The eponymous character, originally named Lieutenant Mary Sue, was created by Paula Smith in her short 1973 parody of Star Trek fan fiction. Editing a Star Trek fanzine, Smith had noticed the predominance of stories that featured

the adventures of the youngest and smartest person ever to graduate from Star Fleet Academy and ever get a commission. Usually characterized by unprecedented skill in everything from art to zoology, including karate and arm wrestling, this character can be found burrowing her way into the good graces of Kirk, Spock, or McCoy, if not all three at once. She saves the day by her wit and ability, and, if we are lucky, has the good grace to die at the end, being grieved by the entire ship.

The Mary Sue can be simply summed up as a character who is too good to be true, having acquired more skills and talents and positive personality traits than our most generous expectations suggest is realistically possible.

Put the Mary Sue shortcut down to the rush of wish fulfillment or to impatient writers who want to fast forward to the "interesting" scenes. Or who think they are giving the audience what it wants to see. You know, because practicing to get good at something is for chumps.

Meeting all these criteria, a recent Mary Sue par excellence is Rey in The Force Awakens.

Yoda himself can't keep Luke Skywalker from getting badly beaten by Darth Vader in the second movie. Forget about crossing swords with anybody in the first. But Rey is an expert the first time she touches a lightsaber. She's as good a pilot as Han Solo the first time she sits in the cockpit of the Millenium Falcon.

Now, Luke does have a Mary Sue moment at the end of A New Hope, when he pilots an X-wing starfighter to victory. No, logging a couple hundred hours in a Cessna 172 does not mean you can hop into an F-35 Lightning and out-fly the Top Guns who've been at it for years.

We give Luke a pass here thanks to the narrative trick of making the audience a participant in the trials, travails, and eventual triumphs of the protagonist. As the help wanted ads put it, having proved his mettle, we'll let the good guy skate by on "equivalent experience" in lieu of a resume.

The problem with Rey is that's she's perfect from the moment she appears on the screen. We never see her resume. We never see her burning the midnight oil. Making it all the more annoying, as I outlined in my review, is that it would not have been difficult to give her one.

The big irony of the Mary Sue and its Star Trek origins is that The Next Generation wrote one right into the cast. Pandering to the fan base, I suppose. But perhaps any trope worth being singled out and savagely critiqued is one that connects at a deep level with a significant portion of the audience.

In that light, it deserves a defense. And so now I rise not to bury Mary Sue but to praise her.

To be sure, I cannot bring myself to defend Wesley Crusher. He is exactly the kind of annoying Mary Sue that Paula Smith snarked about back in 1973. Any reasonable appeal to verisimilitude could not tolerate his presence on the bridge of the Enterprise.

But a Mary Sue story can be done right. Komichi Akebi in Akebi's Sailor Uniform is a more recent and perfectly adorable example. But Snow White with the Red Hair really sets the standard.


Based on the manga by Sorata Akizuki, the anime ran two cours (the manga is still being serialized). As befitting the title, the story takes place in a spick and span medieval Disneyland (the setting itself qualifies as a Mary Sue).

When we first meet her, Shirayuki (白雪), whose name translates as "Snow White," is a conscientious herbalist who owns a small pharmacy. That is, until the lecherous Prince Raj, entranced by her brilliant red hair, decides to make Shirayuki his mistress. And won't take no for an answer.

Figuring that caution is the better part of valor, Shirayuki's answer is to pack up and scamper across the border, where she promptly runs into Prince Zen of Clarines and his retainers. It's "like" at first sight.

No mooning around. No one gets serenaded beneath a window. Shirayuki and Zen are preternaturally practical and competent people. Shirayuki has principles and no hesitation in standing up for them. And one of those principles is to own only what she's earned.

Although ostensibly a "European" kingdom, Clarines appears to be run by a ranked bureaucracy of mandarins appointed through an imperial examination system. Determined to stay close to Zen but refusing any handouts, Shirayuki applies for a job as an assistant court herbalist. And passes the tests.

But, again, the backstory has established that she works hard and is good at it, and shows us (doesn't just tell us) that she is deserving of the position. Zen as well works for a living. Being a prince in Clarines comes with a portfolio. Besides going on inspection tours, he has to sit at a desk and push paper around.

