Fushigi Yuugi: Fascination

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This is the page of other stuff I found interesting that didn’t seem to fit anywhere else. For instance, did you notice that Hotohori makes a superb geisha when he decides to get into it (Ep 13)?

Main Part

This was a quirky little thing that pops up a couple times rather subtly. In Episode Eleven, when Miaka and Tamahome go in to rescue Yui the first time, Yui notes rather contemplatively that if Miaka had been drawn back to the real world instead of her then Yui would have been Suzaku no Miko and played the part Miaka has been playing. This idea of the main part feeds into something much harder to spot: Miaka is narrated in the book while Yui isn’t. Take Episode Fourteen, for example; Yui only gets narrated because of her interaction with Tamahome.

This suggests to me that Seiryuu is cheating. It’s clear by the color coding that Suzaku takes Yui back to the real world after bringing both Miaka and her in. But when Yui has succeeded in drawing Miaka back, there’s a flash of blue moving down while the flash of red that carries Miaka moves up. Lo and behold, Yui is inside the book while Miaka is out (Ep 7). The book continues to narrate the single heroine of this round, Suzaku no Miko, but Seiryuu’s Miko seems to be introduced out of time and place, almost catastrophically disrupting the story. Perhaps all along Seiryuu wants to break the boundaries of the story/real worlds, which would go some ways toward explaining why Nakago has such incredible power (he’s the instrument of Seiryuu’s will) and why the other seishi seem bound to each other, their Miko and their errands so loosely–it wasn’t time for them yet, Seiryuu called them prematurely and considers them disposable.

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Miaka’s Strength

We get a whole bunch of remarks on and examples of this. She’s certainly the most relentlessly determined character I think I’ve ever seen. It’s the first thing Tamahome admires about her; as he says after the episode wherein she bounces up to Hotohori and asks for some of his jewels, “since you have the guts to try that, I’ll help you find Yui” (Ep 2). She also seems to be a very good shot, witness her performance with a bow at the Festival (Ep 26). She surprises her friends several times with her endurance or ability. When she, Tamahome and Nuriko go overboard and the others try to find and fish them out again, Tasuki opines at some point in the search, “no girl could get this far out” (Ep 35), only to have Miaka prove him wrong. After getting decked by Miaka once again, Tamahome wonders to himself if she isn’t really the stronger of them (Ep 36).

This combines curiously with Miaka’s frequent appearance of shallowness. I mean, consider what wishes she wants granted when Hotohori first asks her to be Miko: to look good in tight dresses, to have any boyfriend she wants, to beat up bad guys, to eat anything, and, as an afterthought, to get into any school (Ep 2). Miaka is the comic relief character, whose misunderstandings and ignorance provide many a superdeformed moment. And yet, that seems somehow paired with the beating-up-badguys aspect. On the one hand, I suspect that a girl beating up grown men is put forward as comedy–not real, couldn’t happen. But on the other, I think we have an implication here that by being fairly unsocialized and simple Miaka sidesteps any limits on her strength. Precisely because she doesn’t especially care how uncivilized she looks to other people, she’s willing to be unladylike, show her strength and defend herself.

Unlike Yui, I might note.

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Experience and Illusion

The Tomo episodes, Thirty-five through Fourty, kind of have their own little sub-plot that offers illumination of some major plot points.

First of all, Tomo-Taiitsukun tricks Miaka into attempting to seduce Nakago, in actuality giving Nakago the opportunity to rape Miaka.

But it doesn’t work. Here’s Miaka, unconscious, and Nakago can’t touch her…much to his irritation. So he does the next best thing; leads both Miaka and Tamahome to believe it did work by leaving her in the classic compromising position. It’s also in these episodes that we find out Yui wasn’t raped either, that Nakago drove off her attackers at right about the same point Suzaku’s power stops him with Miaka–after the girl is terrified, battered, and unconscious but before actual penetration occurs. Interesting parallel.

So, anyway, Miaka, like Yui, still has to deal with the aftermath quite as if she had been raped. She, like Yui, experiences self-hatred and self-blame that she couldn’t stop it from happening. Like Yui, she insists that she is tarnished by this–unclean, unworthy of love. And, like Suboshi, Tamahome tells her that’s a crock, that he will always love her no matter what happens to her and that it certainly isn’t her fault.

