Anime Explosion!

by Drazen, Patrick

  Among the in-jokes and references is a book within a book: The City with No People, a strange children’s book which will also appear later in xxxholic. In this story, however, The City with No People appears, in installment after installment, to function as an owner’s manual for Chi. In fact, the books are created by the widow of the man who invented Chi, a computer programmer who invented robotic children when he and his wife could have none of their own. They felt that limiting the robots’ programming to machine functions, so that they would never know happiness or other human emotions, was unfair to them by denying the full range of human experience—notably, love.

  And here’s where Chobits blindsides the reader. Instead of just being a pleasant little sci-fi romantic comedy, CLAMP uses this story to ask the big questions: What if the story doesn’t end happily ever after? What if one partner falls out of love, or dies? By building computers as sophisticated as humans, including human emotions, the question of whether happiness and love can be denied to computers is raised. In real life, people who fall in love with, or state their intention to marry, an anime character is found as a sidebar to “real” news. However, this question fits very neatly into the current dialogue on same-sex marriage; quoting Chitose Hibiya, the widow of Chi’s inventor, “Having children isn’t all there is to life, and it’s not the reason for loving someone. Happiness can come in different forms and different ways. Even if a couple looks a bit odd on the outside, they can still be happy on the inside. Happiness doesn’t come in just one shape.”5

  Wings and Magic Things

  2003 saw the appearance of two different yet related manga stories, and both were animated. One was based on previous CLAMP work, and the other, while referencing other stories, was unlike anything the group had ever done.

  Tsubasa: Reservoir Chronicle

  This manga ran for more than six years, longer than most CLAMP projects but not as long as xxxholic. It gave rise to two seasons of TV anime, one feature film, and several OAVs. Although the roles played by the characters are as different as the universes they now inhabit, there’s a similarity in the way the manga is structured to parallel the quest of Cardcaptor Sakura.

  Sakura and Syaoran are back, a little older and completely divorced from their earthly roles. Here Sakura is princess of the kingdom of Clow; Syaoran is an archeologist, like his late father. They like each other, but each has been waiting to express their feelings until work on an archaeological dig near their city is complete. The day it is supposed to finish, Sakura visits the ruins and is almost kidnapped. Syaoran rescues her, but her memories (symbolized by large white feathers) have been scattered throughout the universe. With help from several older people, and a white Mokona as in Magic Knight Rayearth, they set out on a quest to restore Sakura’s memories. This is a bittersweet quest, however; their first stop is to visit a “dimensional witch” who tells Syaoran that he must pay for her help with what is most valuable to him: Sakura’s memories of him. His love for her is such that he agrees.

  Now, about that witch . . .

  xxxholic

  Appearing at the same time as Tsubasa, and occasionally crossing paths with it, is the completely different xxxholic. Set in modern day Tokyo, its hero is Kimihiro Watanuki, a hapless high school student who can see the denizens of the spirit world alive and well in the human world. Wishing to be rid of his visions, he makes a contract with Yuko Ishihara, the self-described “witch of space and time” who runs an old curiosity shop. She offers to rid Watanuki of his vision—for a price. Since the price is so high he can’t afford it, she gives Watanuki the chance to work it off—in her shop.

  The unusual title can be translated as “addicted to (fill in the blank).” When the series starts out, Yuko interferes with the lives of others who have various personality flaws: addiction to lying, addiction to the Internet, addiction to bad-mouthing other people. One story arc, a reworking of W. W. Jacobs’s 1902 horror story “The Monkey’s Paw,” cautions against being addicted to a belief in one’s good luck. But addiction is actually a secondary theme of the manga, which draws more often on Japan’s rich ghost tradition.

  Early in the series, Yuko, Watanuki, his beloved fellow student Himawari, and a romantic rival named Domeki, actually perform a hyaku monogatari. This marathon telling of ghost stories goes back hundreds of years but is still performed in factual and fictional Japan. Some students in the Ghost Hunt books by Fuyumi Ono, turned into manga by Shiho Inada, begin the series with a hyaku monogatari. Students from Mahora Academy’s field trip to Kyoto tell ghost stories in their hotel room. Watanuki and friends tell their ghost stories in a Shinto temple where Domeki’s father is the head priest. After only three stories, a corpse lying in state in the next room interrupts.