These jobs not only make them more interesting but also generate compelling plot material.

(Seriously, what do Disney's Cinderella, Snow White, and Sleeping Beauty actually do? Well, Cinderella is good at housekeeping. What does Elsa do? Anna at least has the important job of keeping Elsa from going nuts and destroying the kingdom.)

There's no need to pretend Shirayuki and Zen aren't Mary Sues. They are too good to be true. Here we have a pair of protagonists who couldn't be any nicer without getting saccharin. Even Prince Raj can't resist becoming a better person when he's around them (a character arc that pays off well in the second cour).

Yet they both possess a depth of character that makes their stories compelling. Yes, nice people can be interesting and do interesting things. I would describe the resulting genre as a "cozy" romance, the equivalent of the "cozy" mystery.

Dispensed with are the angst, the sturm und drang, the love triangles, the miscommunication, all the melodramatic conventions of the genre. Another way of describing this romance sub-genre might be "You and me (and our friends) against the world."

In fact, the only real hint of romantic tension arises among their friends, principally Mitsuhide, Kiki, and Obi, who are Zen's retainers, though Zen assigns Obi to Shirayuki. Later in the series, Mitsuhide seems to have a thing for Kiki, and Obi definitely has unrequited affection for Shirayuki.

But being loyal to Zen and having earned his trust, Obi never does anything stupid or inappropriate. Aside from Mitsuhide getting goofy in one episode in which he goes looking for Shirayuki in the pharmacy and accidentally ingests an elixir, nobody embarrasses, betrays, or compromises anybody.

Even for the day or so that Mitsuhide is under the effect of the elixir, he acts like a stereotypical gallant knight and drives everybody batty. It's a clever way of stating what the show is not about.

In the second cour, more high adventure comes their way, what with pirates and outlaws and damsels in distress and long lost family members showing up in unexpected places. But Shirayuki keeps her head on her shoulders (literally and figuratively) and the relationship never falters. Neither does her career.

In the end, nobody rides off into the sunset. There are no impending nuptials. We don't need to be told that Shirayuki and Zen will live "happily ever after." They only need to live their lives as best they can. From what we have learned about them, that will suffice. Real life is tough enough already.

Labels: anime, anime reviews, crunchyroll, movie reviews, romance, star trek, star wars, streaming, thinking about writing

As I discussed previously, how popular fiction genres overlap in their appeal from country to country can tell you a lot about cultural "universals."

Just as informative are those genres that do not find close analogues abroad, or inspire opposite reactions. For example, in the "conventional" romance genre, the relationship between a teacher and student. The Hollywood version is typically described with words like "forbidden."

Even if we're talking about legal adults, any given episode of Law & Order involving a professor and a college student is likely to end with a dead body.

There are, to be sure, plenty of legal, ethical, and moral reasons for discouraging such relationships. But as Kate argues,

The American attitude is bizarre. Not because teacher-student relationships are a good idea. But because the stigma rests on a proposition that is unsettling in the extreme: namely, that any teenager before the age of eighteen is the equivalent of a child.

And yet, in Japan, it's a go-to plot device, and not one expressly designed to raise eyebrows or breach taboos. Less a May-September romance than May-July, it typically involves a girl who is a high school student (and thus a minor) when we first meet her. Or far younger, as in The Tale of Genji.

But Genji is a gentlemen—well, one who has bed just about every aristocrat's wife or daughter in Kyoto—so he installs the ten-year-old Murasaki in his villa and waits for her to grow up. Which, back then, wasn't that much older.

A modern version of this story is Bunny Drop. Tellingly, the implied May-September romance the series open with ruffles fewer feathers than the one it ends with (the manga series, not the anime), despite the age difference in the latter being half that of the former.

And unlike Genji, Daikichi is the perfect single adopted dad. It's one of those endings that leaves me curious about what the unwritten sequel would be like. (Keep in mind that "Murasaki" in Genji is generally considered to be the author's autobiographical Mary Sue.)

Bunny Drop dares to keep the subject grounded in the real world. More typical of the genre is I Married a Pop Idol. The book blurb reads as follows: "A young businessman meets a woman and falls in love, leading them to marry. But the man's wife is actually an idol in high school!"

