A commentary on volume one of the Sekai series
Please read Our Broken World, the first volume of the Sekai series before continuing with this post. Both for the sake of spoilers and for your own sanity.
Since this post is so long, it is also available in epub here. (Some users may have to use the “save link as” function of their browser.)
The first thing that comes to mind for a post like this is what kind of audience it might have, and what expectations they would have for it. I expect that a decent number of people ended up here either through sheer chance or after being told that on the other side of this link is an incredibly long analysis of a Nisio, Isin novel. Certainly, I expect this is probably the longest commentary/review of a Nisio novel on the whole internet. Even the longest Japanese language review I can think of would be shorter if it were translated to English. But I do not want this fact to become some kind of stunt that defines this post. I wrote this because I love the novel Our Broken World, and there were a lot of tangents and ideas that came into being as I wanted to express exactly why that is.
I am definitely aware that some portions of this review, especially the middle section of Part One, are likely to be frustrating. It will feel more like you are doing homework rather than reading for pleasure. For this, I can only apologise for the fact that I failed to communicate things in a more fun and relaxed manner. There was a lot of information I needed to cover, and I am just not a good enough writer to make it fun to learn. Some people might even walk away from this post thinking that it was just a bunch of pseudointellectual, obscurantist gibberish. I can only offer my promise that it is not that. And also, I can offer my hopes that by casually covering some of the topics of the whole post via this introduction, you will be primed to follow along even when things get annoying and dense.
First, some context on my history with this novel. I started reading the Sekai series over a year before the release of this post. While doing so, I endeavoured to provide quick first impressions reviews that coincided with the release of the fan translation of each volume. In fact, you can still find the rest of these reviews on this very blog. I of course wrote out my impressions for the first volume of the series, Our Broken World, in this manner. (That review now redirects here, in order to avoid prying eyes.) However, as I look back on that review, there are two major problems with it. Firstly, it was a fairly mediocre review. I would never claim that every post on this blog is of the highest quality—or even that they meet any kind of meaningful standard. Nonetheless, that first review was substantially worse than my subsequent reviews of Sekai series novels. Secondly, my opinion about the series, and especially the first novel, has evolved considerably since I wrote those reviews. To be direct about it, Our Broken World is presently my favourite novel ever written—this was not the case when I wrote my first impressions, even if I enjoyed it quite a lot. The force of these two reasons was more than enough motivation to justify revisiting that novel in some form, and the size of that follow-up post ballooned into the gargantuan (shit)post that now lies before you. It would not do to have my review of my favourite novel be among my least favourite reviews.
To cover some background exposition: Our Broken World is a 2003 mystery novel written by the Japanese author Nisio, Isin. While he has subsequently dipped his toes into a much broader array of otaku-centric works, Nisio started out firmly in the world of mystery fiction. It would be a meaningless diversion to try to decisively classify him as either a “mystery author” or “otaku author”, but since both labels appeal to my interests, I have had my eye on him for quite some time. Even before I read this particular work, he was a strong contender for my favourite author—if such a title has any meaning with all of the caveats and nuances it invites. Regardless, even as the novel has been available in English translation for some time, interest in it has been relatively restrained compared to the more popular Zaregoto and Monogatari series from the same author.
I am sure more people would have been interested in this post if it was a commentary on one of those two series, but I can only say that the content of Our Broken World left a stronger impact on me. Despite this, I thought that a good place to start in terms of introducing Our Broken World and this post would be a quote from the start of the Zaregoto series. Near the beginning of that series, the series’ detective character declares:
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. Two ways. Either you allow your value to be absorbed by the world, or you chisel away at the world’s value and make it your own.
I think a lot of the repeated motifs and themes of Nisio’s work can be best understood by beginning with this quote. A constant refrain in his novels is how unique and remarkable individual human beings can be, and how challenging it can be for them to find a relationship with the world that they can accept. Individual people can be interesting and amazing, but the world does not offer them any clear meaning or use for being so. So long as they accept the world, people find it nearly impossible to find value in their own individuality. So, the choice put forward here is between embracing that individuality or finding a way to live in our world that enforces conformity. Both options cannot be obtained simultaneously.
Unsurprisingly, Our Broken World sees the world in a very similar way. To understand its viewpoint, we are going to start by analysing the novel through the lens of romance stories from the same era. These romances often fit into a very particular archetype known as sekai-kei stories, which fixated on individuals who felt abandoned by the wider world. These individuals would try to find their own meaning independent of the world through a high stakes romance in a fantastical setting. This will constitute Part One of this post.
For Part Two, we are going to focus on Our Broken World as a mystery novel. While it has many links and similarities to the sekai-kei romance stories that were contemporaneous with its publication, it distinguishes itself from them with a commitment to a decidedly non-fantastical whodunit mystery narrative. The fact that this mystery narrative is of the strictly non-fantastical kind as opposed to, say, the Zaregoto series, which takes influence from more bizarre otaku media, forms the backbone of what separates this novel.
In Part Three, we will consider in detail exactly what we should take away from these two different genre readings of the same novel. Hopefully, it will make the point of Our Broken World clear for those that did not really get much out of the novel itself. This is a story about people who cannot reconcile with the world. Such people tend to wish the world could be a fairer and more liberating one, such as what we find in fiction. By interrogating the question of escapism, we will see that fiction cannot be the sole answer to alienation from the world. The ways that Our Broken World demonstrates this makes for an exciting and interesting read. At least, I think it does.
I do not want anyone to have the false expectation that everything contained within will follow a rigidly structured argument. We will follow a lot of tangents through to their conclusion because I think they are interesting and informative in their own right. And I hope that alongside our discussion of Our Broken World we can all say that we learned some interesting things about fiction in general due to this post. If not, I can only hope I can do better in my future posts.
Part One: Mondai-hen
“Yorutsuki doesn’t really like onii-chan talking to other women, I guess.”
“Is this a breakup? A divorce? Is that what it is?”
“Hearing this information, you might feel so thankful that you would end up wanting to kiss my feet, but I will decline in advance as it is not necessary. I wouldn’t want to gain your sister’s hatred by having this kind of relationship, and even disregarding that, I just want to form a pure friendship between man and woman with you.”
New century romance
Among the first phrases to be found in Nisio, Isin’s Our Broken World reads “my pet theory is that if the title of a book is lame, its writing will end up being lame too.” With such a challenge at our feet, it would be rude to not briefly address the title of this story. The “our” in Our Broken World abbreviates a slightly more specific phrase in Japanese that would be challenging to translate in a succinct way. The full Japanese title is Kimi to Boku no Kowareta Sekai, which could alternatively be translated as Mine and Your Broken World, Broken World of You and I, Both of Our Broken World, Broken World for You and I, et cetera, et cetera. The key point being that the two separate keywords of you (kimi) and I (boku) often combine into the single our in English.
All in all, this title has four keywords that are, as we will see, essential for understanding the novel; You (kimi), I (boku), Broken (kowareta), World (sekai). Three of these keywords are deeply tied up in the representative post-Evangelion genre of pseudo-romance plus pseudo-fantasy known as sekai-kei. The term sekai-kei, as defined by Kiyoshi Kasai, refers to:
A group of works in which the small, everyday life problem of the relationship (kimi to boku) of the protagonist (boku, i.e. a male) and the heroine in his thoughts (kimi), and an abstract, extraordinary large problem such as ‘a world (sekai) crisis’ or ‘the end of the world,’ are simplistically connected directly without a (midway) interposition of a completely concrete (social) context.
Although it may be esoteric, or maybe even obtuse, explaining the context and concepts of sekai-kei will be an essential first step in understanding Our Broken World—it is literally the vocabulary the novel presents to those who wish to judge a book by its cover, after all. Ignoring it would lead to the rather peculiar choice of ignoring the very first, if not foundational, unit of meaning for the text. Before attempting to illustrate the use of the term in practice, we should investigate another definition from the literature, as presented by Tsunehiro Uno:
[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 other words, the term sekai-kei refers to the particularly individual-centric context that defined the worldbuilding and structure of the subset of stories that existed in the extended aftermath of the original television run of Neon Genesis Evangelion. To put it even more simply, sekai-kei is the name given to the most prevalent tropes of the media that reacted to and commented on certain ideas popularised by Evangelion. Examples of such ideas being the presence of introspective, existentially troubled characterisation; the failure of society at large to intermediate between the individual and the other; powerlessness, especially among boys, in contrast to the cold and impersonal power of assertive figures, especially women; and lastly, the seemingly insurmountable stakes of the “crisis” of merely surviving whilst beset by the challenge of self-actualisation. In practice, sekai-kei has taken the form of a trend of part-romance, part-fantastical (often sci-fi) adventure fiction—usually concerning the end or fate of the world.
The core of a sekai-kei type romance is the interplay between the boyish hero I (boku) and a feminine romantic interest, you (kimi), as representative of the deep existential dysfunction of the hero. Building on the psychoanalytical content to be found in Evangelion itself, and especially The End of Evangelion, these relationships often echo a fictionalised representation of Lacanian psychoanalysis—a rabbit hole which we will deliberately avoid as much as is possible. In essence, this view of sekai-kei is built on emphasising the purely formal nature of the Real, and how this interacts with our doomed desire to truly understand the other. For any readers who are interested, a more detailed explanation of the role of Lacanian psychoanalysis in Japanese media can be found in the translated works of Tamaki Saitou. Those who are intimately aware of the content of Evangelion might recognise these themes as direct responses to particular motifs present in the original show: in particular, Schopenhauer’s hedgehog’s dilemma as well as the central plot device of Human Instrumentality. While sekai-kei works might differ from Evangelion in the specifics, they are nonetheless built on similar experiences of isolation, alienation, and resentment as those that defined the lead character of Shinji Ikari.
Returning to Our Broken World, it should by now hopefully be clearer exactly what the novel’s title primes us to expect from the subsequent text: the phrase our world more or less summarises the textbook definition of sekai-kei romance—a sekai shaped by the relationship between boku and kimi. However, such a clean rendition of the concept is fractured by the remaining keyword, kowareta—broken. It is as though the title wants to conjure the image of sekai-kei only to shatter it until we are left with something unrecognisable. And the content of Our Broken World fits this image rather aptly, especially since the work is neither a romance nor a fantastical (sci-fi) adventure in any conventionally understood sense. Instead, the plot is filtered through a seemingly unrelated genre—a tradition more than a century older than even the earliest glimpses of the sekai-kei type narrative. I am referring to the whodunit style mystery novel. However, we should not get too ahead of ourselves. Our Broken World is much more of a mystery novel than a sekai-kei romance, but that does not mean romance is an irrelevant word. On the contrary, the romantic developments of Our Broken World are arguably more central to the heart of the story than any of its mystery novel trappings.
The semiotic structure of sekai-kei fiction
I promise this will be the last time we spend time explaining it, since I despise psychoanalysis, but let us return to the Lacanian view of sekai-kei once more. The Lacanian triad of orders separates the phenomenon of consciousness into three categories: the Imaginary, the Symbolic, and the Real. The Real is, in abstract, the literal material reality that exists outside of the subjectivity of human consciousness—but this is exactly why it does not exist inside of that same consciousness. For the human subject, reality is a strictly formal and theoretical notion; the human mind does not process reality in any pure form. Instead, we must think of each individual thing in relation to its place in the wider categorisation system of all other things. In other words, we do not process things as they are, but instead we process the symbols that signify the place of each thing within the system of other symbols. This system is what Lacan calls the Symbolic order. However, the Real cannot be represented by the Symbolic directly. These symbols emerge from within humans rather than from material reality, and so insomuch as they represent something, it must be an internal representation of reality rather than the Real itself. This internalised image of reality is the Imaginary order—the idealised notion of reality that must be symbolised from since the Real resists direct symbolisation.
The most important feature of this structure for our purposes is that the Imaginary is constructed and exists within each individual, rather than necessarily being a representation of material reality. To be clear, in our world, the Imaginary is deeply shaped by the Real. Even as the Imaginary is a product of our particular, subjective fixations, the concrete material of the Real is able to assert itself with a degree of universality: despite many thought experiments to the contrary, we do not have any serious reason to think that each individual experiences colour differently. However, the diegetic world of fiction is something different. The role of any diegetic Real is infinitely mutable by creators. If one sees a white rabbit in our world, regardless of what symbolic and imaginary meaning is attached to it as a metaphor by the subjective consciousness, the white rabbit itself still originates in the conditions present in the material Real. This is not so in the fantasy of fiction, where a white rabbit might exist purely in the diegetic Symbolic and Imaginary as a metaphor without any materiality in the diegetic Real.
After such repeated use of the word diegetic, I suppose it would be appropriate to more thoroughly model this structure and explain the concept of the diegesis. It goes without saying, but fiction does not exist. What we experience as the fantasy of a separate fictional world is actually a purely symbolic phenomenon that exists exterior to any individual person, and therefore can be thought of as an input at the Symbolic order in the above diagram. Although the phenomenon of fiction that we experience is purely symbolic and does not exist, the world that the fiction takes place in still has its own logic that informs the symbolic output that we interpret: The division between the internal logic of a fictional world and the symbolic output that is interpreted by the audience is called the diegesis. Therefore, a diegetic concept is one that only exists within that fictional world—the nonexistent phantasm that constructs the symbolic phenomena that the audience interprets as fiction.
This all might be too abstract, so let us try to visualise the system. The completely symbolic nature of fiction results in a decidedly flattened structure compared to the Lacanian orders of the consciousness. While consciousness exists in the dynamic, circular system that is shown above, fiction has a comparatively linear structure. Even as our direct interaction with fiction operates purely in the Symbolic order, within the internal logic of the fiction—behind the diegesis—simulacra of the Real and the Imaginary operate as the foundational logic of what we perceive as purely symbolic fiction. To be clear, these simulacra are exactly that, simulacra in the Baudrillardian sense: They are symbols with no existent Real and Imaginary basis behind them. Fiction is not an alternative reality system, and so it has very little to it that is Real or Imaginary. Rather, it is a simulation of reality with its own internal consciousness-like logic.
