At least she has clothes in this one...
As you’re probably already aware, I’m blogging my way through Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism. I already had an idea for an actual anime post, and I’ve only read the introduction. Even though this was inspired by Frye, I probably won’t reference him too much. Really, this is just my obligatory Kannagi post. Everyone’s doing one, and who am I to argue with the crowd? Well, I do it all the time, but never mind that now.
I’m not the best at keeping up with the otaku-rhombus, but I’m getting the impression that a lot of people are upset with Kannagi‘s ending. I can say on a personal level that episode twelve irritated me somewhat, but thirteen seemed a natural progression, bringing the suddenly disparate elements back together. Could it have been better? Sure, but so could the Mona Lisa. And here’s the part that concerns Northrop Frye: I’m not here to talk about whether or not it was good. That doesn’t matter. I enjoyed it well enough to want to post about it, and since criticism is fun, I’m going to enjoy this no matter how much you wanted the show to end with teh pr0n.
It’s hard to find a lot of contemporary stuff to compare Shinto gods with. If you know anything about Celtic animism, they’re pretty similar, at least in the idea that everything has a soul, including trees, wells, and maybe even rocks. I’m sure there are loads of differences as well, but I’m not going to do much with that comparison, so we’ll just let it slide for now. What did strike me, today, is the similarities between the Shinto gods and the ancient Greek Titans. The Greek gods are, well, what a westerner expects gods to be: mighty, demanding, and just a little inhuman. But in-between these gods and the humans, who were still human for all their heroic traits, lie the Titans. The Titans were really a kind of first-god-race, but most of the time they’re viewed as half-human, half-god (never mind that Greek mythology had plenty of characters who could claim that pedigree literally). The Titans were not human, not at all, but they were weaker than the Olympians and, from what I remember, often tied to a place. Prometheus was chained in the Caucasus until Herakles freed him; Atlas was believed to stand, holding up the heavens, at the world’s western edge, or, later, somewhere around the Atlas Mountains. I mention this because Shinto gods are typically tied to places, like sacred trees or caves, maybe a waterfall or river. [One must wonder if the civilization that the Greeks swept in and conquered / absorbed were animist, with beliefs like the Celts or the Shinto religion, as subordinated beings in conglomerated myths are often the remnants of the gods of the older, defeated religion -- hence all the saints in Christian mythology derived from gods and goddesses, such as Saint Bridget. Not that this speculation is helpful to the essay at hand.]
The Titans acted almost as intermediaries between the humans and the gods. We all know the story of Prometheus stealing fire from the Sun, but he also tricked the gods into choosing the useless, non-nutritive parts of sacrifices so the humans could keep the food and burn the bones and fat in honor of the gods, thus worshipping them in the way Zeus selected but staying alive longer. So far as I know the Shinto gods aren’t intermediaries in the same way, but I think we could look at them as go-betweens for the earth itself and the humans who live on it. This is important because I wonder if some people are misinterpreting Nagi’s status. She is a god, this hypothetical reasoning could go, so why all these strange problems — the inability to properly destroy impurities, the memory loss, the weakness in power. But unlike a Greek god, who just has power, the Shinto gods are just sort-of around, almost like a higher grouping of priests (there were cults to Prometheus, even though he couldn’t god-magic anything). Nagi’s home has been effectively destroyed. In mythic thinking, like in dream-logic, things often have more than one identity at the same time; that is, Nagi was both the goddess of the countryside and the tree in which the god was housed — there was no difference between the two. Destroying the tree was akin to destroying the goddess, except she got a loophole: Jin’s recreation of her using her body. Technically she’s still made of wood, as they discuss early on — particularly when Zange’s father talks to her midway through the series.
The idea of a god needing worship has been familiar to me ever since I read Sir Terry Pratchett’s Small Gods. This show deals with much the same thing.
