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After Nasu: The consumption of myth as data

   Published Date: October 22, 2023  1 Comment on After Nasu: The consumption of myth as data

Japanese Urban Fantasy and the Social Terrain of the Early Digital Age, Part 2

This post is the second of two halves of a book-length post titled Japanese Urban Fantasy and the Social Terrain of the Early Digital Age. The first half can be accessed here.

This post will contain some of the same spoilers for Kinoko Nasu’s major works (Mahou Tsukai no Yoru, Kara no Kyoukai, Tsukihime (the original), and Fate/stay night) that were present in the first half. The visual novels Rewrite and Higurashi are also spoiled in detail. The Zaregoto and Monogatari novel series are also mentioned fairly extensively. Other minor spoilers are littered throughout, but nothing that requires a warning.

Table of contents

The most intuitive domain for art is culture. Culture in turn is a social activity that we perceive in the form of ideas and thoughts. Despite its intangibility, the existence of culture is ubiquitous and undeniable; human beings are cultural animals. As culture envelops us, saturates us, and wraps us in its unrelenting embrace, it can become difficult to sense anything beyond it. Its existence in time and space becomes so natural as to be inescapable. But there is an absolute beginning to art which exists outside of the haze of culture. There are material object(s) which, through the beholding of their representation, transform into cultural artefacts. The appearance of these representations in any given moment depends upon a mosaic of dialectical relationships that span material reality. The problem is how to respond to the seeming reality of these highly contingent representations: What tools are available to verify ideas and thoughts? On this, Walter Benjamin said:

It is characteristic of philosophical writing that it must continually confront the question of representation. In its finished form philosophy will, it is true, assume the quality of doctrine, but it does not lie within the power of thought to confer such a form. Philosophical doctrine is based on historical codification.

And G.W.F. Hegel said:

Philosophy, as the thought of the world, does not appear until reality has completed its formative process, and made itself ready. History thus corroborates the teaching of the conception that only in the maturity of reality does the ideal appear as counterpart to the real, apprehends the real world in its substance, and shapes it into an intellectual kingdom. … The owl of Minerva takes its flight only when the shades of night are gathering.

This point is not as mystical as it sounds. Of course, we would not need historical codification if we truly understood reality with such perfection that we could predict every future outcome from cosmological first movers—as per Laplace’s demon. But ironically, the physical viability of this picture has been disputed by recent discoveries regarding quantum indeterminacy. And more to the point, with the kinds of systems we actually interact with and understand, historical codification is necessary. A systematic understanding of their natures can provide us with certain possibilities, but only the full unfolding of time can reveal the full complexity of their inner tensions: Before one flips a coin, its outcome is uncertain. But after the coin is flipped, we can confirm that the multitude of subtle physical factors at play would inevitably lead to that precise outcome at that exact moment.

In the first half of this post, we set out to write a cultural history of Kinoko Nasu’s career up until the end of the year 2004. That history implicitly anticipated a certain state of affairs where the genre content within Fate/stay night eluded reproduction. (Note: I am specifying Fate/stay night to mean the abstract notion of a work that best embodied the totality of Nasu’s early career.) To that end, we spent a long time—perhaps too long—sketching out the contours of the defining denki works of Kinoko Nasu. From the history presented up until that point, we came to see exactly how a magazine called Faust could declare that Nasu’s denki represented a new (shin) idea of denki. In their present, Faust’s doctrine, built on the content of Nasu, seemed codified by the progress of history.

But from the perspective of the never-ending present, history always appears in its completed totality: Reality is all too ready, mature, and eager to please. Walter Benjamin said:

The true picture of the past whizzes by. Only as a picture, which flashes its final farewell in the moment of its recognizability, is the past to be held fast. … For it is an irretrievable picture of the past, which threatens to disappear with every present, which does not recognize itself as meant in it. … To articulate what is past does not mean to recognize “how it really was.” It means to take control of a memory, as it flashes in a moment of danger. … History is the subject of a structure whose site is not homogeneous, empty time, but time filled by the presence of the now.

So then, what is the use of thoughts if they swing wildly back and forth in the endless gusts of history? In order to make use of them, we must strip them of their illusions of eternity. We must meet Benjamin’s demand that we:

Cannot do without the notion of a present which is not a transition, but in which time stands still and has come to a stop. For this notion defines the present in which he himself is writing history. … Thinking involves not only the flow of thoughts, but their arrest as well. Where thinking suddenly stops in a configuration pregnant with tensions, it gives that configuration a shock, by which it crystallizes into a monad. … As a result of this method the lifework is preserved in this work and at the same time cancelled; in the lifework, the era; and in the era, the entire course of history. The nourishing fruit of the historically understood contains time as a precious but tasteless seed.

The tensions that give truth to a concept in one present might be reconfigured by a subsequent present into a shape that reveals its falsehood. The meaning of the concept of shindenki can be found in Faust and how they saw the culmination of the past in the rising popularity of Kinoko Nasu at that moment. They believed that a denki configured around the calcified reality of contemporary capitalist society could have as much impact as the earlier era of denki, which was itself configured around the unstable tensions of the post-war democratic settlement. But inasmuch as this representation of the state of affairs had truth, it did not have eternal truth. New tensions produced a new context for the consumption and representation of art beyond what the concept of shindenki alone could account for in its particular originating past.

With our understanding of Nasu as established thus far, we can begin to tackle his place in this context. In our investigation of shindenki, we saw how various artistic lineages and influences that played out in Nasu’s work gave the genre an elusive shape. All of his works had a unified connection to the general mood of the stagnant capitalism of the 1990s. But in one breath Faust declared Nasu to be leading the shindenki movement as they understood it, and in another promoted the novel in his canon—Kara no Kyoukai—that was most distant from their stated definition of a “[fusion of] the denki movement of the 1980s with the anime, manga, and video games of the 1990s.” And while Faust saw the influence of otaku culture as paramount, Nasu himself was far more interested in his attempts to combine denki fiction with the style of his favourite shinhonkaku mystery novelists. In a world where shindenki was all of these things in varying arrangements, it could only define itself as not being particular to any of these things. And lacking any anchor to these specific features, the genre’s definition became embodied by the nearest example at hand. The only practical guidance available to anyone who wanted to carry the mantle of Faust’s concept of shindenki was to write ‘like Nasu’—whatever they took that to mean based on the sum total of his work.

This is challenging to comprehend when our only reference is Nasu’s work on its own terms. As Seymour Martin Lipset said, “a person who knows only one country knows no countries:” The same is true of art. As we step past the point of understanding what Faust meant by the term shindenki, we lack the comparative tools to reach a higher resolution image of Nasu’s full place in the world. Our estimation of the genre apart from the works of Nasu is vague. To reach this, the first task before us is a thorough comparison of the shindenki of Nasu with other so-called shindenki stories from a similar era.

There are many valid alternatives available for this project: The popular novel series Shakugan no Shana was a shindenki series that was particularly contemporaneous with Nasu, having started its own publication in 2002. The visual novel Dies irae has been repeatedly compared to Fate/stay night in style and content. A Certain Magical Index was the defining urban fantasy series of its time. And there are numerous denki visual novels that show a clear lineage from the success of Type-moon such as 11eyes and Soushuu Senshinkan Gakuen. Any one of these options would have offered an interesting comparison to some specific aspect of Nasu’s storytelling. But I suspect with each of them, their chief characteristics would have been too subsumed by Nasu’s own work to make for comparisons that reveal as much as we would wish for. Despite their own charms, they are each remembered as something done in the style of a Nasu work, instead of something born distinct from him.

This is natural. One should expect that shindenki fiction would walk in the shadow of Nasu as its leading author. But this is exactly why I chose to focus a considerable portion of this post on discussing a shindenki work that escapes that feeling so seamlessly: A work that thoroughly responds to the literary place of Nasu’s works—particularly Fate/stay night—while inconspicuously being passed over as something unrelated to Nasu. I believe this offers two concrete advantages: Examining a distinct vision of shindenki that nonetheless adheres to the foundational definitions we have painted thus far will allow us to separate the genre and its content from the results of imitating Nasu. This separation will allow us to better understand each in their own context. And secondly, understanding the failure of shindenki to construct a lasting genre requires understanding exactly the kinds of shindenki works that are not recognised as such, despite being internally coherent in other senses.

Chapter 5 – Rewrite, first section: An answer in theory

The boundaries of a post-Nasu world

Rewrite is a 2011 visual novel developed by Key. Given that Kinoko Nasu’s own introduction to the world of dating sims was so shaped by Key’s games, there is a kind of poetic validity to exploring one of their games in detail here. But in most other respects, Key is not a name conventionally associated with Type-moon. Their brands could not be more distinct. Key are most famous for their fairly light and approachable style of ‘crying game’ dating sims such as Kanon, AIR, and most prominently Clannad. Even those who are not familiar with their games are likely to at least be familiar with the critically acclaimed anime adaptation of Clannad produced by Kyoto Animation—which has come to be synonymous with the name Key in its own right.

Throughout the production of these three games, which are often remembered as a sort of spiritual trilogy, their direction increasingly came to be driven by co-founder, music composer, and scenario writer Jun Maeda. Starting out as just one of several scenario writers in Kanon, Maeda was given the effective role of head scenario writer—that is, chief creative control over the common route, true route, and other major structural decisions—by the time of Clannad and later titles such as Little Busters!.However, after Little Busters!, Maeda scaled back his role to focus more on his music. This represented an important juncture for Key: Their brand was intimately tied up in a style that had come to be seen as synonymous with Maeda. To be sure, they still had many of the same staff that had built that brand in the first place, and so could continue to function more or less as normal. But it was still unclear whether the company should continue to produce ‘Maeda-style’ games without his distinct touch or whether they should branch out in a new direction.

With the benefit of hindsight, we can see that the eventual strategy they settled on relied on a mix of both: Working with a wide range of scenario writers, both in-house and freelance, their games over the past decade have delivered a varied set of experiences. Some, such as Summer Pockets, harken back to their established brand. And others, such as LOOPERS and Tsui no Stella, set out to broaden the image of Key. However, before any of these titles, the very first game that Key developed after Little Busters! was Rewrite in 2011.

Rewrite’s concept started out as a thoroughly in-house affair that lacked any awareness of the transformative context that would later surround it. Itaru Hinoue, an illustrator and founding member of Key, initially drafted the setting as the basis for some concept illustrations that she drew after the release of Clannad in 2004. While she was interested in turning the concept into a full visual novel from the outset, it took several years before the project gained the interest and momentum necessary to get off the ground. Once it did, Yuuto Tonokawa, who had been heavily involved in writing Little Busters! alongside Maeda, was given the responsibility for writing much of the scenario. However, the role of head scenario writer was outsourced to Romeo Tanaka. Tanaka is a long-standing presence in the dating sim scene, being most famous for titles such as Daughter Maker, CROSS†CHANNEL, and Saihate no Ima at that time. The vast majority of Rewrite’s story can be attributed to these two writers working in combination—within the guidance of the general concept provided by Hinoue. But to round out the game further, Ryuukishi07 (Higurashi: When They Cry and Umineko: When They Cry) was brought in to write an extra route. (We will be ignoring his route; I hate it.)

Perhaps this history is mildly interesting in a trivial sense, but its relevance to Kinoko Nasu is less clear from how we have described it so far. On this point, Rewrite’s role in this post starts with the fact that itis a shindenki narrative. In fact, many of its features cannot be understood outside of its historical situation of existing in the climate following Fate/stay night. And yet, it is also in equal parts a dating sim that is conscious of Key’s style and lineage, and also a story thoroughly enthused with the particularity of being written by Romeo Tanaka, who does not fit into any of these boxes. The result is a shindenki work that is unique and sophisticated enough to help us answer our outstanding questions rather well.

Like Kinoko Nasu’s defining works, Rewrite is an urban fantasy dating sim set in a city that combines mundane contemporary life with a secret undercurrent of supernatural reality. The setting of the story is the highly eco-conscious city of Kazamatsuri. Kazamatsuri is a densely populated metropolis that is nonetheless infused with echoes of nature: Greenery is plentiful, and the city is right beside a monstrously huge, untamed forest. Characters emphasise these unique characteristics constantly, and this fixation on nature is shown to manifest in the politics of the setting in the form of strict environmental regulation and a conscious attempt at sustainable living practices.

It is difficult to imagine a clearer metaphor for the demarcation between the centre and the periphery than the geography of Kazamatsuri. This world has two dominant zones: the city, and the natural landscapes beyond the city. And Kazamatsuri, as a modern and environmentally friendly city, attempts to combine them in order to coexist in perpetuity. As will become apparent as we explore the narrative further, the consequences and shortcomings of this blending take on considerable importance in Rewrite. As the protagonist Kotarou Tennouji muses to himself:

The vast forest: Despite being close to a residential area, it contains very little wildlife around its outer edges. Most of the animals are wary of human activity and stay deeper in the forest. As a result, it functions as a fantastic playground for the local children. … I used to play in this forest a lot. But at some point, I stopped. I suddenly came to a realisation. There weren’t really animals or insects around. It made the forest feel empty and hollow.

Kotarou’s initial interactions with the forest were driven by a sense of adventure as he crossed over a boundary from the city into the unknown world of the periphery. However, he soon noticed that this boundary was an illusion. Just as the city took on aspects of the forest in its eco-friendly aesthetics, the forest had taken on features of human civilisation. The forest that Kotarou encountered was thoroughly domesticated and safe; its seeming mystery was as artificial as the greenery within the city.

Suitably, these ironies and juxtapositions continue even once the plot opens up to reveal a world extraordinary enough to justify Kotarou’s craving for adventure. To understand this better, we should begin with a brief summary of the plot. The central cast of Rewrite—that is, Kotarou and the five heroines—are all members of the Kazamatsuri Academy Occult Club. In accordance with their name, the group serves as a vehicle for repeated expeditions around the city looking for occult phenomena during the common route. A central format repeated throughout this route is that Kotarou and the rest of the club will go on an adventure to investigate a rumour that promises a supernatural outcome. Throughout the adventure, the mundane antics of the friend group takes centre stage, and the alleged mystery is revealed to be the result of some everyday occurrence.

The exceptions to this are insular to Kotarou’s own life. Despite the failure of the Occult Club to locate anything exceptional, Kotarou is hiding concrete proof of the supernatural. He has the seemingly magical power to ‘rewrite’ his own bodily functions. He is haunted by a ‘ghost’ that invades his bedroom at night. He repeatedly wanders into a seeming parallel universe occupied by dangerous creatures and mysterious cloaked men. And Kotarou is secretly living with two sentient fairy-like creatures named Gil and Pani. Through these plot elements, Kotarou is given the quiet assurance of an extraordinary world despite the Occult Club’s total failure to find such proof when working as a group. The fundamental structure of the common route is built on the contrast between Kotarou’s lone encounters with the supernatural and the group activities that are focused on a light-hearted, mundane daily life.

Of course, once the story moves beyond the common route, this structure undergoes considerable change. The division between the common route and the fantastical world that follows is centred around the decisive night of November 13th. For some context, this event unfolds a few days after the Occult Club’s final outing together, which revealed that the rumour of a ‘rainbow river’ caused by pollution was broadly true. However, an amateur student-journalist named Akira Inoue went missing in the forest during her own attempt to follow up on their findings. So, the Occult Club gathers on November 13th to traverse the forest and rescue Inoue. Needless to say, being the climax of the initial portion of the story, things do not go according to plan. Over the course of the night, Kotarou discovers that not only were the five other members of the Occult Club already aware of the world of the supernatural, but they were intimately involved with various factions and social organisations in that world. With this reality out in the open, the Occult Club collapses, and Kotarou must contend with the supernatural periphery via the perspective of the player’s chosen heroine.

Over the course of this post, we will consider the content of both the common route and subsequent routes in greater detail. But for now, we should focus on the metaphorical boundaries between the two: Rewrite borrows from the grammar of denki fiction insomuch as it structures the search for meaning in contemporary life in terms of geographical boundaries. Let us return to an evergreen quote from Kazuhiko Komatsu and Masatoshi Naitou that we considered earlier:

To summarise, denki exists to depict the “strangeness” in society. “Strangeness” refers to things that are rare, inexplicable, supernatural, or abnormal. To go further, denki explores the strangeness on the exterior or periphery of the everyday world. In highly industrialised, regulated societies, the homogenisation of experience does not leave much cause to encounter strangeness in everyday life. Such a society lacks imagination. Therefore, people reach for opportunities to enliven their everyday life and imagination through this strangeness.

In any conventional adventure story, the protagonist will traverse some kind of boundary between the known and the unknown. Fans of Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces may recall his labelling of such a convention as ‘The Crossing of the First Threshold’, saying “the regions of the unknown (desert, jungle, deep sea, alien land, etc.) are free fields for the projection of unconscious content. Incestuous libido and patricidal destrudo are thence reflected back against the individual and his society in forms suggesting threats of violence and fancied dangerous delight—not only as ogres but also as sirens of mysteriously seductive, nostalgic beauty.” That is, the danger of adventure entices the protagonist as it offers psychological and philosophical insights via the secret knowledge of the unknown. Campbell’s incarnation is a general embodiment of the spirit of adventure and describes how all manner of stories structure themselves around a journey into the unknown. What is particular to denki fiction is not the unknown world that the hero must traverse, but the particular way it uses a realistically mundane daily life as the point of juxtaposition.

On its surface, Rewrite seems to present the division between the city and the forest as a very clear embodiment of one such threshold. However, as was hinted at earlier, that boundary reveals itself as fraudulent. Throughout the common route of Rewrite, Kotarou repeatedly fails to uncover the promised world of the unknown within the forest. Of course, in the moment of reading, these failures only seem to anticipate the climactic adventure that should follow the moment of discovery. That is, these failures come across as build-up. And the events of November 13th appear as the prophesised threshold. After many failed expeditions, Kotarou finally encounters the supernatural truth of the world within the forest. However, Rewrite is hiding a devious inversion within this structure.

A personal journey into the unknown

There is certainly a kind of adventure in what follows from the common route after November 13th. Regardless of which heroine the player decides to pursue, the story after November 13th opens up with a healthy dose of the fantasy lore of this universe. Through learning of this lore, the events of November 13th take on associations that do not match with our initial impressions. Whether through our experience with stories in the Campbell model, or through more general logical motifs, the audience came to share Kotarou’s hopes and expectations that the forest contains the mysteries of the periphery that would explain Kotarou’s encounters with the supernatural. And certainly, it is while he is in the forest on November 13th that Kotarou finally confronts the supernatural periphery head-on. However, these mysteries that reside in the forest are revealed to be the work of human factions such as Guardian, Gaia, and the Druids. These factions are all organised and operated out of Kazamatsuri. The forest does contain a major plot character known as the Key, who is one crucial catalyst of the action. However, it is otherwise mostly just a convenient place for the human actors within the city to hide their actions. Just as, when discussing its biological nature, we said that “the forest that Kotarou encountered was thoroughly domesticated and safe; its seeming mystery was as artificial as the greenery within the city,” the forest as a supernatural entity is domesticated and populated by humanity. This apparent threshold for adventure is a mirror which reveals the human agents that drive the story of Rewrite.

This revelation characterises Rewrite’s entire relationship to the motifs of denki fiction. At first blush, it seems to use the common route to characterise a mundane and light-hearted human society in order to contrast with the superhuman periphery that lies beyond the city. However, as we learn that the conflicts of Rewrite are fundamentally interior to human society, the limits of such conclusions are laid bare. The supernatural stakes of Rewrite are real, but they’re centred around the human city and are a conflict between and by humans for thoroughly realistic human reasons. The mundane content of the common route is not for the sake of contrast in the sense of the usual metaphorical geography of a denki story. Rather, the story of Rewrite gradually unravels its seemingly geographic boundaries to reveal that its boundaries were social and endogenous to the city. This is why, in the longer-term scope of the story, the events of November 13th are actually an extension of the Occult Club’s earlier expeditions: In prior expeditions, they had found that the seeming supernatural mysteries that lurked on the periphery of human society were a series of hoaxes and misunderstandings constructed by humans. In these expeditions, the lesson was generally that it was fine that Kotarou failed to finally reach the supernatural periphery because he had gained something valuable closer to home with the mundane friendships developed in the Occult Club. In each of the subsequent routes, the supernatural conflict between Guardian and Gaia initially appears as the embodiment of the periphery that Kotarou sought. However, much like the hoaxes that came before it, the conflict turns out to be the runoff from the failures of human society. And Kotarou once again finds his source of meaning in mundane happiness, friendship, and romance rather than his adventure in the periphery.

The importance of this inversion is not that it subverts or dissects the ostensibly denki-like presentation of Rewrite’s setting. Rather, it is that by reconfiguring the external periphery as part of the centrality of urban human society, Rewrite modernises certain concepts in a manner that ties into its thematic development. Put another way, Rewrite reaches the idea that denki-like layering should take place within the city rather than across the country or world—that the city and the forest form one interdependent system. This allows for a contemporary vision of denki that is comparable to Kinoko Nasu’s while also being different enough for its own purposes. These differences begin with its methodical depiction of Kotarou’s daily life and how that informs the rest of the narrative.

We already mentioned this briefly, but Rewrite’s common route makes use of a certain level of division between Kotarou’s private life and his public existence as tied up in the Occult Club. However, while these two spheres feature very different events, Kotarou’s internal narration is also a source of unity between them. Whether he is dealing with actual supernatural phenomena on his own or fake supernatural phenomena with the Occult Club, certain comparisons are made explicit through Kotarou’s perspective. Kotarou Tennouji’s motivation in the story is not abstract or ideological in a manner comparable to the protagonists we considered with Nasu such as Shirou Emiya. His opening monologue at the beginning of Rewrite reads in part, “I could hold a conversation with anyone—absolutely anyone. However, I had no real friends. Not a one.” The seemingly trivial stakes of friendship are extremely important to Rewrite. Kotarou is curious and excitable in the face of the supernatural, but always under the context of his search for stable human connections. In his mundane daily life, he is sociable and well liked. But circumstances with such low stakes lack concrete meaning, and so he cannot find the kind of true friendship that motivates him. Therefore, he searches for something on the periphery that can give his life importance beyond these trivialities—what Komatsu and Naitou called “opportunities to enliven their everyday life and imagination through this strangeness.”