Behind the diegesis, two different categories of simulacra operate in order to present the illusion of another world. In regard to these simulacra, the analysis of popular culture makes use of the concepts of the Watsonian and Doylist perspectives; in the past I have used the Russian formalist terms of fabula and syuzhet to refer to this same essential idea. Fabula is the formalist term for the diegetic events within the world of fiction whilst syuzhet is the perspective of the events that is presented to the audience. For example, the story of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings takes place over numerous decades within the fabula of the world of Middle Earth, but the syuzhet that the reader experiences largely takes the form of a journal written by Bilbo Baggins which only covers a fraction of that time in any detail. Taking this concept and applying it to the flattened image of the Lacanian orders of consciousness that we adapted for use in fictional worlds, the Real that only exists beyond the diegesis would be roughly equivalent to the fabula whilst the Imaginary would equate to the subjective Imaginary. We will call these the “diegetic Real” and “diegetic Imaginary” respectively when operating in a Lacanian model. These are each separated by different dimensions of the concept of the diegesis: we shall call the separation between the Symbolic output and the diegetic Imaginary “diegesis α” or diegesis alpha. And we shall also refer to the separation between the diegetic Imaginary and the diegetic Real as “diegesis β” or diegesis beta. In summary, we can view this flattened Lacanian model of fiction like so:
Even if we contend that “fiction” as we experience it is a purely symbolic existence, within it lies a simulation of reality, and therefore the simulacra of the nonexistent Imaginary and Real “exist” as experiential phenomena. At least, to put it another way, we experience them as if they exist beyond these twin diegeses. Essentially, via this model we have illustrated how fiction operates as a semi-existent simulation of a nonexistent reality. It may seem like we have covered a lot of distance in order to get nowhere at all after that declaration, but this model is a rather useful secret sauce to understanding the structure of sekai-kei—and a lot of post-Eva Japanese media in general. Let us bring back the first definition of sekai-kei from the beginning of this post:
A group of works in which the small, everyday life problem of the relationship (kimi to boku) of the protagonist (boku, i.e. a male) and the heroine in his thoughts (kimi), and an abstract, extraordinary large problem such as ‘a world (sekai) crisis’ or ‘the end of the world,’ are simplistically connected directly without a (midway) interposition of a completely concrete (social) context.
At first glance, this definition probably appeared to be nothing but a listing of various meaningless genre tropes. However, with the application of the model developed above, we can derive some more substantive conclusions. Structurally speaking, the most important point of sekai-kei is the disintermediation of the character arcs of the lead characters (you and I | our | kimi to boku) from the wider world (sekai). In non-sekai-kei fiction, phenomena in the diegetic Real, such as a fate of the world, echo and rhyme with the subjective phenomena of our window into the world—diegetic Imaginary—insomuch as is necessary for the thematic development of the story. However, such dialogue between diegetically Real and diegetically Imaginary phenomena always occurs within the framework of logical intermediation. For example, because the shounen action hero overcomes the trauma of losing his family, he gains the strength to defeat the villain and save the world: Or, because the heroine of the romance novel overcomes her passivity, she is able to reach out and start a relationship with her romantic interest.
In contrast, a sekai-kei story connects the subjective logic of the diegetic Imaginary related to its core relationship (you and I | our | kimi to boku) with the fate of the diegetic Real without this intermediating logic. In other words, it draws a direct tunnel between the emotive reality of its core romance to the fate of the diegetic Real, straight through diegesis β. Crucially, sekai-kei is not the same as the elimination of diegesis β. The wholesale elimination of diegesis β would deconstruct the entire model, destroying the distinction between the diegetic Imaginary and diegetic Real, and thereby breach the simulation of the nonexistent world that is the basis of the layered model of fiction we have developed thus far. Such cases are already an established convention in highly metaphorical stories, where returning the simulacra of the diegetic Imaginary and diegetic Real to pure symbolisation is the goal—these stories are not the same as sekai-kei. Sekai-kei deliberately breaches diegesis β in the limited sense of disintermediation whilst keeping the structure fundamentally intact. It presents a world that still simulates reality, except that the diegetically Real is determined directly by the diegetically Imaginary development of its lead characters.
Crisis and intermediation
What exactly do I mean by disintermediation? This seemingly esoteric concept is actually rather direct when one looks at concrete examples of sekai-kei media. Take, for example, the famously sekai-kei inspired oeuvre of Makoto Shinkai, award-winning director of the 2016 smash hit Your Name. The nature of disintermediation is clear in both this film and his earlier work from the era most dominated by sekai-kei, such as The Garden of Words, 5 Centimeters per Second, and especially his 2002 sekai-kei classic Voices of a Distant Star. All of these films disintermediate their central romantic drama from what Kasai called a “concrete (social) context” using the theme of distance—some using physical distance, others using more extra-dimensional concepts. Regardless, taking Voices of a Distant Star as our momentary case study, such a film illustrates the structure of a sekai-kei type narrative rather clearly.
Society-at-large is a vague and ephemeral entity in Voices of a Distant Star. Instead of depending on any concrete actions in the diegetic Real to resolve the distance between Noboru and Mikako, the couple relies on the “miracle” that their words and thoughts can reach each other through time and space. This rather extreme example of sekai-kei logic also serves to extinguish a possible misunderstanding—it is not necessary for developments in the diegetic Imaginary to manifest as drastic physical shifts in the diegetic Real. In fact, doing so risks straying from sekai-kei logic into the regular symmetry between theme and plot discussed above, as is a regular dynamic in all kinds of stories: Giving characters the ability to shape reality through their emotions can all too easily become a mere plot device. Instead, it is precisely the removal of alternate sources of diegetically Real control—the concrete context that must be disintermediated—which gives sekai-kei media its distinct feeling. Sekai-kei does not deliver a power fantasy where the diegetic Imaginary becomes powerful enough to overcome the nature of the diegetic Real. Rather, it negates the role of the diegetic Real until it is weak enough to allow the diegetic Imaginary to partially traverse diegesis β and determine the direction of the story. Sekai-kei is more of a retreat into existentialist narrative rather than a tale of the individuals’ concrete power over society, and this is for a significant reason.
The trends that led to sekai-kei fiction arose in a time of crisis in Japan. After a significant economic collapse, the social conditions of the 1990s went far beyond unwelcoming; the youth of Japan were increasingly disenchanted with the social institutions that had promised them stability and support. In this context, crises such as the Aum Shinrikyou sarin gas attack in 1995, and especially the Great Hanshin earthquake of the same year that struck the Kansai region of Japan, crippled confidence in Japanese society at large. Of particular note, the Great Hanshin earthquake involved an unusually slow and ineffectual response by those representing the national government, leaving local citizens’ groups and informal organisations to take up the bulk of the rescue and clean-up effort. These crises, combined with the visibly disconnected response of the formal institutions of society, were illustrative of a distinct mood which overtook the nation. The message was that the collective effort of society was incapable of solving the challenges that beset people in their lives. In other words, even in their everyday existence, Japanese people were increasingly losing confidence in the intermediating forces of society. It comes as no surprise that many sought media that was laser focused on accomplishments achieved at the existential level—the diegetic Imaginary.
Some readers might be practically screaming at their screen by this point about how the previous section was an unbelievable waste of time, given that Our Broken World is not even a sekai-kei story. And this much is true—it is not. But the sekai-kei narrative structure, and the existential retreat it represents, is indispensable for anyone who wishes to really get into the meat of Our Broken World: Indeed, as we have already addressed, it is right there in the name. The story of Our Broken World intersects with the wider sekai-kei-like zeitgeist of Japanese society that enveloped it in very particular and very interesting ways. And those connections make it expressly clear why the novel was named in direct allusion to concepts that were most prominent in sekai-kei fiction. To be clear, the minutiae of sekai-kei are useful and relevant when it comes to understanding any number of Japanese media that was contemporaneous with Our Broken World: Indeed, my personal favourite sekai-kei work, Cross†Channel, was released in the very same year. And were I to cover that game, I would tread much of this same ground once more. Regardless, as we will see, it was similarly necessary in this case even without the explicit genre label of sekai-kei.
The confluence of crises that came to define the 1990s (and onwards) for Japanese society spawned numerous reactions. In fact, many of those reactions are continuing to filter out across contemporary Japanese popular culture. Insomuch as sekai-kei fiction represents a retreat into the self through its disintermediation of diegesis β, it does not represent a contrarian trend within Japanese media: While sekai-kei disintermediates concrete societal structures in order to achieve a narrative that emphasises individuality, denpa-kei style media from the same period depicted the retreat from society as an inherently schizophrenic—which is to say, a stratified perception of reality—phenomenon. Even the emergence of isekai fiction as the dominant publishing trend throughout the 2000s has been at least in part a reaction to the particular post-crisis zeitgeist of the 1900s. However, rather than attempting to retreat from society towards the self, isekai fiction prefers to imagine the self as being freed from the inherently broken society that was exposed by the institutional crises that Japan faced from that era onwards. In other words, it transposes a mundane diegetic Imaginary (a character in regular Japan) onto a diegetic Real (fantasy world) that is tailor made to facilitate escapism. Those who followed along with the discussion of gamification and trauma in the Umineko post should not find it coincidental that isekai worlds are deeply based on the tropes and logic of video games—introducing an implausibly agency-rich vocabulary into the diegetic Real. Indeed, to make a radical aside, the direct lineage from the logic of Japanese mystery fiction to the logic of isekai might be a compelling story for another time.
Regardless, this is all to say that Our Broken World exists in an extensive tradition of contemporaneous media that commented on and reacted to an atmosphere of crisis. And by evoking the sekai-kei tradition, it situates its own events into this context. As we will explore more deeply in Part Two, Our Broken World is a story about the interplay between crises and the mundane. More specifically, Our Broken World eschews the fantastical world crisis of a traditional sekai-kei story and instead constructs a crisis out of the comparatively mundane act of murder: Rather than a grand scale drama that mirrors the collapse of concrete societal intermediators, Our Broken World reproduces the local sense of distance felt between the individual and society during a time of crisis. Samatoki Hitsuuchi does not feel as though the world collapsed, leaving only the individual behind, as is often the motif of sekai-kei stories. Instead, Samatoki is alienated by a feeling of irrelevance in the face of a world far beyond his control. To quote the novel:
The world. When I pronounce that word, or when anyone does for that matter, no one thinks of the entire Earth, even less of the entirety of the universe. From the point of view of our perception, the murmuring of a river flowing at the other end of the planet isn’t on our mind. Even if globalization progresses, even if national borders disappear, for people’s brains, or perhaps for their hearts, the Earth is much too vast to be properly aware of it all. After all, people already have their hands full with grasping their own selves. At most, we refer to the world as our family, friends, school, or workplace. An exceedingly small world inside this nearly infinitely vast one. Small occurrences happening inside a solid framework, nothing more than foolish assumptions unable to detach themselves from rules and order—a personal world.
“No need to worry, the world has always functioned that way. You and I have both been living in a world ruled by such a mechanism. Kotohara, what you’re carrying are useless worries. The world hasn’t changed; it continues being the way it’s always been. If anything’s changed, it’d be your position, Kotohara. Only your perception has shifted. The world hasn’t changed in any way, shape, or form. Don’t misunderstand, be at ease. You can be at ease. Your world has suffered no changes.”
“Fear is, you see… it’s the fear of thinking ‘Am I unrelated to this world?’ The fear of the world progressing without you. You are worried—about the world.”
Ironically, this deviation from the classic sekai-kei formula only increases the importance of the remnants of sekai-kei that still infuse Our Broken World, even if their role is altered in a crucial manner. In a sekai-kei story, the collapse of the world system—the concrete social relations that intermediate one’s life at the highest dimension—forces the protagonist to seek more personal, lower dimensional forms of intermediation. Namely, the relationship between themselves (boku) and a romantic interest (kimi). This new pathway to the diegetic Real serves as a replacement for the intermediating forces that could be said to operate as a key logical structure within diegesis β: which is to say that the intermediating concrete social context that is broken within a traditional sekai-kei story is the structure of logic that normally connects an individual to wider society. When that structure breaks down, the romantic connection between boku and kimi serves as a stopgap replacement, a personal world that is more reliable than the failed institutional intermediators of society. In Our Broken World, it is not the structure of a larger, abstract social context that breaks down, it is something closer to the personal world itself. When the structures of one’s personal world break down due to a murder that takes place within that world, your personal world becomes an unknown, placed into a crisis unto itself. This is a point we will return to in greater detail in Part Two.
The mirror-romance structure
For the purposes of the current Part, we must explore the role of the romantic interest, kimi, in greater detail. A crucial element that separates kimi from, say, a purely metaphorical story of existential self-exploration is that a romantic interest is diegetically exterior to the protagonist. Although sekai-kei stories are representative of an attempt to find meaning in the insular, existential contours of life rather than in social structures, they never depict this as a struggle that one overcomes on their own. Even while one must retreat from society in an age where society fails to live up to the struggles of a crisis, humanity still needs social connections. In the logic of sekai-kei fiction, this connection comes in the form of romance.
Were it as simple as being a story about finding romance to replace the failures of wider society, sekai-kei would be a fundamentally hopeful genre—however, this is far from the case. The foundations of the genre were developed in response to Evangelion, a text that was specifically about the paradoxes of social connections, and these ideas bleed over into the logic of the wider genre. Evangelion is an ironic and contradictory exploration of a character, Shinji Ikari, who desires the love of others while also desiring a solipsistic retreat into his own existential tendencies. In other words, it demonstrated the inherent paradox of retreating from social collapse into existential introspection whilst also seeking an alternative social connection to replace the broken modes of social intermediation.
The result of this paradox is that explorations of romance in sekai-kei works often carry a pessimistic and narcissistic underbelly: the romance offered by kimi cannot simply replicate the conditions of actual romance, which involves the painful and challenging prospect of stepping out into the wider world. Kimi is not just a conventionally appealing romantic interest, but someone so unquestionably suitable for the protagonist that they do not otherise them. Indeed, the genre is filled with couples who are established as predestined for one another, or emotionally inseparable no matter the conditions placed on them by the narrative. In other words, kimi is not just any girl (or boy, although that is far less common for reasons beyond this post)—kimi is a partner that specifically allows the protagonist to conduct their self-introspection and their exterior social connections in parallel: The romance of a sekai-kei-like story presents characters that do not see each other as an unknowable other; it is as though they already went through the Human Instrumentality of Evangelion and became one. Kimi is not just a source of social connection to replace the loss of a concrete social context, but someone who is symbolically a part of the protagonist and can therefore participate in their journey of introspection as well as follow along in their retreat from society. For the purpose of this post, we shall call this kind of romantic structure the mirror-romance structure. The mirror-romance structure is, basically, an idealised romance that allows the protagonist to metaphorically retreat to their personal world while still fulfilling their desire for human connection.
Farewell ethics
Yorutsuki Hitsuuchi—the younger sister of our lead, Samatoki—occupies an ironic place in the centre of the fictive crisis of Our Broken World. As a romantic interest, she is strangely plausible and legitimate within the basic framework of moe character archetypes: She is, even for a blood relative, very close to Samatoki; she is also given an abundance (perhaps an excess) of moe character traits. Samatoki and Yorutsuki’s near-incestuous connection might seem incredibly taboo, but otaku media had seen several siblings go all the way—so to speak—before the publication of Our Broken World, making the penetration of that membrane rather easy to imagine. However, within the logic of the mirror-romance structure, it becomes increasingly clear that Yorutsuki cannot bring closure to Our Broken World. Yorutsuki is closer to a crisis in and of herself; a fragile status quo, the embodiment of the house of cards that so expeditiously falls apart in the first chapter of the novel.
The idea that family represents a kind of metaphorical status quo is hardly novel. In Joseph Campbell’s rendition of the monomyth, the first four stages of the hero’s journey are dedicated to the process of leaving the family—often extending to a clan or tribe—before going out into the wider world. In this sense, incest carries the precise opposite implication compared to the usual trajectory of a heroic protagonist: an incestuous hero has already found romance within a comfortable distance and therefore has little to gain in the exterior world of adventure. In the concrete terms of romance tropes, an incestuous romantic interest is an extreme rendition of many of the inferences of a childhood friend: a metaphysically safe, secure, and unchallenging kind of romance.
