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Spoiler note. This essay treats the core of the story of BanG Dream! It’s MyGO!!!!! / Ave Mujica. Readers who have not yet seen the work may wish to read after viewing.
Note on the English Edition. This is the English edition of an essay first written in Japanese. Page references to theoretical sources follow the editions the author consulted (in several cases Japanese translations). Technical terms are restored to their original languages on first appearance. In-work dialogue and song lyrics are never reproduced verbatim; their sense is paraphrased and marked “(paraphrase).” Character, band, and song names are romanized. On naming: “Hatsune” is the real-name subject who performs the construction; “Uika” is the constructed surface (the stage name).
Introduction — The Dyad as Unit, and the Stance of Diagnosis
(From Episode 10 of Avemujica: Hatsune Misumi lying next to Sakiko Togawa’s torso)
Misumi Hatsune [A note on naming. “Hatsune” designates the real-name subject who performs the construction; “Uika” designates the constructed surface—the stage name (and, as Chapter 1 discloses, the name of her younger sister). This essay holds the distinction throughout; the terminology is set out at the end of this section.]
In Misumi Hatsune’s private room, a single costume stands upright, untenanted. Dressed on a torso mannequin, it is not what Uika herself wears on stage; it is Oblivionis—the costume Togawa Sakiko wears when she takes the stage of Ave Mujica. Sakiko is not there. What occupies the room is an empty costume, standing in silence, keeping only the outline of Sakiko’s body. And in that same room, beside the costume, Hatsune herself lies down. What stands upright is Sakiko’s hollow outline; what lies prone is the flesh-and-blood Hatsune. One could call this love. But before calling it love, something must first be described: here the other is placed not in the position of a partner to a relationship, but in the position of an object that can be installed in one’s room.
Let me describe this object-position one step further. What Hatsune keeps in her room is not the flesh-and-blood Sakiko but a dress-up vessel (yorishiro), shaped like Sakiko. Why a vessel? Because the living Sakiko will not bend to Hatsune’s will. Sakiko climbs the mountain on her own legs, acknowledges Hatsune with her own mouth, names herself by her own will—not at Hatsune’s command. What remains at hand as someone Hatsune can command is therefore not the living Sakiko but only her mute proxy. The vessel is not an image of possession; it is an image of possession-gone-awry. In this single object this essay sees the miniature of the asymmetry it must track—Sakiko, who moves on her own legs, and Hatsune, who holds an unmoving proxy. And it is from the position of this object that this essay begins to read the construction of Hatsune—the real-name subject who wears the construction called Uika.
(From Episode 11 of Avemujica: From left, Sakiko Togawa as a child and Uika Misumi (≈ Hatsune))
What this essay takes as its unit of analysis is the dyad of Misumi Hatsune and Togawa Sakiko. Not the individual characters, but the very relation of construction the two address to one another, is taken as the unit. Yet this dyad is not a pair of two equal subjects. At one pole, Togawa Sakiko is a self-legislating subject who posits meaning from within herself, owing nothing to an external authority. At the other pole, Misumi Hatsune is not a subject equipped with a core from the start. She is a subject who accumulates a real core only after the fact, by layering a borrowed name, borrowed memories, a borrowed role. Hatsune’s self is thin, heteronomous, taking shape only when lit by another’s light. But it is not empty. The fictions she layers, repeated, sediment and come to be real—a self that, however thin, knows, resists, and chooses. This is what the title of this essay means by identity as construction. Identity does not issue from a core; it becomes real after the fact, as the accumulation of construction. This essay treats this asymmetry—Sakiko, who posits meaning from within, and Hatsune, who layers construction to store up a core—not as a tilt arising midway through the relation, but as a condition that constitutes the dyad from the start. And codependence is the name of the lock in which this asymmetry engages. For the core Hatsune stores is a relation-dependent core, one that becomes real only when moored by Sakiko’s light. Hatsune’s mooring—actively imploring to be filled, and possessing—and Sakiko’s supply, which swallows it and more, seal each into a closed domain. And the point where this lock reaches its limit—where the self Hatsune has layered and stored is, by Sakiko’s own hand, unmade of its construction and sealed into a single thing—this essay diagnoses, within its own jurisdiction, as the terminus of the dyad. Only the question that remains beyond it—how identity is let go, or made to be let go, without passing through the relation—is sent to the next essay. This procedure inherits the method of the two preceding essays—taking the collapse of CRYCHIC as a shared event and reading the Tomori-type and the Mutsumi-type as a pair, a two-axis map—but what this essay treats is confined to the Hatsune / Sakiko layer extracted from it. Within a single work, several distinct modes of construction run in parallel, and what this essay tracks is one strand among them—the dyad of the one who possesses and the one who reigns.
And the stance of this essay is diagnosis, not defense. This essay diagnoses this dyadic construction of identity as codependence—a mode of failure in which withdrawal from the game of mutual evaluation closes not into the “weak autonomy” that stands on its own while leaning on others (the garden), but into a sealed garden. This essay uses the word diagnosis as the antonym of exculpation. That is, it does not rescue Hatsune’s possession or Sakiko’s sovereignty by supplying, from outside, a critical distance the work does not hold. That is the gesture the preceding essay rejected under the name of sermon-porn. This essay can be diagnosis because it places its grounds not in the critic’s addition but in the line the work itself draws. The work does not merely stage Hatsune’s construction and Sakiko’s construction in the affirmative. In the contrast of Tomori’s and Hatsune’s poems, in the self-inscription of the provisional, in the sealed register of SUMIMI, the work itself marks the closure of this dyad. To describe this line of the work itself is diagnosis, and its demonstration is placed in Chapter 3.
This essay is not internal criticism of the girls-band-anime genre. It reads MyGO!!!!! / Ave Mujica as the most precise implementation of a fictional response—by way of fiction—to the cluster of problems people face in contemporary Japanese society: those for whom holding a unified self has become difficult, and those exhausted by the economy of recognition. On this horizon, the dyad of Hatsune and Sakiko is a fictional anatomy of the contemporary temptation by which withdrawal from the economy of recognition closes into a maternal embrace. Withdrawal is not itself the error. The question is whether the place one has withdrawn to is a garden, or a closed sealed garden.
Finally, let the discipline of terminology be set. This essay does not use the four words “self,” “individual,” “subject,” and “identity” interchangeably; it ties each to its own source. “Self” (jiga) is vocabulary from Maki Yūsuke’s The Origin of the Self (Iwanami Gendai Bunko, 2008), designating that the self comes to be relationally, in the relation to others (p. 70). “Individual” (kotai) is the translation of Simondon’s individu, designating not a completed substance but what continues to be generated through metastability, the pre-individual, and dephasing (déphasage) (Fujii Chikayo, supervising trans., The Philosophy of Individuation, Hōsei University Press, 2018: metastability p. 143, the pre-individual pp. 6–7, dephasing p. 7). “Subject” (shutai) is the translation of Kristeva’s sujet, designating the subject as a process that can never be fixed (sujet en procès), in the double sense of being at once process and trial (Julia Kristeva, «Le sujet en procès», in Polylogue, Seuil, 1977, pp. 55–106; the work has no Japanese translation and is mobilized in the original). “Identity” is the translation of Butler’s identity, designating a social construct built through citation and resignification and open to the three modes of reiteration, failure, and refusal (Takemura Kazuko trans., Excitable Speech, Iwanami Shoten, 2004; resignification p. 37) [1]. This essay also mobilizes Fromm and Riesman as auxiliary lines [2]. And one rule for proper names is set: “Uika” designates the constructed surface, the stage name, and “Hatsune” the real-name subject who performs that construction; this essay holds the distinction throughout.
On that basis, around the one concept this essay handles most cautiously on the social layer—the ethics of care—a double check is set in advance. This essay mobilizes care at the de-essentialized level of Joan Tronto’s Moral Boundaries (Sugimoto Tatsuya trans., Keisō Shobō, 2024). That is, it treats care not as something borne as a feminine trait, but as a problem of distribution—the way the labor of care is structurally distributed onto particular, often feminized, figures. This is the first check. But this de-essentialization, while it blocks the back door of “trait theory,” does not block another back door—the figure of the all-saving mother. The schema by which one withdraws, in compensation for a failed paternal order, into the embrace of an all-powerful mother is the very figure named by Uno Tsunehiro’s Maternal Dystopia (Hayakawa Bunko, 2019, the “Contact” part, p. 45), and Tronto’s de-essentialization does not cover it. This essay therefore sets a second check: it does not read Sakiko’s care affirmatively, as a maternal, sovereign salvation. When the mouth by which Sakiko declares she will become a god fuses with the hand by which she takes Hatsune in—undoing everything, making it as though it never were (paraphrase)—this essay describes it not as salvation but as the perilousness of a sovereign care. Only upon these two checks does the ethics of care function in this essay not as a device that dignifies the dyad’s codependence but as one that diagnoses it critically.
（「母性のディストピア」）
Introduction — Notes
[1] Terminological discipline. The source of each word is made explicit in a note at each point of mobilization, and adjectival recuperation—”Simondonian individuation,” “Butlerian identity”—is forbidden throughout.
[2] Mobilization of auxiliary lines. The four elements of love in Fromm and the typology of social character in Riesman, mobilized here as auxiliary lines, are mobilized not as an inheritance of the original’s normative reach or of the typology as such, but: the four elements as coordinates of description rather than as a goal to be achieved in love, and the three types as a clue to the character-structure a society produces rather than to an individual’s psychology. The decision to place Sakiko outside the three types is likewise this essay’s reading, not an inheritance of Riesman.
Chapter 1 — Hatsune’s Construction: Possession, Imprisonment, Supplication
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0YNMV7xljD4
(From Avemujica, Episode 10: Imprisoned XII)
The Introduction began this essay from a single object—the vessel of Sakiko standing in Hatsune’s private room. This chapter extends the logic of that object to the whole of Hatsune’s construction. What is Hatsune’s construction? This chapter answers the question from the material—and what is drawn out is the image of a self assembled out of someone who is not oneself, as its material.
First, the name. “Uika” is not a name Hatsune invented; it is the name of her real younger sister. As Hatsune recounts in the monologue-play of episode 11, most of the episodes she carries as memories shared with Sakiko—the memory of catching insects one summer—are not her own experience but stories the sister, Uika, told her on summer nights. The past Hatsune carries as her own is a past borrowed from her sister. Hatsune takes her sister’s name, wears her sister’s memories, and on stage dons the role of Doloris. All three layers—name, memory, role—are borrowed from another. The sister Uika never appears in the work; the work depicts neither her death nor her loss. So Hatsune’s borrowing is not supported, on the work’s side, as a mourning that keeps a lost one alive. The borrowing is a movement of putting on the name and memories of a living other, in that other’s absence. And when this borrowing reaches Sakiko, it becomes clear that it is appropriation. The vessel is its form. Unable to bend the flesh-and-blood Sakiko to her will, Hatsune installs in her room a thing shaped like Sakiko. To the row of borrowable others—the sister’s name, the sister’s memories—Sakiko, too, is added, as a thing.