The Occult Club is a natural vehicle for such themes. Through a series of accidents, Kotarou assembles this group to search for the supernatural. At first, the club rests on unstable ground, with each of its members roped in for spurious reasons. But over the course of the story, concrete rapports and friendships develop between the members. The group allows Kotarou to pursue his desires for an exciting beyond and for concrete friendships in parallel. From an outside point of view, these goals might seem equal, but it is only with the benefit of Kotarou’s perspective that the audience knows the true balance at play.

With the events of November 13th, the Occult Club finally achieves its goal of demonstrating proof of the existence of the supernatural. However, Kotarou does not feel any joy at this reality. Learning of the secret identities of each of the club members only intensifies the feelings of alienation that drove him to create the group in the first place. Indeed, a close reading of the narration of Rewrite reveals an interesting contradiction. As we have already mentioned, Kotarou has absolutely certain knowledge of the existence of the supernatural due to the circumstances of his own life. And yet, beyond one titillating side plot, Kotarou scarcely thinks of this fact in relation to the club’s activities. Throughout the many expeditions of the Occult Club, Kotarou does not leverage his special powers or special knowledge to consider plausible supernatural explanations for the apparent phenomena they are researching. Instead, he engages them with a boy-like sense of wonder and excitement, with no clear idea of what possible explanations might exist. This of course reflects his genuine desire for a world beyond that might excite his sense of imagination. But more particularly, his ability to mentally separate the club’s adventures from his own personal experience with the supernatural demonstrates how he fundamentally sees them as unrelated. This is chiefly because the club is not about searching for the supernatural, but about searching for friendship. The point is not to validate the odd experiences in his own life, but to find concrete human connections with the other members. This is why the events of November 13th play out as tragedy rather than triumph. Finding out the truth of the supernatural whilst losing his friends is a hollow, Pyrrhic victory for Kotarou Tennouji.

The suitability of this kind of structure to the motifs of Rewrite is easy enough to understand: Just as the forest is hiding phenomena of a human origin, Kotarou’s search for adventure in the periphery was always a search for something closer to home. In addition, such themes are well suited to the format of dating sims. In reference to the works of Kinoko Nasu, we discussed how dating sims were able to incorporate elements of mystery by giving heroines secret backstories and hidden character traits that could be uncovered through the act of romance. Such intrigue gave a sense of momentum to dating sims’ narratives, and distinguished the particular plot focus of those dating sims which followed the branching storyline model pioneered by studios such as Leaf and Key. Since the heroines of Rewrite were all saturated in the world of the supernatural from the start, the events of November 13th precisely open up the story to this kind of dating sim format. In addition, Rewrite is only able to establish the importance of the friendships—which subsequently turn to romance—through the particular character of Kotarou’s first-person narration. Its emphasis and achievements in the trends of the medium slot in nicely with our considerations when examining the works of Nasu. Thus far, we have focused on the common route of Rewrite. But in order to fully see this structure, we must look at the post-common routes in greater detail.

What is to be found there

In a manner fairly typical of the genre, Rewrite offers a route for each of the five heroines within the Occult Club. For the most part, players are free to pursue these routes of their own volition, as the game does not enforce a strict route order. However, there is a soft route order of sorts. The early routes, which are open from the start, are divided from the later routes which are unlocked with certain levels of completion. Ignoring Lucia’s route for the moment, which is a bit of a wild card, a new player to Rewrite will find Chihaya and Kotori’s routes as the options available to them at the beginning of the game. As a result, these routes function thematically as introductions to the fuller scope of Rewrite’s story.

Let us consider the Kotori route in some detail for a moment. In contrast to the other routes, the Kotori route does not centre on the major factions of Guardian and Gaia. Kotori Kanbe is a Druid who engages in the same magical practices as Gaia, but independent of their aims. Her goal is to protect the Key, a world-ending spirit of nature and the primary MacGuffin of this portion of the story. Much of this route is spent in Kotori’s workshop in the forest, as Kotarou and Kotori grow closer together while isolated and besieged by both Guardian and Gaia, as those factions are separately searching for the Key for their own reasons. During this time, Kotarou hones his battle skills in an attempt to gain the power to be the hero of the situation—that is, someone who would be able to protect Kotori and the Key. However, reality is not so kind.

In the last act of the story, worn down by repeated defeats that seem to be driving them towards death in slow-motion, Kotoarou and Kotori take the Key and flee from the forest. In order to do so, Kotori sacrifices all of the familiars that she had built up over many years of learning the art of Druidism—including the reanimated corpses of her parents. Throughout this section of the story, a previously implicit possibility takes centre stage as a major concern: Kotori, feeling that her life is a story of being abandoned by everyone and everything except her power over familiars, becomes convinced that Kotarou’s superpowers must mean that he is one of her familiars. In Kotori’s life, which has been far too bleak for the concept of a hero, the only support she has been able to rely on is when those close to her have died and been reanimated as her familiars—such as the cases of her pet dog Pero or the corpses of her parents. Therefore, Kotarou’s attempts to act as a hero and protect her is all of the proof she needs to reason that his actions are an extension of this pattern. This theme culminates in a climactic moment where Kotori attempts to kill the Key, contrary to all of her stated intentions throughout the route. This serves as a kind of test for Kotarou: if he were truly a familiar, he would be unable to resist Kotori and her sudden change in plan. However, he instead stands up to her and protects the key, demonstrating that he is not a familiar who would simply obey her orders mindlessly, and that he can offer a very different kind of heroism. And for his efforts, the Key is killed, Kotarou loses his powers, and enters into an entirely mundane daily romance with Kotori.

As a point of comparison, heroism is given a relatively straightforward treatment in the Chihaya route—or as it is sometimes mockingly called, the Sakuya route. Despite the importance of the heroine Chihaya Ohtori, this route also gives considerable attention to her butler Sakuya Ohtori, who serves as a foil to Kotarou in a manner inescapably comparable to the role of Archer in Rin’s route of Fate/stay night. Sakuya has powers that are exceptionally similar to Kotarou’s own, which are otherwise without precedent in the world of Rewrite. He serves as Chihaya’s familiar and personal servant. And he models an ideal of dedication and heroism that Kotarou repeatedly falls short of. However, over the course of the route, Sakuya’s condition deteriorates, and Kotarou has to take over his role as Chihaya’s protector. Rather than the ideological role of the concept of heroism in something like Fate/stay night, the focus of the Chihaya route is on how to express the emotion of cherishing someone: How to take responsibility for someone’s wellbeing. In many ways, Sakuya models exactly what Kotori feared Kotarou of being in her own route: A servant who delivers exactly what their master wants but is otherwise incapable of being a true peer. At the climax of the route, Sakuya’s ‘death’ takes the form of transforming into a giant, monstrous form. This intentionally rhymes with a moment earlier in the story where Kotarou lost control of himself and went on a similar rampage. In a final battle sequence, Kotarou defeats Sakuya’s monster-like form, and returns to serve as Chihaya’s new protector and lover in parallel, serving a role that Sakuya never could as a familiar.

Both of these routes use the motif of the hero to tell different kinds of stories about Kotarou. In some ways, Kotarou’s situation at the resolution of these stories could not be further apart: With one, he loses all of his powers, and with the other, he becomes more powerful than he ever imagined. However, as the introductory routes of the wider stories, these both shed an important light on Kotarou’s central thrust as a leading character. November 13th, as the moment Kotarou fully encountered the world of the supernatural, represents a kind of heroic threshold. It is the moment where the exciting world that corresponds to the denki-like motifs that we have discussed throughout this post is actualised. However, as we addressed in the context of the common route, Kotarou does not respond to this possibility positively. In short, he is more distressed by feelings of loneliness than he is excited by the discovery of a new world of adventure. The object of his affection varies based on the route, but in general when Kotarou drifts towards one of the heroines in the aftermath of November 13th, he shows more interest in reviving the sense of human connection that he felt through the Occult Club than anything else. Accordingly, when the Kotori and Chihaya routes explore the motif of heroism, their structure does not correspond to the typical hero’s journey that was articulated by the likes of Campbell. In both routes, he is in part becoming a hero in order to recover the livelihood he lost precisely as a result of walking on the path of adventure.

This is not to say that Rewrite is a story of returning to the status quo ante: In most of the routes, the Occult Club is never reconstituted. The night of November 13th was fundamentally life-changing in ways that are impossible to reverse. However, the distinguishing feature here is a matter of emphasis. In a typical adventure tale, journeying into a new context is so impactful because it delivers experiences that could never be imagined in the prior lives of the characters. However, in Rewrite, there is a deceptive quality to the allure of adventure. More than just simple nature, the forest also hides the underbelly of human society, and the city as a figurative idea extends far beyond its nominal borders. In a related manner, encountering the supernatural does not offer a whole new kind of meaning apart from Kotarou’s prior life—contrary to his expectations. It instead sharpens the aspects of that lifestyle that were most important to him. It is once he walks on the path of adventure that he realises the true value of mundane principles like love and friendship, and thereafter attempts to recover those concepts.

The Kotori and Chihaya routes tell stories with important differences, but they also each embody this reverse hero’s journey: where heroism does not exist to find sources of meaning out in the periphery, but to protect the values that were already present in the hero’s world. In Kotori’s route, this directionality is made obvious in the broad strokes of the plot. Kotarou’s time in the forest is a messy and ambiguous stretch of time surrounded by factions that are beyond his understanding. His relationship with Kotori does not progress through the necessary breakthroughs during this period because his attachment is misunderstood as subservience under the rubric of the supernatural world of familiars. The couple only get anywhere once they flee from the forest and Kotori eventually decides to abandon her duty as a Druid. At this crucial juncture, Kotarou denies that he is a familiar. Prior to this point, Kotori had interpreted their mundane daily relationship through the filter of the supernatural because she believed that Kotarou was one of her familiars and lacked all free will: She believed that her happiness in the city was an illusory consequence of her real life as a Druid. However, Kotarou successfully denies this perspective. And as a result, they are both freed from their ties to the world of the periphery, Kotarou loses his powers, and they can fall in love as a normal couple. (That Gaia and Guardian allow them to live peacefully from this point onwards is confirmed as canonical by the fan disc Rewrite Harvest festa!.)

Some important distinctions need to be made with Chihaya’s route. In this narrative, Kotarou more or less embraces a life entangled in the supernatural as he supplants Sakuya’s duties. However, this does not mean its structure corresponds to a conventional hero’s journey. For all of its nominal importance, the war between Gaia and Guardian is never quite given centre stage in Chihaya’s route. While these disputes are always looming in the background, Chihaya and her manservant Sakuya are fundamentally independent players—they are allied with Gaia by default but have separate goals and are willing to dispense with this relationship if needed. This distinguishes them from Akane Senri, who is thoroughly enmeshed in the internal politics of Gaia. In practical terms, this means that the Chihaya’s route luxuriously equivocates on the ideological issues at play in this factional war. The other issues that rise to the fore are centred on Sakuya’s relationship with Chihaya.

More particularly, Sakuya embodies values of loyalty and service to those he loves. Over the course of the route, Chihaya becomes disheartened by the war between Gaia and Guardian. She laments the loss of the Occult Club, in a manner comparable to Kotarou’s own stance in the Kotori route. Naturally, Kotarou enthusiastically supports this goal. The problem is how powerless the two of them are in the face of this deeply entrenched web of intrigue. Therefore, the core text of the route is Kotarou learning to use Sakuya as a model to understand what it means to have the power to support someone and help them fulfil their dreams. By contrast, Kotarou’s initial foil for this plotline is Midou, an anarchist who undermines the established order of the conflict by engaging in directionless terrorism due to a sense of resentment fostered by his upbringing as a child soldier. Midou embodies the potential for power to be used corruptly in order to fulfil immoral desires. By looking to Sakuya, Kotarou learns the costs of power, and the responsibility that is necessitated by love.

None of these motifs are all that unique on their own terms. But they are suitable for the story that Rewrite is telling. And more to our point for today, despite how Kotarou gains the kinds of power he specifically lost in the Kotori route, the points of ideological affinity offered by the Chihaya route should also be legible. Chihaya’s explicit goal, which Kotarou enthusiastically adopts, is to interrupt the war and reunify the Occult Club. In Kotori’s route, Kotarou had sought power in a desperate attempt to fulfil her desires. Once he realised the error in this approach, his goals shifted accordingly. His goals in the Chihaya route concern similar issues, but the presence of Sakuya stops him from making the same mistakes: Thanks to Sakuya, Chihaya already has a supernatural protector, and one far more competent than he could ever be. While Kotarou does attempt to emulate Sakuya, and makes many fumbles along the way, he also grabs onto those things that Sakuya cannot deliver. Chihaya does not want another supernatural warrior in her life, she wants friends, like what she had in the Occult Club. Kotarou realises that the purpose of power of the kind that Sakuya offers is not to transcend such seemingly trivial concerns, but to protect them. Through this example, Kotarou is able to incorporate a productive attitude towards power and take a journey backwards from the supernatural into the everyday whilst retaining the power to protect that everyday existence. It is no coincidence that the Chihaya route’s epilogue in Rewrite Harvest festa! is the only one where the Occult Club is put back together again: It is precisely the route where Kotarou gets to have it all; he keeps his supernatural powers, gets the girl, and manages to continue his fun expeditions with the Occult Club.

Chapter 6 – Rewrite, second section: A boundless existence

The world at the limit

Since they are accessible from the beginning, the common route and early heroine routes have a foundational responsibility to set the agenda of Rewrite. Fortunately, we have characterised this agenda along the way, as we have described these routes and their reverse hero’s journey that centres the importance of the mundane everyday. However, beyond these routes, the plot of Rewrite escalates considerably. At the ending of each of the two opening routes, Kotarou and his chosen heroine return to a happy school life as a couple. But at the conclusion of both the Shizuru and Akane routes, the world quite literally ends. The majority of the people on the planet die. A rather dramatic outcome, all things considered.

In purely utilitarian terms, these routes serve as bad ends of sorts, with drastic suffering involved in either outcome. However, they also extend the thematic development of the earlier routes and demonstrate relevant extensions of Kotarou’s growth as a character. To put a fine point on it, it is only through loss that Kotarou comes to understand the true value of what he had. We should examine each route in turn.

The Shizuru route is structured around an in media res narrative device. A considerable time after the decisive night of November 13th, Kotarou finds himself suddenly stricken with amnesia and unable to remember any of the events after that night. However, based on the circumstantial evidence around him, he is able to deduce that something dramatic has occurred. Tracing his steps, Kotarou investigates the people around him and is able to uncover the world of the supernatural anew. At this point, he locates Shizuru, who is in a coma and under the care of Guardian. Afterwards, Kotarou remembers the full story: After the night of November 13th, Kotarou partnered with Shizuru. However, in his overeager attempts to help her, he found himself severely wounded by a Gaia familiar. Overcome by grief and foreboding at this, Shizuru used her own special powers to force Kotarou to forget their recent past together, all under the naïve hope that he would return to a mundane and safe everyday existence.

The importance of this act is contextualised by her earlier development as a character, and her associated backstory. Shizuru once lived a simple daily life with a working-class family. However, this all came to an end when they were attacked by a Gaia familiar. Fortunately, Shizuru serendipitously uncovered her supernatural talents during the attack and saved her family’s lives. After learning of this, Guardian attempted to recruit Shizuru. Shizuru, despite her ambivalence, was not opposed to this itself. But she highly valued her family and their simple lives. And yet, the changes to their lifestyle introduced by Shizuru’s powers, and more directly by Guardian’s attempts to ply her parents with money, slowly shattered that simple life. Her once happy family devolved into petty squabbles. In attempting to recover their prior life, Shizuru accidentally wipes their memories of her entire existence instead of merely the existence of her powers. Put simply, Shizuru’s powers to induce amnesia are established as a motif that signals ideas about the transition from the mundane to the extraordinary. More particularly, they speak to her regret at the kind of life she lost.

In this light, her behaviour with Kotarou is a sloppy recreation of such past misadventures; reverting to prior bad habits is a tried-and-true dramatic staple of romance stories. But in the context of the whole route, its meaning is extended slightly. Kotarou refuses to simply be another casualty to misfortune. He tracks down Shizuru and resolves to fight by her side: Not because he rejects her desire for the safe life she lost, but because he recognises that returning to that side alone would do nothing to save her. They fight together against Gaia in order to stop the Key and protect the world of human society that they both yearn to return to. However, they fail. The Key activates and the world’s destruction begins. This turn is surprising in the moment: Shouldn’t there be a last-minute turnaround, where the hero saves the day? Nothing quite so romantic takes place here; people die by their millions.

However, at this crucial moment, the route ends on a surprisingly bittersweet note. Unable to escape the danger, Kotarou forces Shizuru to go on without him and flee to a bunker that would allow her to escape the disaster. He promises that, after this is all over, he will see her again and they will live out their lives in peace. Shizuru makes it to the bunker, and Kotarou survives the wrath of nature by turning himself into a tree (a fairly interesting application of his powers). This moment turns Shizuru’s attempts to protect Kotarou around on herself: She is one of the few people who survives the disaster in the bunker, and eventually is able to return to something (a little) closer to daily human life on the other side. But in doing so, she is separated from Kotarou and experiences a more extreme version of the loss that he experienced at the beginning of the route.

All in all, this structure invites us to consider similar questions to the foundational routes, but with opposite results: Kotarou and Shizuru want nothing more than to retire into a peaceful everyday existence. However, they are caught up in extraordinary circumstances that deny this simple outcome. In this particular circumstance, they lose where Kotarou won in the Kotori and Chihaya route. However, even at the end, Kotarou keeps his promise. Shizuru finds Kotarou (still a tree) and the credits play over their bittersweet reunion. Whether the world stays around or ends, Kotarou’s happiness still relies on the small moments of time spent with those he cares about.

What Shizuru’s route merely hints at through poetic implication is brought into sharp relief by Akane’s. Within this section, Kotarou finally gets a close look at the internal dynamics of Gaia, which has been lurking in the shadows of the prior routes. To cut right to the chase, Kotarou inadvertently helps Akane destroy the world. There are many nuances and lore titbits that explain this state of affairs, of course. But the plain circumstances are that Kotarou’s trust in Akane leads to the destruction of the world and the deaths of millions. The timeframe of this route is more expansive than anything in the preceding alternatives, taking place over many years as Kotarou and Akane age into adulthood. Akane is a senior player in the politics of Gaia, and Kotarou uses his supernatural powers to serve as her bodyguard, and his sexual prowess to serve as her live-in mistress—or well, the equivalent for a man. The route bounces between an extraordinary political life and the more mundane circumstances of their adult courtship. These two elements are even more obstructively intermingled than in any of the prior storylines, and both hero and heroine are left rather unsatisfied by the present state of affairs.

Eventually, for compelling reasons that would be excessively synoptic to explain, the couple drifts apart such that Kotarou catches on to Akane’s intentions to end the world far too late to prevent it. And so, the story ends up in a similarly devastating circumstance as the Shizuru route, except with the added context of culpability for our leading characters. Once again, a central question is what people should value at the end of the world. And the answer revolves around simple themes such as love and friendship. However, this time it does not come from the perspective of Kotarou and Shizuru as victims of misfortune and the end of the world, but from Kotarou and Akane as perpetrators: The concern is not what has been lost, but what they have taken away from others. It is in these latter story points where Rewrite bares its teeth and demonstrates the force that was residing behind the fairly simple thematic ideas developed throughout its runtime: It is not just about valuing the simple joys of daily life and friendship in the platitudinous context of a normal circumstance where those things are easily obtained. It is more concretely about how irreplaceable and essential those simple things are in a time of crisis, where complex and insurmountable circumstances conspire to deny simple happiness to the kinds of people who want nothing more than that. In that kind of moment, the simple joys of love and friendship are everything; they are the reason to fight for anything at all.

A new horizon

When it comes to the ideas that are entertained by the later heroine routes, their relevance only multiplies in the concluding routes of Moon and Terra. Like those preceding routes, Terra also concludes with the literal end of the world at the hands of the Key. At least, the process starts, even if it does not reach the totality of the Shizuru and Akane routes. However, the context for this is rather intimate as the Key itself serves as the heroine for this route in the form of a girl named Kagari. It is best to not be deceived by this. Kagari, despite her appearance, is a thoroughly inhuman entity. This is not a story that reduces mother nature down to a cute anime girl—at least, not exactly. She takes on human elements—not unlike the forest which has been partially domesticated by the city—but she is still a fundamentally foreign creature that cannot understand human concerns and human needs. Regardless, this is the point of the story where the audience is finally given a glimpse into the reasons for its apocalyptic stakes: Kagari is an incarnation of the will of the Earth and observes human society looking for signs of what she calls ‘happy memories’. In prior routes, she has failed to find any, and has needed to be stopped by force lest she usher in the apocalypse and exterminate humanity in order to save nature and the planet.