Ironically, taking these implications further inverts them as they enter into the realm of realism. In reality, the incestuous relationship is one that is inherently dangerous, especially to the immediate social context of the two participants. And this possible danger is essential to the narrative role of incest when juxtaposed against a more conventional source of romantic tension. An incestuous couple—especially among siblings—is one that reflects a desire for safety and stasis, and yet carries a paradoxical potential for crisis and calamity at every step. The risks inherent to the coupling increase in proportion to the closeness that granted it a feeling of safety in the first place. It is this danger that is located in intimacy itself that separates incest from otherwise similar romance tropes, such as a childhood friend character.
With this paradoxical dance between danger and safety in mind, let us return to Yorutsuki Hitsuuchi from Our Broken World. Yorutsuki is the very first girl introduced in the story, and with a preponderance of moe traits she is immediately situated as someone who will be important to any romantic developments that take place. However, even the level of importance this position foreshadows ends up underplaying her role. To an inescapable extent, Samatoki’s entire life is dominated by his care for Yorutsuki. What is introduced as a simple moe relationship rapidly inverts itself when Yorutsuki’s interest turns toward Ririsu Kotohara—with a clearly ominous tone. The sentence that sets off a sense of crisis in Our Broken World is not the murder of Rokunin Kazusawa, nor is it Ririsu Kotohara confessing her love to Samatoki: The crisis is already in motion when Yorutsuki threateningly probes Samatoki, asking the distinctly yandere-like “that woman, who is she?” In other words, from the early stages of the novel, the relationship between Samatoki and Yorutsuki embodies an extraordinarily severe interplay between cheerful safety and sinister danger.
Consider the mirror-romance structure once again—that is to say, the idealisation of romance into an embodied self love that can provide solace from a world crisis: In this context, Yorutsuki’s role in Our Broken World is an amusing cycle of contradictions. Beyond the direct closeness implied by the spectre of incest, could any couple take on a stronger association with the image of a “mirror” than a sibling couple? Indeed, we could quite credibly call the status quo relationship between Samatoki and Yorutsuki a mirror-romance: Samatoki’s life prior to the events of the novel were entirely focused on preserving a crisis-free relationship with his sister. From its first word, Samatoki’s narration is an endless stream of plans, considerations, contingencies, schemes, and strategies designed around manipulating every nuance of his world towards a “best” outcome. That best outcome is of course the privilege to maintain the status quo of his relationship with his sister. In this sense, Our Broken World is rather unique among sekai-kei adjacent works. The situation at the outset already has our protagonist infatuated and involved in a mirror-romance that is, at that moment, free of crisis. What we therefore witness in the unfolding crisis of the novel is not just the creation of a new sekai-kei romance, but also the proportional collapse of a prior sekai-kei adjacent order. This interpretation affords us an intriguing new reading of the title; if we take the title of the novel to the allude to a sekai-kei world—a sekai for boku to kimi, our world—the phrase Our Broken World can be understood in the context of the collapse of that world as constructed through the mirror-romance structure.
As we discussed earlier, Yorutsuki is not a simple source of solace; Yorutsuki is dangerous for Samatoki. To be clear, the siblings both cherish one another, and any sensible adult would make sure they were both up to scratch in their sex education before leaving them alone in a room together, but their love is hardly so unconditional as to be immune from crisis. On the contrary, as per the conventional implications of incest, their relationship is always a step away from crisis—which threatens Samatoki’s relentless search for control. Samatoki’s fixation on agency is reiterated again and again across the events of Our Broken World: One of Samatoki’s most prominent skills is a penchant for shogi, a game dependent on contingencies and control (which he plays with the peculiar rule of skipping turns—reaching for the game’s status quo). His long, interconnected monologues seem to structure reality as an eternal string of decisions to be considered linearly, punctuated by the stylistic inclusion of multiple-choice questionnaires as an element in his narration. Samatoki does not, and can not, resolve a world crisis through retreat with Yorutsuki. She is ultimately a different person than him; she is the other that he cannot fully control, and even somewhat fears. Rather than thinking in unison with Yorutsuki, she is a source of external authority that must be managed in order to maintain the status quo that Samatoki cherishes.
“Once her anger calms down, I’ll properly apologize. Recently, my little sister has been emotionally unstable.”
Pushing the answer off to tomorrow on the fly was a good decision, if I do say so myself. No matter how you think about it, that wasn’t the sort of thing I could decide on my own without consulting Yorutsuki.
As a result, Samatoki’s relationship with Yorutsuki is endangered, not strengthened, by social crisis. In the context of sekai-kei stories, we repeatedly referred to the notions of disintermediation and retreat from social context, which is to say privileging the individual over the society that has failed them. But Samatoki never considers such isolated relief a viable path. The world is not an abstract phenomenon, entirely exterior to the concerns of the individual. The world is something immediately around the individual, and if Samatoki cannot control it, it will run right over him.
“You look convinced that the world has nothing to do with you. The world does not exist because you do, you exist because the world does, you know?”
No… no, no no, this wasn’t something I should be regretting. At that time, I didn’t have the freedom to decide that … Wasn’t it like having your shogi pieces moved by an earthquake while you’re playing?
Not having the room to make a decision truly made me feel cramped … Now then, what should I do first and foremost from this point onward?
In other words, this is all to say that Samatoki’s peaceful relationship with Yorutsuki is entirely contingent on finding control in the world. Not just because Yorutsuki is someone exterior to Samatoki such that he cannot fully control her, but also because that lack of control would be contrary to the wishes of Samatoki himself, who values agency for its own sake. As a result, Samatoki’s relationship with Yorutsuki runs in precisely the opposite direction to a typical sekai-kei mirror-romance structure: While Samatoki does see Yorutsuki as a mirror of himself to some degree, she is not a part of himself per se, and rather than bringing them together, a crisis in the world is something that would put distance between them.
This particular dance between safety and danger is similar to how an incestuous relationship was characterised at the opening of this section, and this is no coincidence. This is not to say that Samatoki and Yorutsuki’s relationship was necessarily incestuous purely as a metaphor for the novel’s view on world crises. Rather, their relationship is related to a deeper theme running through the novel: that of taboos. It does not take an expert in anthropology to note that incest is a near universal taboo across human society. And, as will become especially clear as we explore other characters in more detail, everyone in Our Broken World is brimming with taboos. In specific, the novel largely concerns itself with the interplay between the taboos that are foundational to our humanity and the larger society (world) that cannot bring meaning on its own to that humanity. In that sense, the relationship between Samatoki and Yorutsuki, filled as it is with incestuous implications, is a rather purest distillation of the perspective of Our Broken World on humanity itself.
In the afterword to the digital edition of the novel, the author Nisio, Isin claims that the novel was conceived of with and by the phrase “well then, farewell ethics.” This pithy comment being what Samatoki says to himself when he decides to partially submit himself to his desires with Yorutsuki. This moment comes after a false victory, when Samatoki believes he is finally free of the crises of the first chapter and can therefore live out a mirror-romance in a world under his control. However, even at the end of the novel, once Samatoki has come to accept that the world is not something so simple that one can escape from it or control it, he is still able to look fondly on his relationship with “a precious little sister.” In other words, where a sekai-kei story would teach us how to retreat from the world as the only way to preserve our perverse individuality, no such solution is possible in Our Broken World. Yet, even without escape, a path still exists where one can exist in the world and also continue to perversely cherish their little sister. A path other than saying farewell (escape) ethics (the world).
Childhood friends and the flow of the world
Were it simply a matter of word association, “romance” would lead directly to Ririsu Kotohara. Without her presence, it is difficult to imagine the notion of romance really coming into the story of Our Broken World at all, outside of the most subtle of subtext: After all, Kotohara is in a crucial sense the catalyst behind almost everything. Her romantic interest in Samatoki is the crisis that he first tries to desperately avoid, and then to control. In totality, she serves as perhaps the most direct example of the paradoxically humanising taboos at the heart of Our Broken World. She is the key romantic interest of the novel, and yet also occupies the precise opposite moral position—at least as far as mystery novels are concerned. Basically—and I really hope no one read this far while still being at risk of being spoiled on this novel—she is the culprit; murder is a rather severe taboo to hold in your heart. (To be clear, Kotohara is not alone in this position; her childhood friend, Hakohiko Mukaezuki, is a fellow culprit and murderer.)
Despite this centrality, Kotohara does not necessarily attract the same attentive interest in the reader as the rest of the cast. In fact, many valid criticisms of the novel centre on Kotohara’s characterisation—especially given the standard Nisio sets for himself on this point in other works in the same series. Despite this, I think it is important to spend some time going over her role, as even the novel’s imperfections form part of a greater whole that I find interesting enough to illustrate in this post.
In the wider history of the whodunit genre, Kotohara’s basic role—the love-interest-as-murderer—is a well-trodden path. Often, such characters take on the attributes of the duplicitous femme fatale, such as the kind that became exceptionally common in noir-style hardboiled detective fiction. But, even without that specific lineage, enticing women have often been associated with the same themes of secrecy and betrayal that are inherent to the subject of murder, and have therefore been used as shocking culprits in all sorts of mystery fiction. Such characters have appeared everywhere from Agatha Christie’s puzzlers to more contemporary slasher flicks. With this heritage in mind, Kotohara’s status as the culprit is technically unsurprising, and yet its execution relies on many unexpected and innovative details.
Like Samatoki, Kotohara is someone who is greatly troubled by the lack of agency on offer in contemporary society. However, unlike Samatoki, Kotohara’s protestations are something she has largely been able to move on from. In a phrase, she gave up on control much earlier and easier than Samatoki did. For example, in a story she relates to Samatoki, she speaks of how she used to fight against the gender prejudices that she experiences in the world of kendo. However, she gave up on this approach as she came to see particular contradictions in her mindset. Despite using justice as a pretext, she just wanted her aptitude in kendo to be recognised. In a similar vein, she recalls that:
“I always had the same ones as him, so my swing ended up being a copy of Hakohiko’s. It couldn’t be helped, since we’d been doing kendo together for a long time, but that was what I hated the most. I didn’t want to admit that I was just an inferior copy.”
In much the same way as Samatoki sees shogi as an avenue where he can exert his ideal of control, Kotohara attempts to do so with her kendo. The difference is of course that Samatoki tries to live his life as though it takes place on the shogi board, whereas Kotohara has gone in the opposite direction by accepting that even the purity of kendo is subject to the prejudices and imperfections of the wider world. While this might seem like good old-fashioned pragmatism at first blush, it is also a dangerous timidity that leads her to go along with the flow of the world. In so doing, it becomes a taboo at least as dangerous as Yorutsuki’s incestuous desires. This passivity that leads to disaster makes for a rather novel take on the lover-to-murderer trope: It allows her to instigate crisis while still being a victim of it with surprising credibility.
This is why the metaphorical role of Kotohara and Hakohiko in the story, as the ones that create the titular broken world, is so important. Moreso than any other characters in the story, they represent the influence of the wider “world” on Samatoki’s attempts to create a tightly controlled shogi-like paradise. At every turn, Kotohara and Hakohiko operate outside the flow that Samatoki intends, and thereby let the world influence his behaviour. As Samatoki puts it:
I felt a bizarre discomfort. A cramped feeling born by the fact I didn’t have any other option. Up until now, everything had gone according to Hakohiko’s scheme, and I didn’t have any other choice.
Immediately upon realising this, Samatoki is confessed to by Kotohara, and his world is thrown into chaos. In other words, it is because Kotohara will not conform to Samatoki’s control that his ideal of control breaks down in the first place. He wants a face-up world, where every move can be predicted; Kotohara harbours secret romantic feelings for him. However, even her revealing this secret is done with the resignation that she cannot get her way; things had already spiralised out of control, and Rokunin Kazusawa was dead by this point. Leaving aside these more poetic implications, let us return to the mirror-romance structure that we discussed earlier.
When crisis is seen as implicit to the nature of reality, the mirror-romance structure offers romance as the only path to proper self-understanding and escaping. This is because the romance as depicted is between two people who understand each other as well as themselves, and in so doing have the only perfect, crisis-free human connection that is possible. This is obviously not so between Samatoki and Kotohara. Samatoki can only seem to understand others through his attempts at control, and the fact that Kotohara keeps her feelings a secret belies his attempts at control. And while Samatoki wants to play a game with every variable under control, Kotohara is more interested in a scrappy and imperfect fight, where she just lives as she feels is right. Because of this contrast, rather than allowing for a path into the diegetic Imaginary that is an escape from the crisis, Kotohara is a source of confusion and crisis for Samatoki.
More concretely, the all too human imperfections of Kotohara highlight the inherent impossibility of any kind of mirror-romance as a pathway to escape from the contemporary crisis. It might be obvious as a pragmatic matter, but the desire for human connection and the desire to retreat from human social context are in tension with one another. As a result, any romantic entanglement with Kotohara inherently means that Samatoki cannot disintermediate himself from society. In addition, Kotohara’s own characterisation demonstrates the limits of escapism even if it is undertaken as an individual pursuit. As she internalises what she did, the disconnect between her and Samatoki gradually eats at her throughout the novel: She becomes more and more dissatisfied with the situation, to the point where Samatoki fears that she will not survive it.
The result is the conclusion of Our Broken World. At the end of the story, for reasons we will continue to develop throughout this post, Samatoki is resolved that he can neither escape from crisis by looking inward nor can he control the world as though it were a shogi board. Instead, he has learned that the only way to move on in the crisis is to accept the truth that even if the world is ambiguous and anarchic, it is not so broken that you must escape from or control it. As a result, Samatoki takes a step he never would have ordinarily taken: He chains himself to Kotohara in order to give her the connection she needs, even if it is not “optimal” according to his own desires. He lets Kotohara—the world—control a part of his life because doing so is the only path to having valuable human connections even in a world prone to crisis.
Justice: perverted
When judging the book by its cover, the banner for Our Broken World is not just its title but its cover illustration. Herein, we can find Kuroneko Byouinzaka. She is front and centre, appearing both in this illustration and in all manner of promotional material for the series. Often in lieu of the nominal lead, Samatoki. Were the Sekai series that Our Broken World launched to be named in the manner of traditional mystery fiction, we could easily call it the Byouinzaka series. While our discussion of other characters has touched on several important aspects of Our Broken World, it would not be controversial to say that Kuroneko Byouinzaka is the single most important figure in the narrative. It is impossible to really discuss the novel without discussing Byouinzaka.
Despite this, Byouinzaka does not primarily offer meaning in the sense of esoteric philosophy or symbolism—the more abstract meaning to be taken from the novel is largely established by its structure as it exists with or without her. Instead, Byouinzaka embodies the emotions and texture of Our Broken World more directly than any other character. When Byouinzaka speaks, we are given a forceful window into the socially perverse characterisation that pervades the novel. Byouinzaka is someone at the centre of the world, and yet she does not clearly belong anywhere within it. Her approach to human relationships is extreme; more extreme than even the incestuous and murderous characters we have discussed thus far. To put things in straightforward terms, the entire point of Our Broken World, on a fundamental level, is that even the extreme kind of logic that Byouinzaka operates on is unmistakably human. We should not and cannot disregard her as the embodiment of mechanically abstract or literary concepts.