When this appropriation is directed at Sakiko, it takes the form of imprisonment. In the same loft, Hatsune composes a poem addressed to Sakiko and later sings it to her own accompaniment. The song’s title is “Imprisoned XII”—imprisonment. The structure of its imagery is plain: it casts down a wingless other and shuts her in so she cannot flee. Love is written here as possession, as imprisonment. For Hatsune, loving Sakiko is not distinguished from shutting Sakiko away at her side. The monologue Hatsune lets slip in the shower scene—that she does not want to let Sakiko go, that Tomori will take her away (paraphrase)—lights this logic of imprisonment from the side of the fear of loss. An image of running water endlessly swallowed and vanishing down the drain is laid over that monologue.
(From Episode 9 of Avemujica: Hatsune Misumi loses her temper at Mutsumi Wakaba)
And this imprisonment is inscribed not only in moving song and monologue but in a single still image. In a certain morning scene where the two lie side by side in the same loft, the chests of their sweatshirts bear a paired celestial design—a star on Sakiko’s chest, a crescent moon on Hatsune’s. And Hatsune’s crescent encircles Sakiko’s small star as if to embrace it. A star that gives off its own light, and a moon that gains its outline only by receiving that light. The one who illuminates, and the one who is illuminated. And the moon, the illuminated side, encloses within its arc the very light-source that illuminates it. Beyond the dynamic enactments of the lyric’s imagery and the vessel in the private room, in this single design set into clothing too, Hatsune’s possession and imprisonment are figured as a still emblem.
(From Episode 12 of Avemujica. A star on Sakiko’s chest, a crescent moon on Hatsune’s. And Hatsune’s crescent moon seems to envelop Sakiko’s little star.)
Possession and imprisonment appear as a one-sided offering from Hatsune’s side. In the vocal-practice scene, Hatsune speaks to Sakiko’s back, saying she wants to give her whole life away (paraphrase). It is a total self-donation. But Sakiko, her back turned, does not answer. An awkward interval remains. Hatsune offers everything; Sakiko, neither receiving nor returning, turns aside—this asymmetry is at the core of the dyad. The café scene sharpens it further. When Hatsune pleads—form Ave Mujica, let us stay together always (paraphrase)—Sakiko glares and leaves, saying she is going home. Hatsune follows, apologizing for having said something so selfish (paraphrase), but Sakiko does not turn back. Hatsune stands stock-still. The contrast of light and dark on the screen inscribes the two women’s rupture as image. The words Hatsune forces out to Sakiko—do not come to hate me (paraphrase)—name the emotion at the bottom of this scene: it is supplication. Supplication and self-knowledge occur at the same time. Hatsune says she has said something selfish. She knows her plea is selfish; she does not plead in ignorance. Knowing her own mooring to be one-sided and self-serving, she still pleads not to be hated. This simultaneity—pleading while knowing—is at the heart of Hatsune’s construction.
Hatsune’s craving has a root. The monologue-play of episode 11 reaches back to a night when the young Hatsune looked up at the starry sky with Sakiko. Not knowing Hatsune’s true identity, Sakiko says that the girl who is usually bright as the sun is, today, gentle as the moon (paraphrase). Hatsune answers that she felt filled with light, as if reborn, that she had always, always wanted to be illuminated (paraphrase). What Hatsune first asks of Sakiko is to be illuminated, to be seen. Holding no light of her own, she becomes herself only when illuminated by another’s light—this structure of received light lies at the root of Hatsune’s craving. And folded into that one night is the tragedy of Hatsune’s construction. What Sakiko saw was the moon hidden in the shadow of the sun-bright sister Uika—Hatsune herself. Once, and only once, Hatsune was seen as Hatsune. Yet Hatsune does not remain that seen moon. To go on being at Sakiko’s side, Hatsune becomes the sun, becomes Uika. Performing the sister’s brightness to keep the relation, she buries the very moon-self Sakiko is supposed to have seen beneath the construction. The one who sought to be seen, in order to stay near, erases the self that was seen.
(From Avemujica, Episode 11. Hatsune Misumi and Uika Misumi split apart: “Saki-chan is a prop in a tragedy.”)
But this banishment does not erase the dark part. What is shut out can return. And what is decisive for this essay is the identity of what appears from beneath, at the terminus where the construction itself is stripped away. The monologue-play ends with the mask kept to the last, and connects to the scene at the end of episode 10—the scene where the father, Togawa Sadaharu, calls his daughter. There is no mask there. The father names his daughter by her real name, telling Hatsune to come home (paraphrase). But Hatsune does not answer. She does not voice. She falls silent. Looked at carefully, the two markers of construction vanish here at once. The visual marker, the mask, and the auditory marker, the voice—Hatsune’s voice, across the monologue-play, had been descending little by little from a performed voice toward a real timbre—are, at the terminus, lost together. The stripping of the construction is fixed as material. Yet what lies beyond the stripping is not a “bare Hatsune.” It is silence. The real name “Hatsune” is not something she takes back of her own accord; it is imposed from outside, by the father. The constructed surface (Uika) holds the voice, while the real depth (Hatsune) is voiceless, merely named heteronomously—the assumption that the bare self sleeps precisely in the depth is here reversed. And this silence can be read two ways. Silence as the cessation of response—an active refusal of the paternal order. Or the collapse and submission of one stripped of her construction—the defeat of being driven from Tokyo and returning to Shōdoshima. This chapter does not topple this silence to one side or the other. It registers, as description, the very fact that it cannot be toppled. Whether the silence is refusal or collapse is held suspended until the next chapter, where Hatsune recovers her voice mediated by Sakiko’s recognition.
Let me reread the material accumulated so far with the hand of theory. Hatsune’s construction repeats one and the same movement across several layers, from ontology to social character—the movement of trying to close what ought to remain open, and failing to close it.
Begin from the floor of ontology. For Simondon, the individual is not a completed substance but stands in a metastable phase, pregnant with a pre-individual tension not yet fully resolved (Fujii Chikayo, supervising trans., The Philosophy of Individuation, Hōsei University Press, 2018: metastability p. 143, the pre-individual pp. 6–7). Individuation is an open process in which this tension continues to be generated through dephasing, and moreover the pre-individual tension is never exhausted by any individuation. Hatsune, too, is a metastable subject. Her self is not settled. Hatsune’s construction is an attempt to fix this unresolved tension into a single rigid form assembled from borrowed name, memory, and role. But what Simondon’s ontology tells us is that such fixing cannot be accomplished. Since the pre-individual tension cannot be exhausted, no construction can fully contain it. The tension that cannot be contained erupts as the bare-faced role in the splitting scene, and remains as silence when the construction is stripped at the terminus. Neither the bare-faced role nor the silence is a product of negative dialectics. They are the return of the pre-individual tension the construction left unresolved. The closing is, at the floor of ontology, already broken.
On the semiotic layer, this closing appears as the cutting-off of the trial. Kristeva’s “subject in process” (sujet en procès) carries a double meaning, being at once process and trial (Julia Kristeva, «Le sujet en procès», in Polylogue, Seuil, 1977, pp. 55–106; no Japanese translation exists, and it is mobilized in the original). The subject is never completed; it is endlessly put on trial. The splitting of episode 11 stages this trial in the literal sense. The unmasked bare-faced role places Hatsune’s craving in the dock—do you really love her, or is this not an instrumentalization of Sakiko? But Hatsune does not remain in this trial. She ceases to be the defendant and brings the trial itself to an end. By walking the accusing bare-faced role out of frame and shutting it out, she cuts off the trial. The purified craving that remains is not a conviction tempered through trial but an apparent purity obtained by banishing the trial.
Move to the social layer. For Butler, identity is the sedimentation of citation. Not a fixed essence, it is barely constructed, each time, by continuing to reiterate—to cite—prior norms and roles (Takemura Kazuko trans., Excitable Speech, Iwanami Shoten, 2004; resignification p. 37). Hatsune’s construction lays this logic of citation bare to the limit. Her identity is nothing but citation—citation of the sister’s name, citation of the sister’s memories, citation of the role called Doloris. But citation, by nature, leaves room for slippage and failure. Citation is never repeated perfectly, and in the gap of that failure dwells the very possibility of resignification. Hatsune’s citation does not permit this failure. The failure that is the bare-faced role—the moment the citation frays and the instrumentalization of the construction is exposed—she does not resignify but banishes. Yet that banishment does not take Hatsune outside citation. In Butler, to stand outside the system of citation is in principle impossible, and the banishment of failure is itself only a move of disavowal made within the system. Hatsune’s citation, disavowing its own failure, remains a closed reiteration nonetheless.
What this closed citation commits against the other is the failure of respect. Fromm holds love to consist of four elements—care, responsibility, respect, and knowledge—and defines respect as seeing the other as she is and not using her for one’s own needs (The Art of Loving, Suzuki Akira trans., Kinokuniya Shoten, 2020; the four elements care, responsibility, respect, knowledge, ch. 2, pp. 46–47). Hatsune loves Sakiko. But that love lacks respect. Sakiko is a “stage-prop for tragedy,” the vessel in the private room, the addressee of a total self-donation—not an other seen as she is. In Fromm, love without respect degrades into domination and possession. Hatsune’s song of imprisonment is the work’s own naming of precisely that degradation.
And what supports this whole construction at the level of social character is other-direction. Riesman’s other-directed type is, properly, a character type a given society produces, not an individual’s psychological trait. Holding no compass within herself, receiving from others’ gazes and recognition, each time, who she is—Hatsune embodies that character-structure to an extreme (The Lonely Crowd, Katō Hidetoshi trans., Misuzu Shobō, “Beginnings” series, 2013; the definition of the three types [tradition-directed, inner-directed, other-directed], vol. 1, p. 17). Hatsune’s “I always, always wanted to be illuminated” (paraphrase) is the purest formula of that embodiment. Hatsune holds no light of her own. Only by being illuminated, seen, and recognized by Sakiko does she become herself. The structure of received light—a self that takes shape only in dependence on another’s light and recognition—is the social root of Hatsune’s construction.
Several layers point to one and the same conclusion. Hatsune’s identity-construction is a closed solo drama. It is built by cutting off the trial, disavowing the failure of citation, appropriating the other as material, and trying to seal the metastable openness. Episode 11 presented its form as material—Hatsune performs a play, all alone, before countless empty seats. There is no audience. Sakiko, who ought to be the sole other, is set within the play not as a partner in dialogue but as stage-set, as vessel. This is not a world shared with another but a single, sealed theater built out of an other as material. Half the grounds on which this essay diagnoses the Hatsune pole of the dyad as codependence lie here.