  As we’ve already seen, Japanese ghosts come in various kinds beyond the vengeful young people featured in films like The Ring and The Grudge. Watanuki actually finds a spirit girlfriend, a zashiki warashi, who is usually an omen of good luck. He also finds an oden cart one night, of the kind that used to serve homemade stew—except that this cart is owned and operated by inari fox spirits. And, in an episode where a high school is haunted by the bad karma of students who had played there with Kokkuri-san (a variation on the Ouija board), Watanuki is rescued by a giant serpent spirit not unlike the guardian wolf spirits in Princess Mononoke.

  All of this is accompanied by artwork that is elaborately detailed, almost nineteenth century in nature, unlike the rough sketchy quality of the art in Chobits. There are lots of familiar touches, such as the rotund rabbitty Mokona from Magic Knight Rayearth and Chi’s ears from Chobits, but the real stories involve Watanuki’s growth from a (let’s face it) sometimes hysterical drama queen to someone at peace with his abilities, and able to run the shop in Yuko’s absence. He in fact commits an act of heroic self-sacrifice, since in order to save Syaoran, Watanuki, like Maru and Moro, can never leave Yuko’s shop. To accomplish this, he, like Sakura and Syaoran, must surrender his memories. Over the long run of the manga (which ended in 2010), the story has the same subject as Tsubasa: Reservoir Chronicle: memory.

  There was an animated first season, a one-hour theatrical film, and an abbreviated second season—thirteen episodes broadcast during the spring of 2008. Titled xxxholic: Kei, meaning, rather prosaically, xxxholic: Sequel, it was produced by Production I.G.

  Are some—or all—of these titles ultimately building up to something—a unified CLAMP field theory? Where are we now, and what’s coming next? After more than two decades in manga and anime, there’s only one thing that can safely be said about CLAMP: expect the unexpected.

  1. Susan J. Napier, Anime: From Akira to Princess Mononoke (New York: Palgrave, 2000), 193–94.

  2. CLAMP, xxxholic, vol. 2, trans. Bill Flanagan (New York: Del Rey Manga, 2004).

  3. CLAMP, xxxholic, trans. William Flanagan (New York: Del Rey Manga, 2004), 4:69.

  4. Sakura’s friend, Tomoyo Daidouji, is also a distant cousin. In a delightful pair of drawings that spell out everything, Tomoyo declares that she loves Sakura, and the manga panel is a riot of flowers in the best shojo yuri tradition. Sakura replies that she likes Tomoyo—and the background is completely blank. Sakura being ten years old, spring has not yet come (a Japanese idiom indicating that Sakura’s hormones haven’t kicked in yet).

  5. CLAMP, Chobits, trans. Shirley Kubo (Los Angeles: TOKYOPOP Manga, 2003), 7:173.

  The Fullmetal Alchemist Phenomenon

  The first breakout anime of the twenty-first century is based on a manga by a dairy farmer’s daughter from Hokkaido. You never know where lightning will strike. The light of Fullmetal Alchemist has flashed all around the world.

  Items:

  When the first manga collection volume (tankobon) for Hiromu Arakawa’s Fullmetal Alchemist appeared in Japan in 2001, it sold 150,000 copies. After the first anime episode was broadcast, the number jumped tenfold: 1.5 million copies. The English translation sold just as well in America, becoming the top-selling graphic nov
el in 2005 and cracking the weekly USA Today booklist at number 103 of the 150 best-selling books—not just graphic novels.

  The twenty-first century started out badly for the Japanese rock band L’Arc-en-Ciel. They lost their drummer to a drug arrest in 1997 and, despite some well-attended concerts, the band was essentially inactive from 2000 until 2003. In early 2004 their most recent single hit the top of the charts. “Ready Steady Go” was used as the opening theme for the anime series Fullmetal Alchemist.

  Japan not only has a Disney theme park, but also a Universal Studios park. March of 2005 saw the opening of the only attraction at a Universal park, located in Osaka, that was not based on a movie by Universal Studios. Using animation created for the attraction, visitors were placed in the middle of a battle between State Alchemists and Homunculi.