We have taken a scenic route in our examination of Rewrite. That is, we have specifically stuck to its peripheral themes in contrast to other motifs, such as environmentalism and transhumanism, which are actually front of mind within its plain text. Since these topics are not directly relevant to the reasons that we are interested in Rewrite today, it has been a simple decision to discard them. But Terra blurs this issue due to its given premise. To explain briefly: Throughout Rewrite, the implication of a kind of time loop plotline was present, but not given much importance since there are no characters who carry over their memories between routes. This element is explicated in Moon, where it is revealed that there is a Kagari on the moon who is witnessing these various parallel timelines and attempting to solve the fundamental problem of planetary extinction: Kagari cannot square this circle, regardless of the adjustments she makes to the history of the planet—a concept that serves as a kind of synecdoche for Kotarou’s path in life, given how the audience interacts with the alternativity of these timelines via the gameplay of Kotarou’s first-person choices. The player repeatedly cycles through the many available choices in the regular gameplay of Rewrite, and in the process fails to construct a sustainable solution to the worldwide environmental crisis. These choices are centred on the most obviously important moment in Kotarou’s life; all of the variations available to the player culminate in the events of November 13th, wherein Kotarou is enmeshed in the battle over the Key. But the decisive adjustment made via the storyline of Moon is to alter the timeline at a foundational level: By drastically altering Kotarou’s entire course in life, he loses his chance at friendship in the Occult Club but sets in course the events that will save the planet and humanity. After these adjustments are made in Moon, Terra executes on this new timeline. The plotline of these two routes is caught up in esoteric concepts, and Terra does away with the familiar core of Rewrite as the Occult Club all but disappears. This is because the motifs which we have discussed as existing apart from these high concept issues start to coalesce into a more closely interconnected thematic structure in Terra.

Despite this added complexity, we need not linger on any extravagant explanations. What is important is that we summarised the necessary points in order to address a central moment in Moon and Terra: Kagari’s initial attempts to adjust the timeline included radical and fundamental methods. And yet, there was no certain path to survival for humanity and the planet. Therefore, we should not confuse the difficult path that Kotarou walks in Terra with some kind of noble sacrifice which carves out the necessary space for total salvation on its own. In Moon, after Kagari resigns herself to failure, Kotarou chooses to insert a ‘comment’ into the ‘code’ of the timeline on a whim. This message (“someday, we’ll meet again. – Kotarou Tennouji”) is what actually reverberates through the winds of fate and saves the world. Terra’s full significance only makes sense when read in this light.

In each of the heroine’s routes in Rewrite, Kotarou achieves some degree of success. Whether there is a simple and mundane ending or whether the world ends, Kotarou achieves an interpersonal connection with the given heroine that reverses his distance from the world—at least in that one crucial sense. The fate of the world is important, but Kotarou’s defining issue from the beginning was loneliness. In each of the routes, by changing his circumstances and relationship to the world, Kotarou is able to treat the symptoms of this disease. But the causes are more deeply rooted in Kotarou’s character and are brought to the fore in Moon and Terra. Even when Kotarou had friendship and human connection with the Occult Club, he was irresponsible and unserious: His friendships were too ephemeral to last when a large crisis emerged on November 13th. This microcosmic problem played out in macrocosm with the full structure of the routes as Kotarou always had to fight—often physically—against an array of forces in order to protect the friendships he gained. This may not get the point across for everyone: let us get to the same issue from a slightly different angle; the side of Kotarou that is always chasing adventure in dissatisfaction with the world exists in a curious symbiosis with his tendency to keep a self-destructive distance from the friendships that he most values. In turn, these tendencies are mirrored in a world-structure where Kotarou’s aspiration for human connection is always and everywhere threatened by the precarious position of the planet and the constant possibility of unwanted adventure.

In Moon, when Kotarou befriends the Kagari on the moon, he forms a connection with someone whom he never once saved across all of the many variations in the timeline. Kotarou is dissatisfied by this exceptionally ephemeral friendship, which seems destined to only last for this single meta-existence on the moon. And unable to abide by the limitations and reasons before him, he makes the promise to meet Kagari again and inserts that promise itself into the timeline. The poetic importance of this promise within the structure of Terra cannot be underestimated. While the Kotarou of Terra seems to sacrifice himself through isolation from his chief source of happiness—that is, the Occult Club—this is all in the context of a dogged pursuit of Kagari that is driven by his promise. This crystallises in some interesting gameplay: the traditional dating sim choices of Rewrite more or less melt away as a concrete feature in Terra, but not in their presentation. The choice menu remains in Terra, but with only one option or with a single option pre-selected as if by some mysterious force. This force is the path carved out by Kagari and by Kotarou’s promise to her in Moon. (For example:)

(Or:)

(Or, even more extremely:)

The outcome for humanity arrived at via this path is far from rosy. After all, the end of the world occurs in Terra in a manner that was not directly present in, say, the Chihaya route. However, Kotarou’s dogged pursuit of Kagari leads to some very particular outcomes. The other members of the Occult Club are led down a series of contingencies that prevents most of their individual traumas—that is, their issues beyond the worldwide crisis that occurs independent of them. (For example, Kotori’s parents are saved.) And in the aftermath of the apocalypse, they still meet and form a group together. Kotarou more or less sacrifices himself to show Kagari the “happy memories” that she desires. However, he does so while finding a sense of purpose for himself and fully understanding the meaning of service that challenged him in prior routes such as Chihaya’s and Akane’s. At the conclusion of the story, Kotarou is accidentally resurrected by the members of the new Occult Club. After some back and forth, Kotarou’s resurrected form drags the club along on one final adventure: Kotarou uses his completed powers to allow for space travel and takes the club to the moon to find Kagari. The arrival of inter-planetary travel is the final note on Rewrite’s treatment of issues of environmentalism and transhumanism. However, poetically speaking, it is also played as the realisation of Kotarou’s dream of finally freeing his friendships from the precarious circumstances of the world’s crisis, and therefore he is able to lead his friends to the moon and befriend the Kagari on the moon. Only then is the Occult Club complete. The purpose of saving the world is not for its own sake, it is for those things we value in that world. Hence, the journey away from Earth is shown with the following CG, not as something purely fantastical and dramatic:

And when they find Kagari on the moon, she appears as synonymous with the birth of plant life on that body: Friendship is a source of joy that is equated with the terraforming of the universe to allow transcendence and escape for humanity.

Chapter 7 – Rewrite, third section: Looking for your keys where the light is good

Back down to Earth: What was all of that about denki?

Our expansive summary and discussion of Rewrite did establish some useful ideas that we can read within the framework of denki fiction. But I also let the subject stew for as long as I did for the simple reason that I like Rewrite and wanted to gush about it. So, as we step away from the more tangential elements of this discussion, we should contextualise the portrait of Rewrite that we have drawn. That is, we should examine how this all fits into the issues that we started with.

Rewrite concerns a listless youth who yearns for adventure. Like in any good adventure story, romance, mystery, friendship, and violence are all waiting for him. However, as we already discussed, this adventure is all backwards. The dangers lurking in the forest turn out to be the residue of a war between secret societies, and these secret societies are in turn staffed by the heroines that our ambitious youth has recently befriended. And in a metaphysical sense, the root crisis at issue in Rewrite is the slow death of the planet at the hands of human pollution. The world from Kotarou’s initial perspective, defined by its layered boundaries between mundane human society and the great unknown, coheres to the structure of denki fiction. Rewrite plays with this structure and uses many touchstones of the genre; its many nods to nearby successes such as Fate/stay night do not feel accidental.

Its denki-ness serves a simple enough purpose in the early portions of the story, where Kotarou’s perspective is yet to be challenged. But this thread may be harder to follow as we delve into the more esoteric facets of the later routes. How could an ending punctuated by inter-planetary travel relate to the mechanisms of denki fiction? Well, to begin with, is there any periphery more peripheral than space (the final frontier)? As the story expands beyond the romantic notions that Kotarou brought to the world, the intractability of the conflicts that undergird this society become apparent. One side wants to protect human society, since many millions of people depend on it in order to stay alive. The other side knows that this same human society cannot survive without the planet which is slowly dying; they are willing to sacrifice some in order to protect the whole. Seeing these social systems from the inside also makes it apparent that the internal politics of human organisations often make compromise and cooperation impossible. Even if a hypothetical solution were found, enacting it would be another matter entirely. Seemingly total victories for humanity, like in Chihaya’s route, are only delaying the inevitable. And the best efforts at mitigating the damage of the Key’s apocalypse, such as we see in Akane’s route, still leave untold suffering in their wake. After witnessing these challenges, Kotarou’s initial model of the world is insufficient. It is not that there is a mundane reality in the city and an entirely different reality in its exterior; there is just one reality, and it is all under the umbrella of the complexities of human society. Kotarou longs for seemingly trivial things like love and friendship, and he is able to find these in an industrialised contemporary society. But this same society is slowly destroying the planet. The war between Guardian and Gaia that threatens Kotarou’s daily life is just an off-shoot from this problem of human-caused pollution.

The esoteric challenges of the later routes, featuring concepts such as environmentalism and transhumanism, have a fairly direct bearing on Kotarou’s personal character arc. Kotarou’s concerns are denki-like in their juxtaposition of the mundane versus the exceptional, and how this relates to his perspectives on his own life. However, since this way of thinking is belied by the actual complexity of the world, Kotarou’s search for “opportunities to enliven their everyday life and imagination through this strangeness” (Kazuhiko Komatsu and Masatoshi Naitou) ends up taking a critical and subversive lens as it encounters this complexity: Even as people lament the homogeneous experiences of industrialised modern societies, they rely on those societies to maintain the conventional circumstances of their happiness. There is not a readily available alternative lurking just beyond the periphery of modern society that can fulfil a longing for youthful adventure whilst still providing mundane sources of meaning. Instead, beyond the periphery, there are only the carefully hidden costs to that mundane happiness: Beyond a happy school life and youthful romance, there are the things that maintain current human prosperity such as ecological decay, war, economic exploitation, and political intrigue—that is, the kinds of things seen in the Terra route. Terra sees Kotarou plunge directly into this peripheral world, giving up a fun school life with the Occult Club in the process. This is all done in order to save the world on Kagari’s behalf, but it is not enough.

As the posture of Rewrite becomes increasingly critical towards a naïve hope for adventure, there is only limited applicability for the usual framework of denki fiction. In this fundamental sense, it is worth looking at Rewrite’s later content as a kind of anti-denki: It takes a world that seems to contrast contemporary capitalist society with a fantastical underbelly in the manner of denki fiction, only to specifically repudiate that fantasy. Even in a world with superpowers, the exploitation of others at the hands of complex and thoroughly mundane social forces is what drives conflict. However, this does not mean that the denki lens loses all of its utility at this point in the story. Kotarou seeks adventure because he is dissatisfied with human society. Initially, he fails to identify the causes of this discontent beyond a vague sense of loneliness, and so he looks beyond his immediate surroundings for an external concrete source of meaning. Kotarou’s personal journey throughout Rewrite involves coming to understand what it is he wanted from society in the first place. And while he does not find the satisfaction he hoped for in his immediate exterior, Rewrite nonetheless remains a story about stepping beyond the limits imposed by social conditions. By learning the full nature of the crisis that faces humanity, Kotarou understands that the periphery he believed in was actually a reflection of the centre of human society. Transcending this crisis in Rewrite does not mean finding some utopia beyond the boundaries of a mundane daily life. Instead, it is about expanding the horizons of human thought to allow society to overcome its current limitations. In a diegetic context, Rewrite presents this as humans literally moving beyond the Earth in order to transcend the crisis of the environment. But this concept is also meant in an abstract and conceptual sense, as opposed to a pure call for space travel as the solution to all social ills. It can be interpreted in broader terms as a call for technological and social progress; each moment has its underlying evils, but we cannot run away, only forward. Rewrite articulates this vision like so:

The power and the determination to blaze a trail into the future. … We were so desperate for it that we’d even consume our one and only Mother Earth. We thought we had to expand that badly. … That’s why she looks like a mother watching her child leave the nest. …

Even so, the planet will forgive us. Blessings to the child that tramples over their mother to journey forth. For it is not a sad memory. It is a path of light. It is the only hope that will lead to a bright future.

Such limitations on human thriving are identified with Kotarou’s feelings of loneliness and a longing for belonging. This is embodied in the final moments of the story when he reunites with the Occult Club and Kagari—a moment that we already discussed. If we understand the structure of the denki story as the use of overlapping layers to hint at the potential for concrete meaning and excitement just beyond the limits of conventional human society, the meaning of Rewrite as a work of denki fiction does not need to be read as entirely subversive. Rewrite instead sees transcending the limits of the human condition, with its many contained layers bundled up into an interlinked system of crisis, as a deeper aspiration. And it sees this as a transhumanist dream that requires us to make progress, step by step, until we are no longer constrained by our biological limits.

On particularity

When we set out to examine Rewrite, our goal was comparison. With a full enough picture of Rewrite in mind, it should be possible to accept the points where Rewrite is similar to the works of Kinoko Nasu while also gaining some insight from the areas where they totally differ. There are some truths that can only be reached through the interpenetration of opposites, rather than taking each fact as it is on its face. Now, as is obvious from playing each in turn, Rewrite is very different from, say, Fate/stay night. More than anything else, they feel radically different. Even if we apprehend the various strains of similarity in terms of their structures or use of certain conventions, there is a certain intuitive or aesthetic difference in aura that mitigates against analogising them. I have no doubt that many readers felt that Rewrite was a strange example to turn to—all the more so given the disproportionate time we have spent on it.

Yet, this is precisely what is so fascinating about the issue. Rewrite is a highly introspective dating sim that gives considerable attention to its superpowered protagonist. This protagonist has the secret power to manifest various weapons from his body in return for risking his sense of humanity. The structure of the story transforms a mundane everyday in contemporary Japan into a secret war between superpowered individuals in the underbelly of that society. The perspective of Kotarou—and the audience in turn—on this drama is affixed to the circumstances of a particular chosen heroine. Specifically, the mysterious element of romance is aligned with the use of mystery in a fantastical setting to make the two into a single uniform path; the more we learn about the heroine, the more we learn about the secret world of Guardian and Gaia. With the use of this structure, the motifs of the denki genre, and a considerable runtime, Rewrite manages to dance across a range of tones and create a very ‘total’ experience in a manner comparable to Fate/stay night, as well as those visual novels that most aspired to push the medium in a similar direction. And yet, Rewrite just feels so distinct from Fate/stay night in the final analysis. Some kind of anti-magnetism in the zeitgeist of the subculture ensures that these points of comparison feel distant in the minds of the audience. Rewrite is compressed into the shape of a dating sim of the Key type.

The features that align with this difference in perception are core to the appeal of Rewrite. In broad terms, the two most common ways to present text in a visual novel are the NVL and the ADV formats. The NVL format covers the majority of the screen in text and uses novel-like paragraphs. The ADV format tends towards a more ‘game-like’ presentation where text is limited to a smaller textbox. This textbook is only large enough present each line of dialogue separately without much in possibility for lengthy paragraphs. In addition, the screen real estate opened by this smaller textbox can be used to emphasise sprites and other art assets. This mode of presentation is shared with many kinds of roleplaying games and all manner of dialogue-heavy games in Japan. The games developed by Type-moon universally adopt the NVL format; Fate/stay night for example looks like this:

By contrast, Rewrite mostly sticks to the ADV format, in line with prior titles by Key:

At least it does until Terra, where it adopts the NVL format to accommodate the disappearance of dialogue in favour of lonely monologue—a natural arrangement as our protagonist loses his friends in the Occult Club:

However, the use of ADV text is just one highly visible point of comparison. The common route of Rewrite is considerably longer than any similar stretch of mundanity in Fate/stay night. Even the relatively slice-of-life-heavy Mahoyo cannot compare. This is commensurate with a generally greater focus on romance in Rewrite—despite the lack of sex scenes next to Fate/stay night’s healthy helping of those. The use of single purpose of CGs in combat scenes is rare in Rewrite: By contrast, CGs are littered about fairly liberally during romantic moments of connection between the hero and heroine. This makes for quite the point of difference from Fate/stay night, which is full of CGs during its many battle scenes.

We could conduct a further point-by-point comparison between the two titles. But its value would be limited. While some features here and there may distinguish themselves as being somewhat interesting, we are not likely to find some kind of secret sauce that explains what it is that gives Rewrite its distinctive character. Rather, playing the games side by side makes it clear that the boundary between them is an intangible quality that emerges from taking in their respective totalities. This intangibility makes the issue challenging to define, but not impossible to understand. Among Rewrite’s different flavours, there are two that contribute the most to separating it from other battle-heavy denki dating sims: Firstly, its relationship to the traditional brand of Key as a game studio. And secondly, the particular voices of its creators, especially in the case of Romeo Tanaka and his impact on certain thematically decisive arcs such as the Akane route or Moon and Terra.

This latter point tends to have pretty obvious relevance when comparing any pair of stories. The distinctive voice of the creator is an issue that is almost always front of mind for the audience, and also tends to result in several concrete differences between the works in question that can be broken down and examined. While clearly important in shaping Rewrite itself, the issue of this kind of authorship actually has limited importance for our current discussion. These kind of normal differences in style and identity are commonplace in art. And even when such distinctions exist, art is often considered to work within the same genre: Pablo Picasso and René Magritte both contributed to the cultural phenomenon of surrealism and can be compared with one another on certain analytical points, and yet their works are trivially easy to tell apart from one another. The issue that we are dealing with when it comes to Rewrite and Fate/stay night is more totalising and more challenging to grasp. Something seems to preclude the act of comparing the two titles, even when they have several overlapping genre elements that tie them together in the concrete sense of lineage and structure.

We should instead turn our attention to the subject of brands. At first, a brand and an author seem like overlapping concepts. They both describe an identity related to the origin or source of an artistic product. But there is an absolutely essential distinction between the two words: An author is a symbol that suggests an original creator, but a brand is a symbolic structure used by consumers to group products together. One exists to communicate an underlying concept, the other exists to communicate itself. We could interpret this difference in an essentially Baudrillardian sense if we were feeling a little French. (We are not and will not ever be feeling French.) Summarising the issue differently, from the perspective of the audience an author is an exterior identity. By contrast, a brand is an internal framework that the audience uses to structure their perception of reality. The formulation is a little inexact, but an author shapes the content of media whereas a brand shapes the perception of that content: Hideo Kojima as an author shaped the content of Metal Gear Solid by determining the words that the characters speak and the actions that take place in its story; Hideo Kojima as a brand shapes the expectations that lead an audience to the work in the first place, and the ideas that are used by them to interpret the work. While these two concepts are linked, they shape the work from entirely opposite sides of the interpretive process.

Rewrite is kept apart from other denki works by this intangible structuring process, which is separate from the story’s straightforward content. Our earlier investigation on Rewrite was focused on the aspects of this content that align with a denki-like orientation: Despite this narrowly assigned interest, there are certain conclusions we can draw. Rewrite is a story about Kotarou Tennouji’s journey into the unknown, the ironical lack of fulfilment he finds there, and the radical upheavals that are necessary to allow Kotarou—and humanity at large—to live happily in their mundane lives without risking the planet. When taking in this structure as a whole, it stands out in its use of denki-like motifs in its characterisation of the distinctions between mundane city-life and the ‘true’ underbelly of society. What is particularly notable is how Rewrite uses this structure to touch on its own themes and deliver its own experience. Its exact balance of adjacency and distance from the works of Kinoko Nasu, which Faust labelled as shindenki, is enough to prove that the genre could deliver something apart from ‘Nasu clones’. Even if the denki aspects are just one side of Rewrite, they are nonetheless clear and important when laid out as individual pieces of the text as it exists.

This is exactly the point of this elaborate exercise we have conducted: Rewrite’s content offers an extension of the same motifs that were established by Nasu and Faust as the shindenki movement, but in a relatively novel and interesting direction. And yet, that movement and its associated ideas were largely excluded from Rewrite’s consideration by audiences. Our purpose is to understand this problem, since doing so would provide a considerable hint and case-study as to why this movement had little staying power. That was the original problem that necessitated our interest in Rewrite, after all. By isolating the many elements related to denki fiction in its presentation and structure, we can say with some certainty that Rewrite’s difficulty in this regard was not that its content was so distinct from the conventions of the genre that it could not possibly be read in this light. Rather, it was that audiences were more receptive to and focused on the non-denki elements than the denki elements. In the case of Rewrite, this perception was moulded by its legacy within a preexisting brand known as Key.

If the purpose of these last few sections was to understand Rewrite’s content when read in the light of denki fiction, our next purpose needs to be to understand how Rewrite’s non-content—its brand—directed its reading away from this light. However, the idea of talking about Rewrite’s non-content is confused by its negative characteristics: Discussing something is possible, but one cannot easily discuss a non-something. A non-discussion of a non-something seems suitable, but doing nothing would of course accomplish nothing.

The approach I have chosen is a kind of literary montage. I would like to briefly go over several other works and trends that arose in the immediate context of Nasu’s rise and establish their examples as something to keep in mind as we think through this issue. We will do this through a series of mini-essays—do not worry, they will each be a fraction of the size of our discussion of Rewrite. Through these exhibits, I hope to develop the tools to discuss this elusive and intangible problem known as the brand.

Exhibit A – Higurashi: A missed moment?

Our discussion of Rewrite was oriented by a text that is remembered as being particularly distinct from the style of Kinoko Nasu. However, Higurashi: When They Cry has an history that is interwoven with Nasu’s own. In that sense, it is ironic that Ryuukishi07’s name is attached to both projects, even if his involvement in Rewrite was much more subdued. Regardless, Ryuukishi07 was promoted by Faust as the follow-up act to Nasu’s own establishment of shindenki under Kara no Kyoukai: To this end, Ryuukishi’s 2005 novel Our Haunted Dance on the Stairs was serialised in the magazine under the designation of a ‘shindenki novel’. However, when it came to the attention of readers at large, Ryuukishi07’s name has always been more intimately tied with his 2002 visual novel Higurashi: When They Cry.

The story of how Ryuukishi07 became involved in the world of dating sims features many of the same titles as Nasu’s own path: Ryuukishi07 started with Otogirisou and Kamaitachi no Yoru from Chunsoft’s ‘sound novel’ series. (He later appropriated the phrase ‘sound novel’ for his When They Cry series.) From this point onwards, Ryuukishi07 was hooked, saying that:

I experienced the golden age of the genre, playing Leaf’s titles such as Shizuku, Kizuato, and To Heart on my PC—as well as Key’s Kanon and AIR. I had a deep interest in visual novels.