One more point, to be confirmed. The material accumulated so far—the borrowed name, the borrowed memories, the borrowed role, the vessel in the private room, and the structure of received light by which she takes shape only when illuminated, holding no light of her own—indicates that Hatsune is not a thick subject equipped with a core from within. But it is not that she has no core. Hatsune is a subject who accumulates a real core only after the fact, by layering borrowed fictions. As she takes the sister’s name, wears the sister’s memories, and repeats the episodes around Sakiko, those borrowings sediment and become a single self that actually exists. The construction called “Uika” is not a mask covering a void. It is the name of that accumulation—the congealing of repeated fiction into a real core. Just so, Hatsune knows, resists, and chooses—judging her own craving as “something selfish,” refusing forgetting with “it is not allowed” (paraphrase). These are not the conduct of a coreless vessel. They are the voice of a self that, however thin, actually exists, stored up through construction. Yet this self has a decisive fragility. It does not stand from within; it becomes real by being illuminated and moored—a relation-dependent core. If Sakiko’s light is withdrawn, the stored reality loses its support. This status of Hatsune—a self stored through construction yet dependent on the relation—defines the dyad of this essay not as a pair of two equal subjects but as an asymmetric pair from the start: a subject who stands from within, and a subject who stands by layering construction. And the reduction to a doll is not a loss of subjecthood arriving abruptly in episode 13. It is the terminus where the self that has been layered and stored is, by Sakiko’s own hand, cut off from the support of its construction—Sakiko’s mooring—and sealed.
But this closed solo drama was stripped away at the terminus of this chapter. Mask and voice were lost at once, and what remained was not a bare self but silence. That suspended silence after the stripping of the closed construction—refusal or collapse—Hatsune can never fill alone. What fills it is not Hatsune but the other pole, the one who comes to recognize Hatsune as Hatsune. The next chapter turns to the construction of that pole—Togawa Sakiko.
Chapter 2 — Sakiko’s Construction: Sovereign, Encompassing Care
(From Episode 12 of Avemujica: Sakiko Togawa takes Hatsune Misumi by the hand and leaves the old mansion, determined to “live together as a couple.”)
Chapter 1 ended with Hatsune’s silence, left beneath the stripped construction. The one who comes to fill that silence is Togawa Sakiko. And Sakiko does, in reverse, every single thing Hatsune did. Where Hatsune appropriated the other, Sakiko lets go of her own foothold. Where Hatsune shut the other away as a tool, Sakiko sees the other as she is and recognizes her. Where Hatsune begged to be illuminated, Sakiko tries to become the light-source herself. The center of gravity of this essay lies here. The one who actively constructs, recognizes, and declares is not Hatsune but Sakiko. But what this chapter shows is that this activity, in a manner different from Hatsune’s closure, heads nonetheless toward a closure of its own.
First, Sakiko descends. At the opening of episode 12, at a rain-soaked airport, her grandfather, Togawa Sadaharu—that father who, at the end of Chapter 1, called Hatsune by her real name—orders Sakiko to study abroad in Switzerland. It is the course laid by the Togawa order. Sakiko murmurs, asking whether this is supposed to be the fate a god decreed, and goes on: struggle as one might, everything is swept away in the muddy torrent (paraphrase). Her words speak defeat. But her body does not. Midway up the steps of the private jet she turns back and, leaving her slipped-off shoe where it lies, departs the airport. Sakiko, saying she cannot resist fate, leaves fate behind and walks away. In the later confrontation this gesture becomes words. Before her grandfather she declares: she will no longer do as he says; the two of them will live together (paraphrase). Sakiko, of her own accord, steps down from the Togawa order of evaluation and recognition.
(From Episode 11 of Avemujica: Hatsune Misumi gazing at Shodoshima)
Where the descended Sakiko heads is Shōdoshima. She crosses to the island alone, climbs Mt. Mikasa on foot, and tracks down Hatsune, who has taken up residence as caretaker of the villa. The Hatsune who fell silent when the father imposed her real name here opens her own mouth—but not with words of recognition; with words of refusal. Hatsune discloses her origin: she is the child of a mistress, one who had a hand in the downfall of Sakiko’s real father, Togawa Kiyotsugu; she has no right to be at Sakiko’s side; she wants her to return to Tokyo (paraphrase). Hatsune tries to push herself away from Sakiko. Sakiko does not listen. She leads Hatsune to the summit of Mt. Mikasa and, in the memory of that night long ago when the two gazed at the starry sky, names her: the one who loved the stars was none other than Hatsune. And she calls her back by her real name—Hatsune, we are going home (paraphrase). The form of address shifts: from “Hatsune-san” to “Hatsune.”
Let me describe precisely what happens here. Sakiko’s recognition is an act that overturns Hatsune’s self-definition from outside. Hatsune had pushed herself away from Sakiko, saying she had “no right.” Sakiko does not accept that self-definition. As if to say, who you are is decided not by you but by me, Sakiko rejects Hatsune’s self-rejection and certifies, from above, that the one who loved the stars is none other than Hatsune. This is a powerful recognition, given by Sakiko from outside Hatsune, of the identification of construction and reality that Hatsune herself could not accomplish in Chapter 1. But at the same time it is an act in which the one who recognizes rewrites the self-understanding of the one recognized. Respect and sovereignty are, here, already one.
(From Episode 12 of Avemujica: Sakiko Togawa takes Hatsune Misumi by the hand, calls her by name, and tries to walk with her.)
This recognition unties the silence left suspended at the terminus of Chapter 1. Hatsune’s silence at the father’s naming was neither refusal nor collapse. It was a silence waiting for an other who would recognize her. Through Sakiko’s recognition, Hatsune at last recovers her voice. The first rebuttal Hatsune utters in the main story, before the grandfather—please let me stay with Sakiko (paraphrase)—is that voice. Yet what the recovered voice says is not “I am Hatsune.” It is “please let me stay with Sakiko.” Hatsune’s voice is uttered not as a declaration of autonomy but in the craving for the other, just as it is. What broke the silence was not Hatsune’s autonomy but a relational ignition mediated by Sakiko’s recognition. The substance of this third form is entered in Chapter 3.
This top-down certification is most exposed in the scene over suffering. At the summit, Hatsune abases herself to push Sakiko away—she was happy to have spent time with Sakiko, though she is in no position to say “happy”; because she has this memory, she can go on living; and so (paraphrase). Saying she can go on living, Hatsune, with that same mouth, tries to step down from the relation, saying she has no right to be here. Sakiko rejects this, saying Hatsune thinks only of herself (paraphrase)—Hatsune, who counts only her own lack of right and tries to withdraw alone. And on the boat, Sakiko proposes: shall we make it as though it never happened? (paraphrase). What is to be made as though it never were? Sakiko makes it explicit: all the misfortune, regret, and entanglements surrounding the two of them (paraphrase). Looked at carefully, what Sakiko tries to erase is not Hatsune’s existence. It is the suffering around Hatsune. Sakiko affirms Hatsune’s existence and tries to make her forget only her suffering. But Hatsune refuses this erasure—she cannot do that; it is not allowed (paraphrase). To make it as though it never were is, for Hatsune, not allowed. Sakiko’s care, rather than receiving this refusal, tilts toward going beyond it—toward making her forget, making it as though it never were, and beginning from there.
Sakiko’s care therefore holds, inseparably, two aspects. On one side it is a powerful care that does not abandon the suffering other and affirms her existence whole. On the other it is a care in which the one who saves rewrites, from above, the self-judgment of the one who is saved. Hatsune judges herself to have no right and resists the proposal of erasure with “it is not allowed.” Sakiko, rather than receiving both that judgment and that resistance and bearing them together, makes her forget, makes it as though it never were, and brushes aside what fate could possibly matter. Sakiko’s care tilts away from being a response that receives Hatsune’s voice and toward the exercise of a sovereignty that takes over the solution in Hatsune’s stead.
When this sovereignty takes the form of a contract, it becomes a kingdom. The words by which Sakiko binds Ave Mujica trace the formula of a wedding vow—we are a community of fate; in sickness and in health, you shall share that fate with me (paraphrase). And: henceforth, whatever happens, no withdrawal is permitted; this is a contract (paraphrase). Sakiko binds each person’s life into a single fate. Withdrawal is not permitted. This is not a horizontally open community but the form of a kingdom in which all are bound by contract under a single sovereign. And at the close of episode 12, that sovereignty reaches its peak. Sakiko gathers Mutsumi, Umiri, Nyamu, and Hatsune and declares: there is no need to meekly accept fate; there is no god; therefore, I shall become god (paraphrase). The agency, taking Sadaharu’s intent, tries to stop the reunion. Sakiko does not yield—who do you think I am; I am Ave Mujica’s Oblivionis, Togawa Sakiko (paraphrase). If there is no god to guarantee meaning, she will become that god herself. Sakiko folds role and real name—Oblivionis and Togawa Sakiko—into a single self-naming in one breath. What Hatsune could not accomplish in Chapter 1—to name, with her own mouth, the real name and the construction together—Sakiko does without hesitation.
Yet the same mouth that declares she will become god knows this kingdom will not last. In a quiet apartment scene, Sakiko says to herself: turning one’s back on fate and on the world changes nothing; this small world will someday end—suddenly, irresistibly, like waking from a dream in the morning (paraphrase). And yet she wants to linger a little longer in the drowse (paraphrase). The declaration of becoming god is not the declaration of an everlasting kingdom. It is a provisional construction, one that goes on watching the dream while knowing it will someday wake, deferring that waking nonetheless. Here, “provisional” is not a word Sakiko herself spoke; it is the term by which this essay names the structure of this dream that one goes on watching while knowing it will end. Here is one of what this essay calls the lines the work itself draws. The work does not merely present Sakiko’s position of god / sovereign in triumph. By having Sakiko’s mouth speak of this kingdom as something that ends “like waking from a dream,” the work inscribes that the kingdom is a dream that someday wakes.
(From Episode 12 of Avemujica: The steam and three-dimensional quality of the coffee signifying the end of a dream, preceded by Sakiko Togawa’s line, “I hate it.”)
But how far this inscription takes effect, this chapter does not topple. This account of the dream and the drowse is placed not in the finale but in the apartment scene that precedes it. What actually closes the episode is not that account. It is the high self-naming that brushes aside the agency’s restraint—who do you think I am; I am Ave Mujica’s Oblivionis, Togawa Sakiko (paraphrase). And with those words, the OP plays and the episode closes. The account of the waking dream is buried in the scene preceding the finale, and what adorns the finale is the triumphant declaration and the OP that celebrates it. Here a rebuttal is possible: that the kingdom, rather than undermining its own provisionality, simply ends in high triumph. But here there is one more turn. This OP that flows at the finale is the theme song that should, by rights, have adorned the episode’s opening, postposed to the position of ending (at the opening, an ED had been preposed in the OP’s place). At the position of ending, the song of beginning sounds. This editing paradox can be read as inscribing, from the side of structure, that the triumphant kingdom is in fact no more than a fresh start rising from a single ending. That is, the inscription of provisionality unfulfilled at the level of the line may be borne instead, at the level of editing, by the postposing of the OP. Whether the triumph swallows the provisional, or the editing paradox undermines the triumph—that verdict cannot be reached without looking at the level of the staging of image, light, and sound. But here one thing about the OP itself can be confirmed. This OP postposed to the finale is not a triumphal variation specially reworked for the episode’s achievement; it is the same footage as before, merely shifted in position and sounded—not new footage made specially to celebrate the triumph. Moreover, the OP’s music itself lacks the musical markers of triumph. Its intro sends the melody descending and steers the harmony toward tension rather than resolution—the reverse of the triumphal formula of ascent and resolution. The OP, not only postposed to the ending in position but in the very movement of the music, does not celebrate triumph. The remaining scrutiny of image, light, and sound is taken up by the next section, together with the contrast of depictive media.