Even with all of that said, we should make use of the abstract concepts we have established thus far to structure how we think about Byouinzaka in this story. As the detective, Byouinzaka subverts many of the idealistic aspirations of the mirror-romance structure. We will construct a more detailed framework for thinking about mystery fiction in Part Two, but it is important to remember that mystery tales are generally structured around the process of revealing truth. Leaving aside whether the concept of truth invoked here is objective or subjective, it is at the very least correct to say that the structure of mystery fiction biases towards the irrefutability of the final truth it gives. The truth revealed by a detective is the last word given within the text on the nature of its reality, and therefore any theoretical contradiction of the detective’s deduction is never given an equivalent voice. This is all to say that detectives enforce an authoritative view of reality and replace chaos with a defined order.
Chaos and crisis are deeply intertwined and overlapping concepts here. A detective can co-exist with crisis for some time—indeed, doing so is a core part of the drama of mystery fiction. However, the conventional role of the archetype is to bring an end to this crisis. This is because they are fundamentally incompatible phenomena; the reasons for this will be discussed in greater detail in Part Two. Regardless of the reason, a detective who is thrust into a crisis situation will conventionally be expected to pursue an end to it. Byouinzaka embodies this trait rather directly:
“I cannot bear having something around me being broken or collapsing. I get irritated when I see anything of the sort. A peaceful world, complete stillness is the only thing I ask of the gods. I am sick of this broken world. I don’t intend to prize logic, but I feel something similar to anger whenever I face irrational and illogical things.”
Of course, as is the tendency of Our Broken World, conventional motivations like this are exaggerated to the point of pathology. If one were to describe the characterisation style of the novel directly, it is a study of characters who behave in extreme ways for mundane reasons. While the motivation given above is a variation on the standard role of a detective, the behaviours it demands of Byouinzaka are nothing if not radical. After all, the climax of the novel rests on her attempting suicide due to a failure to live up to her desire to restore the world to “complete stillness.”
Although it may be the most extreme behaviour demonstrated by Byouinzaka, suicidality is not the only residual effect of this mindset. For example, much of her behaviour throughout the novel is contextualised by a pervasive and overwhelming fear of crowds. In fact, if we run out the above quote a little longer, Byouinzaka directly links the two phenomena:
“…I feel something similar to anger whenever I face irrational and illogical things. That’s why I cannot leave someone unstable like you alone. That’s why I hate crowds. Crowds are something like a treasure trove of dissonance.”
This is all to say that, in a manner similar to the other members of the cast, Byouinzaka is not so much afflicted by a varied array of peculiar habits. Instead, her beliefs and role in the story are shaped into and by extreme manifestations of recognisably human concepts. This is why the specific extreme behaviours shown by Byouinzaka make the ordinary psychology that drives the mirror-romance structure more apparent than just about any other character. Her inability to understand others drives her to reject contact with those others en masse, and also to combat the crisis that a world made up of strangers entails. And yet, much of the novel is framed by her attempts to connect to others—especially Samatoki. As Byouinzaka herself said, Samatoki’s behaviour is something that cuts to the heart of her perversities: She cannot understand others, and yet someone so confusingly unsettled and unstable like Samatoki attracts her attention and interest. Her dual intuition to fear others and yet want to engage with them is demonstrative of the core of the mirror-romance structure.
As we already discussed, Samatoki’s other relationships already touch on the dichotomous themes of submission and escape from the world. Byouinzaka is herself similarly defined by the push and pull of the world, and this forms the foundation of much of her friendship with Samatoki. She cannot tolerate the unknowability of the sum of the whole world, but this does not mean that escape is an option for her. Escape from the world is an unsuitable solution for a detective precisely because she knows that there is some kind of truth to move towards, even if its totality is unobtainable. Byouinzaka can only construct it brick by brick—person by person. This is obviously similar in part to the core notions of the mirror-romance structure: even if the world leaves the individual behind, they can find their own world in their relationship to a singular other. However, a close comparison also reveals some key distinctions. Samatoki’s other romantic entanglements, which were of a kind that more closely echoed the mirror-romance structure, ultimately failed to provide a satisfying resolution in the face of the disintermediated world that had collapsed in on him. They simply revealed the ideal of escape from the world to be untenable. In each of those other relationships, Samatoki sought control in lieu of a world that he could not control. However, his companionship with Byouinzaka ultimately was something that could never operate on the basis of control.
This would be a suitable time to deal with a particularly important tangent in terms of any critical evaluation of Our Broken World. A somewhat confronting and controversial plot point is that Byouinzaka, a character given a great deal of deference and moral authority by the narrative, engages in underage prostitution. While any individual reader might bristle or take offence to the inherent edginess of this plot point, it is important to establish why and how this character trait is congruent with the rest of Byouinzaka’s character.
Byouinzaka being a moe-type character is more or less incontrovertible, but more specifically she embodies a very twisted rendition of something like the dandere character archetype. Except, she is not shy with a cute side by way of a personality trait; her dandere characteristics emerge from her core physiological inability to tolerate strangers and crowds. Byouinzaka doesn’t actually have a dandere personality in any psychological or interior sense. She is a highly charismatic, extroverted person who cannot tolerate strangers and society due to a condition. The net result is that she is completely timid in the case of wider society but eager to socialise with those that she knows.
Another way to state this character trait is that Byouinzaka is only able to be authentic to an important side of herself in highly intimate settings. That the narrative extends this logic to an extreme manifestation of that kind of intimacy is not strictly necessary for the point to be made, but it is contiguous with the approach taken to taboo across the story. Across Our Broken World, characters find themselves expressing interior preferences and inclinations that are modelled on mundane, thoroughly realistic motivations, but in ways that are directly at odds with the expectations and demands of the wider world. Byouinzaka seeks intimacy and knowledge of others, and this is expressed by her trading intimate, physical connections for more information, bringing herself closer to reconciliation with the world in both senses.
In fact, Samatoki’s acceptance of Byouinzaka despite his initial disgust in the face of her sexual activities is what structures much of the climax of the novel. While much of their relationship is crystalised by Byouinzaka’s dramatic suicide attempt on the school rooftop, Samatoki is still fixated on restoring control to his world, and his vision of a relationship with Byouinzaka is one still contextualised by control. With this mindset, he is initially disgusted by her behaviour, not least of all because it is so far outside of his predictions and his control. However, paralleling many of the same reasons that he relinquishes control in his relationships with his sister and Kotohara, Samatoki ultimately learns that reconciling with the world means that you cannot control it.
While much of Samatoki’s character growth can be expressed as a control freak maturing in the face of a world too complex to be controlled, what this also means is his growth into being someone capable of having a friendship with Byouinzaka: Changing into someone that can accept her rather than trying to control her as a part of his unchanging, unchallenging illusion of a romance with his sister. To be more specific, Samatoki only falls in love with her, rather than some idealistic picture of romance with a sister or childhood friend character, because he is forced to come to terms with the world. While we can understand the contours of what exactly changed in Samatoki by focusing on how his picture of romance evolved as he came to understand the taboos that define Byouinzaka, the full picture of what is happening in Our Broken World can only become clear once we also understand how this interlinks with Byouinzaka’s role as a detective. Samatoki understands that his romantic entanglements cannot be premised on control precisely because of what he learns while solving a whodunit murder mystery by Byouinzaka’s side. This side of their relationship and its total role in the novel will be what we cover in Part Two of this post.
Part Two: Tantei-hen
“This isn’t some dumb detective novel. I hope you’re not actually taking yourself for an amateur detective trying to investigate the place.”
“Hmm.”
Byouinzaka didn’t show any surprise.
“What if I was, Samatoki-kun?”
From the red string to blood and guts
In the first Part of this post, we took an osteological (there’s a new Scrabble word for those that want it) approach to examining Our Broken World: For all of the detail present in our discussion of crisis-based romance, and the many ancillary features of that genre framework, such a perspective only captures the thirty-thousand-foot view of matters. The preceding model, which outlines this particular kind of romance, is best thought of as the connective tissue between the various pieces of Our Broken World. But it is not the guts of the matter, so to speak. Basically, we are dealing with a mystery novel here, so it is best to start talking about it in those terms.
Still, considering the novel as a mystery is not a wholesale break from our prior approach. In fact, they are complementary to one another. In attempting to frame Our Broken World as several intermingling almost-romances that are each contextualised by an overbearing world crisis, the exact nature of that crisis has been lingering over our analysis, like the figurative elephant that we have dared not recognise directly until now. In this novel, that crisis takes the form of a classic whodunit mystery.
Before we continue further in developing the links between Part One and the particular texture of mystery fiction, I should issue a clarification, especially for anyone who is new to the blog: My goal is not to suggest that Nisio, Isin intentionally unified the tropes of classic mystery fiction with those of sekai-kei romance in order to say something profound about either. That Our Broken World is a mystery novel is such an overdetermined fact that it is utterly meaningless in and of itself. At the point this novel was published, Nisio’s history as an author exclusively involved mystery novels. At this point in his career, Nisio could only accurately be described with the specialisation of a mystery novel author. The contemporary image of Nisio as a versatile author that has dipped his fingers into many kinds of otaku-centric works had yet to materialise. It is in this light that it becomes impossible to give Nisio’s decision to write Our Broken World as a mystery novel—his default genre—any special significance.
The usual temptation is to assume differently; our tendency to operate as though all meaning in art is the product of deliberate human ingenuity is very natural. However, even if it is natural, this is a fundamental misunderstanding. While, no doubt, some of the meaning within art is the product of the intentional calculations of particularly devious artists, this art is also the product of its wider social and historical context. And this wider context echoes and reverberates through art with at least as much resonance as the machinations of the author, who only has so much control over the meaning that is ultimately transmitted to the audience. That we should so often assume that art is a direct window into the soul of the auteur creator—what writer and critic Shouyou Tsubouchi called the “submerged ideals of the author” that he saw as present in every work—is itself historically contingent, and consequently a strange value to attempt to universalise. In reality, Nisio’s interest in both classical mystery fiction and otaku culture is more than sufficient to explain the interpenetration of genre concepts as present in Our Broken World. There is no need to speculate on a deeper biographical motive or intention behind it; whether or not there is one, we can simply take the work as is.
Even with this consideration in place, we may still visit the particular features of Our Broken World as a mystery novel: Not as a product of the author’s genius or unique vision, but as a simple and direct property of the text as it exists unto itself.
Mystery fiction as crisis literature
For the sake of those that are aware of it, I will endeavour to not simply repeat this point since I have covered it before, but the main boom in mystery fiction arose in the historical aftermath of an unimaginable crisis—more specifically, the First World War. General histories of the genre tend to blend the 19th and 20th centuries together, producing a unified narrative that goes something like this: Mystery fiction as a trend in English literature arose in an era of positivism and romanticism where Gothic writers such as Edgar Allan Poe and adventure writers such as Arthur Conan Doyle sought to write stories about the aesthetics of the rational inquiry into the unknown. Unlike prior eras, technological and scientific advancement had robbed the zeitgeist of an easy fantasy of the supernatural and mythological. This was the century where Nietzsche had declared the death of God, and in his place, the only mysteries left were those that could be solved by the rational and scientific detective.
This approach is a simplified but fundamentally accurate summary of the origins of the genre. But, attempting to extend this origin forward to explain the unfolding of its own subsequent history is a grave error. More particularly, it is a post hoc ergo propter hoc (after this, therefore because of this) false rationalisation, where the continuation of mystery fiction into the 20th century is assumed to follow the same sociological basis as the mystery fiction of the 19th century simply because one followed the other. In reality, there is no such thing as such a pure anachronism in culture. That which exists in the 20th century represents something about that same century, not just what came before. And for this reason, we need a theory of mystery fiction that explains its massive explosion of popularity (known as the Golden Age) during the 20th century as separate from the origins of its tropes in the 19th century. This theory, as with many histories of the 20th century, largely rests on the First World War.
Given the winding and complex historical events that unfolded all across the 20th century, it can be difficult to remember how singularly destructive and horrifying the events of the First World War were. Between fifteen and twenty million people were killed in the war, and upwards of fifty million were killed in the subsequent influenza pandemic that was unleashed by the depraved conditions of the war. By most population estimates, this puts the total cost to the world population suffered in the era at well above five percent—and these casualties were particularly concentrated within the nations that were involved in the most intense fighting. Even in nations that were given a degree of geographic separation, they were sufficiently involved such that almost everyone lost friends or family in either the war or its aftermath. And it was exactly this dichotomy between nations that suffered direct trauma and those that suffered indirect trauma which contextualised the sudden torrent of interest in mystery fiction. To quote critic and theorist Kiyoshi Kasai:
Most of the major movements associated with modernism—for example, formalism, surrealism, dadaism, and expressionism—originated in countries like Russia, Germany, and France, where battles had actually taken place in front of their very eyes. Whereas you don’t find these sorts of drastic artistic movements occurring in countries like America and England, which didn’t experience the war firsthand. Then what did happen in America and England? The fad of serious mystery novels! Let’s take a serial story in a magazine or newspaper. Before the war, at least one person per day or per week or per month was killed in those stories. The way death is presented in those works reflected the way people thought about death before the war—it was routine, very easy: people simply died, very quickly, with almost no fuss at all. But in a serious post-war mystery novel, death doesn’t happen so easily: the murderer scrupulously plans the killing in detail and carries out the crime with every due respect to the victim. Even after the murder, the detective works very hard to find out who had done it. This is almost like a double authorization of the victim. The death of the individual is made very meaningful—perhaps in order to give it meaning in art that’s no longer possible in real life.
To simplify this further, while the nations that were directly ravaged by the war had to rely on radical and transformative artistic movements to represent the severe trauma that was inflicted on them, those who were removed from the war by one dimension were able to instead reformulate and express this trauma in their popular culture. The terror of the war was totalising and nihilistic on the continent, but in Britain there was a paradoxical ideological disconnect: The institutions and logic of pre-war modernity remained intact, in contrast to other European powers which became hotbeds for radical and reactionary politics. Yet, these relatively sheltered nations still experienced the banalisation and irrationality of mass death. They sought to reconcile the previous order of hyper-rationality and unambiguous political orders with the crisis of mass death that seemed to undermine all rational explanation. For this reason, mystery fiction was able to bring ritualised importance and logic to this otherwise banal mass death. To quote Kasai once more:
The backbone of the detectives of the nineteenth century is positivism. They thought that the truth exists and that they could get to that truth by experience, observation, and presumption. Holmes is a good example. However, the detectives of the twentieth century begin by doubting the truth. If there were any truth at all, it would be something that they themselves must create, rather than discover. In a sense, nihilism was pervasive. From this point it is interesting to see that Van Dine was a student of Nietzsche.