The most interesting part of this passage, to me, is that in the midst of it we have the interlude with Amiboshi, who advises Miaka to forget all the pain and trouble she’s experienced and make a new life the way he’s done. Miaka, at this point, observes that experiences are neccessary, that one can’t just forget and be free of care. Experience is memory, memory is self, one can’t blithely leave oneself behind.

This links up with what happens when Tomo reappears. He insists that he is kind to his victims, because he leads them into their fondest dreams. The catch here, of course, is that those dreams drain the life of the dreamer. Fortunately, both Miaka and Tamahome’s dreams include love and they are both able to recognize that while the dreams are more pleasent and less trouble than the reality, they don’t have the depth and rewards that struggles with uncongenial reality might bring. Real experience and thus real self won’t come out of dreams.

There’s also an unspoken parallel here to the book-world itself. After all, we could see the book as a dream that will eventually drain the life of the dreamer–that’s what happened to the first of the previous Mikos and almost happened to the second (and happens to Yui, if only temporarily). Perhaps the implication is that Miaka and Yui experience only a somewhat (comparatively) more real level of dream while in the book than what Miaka or Tamahome experience while under Tomo’s spell. Of course, that rather opens up the question of just how real reality is. That does seem to keep coming up, doesn’t it?

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Rape

For one thing, as per the examples noted above, there’s a persistent implication that it’s not real. It never really happens in this show, not even to Soi; like Miaka and Yui she’s saved before the threat becomes a reality.

For another, even if it were real, we also have the lesson that it doesn’t matter. It isn’t the girl’s fault, and true loves or friends will keep right on loving her anyway. Quite stubbornly, in fact.

At the same time, it is real for both girls despite the fact that it didn’t happen. They believe it did, and were probably both in enough pain from injuries picked up in the course of their encounters to have some reinforcement for that belief. (Remember their age, remember they’re both virgins; I much doubt either of them has the physiological knowledge to realize what the absence of specifically vaginal pain meant.) Both girls display classic survivor reactions. Yui turns sexuality into a weapon, traipsing around Kutou’s palace in nothing but a button-down shirt. I read this as an attempt to remind everyone, including herself, that she’s safe under Nakago’s protection even when she leaves off the protective coloration of her moderately demure uniform. The trade of sex for protection is implicit in her demi-seduction of Tamahome, when she tells him that she gives herself to him–also a bid for reassurance that she’s worth something. That one rather backfires. Miaka goes straight down the I-am-mud track at full tilt. For a girl who doesn’t usually give a flying one about proprieties, she buys in thoroughly to the idea that only an ‘unspoiled’ girl is worthy to be a bride.

I have trouble believing that this clipping out of rape itself was a ratings issue, if only because the audience, as well as the girls, are led to believe for quite a while that it did happen. So why might Watase have arranged things this way?

I think at least one implication is that sometimes even being saved at the eleventh hour isn’t enough. That the girls’ vulnerability to violence is, itself, the problem, not whether that violence went as far as it might or not. A somewhat more esoteric possibility that occurs to me is that rape is, in fact, some kind of illusion–not perhaps the act, but (for lack of a better word) the culture of it: the resulting I-am-mud belief…and that if a girl can but realize this she can break free of those results the same way that Miaka and Yui do.

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Education

Curious comments on the educational system embedded in this show–especially the competitive aspect. For one thing, it’s the intelligent, well-socialized girl who gets sexually assaulted. To me, that contains a subtext of remarkable hostility toward girls like Yui. The one who gets protected is the non-competitive one, Miaka. She has a very telling flashback, while contemplating the possibility of having to fight Yui, to telling her mother that Yui is also going for Jonan High School. Her mother blows up and scolds Miaka, telling her that this kind of competition is like a war, and things like friendship must come second. Miaka doesn’t like this idea under either set of circumstances. Looked at from this angle, it’s precisely Yui’s socialization and compliance with a system of ruthless competition that make her so vulnerable to Nakago’s machinations to set her at odds with Miaka. It’s a context Yui already understands, and without Miaka there to mitigate it Yui falls back into that groove.

Not a very positive comment on the school system, or the kind of people who succeed in it.