The Tick protects. . . The City.
Where does Bakemonogatari take place? In a city, that’s in Japan, which is a country in a world that has gods and ghosts. But the city is strange. Not on its own behalf — it’s not a warped place, like Sunnydale or something. It’s stranged for the inhabitants by the events that take place within it. Or really, perhaps it is stranged by the people themselves, making their own surroundings into mystery.
Araragi used to be a vampire. But he got better. He met a girl who weighed almost nothing, but she got better. Then he met a younger girl who’s dead, but she’s okay with it now. Like living in a Decemberists song, Araragi’s life inverted one day and now he’s trapped in the weird underbelly that, it turns out, lurks below everyday life. Who knew, right?
The second story arc of Bakemonogatari has the characters wandering the city for three episodes, lost in old neighborhoods they should know and following a girl who isn’t really there. Where are they? They spend time in a park that behaves too much like a prison for comfort, then find an empty lot that used to be Mayoi’s house.
All the park fence needs is one of Foucault's panoptic eyes
Araragi is moving through other spaces. He used to be a vampire. He used to be dead. But he got better. Araragi fell onto the path worn by a great many mythic and romantic heroes: he passed into and back out of death. He still bears boons from his passage, as he heals quickly when injured. But like anyone who has truly been of two worlds, he can’t get one foot out of the world he left: the spiritual realm is, for Araragi, now overlaid on top of the mundane one. He doesn’t just see dead people, he sees gods and monsters and cursed girls drawn up into their hard shells like crabs, pinching anything that gets near them.
It’s interesting that Mayoi keeps stumbling over Araragi’s name in a story about forward motion: Araragi seems trapped in time, stuck in that moment, that single time — that one time during summer vacation. Every episode opens with a flash of his remembrance of it. Even Araragi’s identity is caught in time, his very name, looping or cutting short.
So the city changes around him. Not literally — we should probably assume most of the other students at Araragi’s high school commute home every day without ever being led astray by dead girls. But not all of them, it turns out: Hanekawa ran across Mayoi as well, while Senjogahara only ran across Araragi. Araragi’s world is now one of doubling. Every park is a ghost town, every empty warehouse is a temple.
Navigate this maze
The story takes place, to a great extent, within a sympathetic reality that reflects the internal conditions of Araragi, which is appropriate for a ghost show that isn’t about hunting down ghosts, but about dealing with the ghosts the characters create or call to themselves. And Araragi is confused. Just look at his eye:
Spin spin spin
We get this shot fairly often, even over only five episodes. If you haven’t seen it yourself, the lines all spin like a hypnotist’s wheel or a stylized version of a stylization (that is, the traditional spinning eye of confusion). The oval background shading guarantees that this abstract representation still looks like an eye. This is the mirror moment for the show: most everything is, in one way or another, from Araragi’s point of view. We hear his thoughts and narration, but no one else’s. This is our direct look at Araragi from outside. And it’s useless motion, motion turning back on itself.
The show, then, is an internal one. The landscape represents Araragi’s psyche more than it does a city. This isn’t exactly new for anime. A lot of shows use the scenery to reflect the characters’ internal lives. Think of any GAINAX show, with its street lights and road signs. Bakemonogatari even engages in a little of that:
A path splitting: Araragi makes a decision
Mayoi went where Araragi isn't allowed
At first glance, then, the show looks like a kind but confused teenager, rescued from his supernatural problem, helping others. But that’s not really what this is about. Araragi isn’t human yet, not entirely. He wants to get back to that world, but all the signs point to him being stuck. Not only little hints like his name, but bigger ones: why did his school performance wilt? It was in the transition between middle and high school. That time also marks his transition from human to vampire and (ostensibly) back again. His life isn’t going forward. It’s stalled. That’s how he got caught by the snail. All the other figures are prey to the confused geography until they work out who they are and what they want: Senjogahara is now able to move through a normal world. Before, she was falling through a weightless abyss.
weightlessness implies drifting, or motion without purpose
Mayoi also is free now: still dead, granted, but she can control her own motion. She chose to pass by Araragi’s house at the end of episode five. She’s no longer trapped in a labyrinth of her own memories and regrets.
Araragi, on the other hand, he’s stuck. He’s going to keep running into these things himself until he makes his way back to the normal world just as Senjogahara and Mayoi have. Until then, he’s going to be walking through a land more like a confused vision quest than a city.
Where are we?
Maybe the most striking image in the series so far, this map is not only accusing (the locations on the right, apart from the obvious, are also weighted to “guilty”), but confusing: the alphabetic labels don’t refer to anything; the map is labeled with numbers, not letters. So Araragi needs to map his feelings, his sense of guilt or not-guilt, because right now the space he’s in isn’t mapped at all. He’s wandering in a wilderness.
Wow, good work!