Even frumpy NHK has gotten into the act, with the clumsily titled Ms. Sauce's Love (literally translated), a weepy May-July romance between a college freshman (Yudai Chiba) and a thirty-something (Mimura). Chiba is actually 28 to Mimura's 33, though I'd swear he looks 14, if that.


The manga series R-18 combines the May-July romance with another strange (to American sensibilities) trope, according to which the virginal protagonist writes an explicit sex column under a nom de plume. This year's Eromanga Sensei again leveraged the popularity of that particular idea.

And let's not even get started on the whole sibling romance thing.

But back to teachers and students, a realistic portrayal can be found in Makoto Shinkai's Garden of Words, which has the teacher breaking off the relationship before it can move to the "next level." (And Shinkai's Takao looks and acts more mature than Chiba's Masanao.)


Dancing around the taboo are stories that concoct an excuse for the protagonists to get married, as in the aforementioned I Married a Pop Idol and the obnoxious Please Teacher series. Or the less obnoxious but pornier and occasionally funny My Wife is the Student Council President.

Back in the real world, there's French President Emmanuel Macron, whose wife is 25 years older than him. They met when he was in high school. Okay, reality can be stranger than fiction. How about "real" enough to make a live-action movie? Say, of Kazune Kawahara's bestselling Sensei! manga.

The story centers on second-year high school student Hibiki Shimada, who is in love with her teacher Kosaku Ito, a cold man who seems to hate girls, but is actually kind. The story begins when she accidentally puts a love letter entrusted to her by a friend in Kosaku's shoe locker.

Whatever would happen to high school romance in Japan without shoe lockers? But seriously, the sociology behind the widespread acceptability of this particular romance genre does deserve a closer look.

Japan's consent laws can be easily misconstrued. The applicable civil code is little different than in the U.S. Compulsory education in Japan ends after junior high. Few teenagers leave school at that point, but the legal possibility may help erode the magical 18-year-old boundary.

More importantly, most teens in Japan haven't contracted special snowflake syndrome. Japan is a country where elementary school students are expected to walk to school by themselves. Zounds!

Alas, actor Keisuke Koide recently learned how unforgiving real life can be. A drunken one-night stand with a 17-year-old girl resulted in NHK and NTV yanking shows he was in. Netflix, which cast him in an upcoming big-budget series, "is considering how to respond to the scandal."

(Which sounds to me like they'll let the commotion die down and proceed as planned, counting on there being "no such thing as bad publicity.")

You see, that's not fiction. In a society that can superficially appear devoid of moral limits (when making believe), social expectations ruthlessly enforce the lines that must not be crossed (in reality). Japan has the lowest teen fertility rate in the world and an abortion rate half that of the U.S.

Apparently Japanese teenagers know the difference.

Related posts

Cheese! (part 3)
Kicking down the door
The student-teacher romance in manga

Labels: anime, japanese culture, japanese tv, law, nhk, romance, social studies

The couple in question.

As I mentioned in my previous post about Kimi ni Todoke, two supporting characters, Chizuru and Ryu, are substantively more interesting than the main characters, Sawako and Shota. As for the latter two, ultimately there's not a whole lot of "there" there.

That's not an insurmountable problem in story like this (with so much else going on). But as Kate asks, "What on earth will they talk about for the rest of their lives if they can no longer talk about their growing romance?"

Pushing aside everything you know about the characters from the anime, the live-action movie makes this hard to ignore. On the plus side, it hits all the major plot points from the first season of the anime. The two-hour time constraint means much less angst to wade through.

But the deeper side-story about Ryu and Chizuru is reduced to about five minutes. Racing from conflict to conflict, the relationship among Sawako, Ayane and Chizuru--the true substance of the series--becomes a fait accompli rather than a nurtured and growing thing.

In the process, Shota ends up a conventional teen lead, little more than a "MacGuffin." That's Hollywood slang for "a plot device in the form of some goal, desired object, or other motivator that the protagonist pursues, often with little or no narrative explanation."

What separates formula romance from, say, Jane Austen, is giving the heroine a reason to want the hero aside from him being the closest available white knight. Aside from being a nice guy, nothing about Shota convinces us that he is desired for anything more than being desirable.