That scrutiny of image, light, and sound can be carried out here, together with the contrast of depictive media. The work has prepared the site of this scrutiny at the most material level too: the medium in which a character is depicted. In the drowse scene, the two—Sakiko and Hatsune—leave the usual 3DCG and are depicted in a decolorized 2D drawing. While the indoor objects—two mugs, a skylight, a smartphone—remain in 3DCG, only the two flesh-and-blood figures are transposed to a different line [1].
(From Episode 12 of Avemujica: Hatsune Misumi and Sakiko Togawa depicted in 2D)
If the 3DCG body is on the side of the surface of the construction called Ave Mujica—the side of the mask—then the transposition to 2D inscribes, at the very level of the depictive medium, the moment when that surface is stripped and the flesh laid bare. Sakiko’s account—murmuring she wants to linger in the drowse and turning an “I hate it” toward the scent of waking (paraphrase)—is, as a confession of the bare face with the mask removed, marked in the very manner of depiction. And at the finale, the Sakiko who brushes aside the agency’s restraint and names herself “Togawa Sakiko” leaves the 2D of the account and returns once more to the 3DCG body—the medium of the surface of the construction. But the body to which she returns is not staged as a triumphant image. Behind her there is no throne-like structure and no dais; the background is the everyday office space—brick wall and houseplants—with no elevation or symbolic object to lift Sakiko vertically. What she wears is neither mask nor stage costume but the school uniform, closest to the bare face. The camera declines the low angle that looks up, capturing her from a horizontal eye level at the closest super-close-up, her gaze directed straight at us. There is no emphatic lighting. On the very line of the self-naming that folds role (Oblivionis) and real name (Togawa Sakiko) into one breath, not even a peak of the BGM is placed; the swell is let escape to before and after the line. But what is declined here is the register of triumph—the low-angle thrust, the throne, the musical peak on the line—not heat as such. The closest scale and the frontal gaze rather direct an intensity of another kind than triumph: intimate yet confrontational. The surface of the construction is recovered at the level of the 3DCG medium, yet does not appear as a visual mask—the mask is summoned only at the level of the word, the naming “Oblivionis.” After the bare face of the waking dream (2D) is first laid down, what occupies the finale is not the victory of the mask. It is a restrained self-naming that, while returning to the medium of the surface of the construction, still declines the elation of triumph. What the shift in how the body is depicted, from 2D to 3DCG, announces is not the victory of the mask but the very fact that the shift declines the elation of triumph—and this supports once more, from the level of the staging, the provisional that the postposing of the OP had announced in the arrangement of time.
As in Chapter 1, let me reread the accumulated material with the hand of theory. But Sakiko’s construction is not the mere inverse of Hatsune’s. Where Hatsune closed by lack, Sakiko closes by excess. The respect Hatsune lacked, Sakiko has. The autonomy Hatsune could not hold, Sakiko exercises. And yet that respect and that autonomy congeal into a single sovereignty and raise, nonetheless, a closed kingdom. Theory describes this closure-by-excess layer by layer.
First, respect. Fromm held love to consist of four elements—care, responsibility, respect, and knowledge. As seen in Chapter 1, Hatsune’s love lacked respect—seeing the other as she is, not using her for one’s own needs—and lacked knowledge too. Hatsune treated Sakiko in the guise of the phantom called the device of tragedy, and did not try to know her as she is. Sakiko is the exact opposite. She knows Hatsune deeply, from childhood, and sees her as she is—the lie called Uika and all—and acknowledges that this is Hatsune. Sakiko’s love is not lacking. The four elements are, if anything, too complete. And just so, the locus of the peril is inverted. In Fromm, the check that keeps love from degrading into domination is respect itself. Because one sees the other as she is, love does not possess her. But in Sakiko, that very respect is tilted toward sovereignty. The image Sakiko gives Hatsune—”you are Hatsune”—is given from outside, after rejecting Hatsune’s own self-definition: I have no right. Here a question arises. Who determines Hatsune’s true self—Hatsune herself, or Sakiko? Sakiko’s certification can be read as a deeper respect, one that sees through Hatsune’s self-loathing to her true form. But at the same time it can be read as the conversion of respect into sovereignty—deciding who the other is from outside the other. This essay does not topple this ambiguity to one side. Set down without toppling, it is enough: Sakiko’s love is perilous not because it lacks but because it is full—because that full love can become domination.
This sovereignty appears most sharply in the phase of care. This essay determined, in the Introduction, to mobilize care at Tronto’s de-essentialized level—as a problem of distribution, the way the labor of care is structurally distributed onto particular figures. In Tronto, the fullness of care is measured not by the convenience of the one who cares but by the responsiveness of the one who receives care. This is set as a check against care’s degeneration into a paternalism that dominates the recipient (Sugimoto Tatsuya trans., Moral Boundaries, Keisō Shobō, 2024; the four phases of care, ch. 4, pp. 116–119, in particular the fourth phase [care-receiving], which treats the recipient’s response, p. 119; de-essentialization / the critique of Gilligan, ch. 3, pp. 85–102). Sakiko’s care crosses the line of this check. Hatsune resists the proposal of erasure with “it is not allowed” and tries to withdraw, saying she has no right. This is the recipient’s response. By Tronto’s standard, care begins from receiving this response and bearing it together. But Sakiko does not receive it. She makes Hatsune’s suffering “as though it never were” and brushes aside her resistance and self-abasement as thinking “only of herself.” Not counting the recipient’s response, the one who saves imposes the solution from above—this structure is material evidence of the tilt by which care leans toward the paternalism Tronto named. Yet whether to name it paternalism in the end, this chapter does not yet topple. Sakiko’s care is powerful. Whether that power is the power to hear the response or the power to overwrite it—that ambiguous verdict is held suspended until the final chapter, where the dyad is enlarged to the scale of the group.
When Sakiko’s care tilts toward the side that overwrites the response, binds all into a single fate by contract, and declares herself god, it crystallizes into one familiar figure. The daughter who rejected the failed paternal order—Togawa Kiyotsugu—installs herself, in its compensation, as the all-powerful mother / god who saves. This is none other than the figure Uno Tsunehiro named “maternal dystopia.” But here, what the term names is not that Sakiko’s essence is mother—Sakiko’s sovereignty, as discussed below, takes rather the form of self-legislation—but the level of the gendered iconography of the all-saving, omnipotent mother that this self-legislating sovereignty takes on as compensation for the failed father. Yet what marks this gendering of the maternal on screen is not the encompassing gestures of the god-declaration (spreading the arms, encircling, standing at the center)—Sakiko does none of these—but the iconography discussed below: the mother’s keepsake doll, the conflagration of the ED, the enclosure of the garden. Here this essay activates the second check set in the Introduction. It does not read this figure as an affirmative salvation. To extol Sakiko’s becoming god and encompassing all into a community of fate as liberation from the bad father would make this essay itself reproduce maternal dystopia. This essay, on the contrary, diagnoses Sakiko’s position of god / mother not as salvation but as the perilousness of a sovereign care. If what rises at the point where the bad father is rejected is not a horizontally open garden but the kingdom of a single sovereign who sets herself up as the good mother, then the withdrawal is not completed. The father’s sovereignty has merely been replaced by the mother’s.
This gendered iconography is not something this essay dressed Sakiko in from outside. The work itself places the figure of the maternal on screen. In the morning scene at the old mansion, a single doll is set in the room—a keepsake of the mother, blond and in a crimson dress. The camera captures it from the darkness of the room, placing focus on the doll. Beyond its gaze, in the bright garden outside the window, Sakiko and Hatsune frolic. The doll is not merely placed. Across the window that separates the indoor darkness from the outdoor brightness, it is positioned as the subject of a gaze watching the play of paradise [2]. The frozen keepsake of the lost mother is set within the room as a mother watching over the paradise of Sakiko and Hatsune. [3]
(From Episode 12 of Avemujica. A frozen memento of their lost mother stands in the room, watching over Sakiko and Hatsune’s paradise as their mother.)
And at the episode’s opening, when the ED “Georgette Me, Georgette You” is preposed, the same keepsake doll of the mother appears, this time as a still ink-wash image, and ends burned in a conflagration. The watching mother (the garden scene), and the burning mother (the conflagration of the ED). The figure of the maternal is inscribed within the episode and at both its ends, in both watching and destruction. The single trace of the mother left in the house of the failed father—the house where the grandfather Togawa reigns and the real father fell—is this keepsake doll. That mother no longer moves. In the paradise watched over by the unmoving keepsake of the mother, Sakiko sets herself up as the moving, all-saving, omnipotent mother. The gendering this essay calls maternal dystopia is thus moored not to the critic’s interpolation but to the work’s own iconography. Yet here too the check is kept in force—that the work figures Sakiko’s sovereignty in maternal iconography, and that care is essentially a woman’s, are two different things. What the doll supports is the former, not the latter.
At the level of social character, Sakiko is the exact opposite pole from Hatsune. If Hatsune was the embodiment of other-direction—holding no compass within herself, becoming herself only when illuminated by another’s light—then Sakiko is the embodiment of self-legislation, positing meaning from within, owing nothing to external authority—rejecting the grandfather’s authority, declaring that if there is no god she herself will become one. But this self-legislation must not be short-circuited with Riesman’s healthy autonomous type. Riesman’s autonomous type is one who, while possessing the capacity to conform to the behavioral norms of his society, retains the freedom to choose whether or not to conform (The Lonely Crowd, Katō Hidetoshi trans., Misuzu Shobō, “Beginnings” series, 2013, vol. 2, p. 138, part 3, “Autonomy”). To possess the capacity and then to choose whether or not to obey—that maturity is the core of the autonomous type. Sakiko’s “I shall become god” is not that maturity. It fits neither Riesman’s three types nor the autonomous type—it is, this essay reads, something that, neither other-directed nor inner-directed nor autonomous, takes the form of self-legislation while spilling outside it. Sakiko is liberated from other-direction. But the destination of that liberation is not autonomy; it is another excess—setting up a hypertrophied self in place of an external authority.