While this list of titles corresponds closely to Nasu’s own frame of reference, the level of enthusiasm definitely does not. Nasu was a reluctant late bloomer who did not even own a PC; Ryuukishi07 was an enthusiast who played visual novels throughout the 1990s on his own PC, and even made his own visual novel as a hobby prior to entering the self-publishing scene. But one definite connection between the two emerged from the belatedness of Ryuukishi07’s debut. This connection was addressed in an interview that Ryuukishi07 provided for the fifth volume of Faust in 2005, as they continued to promote the unity of the shindenki movement:

Interviewer: You are of the same generation as Kinoko Nasu, right?

Ryuukishi07: Yes. The generation of Nintendo Famicom. … Back then, I thought there was no point in presenting my work unless others could see it. … It was considered that in self-publishing others would not take you seriously if you did not create so-called “secondary works,” and I was of the same mindset. But just at that moment, Tsukihime by Type-moon, led by Takashi Takeuchi and Kinoko Nasu, became a huge hit as an original self-published work, and it opened the door to the new world of self-publishing activities. … And while I was marvelling at how amazing Tsukihime was, Yatazakura, a current 07th Expansion member, told me he was currently studying the visual novel engine that it uses. He said, “It’s called ‘NScripter’ and it’s fun”. So, we decided to try to make a sound novel using that software. That was Higurashi: When They Cry.

This influence is something that Ryuukishi07 wears on his sleeve: Higurashi features a parody character in Rumiko Chie who is meant as a callback to the heroine named Ciel from Tsukihime. And Ryuukishi07’s enthusiasm for certain techniques, such as poetic narrative layering, and the integration of third-person style descriptions within nominally first-person perspective combat scenes, all show the clear residue of someone who was a fan of Nasu’s work. Indeed, Faust’s interest in Higurashi as a contribution to an era of shindenki ushered in by Nasu seems obvious from its content. Like Nasu’s work, Higurashi appears as if born from a fusion of denki fiction, otaku culture, and mystery elements. To demonstrate this, let us briefly summarise Higurashi’s relevant elements.

Higurashi centres on Keiichi Maebara, a recent arrival in the rural village of Hinamizawa. His mundane life of playing games with his school club is interrupted by the mysterious murder of the photographer Jirou Tomitake. This murder sets off a series of events that reveal the dark underbelly of Hinamizawa and how Keiichi’s friends are each involved to varying degrees. The core genre term to consider with Higurashi is not fantasy like Tsukihime, but mystery. For all of the fantastical revelations in the latter half of the plot, Higurashi’s looping narrative is structured around the quest to unravel the truths that emerge in connection with Tomitake’s murder. This search for truth is contrasted with the prevalence of Keiichi’s mundane ‘pre-murder’ life in each of the story arcs. And this everyday life involves the spirited depiction of slice of life scenes between Keiichi and the female-dominated school club—in scenes filled with otaku culture references and character traits typical of moe culture. Not to mention the dating sim-like presentation taken from the visual novels of Leaf.

The setting of Hinamizawa is a remote village that evokes the rustic style of a lost Japan and evokes a very different feeling from Nasu’s own choice of setting. Rather, this aesthetic mirrors some alternative denki-like fantasy fiction of the 1990s, such as Fuyumi Ono’s Shiki. In understanding this, it is helpful to note that Higurashi is not set in contemporary Japan like Nasu’s work, but in the year 1983. However, its other denki features are undeniably familiar to our investigation of Nasu. It is revealed over the course of the story that Hinamizawa was actually known as ‘Onigafuchi’ up until the Meiji Restoration. In accordance with its namesake, Onigafuchi is allegedly inhabited by those descended from demons—oni: The renaming of the village was associated with the Meiji government’s attempts to tame the periphery and bring it under the domain of the imperial system. The people of Onigafuchi had a distinct lineage from the majority of the Japanese population; a problem evocative of groups such as the burakumin and the ‘mountain people’ that we discussed much earlier in relation to denki fiction and Mahoyo. In fact, the setting for Higurashi is based on the real mountain village of Shirakawa. In summary, Higurashi is a story set in the periphery as it collides with the modernisation of the 1980s.

With a murder mystery, otaku elements, and a fantastical denki setting that plays on the motif of the centre versus the periphery, it seems at first blush that Higurashi found its way to a distinct vision for an updated presentation of denki fiction—all while being sufficiently aware of and influenced by Nasu’s own concepts to hit many of the same notes. But such appearances are deceiving in important ways. While Ryuukishi07 came from the same generation as Nasu when it came to the arena of video games, his experience with novelistic literature was very different. Despite the suitability of the setting of Hinamizawa to denki-like storytelling, Ryuukishi07 has not expressed the kind of strong affinity for the denki fiction of the 1980s that Nasu has—despite his continued returns to the genre, such as with Iwaihime in 2016. And even with Ryuukishi07’s insistence on writing mystery narratives, his concrete experience with the genre was a work in progress. In 2005, Faust’s editor-in-chief Katsushi Oota explained:

When I first met Ryuukishi07, there was something that left me speechless. That is, the moment when I realized he is a talent whose culture purely came out of the world of visual novels. While I was playing Higurashi: When They Cry, I was convinced that Ryuukishi07 must have been immersed in the shinhonkaku mystery scene, and I thought, “he must also be a fan of Seishi Yokomizo!” But that wasn’t the case at all. As an editor of Kodansha Novels, I felt that this was a problem. For example, Kinoko Nasu was clearly a talent that came out of the shinhonkaku mystery genre—a talent that was very close to my context as an editor. But Ryukishi07 is clearly different from Nasu in this respect. When we first met, he told me he had never even heard of Natsuhiko Kyougoku until recently. “What does that mean?” I thought.

This is a peculiar state of affairs for numerous reasons. As Oota intuited, there is no pair of mystery authors who are more readily compared to the content of Higurashi than Seishi Yokomizo and Natsuhiko Kyougoku—the latter in particular. The form of Japanese mythology used in Higurashi is particular to the Onmyoudou-inspired variant, which first entered mass popular culture through the denki fiction of Hiroshi Aramata, and then was subsequently refined in the Onmyouji detective novels of Natsuhiko Kyougoku. During the Watanagashi Festival, which is repeatedly depicted throughout Higurashi, the description given for the steps of the shrine maiden naturally brings the kagura practice of henbai steps to mind. And as explained in Kyougoku’s Box of the Mouryou, the henbai or ufou as originally practiced in Onmyoudou is a countermeasure against pre-Meiji forms of oni-like mononoke known as mouryou. Prior to overlapping with oni in contemporary Japanese mythology, the man-eating mouryou were associated with the water and swamp dwelling suijin known as mizugami: The henbai steps were an ancient countermeasure against man-eating earth spirits that dwell near rivers and swamps. This explanation of the ritual, reached by way of Kyougoku, seems to pre-empt the entire mythology of Onigafuchi long before it was revealed in Higurashi. And yet, Ryuukishi07 had never read this novel: He cites no knowledge of it or its ancestors.

It is impossible to know exactly how all of the particular elements of Higurashi entered the brain of Ryuukishi07. Due to its serialised release, it is entirely possible that many of the original ideas in Higurashi were retroactively cloaked with fragments of information that Ryuukishi07 gained in the intervening years. However, many of these ideas also arrived fully formed from the beginning of the story. And to some extent it does not precisely matter how much of Higurashi was the result of planning versus backfilling. The key point is that the end product of Higurashi took the shape that it did despite Ryuukishi07’s lack of a background in the relevant literature: what Oota called “a talent whose culture purely came out of the world of visual novels.” This is of consequence because of how it complicates Kinoko Nasu’s own literary lineage: Ryuukishi07’s pure connection to visual novels is juxtaposed to Nasu’s impure connection, but they both produced works that met Faust’s criteria of a shindenki “tradition that fuses the denki movement of the 1980s with the anime, manga, and video games of the 1990s.”

This means, in short, that there were other paths to arrive at this style beyond literally and directly reading a preceding canon of works. It seems unlikely that Ryuukishi07 was able to reverse engineer the literary history of Kinoko Nasu purely through Tsukihime. Rather, it was that he could reach the same destination independent of this literature. A key example can be found in Ryuukishi07’s history as an avid gamer. For example, one of the defining video game series of his ‘Famicom generation’ was the role-playing game franchise of Megami Tensei, which adapted Aya Nishitani’s denki novel series Digital Devil Story into a video game. There’s no way to be certain of the impact of this particular title on Ryuukishi07 as an individual (except the presence of a character cameo in the minigames in Higurashi,which suggests at least some awareness), but it and other similar games reflected his generation’s overall interests. It is illustrative of how literary concepts such as denki were present in non-literary mediums: The cultural ripples that influenced Kinoko Nasu as a reader also shaped Ryuukishi07 in turn as a gamer. Many adventure games and visual novels popular in Japan during the 1990s featured themes of horror and mystery, such as Chunsoft’s already noted ‘sound novels’ series. And the particular features of Japanese mythology as popularised by Hiroshi Aramata and Natsuhiko Kyougoku affected the canonical depiction of that mythology in all manner of popular culture.

This leads us to the important conclusion that the kinds of denki content that interested Faust were not particular to Nasu. It was in fact possible to recreate many of the defining features of this so-called shindenki movement largely independently of the lineage that shaped Nasu—and even to create unique variations within this result. Higurashi took many of these ingredients and positioned them in a rural setting, contrary to the overriding orientation of the zeitgeist. In addition, it elevated the importance of mystery and horror. This horror element is worth briefly discussing on its own terms: Horror offers a fairly unique approach to the motifs of denki fiction. If we recall the description of denki fiction provided by Kazuhiko Komatsu and Masatoshi Naitou:

To summarise, denki exists to depict the “strangeness” in society. “Strangeness” refers to things that are rare, inexplicable, supernatural, or abnormal. To go further, denki explores the strangeness on the exterior or periphery of the everyday world. In highly industrialised, regulated societies, the homogenisation of experience does not leave much cause to encounter strangeness in everyday life. Such a society lacks imagination. Therefore, people reach for opportunities to enliven their everyday life and imagination through this strangeness.

In such fantasies, the existence of strangeness provides readers with “opportunities to enliven their everyday life and imagination.” More specifically, this is to say that the possibility of a supernatural and inexplicable hidden nature to the world is a source of excitement and meaning that is aspirational when compared to the dreary and mundane nature of contemporary life. The association is a little different with horror. Horror transforms the unknown into something terrifying. In Higurashi, Keiichi does not predominantly undergo a journey into the periphery that provides excitement and meaning. Certainly, he does achieve something like this right at the end of the story, after successive failed loops. But in general, Higurashi presents the periphery as a source of death and despair that the audience is meant to fear. In this light, that the eventual culprit turns out to be acting on behalf of a conspiracy of Japanese fascists who are nostalgic for the pre-war imperial system is a fact pregnant with meaning.

These many unique facets of Higurashi can be understood under the general rubric of an author finding his own voice in the context of a larger movement: Even if the movement was defined by the success of Kinoko Nasu, it is natural that subsequent writers would exhibit their own diverse perspectives on overlapping ideas apart from Nasu’s own. This is generally the case with literary trends. Given this, the more dramatic problem before us is the reception of Higurashi rather than its internal qualities on their own. Higurashi demonstrated how a distinct tone and unique voice could be brought to many of the same ideas that drove the highly successful works of Nasu. Higurashi was from a comparable era, had a successful anime, and embodied the possibility of revisiting Nasu-like ideas from new angles beyond his particular kind of bombastic urban fantasy. Indeed, despite some continued sectarian divisions among more tribal factions, the growth of the visual novel community of that generation was driven in part by the large and overlapping fanbases of Nasu and Ryuukishi07. If there was any potential for the motifs of shindenki to create a movement driven by multiple authors, Higurashi seemed to be sowing seeds in the ground that Nasu had ploughed with Kara no Kyoukai and Tsukihime. The subsequent history of popular culture in Japan must be considered with the specific understanding that this did not happen. Higurashi came to be read apart from Nasu and other writers, as its own insular brand.

Exhibit B – Zaregoto: A seamless leap

On the subject of Nisio, Isin, the critic Tsunehiro Uno said:

We now have a clear answer as to why shindenki defeated sekai-kei. By the late 2000s, sekai-kei was a repository of the prior imagination of the 1990s and was therefore rendered anachronistic by the changing tides of the 2000s. … However, it was Nisio, Isin that remained as a stable flagship at Faust both before and after their shift in orientation. In other words, only Nisio, Isin managed a seamless leap from sekai-kei to shindenki.

Insomuch as Uno’s analysis is rooted in seeing the imagination of each epoch as stable and defined for eternity, it falls too closely in line with the limits of Faust’s own opinion. However, this invocation of Nisio, Isin is important. Looking over Nisio’s career, he has written in a range of genres with an orientation towards a very broad group of otaku readers. In that sense, his “seamless leap from sekai-kei to shindenki” was just the expected result of lacking a strong attachment to the preceding style (sekai-kei). But even granting this general viewpoint, it is worth examining Nisio’s specific relationship to shindenki-like fiction, as it is demonstrative of several important concepts which will be of use to us.

Uno further described Nisio’s debut series, the Zaregoto series, as a story that “started as sekai-kei, negated this identity, and ended as shindenki.” Whether we find this claim credible or not, the Zaregoto series makes for an interesting case study of how the conceptual framework of shindenki fiction should inform our understanding of popular otaku authors like Nisio, Isin. As should be obvious to those who have read it, Zaregoto does not necessarily call the style of Kinoko Nasu to mind: It is not particularly steeped in the conventions and logic of hardcore urban fantasy. And even leaving aside the shindenki claim, Uno’s invocation of the term sekai-kei is likely to surprise those who are familiar with the term. Instead, Zaregoto’s content most visibly fits under the umbrella of shinhonkaku mystery fiction.

The nine Zaregoto novels are broken up into six distinct story arcs: Decapitation Cycle, Strangulation Romanticist, Hanging High School, Psycho Logical, Cannibal Magical, and Uprooted Radical respectively. (We will not be including the recently released tenth volume in our discussion of Zaregoto, as it is too recent and too distinct from the others to fit into this history.) The first five out of these six all follow a generally similar structure. The perspective character, the pseudonymous ‘Ii-chan’, episodically encounters a series of locked room murders in closed circle settings. (The locked room and closed circle of Strangulation Romanticist is obscured by the nature of the novel, but both are still factors present in its mystery.)

Ii-chan’s role in these mysteries is generally as a type of Watson character; he is a relatively remote observer. Rather than conducting a straightforward investigation, Ii-chan’s investment in the events is often kept opaque. He drifts from conversation to conversation, discussing a large range of subjects that seem to be irrelevant to the issue of the murder. These sprawling conversations and Ii-chan’s distinct prosaic voice make up the core of Zaregoto’s particular literary feeling. Next to Ii-chan’s attempt at neutrality, the series does have an active detective character in Jun Aikawa. With some exceptions, Jun tends to solve the central mystery before Ii-chan does, and has the power to resolve the situation if she wishes. However, despite this, the structure of the story is always framed around when Ii-chan comes to realise the truth of the situation, rather than when the truth is available to highly capable characters like Jun. Put another way, the stakes of the plot are structured in existential terms.

A key hint to Zaregoto’s nature can be grasped by considering how the series is littered with references to Osamu Dezai’s hit novel No Longer Human. No Longer Human was one of the closing masterpieces of the era of shishousetsu (I-novel) literature. Shishousetsu were a prominent style of confessional literature in Japan throughout the first half of the 20th century, with popular attention driven by titles such as The Broken Commandment by Touson Shimazaki (1906) and The Quilt by Katai Tayama (1907). Such stories were generally written in an autobiographical, first-person style. However, in contrast to the confessional styles popular in the West, the focus of this first-person perspective was on the particularity of an individual’s daily life rather than developing their psychology in their defining moments. In other words, the subjective perspective of shishousetsu was constructed using events to paint a portrait of a unique time and place, rather than using an accumulation of defining events to reveal the internal mental processes of the individual. They tend to centre on the mundane, seemingly irrelevant aspects of daily life, rather than the decisive moments that are perceived to define the individual person.

For example, the shishousetsu novel Shichirigahama: One Man’s Fate by Kanya Miyauchi tells the story of Ishizuka (Miyauchi’s father), a teacher who was forced to resign after six of his students were killed in a boating accident. However, the novel does not focus on these tragic events. Instead, it develops the mundane life of the school, the students, other teachers, and Ishizuka himself through his perspective on these trivial circumstances. In doing so, it frames the causes and nature of this tragedy in terms of the daily psychology of those involved.

The philosopher Koujin Karatani develops a similar point in regard to The Quilt by Katai Tayama:

Tayama confesses nothing but trivialities in The Quilt. One suspects he had more serious reasons for feeling remorseful, but due to the special nature of modern Japanese literary “confession,” Tayama was able to conceal those things while “confessing” to trivialities. … By depicting ugly feelings rather than ugly matters, that is, Tayama described what did not even exist.

For a point of contrast we might consider The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath; even when the events of a Western confessional novel are situated in the narrator’s daily life, the ‘ugly matters’ that form the subject of the novel are given a direct form. For example, the subjects of depression and suicidality linger across several scenes, such as in the following ostensibly minor exchange:

“You say you want more sleeping pills?”
“Yes.”
“But the ones I gave you last week are very strong.”
“They don’t work any more.”
I liked Teresa. She had a gentle, intuitive touch.
Teresa’s large, dark eyes regarded me thoughtfully.
…
There was a little pause.
“What seems to be the matter?” Teresa said then.
“I can’t sleep. I can’t read.” I tried to speak in a cool, calm way, but the zombie rose up in my throat and choked me off. I turned my hands palm up.
“I think,” Teresa tore off a white slip from her prescription pad and wrote down a name and address, “you’d better see another doctor I know. He’ll be able to help you more than I can.”
I peered at the writing, but I couldn’t read it.
“Doctor Gordon,” Teresa said. “He’s a psychiatrist.”

While Plath has her own idiosyncratic interests, the overall focus of this style of confession is typical of Western novels of this type. It is not so in Japanese shishousetsu novels. These differences were also addressed by Karatani like so:

To “write undisguisedly” in the shishousetsu style was, to borrow Ougai’s formulation, to no longer “tie the strands together.” Since nineteenth-century European realism also belonged to the space created by drafting techniques, the same word “realism” took on an entirely different content when used by shishousetsu writers. One could say the same about the word “I.” In shishousetsu the “I” is placed within brackets in the phenomenological sense. The “I” in Western modernity, as shown by the example of Descartes, exists by virtue of a specific perspectival configuration which had come to appear so self-evident and natural that it was not easy to recognize that it was a product of drafting techniques. … In the Japanese shishousetsu the opposite was the case, since the configuration that constituted the Western “I” as natural seemed unnatural and artificial to the shishousetsu writers.

Since the Western concept of a psychological, interior sense of personhood was less naturalised in the Japanese context, the form of confessional literature differed in proportion. In the West, the self was understood as a self-evident entity, and confessional literature primarily existed to explain the role of the self in the crucial moments of the narrator’s life. In the Japanese context, the self had to undergo a diffuse process of ‘construction’ through implication and association within the narrative. The various trivial relationships and obligations that make up the daily life of a person needed to be sketched out in detail to see the self emerge at all.

However, this tendency was not eternal. While Japanese literature remained distinct from the West in its own way, it also responded to the changing circumstances of Japan’s modernisation. It is in this context that we should approach No Longer Human and its influence on Zaregoto. No Longer Human (1948) was released almost half a century after the defining early titles of the shishousetsu era, such as The Quilt (1907). In that time, the “unnatural and artificial” understanding of the self referenced by Karatani had at least evolved, even if it had not disappeared entirely.

Through their interest in the mundane features of the external environment around the self, prior shishousetsu did not need to directly rely on the particular internal nature of that individual for their sense of characterisation. The self started as an empty subject that was filled with the portrait painted by the story of their particular life. No Longer Human is rather different. It is dripping with the particularities of a full interior voice. Its flow is punctuated by its lengthy monologues just as much as the distinct events within its narrative. But this is not to say that it is written in a Western style of confession. It is still rooted in the centrality of non-events; the “ugly feelings rather than ugly matters, that … [do] not even exist” described by Karatani. There is no sense that life is something that emerges from the narrator’s self, instead life is something that reveals the self as it happens to that narrator.

Through his interest in No Longer Human and also in comparably confessional Western literature such as J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, Nisio, Isin sought to adapt such an intimate form to his desperate interest in shinhonkaku style mystery fiction. As we discussed much earlier in this post, shinhonkaku mystery fiction had already developed a particular relationship to the concepts of narration and perspective that was distinct from the Western approach of the golden era of puzzlers. The Watson was more readily given a distinct point of view that complicated their role as the neutral observer and audience surrogate. Nisio’s strongest influences were the shinhonkaku writers who had most strongly tended towards coupling the structure of their mystery plots with the particular features of their characters—namely Natsuhiko Kyoukgoku, Hiroshi Mori, and Ryuusui Seiryouin. Zaregoto was Nisio’s attempt to write a mystery informed by this style with consideration towards a deep sense of existentialism rooted in No Longer Human and similar titles.

We have previously discussed a contemporaneous attempt at writing an existential, confessional mystery by Outarou Maijou on this blog. In both cases (Zaregoto and Tsukumojuuku), the climate of otaku culture during the early 2000s shaped how these works interacted with the dominant style of existentialism present in Japan as characterised by the framework of sekai-kei fiction. To summarise considerably, all of this context amounts to the conditions that influenced Tsunehiro Uno’s description of Zaregoto as a work within the sekai-kei tradition. As he further explains:

Ii-chan is saturated in the morosity of the 1990s. His morals are of the sekai-kei type, with a non-committal and passive approach to his engagements. … If I might add, … the desire for a broken, beautiful girl, whose process of healing can provide one with an unconditional source of love and meaning, is used to justify the postmodern condition. This is why the action of the Zaregoto series is driven by women, who are the ones made to take initiative and dirty their hands.