Even in the movie, we learn far more about Ryu than we ever do about Shota. (The movie actually adds more backstory about Sawako than is in the anime.)

As Sawako, Mikako Tabe, in turn, has to lean more heavily on affect than acting. Trying too hard to match the look of the anime forces her to compete with her hair in the early scenes. Her performance improves considerably when she can finally wear her hair up or back.

Even then, she has barely any material to work with, other than her character's odd personality. The movie unintentionally makes it obvious that here are two kids who really need to get themselves a life, something more substantive than pining for each other.

Sawako at least has her flower garden. I would have liked to see this used much more as an outer expression of her inner self. Make her a budding botanist.

Kimi ni Todoke is a good example of how animation can be the superior visual medium when so much of the subject matter is internal or subjective. Manga artist Karuho Shiina can draw what she wants us to see (hair, to start with), especially if she wants us to see a state of mind.

Sawako and Chizuru in super-deformed mode.

Manga and anime have rich repertoires of abstract effects and visual metaphors, such as the "super-deformed" style.⁽¹⁾ These effects don't interrupt the narrative and announce themselves precisely because they are drawn. We've already disassociated story from "reality."

Pixar has further proven the point with Inside Out.

I think a movie adaptation like Kimi ni Todoke would work better by addressing a far smaller slice of the original. A straightforward summation of events, however accurate, simply can't generate the same emotional Sturm und Drang.

They look and can play the parts.

The movie does get a few things exactly right: Haru Aoyama and Misako Renbutsu are perfectly cast as Ryu and Chizuru. There's the better movie to make: flip the point-of-view around and tell the story from their perspective. All the necessary material is already available.

Related posts

Kimi ni Todoke (anime manga)

Here is a useful guide to the dating scene in Japan.

Japan's “Love Confessing” Culture
What It's Like Dating A Japanese Girl
What It's Like Dating A Japanese Guy

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1. Although "super-deformed" is generally considered analogous to "chibi," I think it's more semantically useful to define "super-deformed" literally and "chibi" as a sub-category.

Labels: anime, japanese movie reviews, mikako tabe, movies, movies about japan, romance, social studies, thinking about writing

Japan can best be understood (sociologically and anthropologically) as a country of 128 million introverts living in a country the size of California. Actually, that's 127 million introverts and one million extroverts who fill all the jobs for talk show hosts and politicians.

As a result, even reaching the borderlines of the personality disorder spectrum in Japan—the poster child here being hikikomori—requires diving deep into Asperger syndrome territory, well past the point at which an American helicopter parent would have carted the kid off to a shrink.

To the average introvert, though, Japanese society is pretty much organized the way society ought to be, hence the nerd appeal: it's not some wayward planet Captain Kirk needs to save from itself.

(Though NHK did feel the need to create an online course for elementary school students that explains how to carry on a constructive conversation and communicate with your teacher. It's a pretty good series, frankly.)

Surveys of Japanese high school and college students reveal little interest in abandoning the traditional hierarchical social structure. Despite all the attendant dysfunctions, it's too convenient a way to relate to people without getting too forward or personal all at once (if ever).

A new word had to be invented to describe speaking colloquially with one's peers as equals: tamego (タメ語). Versus using the traditional honorifics: keigo (敬語). Nevertheless, keigo remains the universal default, even among the "younger set."

The great turning point in every Japanese romance is when the main characters start using tamego with each other.

Because of the reversed ratios on this side of the Pacific, the American extrovert's primary (if only) exposure to introverts is television. Principally Aspergery characters like Sheldon on Big Bang Theory, who aren't only introverted but socially maladaptive in a variety of humorous ways.

Granted, it is easier to "show, don't tell" when you're dealing with showy material. By the same token, the extroverted protagonist is easier to write for than somebody comfortable living inside his own head (without relying on copious voice-overs).

Extroverts aren't hard to find on Japanese television for the same reason. They're especially useful for jump-starting conflicts and propelling plots forward (see: tsundere), especially when obvious conflicts go unresolved because of the lack of definitive action or clear communication.

And, yes, the lack of definitive action or clear communication can make Japanese romances way more annoying than American ones. But when the protagonists really are introverts, also more believable (which doesn't always mean more entertaining).

