Saturday 13 December 2003

Pic of the day: At least in anime, it seems the Japanese have this custom of not talking to your face when they say something uncomfortable. In this case, I can kinda understand it. (Picture from anime Da Capo.

Familiarity breeds?

I will start by writing about anime, the Japanese equivalent of cartoons. I do have a point beside pure art, though. It is about something that has impacted on my life big time. Nothing will ever be the same again. Then again, it never was. In fact, that's the point.

I am not sure if this is a new trend in Japanese anime (and presumably manga) or whether I just haven't noticed it before. I believe it is coming to a new phase, but the basic premise is, well, familiar. Let us look at a few of my not quite new favorites. I will just mention the relevant parts of these otherwise quite intricate movies.

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Kodomo no Omocha (Child's Toy) features 11 year old Sana-chan and her "boyfriend and pimp" Rei-kun, seemingly in his twenties. She is the one who calls him that. Of course it is not true, but he is very attached to her. She literally took him in from the streets and got her somewhat rich but eccentric mother to find a place for him in their household. As Sana-chan reaches puberty, she realizes what a boyfriend is, and Rei-kun fades to a less prominent status.

In Jungle wa Itsumo Hale Nochi Guu ("The Jungle was fine and then came Guu"?) the schoolboy Hale has his life overturned when a girl with no parents is taken in by his mother. Nobody except him realizes that she has vast supernatural powers. She delights in bringing him in trouble, but she also saves him when things go wrong.

In Happy World an angel is sent to protect a high school boy from an ancient curse. The angel transforms into a pretty, naive girl who moves in. She still has some awesome powers, but hides them when she can. The boy is attracted to her but treats her harshly. Except when there is trouble, then he tries to protect her (although usually she ends up protecting him). I don't know how this story ends.

In the strangely named Daa! Daa! Daa! a high school girl (...) goes to live at a Buddhist shrine while her mother is abroad. The monk who lives there has a son her age. And as she arrives, the monk leaves on some spiritual journey, leaving the two teens alone. (What is this guy thinking? Well, he probably thinks he knows his son, and he is right.) Things get complicated with the arrival of a baby from outer space, who can say little except "Mom" and "Dad", which he calls them. There is a lot of awkwardness but nothing really naughty as they settle into a reasonably platonic (or at least chaste) family life.

In Kanon, a high school boy (another one!) moves in with his aunt and her daughter, who is his age. The two youngsters were very close when they were children, but he has for some reason forgotten that time. (We later learn why.) She, on the other hand, has romanticized their childhood relationship and now believes herself in love with her cousin.

Fast forward to this year's crop of anime. In Onegai Twins an orphaned high school boy (!!) lives alone when two girls show up and claim to be his twins. Both have the same rare eye color as he, but they cannot all three be twins. Meanwhile they live at his place in a weird relationship version of Schroedinger's Cat (who famously was both dead and alive until the box was opened). In the same way the two girls love Mike both as a brother and boyfriend but cannot have him either way until they find out who is truly the twin. It isn't too easy to be him either and not know what to feel.

Finally in Da Capo, we have once again a girl who is in love with her cousin. To further complicate matters, she has remained 12 for 6 years now. (Yes, they are seniors in high school!) Meanwhile he is living alone with his adopted sister. They are also beginning to feel some ... unfamiliar feelings for each other. Eventually this becomes visible to their classmates, and one of them says the words that shook me up this time: "Even though she may not be your real sister, she's still your sister none the less. If you want to wake up from this dream, it won't hurt you to do it soon."

***

Indeed. And if you don't see how this has anything to do with me, you probably don't need to know. My long-time reader probably sees what I mean. A dream, I always knew it was a dream, that at some point I would wake up safely before it went too far. And yet I did not want to wake up. I wanted to dream the dream that humans do, to imagine – possibly even learn – the experience that humans call "love". To know it from close up, not just seen through a telescope made of book pages, but close enough to touch. But the dream already crumbles. Already? I have served seven years for Leah and seven years for Rachel, even though I knew I was no Jacob and that I would leave as empty-handed as I came. All for the dream.

At least it's not just me. The plethora of such anime has convinced me that a lot of Japanese boys really wish that a girlfriend would just happen. That she would be thrust upon them, so to speak. (Of course, in times gone by, this was the normal course of events, in so far as the parents would fix them up with a suitable spouse. But that's a while ago already, not quite as long ago as here, but well beyond memory and into legend if not myth.) It would seem that some girls feel the same way too. In Japan, at least.

Of course, in real life, girlfriends rarely "just happen". Whether the reason be Darwinian or cultural, the man is supposed to go hunting – or at least competing – for a female companion. They don't actually come and ring your bell. (And even if they do, some of us still don't know what to do. It happened to me. But at least I don't actually need anyone.) You can't expect to find love with someone familiar, no matter how ideal that may seem. That is the lesson, but in the anime at least it is taught gently. In real life, perhaps less so.