Several layers point to one conclusion. Sakiko’s construction is a sovereign, encompassing care. Beginning as respect, becoming a certification that overwrites the other’s self-understanding, tilting toward a power that overwrites the response, becoming a kingdom that binds all into a single fate, and arriving at the self-deification of setting herself up as god. Whether to name that tilt paternalism in the end is held, in ambiguity, until the final chapter. This is the substance of what this essay calls the inversion of the center of gravity: in the dyad, the one who actively constructs, recognizes, and declares is Sakiko, and that activity raises a closure-by-excess different from Hatsune’s closure-by-lack.
And this sovereign care, the work does not celebrate unconditionally. By having Sakiko’s mouth speak of the kingdom ending someday “like waking from a dream,” and by postposing the finale’s OP—by sounding the song of beginning at the position of ending—the work tries to inscribe, from the side of structure, that the triumphant kingdom is no more than a fresh start rising from a single ending. And whether this inscription has the strength to undermine the triumph is no longer the staging layer’s homework. This chapter scrutinized it at the level of the depictive medium and confirmed that the finale’s self-naming is staged lacking elation—that the triumph itself is restrained. The inscription exits this chapter with strength enough to support the side of the provisional.
What remains is the asymmetry of the dyad. Sakiko embraces, sees, and binds. Hatsune begs, shuts in, and instrumentalizes. One by excess, the other by lack, build up one and the same sealed garden. How this asymmetry engages into a single structure called codependence—and where the work itself draws the line between that codependence and the other, closed-off road—that is the question of the next chapter.
Chapter 2 — Notes
[1] Parsing the media. 2D appears in the work in other contexts too, such as the figures of the agency’s personnel. What is decisive here is not the appearance of 2D as such but the marked deviation by which the principal two, usually modeled in 3DCG, turn to 2D at the juncture where the surface of the construction is stripped and the bare face / true feeling is laid bare. It appears in the drowse scene (Sakiko and Hatsune both to 2D) and in the summit scene where Sakiko names Hatsune’s true self (only Hatsune to 2D). The 2D in the background art (the trees of the summit, the garden’s plants) belongs to the picture-making of an idealized space; the markedness spoken of here is confined to the point that human bodies usually modeled in 3DCG turn to 2D. But the mechanism of marking differs in the two scenes. In the drowse scene the two figures’ 2D forms a contrast with the 3DCG of the room’s inorganic objects (a figure-ground media contrast), whereas in the other there is no such contrast, the background being 2D as well, and the function of the bare face is borne by the dialogue and Sakiko’s recognition. The strong visual marking by media contrast is proper to the drowse scene.
[2] Observation procedure. Whether the doll functions as the subject that sees the garden, or remains a mere still life—this essay observed both outcomes equally and judged the former.
[3] The melodrama genealogy. The iconography of a mother gazing through a window from a dark interior at the happiness outside belongs to a lineage that family-melodrama studies have discussed as the very type of pathos that diffuses emotion not into dialogue but into mise-en-scène—the structure of displacement by which the unspeakable, repressed emotion of the mother is transposed onto details of mise-en-scène such as the window or the keepsake object (Thomas Elsaesser, “Tales of Sound and Fury: Observations on the Family Melodrama,” 1972, in Marcia Landy ed., Imitations of Life, Wayne State University Press, 1991, pp. 68–91; the formula that emotion is transposed onto music and mise-en-scène is given explicitly in Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, “Minnelli and Melodrama,” Screen 18:2 (1977), pp. 113–118, at p. 117). In particular, the closing image of Stella Dallas (King Vidor, 1937)—the mother gazing through a window at her daughter’s wedding, pushed out by the crowd as she departs—is analyzed in precise detail as a paradigm of the maternal melodrama by Linda Williams, “‘Something Else Besides a Mother’: Stella Dallas and the Maternal Melodrama,” Cinema Journal 24:1 (1984), pp. 2–27. For an overview available in Japanese, see also John Mercer and Martin Shingler, Melodrama: Genre, Style, Sensibility, trans. Nakamura Hideyuki and Kōno Marie (Tokyo: Film Art, 2013), pp. 196–197. This essay mobilizes this lineage not as grounds for the diagnosis but, at the level of a note, as the film-historical backing for the maternal iconography.
Chapter 3 — The Asymmetry of the Dyad and Codependence: Where Is the Line Drawn?
(From Avemujica, Episode 11. Hatsune Misumi marks her first encounter with Sakiko Togawa as a lie.)
Chapter 1 described Hatsune’s closure, and Chapter 2 Sakiko’s closure, each separately—one closing by lack, the other by excess. This chapter first shows that these two closures are not two separate pathologies but a single structure. The key is that the two closures fit exactly into each other’s gaps.
What Hatsune begged for was to be illuminated. Holding no light of her own, taking shape only when illuminated by another’s light—”I always, always wanted to be illuminated.” Hatsune’s closure is a closure on the receiving side, one that absolutely needs an other who gives. What Sakiko desired was the exact opposite—to become the light-source itself. If there is no god, she becomes god. The giving side’s excess: giving, illuminating, binding. These two engage exactly. The one who wants to be illuminated, and the one who wants to illuminate. The one who wants to be seen, and the one who wants to see as she is. What one’s lack seeks, the other’s excess supplies exactly.
But this engagement must not be mistaken for a complementary encounter. The supply does not stop, fitted neatly to demand. It exceeds it, overflows. Hatsune refused to make it as though it never were—”it is not allowed”—and grasped the past as something that cannot be erased. Sakiko tries to swallow that refusal from above, beyond Hatsune’s asking, “making it as though it never were.” Even what Hatsune sought to keep, Sakiko’s supply swallows. In a healthy interdependence, the supply stops at the other’s asking, and the other remains the other still. Here, the supply exceeds the other’s asking, swallows the other, and dissolves her into a closed domain. What looks like lock and key fitting together is, in its fitting, not an encounter but the very mechanism of sealing. One’s pathology becomes the nourishment of the other’s. What makes the dyad of the two a single closed domain—what this essay calls codependence—is this engagement of an overflowing supply and a lack that lets itself be swallowed.
This third form is none other than the relation-side aspect of Hatsune’s status drawn out in Chapter 1—a relation-dependent self that layers construction to store up a core. Hatsune’s self does not stand from within and lean. It becomes real only by being illuminated and moored, and stores that reality up within the relation. So that self does not remain even when leaning; if the relation is severed, it collapses, accumulation and all. In weak autonomy, a thick self remains even while leaning. In codependence, a thin self stored through the relation dissolves entirely with the closure of the relation. Hatsune’s third form is on the latter side—the side of the correct failure-form of weak autonomy. Here the asymmetry of the dyad is fixed not as a relation of two equals but as an asymmetry, from the start, between a subject who stands from within and a subject who stands within the relation by layering construction. Yet by what the de-subjectivation this self undergoes is divided from the Mutsumi-type’s dissolution into nothing is deferred until the final chapter, where the terminal images are assembled. What divides them is neither the image arrived at nor the purity of who writes that image, but the very slope of descent—that this self descends down the road of the relation.
But here this essay must be most cautious. Withdrawal itself is not the error. For one exhausted by the economy of recognition to step down from the game of appraising one another by mutual evaluation—that, rather, was a movement the preceding main essay read affirmatively. The problem lies in where one steps down to. If the place stepped down to is a horizontal site where one can be without being asked who one is, that is the correct completion of withdrawal. If the place stepped down to is a domain sealed by a single sovereign, the withdrawal has closed into another cage. To supply the line dividing these two—how far is healthy withdrawal, and where does closure begin—from outside the work would degrade into the sermon-porn gesture of standing in for a distance the work does not hold. Whether this essay can be diagnosis depends on whether the work itself draws this line.
The work draws it. In episode 10, Hatsune composes a poem to Sakiko. But that poem is not written in isolation. In the preceding episode 9, Hatsune is shown, at the planetarium, Tomori’s “song.” Tomori, too, is one who wrote a poem out of feeling for Sakiko. Both poems are addressed to Sakiko. And the way of loving is the exact opposite. The imagery of Tomori’s poem only gazes at the other’s wings—not reaching out, letting her fly, affirming the other’s freedom as it is. The imagery of Hatsune’s poem casts down a wingless other and shuts her in so she cannot flee—sealing, possessing. Set the wording aside. Extract the structure alone: the watching wing, and the imprisoning wing. The hands-off affirmation, and the sealing possession. The work sets these two against each other as two ways of loving Sakiko.
Moreover, this opposition is not a static juxtaposition. It is drawn as a movement. Hatsune receives Tomori’s mode in episode 9 and, in episode 10, inverts it in writing. The one shown a watching love writes an imprisoning love. The line is not borrowed from outside the dyad. In the very midst of the dyad, as the movement by which Hatsune herself receives Tomori’s letting-go and bends it toward possession, it is drawn inside the work. This is the most vivid instance of what this essay calls the line the work itself draws. The critic has not invented the contrast of watching / imprisoning. The work places Tomori’s wing and Hatsune’s wing side by side and shows, as the movement of the story, that the latter is the inversion of the former. [1]
Let me dispose of one counter-reading. Hatsune’s imagery of imprisonment can also be read as not literal possessiveness but merely the gothic aesthetic of the role in the band called Ave Mujica—the rhetoric of a dark, decadent worldview. But this reading is rejected by the material arrayed in the same period. In Hatsune’s private room stands Sakiko’s vessel, and in that same period Hatsune composes the lyrics of “Imprisoned XII” with her own hand. Imprisonment is not the style of a given role. It is a poem Hatsune herself wrote, and a literal structure of possession that Hatsune herself enacts upon a thing, as the vessel in her private room. The gothic aesthetic is a surface covering that literalness, not a ground that exempts it.
Finally, the voice of Hatsune held suspended in Chapter 2 is opened here. The voice Hatsune recovered, breaking the silence at the father’s naming, was “please let me stay with Sakiko.” This essay calls this voice Hatsune’s “third form.” It is neither of the two poles the preceding main essay set up—the Tomori-type (autonomous letting-go, the ethics of the lost child) and the Mutsumi-type (dissolution into nothing). Hatsune’s voice neither dissolves into nothing nor lets go autonomously; it ignites only when mediated by Sakiko’s recognition. But this very thirdness is the core of the diagnosis. What the recovered voice says is not “I am Hatsune” but “please let me stay with Sakiko.” Not a declaration of autonomy but an ignition in the craving for the other, just as it is. Hatsune’s self does not lean on the other while remaining a self nonetheless. It becomes a self only through being sealed into the other. Leaning and dissolving-in are different. In the former the self remains; in the latter the self dissolves into a closed domain with the other. Hatsune’s third form is on the latter side. And this “self that ignites only when sealed” is precisely what engages Sakiko’s sovereign care and closes the dyad into a single domain.
(From Avemujica, Episode 12. Hatsune Misumi: “Please let me stay with Saki-chan!”)