The quintessential showcase is Kimi ni Todoke ("From Me to You"), the hugely popular manga by Karuho Shiina. Serialized since 2006, it's been made in a light novel series, an anime series, and a live-action film (with Mikako Tabe). Here we are presented with a mirror held up to the national teen psyche.

The premise appears entirely predictable at first: Sawako, the quietest girl in class, falls for Shota, the most popular guy.

Except that Shota is not the typical BMOC extrovert (one of those shows up in the second season). If Sawako can be described as far more shy than introverted, Shota is perhaps more introverted but markedly less shy. Shyness and introversion are certainly not synonyms!

The most introverted person in the series is Ryu, Shota's best friend. He's also not shy but has a gregariousness rating of approximately zero. He is the strong, silent type. (In the first season, Chizuru and Ryu are also the more interesting couple, a problem I'll address in a future post.)

Sawako definitely is shy. Worse, she looks like "Sadako," the devilish main character in Koji Suzuki's famous horror trilogy. Everybody calls her "Sadako" and deems her bad luck to be around. Exacerbated by her extremely reserved personality, this pretty much shuts down her social life.

Important point: that isn't something she's wrung her hands over (until now). Introverts don't. They shrug and carry on.

Sawako was comfortably living in her own little world until, like Ken Takakura in The Yellow Handkerchief, she's befriended by a happy-go-lucky pair of extroverts (extroverted according to Japanese standards). Ayane and Chizuru, in turn, connect her to Shota, who, it turns out, already has a thing for her.

(While this reliable plot device is amusing enough in fiction, in real life it often arouses the kind of emotions that would frighten Hannibal Lecter.)

But since Shota is pretty introverted too (though of the more normal sort), he's not going to broach the subject with someone he knows isn't going to broach it either. As I mentioned, this can get annoying fast. And I'll warn you: it drives the plot of practically the entire second season.

This is the underlying flaw in the teen soap opera: you have to keep breaking up the couple so they can get back together. For a long-running series, I would prefer something akin to the timeline of Clannad, that follows the main characters out of their teenage years into their early twenties.

(These problems might also have been mitigated if, as Kate puts it, Sawako and Shota didn't have so much time to "sit and around and get angsty," and got themselves a part-time job or serious hobby.)

A troublesome extrovert.

Predictably, one of the catalysts in making things worse is a brassy ex-pat incapable of minding his own business. It does pay off nicely in the end, but you will suffer for it as much as the characters. (Thirty-eight episodes is suffering enough; the manga is closing on a tortuous one hundred.)

What ultimately saves the series (more in the first season than the second), is that romance is not the constant focus of attention. Rather, the story is about how extending her circle of friends to two or three more people not only expands her world but theirs as well.

Sawako isn't "troubled" or "damaged" or harboring deep psychological secrets. She is only less than fully functional in her inability to "read" people, but even that becomes a kind of superpower. Not reacting predictably to ulterior motives has the comical result of defanging the mean girls.

For an introvert to be an outlier in a Japanese melodrama, she has to be a true outlier. So Sawako is odd even by Japanese standards, but not so odd that millions of Japanese don't identify with her.

If you're looking for a Harlequin plot with extroverts confessing their undying love and making public displays of affection, you're not going to get it (prepare for the exact opposite). What you will get instead is a gentle, goodhearted tale about quiet people becoming better at who they already are.

Related posts

Kimi ni Todoke (Hulu CR)
MacGuffin man
Useful Japanese stereotypes
Understanding Japanese women

Labels: anime reviews, introversion, japanese culture, japanese tv, manga, nhk, romance, social studies

"The Great Passage" is the (fictional) name of an unabridged dictionary being created by the microscopic dictionary department in a large publishing firm.

The title of the movie in Japanese is Fune o Amu (舟を編む), which is even more obscure. It literally means "knitting together a boat," Japanese lexicographer's slang for compiling a dictionary.

The Japanese name of the dictionary is Daidokai (大渡海), literally "great sea voyage." Because a dictionary, the managing editor explains, is the ship by which readers navigate the vast sea of words that encompass life.

These people take words seriously.

Ryuhei Matsuda, who did very well as a roving talent agent in Amachan, plays against type as Majime Mitsuya, a clinically introverted linguist who gets chosen (practically at random) to replace a veteran editor at the onset of the project.