If this is all true, the more astute of you might be wondering, why the shift into screwball comedy? I would posit to you that the show’s genre is a fully-blended admixture of contemporary fantasy and said comedy. Even its much-contested meta-humor helps support the theme; what else would a show about a goddess dealing with mortals have, but humor about the nature of the humor inherent in the relationship between them? The blending means it’s something different than one borrowing elements of the other. The portions of the show concerning Nagi’s status as a goddess, serious and angsty as they end up being, are absolutely necessary. Contemporary fantasies are often concerned with a re-imagining of the crisis of faith (I’m thinking particularly of Charles de Lint’s Forests of the Heart.) Without constructing the world in which Jin, who has lived his life pursuing this goddess, is suddenly, through the comedy, confronted with how mundane this magical presence can be, the contemporary fantasy’s drama can’t function. And without the underlying drama the humor can’t work, either, as it relies on Nagi secretly being on a different level from the others. She is comprised of certain elements, but they are synthesized by her status as a god, or mystical being of some sort, weak but not mortal-weak. She is a bit of a Cloud Cuckoo Lander, but only through virtue of her being not human. Once or twice she, like God in the old, sadly-cancelled NBC series God, the Devil, and Bob, appreciates the things these humans have come up with (God really appreciated Pop-Tarts and twist-off beer bottle caps, if you’re curious).
The two parts do function together. Without the drama, the comedy wouldn’t be as funny. Without the comedy, the drama wouldn’t be as touching, or as humanized. Note that no episode wholly abandons one aspect. I know. I felt like episode twelve had abandoned the comedy as well, but that’s merely because all the angst is concentrated in the ending. Try to remember the bits with Jin falling out of the bathroom trying to catch a butterfly. The karaoke episode is already near-infamous for its weapons-grade comedy, but even then the undercurrent of Zange’s possession of a human being still colors everything.
Short version: despite what it feels like, Kannagi never actually veers too wildly from its purpose.
Pontifus
kaiserpingvin
cuchlann
Shance
TheKittymeister
Pontifus
/ 3 January 2009Reading this made me realize (in a roundabout way, I guess) that I’m coming to terms with Jin’s seemingly single-minded, maybe-romantic-maybe-not devotion to Nagi in that he’s her most devout worshiper (there’s the old woman in the last two episodes, I guess…but I’m going to do a post that deals with her). I suppose, given the possibility of future seasons, Kannagi could become an examination of love with considerable breadth; where does one draw the line between romantic love and love for a deity? To what degree do they feel the same? And what of Christian-bedecked Zange, who demands affection? Is any of this really relevant to your post? I think not!
It’s not the drama that bothered me about the end. Really, I think I just wanted a “Nagi goes back to Goddess-land, and everyone learns something” end. But this post also makes me wonder, in the context of Shintoism, if Nagi has anywhere to go back to. If “destroying the tree was akin to destroying the goddess,” is her human (or human-like) body her new “tree?” Is she susceptible to death, and if so, what then? In any case, I’m inclined to think now that she may just be stuck as she is.
lelangir
/ 3 January 2009I like your last thought, the notion of bodily freedom. Here’s this…
Nagi explicitly says that the old woman who died was her oldest worshipper. So her source of faith was cut off, so she should have technically died. It’s also interesting, how you see her next to a river in 13. Isn’t there a Greek river, the river Styx or something, that passed people into the other life? But rivers probably have after-life significance in other cultures as well, it needn’t be specifically a Greek reference. Though that’s kind of farfetched but metaphorically lines up excellently. She was also wearing black…? Also, they showed the two children (boy and girl) on a bike, and I’d be damned if that were purely accidental too.
I also just thought about the hospitality metaphor a while ago. One episode Jin was saying “my house isn’t good enough for you?” So you could compare Jin as turning his house into a sort of portable shrine, since Nagi is bodiless. She has nowhere to go, her tree being chopped down, and she has no memory since the records were destroyed, she is literally a nameless goddess now.
Nagi’s rite of passage might be somewhat comparable to Takemoto’s. The point isn’t to “find yourself”, which is an outdated take on identity, but to take on the journey. Jin says her memory/past doesn’t matter, though he does she they’ll hunt. I didn’t get that – it seemed like a contradiction.
I would like to say that there are themes of “what is human?” in this, but really, that’s only acutely observable in the last episode. If there is a 2nd season, it’ll focus more on Zange, and Christianity I bet (and hope, sorta).