Let me reread, in the vocabulary of Uno Tsunehiro’s The Garden, the engagement and the line described so far in natural language.
Uno calls the contemporary site of recognition the platform. There, people are ceaselessly drawn into a game of mutual evaluation in which they appraise one another, able to confirm themselves only through winning that evaluation (The Garden, the game of mutual evaluation, p. 285). To step down from this game is not, in itself, a sickness. What Uno calls the garden is another site that opens beyond withdrawal from this place of evaluation—a site of autonomy where one can go on making something, not depending on others’ appraisal. And the garden is not isolation. It connects with an open public where those who gather there can be without being asked “who they are” (ibid., the public, pp. 242–243). [2]
Sakiko stepped down from this game explicitly. “I will no longer do as you say, grandfather”—Sakiko, with her own mouth, refuses the grandfather Togawa’s order of evaluation. Withdrawal has occurred. The problem is what comes after. Where Sakiko alighted was not an open garden where one is not asked who one is. It was a sealed domain where a single sovereign reigns, all are bound by contract, and withdrawal is not permitted. A sealed site of withdrawal that, while escaping the platform’s game of evaluation, reaches neither the garden’s openness nor the public, and closes under a single sovereign—this this essay calls, as the counterpart to the garden, the sealed garden [3]. Is the destination of withdrawal a garden, or a sealed garden? Sakiko’s withdrawal closed into the latter.
What Uno depicts as the mode of the subject dwelling in the garden is weak autonomy (ibid., weak autonomy, p. 301). It is not a strong individual who depends on no one. It is a mode of remaining a self while leaning on others—a mode that takes on dependence yet does not dissolve into it. What this essay calls codependence is exactly the failure-form of this weak autonomy. Here let me delimit one term. This essay uses codependence not as the diagnostic concept used in clinical psychology but as the negative form of Uno’s weak autonomy—as a structural mode of failure in which withdrawal from the game of mutual evaluation closes not into weak autonomy (the garden) but into a sealed garden. In weak autonomy, the self remains even while leaning on others. In codependence, the self dissolves into a closed domain with the other. What Hatsune’s third form—the self that ignites only when sealed by Sakiko—showed was precisely this dissolution.
And here is the hinge of this chapter—of the whole essay. This line dividing weak autonomy from codependence was not drawn by the critic from outside the work. The work itself draws it. The contrast of Tomori’s wing and Hatsune’s wing—watching love and imprisoning love—is that line. The watching wing affirms the other’s freedom hands-off. It is a love on the side of weak autonomy, leaning yet leaving the other as the other still. The imprisoning wing seals and possesses the other. It is a love on the side of codependence, swallowing the other into a closed domain. The work set these two side by side within itself, as the movement by which Hatsune receives Tomori’s mode and inverts it. The line is not the critic’s addition. It is the work’s material evidence.
This single point divides this essay from sermon-porn. That this essay, while handing down the diagnosis of codependence, still does not degrade into sermon-porn is because it places the grounds of the diagnosis not in the degree to which the critic has judged the work severely but in the structure of where the work itself drew the line. The articulation holds by structure, not by degree. The critic is not measuring from outside how sick Hatsune’s love is. The critic merely describes the structure by which the work placed Tomori’s wing beside Hatsune’s wing and wrote the latter as the inversion of the former.
But here one counter-question is possible. The work has countless lines—the vessel, the mask, the provisional, the postposing of the OP. That the contrast of Tomori’s / Hatsune’s wings was chosen as the axis of the diagnosis is, after all, the critic’s doing, is it not? If the very selection of which line to count as diagnostic is the critic’s operation, then the articulation that “holds by structure, not by degree” is merely calling back, through the back door, a judgment of degree under the name of selection—is it not? This is answered in two stages.
First, what decisively distinguishes the Tomori / Hatsune contrast from the other material evidence is that it is not a static juxtaposition by the critic but a temporal movement the work itself performs. This essay did not array, from outside, the two pictures of the watching wing and the imprisoning wing and name the latter the inversion of the former. The work had Hatsune receive Tomori’s watching mode in episode 9 and write it, inverted into imprisonment, in episode 10. Reception and inversion are enacted in the work as the succession of the story. This essay did not pick out this one strand; it merely describes, after the fact, the work’s having drawn this one strand as a movement. The criterion of selection lies not on the side of the critic’s taste but on the side of the work’s movement. And this essay has, throughout the paper, consistently articulated this line the work draws and the reading this essay synthesizes—the contrast of garden and sealed garden, the connection of platform and the game of mutual evaluation—and has, for the latter, made the synthesis explicit in footnotes. The weight of the diagnosis is placed not on the side of synthesis but on the side of the line the work drew as movement. The synthetic line is marked as such, and the diagnostic line is moored to the work’s movement—keeping this distinction is the condition on which this essay stands independent of sermon-porn.
This articulation seals two assessment gaps. The first gap was the suspicion that the grounds for pointing out the perilousness of Sakiko’s care might be merely the critic’s judgment. But, as just seen, the grounds are not the critic’s judgment. That Sakiko’s supply swallows Hatsune beyond Hatsune’s asking—that it erases even the judgment Hatsune sought to keep, “making it as though it never were”—is material evidence the work depicts, and to name that swallowing, invertedly, as imprisonment is likewise the line the work itself wrote onto Hatsune’s wing. Yet what is sealed is the gap of whether this material evidence is the critic’s extrapolation, while the verdict that finally names that material evidence paternalism is still deferred, ambiguous, until the final chapter. That the grounds lie in the work, and that the verdict is not rushed, are compatible. The second gap was the suspicion that the provisionality of Sakiko’s kingdom might, swallowed by the swell of the finale’s OP, remain a self-intoxicated triumph. This gap is no longer suspended. As Chapter 2 scrutinized at the level of the depictive medium, the finale’s self-naming is staged with the uniform, no mask, no emphatic lighting, and not even the swell of the BGM is laid over the line itself. The postposed OP, too, is not a triumphal song specially varied for the episode but merely a positional shift of the same footage as before. The triumph is, in the substance of the staging, restrained, and does not swallow the inscription of the provisional. What the diagnosis moors to is two facts that do not change however warmly things are depicted [4]. First, the end of the kingdom is not something the critic reads off from the quality of the beauty; Sakiko herself speaks it as a proposition—this world ends “suddenly, irresistibly, like waking from a dream in the morning.” A kingdom that survives is not spoken of thus. What marks the closure is not the hue of the beauty but this proposition issuing from Sakiko’s mouth, and the proposition is not swayed by the temperature of the screen. Second, the inversion of Tomori’s / Hatsune’s wings seen just after—the movement of receiving the watching and bending it into imprisonment—is likewise invariant against the temperature of the drawing line. However lovingly the characters are depicted, the very succession by which Hatsune received Tomori’s watching and inverted it into imprisonment does not move. And that this end is attributed not to a tragedy arriving from outside but to the kingdom’s own sealing is announced by the open road that did not need to close—the road Tomori actually walked—being placed beside it. Further, even if the work stages its own evanescence in advance and robs the critic of the distance he would point out from outside, that is not a failure of the diagnosis. When the work draws its line through to the end, the criticism that can only describe that line is not failing to supply an external distance but is fulfilling, in the purest way, this essay’s condition of mooring to the work’s own line. The gap is sealed on the side of the provisional. And what is more decisive is that this essay’s diagnosis was never, from the start, held hostage to the result of this scrutiny. Even had the inscription of the provisional been swallowed by triumph at the staging layer, the grounds for diagnosing the dyad as codependence are already independently supported by other material evidence—the contrast of Tomori’s / Hatsune’s poems. The diagnosis does not depend on the settlement of a single staging problem. It is multiply secured by several lines the work itself draws.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FWXkipC-vqs&list=RDFWXkipC-vqs&start_radio=1
(From Avemujica’s opening theme “Kill Kiss.” At the end, the singer, Hatsune Misumi, falls into an abyss.)
What remains is the fact that this codependence does not stay with the two of the dyad alone. Sakiko’s sealed garden does not complete itself by shutting in Hatsune alone. It expands into a single kingdom binding, by contract, the five, then the audience, and, in the work’s own mythology, the cosmos as well. When the dyad’s codependence is expanded to the scale of the group, what does it become—and outside that expanded sealed garden, what other road does the work leave, as Tomori’s wing? That is the question of the final chapter.
Chapter 3 — Notes
[1] Cross-boundary articulation. The site where Hatsune receives Tomori’s song is within episode 9 of Ave Mujica, but the composition of Tomori’s poem itself may belong to the MyGO side. Hence this essay can say “the work draws the line immanently” only insofar as the movement by which Hatsune receives and inverts Tomori’s mode occurs within Ave Mujica; it does not advance a cross-franchise claim.
[2] Source of the connection. The connection of garden and public is moored to the public that does not ask “who one is” in The Garden, pp. 242–243 (distinguished from the level at which the same book, p. 234, treats SNS as a public space). The connection that binds platform and the game of mutual evaluation into a single pole is made explicit as a reading this essay synthesizes from Uno’s individual concepts.
[3] Terminological note. “Garden” and “platform” are Uno’s words. “Sealed garden” is a word this essay sets up as the counterpart to the garden; it is not Uno’s term. The source for the garden is The Garden, ch. 1, pp. 58–59, and ch. 10, p. 234.
[4] A counter-reading on the aesthetics of restraint. The restraint of triumph itself raises an aesthetic value—a sobered beauty, a stillness that holds the ending. Then is restraint not merely covering indulgence in the kingdom with a still finer chiaroscuro? Such a counter-reading is possible. That this scene—and many of the scenes around the dyad—is drawn so as to cherish the characters with a touch lavished with the maker’s affection, and that this sobered beauty is also an emanation of self-character love, this essay does not reject. Drawing beautifully with care, and doting on one’s own characters, cannot be told apart on the screen. But self-character love only explains the temperature of the drawing line and cannot erase the two facts of the body text—that Sakiko herself speaks the ending as a proposition, and the movement of the inversion of Tomori’s / Hatsune’s wings. Aesthetic empathy and the marking of closure are compatible in this temperature-invariant layer.
Final Chapter — The Pair over Being and the Kingdom of Encompassment: The Social Reach of Codependence
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GMn4qO7zT0E
(From Avemujica, Episode 13: “Musica of the Celestial Sphere”)
Chapter 3 closed the dyad as a single codependence. This final chapter draws, from the same material of the work, the deepest depth of this codependence and its widest expanse. The depth is the pair of the two over being; the expanse is the kingdom of encompassment that, beyond the dyad, swallows the collective.