Mystery fiction offered a special sociological ritual where those left behind by the war, especially women, could undergo a process where death is treated with great importance. The mystery novel debanalified death and, most importantly, offered a participatory element where the death could be intimately and logically interrogated by the reader. To outsiders it may have looked like a meaningless game, like nothing more than a crossword, but to readers of mystery fiction the narrativity was reflective of a deeper emotional weight that separated the artform from being mere idle entertainment. This was a game that carried unique emotional weight in a world where death had been banalised by the horrors and nihilism of the First World War. It was only the overwhelming victory of the United States in the Second World War that broke this spell for much of the English-speaking world.
In this sense, the mystery fiction of the 19th and 20th centuries could not be more different—even as they overlapped in their basic forms. They both celebrated the use of logic and rationality to elucidate the unknown. However, while the 19th century formulation was an experimentally positivist literature meant to reflect the progress of modern science, in the 20th century it had instead become a kind of backwards-looking conservative crisis literature. And this inversion became the foundation for subsequent trends in mystery fiction. While the ascendent United States abandoned the genre in favour of dark and gritty hardboiled police dramas, postcolonial imperial decline saw the genre find continued purchase in Britain, France, and Italy during the Cold War era. In this environment, while it would never again reach the total dominance of its Golden Age, mystery fiction continued to satisfy its role as crisis fiction. As the British mystery writer Ian Rankin explains:
[Mystery fiction] is about tragedy and our emotional responses to tragedy. It is also about moral choices and questions. It can be utterly serious in intent, yet still entertaining … In real life, we seldom know what specifically killed off our happiness, whereas in the novel the seemingly random nature of existence is given an explanation–in crime fiction, death never happens without good reason and the causes of death never go unexplained (and are seldom unpunished).
Most relevantly for the case of Our Broken World, Japan had their own experience with mass death in the Second World War. Afterwards, they moved away from a prior tradition of horror-like mysteries such as those written by Edogawa, Ranpo and instead towards the spectacularly popular classic-style whodunits of Seishi Yokomizo in the post-war era. The peculiar features of pre-war and post-war Japanese mysteries, and their origins, will be a story for another time. However, the history of Japanese mystery fiction that immediately preceded Our Broken World will be worth revisiting in some detail.
The contemporary crisis
Once we understand that mystery fiction can be constituted as a kind of crisis literature, its massive popularity in Japan during and around the 1990s hardly comes as a surprise. As we discussed in Part One, the 1990s saw the dramatic reversal of Japan’s ascendence during the prior decade. Economic recession, domestic terrorism, natural disasters; the era was punctuated by crisis after crisis. Although none of these crises involved anywhere near the kind of mass death of the Second World War, they were nonetheless shocking to the national zeitgeist. Take, for example, the chemical weapon attacks perpetrated by the cult Aum Shinrikyou across 1994 and 1995. While these attacks were relatively minor in scale compared to the mass casualty terrorist events that later rocked the United States and its allies during the 2000s, the ideological shifts that accompanied Japan’s own attacks were major. This cult, which had, somewhat erroneously, been culturally linked to the broad notion of “youth culture,” represented the return of a tangible fear of death that had been abstracted away in pristine boom years of Japan’s post-war economic miracle.
The attacks perpetrated by Aum Shinrikyou, while dramatic, were only able to contribute so dramatically to a reformulation of the Japanese zeitgeist because they were one part of a larger context that had brought mass death into the spotlight. Earlier in the same year that the largest of the Aum Shinrikyou attacks took place, the Great Hanshin earthquake led to the shocking deaths of over six thousand people. And even before the turn of the decade, a serial string of gruesome murders committed by Tsutomu Miyazaki between 1988 and 1989 caused a severe moral panic. In only a handful of years, Japan seemed to suddenly become a nation where average people could die suddenly and for no logical reason at all. Of course, these perceptions were not true in a literal sense. Like most post-industrial democracies, Japan has enjoyed a general and persistent downward trend in homicide rates and other crimes. However, technological and sociocultural shifts have blinded many citizens across the globe to this trend. Unlike the real mass death of the World Wars, the contemporary citizen sees a phantasmic mass death, where its spectre haunts them even without the corpses to show for it.
It is in this context that we must shift our thinking to most accurately contrast the contemporary crisis from the earlier kind of crisis that influenced the original Golden Age of mystery fiction. The mystery fiction boom of the inter-war period was the reflection of a modern social crisis; it represented the reconstitution of mass culture in an age where an abiding faith in logic had been shaken by a seemingly senseless mass death event, the First World War, which had taken place on an industrial scale. In contrast, the contemporary crisis that led to Our Broken World is a postmodern crisis: Mass culture has not reformulated itself in response to people witnessing any particular event. Rather, it was the very act of “perception” itself that was shaken to its core. The French philosopher and sociologist Jean Baudrillard identifies postmodernity with “simulacra,” meaning symbols that are a truth unto themselves rather than representing some underlying reality. Put another way, simulacra are symbols that have no original meaning, and therefore exclusively mean whatever they are taken to mean in relation to themselves. We can think of the contemporary crisis as one involving the simulacra of mass death and trauma emerging from the shadows. In the current age, the symbol of mass death does not result from actual mass death. In imitation of a now entirely symbolic historical process, we fear death even without witnessing actual death because of its symbolic resonance in mass culture.
This is all to say that while we must understand the boom in puzzle mysteries in Japan as the re-emergence of a kind of crisis literature, we must also invert the directionality of our thinking as compared to puzzle mysteries from the early 20th century. It is not that contemporary mysteries emerged in response to tangible crises, it is that a climate of crisis became natural in the kind of culture that would return to puzzle mysteries. To explain further, inter-war mystery fiction attempted to find a path back to notions of “truth” after an anti-rational crisis, but postmodern mystery fiction wrote about “truth” in order to navigate a culture that had abandoned the concept. This is why, even as it is “hardly a surprise” that mystery fiction exploded in popularity during the crises of the 1990s, it is equally unsurprising the boom also preceded these crises, with Yukito Ayatsuji’s movement-defining The Decagon House Murders being released in 1987—before even the Tsutomu Miyazaki murders had introduced any material sense of “crisis” to Japan.
In Tzvetan Todorov’s The Poetics of Prose, he argues that traditional mystery fiction relied on the double layered narrative structure, a concept previously established in Russian formalism, to deliver the catharsis of order in a world overtaken by chaos. The double narrative refers to the interplay of two narrative concepts known as fabula and syuzhet respectively. As we established in Part One, the fabula is the formalist term for the diegetic events within the world of fiction whilst syuzhet is the perspective of the events that is presented to the audience. In mystery fiction, the narrative is formed when a particular feature of the fabula, “the world as it is,” is hidden by means of some trick as we follow the syuzhet, “the world as it seems.”
The precise role of mystery fiction as a representation of crisis hinges on the discontinuity and subsequent reconciliation of the double layered narrative structure: In contrast to most narrative forms, the wider world of mystery fiction is generally presented as a logical and orderly world that coheres to the nostalgia of a pre-war, positivist ideal. However, some particular incongruence between the syuzhet and the fabula, usually the mysterious death or other incident, derails this idealised order. Therefore, the detective who reconciles the syuzhet to the objective truth of the fabula symbolically reconstitutes the old logical order. This reconciliation of the double layered narrative structure is the essential nature of the “ritual” that is mystery fiction as crisis literature, and it is also what critic and theorist Kiyoshi Kasai called the “mystery—logical resolution formula” that lays at the heart of mystery fiction.
In traditional mystery fiction, the mystery—logical resolution formula could be pursued in a pure fashion as discussed above, but such purity has been directly challenged by the conditions of contemporary culture. As a result, any attempts to revive the genre have either had to anachronise themselves or else recontextualise this mystery—logical resolution formula in accordance with the current culture. In Britain and the United States, authors have generally followed the path of anachronism, leading to the birth of the so-called “cosy” mystery. In a cosy mystery, this mystery—logical resolution formula is strictly followed to completion in the form of Golden Age mystery fiction—perhaps to such an excessive degree that they exaggerate the tropes of the era in an attempt to deliberately evoke nostalgia. In such cosy mysteries, the most distinctive feature of the genre becomes the neatness of their resolutions; the mystery—logical resolution formula is deproblematicised, and a perfectly comprehensive explanation of the “objective” truth is always provided.
The re-emergence of mystery fiction into the same Japanese zeitgeist that created the contemporary crisis followed the opposite path of its Western counterpart. Instead of attempting to reach the pure resolutions of Golden Age mystery fiction, Japanese authors of what was called the “honkaku renaissance” took the foundational form of the mystery—logical resolution formula and used it to explore the limits of the culture of crisis that surrounded them. Honkaku—translatable as orthodox—is the Japanese term for puzzle mysteries that follow the traditional mystery—logical resolution formula. From 1987, Japanese authors took it on themselves to create a shinhonkaku—neo-orthodox—style of mystery fiction that adapted the mystery—logical resolution formula for the current age. These were not “dark” or “hardboiled” mysteries meant to contrast the kind of aesthetic sensibilities that informed Western cosy mysteries. On the contrary, shinhonkaku mysteries often feature the stylistic flourishes and tropes of Golden Age detective fiction in their entirety. However, in attempting to write for the contemporary youth of the 1990s, and not just for those overcome with nostalgia for the Golden Age, it became natural to play with the mystery—logical resolution formula in accordance with the assumptions of postmodernity. We can see this clearly in Kasai’s commentary on the third generation shinhonkaku writer Ryuusui Seiryouin:
On the novel formula aspect, it’s near to impossible to hear the echoes of the 20th century in Seiryouin’s works. To put it simply, Seiryouin’s works destroy the “mystery—logical resolution” format restrictions externally. While he stuffs elements from detective novels like great detectives, serial killers, and locked rooms to an extreme degree in his works, he doesn’t provide the readers with the catharsis that is rational explanations. Seiryouin’s detectives don’t work with logic, but with plays on words. They shine light onto the truth through voodoo-like principles like anagrams.
Nisio, Isin himself is a fourth generation shinhonkaku writer, having been raised on the works of Ryuusui Seiryouin, as well as other contemporaries such as Hiroshi Mori and Natsuhiko Kyougoku. Indeed, Nisio’s own debut was associated with Kodansha’s Mephisto Prize, which was the same newcomer award that had previously been linked to all three of these authors. We have already partially explored Kyougoku’s own approach to the mystery—logical resolution formula on this blog, and similarly to Seiryouin’s, Kyougoku’s novels construct their own mystery—logical resolution formula that is entirely separate from the traditional model used by Golden Age mystery fiction. It is in this context that Our Broken World must be understood: It is a novel written by a youthful member of a movement dedicated to the playful restructuring of the mystery—logical resolution formula in an age where it no longer belonged.
What it means to break the world
For those that only dabble in either genre, it can be remarkably difficult to disentangle thrillers from the kinds of puzzle-based mystery fiction that we have concerned ourselves with so far. While there are substantial differences in the minutiae of each genre, their overlap in the cultural consciousness is hardly surprising. While mystery fiction concerns itself with the metaphysical response to the crisis of mass death, thrillers instead reflect the physical nature of mass death. In that sense, thrillers are more a derivative of horror than mystery. Regardless, the two terms often went hand in hand, as it was typical for the crisis in mystery fiction to translate into real physical peril until the mystery—logical resolution formula allowed for order to be restored to the double layered narrative structure. It is for this reason that the most popular works of the Golden Age, such as And Then There Were None or The A.B.C. Murders, bothby Agatha Christie, are often called both mysteries and thrillers, as they were representative of both the metaphysical and physical peril of the crisis of mass death.
By contrast, feeling the fear of death in the contemporary crisis is a far more purely metaphysical phenomenon. As previously discussed, the fear of death in postmodern society is a simulacrum, or a pure symbol, rather than a reflection of physical mass death. It is therefore appropriate that Our Broken World, which emerged from this particular facet of postmodernity, is chiefly concerned with the metaphysical nature of the fear of death. The sense of the word “broken” that we find in the title of Our Broken World is precisely inverted from how it would be used in a Golden Age mystery. In the logic of traditional mystery, the decoupling of the fabula from the syuzhet, and the resultant prominence of the unknown, was terrifying precisely because it was associated with mass death. In other words, in the Golden Age, the world was broken by mass death. This is notably subverted in Our Broken World, where the fear of death can only be understood in context as a fear of the unknown. In other words, the world is broken by the unknown. The nuances of this inversion are made explicit by the detective of the story, Kuroneko Byouinzaka, who declares that she “would prefer dying than having something I don’t know.”
To be clear, both forms of the crisis inherent to mystery fiction concern a mix of death and the unknown as natural motifs. But Our Broken World sublimates the physical fear of death entirely beneath the metaphysical fear of the unknown, producing a clear hierarchy that was unimaginable in the war-torn psyche of Golden Age mystery fiction. When Ririsu Kotohara is overcome by the fear of death at the opening of chapter 2, her explanation for how she feels does not rest on the physical likelihood of mass death, but precisely on its irrational unpredictability:
“So maybe I’ll be killed without a reason too. Maybe one day I’ll suddenly, abruptly, without any reason, get killed. Aren’t I right? Isn’t that the case? I’m sure it is.”
However, when Kotohara’s fear is related to Byouinzaka, she rejects the simplicity of this formulation entirely:
“What’s that? That’s just common sense, not even worthy of being called a fear. Fear is, you see… it’s the fear of thinking ‘am I unrelated to this world?’ The fear of the world progressing without you. You are worried—about the world.”
In other words, it is not death that makes the decoupling of the fabula and syuzhet—the murder—terrifying, it is that without a rational order, there is no control. It becomes an arbitrary, illogical phenomenon. Samatoki’s crisis is not the physical crisis of mass death, it is the figurative crisis of being disconnected from the progress of the world. In the metaphysics of Our Broken World, this is what it means to “break” the world: The world becomes broken by its irrationalities that strip us of control and peace. Returning to a key quote of Byouinzaka’s:
“I cannot bear having something around me being broken or collapsing. I get irritated when I see anything of the sort. A peaceful world, complete stillness is the only thing I ask of the gods. I am sick of this broken world. I don’t intend to prize logic, but I feel something similar to anger whenever I face irrational and illogical things.”
The close link between the concepts of the unknown and individual agency might seem arbitrary, but for close readers of mystery fiction it is a long-standing association. Indeed, the unique ability of mystery fiction to offer a sense of agency to its readers goes a long way towards explaining its tradition of popularity among female writers and readers. Relatedly, in Queering Agatha Christie, James Bernthal explores the paradoxical importance of non-standard gender norms in the irreverently conservative worlds of Golden Age mystery fiction. The nuances of the theory of agency in mystery fiction was a major subject in a prior post on this blog, and so we will only cover it briefly.
