Thursday 30 December 2004

Pic of the day: Do you grok this? Screenshot from the anime Hikaru no Go. It's not just entertainment anymore.

Hikaru, Jesus and I

This entry contains heavy spoilers for the manga and anime Hikaru no Go. If you are at all interested in these, and have not read enough to know the final fate of Sai, you should not read this entry until you are thus prepared. In the meantime, I recommend my entry on a related topic from the previous time I watched this series: Spirits of Prowess.

***

Well, then. The story is fictional from the start, but it is held in an unusually realistic style, with little more than names and faces changed from the real world. The manga (and the anime based on it) takes us through the various stages of a gifted Go player (not go carts but the ancient Asian strategy game!). Shindou Hikaru finds a Go board, then plays another kid in a Go salon (they have those in Japanese cities in real life as well, it is a popular pastime of the elderly). He attends a Go class in evening school, and when he begins in junior high school he joins the Go club there. Due to his unusual progress, he decides to study Go at a special school that prepares young people who want to become professionals. All these things really exist. There really are teens who are so gifted that they decide to cut down on their normal education and try to become professional players while still in high school or college. In fact, most of the high ranking players did become pro in their teens.

The only strange thing about this story then is the fact that Hikaru did not start playing Go until 6th grade, and that he is tutored by the ghost of the world's greatest Go player from 1000 years ago. This seems to break totally with the realism of the rest of the show. But what if the ghost only exists in Hikaru's mind? In fact, the anime states outright (see photo on my web page referenced in the previous section): "...has passed through time and returned to the world in the mind of Shindou Hikaru..." That is to say, nobody else ever sees Sai, the Go- playing ghost. Conversely, the ghost can not walk off on its own. When Hikaru leaves a theater where they watch a high-level match on the big screen, Sai gets very upset, but he never considers staying behind or even going back when Shindou settles down with a computer. Sai evidently cannot move more than a short distance away from his host. He notices things Hikaru don't within his field of view, but he never dives through a wall to peek at something on the other side, for instance.

In effect, the anime supports the theory that Sai only exists in Hikaru's imagination. Even when Hikaru researches the history of the period when Sai should have lived, there is no mention of him, even though he supposedly tutored the Emperor! How then did he come to be one of the world's strongest Go players?

We know from the start that Hikaru's grandfather played Go. We soon learn that he has a wall full of trophies, and has boasted about it innumerable times in the past. We also know that Hikaru is pretty close with his grandfather, coming and going there on his own. My theory is that his grandfather taught him Go when he was little, and talked about his own exploits as well as the famous people of history, which is why Sai seems to be informed about this. The grandfather probably also had books with written records of great historical games. Such books seem common enough in the anime that a leading amateur player probably would have them, and Hikaru probably looked at them even though he did not understand them. Then, his brain began to work. Being treated as no one special, he developed this exceptional ghost as a second personality, since he was unable to believe that he himself could figure out these things. For years his exceptional talent worked with the material of his childhood, until he could no longer resist it breaking into his consciousness and the dramatic ghost scene happened.

Around episode 40 of the anime, Sai is aware that something is happening to him. As Hikaru starts to approach his own level, Sai reacts not with jealousy or joy, but with doubt and fear. When Hikaru admits that he figures out good moves by imagining that he is Sai, the ghost begins to fear for his life. In the screenshot above, we see that Sai is aware of being absorbed. Can you absorb a ghost? This is certainly not what people normally do. But you can absorb a complex from your subconscious. When you integrate its memories and attitudes into your own life, you grow and it weakens. In this case, Hikaru absorb all of Sai, and the ghost expires. He simply disappears into nothingness.

Hikaru searches for Sai for a long time, to no avail. But in the end, he realizes that whenever he plays Go, Sai is present, in his moves. That is pretty much stating it outright, that he has absorbed Sai. He has become Sai, but Sai is no longer recognizable as a presence apart from himself.

***

You may have read the book Stranger in a Strange Land. It is a dubious book, containing indecency and later what is clearly a parody of the Last Supper. And yet, strangely enough, the parody kind of explains the original in a way that no sermons have done for me. To eat someone is to absorb them, it is a symbol but it signifies the same thing. Just like food becomes part of our body, so when we "grok" someone they become part of our soul. Reading the Bible again, I found that Jesus clearly saw it the same way. He told his disciples that they would live by eating him, in the same way that he lived by his Father. This is not ritual magic, then: Jesus would not have his divine content by ritual magic! But just as importantly, he wasn't quite born with it. He had absorbed it from the Father.

Very few Christians seem to have got this point. In so far as they think about it at all, most seem to assume that Jesus was always God, just in a body. But if Jesus lived by absorbing God, then at the outset of his earthly life he must have not been conscious of all things in God. This is indeed what the Bible portrays, saying that he grew in wisdom. He could not possibly grow in wisdom if he had unlimited wisdom at the outset. And throughout his life, he continued to refer to the Father as someone apart from himself, but who was always present. With one notable exception. On the cross, Jesus was alone. "My God, my God, why have you left me?"

I have thought, but I won't say this for sure, that God may have left him alone because at that point Jesus had absorbed him completely. This is a nifty theory but probably wrong, because Jesus refers to his Father as a separate person (and indeed as his God) after the resurrection. Then again, he does not at that point say anything about whether he still experienced God's presence. Rather, he says that he goes to the Father, as if the Father was now elsewhere, as if there was nothing more to chase after on the material plane. I won't take any of this as proof either way, but it is a fascinating thought, that Jesus may have experienced the presence of God in his soul and gradually become like him.

I really don't think the Japanese script writer had any thought of Jesus when creating Hikaru no Go, but the parallel is fascinating. Hikaru first just obeys without understanding, much like a young Christian has to do. The ghost tells him where to move, and even though he moves clumsily, he makes the right moves, astounding everyone. Later, he begins to understand what he does, and is able to do it on his own. Isn't this how it is with us as well? At first, we think "how can something that feels so good possibly be wrong?" or "how can something that feels so painful possibly be good?" but later we see the outcome of each action and the pieces come together. As the saying goes: "If we knew what God knows, we would always want what God wants."

Not that there is any risk of me absorbing all of Jesus, ever in this lifetime. You can trust me on that at least.