First, the depth. Let me look once more, in its object, at Sakiko’s “shall we make it as though it never were?” described in Chapter 2. What Sakiko seeks to erase is not the existence that is Hatsune. It is “the whole of the misfortune and regret, all the entanglements, that surround you and me”—the suffering. Sakiko affirms Hatsune’s existence and seeks to make her forget only the suffering. For Sakiko, suffering can be severed from existence. Against this, Hatsune refuses that severance. To Sakiko’s proposal of erasure, Hatsune returns, “I can’t do that. It is not allowed.” What “it is not allowed” bears upon here is not the existence that is Hatsune but the very act of making it as though it never were. To erase the past, the suffering—that is what is not allowed to Hatsune. Hatsune grasps the past as something that cannot be erased and refuses oblivion. The asymmetry of the dyad appears first at this one point—Sakiko seeks to sever suffering from existence and erase it, and Hatsune refuses that erasure itself.
Yet this same Hatsune, who refused oblivion in the reality of episode 12, the work stages in episode 13 as Doloris, who vows oblivion. In the play-within-the-play embedded in the episode 13 live—a mythic drama in which the goddess of oblivion Oblivionis (Sakiko) bestows her blessing upon her vassals—Hatsune-as-Doloris steps forward before the goddess. But she does not simply receive the blessing. Here is the decisive material. While Timoris, Amoris, and Mortis receive oblivion, Doloris alone delays. She holds back—”wait” (paraphrase)—denies that this is her first time here, and, even when the goddess rebuffs her—”you are not my knight” (paraphrase)—still pleads, “I only wanted to see you” (paraphrase). Of the four, Hatsune alone hesitates before oblivion and resists. And at the end of that resistance, what Hatsune vows is a total oblivion—”I will forget you; I will forget even this sorrow” (paraphrase), if only thereby “I may stay by your side” (paraphrase). In exchange for the vow, the light vanishes from Hatsune’s eyes, and her body turns to a doll. The work offers, as the mythic staging of episode 13, the moment at which the “it is not allowed” grasped in the reality of episode 12 is let go.
In this staging, the deepest asymmetry of the dyad is completed—and that completion becomes the terminus of the dyad itself. Sakiko peeled only the suffering from existence and held the existence. Hatsune cannot perform that severance—she binds sorrow and self into one and offers the whole binding as it is. At the end of that offering, the light vanishes from Hatsune’s eyes and her body turns to a doll. Here this essay touches head-on the limit its own unit of diagnosis reaches. This essay has taken the dyad—the relation in which two subjects address each other—as its unit of analysis. Both codependence and the sealed garden are diagnoses of a relation, of two subjects engaging in a closed domain. But Hatsune, turned to a doll, is no longer one term of a relation. For the light of the eyes to vanish is for the position called subject to fall empty. As with a specimen displayed on a pedestal, the doll is not a vassal reigned over but a thing collected and possessed. Here the dyad loses one of its terms. What remains is not a relation of two subjects but a collector and the thing in her hand.
Let me record this terminus from two directions. On one hand, the road by which Hatsune reaches this terminus is still the road of relation. Her vanishing carries the condition “if only I may stay by her side,” and its road differs from the “I want to forget it all” (paraphrase) of Mutsumi / Mortis, who seeks to vanish from the very weight of existence without passing through relation. What Hatsune lets go, she lets go not in order to become zero but in order to remain by Sakiko’s side—the third form opened in Chapter 3, the form that layers construction to stand within the relation, reaches here its final consequence. But on the other hand, the image arrived at is no longer an image of ignition. To read the doll, its eye-light gone, as still “ignited” would be to read a subject back in defiance of the material evidence. Though the road differs from the Mutsumi-type, in the terminal image arrived at, Hatsune’s doll-becoming and Mutsumi’s vanishing meet at a single point of de-subjectivation.
Then, if the terminal image converges with the Mutsumi-type, is Hatsune’s third form merely a variant of the route to the Mutsumi-type? No. What divides the two is not the purity of the authorship of the erasure but the slope by which one reaches it. Mutsumi’s dissolution is a direct self-erasure that does not pass through relation—a vertical descent from the very weight of existence. Hatsune’s de-subjectivation descends the road of relation. Hatsune lets go of the self she layered and stored within the very relation that sustained that self—under the condition “if only I may stay by her side.” Where Mutsumi falls vertically, Hatsune descends the slope that is relation. The singularity lies not in the terminal image but in this route of descent.
(In Episode 13 of Avemujica, just before “Musica of the Celestial Sphere,” Hatsune Misumi is transformed into a doll.)
And let me see how this terminal erasure is written. Hatsune vows, “I will forget you; I will forget even this sorrow,” and chooses the condition “if only I may stay by her side.” But this vow must not be read as free co-authorship. Follow the succession of the play-within-the-play: Hatsune-as-Doloris first resists—holding back with “wait,” denying that this is her first time here, rebuffed by the goddess with “you are not my knight”—and only at the end of that rebuff does she at last vow oblivion. The consent is extracted only as the price of proximity, inside a frame where the goddess holds every card of the blessing. This is not free co-authorship. It is consent under conditional access—Hatsune authors her own erasure only inside the frame Sakiko governs. And what actually extinguishes the light of the eyes is not Hatsune’s vow. It is the blessing of the goddess, Sakiko. Hatsune consents to the dismantling of her accumulation, and Sakiko executes it. This asymmetry of consent is not a flaw but the core of the diagnosis. It is the coherent consequence of the fact that Hatsune’s self was, from the start, a relation-dependent core—a core stored only by being illuminated and moored by Sakiko. A self stored together is, as the price of belonging, undone by the hand of the one who holds that belonging. The coldest face of the sealed garden is here—to extract, as the price of staying, “consent” to one’s own erasure.
And this structure keeps this terminus within this essay’s jurisdiction. The doll-becoming is not the trace of a relation that automatically annulled itself. It is the trace of the self that Hatsune layered and stored being sealed, its sustaining relation severed by Sakiko’s own hand. In Chapter 1, Hatsune set Sakiko’s vessel in her private room; she was one who possessed the other. That mode of possession now inverts and is applied to Hatsune herself. Hatsune, undone of the self she stored, turns into a single thing possessed by someone—a doll—the same as the vessel she had set up. The collector is now collected. This is not the self-nullification of a relation. It is the completion of a thingifying relation. At the very bottom of the sealed garden is neither a sealed relation nor the trace of a relation that annulled itself. It is the point of arrival at which the self stored through construction, undone of that construction, is sealed into a single thing.
Next, this play-within-the-play lays bare one more thing: the two levels of construction. In episode 12, in the shared memory of the stars, Sakiko named Hatsune—”the one who loves the stars is Hatsune”—and integrated construction (Uika) and reality (Hatsune) into one. This was a construction occurring at the level of lived reality—that the very one who has lived a falsehood is, just as she is, the real Hatsune. But in the episode 13 play-within-the-play, the condition for Hatsune to become the role Doloris is oblivion. By forgetting reality, the past, she becomes the role. This is a construction occurring at a mythic level, a staging within the staging. Upon the same Hatsune the work layers two constructions—construction as lived reality, and construction as staging, as the provisional, that rises at the cost of oblivion. What this essay’s title, “identity as construction,” was asking returns here as the work’s own two-layer structure. This essay describes this play-within-the-play as the work’s immanent myth-staging. The salvation that the goddess of oblivion’s blessing brings, this essay does not read by giving it meaning through an external theory. It confines itself to describing the structure the work stages as its own myth.
And now to the expanse. In the episode 13 live, the dyad’s codependence does not stay within the closed domain of the two. It expands to the scale of the collective. In the play-within-the-play, Oblivionis (Sakiko) bestows the goddess of oblivion’s blessing upon the four roles—Timoris, Amoris, Mortis, Doloris. She rebirths each one through oblivion and makes them subjects of her kingdom. And Sakiko declares, “Over this twilight paradise, I shall reign on” (paraphrase). This place the work calls a “paradise,” this essay calls a kingdom—a sealed site of encompassment where all are received through oblivion and a single sovereign reigns. The “I will become god” of episode 12 is completed here into the declaration of duration, “I shall reign on.” The kingdom binds the two of the dyad, the five of Ave Mujica, and even the audience of the live. The sealed garden diagnosed in Chapter 3 swells here to the scale of a kingdom. The sealing that shut in Hatsune alone expands into a sealing that encompasses the collective, the audience. But this encompassment does not run continuous to the end. Just after declaring “I shall reign on”—just after the kingdom’s apex is shown, in intense luminescence, against a golden curtain and throne—the work cuts the screen with a super-close-up of Hatsune and switches the register itself. The finale of the song “Tenkyū no musica” begins from there. The stage is the same, but the emphasis on the throne is released; the golden curtain shifts to a single cosmic purple, into a composition where white constellations rise from its depths. The finale is set off as an independent number. The tonic is kept while the modal hue changes, and a new guitar, based in arpeggio, layers in as harmony. The color, too, moves from the gold of reign to the purple of the cosmos. The work marks this not as a continuation of the kingdom but as another phase, demarcated by image, sound, and color.
(From Avemujica, Episode 13, “Musica of the Celestial Sphere.” Breaking away from the storyline, Hatsune Misumi’s eyes light up, and she begins to sing the song.)
What occurs within that demarcated phase is the dismantling of reign. The withdrawn Sakiko takes her place at the piano at the stage’s left edge, side by side at the same height as the other four. No longer is there a gaze that looks down, nor any gesture of investiture. The stars are not released from Sakiko’s hand but, lacking a point-source, are ubiquitous across the screen, and Sakiko herself, too, becomes one of those illuminated by that light—from one who illuminates to one of those illuminated. The shot/reverse-shot of the seeing subject and the one seen in exchange is divided equally between Sakiko and Umiri. The center where a single sovereign towered dissolves here into a side-by-side ensemble.
And the light returns to the eyes of Hatsune, thingified earlier. But that return is not given by Sakiko. Sakiko directs no gesture toward Hatsune. The light kindles spontaneously from Hatsune’s own side, together with the opening words of “Tenkyū no musica,” “let us go” (paraphrase)—in a cut separate from the beat of the doll-becoming, in a separate time. And the returned face of Hatsune is not an innocence bleached by oblivion. With a furrow between the brows, the eyebrows lowered, the mouth pleading, it still harbors the trace of sorrow. The very sorrow she vowed to “forget even this sorrow,” the returned construction bears without letting go. After the vow of oblivion, a self that was not forgotten re-ignites in its own voice.
Whether this re-ignition can cross the closed domain of the dyad, the work shows ambiguously. The exchange of gazes itself is still closed within the dyad of Hatsune and Sakiko. But each of the two, several times, gazes toward the audience seats. And around the climax of the finale—”let us go, toward the world… O beautiful moment” (paraphrase)—white starlight pours over the whole hall, and immediately after, a high-angle super-long shot from the ceiling illuminates, in one breath, the full view of the five players and the first-floor audience seats. In that one cut alone, the five all become white outlines, the audience too all at once raise white light, and in the depths of the curtain, white constellations rise and vanish in the purple cosmos. Everything on the screen becomes the white outline of stars. The possessing gaze moves here into an impersonal field of light, and within that field, the exchange between subjects who keep their outlines and the ubiquity that releases outline into light are placed in the same single cut. This point-sourceless starlight appears, both in the dyad’s shot of exchanged gazes and in the climax’s super-long shot, as the same material of light. The two shots share the same material of light. But whether this sharing is an escape from the dyad’s closure or a cosmic membrane that still covers the closure, here I do not decide. The continuity is material evidence; its meaning—as I take up again at the end of this chapter—I leave undetermined.