Yes! I went as far as to say that the show is about characters finding the meaning behind their monstrous affliction, to perhaps take away the meaning that makes it consequential, to have less weight in their lives. []
From a response to a comment to the post, I exemplified my point:
The meaning that has meaning, is the one that has consequence, to future health/behavior. Looking at Humbert’s answers to his question, the first 2 answers are not consequential beyond being premises to the final answer, which is the most meaningful: “I am not a monster.” This can also be simplified as “I am not a bad person,” which we can apply to the case of Senjougahara.
The unmeaning, or presence of no meaning, is not so much found, but distinguished. Sonjougahara may distinguish that her lightness does not mean she’s a bad person, and she doesn’t have to attack people with stationery.
—
However, I don’t necessarily agree with the surface|deeper dichotomy on what the show is about. What the show seems to be at first glance, needn’t be the lower rung in the value hierarchy of interpretation/appreciation. It is an incomplete or limited reading to stop here, but to take only the latter we could say just the same thing. I’ve written an unpublished post on the dialogue of this show (and Macross Frontier), where I’ve identified exchanges that ennoble — for lack of a better term, the first glance interpretation of the subject. Here is the exchange that I noted, from episode three:
The quote doesn’t do a good job of illustrating the confusion, but the kindness is there; and more importantly, the commentary on adolescence: where kids cannot avoid change in their world and in themselves. The changes in their world, as in Senjougahara’s example are almost always close to home, metaphorical while Araragi’s is literal (his conflict with his siblings leading to his self-image of being “small” for a human being).
—
What is at first glance that is easy to dismiss/relegate as the superficial reading may be a separate and equally multi-dermal venture after all. As is the case with the love story|harem tropes, it may be that the first girl (reading|interpretation) wins. Personally there isn’t a meaningful hierarchy of superficial or ‘deep’ interpretation, only a personally preferred system where enjoyment and appreciation is directly proportional to the meaning created with the text|subject through participation (reading).
Ugh.
…was supposed to link to: http://ghostlightning.wordpress.com/2009/07/14/monsterstories/
I didn’t mean to privilege one reading over another — what I wanted to say is that Araragi can help as many people as he likes, he can help everyone in the world, and it won’t do him any good until he focuses on himself. Thanks for clearing up the difference there! Obviously the show is also about Araragi helping a string of other people, or else it wouldn’t have been there for me to notice in the first place. ^_^
I’ve seen some people complain about how the dialogue is “just abuse,” that Senjogahara wins every exchange. Setting aside, for now, that she doesn’t, I think the tendency in the dialogue for Araragi to be on the defensive might also help illustrate how trapped he is. He can’t respond to what amounts to normal conversation — odd, but normal — because he’s so trapped in his head and the vast emptiness he’s opened up that he can’t claw his way out of it. It’s significant his one caveat to Senjogahara is that she always be truthful: he’s having enough trouble orienting himself without someone skewing his results for him.
Finish that post!
Yes, good to note the trapped situation of Araragi that the defensive posture he takes in conversations is a symptom of.
Oh the post is finished and scheduled to publish as part of analysis in conjunction w/ Macross Frontier ep 03 next week lol.
An interesting way to look at it indeed. Then again, it could also mean that he must find his solution by focusing on others and not just himself. What if his only way out, indeed, is to find himself through others, which is what the mini-story arcs are all about? There may be no way for him to redeem himself if all he does is look at himself – Senjougahara points this out in saying that Araragi would be ready to help anyone. Maybe this is because he subconsciously knows that if he focuses on himself, he might be doomed to really stall in life?
Even his younger sister’s argument about him not growing up relies on his insistence to always be out on Mother’s Day. In other words, in order for him to move on, he must break out of this confusing cycle he has been in, one that keeps revolving ever since he became a vampire. The one good point about his character would be the willingness to help anyone regardless of who they are, human or ghost, and that in turn may help him (because he might know he sucks too much; we have seen so many examples of him not even denying his own worthlessness) to get out of this particular funk.
It could very well be that too. That’s the mark of a great piece, that it supports multiple interpretations. I have to wonder, now that you’ve mentioned it, if there’s a way to reconcile both readings, in fact. Araragi isn’t exactly self-centered, not in the same way as, say, Shinji Akari. Of course, he does set himself up for a lot of things because he’s not paying attention (or paying attention to the wrong things). Interesting.
I was going to put forth a different reading, but the way I’ve been thinking of Araragi’s situation is pretty much in line with this, on second thought. I don’t think he needs help any more than anyone else — but in Bakemonogatari, everyone needs help. Appropriate, as they’re all teenagers, or close enough to it, and teenagers basically live in a world as confused as the one presented here (the teenagers I’ve known have, anyway). And on top of that, it’s an almost absurdly vast world; the backgrounds of the first two screencaps illustrate that with their extreme examples of industrial and residential areas, respectively.
But it is possible, I think, that Araragi needs to help himself. It’s also possible that, after having been helped, he has a thing for helping others at his expense. Is that necessarily a bad thing? Maybe, if it’s causing him to be entrapped by directionally-confused snail-ghosts. It’s possible that what he lacks is balance, and, appropriately, the setting isn’t especially balanced; its most simple elements are quite exaggerated.
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