In developing the idea of mystery fiction as crisis literature, we already uncovered the mystery—logical resolution formula as an important tool for the ritualistic restoration of order to a chaotic world. However, an essential feature of orthodox implementations of the mystery—logical resolution formula is that they involve a participatory element—widely known among fans as the principle of “fair play.” For mystery fiction to abide by fair play, it must be solvable by attentive readers even before the solution—the reconciliation of the syuzhet to the fabula—is directly revealed in the narrative. In other words, the mystery—logical resolution formula is something that can be short-circuited by a reader, allowing them to circumvent the rigid structure of narrative as built by the author. The implications of this are crucial for understanding the full appeal of the inter-war boom in mystery fiction: Mystery fiction is not just crisis literature in terms of depicting the irrationality of mass death, it is a participatory artform that allows the audience to involve themselves in reconciling the double layered narrative structure and thereby resolve the crisis of the unknown that is being depicted in the world of fiction. This process afforded the audience a crucial avenue for personal agency, something which they—especially the women left behind in the war—often lacked for in the real world.
While this might seem like nothing more than abstract theory, it is in fact a concept that Our Broken World discusses at some length, and subsequently twists into an interesting shape. While it was an undercurrent for a large portion of Part One of this post, in order to explore the importance of “agency” as a concept, we should really dive into the role of the protagonist, Samatoki Hitsuuchi. As already discussed, Samatoki is a planner and schemer: If I were to define a “plan” in perhaps overly poetic language, I would call it the unfolding of a future which returns to the present. Samatoki sees no value in an uncertain future because it would be outside of his control, and so he tweaks every variable in the present in order to ensure a result that simply unfolds according to his desires. He seeks outcomes with the same game-like logic and predictability as a game of shogi. In Part One, we primarily discussed this attribute in terms of how it affects his relationships with others, but in the particular context of mystery fiction as an agency-rich variety of crisis literature, Samatoki’s character traits take on additional meaning.
It does not take an especially metaphorical reading to relate Samatoki’s aversion to the future to the nostalgia inherent in the genre. However, this approach gives its most plentiful dividends when we relate it to a wider understanding of the genre in line with the theory we have developed thus far. Beyond just the straightforward “crisis” of a mystery novel—the fear of mass death—there is also the parallel crisis of the unknown. In postmodern mystery fiction, this crisis of truth and reality has been elevated beyond the base physical fear of death. Earlier, we termed the crisis of mystery fiction the “breaking” of the world, in reference to the wording used by Our Broken World. Through Samatoki’s fixation on reclaiming control from the unknowable future, we can come to understand the fear of a broken world in two distinct yet highly synergistic contexts.
Firstly, the breaking of the world refers to the epistemological collapse of predictability in Samatoki’s finely tuned machine of a social existence. Samatoki’s world relies on events that unfold on the basis of logical risk and return, and without that he feels disconnected—broken off—from the mechanisms of the world. The second sense in which we can understand the breaking of the world refers more directly to the logical problem constructed by the nature of a mystery novel. The breaking of syuzhet from fabula, the separation of the world into a double layered narrative structure, means that neither we nor the characters can understand the world until the murder is solved and logical order returns to the world. In other words, Our Broken World as a character-study into the romantic entanglements of a morally unusual control-freak and Our Broken World as a representative of the crisis of fear contained within mystery fiction are not separate strands. Instead, both sides of Our Broken World are closely intertwined with one another and cooperate to construct the novel’s particular viewpoint.
The double layered narrative structure and the diegesis
Insomuch as we have defined the mystery—logical resolution formula as the process involving the initial separation of the syuzhet from the fabula as well as their subsequent reunification, such a formula has some rather direct applications in the conceptual framework we developed to discuss a particular kind of romance fiction in Part One. Back there, we stratified our understanding of fiction between the diegetic Real, the diegetic Imaginary, and the Symbolic representation of fiction that we receive ourselves. Having developed the concept of the double layered narrative structure and related ideas since then, we can now expand these terms to apply to the arena of mystery fiction. Indeed, as a generalised model, there was no reason that we could not apply these terms before now, except for the sake of simplicity. If we revisit the model now, we should be able to see how closely the concepts of the diegetic Real and diegetic Imaginary map onto the formalist concepts of fabula and syuzhet.
If we cast our minds back to the nature of sekai-kei as crisis fiction, the implications of this similarity become profound. Just as sekai-kei fiction seeks to provide a romantic connection that can bridge the gap between the diegetic Imaginary perspective of the protagonist (syuzhet) and their wider diegetically Real context (fabula), mystery fiction presents a crisis that can only be resolved through the reconciliation of the syuzhet and fabula—or diegetic Imaginary and Real. To be sure, there are substantial differences between them: It would not be accurate to say that the kinds of crises shown in sekai-kei could be solved by a detective—at least, not until Hercule Poirot reveals his backstory as The Ultimate Weapon of the JSDF. Neither would a sekai-kei protagonist be the suitable vehicle to solve a locked-room mystery.
It is most accurate to say that, despite their differences, both of these forms of fiction centre the collective trauma of crisis around the sensation of losing control. In sekai-kei, the wider social context retreats, giving up its pretence of peace and stability, leaving only the individual to respond to a world-crisis that is seemingly of a scale beyond their control. In mystery fiction, some “impossible” or “illogical” feature of the world seems to untether the individual from any wider notion of truth, isolating them from reality until they are able to reconcile this incongruent event with their knowledge of the world. In either case, these genres exist to depict the challenges of existing as an individual that encounters an unreliable connection to reality. Beyond their highly visible aesthetic distinctions, the most important difference in form between these two genres lies in their respective methods of resolving the crises that beset the world. In sekai-kei stories, the protagonist must seek a method of existing in an unreliable world. For this, we turn to the mirror-romance structure as discussed in Part One. This being defined as the particular kind of romance that allows a paradoxical combination of both isolation and human connection. In contrast to it, mystery fiction tends towards resolving the crisis itself, repairing the world so that it becomes something that the characters can once again rely on.
Between the two, the sekai-kei approach is clearly more directly informed by the contemporary zeitgeist. The notion of a concrete truth to be relied upon is entirely absent from its approach; even when such stories trace their way to an uplifting resolution, it is always found in isolation from the larger social context of the world. To put it another way, even if sekai-kei and mystery fiction are both forms of crisis fiction, sekai-kei is more thoroughly pervaded by the pessimism that produced the contemporary concept of crisis. It does not see crisis as something that invades an otherwise peaceful natural order—crisis is the natural order.
Between and amongst these differences, Our Broken World exists as a curious intermingling of both viewpoints. Beyond just the wider shinhonkaku tradition of postmodern mystery fiction, this particular novel arrived on the scene in the post-Evangelion zeitgeist of 2003, which had been significantly impacted by the sekai-kei mindset. However, it did not accept the existential retreat that was typical of many of its peers. By choosing to firmly root itself in the logic of mystery fiction, and even celebrating this logic, it depicted a crisis that could in fact be resolved. In other words, the mystery—logical resolution formula remains a prominent piece of Our Broken World. While it does not shy away from the challenges against the concept of truth in the postmodern era, it affirms that mysteries—that which is broken about the world—can be acted upon by those that participate in the mystery—logical resolution formula, whether that’s the characters or the audience.
Even within this affirmation of the traditional structure of mystery fiction, Our Broken World still finds it necessary to approach this structure in its own unique manner. When presenting the world as a puzzle that has an answer—a medium where individual agency still has meaning—Our Broken World understands that it would be dishonest to present the world as though it operated on pure logic. In contrast to the inhuman, mechanised mass death that pervaded the early 20th century, it is only appropriate that Our Broken World presents a mystery dominated by the deeply human post-truth culture that closed out that same century. This is why it is so important that the mystery of Our Broken World is structured around a psychological trick built on comprehending the human motives of its characters. While there is a locked-room component to its mystery, and the mechanically logical motifs of mystery fiction such as alibis, murder weapons, identity tricks, etc., the crime presented in Our Broken World is only possible to understand once one thinks through the motives behind the construction of the trick. In this we find another curious inversion at the heart of the novel; in a typical mystery novel, you must think through the cold and logical mechanics of the mystery in order to see the world occupied by its characters, but in this case the characters are the only coherent pathway to understanding the logical structure of the world. In other words, the variously interconnected character worldviews and romantic entanglements that we discussed in Part One are a foundational piece of the mystery in Our Broken World, not a wholly separate kind of genre appeal.
Of course, any discussion that attempts to build a unified framework with which to discuss Our Broken World would be incomplete without addressing its peculiar ending, and how this ending relates to the double layered narrative structure. To be blunt, the ending of Our Broken World is not just non-cosy, it is anti-cosy. In the conventional history of the crime genre, the contemporary interest in, and return to cosy mysteries was a direct reaction against the trend towards realistic hardboiled and procedural crime dramas that occupied much of the later-middle of the 20th century—this trend was referred to as the shakai era of mystery fiction in Japan. However, even the most cynically hardboiled (or shakai) novels preserved a relatively mainstream view of justice that was broadly in-line with the underlying aspirations of cosy mystery fiction: No matter how pessimistic the resolution, we as the audience are given the tools to orient ourselves towards an ideal of justice; even if the criminal gets away, we understand the tragedy inherent in this resolution, and hope for a world where the detective could instead restore order. However, such neatness is out of the question in Our Broken World, for reasons arising directly out of the motives that led to the diegetic creation of the puzzle mystery. Since the tricks present in the novel were established by the culprits in order to protect our protagonist, it becomes impossible to see the completion of the mystery—logical resolution formula as a path towards order. There is no ideal of justice that could possibly restore the original state of being—put another way, there is no means to unbreak the world. Even after the double layered narrative structure is reconciled, the world continues to stand on the precipice of crisis. Reality cannot be neatly packed up like in a mystery novel.
Part Three: Kaitou-hen
I’m not doing it with such deep thought. I have neither an ideology nor something to claim. I have nothing to protect or grow inside my heart. There is a problem in front of me, and therefore I solve it. I can’t bear having a problem before me. I’m not doing it for the world, I’m not doing it for myself. I’m not doing it for you, I’m not doing it for me. If an insect flies close to one’s face, it’s natural to wave it away. Even lions or demons would do the same. It’s no different. If there’s something I don’t understand, I can die. If I have to escape from things I don’t understand, I can die. Ambiguity and irrationality and contradictions and deception and vague unnaturality and meaninglessness and forceful thinking, any and all of them are our enemies. We are fish. Frail fish unable to breathe without swimming in the vast ocean that is the world. We are warriors. Puny warriors unable to lie outside of the battlefield that is the world.
Dénouement
Similar in style to a mystery novel, the final point and purpose of much of this post may still seem opaque. However, in that same sense of comparison, I hope to at least be able to guarantee its usefulness in the full context of what is to follow. A mystery novel only feels complete after the resolution. We have spent quite some time developing one particular perspective for viewing Our Broken World as a kind of romance, only to subsequently redevelop a different lens to view it as a mystery. As we discussed, these two approaches are able to overlap in helpful and interesting ways. However, merely establishing this synergy was never the point of so closely examining Our Broken World.
Even if I have done little to dispel such a myth up to this point, the kind of concepts on display throughout the first two Parts of this post make for an example of certain misunderstandings. By their own nature, they contribute to a perspective that has pushed many to disregard Our Broken World in favour of the more forward-looking and spectacle-filled alternatives offered by its author—not that these alternatives are uninteresting, I enjoy them myself. More specifically, it is possible to read Our Broken World in an aggressively metaphorical and metatextual lens, where it is more akin to a non-fiction essay on the kinds of romance and mystery tropes we established above. This stands in contrast to the ideal of being a compelling example of fiction in its own right. Whether or not Our Broken World is compelling remains a subjective question that each reader can decide for themselves, but we must at least disentangle the problems that lead to this confused reading.
I somewhat shudder at the thought of saying something so definitive and leaving myself so little wiggle room, but there is no such thing as a work of fiction that is merely an essay—this is to say, merely a vehicle for transmitting commentary on our own world. There are plenty of examples of fiction that is positively dripping with asides and themes that discuss the issues of the day without much in the way of characterisation or immersion. However, even in these cases, fiction can only infinitely approach the limit of non-fiction—it can never cross that threshold. This is mostly due to the meaning created by the notion of fictionality itself. No matter how much we attempt to view the work as a simple act of communication by the author, the illusion of something non-real beyond the contents of the page creates a space for a new dimension of meaning. The dialectical interplay between the real and imaginary shapes the text in ways that are utterly separate from the nature of non-fiction, which is always attempting to chiefly exist in our own world, beyond the page.
The meaning of Our Broken World can never be adequately discussed purely in the context of other works or abstract concepts of literature. We must specifically consider the novel in the light of the creation of a fictional world where the themes we have discussed thus far exert their influence within the diegesis even as they create meaning beyond it. In other words, we must read Our Broken World in the context of not being real. In doing so, we can find a new avenue for talking about the meaning of the novel beyond just how it reflects our reality. Although to some degree, fiction is fiction precisely because it has no stakes, that is not how it appears to its characters. For the characters in a fictional world, idle literary theories take on existential importance. Of course, it may seem paradoxical to insist on the fictionality of a work only to turn around and appeal to the unique features of the characters’ diegetic perspective. However, the contours of that paradox are the most central feature of Our Broken World. For many novels, what we see about ourselves in its world allows us to question particular features of our own world. However, in the case of this novel, dripping as it is with discussions of metatext and genre conventions, seeing ourselves in its characters is precisely about questioning our own fantasies. This turn towards the fictional has become a far more severe issue in a post-truth climate, where the primacy of “reality” cannot be taken for granted.
Early Queen Theory
Just over halfway into Our Broken World, a piece of jargon pops up that probably left many scratching their heads. Namely, what Samatoki calls “the late Queen problem.” As the novel itself states, this term is more or less reserved for fanatical mystery addicts. But even many hardcore mystery fans in the West would be baffled by this phrase, since it is a uniquely Japanese neologism. While the novel itself provides some explanation on the problem, a thorough explanation of its precise nature and role in Our Broken World would offer some much-needed context on the novel’s ending, and the overall point of this post. What came to be known as the late Queen problem has its origins in the contents of a 1995 essay titled Early Queen Theory, written by mystery novelist Rintarou Norizuki. Before discussing Our Broken World any further, we should briefly summarise the main points of this essay—which will be somewhat challenging, since it rivals the length of this post.
Early Queen Theory largely takes the form of a close reading of the oeuvre of American mystery author duo Frederic Dannay and Manfred Bennington Lee—better known by their shared pseudonym Ellery Queen. Norizuki reads the work of the Queen duo through Koujin Karatani’s theory of formalisation, which he explains in detail in Architecture as Metaphor. Karatani’s work seeks to understand Western culture in particular as originating in the dichotomy between the constructed and not constructed. He sees Western philosophy as an attempt to construct formal structures which impose order over reality. He calls his impulse formalisation and reads much of Western literature as a manifestation of formalisation, especially the fixations that have followed since the French Revolution such as realism and positivism.
The essential point of Early Queen Theory is to apply this theory of formalisation to the development and limits of the golden age of mystery fiction. Norizuki regards the traditional whodunit mystery as a highly formal structure which included or excluded certain possibilities by way of its rules and traditions that had gradually developed, especially in the period between the debut of S.S. Van Dine in 1916 and the debut of Ellery Queen in 1929. Norizuki argues that this period saw mystery fiction become increasingly formalised, and that the early work of Ellery Queen distilled the final formalised structure of mystery fiction to its purest manifestation. Earlier on this blog, we already developed a similar theory in regard to the origins of the classic whodunit, which we located in the codification and gamification of the genre. Codification as a concept is functionally identical to formalisation, except that it does not carry the same implications of Karatani’s wider theory about the entire configuration of Western culture.