If we can summarise the original core of Zaregoto as a series of mysteries structured through the lens of sekai-kei-like pessimistic existentialism, all under the cloak of confessional literature such as No Longer Human, then we must also rightly highlight that the series does not end that way. From Hanging High School onwards, the series introduces a growing array of fantastical elements far outside of the conventional framework of shinhonkaku mystery fiction. By Cannibal Magical, these elements take on equal importance to its status as a mystery. And with Uprooted Radical the mystery disappears altogether. This shift in genre content also aligns with Ii-chan’s dramatic changes as a character over the course of Cannibal Magical and Uprooted Radical. He becomes a proactive agent in the story. And his chief rival in these later arcs is a man, in contrast to the repeated use of female foils in the earlier arcs (firstly ‘Akane Sonoyama’, secondly Mikoko Aoii, thirdly Ichihime Yukariki, and fourth Tomo Kunagisa, ordered respectively). This movement from the original vision of Zaregoto to a largely different kind of story by the final arcs is key to what Uno meant when he claimed that Zaregoto “started as sekai-kei, negated this identity, and ended as shindenki.”

While any comparison between Zaregoto and the shindenki works we have discussed thus far might seem absurd, it is worth having a closer look at the fantastical elements that the series developed over the course of its run. Doing so will clarify much of what drove Uno to describe Zaregoto in these terms. The world of Zaregoto has no concept of geographic stratification of the kind that we have considered as typical of the denki mindset. However, it has a strict and total social stratification that defines every facet of its worldbuilding. Society can be entirely categorised with four modes: the Outer World, the Economical World, the Political World, and the Violent World. The Outer World constitutes the entirety of conventional mundane existence in contemporary society. And the remaining Worlds in turn reflect the three different forms of an exceptional world beyond everyday existence: Zaregoto’s abstraction of all historical forces into personalities that directly embody the economics, politics, and violence of the system calls to mind our earlier refrain that “since it can be so difficult for people to notice the concrete operation of vague historical forces, a new mythological history [has] to meet the moment and explain the present in terms of comprehensible narratives and personalities.”

Within the Economical World, the Political World, and the Violent World, the most important actors are ancient families of note and the institutions that channel their power. For example, the Violent World is dominated by the Killing Names and Cursing Names—the respective set of clans specialised in either direct or indirect methods of murder. (For example, much attention is paid to the Zerozaki clan as one of the greatest of the Killing Names.) The Political World is also in turn dominated by the institutions that act on behalf of powerful families such as the Kunagisa Organisation. Such motifs exhibit an initially unexpected level of comparability between Zaregoto and those other works we have discussed such as Kara no Kyoukai.

It is specifically relevant for our purposes to note that Zaregoto’s transformation which we have noted so far—that is, the movement from a work that combines sekai-kei morality with shinhonkaku mystery plots into a fantastical action series—corresponds with a diegetic restaging of events from the context of the Outer World into the three ‘extraordinary’ contexts of the Economical, Political, and Violent Worlds. In Decapitation Cycle, the central pair of locked room puzzles depend on the implicit assumptions that it would be respectively impossible to leap horizontally across a large paint spill and to leap vertically to a particular window: Such assumptions are easy to accept given the mundane settings that are most common in shinhonkaku mystery works. However, there are numerous characters introduced in the ending arcs of Zaregoto who could probably pull off both of these feats. Indeed, in retrospect, quite a few of these characters should strain our belief in the seeming impossibility of the even more drastic circumstances in Psycho Logical. On the one hand, this makes for the relatively trivial point that introducing fantasy elements tends to push a story away from the conventional rules of whodunit mystery fiction—for straightforwardly practical reasons. But we should not limit our thoughts to the surface of this issue.

It is not just that Zaregoto underwent a trivial genre shift. Instead, Zaregoto embodied a total shift in mindset, where its genre was just one element: In seeking to free its lead character, Ii-chan, from the cynical and pessimistic worldview established in the earlier volumes of the series, Zaregoto necessarily needed to move beyond the framework of a predominantly mundane world. As the opening chapter of the series says:

Essentially, people live in one of two ways. Either they live in awareness of their own worthlessness, or they live in awareness of the worthlessness of the world.

The “sekai-kei morality” referenced by Tsunehiro Uno depends upon a perverse negative correlation between these two poles. That is, you can either accept the world by surrendering to total belief in the self, or you can accept the self by surrendering to the total supremacy of the world. By contrast, denki fiction is premised on the understanding that the value of everyday existence is supported by imagining a dramatic and valuable secret reality that structures the world. On this particular point, the two genres diverge drastically. This can be easily understood by examining Uno’s definition of the term Sekai-kei:

[Sekai-kei is] a series of otaku-type works which remove ‘society’ and ‘nation’ while extending ‘one’s own feelings’ or ‘self-consciousness’ to perceive them on the scope of ‘the world’.

In moving from the mundane to the extraordinary, Zaregoto’s motifs organically came to mirror the comparable interest displayed in the interdependence of the two by denki fiction: To the exclusion of the polarisation preferred by sekai-kei fiction. It is no wonder then that Uno defined the shift from sekai-kei to shindenki in terms of a renewed need to confront the world beyond the self. According to Uno:

Sekai-kei insists that it is a continuation of the morality of the 1990s, which was characterised by an ethos of inaction. … However, sekai-kei, which exists as the corruption of a zeitgeist established in 1995, ironically carved the path to the “decisionism” of the 2000s. … The evolution of Nisio, Isin, who is an entertainer with a good nose for the movement of culture, is directly illustrative of the changing imagination of the past decade.

We must be rightly cautious of the reductionism of Uno’s framework of “decisionism”, but it is certainly true that Zaregoto’s introduction of denki-like motifs is related to its desire to move beyond its original existentialist style—that is, the need for ii-chan to make decisions and act in the world rather than abide by an ‘ethos of inaction’. Of course, as we have already seen, the self is an important subject on its own terms in shindenki fiction. The movement from sekai-kei to shindenki is not as totalising as Uno makes it seem. So, if we discard this straightforward narrative, where does that leave the place of Zaregoto in relation to the wider trends of shindenki fiction?

If we imagine the genre as simply a series of checkboxes that need to be filled, certain titles within the Zaregoto series demonstrate a very contemporary vision of shindenki fiction; Cannibal Magical and Hanging High School come to mind as useful works to consider. Through the motifs we have discussed, the setting of Zaregoto evokes the sense of urban fantasy in a compressed social terrain typical of the genre. Beyond the influence of traditional Japanese fantasy, mystery and otaku culture are both important keystones in the series. And in each of these two novels in particular, there is a strong enough contrast between the mundane rules of conventional society and the extraordinary rules of a secret society to link them to the fundamental stylistic thrust of shindenki. However, the nature of the evolution within the Zaregoto series as identified by Tsunehiro Uno forces us to think of the applicability of this framework in contraindicated directions. The gradations of shindenki variously present in Zaregoto is also demonstrative of why it belies the association in the first place—of why thinking of Zaregoto as similar to Fate/stay night is so faulty. It is not as though Zaregoto transforms into Fate/stay night over time. It is that elements also present in Fate/stay night increasingly form the substance of just one of the many masks that Zaregoto wears over time.

It is for this reason that we should consider an especially radical reading of Uno’s claim that “the evolution of Nisio, Isin, who is an entertainer with a good nose for the movement of culture, is directly illustrative of the changing imagination of the past decade:” We should move beyond the limited context of the single decade that Uno intended.

Exhibit C – Monogatari: All that is solid melts into air

While the Zaregoto series was defining for Nisio, Isin’s early years, as it was both highly successful and arrived as his debut series, its cultural relevance has since been surpassed. Today, Nisio is far more well known for his paranormal mystery stories in the Monogatari series. No small part of this success was helped by its tremendously popular anime adaptation, but the novel series was already very popular prior to its arrival on the screen. In addition, it has been longer-lived than Nisio’s other series and has regularly received additions throughout the breadth of his career. Since they entered into serialisation in 2005, the thirty separate novels penned in the Monogatari series have demonstrated every twist and turn of Nisio’s evolution as a writer. And that evolution can tell us a lot about the broader development of certain literary trends.

Naturally, encapsulating a series of thirty novels at this late juncture is nearly impossible. As a result, we are going to need to keep things general in the name of brevity. Fortunately, we are most concerned with a process of change that is general in its character. Monogatari begun as a series of short stories published in Kodansha’s Mephisto magazine. In relation to Kinoko Nasu, we repeatedly referred to Faust, which is another of Kodansha’s literary magazines: it is worth delving into some of the respective details of these magazines in order to explain their relative statuses. Mephisto is actually older than Faust, having been established almost ten years earlier in 1994. In the 1990s, Japan was in the midst of the shinhonkaku boom in mystery fiction, and Kodansha was at the centre of this vortex. It served as the publisher of notable authors such as Yukito Ayatsuji, Rintarou Norizuki, Natsuhiko Kyougoku, and Hiroshi Mori—all under Kodansha’s Third Publishing Department headed by Hideo Uyama. Mephisto was established by Uyama and the other editors of Kodansha to bring attention to the exciting young genre fiction authors they were publishing in this context. Faust was established almost a decade later by Uyama’s direct successor, Katsushi Oota. Of course, Mephisto continued to exist, and this successor magazine was never intended as a replacement. Instead, it could compliment Mephisto by providing an alternate avenue for the works that overlapped most closely with the rising world of anime and manga instead of the traditionally literary universe of Mephisto.

This all means that when we say something is published in Mephisto, it is a comparable concept to being published in Faust, even if not strictly identical. The type of author who is attracted to Mephisto would have appeal with the readers of Faust, and vice versa. The difference is, to overgeneralise, that Mephisto’s audience is less counter-cultural. In the case of Nisio, Isin, he was largely free to jump between either option. His debut novel, Decapitation Cycle, won the Mephisto Prize. This prize was the award for debut authors that interested the editorial staff of Mephisto. A key player on this editorial staff was the aforementioned Katsushi Oota, who served as the head editor for Faust. (As an interesting piece of trivia; given Oota’s very hands-on control of Faust, he is by far the most likely culprit behind the editorial that coined the term shindenki, even if the article had no strict byline.) This close connection between the two magazines means that it should come as no surprise that Nisio had stories published in both prior to Monogatari: For example, his novel Our Broken World was originally introduced as a serialisation in Mephisto, and the first volume of his Shinhonkaku Magical Girl Risuka series was serialised in Faust in turn.

This context is useful when interpreting the early stories of Monogatari—specifically Bakemonogatari. The arcs from Bakemonogatari that were published in Mephisto were Hitagi Crab, Mayoi Snail, and Suruga Monkey. Each of these are magazine length stories that have fairly self-contained narratives and thematic developments. This is in contrast to the introduction of longer-running story elements once the series shifted to the medium of the novel. In specific, they most closely follow the boy-saves-girl format that has obtained a misnomered recognisability as the ‘standard’ format of a Monogatari arc: In reality, the series only uses this format sparingly beyond these early arcs. In each of the serialised arcs of Bakemonogatari, the protagonist, Koyomi Araragi, encounters a new girl who is haunted by a specific supernatural apparition, and helps them solve the haunting. Each magical oddity closely reflects the psychological baggage of the heroine’s specific backstory, and the process of ‘solving’ the incident necessitates Koyomi coming to understand this psychological dimension. This always requires the help of the detective character, Meme Oshino.

Oshino already understands the problem and its cause as soon as he enters each story. Because the oddities of Monogatari are direct representations of psychological states of mind, an expert on the supernatural is capable of immediately deducing the psychology of a victim based on the nature of the oddity that appears. In fact, during these earlier stories, the metaphysical nature of oddities is somewhat ambiguous; there is an allegorical nature to the oddities where they seem to exist purely as embodiments of the characters, and their existence is circularly predicated on belief in their existence. Despite Oshino already possessing the knowledge to ‘solve’ the case from the beginning, these arcs still take on the format of a mystery story. Koyomi is only lightly guided by Oshino, and must independently learn to understand the psychology of the heroine in question so that he can understand the nature of the oddity.

This way of structuring a supernatural mystery shows clear inspiration from the works of Natsuhiko Kyougoku. More particularly, in Kyougoku’s Hyakki Yagyou mystery novel series, he innovated the detection style of Tsukimono-Otoshi. Tsukimono-Otoshi—literally translatable as “possession”—refers to the process of logical reasoning used by the series detective Akihiko Chuuzenji to solve the crimes in the series. Chuuzenji does not solve crimes using fingerprints, physical evidence, or decisive clues related to alibis or locked rooms—although those elements are still present to allow the audience to keep up with Chuuzenji. Instead, Chuuzenji compares the psychological behaviour of the characters to the myths and folklore of Japanese Onmyoudou. Since folklore is reasoned to be derived from eternal tendencies in human psychology, Chuuzenji is able to understand the archetypal nature of certain behaviours via analogies to such folklore. As a result, he is able to deduce which kinds of ‘demons’ are ‘possessing’ the witnesses, and therefore reason his way around any narrative tricks or locked rooms. Putting it another way, a Hyakki Yagyou novel presents an unapproachable and complex locked room puzzle, and then provides a shortcut to the solution that can only be understood via esoteric folklore and Japanese mythology.

Nisio’s approach to Bakemonogatari heavily borrows from this format. His other major inspiration was the episodic supernatural adventure manga xxxHolic, created by the manga circle CLAMP. In the Hyakki Yagyou series, there is no such thing as the supernatural, and folklore is used as a rubric to understand mundane crimes committed using conventional human means. In xxxHolic, the supernatural is real, and the episodic encounters with the supernatural are used as a vehicle to engage fairly lightheartedly with a wide range of genres including comedy, romance, mystery, and drama. Bakemonogatari, to speak in broad terms, combines this versatility and fantastical worldbuilding with a rigorous puzzle mystery structure that uses the same skeleton as Kyougoku’s works. The sensibilities Bakemonogatari brings to this format from its manga influences are rather suitable for the brisk pace of a short story anthology, as opposed to the thousand-page behemoths written by Kyougoku that saturate the audience in the minutiae of history, myth, legend, and psychology.

The original stories of Bakemonogatari introduced a new heroine in each arc, presented self-contained mysteries, and stuck to a precise structure. This format is calibrated pretty well towards serialisation in Mephisto. It borrows from well understood mystery structures—specifically including one associated with an author already published by Kodansha—to tell stories that mix an allegorical and literary feeling with contemporary pop sensibilities. A reader who encountered any of the three stories, and in any order, would find something which could be understood on its own terms and that bridged the appeal of a conventional mystery structure with the free use of fantastical genres by younger authors. Of course, Monogatari did not stay as a series of self-contained short stories. The Monogatari of the present is a novel series with multi-volume storylines, similarly long-running character arcs, no narrowly defined sense of genre, and unrestrained allusions to otaku culture.

The first full-novel story arc to depart from the short story format of Bakemonogatari was Koyomi Vamp, which is a backstory arc released in Kizumonogatari as the third novel of the series. The structure of Kizumonogatari is particularly notable for how it facilitated the perception on the part of critics such as Tsunehiro Uno that Nisio is a shindenki author. The Koyomi Araragi of Bakemonogatari is a vampire with significant existing involvement in the world of the supernatural; he serves as a kind of guide to the heroines who are unfamiliar with the details of that world. But as a prequel to the series, Kizumonogatari begins with an ignorant Koyomi who has no such powers, and depicts his original encounters with the supernatural. The structure of the novel is predominantly an urban fantasy rather than the rigidly structured mysteries of Bakemonogatari, and shows someone dissatisfied with their mundane daily existence becoming enmeshed in the secret magical underbelly of contemporary society. It is natural that such a story would be interpreted in a similar context to Kinoko Nasu, who had also adapted elements of shinhonkaku mystery fiction to an urban fantasy setting. Kizumonogatari even offers some novel innovations on this genre: The one who is dragged into the world of the supernatural in order to find excitement beyond the everyday reality of city life is not the main protagonist Koyomi, but the heroine Tsubasa Hanekawa. Koyomi’s motivations are more of a directionless nihilism and suicidality that are channelled into a self-destructive hero complex. Koyomi has no desire to live in the world of the supernatural from the start, and much of the plot is driven by his desperate attempt to return to his normal life.

If the Monogatari series was limited to just these initial short stories and their novel-length prequel, it would be simple enough to separate its entries into some fairly coherent boxes. The initial short stories, which combined shinhonkaku mysteries with an urban fantasy supernatural setting, could be read as a genre-blending effort in the context of the same zeitgeist as the other shindenki works we have considered thus far. And had the series ended at Kizumonogatari, itcould be seen as using a more thoroughly fantastical story to provide climactic action set-pieces that punctuate the conclusion of this low-intensity mystery series. But of course, the series kept going long beyond this point. Across its many novels, the Monogatari series has tended to be released in short bursts known as Seasons. These are, as of writing: First Season, Second Season, Final Season, Off Season, Monster Season, and Family Season. And throughout each of these Seasons, Nisio has experimented with a number of different formats and genres that stand far apart from the conventions established by Bakemongoatari and Kizumonogatari. In Second Season, other narrators take the stage such as Tsubasa Hanekawa in Nekomonogatari (White) and Nadeko Sengoku in Otorimonogatari. And some of these novels feature genres and structures that only appear for single arcs, such as the time travel adventure of Kabukimonogatari or the slow meditative pace of Hanamonogatari. And other such changes continue in subsequent Seasons, with new narrators and new formats always being introduced: A completely traditional locked room mystery with no supernatural elements appears in Owarimonogatari (Part One), only to be followed up by an arc filled with supernatural action setpieces in Owarimonogatari (Part Two).

The Monogatari series does not content itself with any one genre classification or tone. It seems as though any kind of novel can belong in the series so long as it shares some of the overarching characters and setting. This makes quite a bit of sense when seen in the context of Nisio, Isin’s wider career: The almost two decades worth of Monogatari novels that have been released have been accompanied by dozens of other novels by Nisio in all sorts of other genres, from the traditional puzzler mysteries of the Forgetful Detective series to the battle royale action series Zodiac Wars. The Monogatari series simply followed along with these ephemerally shifting focuses and interests. Any given idea for a novel could be and was made to work in a Monogatari novel. This has meant that the series has been able to repeatedly return despite apparently reaching the nominal end of its overriding narrative several times. So, what then defines a Monogatari novel if not its genre content? The answer can be found in certain stylistic trappings that are expected of one. Regardless of the narrator, and regardless of the underlying events of the plot, a Monogatari arc is expected to engage in diversionary dialogue tangents filled with meta comedy, word play, and pop culture references. These dialogues can be utterly removed from the immediate problems of the characters and can extend for several pages at a time.

This tendency is challenging to separate from the identity of Nisio, Isin as an author. Nisio’s reputation in general depends on his tendency for long dialogue tangents, word play, and meta comedy. However, there is a circular quality to this reputation insomuch as the reputation is itself premised on the ubiquity of the Monogatari series: The presence of this style of dialogue does vary between his other novels, even if they are undeniably a common motif. But it is nonetheless interesting how a series that started with a fairly concrete narrative structure and genre identity, rooted in particular influences, has slowly evolved into being primarily defined by its particular characters and the minute stylistic flourishes of its author.

In the context of its immediate release, the early stages of the Monogatari series seemed to validate the hypothesis that Nisio, Isin was another writer like Kinoko Nasu, whose stories could be captured by an analysis of the evolving interest in urban fantasy on the part of those authors who grew up in the generation that read shinhonkaku mystery fiction. However, over the course of its development, the expectations that shaped the series turned out to be rather different. All of these initial influences melted away as the series became defined by its recurring characters and the idiosyncratic habits of its author. The content and structure that led to its original existence are now optional. This is a rather interesting development precisely because of the history of Kinoko Nasu’s Fate/ series that we summarised earlier in this post.

When Faust prophesied an oncoming shindenki movement, they based this assessment on the shared genre elements that connected various popular works in a particular literary space. However, when the contemporaneous breakout success of Fate/stay night resulted in numerous sequels and spinoffs, these subsequent stories slowly did away with the genre elements identified by Faust in favour of recurring details in their setting and characters. Whether it is a magical girl story, a science fiction adventure, or an historical drama, a story can be Fate/ so long as it has Saber. The key difference between this tendency and the evolution of the Monogatari series by Nisio is that the Monogatari series has been exclusively penned by a single author, whereas Fate/ has ballooned into a multi-author multimedia franchise. Therefore, even if they are comparable phenomena, we cannot attribute the evolution of Fate/ to the flexibility of a single individual in the manner of Tsunehiro Uno’s invocation of “the evolution of Nisio, Isin, who is an entertainer with a good nose for the movement of culture.” Uno’s implicit assumption in this analysis is that Nisio’s evolution was simply a quick and decisive adaptation from one zeitgeist to the next. This assumption is rooted in the limited timeframe of his analysis, where the culture seemed to have cleanly shifted from one preferred genre to another. However, subsequent events cast doubt on this mindset. The evolution of shindenki works that we have considered in this post has been an uneven process, often adopting ideas in one work in isolation only to abandon them in the next. In addition, the apparently dead genre of sekai-kei referenced by Uno has since made a major comeback via works such as Makoto Shinkai’s Your Name and Hideaki Anno’s Shin Godzilla and Rebuild of Evangelion (when Uno wrote his analysis, Rebuild of Evangelion was still possible to perceive as a series of remake films). The character of change itself seems different than assumed by Uno, and as demonstrated by the case of the Fate/ series, this difference cannot be understood in terms of the habits of single authors.

Conclusion B – The work of Kinoko Nasu in the age of mechanical consumption

One

The nature of history is that it is always in its infancy. Each snapshot of a moment contains the seed of what will follow from it. The future seemingly unfolds as a natural consequence of the present. As Plato attributes to Socrates as paraphrasing Heraclitus (the Dialogues are silly like that), “all things flow and nothing stands; … things are in motion and nothing at rest; … [and] you cannot go into the same water twice.” That is, change is the only constant. This much is pithy but not all that substantial. The more challenging task is operating analytically in a world where nothing is ever definite and final. Even a thorough account of everything of importance needed to explain the world at each given time runs the risk of leading you astray as soon as it encounters the future with its reconfiguration of an existing reality into another. The present always turns into the past, but that capacity for change is exactly why our estimations based on the present are so brittle next to the inevitable crystallisation of the future.