This phase, this essay, mooring to the present material evidence, records only thus—that the frame of sovereignty and possession that had constituted the kingdom was severed by the work’s own hand. Yet the returning light does not annul the earlier thingification. That beat in which, in the midst of relation, Hatsune was sealed into a single thing has already occurred. What is severed here is not the fact of the doll-becoming but the very frame of sovereignty and possession that had made the doll-becoming possible. And what opens beyond the severing of that frame—that cosmos of exchanged gazes, mediated by impersonal light—what it is, I take up again at the end of this chapter.
From here, let me reread the first half’s material with the hand of theory and reach. First, let me name what the kingdom of encompassment is the enlargement of. Chapter 2 diagnosed Sakiko’s sovereignty, in the intimate sphere of episode 12, as maternal dystopia—the figure of the omnipotent mother that rises as compensation for the failed father’s order. The maternal imagery of the mother’s keepsake doll, the conflagration of the ED, and the garden’s enclosure all moored to that intimate sphere. But when, in the episode 13 live, encompassment expands to the scale of the collective, what the screen composes is no longer maternal imagery—embracing arms, encircling light, the mother’s body standing at the center. What is there is the investiture that bestows the blessing of oblivion, and the reign of a sovereign who declares from on high, “I shall reign on.” Therefore the kingdom of encompassment of episode 13 is not an enlargement of the maternal but an enlargement of sovereign reign, in which Sakiko’s sovereignty, beyond the two of the dyad, swallows the band and the audience. What the daughter who rebuffed the father’s sovereignty erected takes, in the intimate sphere of episode 12, the face of the mother’s sovereignty, and in the kingdom of episode 13, the face of the sovereign’s reign. This essay keeps the second brake set in the introduction in force to this final juncture. To extol this kingdom as liberation from the bad father, or as the salvation of the abandoned, would have this essay itself affirmatively reproduce the closure into a single savior, be it maternal or sovereign. This essay does not extol but diagnoses—the kingdom of encompassment is an enlargement of sovereign reign, the dyad’s codependence repeated at the scale of the collective (for the gist of maternal dystopia, see the aforementioned Maternal Dystopia, “Contact” part, p. 45).
This diagnosis has a reach that does not stay within the interior of girls’-band anime. As stated in the introduction, this essay reads MyGO!!!!! / Ave Mujica as a response, by way of fiction, to the cluster of problems of contemporary Japanese society. The dyad of Hatsune and Sakiko is one precise implementation of that response—an anatomy of a contemporary temptation in which those exhausted by the economy of recognition, withdrawn from the game of appraising one another, close not into a horizontally open garden but into the maternal embrace of a single sovereign. It is not withdrawal that is the error. As this essay has repeatedly confirmed, the error lies not in withdrawal itself but in the fact that the place withdrawn to was a sealed garden. Whether, beyond the descent from the economy of recognition, one can make a garden where the self still remains, or close into a sealed garden where the self dissolves—this question is also, outside the story of Hatsune and Sakiko, the question of those actually living this society.
And this essay confirms, last, that the work itself marks the other road, the one that did not close. While the dyad closes into the sealed garden, the work has another figure walk a different road. Takamatsu Tomori. As the preceding main essay described, Tomori’s final choice was not to become god. Tomori, not god, lost still, lets go of the hand. Yet here “letting go of the hand” must not be mistaken for severing the relation. What Tomori lets go is possessing and dominating the other, not the connection with the other. Tomori possesses no one, yet abandons no one. Letting go of possession and domination, and continuing to connect, coexist in Tomori. This is the mode of re-bonding—of joining hands while lost still—that the preceding main essay saw in the Tomori-type, and moreover a road the work actually had her walk as the movement of the story. The weight of this essay’s diagnosis lies on the side of this walked road. The letter Sakiko addresses to Tomori in episode 12—your hand, which once wished “don’t let go” (paraphrase), now “lets go of no one’s hand” (paraphrase)—is corroboration in which the person’s own words trace that already-walked road, not the final ground in which the diagnosis sinks its roots.
And in the same letter, Sakiko writes her own road as something distinct from Tomori’s road—”I cannot do as Tomori does” (paraphrase), but “in my own way, I will protect my own band” (paraphrase). This passage lets the contrast of the two roads be confirmed in the person’s own words. Yet the contrast itself is not produced by Sakiko’s self-description; it has already been walked apart as the movement of the story—Tomori actually lived the road that lets go of possession yet still connects, and Hatsune and Sakiko actually lived the road of the sealed garden. The road of Tomori, who possesses no one yet lets go of no one’s hand, and the sealed-garden road of Sakiko, who holds her own band like a god as a single kingdom. Tomori’s road lies on the side of weak autonomy—of the open garden—where the self remains even leaning on others, and where, without severing connection, the other is left as the other. The other of the road the dyad closed, the work leaves open, in Tomori.
This contrast, walked apart as the movement of the story, is the final ground that separates this essay’s diagnosis from condemnation-from-without. It is not that the critic judges, from outside, that Hatsune and Sakiko closed into the sealed garden. The work itself, by actually having Tomori walk the open road and placing it beside the dyad, marks that the road the dyad chose is a closed road. The line of the diagnosis, here too, is drawn by the work.
And here, at last, the verdict held suspended since Chapter 2 can be closed. Whether Sakiko’s care is the power to hear response or the power to overwrite response—that ambiguity, the work settled by placing the open road of Tomori alongside. Sakiko’s care, placed on the side of the closed road, this essay now names as a sovereign paternalism inseparable from its own strength—a closure with the face of salvation. It is not that the ambiguity vanishes. That Sakiko’s care is strong, this essay grants to the end. But which pole that care came to fruition at, the line the work itself drew points out, at the last.
Finally, let me close this essay by placing this dyad on the two-axis map drawn by the preceding main essay. The main essay placed the Tomori-type at the positive pole of the two axes—the ethics of the lost child, and letting go—and the Mutsumi-type at the negative pole—dissolution into nothing. This essay’s Hatsune is inserted, on this map, as a single hinge. Hatsune was one who, receiving Tomori’s letting-go (the positive-pole mode), inverted it into possession and imprisonment (the negative pole)—a hinge straddling the positive-pole mode toward the negative pole. And what this essay saw last is where that hinge swings all the way to. Hatsune went to the very end of the negative pole and, at last, converged—by the road of relation—with the terminus of the Mutsumi-type: dissolution into nothing, the vanishing of the subject. One who set out from Tomori’s positive pole inverts, in the midst of relation, into possession, and at the limit where that possession peaks, loses relation itself and turns to a thing. The hinge crossed, alone, from one end of the map to the other.
Here is the far end at which this essay’s diagnosis arrives. Codependence was the diagnosis of an asymmetric relation between a subject who stands from within and a subject who stands within the relation by layering construction. That relation does not lose its object at the terminus. The reverse—the very moment the relation undoes the self Hatsune stored and seals it into a thing is the peak at which this diagnosis culminates, the point of arrival at which the structure piled up since Chapter 1 as possession, specimen, and light-reception completes itself as a single thing. And here this essay can name, in its own vocabulary, the final price of the sealed garden. When one who has withdrawn from the economy of recognition reaches neither the garden nor weak autonomy but closes into the sealed garden of a single sovereign, what is lost at the last is neither freedom nor equality. It is the very self that the withdrawal sought to protect—that thin reality, barely stored by layering construction. The sealed garden, far from being a refuge that protects the self, becomes the final place where the self is collected and sealed into a thing. This is the final price of a withdrawal that did not become a garden.
Here, one counter-question to this essay’s method itself is possible. The diagnosis of the terminus hung on the vanishing of the eye-light. Then, to carve off the phase where the light returns to those same eyes as “another phase”—is that not merely drawing a line, for the diagnosis’s convenience, on the same visual axis—a critic’s stopping that halts the work’s movement at the frame of the doll and dispatches what lies beyond? To this I answer with the work’s own material evidence. It was not this essay that demarcated that phase as another phase. The sharpest discrete break is the cut by the super-close-up of Hatsune and the editing that sets off the finale as an independent number. Onto this is layered the wholesale conversion of the background—the release of the throne’s emphasis, the rising constellations, the hue from gold to purple—and the song too shifts its modal color while keeping the tonic. The strength of the markings is not uniform. The editing break is sharp, the background’s conversion supports it, and the song’s shift is weaker. But all these markings are at a level other than the contested eye-light. Therefore the articulation here is not a stopping supplied by the critic. It is a boundary the work drew across several different levels. That this essay sends this phase on to the next question is not because it wishes to keep thingification as the final price but because the work itself demarcated another phase there.
That said, there is a question that I do not carry on from here. Mutsumi’s self-authored dissolution, Tomori’s autonomous letting-go, and the cosmos of stars seen in the latter part of this chapter, where the frame of sovereignty and possession was severed by the work’s own hand. What these share is a register of de-subjectivation and non-relation that this essay’s diagnosis, taking relation as its unit, cannot fully grasp. This phase in particular remains ambiguous in this essay’s hands. The withdrawn Sakiko, the light of Hatsune kindling of itself, the ubiquity of stars that illuminates beyond the dyad even the audience—is it an opening that truly steps over the closed domain of sovereignty and possession, out toward the mutual exchange of gazes of a garden that asks not who one is? Or is it merely one more overwriting, covering the thingification just now staged with the beauty of cosmic harmony and making it unseen? The light of Hatsune, kindling of itself bearing sorrow—is it a release from the sealing, or another painting-over by the cosmos? This essay’s dyad, taking relation as its unit, cannot adjudicate this question. This essay did not crush it but described that the work actually advanced that far. But the adjudication beyond that—and the giving of theoretical names to this de-subjectivation (reification, abjection, de-individuation, and the like)—is the work of the next essay, whose theme is how identity is let go outside of relation. Identity as construction can become an open garden or a sealed garden. And the sealed garden, at its bottom, can undo the layered, stored self, construction and all, and seal it into a single thing. The Hatsune and Sakiko of Ave Mujica lived that sealed-garden road most precisely, and Hatsune lived out—the line drawn by the work’s own hand—even the point of arrival at which the thin self stored through construction is undone by the hand of relation and becomes a thing. And the work, even after that thingification, advanced still further—to the ubiquity of stars and the cosmos of exchanged gazes. To ask what remains beyond that is not the work of this essay, which takes relation as its unit. That is the question to be opened next.
(From the final scene of Avemujica Episode 13, “Musica of the Celestial Sphere”)
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