In the essay, Norizuki places great emphasis on the fact that Ellery Queen was both the pseudonym of the writing duo and the diegetic name of their fictional detective. Through this, Norizuki hints that the purpose of the particular formalised/codified structure of puzzler mystery fiction was to offer guarantees from outside of the diegesis that fair play would be adhered to. For example, the shared name between author and detective ensured that, when the fictional detective offered a guarantee of fair play in Ellery Queen’s trademark Challenge to the Reader in each novel, it also amounted to a guarantee by the author of fair play. Were the audience to read this promise as being purely diegetic, there would be no guarantee that the detective is telling the truth. It is only due to the formalised structure—or metastructure—of mystery fiction as a genre that the audience can take the detective at his word: Firstly, because of the development of particular rules and standards about whether or not a detective can lie, and secondly because the words of Ellery Queen are taken to be equivalent to the words of the author, not merely a character in a story.
Norizuki makes particular reference to the concepts of syuzhet, fabula, and the double layered narrative structure that we have already extensively used in this post. He sees the codification and formalisation of mystery fiction, as in the example above, as something that transcends and penetrates the double layered narrative structure: By transcending the diegetic boundaries of the story in order to offer certain guarantees, the formalised metastructure of mystery fiction allows for a pure rendition of the fabula and thereby limits its distance from the syuzhet. For example, if we take the 7th rule of Knox’s ten commandments of mystery fiction, “the detective must not himself commit the crime,” we are able to immediately determine the innocence of the detective character regardless of “the world as it seems” in the syuzhet. This determination comes entirely from something beyond the diegetic boundaries of the narrative, and in this way the entire genre of mystery fiction becomes an essential piece in the reading of any individual text.
Where Norizuki makes a particularly drastic breakthrough is by extending this logic to the development of the careers of the Queen duo. While the early work of Ellery Queen manifested the most uncompromising depiction of highly codified mystery fiction, their work changed as the golden age came to a close. In their early novels, not only were the rules of mystery fiction strictly followed, but they also ensured that there were few if any distractions from the tropes of pure mystery fiction. As S.S. Van Dine himself argued, mixed-genre mysteries reduce the effectiveness of the codified and gamified elements of the genre because they introduce elements that are too ambiguous to judge by the standards of fair play. As a simple example, if the work becomes a romance, we are robbed of the ability to treat the romantic interest as a fair suspect. However, the work of Ellery Queen gradually started to include more of these ambiguous elements. Characters went through emotional character arcs; mixed-genre elements started to figure into the plot; guarantees of fair play such as the Challenge to the Reader became rarer as the emotions of the diegetic story became more central.
In his reading of this transformation, Norizuki identifies an existential problem with the development mystery fiction. Even if the story is ultimately fair, the most important feature of the codification of the genre was the guarantee of fair play from the start. It was only by allowing the audience to take certain features of the fabula as a given that the double layered narrative structure could function. If the story’s adherence to this codified metastructure became ambiguous through the introduction of elements not bound by particular rules, the audience could no longer trust any of these guarantees, they could only take them as the potentially deceptive “world as it seems” of the syuzhet. For example, if the story develops without the trappings of mystery fiction, and therefore lacks the guarantees of codification, the audience might even take the Challenge to the Reader at the end of an Ellery Queen novel to be unreliable. In other words, by tracing the development of Ellery Queen, Norizuki had revealed fair play to be an extremely fragile notion, and something that was only ever possible due to guarantees that existed outside of the double layered narrative structure itself.
By developing a theory on the features of the early work of Ellery Queen, Norizuki uncovered problems with these same theories once they were applied to the late work of Ellery Queen. These problems became known as the late Queen problem(s), a neologism coined by Kiyoshi Kasai in response to Norizuki’s essay. In a general sense, the late Queen problem refers to the pervasive importance of uncertainty that can be revealed by a deep reading of mystery fiction. But, as the issue was debated, it became distilled to two specific questions that arose as a result of Norizuki’s Early Queen Theory:
- The first late Queen problem: Even though the detective may present their deductions and appear to solve the case, can the accuracy of this deduction be proven with certainty?
- The second late Queen problem: In mystery fiction, does the detective play the role of an arbitrary god and decide the fate of the rest of the cast?
The late Queen problem, or, our always broken world
By its very nature, the late Queen problem is illusory—something that only exists insomuch as we believe in it. Despite this, it has the potential to be lethal to the structure of mystery fiction. If the codified metastructure of the genre remains intact, the audience will not even recognise the late Queen problem. Instead, it will simply remain a given that the problem would and could not be exploited in any “fair” novel. In this sense, any rejection of the late Queen problem relies on a tautological consensus: mystery fiction cannot fall prey to the problem, and this is because we all agree that any mystery fiction that would abuse the problem ceases to be mystery fiction as understood within the genre metastructure. Basically, mysteries cannot be subject to the late Queen problem because the late Queen problem does not apply to “true” mysteries. This peculiar line of argument is clarifying when one seeks to understand what sets contemporary culture apart from the zeitgeist of the golden age. Since this argument is dependent on the audience’s faith in the mystery genre metastructure, it seems infinitely more fragile in the current age, which has been shaped by the criticism of all manner of structures.
This is precisely what separates the late Queen problem from the other abstract or theoretical subjects we have discussed so far in this post. While the first two Parts were chiefly concerned with building structures that can be used to model and study fiction in the abstract, in order to separate Our Broken World from other contemporary mystery fiction we need to push these theoretical concepts to their limits. We cannot just build these structures; we must break them apart in order to understand their full scope and meaning. And this is why we must turn to the late Queen problem. The late Queen problem is, to use a most foreboding buzzword, deconstructive. It is a tool that allows us to examine mystery fiction when we reject the assumptions that allow the genre metastructure to function in the first place.
More concretely, the late Queen problem unwinds the mystery—logical resolution formula from both ends. While there are particular features to each of the two late Queen problems when taken in isolation, the general thesis they present together is one chiefly concerned with undermining any attempt to cosily resolve mystery fiction. It posits that when one interrogates the mystery genre metastructure, it is only due to a set of arbitrary assumptions that we take the conclusion at face value. In fact, it is more like the detective (or author) assumes a godlike position and retroactively determines reality in order to allow for the appearance of a definitive conclusion.
This kind of summary positions the late Queen problem as an attack on the resolution of mystery novels, but we must not forget that mystery fiction is an inherently circular category of crisis fiction: While there is a spectrum in how different subgenres approach this theme, the general form of the genre involves restoring a pre-existing order by way of solving the central narrative puzzle. However, as we question the validity of any conclusion that seems to restore this status quo, we inadvertently undermine this prior order itself. In other words, a subtle feature of the late Queen problem—which suggests that we cannot take the solution on faith—is that we similarly cannot take the beginning on faith either. This is what I mean when I say that the problem affects both ends of the mystery—logical resolution formula.
While this does mean that we can treat the diegetic features of the backstory of fictional worlds with scepticism, doing so is not nearly as pressing as it may seem. After all, since it is not literally real, scepticism of a fictional world does not involve doubting anything so existential or fundamental as it would in reality. Rather, it is the metaphorical implications of the problem that should concern us. Scepticism towards the nature of a fictional world should also involve scepticism towards the associations and implications that arise out of the composition of that world. Therefore, when mystery fiction cannot guarantee the authenticity of its resolution, it by association cannot guarantee the authenticity of the pre-crisis world that gives rise to the metaphorical nostalgia and comfort which is often associated with the genre. In other words, when the world remains broken at the end of the story, the dichotomy between broken and unbroken becomes difficult to sustain.
This is why the late Queen problem lies at the emotional heart of Our Broken World, rather than just being an oddity of narrative structure. Because Our Broken World is a fictional story, all of this discussion of genre metastructures and narrative conventions is not merely idle chatter when carried out by and about its characters; they are existential concerns. As we already established in the prior Parts, Samatoki sees the control that comes from knowledge as an essential tool that he needs just to live. The doubt and uncertainty that grows out of the sudden murder of a classmate challenges his way of life down to its roots. His world breaks; as the investigation devolves into a series of discussions and deconstructions of the metastructure of mystery-solving itself, as it becomes impossible to restore transparency and order to the world, it becomes impossible to believe in a world where there is the order and certainty to know anything. After all, even at the resolution of the novel, we never find out exactly which of the two childhood friends actually killed Rokunin Kazusawa. Even after the process of “finding the truth,” the world seems too unwieldy and messy for Samatoki to control, and he begins to think that there is nothing he can do to prevent another crisis. Once the world is broken, it seems as though it has always been broken, and the best we can do is shoddily put it back together with glue and tape and wait for it to inevitably break again. As Samatoki himself put it, at the resolution of the novel:
I shouldn’t have made even one mistake. I should have constantly used my power to its fullest. I should have always been seriously and fervently engaging with all sorts of problems. So why—did I slip and fall in a place like this? The path from ruin to extinction. Why did this place—did this world become so hopeless? Were my will and my intentions already decided from the start, without any involvement from me? Was I only dealing with the aftermath? Was I only forced to do it? And furthermore, once I dealt with the aftermath, I would merely have dealt with the aftermath. It would have been the same whether I did it or not. The world didn’t care about me in the slightest, whether I obtained results or not—Like that, it was as if… as if I—was mistaken about something, about everything—wasn’t it? Then—all I did would’ve been fruitless efforts.
Often, the ending of Our Broken World baffles readers with its peculiar tone and pace. The story seems to end in motion; the murderer(s) is left unpunished with their identity kept a secret from society; Samatoki is trapped in a relationship with one woman while loving a completely different one, and he is also still caught in a toxic cycle of obsession with his sister. In terms of both mystery and romance, things seem to be stuck in a stalemate with no resolution in sight. And then, the novel simply ends. However, when viewed in the light of what we have discussed thus far, I hope this ending might begin to make sense: In an era that has confronted postmodernity, the structures that promise truth and certainty have become fragile and unreliable. There is no totalising conclusion that we can move towards, and the world appears as though it has always been broken. However, there is still the choice to reject any ideological attachment to absolute certainty or perfection. Even if the world is always capable of breaking, we can always go through the mystery—logical resolution formula and put it back together as best we can. A fragile world is not necessarily a broken world, and that is a path towards hope for those that see crisis at every corner.
Herein we find the novel’s “solution” to the late Queen problem: We do not need absolute trust or certainty to put the world back together. So long as we modestly accept the limits of our role in the world, we can just ignore the late Queen problem and accept it as an inevitability. Let us quote the novel’s detective, Kuroneko Byouinzaka, on her answer to the late Queen problem:
“There’s no need to solve it … Everyone is mistaken on the important aspect. Crimes aren’t about debating on probabilities. We call it solving mysteries, but in reality, that process is nothing other than demonstrating the crime. Although we’re talking about novels, what is expected of the role of detective is proving the crime, isn’t it? Their main duty is to doubt. Doubt. Then, wouldn’t it be natural that a duty to prove it would be born with that doubt?
“The actual perpetrator manipulated by the true culprit is nothing but a fool and the culprit led astray by the true culprit is simply an incompetent. No matter what the truth is, that is for certain. At the very least, in the eyes of the law, a crime that cannot be demonstrated isn’t a crime at all. There’s the expression perfect crime, but those words in and of themselves are a contradiction. When dealing with a perfect crime, we’re not even talking about a crime. Even if A-kun was manipulated by B-kun—if you can’t prove it, then that manipulation isn’t a crime. The act of manipulating gets cancelled, and it’s like it never happened in the first place.
“You mustn’t misunderstand. The role of the detective isn’t that of solving the mystery nor of finding the culprit. It’s to prove that the case is a case. It’s not because their main duty is to doubt that they should doubt everything. If they doubt, even if there is no proof, they want some grounds for it.”
In other words, the role of the detective is not to determine the diegetic truth of the matter, since that is simply unknowable. As established within the late Queen problem, attempting to reach some kind of objective or absolute truth about a fictional world is fruitless. Unless we blindly trust in the process of codification, such worlds are infinitely subject to the control of creators and can therefore be reconfigured in retrospect by the words of the godlike detective. However, if we only trust in that which can be proven, we can ignore the late Queen problem in most practical respects. Even if there is no absolute truth, so long as we can demonstrate the logical mechanics of the non-absolute truths that we do know, that is good enough to demonstrate the gap between the syuzhet and fabula that we defined as the double layered narrative structure. For example, so long as we do not fool ourselves into thinking that it is some absolute or objective truth about the fictional world, demonstrating that the syuzhet was biased by way of a narrative trick, such as an unreliable narrator, is enough to “solve” a mystery novel constructed with such a trick. Doing so is enough to bring a broken world back together, even if there is no guarantee that it won’t come apart again.
This is why the world can be unbroken even without a cosy or complete resolution at the end of Our Broken World. What broke the world was not just the uncertainty of a world without any objective truth, it was the disconnect between the individual perspective—syuzhet—and the world—fabula. This is what is behind Samatoki’s sensation that the world is “proceeding without him” and out of his control. It was not that which we cannot know that threw Samatoki into crisis, it was the feeling that the world was lying—that the way in which Samatoki was seeing the world was specifically wrong. To quote Byouinzaka once more:
“It’s the same thing as the fear that took over Kotohara-san. Having told a lie to the world—now you feel like the world is deceiving you. Since you only lie, you cannot trust anyone. Exactly, that is the true agony liars go through. Not being trusted by anyone, that’s not a problem—becoming unable to trust anyone. You feel like everyone is trying to get ahead of you and end up carrying incomprehensible doubts with no clear answer. You’re deceiving someone, so they might be doing the same. Maybe you only consider something the best option because you’ve been deceived, maybe you are mistaken, maybe you are mistaken, maybe you are mistaken. Maybe you keep on being mistaken. The result—which should be the best, might in fact be the worst—you think that way.”
If Our Broken World had a single thesis statement on Samatoki’s characterisation, this quote would be it. If you treat the world as something to be solved and controlled, as though it were filled with pawns that are an extension of yourself, you will see the uncertainty in the world as something terrifying and existential. Your world will be broken, since you cannot understand this world that you intend to control as though it were a piece on a shogi board. Reality will become a crisis, as it seems to lie to you by its nature—which is a potential always carried by the late Queen problem. However, if you instead seek to prove that which you can prove, and carry on modestly, you can ignore this problem and put the world back together. This is why Byouinzaka is able to confidently declare to Samatoki that:
“You cannot deceive me no matter what. Even if you deceive everyone else in the world, even if you deceive the world itself… I will see through your lies. I will prioritize you over everything else and demonstrate your deceits. So you are fine, Samatoki-kun. Your world is still completely fine, Samatoki-kun. Your world… isn’t broken.”