On the subject of reading past poetry, Walter Benjamin said:

It is, to be sure, tempting to pursue the ‘matter in itself’. … It offers itself in profusion. The sources flow to one’s heart’s content, and there they converge to form the stream of tradition; this stream flows along as far as the eye can reach between well-laid-out slopes. Historical materialism is not diverted by this spectacle. It does not seek the reflection of the clouds in this stream, but it also does not turn away from the stream to drink ‘from the source’ and pursue the ‘matter itself’ behind men’s backs. Whose mills does this stream activate? Who is utilizing its power? Who dammed it? These are the questions which historical materialism asks, and it changes the picture of the landscape by naming the forces which have been operative in it.

This seems like a complicated process, and it is. Is there not a more direct, a more decisive one? Why not simply confront the poet … with present-day society and answer the question as to what he has to say to this society’s progressive cadres by referring to his works—without, to be sure, ignoring the question whether he has anything to say to them at all?

Throughout this post we have skirted to-and-fro across various tangents with a seemingly paranoid aversion to landing on a single concrete point. But this scenic path was necessary in order to respond to such problems of analysis: In order to free ourselves from the limits of a given moment, we need to consider the variously disconnected forces whose tensions constitute that moment. It is only through a process of analytic montage that we can take in the stream in its full processes—without being distracted by the various slopes that accompany the stream, and without taking its original source as the thing in itself. Failing to do so leads straight to the ever-present crisis of historicism that has always doggedly pursued literary criticism. As Gore Vidal said of the issue:

It is a rare and lucky physician who can predict accurately at birth whether a child is to become a dwarf or a giant or an ordinary adult, since most babies look alike and the curious arrangements of chromosomes which govern stature are inscrutable and do not yield their secret order even to the shrewdest eye. Time alone gives definition. Nevertheless, interested readers and writers, like anxious parents and midwives, forever speculate upon the direction and meaning of current literary trends, and professional commentators with grave authority make analyses which the briefest interval often declares invalid. But despite their long historic record of bad guesses, bookish men continue to make judgments, and the recorded derelictions of taste and the erratic judgments of earlier times tend only to confirm in them a sense of complacency: they are not we, and did not know; we know.

Theories of culture, when we are not careful, tend to slip through our fingers like fine grains of sand and never be seen again. The moderately schizophrenic tract we have taken throughout our analysis was intended as a stopgap measure against this. Such an approach is doubly necessary exactly because Faust, in their original reaction to the work of Kinoko Nasu, fell into this kind of trap. What does the above quote from Vidal bring to mind if not Faust’s enthusiasm for a shindenki movement? Then, is it my intention to claim that there was never a shindenki movement? Absolutely not. The arrival of shindenki is a single small creek: this creek exists, but exactly as the embodiment of a total system of rivers and lakes.

Two

What is art? According to Viktor Shklovsky:

This thing we call art exists in order to restore the sensation of life, in order to make us feel things, in order to make a stone stony. The goal of art is to create the sensation of seeing, and not merely recognizing, things; the device of art is the ‘defamiliarization’ of things and the complication of the form, which increases the duration and complexity of perception, as the process of perception is, in art, an end in itself and must be prolonged. Art is the means to live through the making of a thing; what has been made does not matter in art.

Each human being experiences life according to their own circumstances. In order to revisit any particular experience, the natural methods at hand for a person are their own memories and recognition. But how can you express this to another person? How is one to communicate something as ephemeral as a memory? If someone wanted another person to experience the beauty of a waterfall, the simplest tool at their disposal would be to simply direct them to the waterfall and point at it. But what if the waterfall in question was inaccessible? What if it were far away, or only existed in the past? Or more troublingly, what if the beauty was in something particular and inexplicable about the waterfall in the eye of the beholder? In that circumstance, the only way to express an experience is to reproduce it. This can be done using a medium such as speech, music, visual art, or the written word. From a grand landscape to an evocative sound to an abstract philosophical thought, humans have a process at hand to express their experiences. This process, which renders human experiences in a manner where they can be perceived freshly, is art.

Three

The most obvious aspiration of art is realism. If a work of art were realistic in a complete and perfect sense, reproducing the essential nature of life would be trivial. The problem is that life is also far too complex and varied for an idea as inexact as realism to mean any one thing. In fact, realism can mean just about anything. And if it means anything, it also means nothing. As S. S. Van Dine put it, “the problems of art, like those of life itself, are in the main unsolvable.” Yet, no matter how impossible the task, humans will struggle at it endlessly. Even as the concept of realism is so faulty as to be nearly useless, there is no surrendering the dream of capturing reality within the work of art.

Coinciding with the arrival of modern literature—that is, the novel—reality seemed to be most vividly developed in the conscious thoughts of the individual. This notion emerged in a fractured form throughout various literary schools. The Romantics, in the shadow of their forefather Jean-Jacques Rousseau, believed that reality was something felt in the inner passions of each person. The Naturalists thought that reality was something to be objectively observed in the outside world. Despite this seeming opposition, neither disputed that the task of the novel was to describe reality. And more to the point, they were both concerned with the individual—as the observed and observer respectively. Souseki Natsume explained this like so:

Because the two schools have different names, some people assume that they are in fierce opposition, that the Romantic School and the Naturalist School glare at each other from within sturdy fortifications and across deep moats. But in reality it is only the names which are contending with each other, content passes back and forth freely between the two schools and there is a great deal of commingling. We can expect this to give rise to some works which, depending on the reader’s viewpoint or interpretation, could be considered Naturalist as well as Romantic. Even if one tried to draw a firm line between the two schools, countless mutations would emerge out of the grey zone between the perfect objectivity attributed to the Naturalists and the perfect subjectivity of the Romantics. Each of these strains would combine with other strains to produce new breeds, which would in turn produce a second order of changes, until ultimately it would be impossible to distinguish the Romantic from the Naturalist.

Whether it is understood through the vehicle of thoughts or senses, the experience of living as a modern individual is a central motif of the novel. Reality in this sense is not something to wrestle with in the abstract. A novel uses the words on its pages and the images it conjures to translate the sensations of existing in a time and place. The task of an author in such a novel is to communicate what it is like to exist as another kind of person: What do they think? What do they feel? What do they see? What do they hear? Even the famous master of realism Honoré de Balzac uses his powers of description to invite the audience to imagine themselves as omniscient enough to see the world through the perspective of anyone—as opposed to no one.

Kiyoshi Kasai said of modern literature:

In modern literature, characters are privileged over and above the other elements of a novel such as themes, plotting, and prose. This is an inevitable goal for art that seeks to faithfully represent modern human lives. … What chiefly matters is the character as a representation of the author and the authenticity of their inner emotions.

But why? And what separates this kind of novel from earlier forms of literature? These questions are in fact closely linked. Literature, like all forms of art, has always been concerned with producing and communicating experiences. The difference is that the audience of art in the classical sense had an immediacy to their sense of the origin of experiences. The experience as the work of art itself was the point. A war story in pre-modernity did not exist to translate a life which experiences death and destruction before the audience, it existed to translate the experience of death and destruction into a slice of the life of the audience. These two concepts are close and yet distinct: A key word to consider here is ‘authenticity’. The original notion of literature does not need to concern itself with a sense of authentic personhood behind the experience (authentic—that is, credible, rather than strictly literally real). This is because authenticity was contained within the work of art itself. By contrast, modern literature requires a sensation of a person beyond the audience who is communicating the experience. It requires an external source for the authenticity—the sincerity; the soul—of the life that it seeks to reproduce: It requires an author.

Walter Benjamin described life in the emerging metropolises of the 19th century in the following terms:

For the private citizen, for the first time the living-space became distinguished from the place of work. The former constituted itself as the interior. The office was its complement. … From this sprang the phantasmagorias of the interior. This represented the universe for the private citizen. In it he assembled the distant in space and in time. His drawing-room was a box in the world-theatre.

… The allegorist’s gaze which falls upon the city is rather the gaze of alienated man. It is the gaze of the flâneur [urban wanderer], whose way of living still bestowed a conciliatory gleam over the growing destitution of men in the great city. The flâneur still stood at the margin, of the great city as of the bourgeois class. Neither of them had yet overwhelmed him. In neither of them was he at home. He sought his asylum in the crowd. Early contributions to the physiognomy of the crowd are to be found in Engels and in Poe. The crowd was the veil from behind which the familiar city as phantasmagoria beckoned to the flâneur. In it, the city was now landscape, now a room.

… The flâneur only seems to break through this ‘unfeeling isolation of each in his private interest’ by filling the hollow space created in him by such isolation, with the borrowed—and fictitious—isolations of strangers.

As is often the case with Benjamin, he captures the essence of the problem, but communicates it indirectly through poetic allusions. The distinctions between classic and modern literature as we have described them was never a matter of mystical or spiritual differences between the people who lived in different eras, but the gradual accumulation of concrete differences in how they lived their lives. In what we think of as pre-modern history, the gap between the public and private was more stark—more absolute. The private realm was associated with the immediate family, clan, or community; contact with strangers only took place by stepping out into an explicitly public realm. This division was naturalised through technology, economics, and politics: The great mass of people lived in disparate agricultural communities, where a ‘stranger’ was totally exterior to their daily existence. According to the British Library, “in the Middle Ages, the majority of the population lived in the countryside, and some 85 percent of the population could be described as peasants.” As a result, communicative activities such as literature reached others in the context of the public sphere of life, and activated emotional responses that were commensurate with its place in this public. It is no wonder that the friend of Benjamin and fellow philosopher Hannah Arendt described the ancient world like so:

What concerns us in this context is the extraordinary difficulty with which we, because of this development, understand the decisive division between the public and private realms, between the sphere of the polis and the sphere of household and family, and, finally, between activities related to a common world and those related to the maintenance of life, a division upon which all ancient political thought rested as self-evident and axiomatic. In our understanding, the dividing line is entirely blurred, because we see the body of peoples and political communities in the image of a family whose everyday affairs have to be taken care of by a gigantic, nation-wide administration of housekeeping.

This is all to say that this transformation from pre-modern to modern reality is not a vague or intangible idea, but the natural consequence of the material changes in the circumstances that configured the lives of people and the shape of their societies. More concretely, the reformulation of a geographically disconnected, agrarian existence into a centralised, bureaucratised, capitalistic, and increasingly urban existence. Our consciousness of strangers and the fact of their own private lives became unavoidable. As Benjamin alluded to, the city is a space that endlessly insists upon this reality. And even beyond the city, the rapid proliferation of communication technology across modern history, from the printing press to television, as well as the emergence of semi-public places of work and existence such as the factory or office, has transformed our understanding of what it means to live ‘privately’. The private life of a stranger is not some far off foreign mystery whose origin is entirely abstract, it is an inevitability which hides behind the anonymous faces of thousands of fellow citizens. Or as Benjamin put it earlier, “the crowd was the veil from behind which the familiar city as phantasmagoria beckoned to the flâneur. In it, the city was now landscape, now a room.”

The meaning of modern literature can be captured rather neatly in this equivalence between the landscape and the room. It represents the total overlapping of the private and the public. And even further than this, the pre-modern frame of mind sees a different kind of landscape in a story such as the Iliad than is natural to the modern mind. For the former, it is a story that constructs the Trojan War as a public phenomenon—a landscape that the audience exists within rather than witnessing from a separate fixed point. By contrast, a modern landscape is an accumulation of private rooms, of individual fixed points. The modern frame of mind generates a pervasive consciousness of the Trojan War as filled with individual people, and a desire to understand their interior spaces—the naked faces behind their anonymity.

The only kind of literature that suits such a society is the kind defined by a private person—the reader—engaging with art in order to understand the thoughts and perspective of another private person—the author. The novel has been a compelling vehicle for such a philosophy of art. Realism in the novel is often defined by the ability of the author to capture reality as they see it and as they think it, and to use words to transport the audience into such private experiences. Therefore, just as Kiyoshi Kasai intuited, the essence of realism in the modern novel is the use of characters, as both subject and object, to construct the world from the accumulated perspectives of individuals.

Four

Walter Benjamin’s most comprehensive study of the maturation of European modern literature in the 19th century was focused, of all things, on an inventory of the production inputs that went into the architecture and entertainment of Paris—the cultural capital of that time. For example, his examination reads in part that:

Most of the Paris arcades came into being during the decade and a half which followed 1822. The first condition of their emergence was the boom in the textile trade. The magasins de nouveauté [novelty stores], the first establishments that kept large stocks of goods on the premises, began to appear. They were the forerunners of the department stores. … The beginnings of construction in iron constituted the second condition for the appearance of the arcades. … The technical absolutism that is fundamental to iron construction—and fundamental merely on account of the material itself—becomes apparent to anyone who recognises the extent to which it contrasts with traditional concepts of the value and utility of building materials. … Alongside the theoretical battles were ongoing practical struggles with materials.

Benjamin’s intention with the seeming tangentiality of this issue was to tell the story of culture by way of the practical, material objects that shaped people in their ways of living—and their ways of thought. After all, the way that people live and the ways that they think and see are deeply related. It is no wonder Benjamin also said that “just as the entire mode of existence of human collectives changes over long historical periods, so too does their mode of perception. The way in which human perception is organised—the medium in which it occurs—is conditioned not only by nature but by history.”

In much the same way, our attempt to understand Japanese subculture has highlighted that the changing attitudes represented by evolving artistic expressions were not just an abstract shifting of ideas. The development of different modes of thinking also corresponded to the evolution of Japan from somewhere that looked like this (1865):

Into somewhere that looked like this (1930s):

Into somewhere that looks like this (1955):

And finally, into somewhere that looks like this (today):

That this transformation took place with such speed that one person could live to see it through to its conclusion must be an explicit factor in any conclusions we reach.

Five

Tsunehiro Uno was intrigued by the nature of shindenki stories exactly because they captured the extremity of Japan’s modernisation. Or more precisely, because they represented historical developments further along than the ‘old imagination’ of prior artistic movements within Japan’s path to modernisation. Uno’s analysis was in reaction to the rapid ascent and decline of three major literary ‘movements’ over the prior few decades. First there was the original boom in denki during the 1980s, and then shinhonkaku mysteries cast this trend aside and captured the imagination of the public and critics, and then sekai-kei style stories were given considerable attention in the post-Evangelion environment. This pattern primed critics to see the rise of any new story forms as a response to the changing character of Japan’s modernisation over the course of its fast-paced history. As Uno said of his intentions:

It is a cliché, but the transformation of the world under the shadow of  9/11 and the Koizumi government since 2001 had a startling impact on the imagination that generates our stories. … By reflecting on such stories, we can examine the shifts in our world and their underlying mechanisms. … Critics have been left behind by the changing circumstances of our world since 2001, and have been trapped within the same frameworks for over a decade, … on one side lies the old imagination of the world between 1995 and 2001, and on the other we have a contemporary imagination which has grown to symbolise the world after 2001.

Under this mode of thought, culture strolls along a road laid out for it by the progression of history. And at the critical junctures where major events send history barrelling down a new direction, culture makes a corresponding about-face to follow along this new path. The danger of this kind of implicit teleology was already explained by Benjamin in his description of the “sources [that] flow to one’s heart’s content, and there they converge to form the stream of tradition; this stream flows along as far as the eye can reach between well-laid-out slopes.” An understanding of culture that operates on the level of the twists and turns of its linear journey will, as they say, miss the forest for the trees—to add a third mixed metaphor to this paragraph. In more literal terms, the rise and fall of momentary trends is the wrong frame of reference for understanding such phenomena. Instead, we should be concerned with the fuller processes that shape the forces of history into a narrative that we label as cultural progression or change.

Six

Japan is a society that ‘Westernised’ and modernised in fast-forward. Firstly in the sense of the imperial era born from the Meiji Restoration, and secondly in the sense of the era of Western capitalism imposed on it by the post-war geopolitical settlement. Fredric Jameson articulated this phenomenon similarly, saying:

I take it that any reflection on modernity—it is a little like the question about the self, or better still, about the nature of language, when you are inside it and cannot be expected to imagine anything which is outside—has known three renewals, three moments of an intense and speculative questioning. … In Japan these three stages, separated in the West by two hundred years, have been compressed into a century. … It is indeed well known in the sciences how the “outsider principle” explains the capacity of non-card-carrying unprofessional tourists and visitors-to-a-given-discipline to deduce impending fundamental paradigm shifts; … it is as though that great laboratory experiment which was the modernization of Japan allows us to see the features of our own development in slow motion, in a new kind of form.

Quite so. It is therefore not a surprise that a genre such as denki, which builds on the mythological traditions of pre-modern Japan and reuses them for its own modern intentions, is so exactly concerned with the transformation of a disparate rural society into a centralised urban empire. In the context of a culture that was suddenly drafted into the frontlines of world history, it is a genre that makes the unfolding of history and its consequences into a natural subject. This sensitivity to its current moment certainly gives it a compelling sense of timeliness. But it is also a fragile specimen, and easily smashed when exposed to any sudden changes. Put another way, any story whose vision of reality is so deeply enmeshed in the relationship between its present and its past will quickly become an artefact of mere nostalgia rather than a vehicle for sustained cultural salience.

Denki stories depict a fantasy where such rapid changes to society are merely camouflage for the ‘real’ order of the world, which is played by the old comprehensible rules. It responds to the speed with which Japan transformed; first from a decentralised clan-based order into an imperial empire, and then from this empire into a consumer-driven capitalist society. To be sure, there is a kind of political conservatism implicit in this nostalgia. But more particularly, it is about reconciling the past and the present for the sake of those living in that present. Denki is not pure historical fiction after all. It does not expect the audience to linger in the past per se. Rather, it offers the present in an altered, fantastical form that suits those who are bewildered by the pace of change entailed by modernisation. It waters down the present for the sake of those who are taking their time in moving on from the past.

It is no mistake that such art does this by putting a human face on the political drama of modernisation. Above all, culture is a deeply interrelated beast. Denki is a form of social storytelling that concerns itself with motifs and themes on the scale of the whole society. But it does so with a particular tendency to simplify that society into traditional forms of the family, clan, and community. That is, denki restructures society into a nostalgic form to contrast with the modern social reality of a boundless mass of faceless strangers. Such stories may have a number of important characters or a relatively narrow slice of central characters. But in either case, the ambiguity of Japan’s directionless post-war democratic capitalism is made legible through the motivations and actions of a series of characters whose internal lives can be revealed in a novelistic form. Denki, in a phrase, transforms modern history into an accumulation of character arcs.

Seven

The shift from denki to shindenki fiction that we discussed in the first half of this post was one where these central tendencies remained intact, even if they were reformulated for a new context that no longer corresponded to the nostalgia of the immediate post-war world. Shindenki, as typified by an author such as Kinoko Nasu, is still interested in the cultural consequences of centralisation, urbanisation, and modernisation. In fact, the intensity of these forces is even more stark: It is just that shindenki also admits a kind of defeat. There is no longer an echo of old Japan lurking in the periphery beyond the city, for the city and the modernity it represents became ubiquitous and inescapable. And so the city becomes a universal object, seen in everything no matter where one looks.

This new perspective reflected the maturation of this century-long process of Japanese modernisation. The denki of the 1980s corresponded to the last gasp of nostalgia in a society that was conscious of its imperial past. This era was inherently contradictory: Driven by a booming electronics sector, Japan’s capitalist economy developed to the point where it challenged the United States in per capita income. However, Japan was also conscious of its past as an independent imperial power. The pace of social change was faster than the corresponding turnover of generations. Fiction was a space where such contradictory forces could be toyed with freely. But at the close of the 1980s, a new decade arrived where the fully post-war generations took their place in society. Japan’s economy was still large, but it was also stagnant. The dominant sense was not the blistering pace of change, but instead Japan joined other ‘Westernised’ countries in having an immovable but stable system under the rubric of what is sometimes termed ‘late capitalism’ or ‘advanced capitalism’—or most accurately, post-industrial capitalism (Daniel Bell). Japan was no longer a society in transition, pulled at from both sides by an imperial past and a capitalist future. It was simply stuck in the mud. Our portrait of the works of Kinoko Nasu demonstrates the distinct features of art that emerged in the context of this mature post-industrial capitalism.

This portrait includes a radical reformulation of the fundamental motifs of modernity that were already present in denki fiction. However, shindenki’s portrait of modern life is distinguished by a sense of compression. The broad geography of old denki captured the intrusion of modernity on a large and decentralised empire which was wrapped in pre-modern traditions. But in shindenki, the scope of the world falls within the range of a homogenised, ubiquitous city-scape. And this world is witnessed from the perspective of a limited set of characters—often a single key narrator. In other words, the world of shindenki feels shrunken, reflecting an abundant feeling of same-ness. For a Japan that moved beyond its transitional post-war period into a mature capitalism, shindenki correspondingly took the logic of modernity within denki to its mature extreme. It is a genre typified by society-level themes such as history and politics, but compressed down into the perspective of individuals living a truly modern existence; this form of denki is an impressive reflection of Benjamin’s claim that “the city was now landscape, now a room.”

Eight

The landscape/room of the city changed considerably in the time between the 19th century Paris that transfixed Walter Benjamin and the contemporary Tokyo whose image reigns over shindenki fiction. The nature of this separation is best embodied by the intervening intensification of communication technology. As we have all recently witnessed, Benjamin’s observation that “for the first time the living-space became distinguished from the place of work” only took a few short years to undo itself under the combined force of the network economy and a worldwide pandemic. We did not arrive in this place all at once: During the Napoleonic Wars a mere two centuries ago, orders were still transmitted via paper on horseback; by the time of the American Civil War, electronic telegrams were used to relay messages across the nation; during the First World War, telephone lines allowed commanders in the trenches to verbally communicate with one another across vast distances in real time, and even occasionally contact the home front; the Gulf War was broadcast live on CNN; the current Ukraine War has been coordinated by soldiers with smartphones, which they have used to control drones and broadcast their actions on Telegram.