The not-uncommon name "Majime" is an Oscar Wilde-worthy pun, as it has the approximate meaning as "earnest" (or "Ernest").

Majime has been living by himself in a boarding house (plus a cat and the landlady), having taking over all the other rooms to store his books. And then the landlady's granddaughter (Aoi Miyazaki) moves in.

Aoi Miyazaki, who put in fine performances in Nana (also with Ryuhei Matsuda) and Atsuhime, is perfectly cast here, cute without being unrealistically pretty for the part.

You could be forgiven at this point for expecting a classic "geek gets the girl" story. However, that subplot is pretty much wrapped up in the first half.

This really is a movie about making a dictionary. The whole fifteen-year process. Collecting and collating the entries. The endless revisions. Looming deadlines and shrinking budgets. Frantic searches for missing entries.

It's a fascinating tale from start to finish. Granted, you have to love lexicography to enjoy this movie, which apparently some Japanese movie critics do.

"The Great Passage" won Best Picture at the 2013 Japan Academy Awards. Alas, right now, the only available DVD version with English subtitles is the region 3 (Chinese) release.

Amazon Prime picked up the streaming rights for the anime version in October 2016. Amazon Crossing published the English-language translation in 2017.

Labels: japanese, japanese movie reviews, language, personal favs, romance

Clannad is best examined in reference to Kanon. It's pretty much the same, only different. Which is to say it's very much worth watching. Good, not great, though there are many moments of greatness. The better the idea, the more it should be ripped off. The world hasn't run out of worthy homages to Pride and Prejudice.

As with Kanon and Air, the story and character design were created by software developer Key Visual Arts. The anime version was produced by Kyoto Animation, directed by Tatsuya Ishihara and written by Fumihiko Shimo. This team has a good thing going. I hope they keep at it.

Clannad, like Kanon, is on the surface a high school harem melodrama with a wise-guy male lead (Tomoya Okazaki, voiced by Yuichi Nakamura), surrounded by a bunch of girls with "issues." But while Kanon starts out with a story derived from traditional folklore, Clannad begins as a theater of the absurd.

Tomoya sets out help Nagisa join the drama club. The drama club was shut down for lack of interest. They can start it up again if they can attract a quorum of members. But they can't officially recruit because it's not a club. And nobody wants to join because nobody's interested in joining what's-not-a-club. That sort of thing.

The comic relief is broader. The repartee between Tomoya and Fuko is fall-down funny (though the patter can be tough to follow even with subtitles).

We also find out about everybody's "after school special" problems much earlier. This makes Clannad more by-the-numbers, less dramatically complex than Kanon. Rather than weaving several stories together, the narratives follow one after the other in an episodic fashion, almost independent of each other.

The story arcs thus tend to hang separately than together, and never quite surmount the first featuring Fuko (or address the implicit magical realism). The writer seems to have realized this and has Fuko popping up randomly throughout the series doing a "magical girl" parody that though funny, only serves to remind how much she is missed.

Anybody who's seen Cipher in the Snow will recognize the same theme in the Fuko arc. Both Clannad and Kanon deal seriously with the weight of memory and loss and the burden of guilt—and about disparate people uniting in a common cause largely despite themselves.

The concluding arc featuring Nagisa tries to tie up the lose ends, but raises more questions than it settles—about Nagisa's parents, about the relationship between Tomoya and his father, about the metaphorical significance of the poignant "lonely robot" vignettes—and doesn't quite deliver on the original promise.

If anything, Clannad is cursed by an abundance of good ideas and the inability to choose the right ones to follow through on. (The story as a whole becomes much clearer after seeing Clannad: After Story.)

Which is perhaps why, far and away, the best-written episode is a stand-alone short story tagged onto the very end (it expands upon a secondary character and conflict raised during the series). Rather than focusing on group dynamics, it's about two individuals coming to terms with each other and their place in the world.

Essentially, a high school senior slacking his way through life realizes he's not half the man his girlfriend thinks he is and finally grows the heck up. In only twenty minutes, the story comes to a well-crafted conclusion and a satisfying moral point but without a hint of moralizing. It is a superbly directed and edited short animated film.

Although Clannad takes a more meandering and uneven path than Kanon, it does begin and end on two very high notes.