Cuchlann
/ 3 January 2009@Pontifus: I think what you wanted to say was, what of Christian-bedecked Zange, whose behavior goes so far as to convince men she’s a prostititute? *cough*
@lelangir: There’s a Japanese version of the river Styx, actually, so it’s even more likely. Good call, by the way; there must be some reason they wander around on in a field for so long — and I think a blank field was a part of the Greek underworld, as well. Though I don’t know if there’s a Japanese analog for that one. I doubt, if we get a second season, that it will focus much more on Christianity — indirectly, of course, like my comment to Pontifus above, but like a lot of anime comedy, I don’t think it’s going to bear up and take on any issue directly. And I’m okay with that.
I did love Zange’s frustrated line, later on, that a Christian priest shouldn’t go around talking about Shinto gods like that. Funny. :)
lelangir
/ 3 January 2009in other news…
lelangir
/ 3 January 2009hmmm, I wonder if pontifus would let me blog through – in a similar manner to Cuchlann’s criticism posts – a Gramsci reader? That would be interesting.
Cuchlann
/ 3 January 2009Well, you know — as I could never find Pontifus on AIM, I just did it. So you could just go ahead as well. :)
Pontifus
/ 4 January 2009Yeah, have at it. When it comes to things like that, you don’t really have to ask. Philosophers and theorists are our currency.
@Cuchlann
I told you I tend to forget AIM exists.
Cuchlann
/ 4 January 2009@Pontifus: Grr.
lelangir
/ 4 January 2009ack, it’s Buddhist.
lelangir
/ 4 January 2009also, remember in Spirited Away when Chihiro has to cross the river to get to the spirit world?
Cuchlann
/ 4 January 2009Well, there’s this old Japanese proverb, that most people “are born Shinto, and die Buddhist.” They’re not by any means interchangeable, but a lot of people believe both, in some ways. Buddhism originally had a lot of gods in it, and it provides for the worship of them — it simply has a person in it who teaches how to live. It’s pretty similar to how (most forms of) Christianity worship God but follow the teachings of Jesus. So I am okay with still putting importance on the river, both because it’s still in Japanese myth (just not Shinto), and because, in general, a river does tend to have that same symbolic significance.
ghostlightning
/ 5 January 2009Hai Guise. I’m thoroughly atheist that is also a shameless Roman Catholiphile. The animistic shinto business has similarity with the tradition of sainthood in Catholicism. We have ‘patron saints’ who not only govern ‘issues’ (St. Peregrine for Cancer if I’m not mistaken, St. Joseph of Cupertino for human flight), but also govern locales.
I lived for 19 years in a parish watched over by St. Joseph Emiliani (but was usurped by a larger parish who swallowed the area in the name of St. James the Great) not knowing who in God’s name this Joseph was, nor how this particular James was greater than the other guy.
Nonetheless, they fulfill Nagi’s function of watching over the community. We also pray to God ‘through’ the saint’s mediation. In my university, all our prayers end this way:
Leader: “St. Jean-Baptiste de La Salle”
Us: “Pray for us”
Leader: “Live Jesus in our hearts”
Us: “Forever”
As if we couldn’t pray for ourselves to God directly indeed. We also invoked dear old Jean to “live Jesus in our hearts forever” – something apparently we cannot do without saintly intervention.
The primary difference I think, is the lack of ‘integration’ with nature. St. Jerome or St. James weren’t the rocks and trees and the people. They were separate, happily working as couriers and representatives of human prayers to the almighty.
schneider
/ 5 January 2009Great post. I’m intrigued about the comment on Small Gods–I should check it out some time. :)
I felt ambivalent towards Kannagi’s ending. It was fine and did the job, but the golden comedy eps (karaoke, Nagi-in-a-closet, maid cafe) spoiled me too much. But I like the parallels made between Shintoism, Celtic animism, and even Greek mythology. My curiosity is piqued enough to read up more about those Celtic stuff.
And there’s also this symbolism on Zange and Christianity, and how she’s totally upsetting Nagi (and Shintoism) in a lot of parts (i.e. followers/fans). Hmmmm…