At the mid-point of these developments, Marshall McLuhan said:

All media are extensions of some human faculty—psychic or physical. … The electro-magnetic discoveries have recreated the simultaneous “field” in all human affairs so that the human family now exists under conditions of a “global village.”

This enlargement of human senses, Benjamin’s anonymous masses, the rise of novelistic conceptions of realism, and shindenki’s compressed social space are all homologous—of the same origin. This origin lies within Benjamin’s “way in which human perception is organised—the medium in which it occurs:” A viscous cultural mass that emerges from the material ‘mode of existence’, like amino acids forming atop primordial bedrock. As a general matter, the developments of such mediums of thought have tended in the direction of reifying social forms. Art has been at the frontlines of this tendency through drawing, writing, and architecture. The same is true of money as a reification of social value.

Throughout history, the private person started to intrude on the public space in proportion to the emergence of mediums that broadened their mode of perception. A highly visible moment in this story was the Gutenberg revolution, which was when innovations in the printing press during the 15th century led to an explosion of books throughout Europe and altered the fundamental meaning of reading and writing. Around the same time, the development of multi-sail carracks drove an economic metamorphosis within the concept of cross-continental trade and travel—and accidentally led to the colonisation of the Americas by Europeans.

Cultural modernisation is, in a phrase, symptomatic of the private person existing in public. Or most accurately, reflective of how the intrusion of the private into the public allows us to see our own private selves as a position within a public space. When the private and public are truly divided, the individual does not witness the public, they simply are either in or out of the public. Therein we can see the shift to a world where human senses are enlarged, faceless strangers surround us, art exists to express the private, and the public or social seems to always be melting away. Referring to this positioning of the self within a public space as the ideology of “landscape,” Koujin Karatani explained that:

The theme of the exploration of the modern self, however diverse its articulations, dominates discussions of modern Japanese literature. Yet it is laughable to speak of this modern self as if it were purely a mental or psychological phenomenon. For this modern self is rooted in materiality and comes into existence—if I may put it this way—only by being established as a system. …

To treat the psychological as an autonomous sphere, as the science of psychology does, is an historical, not a timeless, phenomenon. The most significant development in the third decade of the Meiji period was rather the consolidation of modern systems and the emergence of “landscape,” not so much as a phenomenon contesting such systems, but as itself a system. … In the very moment when we become capable of perceiving landscape, it appears to us as if it had been there, outside of us, from the start.

That Karatani uses the word landscape to describe this phenomenon is rather apt; Benjamin also used the word landscape, combining it with the word room to characterise the form of the space that modern people see in the city. This parallel helps us clarify the less intuitive dynamics of the system: Why is it that placing the private self within the public sphere intensifies a psychological sense of the self rather than dampening it? It is rather like a deep-sea oil leak. When undersea oil reserves are under the sea floor, it is impossible to spot them from the surface. But when a crack appears, allowing the oil to mix with the sea water, fully intact bubbles of oil will float to the surface, allowing one to see what was hidden underneath the whole time. In much the same way, the technological, architectural, and economical extrusion of the self from beyond the brain results in psycho-cultural ‘bubbles’ that make the sudden importance of the individual unavoidably conspicuous.

Nine

As corresponding technologies and economic forces develop across history, the social consequences of the enlargement of the human subject also evolve. In what we call the pre-modern world (that is, the world prior to Gutenberg’s printing press), the art of the story was relatively unresponsive to the private sense of the individual. This is a subject we have discussed on this blog previously, but characters in pre-modern literature tended to be presented in a sense corresponding to a public self. That is, their natures were static symbols for public ideas of morality or principle. The stage for such performances was not ‘reality’ in the sense of something privately constructed by the author, but a publicly understood symbolic idea or setting. Kiyoshi Kasai underscored this similarity between pre-modern Japanese and European narrative-forms like so:

All three great [Greek] tragedy writers wrote of the legend of Electra … in addition, Sophocles wrote two different stories in the tradition of the Oedipus myth. These stories were conceived of with the lore of Oedipus as an established ‘world’ to draw from. In the same manner as kabuki’s established use of a ‘world’ such as chuushingura, Greek tragedy used the ‘world’ of Oedipus.

The novel and modern literature are by contrast interested in ideas of ‘character development’ which serve the purpose of psychologising the private life of the individual by explaining the unique motivations for their behaviour. This is exactly why characters occupy such importance for the modern, novelistic story: It is a form that is fundamentally concerned with showing the experiences that led a person to thinking and feeling a certain way.

While this central thrust has always been present, certain approaches to the novel have come into or out of fashion depending on the exact cultural configuration that suits the technology, economics, politics, and social situation of the time. The highly introspective form of the early 20th century novel, for example, acted as a corrective to the falling relevance of the Naturalist novel in the face of film. As Gore Vidal explains:

With television (ten new “live” plays a week; from such an awful abundance, a dramatic renaissance must come) the great audience now has the immediacy it has always craved, the picture which moves and talks, the story experienced, not reported. … The novel is left only the best things: that exploration of the inner world’s divisions and distinctions where no camera may follow, the private, the necessary pursuit of the whole which makes the novel, at its highest, the humane art that Lawrence called “The one bright book of life.”

In some senses, the shift from the 1980s of denki and the 1990s of shindenki was a small one. As a result, there are more similarities than dissimilarities between the two genres. However, as we discussed earlier in the post, there was a particular importance to the change for Japan, as those ten years made a considerable dent to the cultural relevance of the memory of the pre-war period, and also saw the arrival of a large economic recession which solidified the visibility of capitalism, employment, and money. In this sense, shindenki’s motivating difference was transforming mythological storytelling to always and everywhere be about the kind of inescapable capitalist modernisation that had now fully matured in Japan. This sense of inescapability was also inculcated by international circumstances. The end of the Cold War produced a kind of mature sense of finality for all of global culture. The monopolarity promised by the American Empire was, in its total victory over the USSR, now a kind of universal centre with no available periphery: this was the era where Francis Fukuyama famously wrote The End of History, and suggested that there was a kind of finality to the liberal democratic capitalism of the 1990s.

In this sense, Tsunehiro Uno’s focus on 9/11 does note something of considerable significance: The universality of the American centre was peeled back slightly by 9/11, the resultant quagmire in the Middle East, and the 2008 recession. It could be argued that Nasu’s explosive success in 2004 and onwards depended in part on this slight return of the international periphery. But the timeline is all wrong for any kind of simple chain of causation: Interest in denki-like stories that represented pure city-life and capitalist culture had already started to break onto the scene in Japan in the late 1990s with Kara no Kyoukai and Boogiepop. And Tsukihime was already rocketing through the self-published dating sim scene throughout 2001 prior to 9/11. We cannot rely on Uno’s model of “decisionism” in the face of international terrorism to explain the rise and fall of shindenki.

Rather, Nasu’s approach to writing denki—a genre he had been reading since his youth—was shaped by the range of factors which had given Japan’s modernisation a sense of complete totality by the late 1990s. In the first part of this post, we discussed Nasu’s self-stated reasons for developing a greater interest in the interior characterisation of his protagonists. Nasu’s particular interests combined with the particular cultural configuration inculcated by the economic, technological, and political modernisation around him in order to make his works popular with a wide audience. This is a fuller history of how Nasu’s style of shindenki came into being. But what about its decline—or rather, its disposability within the subsequent development of a Fate/ franchise?

Ten

The ironic reality of the period of Nasu’s rise is that, despite its sense of cultural finality, it was actually occurring in parallel to a Gutenberg level techno-economic reshuffling. The modernity that shindenki reflected in its depiction of a homogenous urban existence was undergoing a strange inversion. The internet, in its essence, is an extension of human sensory experience in the same manner as all of the other mediums of modernisation. However, some of the underlying details invite problematic considerations. Participation in television or radio has always been possible, but they are not the dominant force of the medium: The audience receives television, heightening their consciousness of the stranger, but they live their life in the city. But participation in the sense of the internet has a very different relationship to the idea of private existence precisely because it produces an alternate space for existence: it does not alter the city, it replaces it.

The meaning of this inversion was briefly glimpsed during the CoViD pandemic of 2020, when certain illusions fell away. Japan no longer looked like this:

It instead looked like this:

The replaceability of the city demonstrated by such a phenomenon has implications that fly exactly in the face of the kind of city witnessed by Walter Benjamin. A city used to be the result of the need for masses of people to intermingle in order to accomplish tasks within the economic and technological conditions of modernity. Without the people, there was no purpose to the city. While Benjamin’s portrait of the city seems to contrast with pre-modern life, as a triumph of the private-person-in-public, it was precisely defined by the dialectical tangling of the two: A mix of both landscape and room, as Benjamin said. By contrast, the city of 2020 was simply an accumulation of rooms; the public space transformed into a façade in its emptiness. The landscape of society was now thoroughly digital.

While computers and network technology were required for the emergence of a literally digital culture, the hollowing out of the public city is representative of certain subcultural trends that were already embedded within earlier processes of modernisation. Fully capturing these strands would take up another full post of this length, so a degree of restraint is required. However, we can address the gist of the matter. While there is a continuous story to the mediums of modernisation in terms of their enlarging of human experience, there is a disconnect in their underlying means of production. Or more accurately, a subterranean pressure point that only managed to break into the surface with the technology available in the 20th century: For all of the attempts at automation implicit in innovations like Gutenberg’s printing press, the realisation of an economy capable of truly mechanical production is fairly recent. Daniel Bell’s discussion of the matter reads:

Marx and Engels envisaged a society in which there would be only two classes, capitalist and worker—the few who owned the means of production and the many who lived by selling their labor power. … Yet if one takes the industrial worker as the instrument of the future, or, more specifically, the factory worker as the symbol of the proletariat, then this vision is warped. For the paradoxical fact is that as one goes along the trajectory of industrialization—the increasing replacement of men by machines—one comes logically to the erosion of the industrial worker himself.

The 20th century had partially realised this fact by the time of Bell’s writing, and fully manifested it shortly afterwards:

Art, in turn, developed in accordance with industrialisation’s “increasing replacement of men by machines.” Not just in terms of the themes it represents, but in its method of production. An economy based around technology that allows for the production of goods by machines also allows for art to be reproduced via those same industrial technologies, and distributed on mass. This change in production radically alters the horizons of art. Walter Benjamin convincingly explains this in two of his essays, which we will enter into the record now so that we do not need to become too stuck on the minutiae of this point. But to quote from the first briefly:

For the first time in world history, technological reproducibility emancipates the work of art from its parasitic subservience to ritual. To an ever-increasing degree, the work reproduced becomes the reproduction of a work designed for reproducibility. From a photographic plate for example, one can make any number of prints; to ask for the “authentic” print makes no sense. But as soon as the criterion of authenticity ceases to be applied to artistic production, the whole social function of art is revolutionized. Instead of being founded on ritual, it is based on a different practice: politics.

This process of art losing its sense of authenticity is intimately linked with the post-industrial economy of the 20th century and beyond. As art is produced via technologies that allow for the distribution of exact copies, it takes on the properties of a transferable, replaceable commodity. The impacts of this shift are myriad and complex. But for the purposes of our current issue, the most pressing concern is the emergence of a kind of mass privacy through its reproduction. As the public space as a shared ritual evaporates, our ‘public’ lives become an accumulation of others’ private lives that we consume. Benjamin also hinted at exactly this, saying:

For centuries it was in the nature of literature that a small number of writers confronted many thousands of readers. This began to change toward the end of the past century. With the growth and extension of the press, which constantly made new political, religious, scientific, professional, and local journals available to readers, an increasing number of readers—in isolated cases, at first—turned into writers. It began with the space set aside for “letters to the editor” in the daily press, and has now reached a point where there is hardly a European engaged in the work process who could not, in principle, find an opportunity to publish somewhere or other an account of a work experience, a complaint, a report, or something of the kind. Thus, the distinction between author and public is about to lose its axiomatic character.

Technological development produced the culture of modernity where experiences require an originating individual voice to articulate its authorship. But ironically, similar technological developments, when carried through to certain extremes under the conditions of industrial production, erased the author in turn. This is an important originating force for postmodernity as it has been described previously on this blog.  Such changes do not arrive all at once; for many, given the importance placed on authenticity and authorship by modernity, the hollowing out of these principles at the hands of commodification only makes them all the more valued in their scarcity.

Eleven

Industrial technologies allowed for the mechanical production of art. Post-industrial network technologies allow for the mechanical consumption of art. In our present context, machine-driven consumption has been fully realised by the world of the algorithmic content engine. But even before that stage, mechanical consumption was an implicit feature of the internet and its relationship to art. Mechanical consumption in this sense is the inversion of mechanical production along a particular axis—or more accurately, a furthering of its logic into new domains. Earlier, I said:

Participation in television or radio has always been possible, but they are not the dominant force of the medium: The audience receives television, heightening their consciousness of the stranger, but they live their life in the city. But participation in the sense of the internet has a very different relationship to the idea of private existence precisely because it produces an alternate space for existence: it does not alter the city, it replaces it.

Television is a medium shaped by the use of technology to mass produce its artistic content. But through mass participation in a technological medium which shapes that artistic content in turn, such as the internet, the audience becomes a producer in a secondary, meta-art. For art that no longer needs to be solely authorial and authentic to function, this secondary meta-art can be consumed as the primary work. And it is. By mechanical consumption, I mean this process, where the use of technology to consume a work of art produces an ancillary artistic experience, which is then actually consumed in place of the work itself. Outside of the domain of art, the market has been aware of this inversion for quite some time. Modern American advertising is built on an axiomatic understanding that consumers buy brands, not products. Brands are in fact the specific construction of a shared symbol or image that the consumer recognises in place of the product. As soon as art was untethered from the authenticity of an original, unreproducible experience, it was possible for it to be consumed as a brand.

Twelve

Japan, aided by the rapidity of their own modernisation, has developed an extreme sensitivity to the cultural phenomena brought on by mechanical consumption. The consequences of this on narrative art were already present in the immediate post-war era.

Mascot characters initially emerged as an incidental tradition in American collegiate sports. However, the proliferation of industries well suited to mascots in puppetry and animation during the mid 20th century brought such characters into their own—and revealed the degree to which they are more than just an empty marketing symbol. Walt Disney had, among the American capitalists of the era, the clearest vision to the degree to which a so-called ‘crummy commercial’ depended on stories and the artistic experience. Disney’s chief product to this day remains this sense of the importance of the story—imagining the American dream, as films and theme parks, for a profit. Osamu Tezuka, the so-called father of anime and manga, was obsessed by his admiration for Disney’s products, especially his company’s animation. Even as Tezuka’s understanding of the world was more that of an artist than a businessman.

Of all of the many things that distinguished Tezuka from Walt Disney, this genuine artistic passion probably proved most decisive. After all, Tezuka’s commitment to experimentation and willingness to tackle exclusively adult subjects would have baffled Disney, whose pangs of creativity were always subservient to his desire to make money. Naturally, Disney made a fabulous amount of that money and founded a company whose control of the global entertainment industry persists to this day, while Tezuka decidedly did not. But what Tezuka did accomplish was constructing a context and arena that was far more artistically dynamic than Disney’s vision of the cartoon as an unchallenging advertisement. Of course, the developing world of anime and manga was far from adverse to advertisements and commercialisation. Tezuka’s interest in Disney was one of the reasons that his art tends towards exaggerated, mascot-like features. And the businessmen of Japan took note: A burgeoning animation industry was funded on the back of the realisation that such characters were capable of inviting a particularly profitable kind of sympathy.

The subsequent history of anime and manga is marked by this curious interplay of the artistic and the commercial. We cannot and will not develop this full history: the kind of art fostered by this fertile soil turned out to be fundamentally ahead of its time. As the technological conditions of mechanical consumption crystalised across the Japanese and world economy, the industry went from strength to strength. A particularly notable summit came in the 1990s with the ascent of a particular kind of fan known as the otaku in correlation with titles such as Sailor Moon and Neon Genesis Evangelion, and also the mass introduction of the market to the West via Pokémon and the risk-taking of cable television broadcasters such as in the case of Cartoon Network’s Toonami time-slot.

A shortcut to understanding otaku culture is understanding that the otaku were those who had an early and profound reaction to the mascot features of the character-types which had developed in anime and manga in the shadow of Tezuka, and the subsequent socioeconomic context of Japan. In particular, the combination of these exaggerated mascot features with the aesthetic preferences of girls’ romance subcultures during the so-called renaissance of shoujo (girls’) manga and the lolicon boom during the 1970s. (In recognition of how we shall need to abbreviate this history, here is a video essay to summarise some of the core concepts:)

Such characters, and the stories they were involved with, inspired a profound and lasting impact on these young hyper-engaged consumers. And as this community and subculture matured over subsequent generations, the reasons for this attachment became more explicit. Tamaki Saitou, a psychoanalyst and expert on the subculture, wrote of them that:

Otaku seek value in fictionality itself, but they are also extremely sensitive to different levels of fictionality. From within our increasingly mediatized environment, it is already difficult to draw a clear distinction between reality and fiction. It is no longer a matter of deciding whether we are seeing one or the other, but of judging which level of fiction something represents.

This conscious embrace of the fictional is the most pervasive feature of otaku culture. In this sense, it is not just a break with the immediate aesthetics of modernity, but with one of the most commonplace aspirations of art throughout history—that of realism. (Get owned, Georg Lukacs.) It is even accurate to say that the otaku mindset tends towards a sceptical view of the concept of realism itself.

Such scepticism is thoroughly represented in their attitude towards characters in fiction. Differences on this point are a major issue both because interest in specific characters was a driving force in the formation of otaku to begin with and also because the novelistic approach to characterisation present in modern literature is itself definitional. In the modern novel, characters drive the story because the purpose of the novel is to communicate an experience by allowing the audience to understand it in a sense informed by (a) particular human perspective(s). This is to give the novel a sense of realism as understood within the context of a modern world centred on the experiences of individuals: Such realism can only be developed by communicating the psychological development of individual characters. Otaku culture, in its embrace of the fictionality, departs from this model: Being unable to enjoy such modern character development is not necessarily definitional to being an otaku, but an otaku can also enjoy characters who act as symbolic mascots for highly visible character traits, of the kind that do not evolve and do not require psychological explication over the course of the story. Kiyoshi Kasai explains this evolution in the following terms:

In the context of novels, theatre, and film, the term character had a technical definition. However, from the 1970s onwards, the term gained an additional meaning. For example, the word character in the sense of the merchandise and character goods sold by Sanrio does not carry the implication of a personality or psychology as it does in the technical usage. It refers to the illustrations purely depicting a character’s appearance—particularly in an anime-style. … This kind of character deconstructs the technical word character—meaning “personality”—into the word’s other sense—meaning “symbol”.

From the 1970s onwards, plastic models sold by toy makers were marketed using robot anime as advertisements. While such anime did not get to the point where their characters were entirely robbed of their “personality” and reduced to mere “symbols” for plastic models, it also was not uncommon for the toy makers to override the preferences of the anime design team and impose their own vision for the sake of marketability.

In this manner, children’s fiction was where the technical term for character in an artistic, literary sense was mixed and generalised with the other sense of the word character.

Kasai’s account is particularly important precisely because it does not position the emergence of the otaku sense of character as entirely replacing the modern novelistic character: It is not that otaku have no conception of the artistic and are completely taken in by commercialised mascot characters. It is that a particular type of appeal to fictionality itself was revealed when the transparent marketing appeal of mascot features was added to and augmented the existing features of artistic fiction. Otaku coined a new word to describe when they felt this appeal—to moe (a verb).

Thirteen

The term otaku emerged as a play on the Japanese second-person pronoun o-taku, which literally means “your family” or “your home”. However, the more common usage of this original word was to address another person with an appropriate level of formal distance—that is, a second-person pronoun with exactly the same kind of perfunctory respect as asking a co-worker about their wife. The psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, who believed that speech always means more than the speaker intends, would have been thrilled by such an accident of language: The word otaku, which nominally means nerd or super-fan in Japan today, has a poetic implication of a distant and anonymously collective “you” who is also a home and a family.

A mode of consumption based around fandoms is so ubiquitous today among highly engaged readers and watchers that it is easy to imagine that fandoms have existed as long as art itself. And certainly, it is very rare that a social phenomenon has absolutely no historical antecedents; there are always eccentrics who defy the dominant trends of their age. But the concrete origins of modern mass scale fandom can be traced back to the proliferation of episodic genre fiction. Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories were a notable flash point. Mystery fiction, like otaku media, disrupts the structuring of character as conventionally understood in modern literature. This is implicit to their double layered narrative structure, where diegetic truth is not chiefly subject to change, only revelation. S. S. Van Dine articulated the gap between the characters of mystery fiction and the characters of modern literature, saying:

[Characters] should merely fulfil the requirements of plausibility, so that their actions will not appear to spring entirely from the author’s preconceived scheme. Any closely drawn character analysis, any undue lingering over details of temperament, will act only as a clog in the narrative machinery. The automaton of the cheap detective thriller detracts from the reader’s eagerness to rectify the confusion of the plot; and the subtly limned personality of the “literary” detective novel shunts the analytic operations of the reader’s mind to extraneous considerations.

The essential nature of each character in a whodunit story is set in place; the culprit is the culprit from the start, the victim is the victim, the detective is the detective: there is a sense of destiny present in the narrative structure, whose form is set in place in the name of fair play. The character development in a mystery story is almost purely from the audience’s perspective, as they come to understand the established and unchanging truth of the matter via the solution to the puzzle. To ignore this and include characters who change too drastically—and too novelistically—would be to compromise on the formal rigidity of this puzzle.