Related posts

Dying for art
Clannad: After Story
Kanon

Labels: anime reviews, fantasy, kyoani, magic, magical girl, personal favs, robots, romance

Like space opera and romance, the "harem" anime genre is easy to make snooty fun of because most of it is so bad. Sometimes on purpose, often unintentionally. But just because the bulge of the bell curve ranks high on the kitsch index doesn't mean there's nothing on the "amazing" meter a few standard deviations out.

At one end of the harem spectrum, for example, is Elfen Lied, a blood-spattered S/F horror series. And at the other is one of the most poignant romances—and most complex psychological dramas—I've ever seen, with a demanding, multi-layered narrative structure that indeed deserves to be described as "literary": Kanon.

The story has a long and twisted pedigree (though not that uncommon in anime), having originated as an "adult" video game in 1999 (a "visual novel," for which there is no counterpart in the U.S. gaming market), then a G-rated version, and consequently as a light novel series, a manga series, a drama CD, and two anime series.

But it was the latest—2006—version produced by the innovative Kyoto Animation, directed by Tatsuya Ishihara and written by Fumihiko Shimo (who penned three episodes of The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya), that molded it into an authentic work of art. Voice actor Tomokazu Sugita also deserves a lion's share of the credit.

Sugita is probably better known as Kyon in The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, the straight man to the frenetic Haruhi, the grounded center of whatever maelstrom she's cooking up next.

Haruhi's world is so unhinged that it's all Kyon can do to keep it from flying apart. In the process, though, we don't have many opportunities to invest ourselves deeply in the fate of the characters themselves. As in any madcap sitcom, we always expect some crazy rabbit to get pulled out of the hat by the time the credits roll.

That's a good part of the fun, but at the end of the fourteen-episode run, it seems more that the writers wrote themselves into one too many corners than the story came to a carefully scripted conclusion. Like a Mobius strip, you could feed the last episode into the first one and start the whole thing all over again.

I highly recommend the series for its quirky exuberance, Sugita's straight-man performance, the dance number in the opening credits, and because its general craziness inspires equally inventive fan analyses. The individual parts aren't only greater than the whole, they're often downright brilliant.

Kanon, though, exists as a completely realized artistic effort from beginning to end, where the characters are so changed in the process that there is no going back. It may not seem that way at first, as Yuichi's unflappability comes across as too nonchalant, given the quirky, illogical nature of the events around him.

But this is on purpose. Nothing in Kanon happens for lack of a better idea at the time.

As the story begins, Yuichi Aizawa (Sugita) has moved to snowy Hokkaido to live with his aunt and niece while he finishes his senior year in high school. He initially comes across as an unusually normal teenager, more a counterpart to John Cusack's Lloyd Dobler in Say Anything than the typical teen romantic lead from anime-land.

Unlike the neurotic, clinically introverted, "lesser male" harem protagonist, Yuichi has reasonable good sense of himself, is prone to reflection rather than panic, and doesn't turn into a tongue-tied imbecile around girls. He's pretty much a rock, if a slightly cynical one, a more extroverted and involved "Kyon."

To be sure, few teenage boys of any stripe are that calm, cool and collected. The neurotic "lesser male" of harem comedies is probably closer to reality. But as Ron Rosenbaum quips in Slate, "I hate characters I can identify with. I read to escape myself; I'm tired of my identity."

However, it does turn out that Yuichi has one thing very wrong with him: he's forgotten practically everything about the last time he lived there. Still, he treats this massive case of amnesia with suspiciously good cheer as he becomes reacquainted with a half-dozen girls who know him for important reasons he can't remember.

The series proceeds with a series of interlocking stories about how each of their screwed up lives (varying from "somewhat" to "a lot") relate to Yuichi. Little by little these experiences pry open the lid of his memories and the tragic truth we suspect lies at the heart of it. And the brilliant gem of hope that resides there also.

Uniting these stories is the series-long arc about the mysterious Ayu Tsukimiya—who runs through the closing credits wearing a knapsack sporting a pair of wings. She shows up at first as comic relief, but as the other variables fall away she moves closer to the center of the story, just as Yuichi moves closer to the truth about himself.