  Sometimes an anime or manga title will get so big that the word “popular” just doesn’t cover it. Terms like “phenomenon” or “juggernaut” are a better fit: the fan attention is so passionate, so dedicated to the smallest facet of the work, that the one title looms larger than all others. It’s happened with the decade-plus run of Pokémon, with the long-running Dragon Ball series. And it’s happening now to Fullmetal Alchemist.

  To give the series its full Japanese name, Hagane no Renkin Jutsushi (literally meaning “Alchemist of Steel”),1 shortened to Hagaren, is the creation of Hiromu Arakawa, who may be one of the most unlikely manga stars. The daughter of a dairy farmer on the northern island of Hokkaido, she took art lessons for seven years after graduating high school, while also working on the family farm. She served as an assistant to manga artist Hiroyuki Eto (best known for Mahojin Guru Guru, a parody of computer role-playing games) before striking out on her own. When Fullmetal was picked up by Monthly Shonen GanGan, the manga ran from 2001 to 2010.

  The anime studio Bones actually created two Fullmetal anime series. When the first one started, late in 2003, Arakawa gave the studio pretty much a free hand in adapting the series, not wanting the anime to be trapped by the manga plot that was still unfolding. So, while staying true to Arakawa’s overall vision of a parallel universe in which alchemy was the highest technology, the first series and its attendant feature film, Fullmetal Alchemist: Conqueror of Shamballa, went down a rather different path.

  In 2009, with the manga nearing the climax of its plot, Arakawa announced the second Fullmetal anime series, also animated by Bones but sticking more closely to the original story and distinguished from the first series by the subtitles FA in Japan and Brotherhood in the United States. Arakawa also announced that a second feature film was in the works.

  Unlike the assortment of magical manga and anime that appeared in the wake of Harry Potter’s worldwide success, Fullmetal Alchemist really isn’t part of that fad, even if the Elric Brothers, Edward and Alphonse, spend a good slice of time looking for, or finding out about, the Philosopher’s Stone. The stone itself is an example of Arakawa’s reinvention of medieval Western alchemy to suit the plot: change whatever you need to change to make the plot work. (Witch Hunter Robin took a similar approach.)

  The Elric brothers live in a world where they were exposed to alchemy early on because their father Hohenheim was a practitioner himself. One day he simply left and wasn’t heard from again; his whereabouts were unknown when the boys’ mother Tricia Elric fell ill and died. They took it upon themselves to try to bring her back from the dead. In doing so, they violated the most serious taboo of alchemy: transmuting living beings, which includes the dead. Not only did they fail to bring back their mother (what they brought back “wasn’t even human anymore,” as Al later described it), but also they paid with their own flesh: Ed lost two limbs, and Al’s whole body was taken. Ed had no choice but to anchor Al’s soul in a suit of armor.

  As if the loss of their bodies wasn’t bad enough, these transgressions, like all attempts at human transmutation, gave rise to some of the supervillains of the piece: Homunculi, artificial humans (in this case, named after the Seven Deadly Sins, with some looking and acting more human than others) whose powerful alchemy and near indestructibility are due to having Philosopher’s Stones embedded within them.

  Ed and Al discover the Homunculi are the power behind the Amestris government, controlling the military through Fuhrer King Bradley. He and the higher-ranking military are in turn controlled by a man simply known as “Father.” Hohenheim, father of the Elric brothers, is pretty much immortal, and, in the manga/anime tradition, he suffers for it (see the chapter on reincarnation).

  The remaining Homunculi are defeated one by one and the Amestrian troops fight Father, forcing him to use more and more of his stone. He is finally defeated by Ed; Al having sacrificed himself to bring Ed’s arm back and Ed in turn sacrificing his alchemical abilities to restore Al’s body.

  * * *

  The manga by Arakawa and its wildly popular anime don’t merely continue a distinguished literary line of cursed characters who violate a taboo and end up paying the price. It also presents a modern Japanese version of what America has come to call the Culture Wars; specifically, the collision between science and religion. This doesn’t seem to be as much of a problem in Japan, however.