This peculiar understanding of characters is evocative of Kiyoshi Kasai’s notion of characters who exist in the sense of a “symbol” rather than a “personality”—after all, Kasai’s original purpose in developing this theory of symbolic characters was to argue for its pertinence to mystery fiction. And relevantly for our purposes, the structure of mystery fiction highlights the differing structure of characters as personalities and as symbols. It should be obvious, but a character is not a real person, no matter how realistically they are presented to the audience. Even in a biographical story where a character represents a real person, the representation is different from that person in a semiotic sense. A real person has a concrete existence as a definite person who lived a certain life and has their own thoughts. A character is a symbol—an image of a person, rendered via the accumulated content of the work of art within a medium. A character in a film comes to exist from the interaction between the actor’s performance and the cinematography, the editing, the sound design, and all of the other composite features of the film as a medium. In a similar manner, the character in the novel is a fictional construction who is invented by the words on the page. Even if the audience’s impressions are shaped by this character’s comparability to a real person, the freedom that the author enjoys to change this character by changing the words on the page demonstrates the ultimately symbolic nature of their existence.

If all characters have a fundamentally symbolic structure, what is it that distinguishes a so-called symbolic character from one in the sense of a personality? A character in the sense of a personality is one who is depicted in an attempt to simulate their full psychological structure as a person. That is, relying on a Naturalistic sense of realism, their various actions, thoughts, motivations, and relationships throughout the story conglomerate together to form the sense of a person with a unified identity and life. A revealing distinction can be located in the extent to which the character-as-personality relies on the in-text construction of an illusion of personhood, whereas a symbolic character is allowed to exist as a collection of traits and ideas which originate from outside of the text. This separation between inside and outside is definitional to the self-conception of modern literature. To write characters novelistically is to write characters whose justification and nature is all present within the text. And more to the point, this mode sees characters as defined by an accumulation of diegetic experiences. Such characters emerge from the content of the novel, and their development within it: They are constructed from the philosophy that a character is one and the same with their surrounding (con)text, and cannot be transplanted to an entirely different narrative without altering the character.

The phenomenon of fandoms is fundamentally driven by interest in fictional characters. Their crystallisation around the Sherlock Holmes stories was focused on enlivening recurring characters, especially the titular Sherlock Holmes and the narrator John Watson. The episodic nature of the Holmes stories as well as the structural features of mystery fiction were all important catalysts in the formulation of a new kind of reader in the fandoms. The presentation of disconnected, episodic narratives interrupted the conventional structure of characterisation present in modern literature. The recurring characters jumped from case to case with little interior change as personalities. In fact, the diegetic timeline across stories often amounted to a pure formality, and the stories could resultantly be read out of order. This accelerated the recognition of characters as self-defined symbols—as was already implicit to mystery fiction. The Sherlock Holmes stories do not show the psychological emergence of Holmes as a personality; Holmes is already a consulting detective at the beginning of the narrative, and neither Holmes nor Watson drastically evolve in a novelistic manner. Similar patterns continued throughout the mystery fiction of the early 20th century, where detectives and Watson-type characters confronted repeated episodic cases with little impetus for introspective character development.

While mystery fiction was an early home for fandoms, their zenith arrived via science fiction. From the 1930s onwards, fandoms formed around the emerging world of science fiction pulp magazines in even greater proportion than their existence in the mystery fiction space. But their mass era came in the 1960s with the inculcation of long-running episodic science fiction TV shows such as Star Trek, Doctor Who, and The Man from U.N.C.L.E.. Science fiction is ultimately very different from mystery fiction in the finer details, but they do both revolve around the highly formalised use of narrative to focus on something apart from the novelistic priorities of character-driven literature. For mystery fiction, this is the puzzle to be solved. For science fiction this is the creation of believable and detailed technologies and similar scientific concepts. However, with the limited runtime of episodic TV shows such as Star Trek, the purpose of this formalised structure shifts slightly. Any given episode can only develop a small proportion of the interplanetary universe imagined by its creators. The format chosen is decidedly procedural in a manner comparable to the structure of TV crime dramas: A recurring cast of characters encounter a new problem that introduces some specific slice of the Star Trek world. The episode then goes through a very strict 3-act structure in order to demonstrate the nature of this slice of the world, depict the characters in peril due to some problem, and then reveal how some feature of the world introduced earlier in the episode would allow the characters to escape their predicament. That Star Trek and Doctor Who remain mainstays of fandom spaces to this day demonstrates the suitability of such formats to fandom-like consumption. Of course, fandoms today have expanded far beyond the limits that can be easily understood via the limited framework of episodic procedurals. In order to get to the essence of such evolutions, we need to locate the shared points of interest between fandoms today and fandoms in their original form.

Fourteen

Fandoms, like any cultural institution, ultimately arose to fulfil a specific need. In the first order, that need is simply to gather fans together. In that sense, any gathering of celebratory voices in response to narrative media is a fandom—something that has occurred in a limited form all throughout the history of literature. But in the second order, fandoms as a cultural mass phenomenon manifested in response to the popularity of a particular era of episodic TV programmes. We have already discussed the essential characteristics of these programmes as indicative of the early era of fandom. But what deeper needs did fandom appeal to that has allowed the concept to perpetuate far beyond comparable media in the contemporary era?

The mystery stories and science fiction shows that most appealed to early fandoms were episodic. But their episodic character was instrumental to the actual interest of these fans: Such episodic stories necessitated characters that were stable and able to move from plot to plot without needing to be developed in a novelistic sense from the ground up. While an episodic story is diegetically continuous for the sake of its identity, its realism, and due to historical conventions, the formal plot structure of an episodic procedural is more akin to an anthology series. The same set of characters are transported into novel circumstances with differing textures and tones. Despite the seeming repetitiveness and formulaic elements of such structures, the appeal comes precisely from seeing stable characters thrust into a range of different circumstances. This mode of engagement is fundamentally different from modern literature, which, as described by Kiyoshi Kasai, concerned itself with the author as the source of authenticity:

The modern literature that arrived after Rousseau begins with the vertical three-limbed structure of author-work-reader, which is taken to be natural and inevitable. With this structure, the author (my truth) is objectified and transposed into the work (my narrative). This work becomes an author surrogate for the reader. And with this framework, the reader can reach the author (my truth) through the act of accurately reading the work—that is, the author surrogate (my narrative). In fact, he must reach it: That is the irreplaceable, solemn meaning of reading in modern literature.

As a result, each word takes on only one meaning. Each sentence provides its own context. And the work solely represents the author. As long as we rely on the author-work-reader triad in our approach to modern literature, it will naturally be reduced to a direct author-reader structure. The work—down to its component words and sentences themselves—becomes a mere medium between the two. This medium is a regrettably necessary barrier in order to overlap the author’s truth with the reader’s truth, but nothing more.

Due to the particular characteristics of television, the character-focused procedural incidentally happened upon a far deeper interruption of this structure than the creators could have been aware of. Characters-as-personalities are built around and within the particular features of the individual text as an independent body of context. However, anthology storytelling needed to create deep and lasting artistic connections while operating with symbolic characters who could be transported between texts—episodes—freely. Such characters became their own context, and their own authors.

Fans crave such non-novelistic characters because they can be engaged with interactively, not passively in the manner of novelistic characters who are defined by their author. The importance of participatory media to the fan can be seen most clearly in their interest in derivative works and fanfiction. And, in fact, the telling of anthology stories with stable characters as happened upon by episodic TV programmes replicates many of the same fundamental points of appeal as reading fanfiction. Fanfiction reads all characters as symbolic, as defined to completion by their representation in their original text. Such characters are then utilised in new settings, new plots, or in crossover events in order to synthesise new dynamics from within the recognisably ‘same’ character.

The emerging participatory features of new media were already understood by Walter Benjamin, who said:

It is inherent in the technology of film, as of sports, that everyone who witnesses these performances does so as a quasi-expert. Anyone who has listened to a group of newspaper boys leaning on their bicycles and discussing the outcome of a bicycle race will have an inkling of this. In the case of film, the newsreel demonstrates unequivocally that any individual can be in a position to be filmed. But that possibility is not enough. Any person today can lay claim to being filmed. …

Nowhere more than in the cinema are the reactions of individuals, which together make up the massive reaction of the audience, determined by the imminent concentration of reactions into a mass. No sooner are these reactions manifest than they regulate one another. Again, the comparison with painting is fruitful. A painting has always exerted a claim to be viewed primarily by a single person or by a few, The simultaneous viewing of paintings by a large audience, as happens in the nineteenth century, is an early symptom of the crisis in painting, a crisis triggered not only by photography but, in a relatively independent way, by the artwork’s claim to the attention of the masses. Painting, by its nature, cannot provide an object of simultaneous collective reception, as architecture has always been able to do, as the epic poem could do at one time, and as film is able to do today. …

The masses are a matrix from which all customary behavior toward works of art is today emerging newborn. Quantity has been transformed into quality: the greatly increased mass of participants has produced a different kind of participation.

But Benjamin’s experience of these phenomena was still early, despite his forward-looking insights. Benjamin reasoned that such participatory elements were intrinsic to how film and TV are mass produced with the technology of industrial production. The expansion of fandoms reveals a slight addition to this story: While the industrial production of art led to its mass consumption as a prerequisite for participation of the masses, this phenomenon, which was subliminal to the early experience of industrial art, becomes front of mind when these industrial technologies are deployed in the consumption of art.

Fandoms are core to this process. Fandoms use communication technology to fill the spaces within and between canonical texts with special avenues and mediums for audience participation. The role of technology in this process was subtler in the age of TV, when the force of the medium directed creators into inadvertently discovering the essential features of fanfiction. This discovery was then codified into an actual fandom and actual fanworks by modern communication technology in the context of fan-zines, the arrival of the modern fan-convention, and other such developments. In Japan, where fans were more radically attuned to the underlying nature of symbolic characters, the response was decisive. Western fans chiefly responded to media that perpetuated the kinds of symbolic characters who could be participated with in a ‘playful’ manner that placed fans on even footing with the author, but they did so tepidly and conservatively. The otaku culture emerging in Japan by contrast was radical in its embrace of such phenomena. The otaku openly understood that contemporary consumption was to be defined by the overlapping of symbolic mascots with art.

The age of the internet has been especially revealing for this equivalence in how it has intensified the underlying process within both cultures, and for how it has homogenised the global media environment. The developments since have demonstrated the degree to which the otaku who responded enthusiastically to anime-style corporate mascots and the fandoms who embraced Star Trek for its interactivity were of the same fundamental type. Before the internet, fandoms existed at a kind of distance from the daily lives of participants. The work of art would appear as it is on TV, and then a subsequent meta-work was created by fans, embodied in a collective fandom, and consumed by other fans using communication technology. The decisive impact of the internet on this, as the most transformative change to communication technology in centuries, was the elimination of the implicit temporal gap of earlier fandoms. Art could now be consumed with constant, instantaneous access to the meta-work in parallel to the original work. Indeed, within the emergence of Web 2.0 type social media and beyond, this temporal gap has been inverted: Fandoms are reified into commodities and embedded within social media. Fans then participate in overlapping social groups, chosen via self selection and via algorithm, and consume works of art as a secondary, subsequent means of engaging in their primary hobby, which is the expression of themselves and consumption of their community. In other words, the internet has allowed the mechanical consumption of art to displace the organic consumption of art.

Fifteen

The technological changes that have taken place over the past century have utterly replaced the communal space—the city—with an accumulation of private spaces that blur together to a remarkable degree. In this context, we no longer consume the work of art as the representation of the author as some far-off individual in their own private space. We participate in the joining of private spaces and consume this accumulation—this fandom, this otakudom—as equivalent to or even superior to the work of art itself. When sorting between these meta-works, older modes of categorisation based solely around the content of works, such as genres, have become outdated. Works are now grouped based on how they communicate the communities the individual belongs to, and the values that these communities represent—or most accurately in the context of social media, express. When works are not consumed as themselves but on the basis of the whole cultural idea that exists beyond the work, the brand replaces the genre as the primary categorisation for art.

The brand and the symbolic character were always, formally speaking, similar concepts. Just as the brand endeavours to create a symbolic meta-commodity that the consumer internalises and consumes apart and over the actual product, the work of art in the age of mechanical consumption endeavours to create a symbolic meta-character that the consumer internalises and is able to consume apart and over the canonical text. In this circumstance, where the metatexts that prevail in social groups known as fandoms or otaku are more important than the underlying text as-itself, assessing and grouping works on the basis of these fan communities is the only artistically sensible response.

Sixteen

The evolving career of Nisio, Isin cannot be understood in terms of individual responsiveness to genres in the manner attempted by Tsunehiro Uno. Throughout the Zaregoto and Monogatari series, Nisio does not jump between genres cleanly and in response to the audience in the manner implied by Uno. Instead, Nisio is fundamentally promiscuous with the whole concept of genre. While he does endeavour to give his works individual identities to separate them from one another, he is happy to use different tones and different kinds of settings within the same series in accordance with his own whims and interests as an author. This should come as no surprise since Nisio’s style is not built on a definite literary lineage, but instead from his own eclectic interests as an extremely otaku-like consumer of pop culture. He is the type of consumer to list Ryuusui Seiryouin’s outlandishly metafictional shinhonkaku mysteries, Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure, 80s shoujo manga, and Western Marvel movies as equally important works of art. For such an author, it is entirely natural that he should write the Monogatari series and have it be his most representative series. The Monogatri series, despite its nominal attempt to blend mysteries in the style of Natsuhiko Kyougoku with the shindenki supernatural settings Nisio had experimented with in Zaregoto, has no concrete genre. It is an accumulation of wildly different novels that are tied together by a fairly loose set of esoteric supernatural rules and a recurring cast of characters who are filled with the same kind of anime-like moe mascot traits that appeal to otaku. Nisio, Isin’s success is not due to his use of genre, but in his rejection of it as a limiting factor. He writes in a style that is akin to writing fanfiction about his own worlds and his own characters, and is therefore able to appeal to contemporary consumers regardless of the particular trends in popular genre fiction emerging around him. Nisio, Isin crafted himself as a brand, and allows his works to freely take on the style of a community playing with symbolic characters for their own ends.

Seventeen

When Faust highlighted the work of Ryuukishi07 in Higurashi and beyond as the next step in shindenki fiction, they were more or less correct about his work having appeal, and about how this appeal would overlap with some general aesthetic genre interests shared by Kinoko Nasu. However, given the emergence of the internet and advanced otaku culture in the time since the original denki boom, Ryuukishi07’s most immediate point of comparison could not be other authors in the same genre space. It could only be Ryuukishi07 himself, as he extended the world and brand of 07th Expansion—his self-publishing circle. Regardless of Ryuukishi’s later returns to the denki genre, interest in his works is defined by interest in particular elements that can be embodied in the surrounding fan community and branding. Discussions are not likely to centre on the context of Higurashi in comparison to contemporaneous works of interest like Shiki or Tsukihime or Boogiepop. Instead, Higurashi fans are interested in how the recurring characters are depicted when they appear in fanservice spin-off chapters, or in the TV anime, or in semi-cameos in other When They Cry works like Umineko. The whole idea of Higurashi existing as just one of many works in a movement in the style of the earlier denki movement is antithetical to the whole mode of existing as one who consumes Higurashi, given the pervasive importance of its fan community to defining its meaning and context.

Eighteen

Rewrite’s content is, artistically speaking, a remarkable response to the thematic ideas presented in the oeuvre of Kinoko Nasu and other major denki works in the early 2000s. Were the dominant mode of consumption interested in ideas such as Tsunehiro Uno’s framework of “decisionism”, Rewrite’s reformulation of the essentially escapist fantasy of works like Fate/stay night into being unambiguously about mundane life in contemporary capitalist Japan would be obvious. The concept of an exterior source of meaning in the periphery is structured in terms of human-caused pollution and environmental decay, and the ultimate message of the story is centred on concepts of human technological and social progress. However, Rewrite did not emerge and could not exist in this context. As a dating sim produced by Key, it is necessarily consumed through the medium of the existing fandom for such mundane dating sim romance stories. In this way, the necessary questions invoked by its content are inverted: It is no longer about how the mundane world impacts the thematic reading of its fantastical adventure, it is necessarily discussed with a mind towards how its inclusion of fantastical elements impacts its mundane romance elements. The major question becomes whether or not such elements add to or improve the established Keyformula. And while Rewrite is assessed relatively positively in this light, it also highlights that the whole question of its genre is secondary to its reception as a work of art. By its release in 2011, it was entirely natural that its fandom would define it in terms of its particular history as a work of Key, rather than inserting it into the context of the action fantasy dating sims of the early 2000s that its plot nominally invokes.

Nineteen

For the literary magazine Faust, the works of Kinoko Nasu heralded a new movement in genre fiction. They said:

The present moment of the 2000s is one where the extraordinary content of the past has fused with our ordinary daily lives … One answer is the denki novel, which is a format that expertly depicts the extraordinary as part of the everyday … Based on this understanding, Faust has developed a “new (shin) denki” novel tradition that fuses the denki movement of the 1980s with the anime, manga, and video games of the 1990s.

However, for all of its nominal accuracy—given that there was a real trend of works in that era that genuinely invoked the motifs and concepts of denki fiction, which we have explored in a little detail throughout these posts—such a prediction was nonetheless stuck in a framework that saw the world in terms of literary movements and genres. While readers’ habits in the 1980s could be understood in terms of fairly straightforward cultural trends, such as Japan’s history since the end of the Second World War, Kinoko Nasu was never going to signal the kind of movement that could be explained in a similar manner in the world of 2004. Kinoko Nasu’s audiences do not experience him in the light of his work as a specific artistic response to overriding socio-political trends. Kinoko Nasu is experienced as Type-moon, a brand and community that invites its consumers to embrace the full fictionality of its world as an extended universe above and beyond the value of the original work of art.

One response to the first part of this post noted that “Nasu inherently stumbled into a reproducible, replicable format that inherently self fuels with the power of historical and cultural legacies.” This is essentially correct. However, we need to specify which precise historical and cultural legacy we mean. Is it the specific Japanese legacy of modernisation and urbanisation that is represented in the plotlines of shindenki stories? Or is it the fictional history and culture represented within Nasu’s works themselves—that is, the internal mythology of the heroes and the Nasuverse world as depicted in Fate/stay night? The first of these is very precisely wrong: Fate/ has thoroughly globalised as a brand, and extended into a media mix strategy that belies any reliance on the shindenki genre. The actual experience of consuming Fate/ today has little to do with the specific historical themes explored in the original works released by Nasu from 1998 to 2004. The second meaning of legacy is closer to the mark, but requires some exposition. The diegetic world created by Nasu is a key instrument in his lasting success and appeal. But it is not just that such a world has inherent appeal as a mythic retelling of history. It is that the particular structure of Fate/stay night found the right balance between shindenki, as an artistic depiction of modern urbanisation as being contiguous with the past, and the symbolic modes of thinking preferred in an environment of mechanical consumption.

What parts of Fate/ have remained the most relevant—the most enduring—in its multiple incarnations across several mediums? Its highly marketable characters, especially its Servants. Such characters exist as both personalities, as they appeared in the specificity of Fate/stay night,and as symbolic mascots extending into its spinoff material. The eventual zenith of Fate/ as Fate/Grand Order, a game where the player uses a slot machine mechanic in order to collect Servant characters as mascots, is not an aberration of the Fate/ phenomenon, but the crystallisation of its essence. Such commodification is not the critical and even the cultural summation of all there is to Fate/. I hope that the history and frameworks that we developed in the earliest sections of this post are enough to see that the works of Kinoko Nasu can be read as being rather interesting in the light of the longer lineage of denki-style fantasy fiction. But the perspective that we have refined in these subsequent sections also recontextualises these readings in the light of the foundational material context over which such cultural artefacts move.

What is it exactly that this post wishes to say about Fate/ in this context? The stark delineation implicit in this post, which has separately told a cultural history of Kinoko Nasu and a techno-economic history of Kinoko Nasu, is necessary because Kinoko Nasu is a phenomenon that cannot be properly understood through the lens of either story on their own. The mode of mechanical consumption which has intensified under the internet is also an extension of the industrial mechanical production of art developed in a modern capitalist economy. When Faust wrote their editorial in 2004 declaring Kinoko Nasu to be the beginning of a shindenki movement, they were accurately reading the significance of his works as art on their own terms. To simply decry Fate/stay night as a commodified representation of otaku culture would not accurately capture the reasons for his enduring appeal. However, Faust also underestimated or missed the changing modes of perception and modes of consumption present in the new digital economy of Japan by that stage. As the economy of Japan matured, culture changes that were embryonic in the prior decades of otaku culture were rapidly accelerating and shaping what art would mean in the coming century. Faust saw Kinoko Nasu’s impressive ability to capture the compression of social terrain in the city of the 20th century, but missed the evaporation and inversion of the city into a purely solitary experience in the digital economy of the 21st. This is a rather ironic misstep, given that they attached shindenki to the “anime, manga, and video games of the 1990s.”

Shindenki was a real genre, and one whose artistic appeal is well represented by the best works of Kinoko Nasu, such as Mahou Tsukai no Yoru. However, the destiny of Kinoko Nasu transcended older modes of thinking, such as the genres that concerned Faust. Fate/stay night is not a genre, it is a post-genre brand. Such a work of art does not simply end when the credits roll any more than Coke ends when you finish drinking a can. There’s still New Coke to try after all. To consume Fate/stay night is to participate in a lifestyle, and in a community. It is to play with its many variations and to engage with many genres through its lens. Art today is something that the audience is always participating in and developing—a process, not an object.

There is no original or authentic essence to copy from per se. Rather, Fate/stay night already has infinite copies in the form of itself. The work of art in the age of mechanical consumption now stretches out, an eternity within the mind, a landscape in a room. Refresh. Scroll. Refresh. Scroll some more. Did they post any new fan art today?

Author: Jared E. Jellson

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