In other words, the detective that seeks to simply prove what can be proven will see through these lies and deceptions, and as a result Samatoki’s world will no longer be broken. It is not that Our Broken World ends with nothing resolved. Rather, the novel ends with Samatoki having to accept that even if he cannot shape the world according to his will, it can still be unbroken. The resolution is not clean—it cannot be in a world that no longer accepts the mystery genre metastructure and therefore must be wary of the late Queen problem. In the most plain possible terms, Our Broken World demonstrates how happiness does not come from control, it comes from compromise. This is why Samatoki cannot manipulate the world to get the resolution he wants, even if that means compromised relationships with three different women.
Escapism and crisis
What we established above should not be confused with any kind of didacticism that is separate from the fictionality of Our Broken World. After all, the late Queen problem does not exist in material reality. While there are lessons that can be taken from the characters in Our Broken World and applied to our own lives, it is more appropriate to focus on the work as fiction. Despite frequent misunderstandings to the contrary, metafiction is not an essay with extra steps. More specifically, the peril that Samatoki feels when he is unable to bring the world to heel, due in large part to the late Queen problem, does not concern particulars of a realistic contemporary existence. Rather, art that comments on fiction is more often commenting on our fantasies—in other words, the metaphors that we use to understand and discuss reality as an abstraction. To fix our discussion on this lens, we must tackle the issue of escapism.
So-called cosy mystery fiction is frequently criticised for its tendency towards escapism. Indeed, as we traced through the history of mystery fiction in Part Two, escapism was to a notable extent the entire point. Prior to the 20th century, mystery fiction, along with other representative genres such as gothic and adventure fiction, was deeply intertwined with a Victorian longing for escapism from the crushing certainty that defined their newly modern world. The 19th century had seen the number of mysteries in the world at-large disappear at a startling rate; it is no coincidence that the creator of Sherlock Holmes also wrote adventure stories about finding secret and untouched lands to explore. The mystery genre afforded Victorians an escape from the dull certainty around them by presenting a mystery that had yet to be solved—of course, it would be solved in the course of the story, in an ironic affirmation of the positivism of the era.
In a similar manner, early 20th century mystery fiction had a purpose tied up with escapism. As we previously discussed, mystery fiction in the interwar period was contextualised by a reality that was too brutal to bear. Such context is often missing even from contemporaneous, especially American, perspectives on whodunits and puzzlers, which are all too often reduced to the panicked escapism of the British gentry who lost their imperial dividends in the Great War. Indeed, any good Marxist would be remiss to ignore the effects on the economic base on the interwar superstructure. However, we should not forget that the escapism of mystery fiction is chiefly tied up in the issue of death, not wealth—this is by no means subtle, given the subject matter of the novels in question. Regardless of which explanation one chooses to emphasise, the escapist nature of mystery fiction is self-evident to most readers even after their first Christie. While the common stereotypes such as country houses and gentlemen detectives do tend to ignore the nuances of particular authors’ oeuvres, there is an inescapable sense of hyper-reality to the trappings of the genre. This hyper-real style is precisely what allows for the ritualistic treatment of mass death that we discussed in Part Two, and thereby affords the audience an avenue for escapism.
If we are going to hinge so much discussion on the issue of escapism, it becomes necessary to clarify that to some degree all art is escapist. In a prior post on this blog, we located the essential purpose of art in its ability to allow the individual to experience things beyond themselves. In practical terms, this means that art usually involves taking the extremes of life, those elements that stretch and challenge our conceptions of ourselves, and playing them out in microcosm—all with an implicit guarantee of safety. While most people would never want to experience war in all of its brutality, a war film allows civilians to engage with the extremity of this event without taking on the risks of directly doing so. The same is true even of more mundane experiences. Even if many of us experience romance, we are still stepping into an extreme and foreign experience when we read a melodramatic romance novel. Even mediums not oriented towards fictional narratives fit under this rubric: a landscape painting communicates a sense of place and being that we are not directly experiencing in reality; a documentary film allows the audience to intellectually investigate an issue or experience far removed from their own lives; music allows the listener to be taken in by sounds that they would never hear in nature. Art by its very essence involves practicing elements of life in lieu of directly experiencing them in reality. In this sense, even challenging or negative artistic connections come about in an escape from the danger of first-hand experience and therefore could be called escapism.
With this framework in mind, it would be meaningless to attempt to separate escapist mystery fiction from non-escapist mystery fiction. Whether we are discussing a cosy whodunit in an English country manor or a darker tale that directly confronts the issue of death, both cases fit within the model that understands mystery fiction as an attempt to ritualise and codify death into a logical framework. Regardless of the underlying tone of the specific story in question, mystery fiction is a space where the audience escapes from reality in order to interact with death in a decidedly non-real space.
Let us return to Our Broken World. By emphasising the late Queen problem, I sought to demonstrate how the structure of this particular novel, which is framed and contextualised by the search for a concrete reality, comes up against the terrifying unknowability of that reality. When read as a sekai-kei romance, Samatoki’s variously incongruent relationships with women all come about as he cannot accept the retreat that would be entailed by the mirror-romance structure: He wants something more concrete, real, and in his control. However, as his world is overtaken by the logic of mystery fiction, that very pursuit of reality breaks down at its limit. He learns that his attempt to reject the crisis implicit in his romantic entanglements was itself a fantastical attempt—or as Byouinzaka put it, a lie. The novel is structured all around the push and pull of these two non-realities: Simply abandoning reality in favour of an existential romance is a retreat to fantasy. But, believing in truth and reality when they cannot be proven only came so easily to Samatoki because he “told a lie to the world” and entered into his own kind of fantasy.
So where does escapism enter into this? Well, considering that all of these events are fictional fantasies to begin with, escapism is an implicit subject from the very beginning. Samatoki seeks reality in these narrative structures which, by their very nature, do not exist in reality: the mirror-romance structure, the double-layered narrative structure, the late Queen problem—these phenomena are all features of fiction. Our connection with Samatoki, beyond the empathetic connection that can be expected with any character, largely comes about in how we see ourselves engaging with these fictional structures. In other words, Samatoki, perhaps inadvertently from his perspective, attempts to find reality in the tropes and logic of fiction. And the subject of the novel is very much also how we as readers similarly fail to find a satisfying reality in these same tropes and logical structures.
To clarify, these are not merely realistic structures that happen to be in a work of fiction—as might be found in any novel. Nor are they purely metafictional constructs that don’t exist even to the characters. Instead, the novel’s primary themes are all shaped and contextualised by metatext that cannot exist in our reality. In particular, the experiences of the characters themselves directly comment on the shape of fiction as a concept. This is precisely what we have established in the preceding portion of this post. This goes a long way towards fully explaining the peculiar ending of Our Broken World: The world cannot be neatly packed into a box by relying on a fantasy of a world that can be resolved. Instead, we see that there is no such thing as an absolute success. Even fantasy is not the place where we are given a complete and final truth in order to escape from the crises of reality. Instead, in fiction, we must compromise with the imperfect pursuit of truth, content in the meaning of the aspiration towards truth itself, as per the imperfect attempt that was carried out by Samatoki and Byouinzaka.
Ending
I would like to open my concluding comments by returning to something I already emphasised earlier in this post: It is not as though Nisio, Isin wrote Our Broken World as a deliberate attempt to tie together the variously disconnected strands of the different kinds of crisis fiction and thereby come to some kind of concrete answer about the meaning of escapism. In contrast, there is every reason to believe that Nisio’s motivations were a straightforward and even simple attempt to write an interesting work of mystery fiction within his own view of what was the contemporaneous zeitgeist. For example, he located his own interest in creating the novel in an attempt to write about the theme of the taboo. We should therefore not lose sight of the fact that Our Broken World is a work of popular entertainment.
In that sense, there is a certain whiff of failure from this novel, and from its surrounding Sekai series. In terms of its popularity as mystery fiction, it was always overshadowed by its elder brother in the Zaregoto series. And in some ways, the mainstream cultural impact of both of these titles pales next to the Monogatari series of supernatural mysteries, which were subsequently penned by Nisio across more than a decade. That particular series has dozens of books and an immensely popular anime adaptation to hang its hat on.
Nonetheless, what I hoped to communicate in this post are a few of the reasons why Our Broken World left a far stronger impression on me than the novels from either of those two series. Certainly, a great deal of that can be found in the theme that Nisio himself highlighted: the taboo. Those that have read Nisio’s highly intimate Imperfect Girl are sure to be aware of the extent to which Nisio prizes the perspective of the social outsider. And it is in that sense that Nisio fills Our Broken World with perverts and deviants. To be a Nisio character is to behave in extreme ways: unrealistic speaking quirks, nonsensical fixations on particular patterns, self-referential conceptions of their identity—all of his works contain bizarre people that behave like this. But, in Our Broken World these extreme behaviours are juxtaposed against particularly mundane and simple motives. Yorutsuki Hitsuuchi dances on the line of incest because she finds strangers hard to understand; Ririsu Kotohara, in partnership with her childhood friend, sets up an elaborate locked room murder scenario in order to protect the reputation of her high school crush; Samatoki Hitsuuchi is willing to betray his friends or break his sister’s bones just to feel like his life is stable and peaceful; Kuroneko Byouinzaka is willing to kill herself rather than confront how uncertain her world is.
For all of the theory that we have covered in this post—which I do believe is ultimately helpful in terms of understanding Our Broken World—this is not a novel about those theories. Rather, it is about the particular, perverse perspective that allows characters like these to function. As a social outsider, there is a constant temptation to swing towards an extreme view of the world; either everything in your life has meaning or nothing does. Returning to an earlier quote, the beginning of NIsio’s Zaregoto series declares:
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. Two ways. Either you allow your value to be absorbed by the world, or you chisel away at the world’s value and make it your own.
This dichotomy has been a theme that Nisio has been happy to return to in subsequent works—but never with a sense of certitude. Many of those that grew up in the so-called Lost Decade of the 1990s in Japan became despondent towards society by drifting towards one of these two poles. In a society that seemed to disregard the value of these individuals, it was all too easy to fall prey to nihilism and become absorbed by the meaninglessness that the world promised. Similarly, dissatisfaction with the world became a powerful motivator for retreat. This could take the form of straightforwardly becoming saturated in the worlds of fiction, or it could be a more abstract escapism that simply takes the world and its injustices as an irreality that can be ignored. In some ways, the collapse of any straightforward reality, and these two equally morose reactions to it, has been the story of postmodernity itself.
When Nisio was in high school, mystery fiction was a trendsetting genre of literature. For those that sought distance from the collapsing social order around them, it was as good a choice of escape as any. Imagining oneself as a detective capable of solving cases from many different authors was a kind of isekai portal, except that these stories existed almost a decade before that genre cemented itself. However, by way of its form, mystery fiction was also an implicit criticism of the ideas that led to this social retreat in the first place. Japanese youths rejected the meaning and truth of the world, but mystery fiction was built on an affirmation of truth; it was the pathway back to objective meaning for the inter-war generation that had lost all sense of meaning in the war. The particular appeal of Japanese mystery fiction of this era is how radical and interesting its form became in response to this particular push and pull. And Nisio was a young author that was dramatically shaped by this era.
I cannot speak for him as an author or person, but Nisio’s work is dripping with awareness of the particular ironies of trying to find meaning in an age that seemed so devoid of meaning. And Our Broken World is his most direct treatment of how such themes infused the mystery fiction that he was attached to throughout his youth. In particular, it brings this challenge to an especially mundane setting compared to the author’s usual style. Nisio takes the same kind of extreme characters that tended to be alienated in the society that he grew up in and drops them into a very particular kind of fantasy that such people might well hold: It is not a world where magic exists or where science has provided a source of objective meaning and truth; in that sense, it is not much of a fantasy at all. All that happens is that a fiction-like scenario occurs in this high school filled with eccentric people—the kinds of people who do not fit in with society. And this scenario is firmly rooted in the tropes and conventions of genres (sekai-kei romance and mystery) that trace a path, by the means we have discussed in this post, from meaninglessness back to a world that has meaning. In other words, it is a story that depicts the search for truth and meaning among those who feel abandoned by society.
To be clear, most sekai-kei works or examples of mystery fiction that were contemporaneous with Our Broken World deal with such themes to some degree or other. What is particular about Our Broken World is the thrilling alchemy that it uses to find a middle path between two genres so enmeshed in their own extremes. The structure of sekai-kei, as we have discussed previously, addresses the crushing morosity of contemporary society by attempting to excise such social context itself. It is the fantasy of finding such insular meaning that society’s failures are not material to the individual, who has their own world to save. In mystery fiction, the fantasy is instead the process of finding truth and meaning in the exterior of the world. What Our Broken World shows is that both kinds of fantasy are insufficient.
For those that cannot accept a world that moves on without them, like Samatoki, neither fantasy is much of an answer at all. In fact, having these scenarios invade his life without warning is nothing short of a crisis. He does not want a lovey-dovey romance, and he does not want to solve a murder. Samatoki just wants to feel in control of his own life. And fantasy, no matter its form, is not the same thing as control. In the process of solving this particular murder, Samatoki must confront the meaninglessness of the ideas that inform our commonplace contemporary fantasies of escape and truth. This is why the metatextual density of Our Broken World is not just throat-clearing to fill up pages in the novel. It is not just pretentious, pseudointellectual waffling. The way it carves out a middle path between the search for escape and the search for truth is essential in the development of Samatoki as a character.
If I were to sum up the point of this post, although it isn’t pithy, I would explain it like so: Our Broken World demonstrates rather well how those that feel alienated by society can aspire to something more without engaging in empty, ideological delusion—without lying to the world. It is a story about the paradoxes of our own aspirations and dreams, showing how there is no direct process for bringing order to a chaotic world. Despite having plenty to chew on in that regard, it does not do this by over-intellectualising the human condition. Instead, it shows how social outsiders and oddballs come up against the limits of trying to find truth and meaning in the logic of fiction: There are no easy fixes in life, not even in our imagination. By coming to terms with these limits we can, like Samatoki, reach a resolution without reaching a final conclusion. His life is still in motion, the murderer is free, and he is not in a relationship with the woman he loves. However, he has learned that some puzzles in life do have answers, even if they are not utopian ones. He has learned that the lack of any absolute truth is no reason to believe in nothing and succumb to escapism. And he has learned to fall in love with a short woman that is willing to die before she gives up on finding what truth she can in their broken world. I have heard it said that every mystery novel ends with a comma–since there’s always something more to be said. I think what Our Broken World is about, more than anything, is how the same is true of life itself,
nice review. My goat
Would it be possible to have the original review of Sakai Vol 1 on the site as well?
I can’t really imagine what the use of it would be. There’s not anything interesting it says that is not said better here. And I would generally prefer that any new views to that original post redirect here.
But, if you really need it for whatever reason, this link should avoid the redirect.
Australian man writes a novella’s worth of words in a desperate attempt to justify his love of incestual smut fiction.
As someone who only has a superficial grasp on the topics at hand, this was a fascinating read and made me appreciate the novel much more, thank you very much
Good day! This is my 1st comment here so I just wanted to give a quick shout out
and tell you I truly enjoy reading through your articles.
Can you suggest any other blogs/websites/forums that go over the same
topics? Thanks!