  Westerners are used to thinking of alchemy as an aspect of magic, as well as a violation of the One True Church. Euro-American literature, from Faust to Harry Potter, places alchemy squarely in the magic category. In the Fullmetal world, everything is reversed: alchemy is the systematized and respected science. Religion is represented in the series by the followers of Ishbal and the cult of the sun god Leto.

  And yet the Fullmetal universe is ordered in terms that a Japanese audience can immediately understand, since alchemy in this case contains aspects of Buddhism. The most obvious way is in the concept of Equivalent Exchange. Alchemy in this story is based on the universal law that matter cannot be created or destroyed, but only transmuted. Turning lead into gold is possible but not turning a single spoon into a mountain of gold; the material has to come from somewhere. This is reminiscent of the Buddha’s teaching that all events have causes and all events have consequences, which cause other events, and so on for the entire physical universe. (The Buddha used the example of a fishing net to illustrate this.)

  This quasi-Buddhism is on clearest display in the episode titled (in the manga and both anime seasons), “One is All, All is One.” Most of the episode is a flashback to a thirty-day test imposed on the young Ed and Al by the woman who taught them alchemy: before she could agree to teach them, they had to survive on a deserted island for thirty days, while interpreting the title riddle of the episode.

  In this flashback, faced with having to build their own shelter, capture and kill their own food, Ed comes to a decidedly Buddhist interpretation of alchemy. Ed realizes that, in the entire cycle of life, the basic elemental building blocks that make up a human, the essential minerals and the water in our cells, is neither created nor destroyed but transformed. Death is the loss of “awareness”—of the ego—but the elements that make up the body go on, and the changing of those elements—including the rules governing the analysis, deconstruction, and reconstruction of matter—is called alchemy.2

  In the end, the most important cultural difference may be the American readiness to assign a moral value to every conflict or controversy. It all comes down to the end, where there “has to be” one winner and one loser. The simplest way to achieve this end in the West is to pose a technical question that has a clearly identified technical answer that can be governed by a specifically written law.

  The Japanese approach to such questions, according to anthropologist Takie Sugiyama Lebra, is very different:

  The Japanese tend to hold everyone involved in a conflict responsible for it. The Anglo-American compulsion for a court trial to determine one person guilty and the other innocent is in remarkable contrast to the Japanese ideal that mutual apology and compromise be attained between the parties before the conflict attracts public attention.3

  (Of course,
Lebra says that this is the ideal way Japanese society works and not necessarily real life; then again, pop culture is also an ideal. Anime, even the most outrageous, can be summed up as throwing the craziest possible situation at an idealized Japanese person and getting—usually—the best of all possible outcomes. Whether it’s Chihiro separated from her parents and surrounded by monsters in Spirited Away or Hanamichi Sakuragi, who has to learn basketball from square one if he’s to have any hope of getting a girlfriend in Takehiko Inoue’s manga Slam Dunk and its attendant anime, pop culture is a mix to varying degrees of reality and idealism.)

  Japan does have a variety of opinions and practices regarding human abortion, but they also have two things the West lacks. The first is a belief system that recognizes reality as being one world and the realm of the spirits being another, with a rather porous border between the two. By aborting a fetus, the spirit within that fetus is not destroyed but returned to the realm of spirits, to await rebirth in another body.

  Such an abrupt change of plans has been known to cause resentment in the spirit, which brings up the second difference. Japan has developed a set of observances and rites that officially apologize to the spirit of the aborted child. Some dismiss these rites, especially those of more modern origin, as moneymaking gimmicks on the part of temples. However, these rites use temples, jizo (stone statues believed to house spirits that are guardians of children), and other already existing aspects of Japanese culture to meet a perceived need.

  None of these things appear in Arakawa’s Fullmetal world, because it is after all an alternate reality, with nations that resemble the Middle East, or Europe, or China. And, while there are bits of Japanese philosophy, not every aspect of Japanese culture is available. Thus, Ed and Al were tempted to transgress to bring back the dead, as was their teacher, Izumi Curtis. She certainly should have known better than to try to revive her stillborn infant, but the temptation was too great. She lost half of her internal organs in the process.