater lie to win acceptance for the Red Ogre. (In the story, the Blue Ogre, too, is punished for his actual wrongdoing through self-imposed exile.)
This is also why viewers, with their privileged view, must be able to ascertain that Gin’s repentance is sincere. What happens here is like the mechanism revealed in Jameson’s analysis of Shakespeare: many of Shakespeare’s plays have a homosexual coloring, yet prohibit overt contact between male characters. So, as soon as intimacy between two male characters presents the danger of a taboo, one turns out to be a girl, and the characters are returned to safety. Shakespearean mistaken identity makes light of the scandal and laughs it off. Likewise, having already seen Gin’s struggle to save those big bills—even while being beaten, he protects the fine envelope containing the money he intended to send his daughter—and the genuine feeling disclosed by the story, viewers have already absolved him of his past. Hana’s well-intentioned performance then moves them to rejoice at the reunion of father and daughter, quietly overlooking the danger of transgression here. (In real life, without the audience’s omniscient eye, such dangerous absolution is often difficult to grant because of endless suspicion.)
In fact, we can find the same structure in the main plot, the search for Kiyoko’s mother. This joking treatment of taboo and transgression can be understood as a displacement. It performs an indispensable diversion, canceling a more dangerous, destructive force of taboo: the anxiety aroused by the fact that abandoned babies really do exist in the city. The structure of Shakespearean homosexual comedy distracts us from this more disturbing sociological anxiety. Then we learn a fact that soothes our troubled consciences: Kiyoko was not abandoned by her biological parents. A mad woman desperate for a child stole her from a hospital nursery, then, at her irresponsible husband’s urging, dumped her in the garbage. There has been no abandonment in the true sense. (Concealed here is Kon’s analogy with the fate of Tokyo’s homeless: no homeless person in Tokyo has truly been given up on. As Kon says in an interview, “Even in today’s affluent society, people continue to become homeless, yet they survive on the material abundance surrounding them. This situation gave me an idea: perhaps it is the city itself that is raising them.” Incidentally, this is the one aspect of the film that makes me deeply uncomfortable.) Kiyoko’s biological parents are anxiously searching for her—and so this comedy returns to mere appearance.
This seems to amount to a criticism of the limits of Kon’s continuing humanist position. Having pointed it out, though, I think a clarification is necessary. The parallel is with Shakespeare’s time, when same-sex love really could not be portrayed directly (although it was quite widespread). As Kon says: “Throughout the making of this film, Japan was in an economic slump. I think this drained people across society of their energy and left them lifeless. The growing number of homeless people was also a living reflection of the economic situation in social reality.” When filming this city directly is impossible—whether prohibited or too painful—a Christmas comedy about Tokyo, with its internal tensions, seems already to give form to an effort to speak about the subject. These two related diachronic or intertextual constructions within this Christmas comedy allow us to reread the film-text of Tokyo Godfathers synchronically—though Japan’s economy seems to have picked up lately—and to understand it as a series of coexisting contradictions or uneven developments within its narrative systems. This makes possible a reading that, in turn, allows us to understand the film-text as a socially symbolic act: an ideological response, formal and immanent, to a sociohistorical predicament. We should therefore still take Kon’s words seriously as sincerely meant:
“In Tokyo Godfathers, I did not want to treat homeless people as representatives of the weak and unfortunate, or as burdens on society. Rather than equating them with actual homeless people, it would be more appropriate to see them as symbols of the ‘weakness’ and ‘regret’ that none of us can escape.”
Bergson holds that comedy uses irony to correct social deviations and thus maintain social norms; Emil Staiger holds that comedy helps make the fundamental absurdity of human existence bearable. To some extent, these apparently opposing views reveal comedy’s wavering position between oppression and liberation. More importantly, however, the secret of the antinomy produced by this parallax shift can be sought only by returning to the master’s stance.
Editor’s note: The author’s diligence has made the pigeons on the roof hang their heads.