To be sure, a staple of the Hollywood melodrama, from Rebel without a Cause to Ordinary People to Good Will Hunting is the angst-ridden young man with the troubled past who works through his "issues," usually with the help of empathetic shrink and a faithful girlfriend.

Not to denigrate the genre (I liked the aforementioned movies), but it's awfully solipsistic stuff, all about how tough it is being me and how much I deserve to be loved because nothing bad that ever happened to me is really my fault. As the credits roll, we cheer the resurrection of the protagonist's self-esteem.

There's not a shrink to be found anywhere in Kanon, which argues instead that the one effective way to work through your "issues" is to do good by others. I know, even writing that it sounds saccharine. This is where Fumihiko Shimo's script and Tomokazu Sugita's performance carry the day.

Like Hugh Laurie's Dr. House, Yuichi doesn't run around doing good because he's a selfless altruist brimming over with charity for his fellow (wo)man. Rather, like House, he's drawn to the people he ends up helping out of curiosity about their plights and about his own curious mental state. And does more good as a result.

"Well, this is an interesting development," you can all but hear him thinking. So when the ninety and nine finally band together to care for the one, it comes across as authentic. In fact, the whole series could be read as an argument for why, in the final episodes, a bunch of teenagers should act so selflessly.

Kanon ultimately only makes sense after you've seen it. The pieces won't fall together until they're all there. Along the way, it can be treated as fantasy, magical realism, or straight psychological drama. In comparative terms, Orson Scott Card's Lost Boys springs to mind, as does The Sixth Sense.

Like The Sixth Sense, Fumihiko Shimo relies on the viewer jumping to the wrong conclusions. Still, he tips his hand early on with an updated version of "The Fox Wife," a classic Japanese fairy tale. This story-in-a-story creates the lens through which the rest of the series should be viewed.

If you would forgive the spoiler, what we have been watching all along are the stories Yuichi told Ayu while she was in a coma at the hospital. Except that, aside from one key scene, the points at which the surreal invades the real aren't clearly delineated, and that's fine with me. As Fox Mulder would put it, I want to believe.

Storytellers who build castles in the air and then preen as they shoot them down annoy me. If the castle's floating in the air, I know it's a castle in the air. As a case in point, does Mai possess healing powers, or is that a literary device too? Or another story-in-a-story? Hey, stop overthinking everything!

There's no overthinking the message of Kanon, though. Contrary to the assurances of the pop psychoanalytic culture, a true understanding of the self comes not from discovering your inner whatever, but from looking outwards at the rest of the world and examining why it is there and what it has to say and dealing with it.

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Labels: anime reviews, fantasy, jun maeda, kyoani, magic, magical girl, personal favs, romance

Kaori Shoji informs us in the International Herald Tribune that "in Japan, it's the men who want to be skinny and cute."

Young males between the ages of 18 and 30 make up the slimmest segment of the population and the ideal fashion weight as decreed by the apparel industry is 57 kilograms, or about 125 pounds, for a height of 175 centimeters, or 5 feet 8 inches.

This strikes me as one of those deeply-researched MSM pieces based on a sample size of "me and my two best friends." The business about the girlfriends weighing more than their boyfriends is physically improbable. But in general I think she's onto something.

A recent episode of NHK's Cool Japan program polled Japanese women to create a composite of the "ideal man." He turned out to be the twin of popular enka crooner Kiyoshi Hikawa. According to his record label, Hikawa is 177 cm tall and weighs 62 kg (5'9.5" 136 lbs).

Those are my approximate dimensions, and I'm a beanpole. Before looking up the actual numbers, I'd assumed from watching his variety show that Hikawa was around six feet tall. But that's because his guests are usually so much shorter than he is. So we may be talking about tastes governed by situationally-relative dimensions.

To be sure, as an enka artist, Hikawa is most popular with the forty-plus crowd. Though the boy band idols on NHK's Pop Music Club (think American Bandstand) that have thousands of teenage girls screaming their lungs out every week look pretty much like teenage Hikawa clones.

Then consider yaoi and the Takarazuka theater troupe. In Takarazuka productions, all the male roles are played by women. The willowy, porcelain-skinned Takarazuka "leading man" looks exactly like the typical yaoi protagonist, and an awful lot like Kiyoshi Hikawa.

But the most annoying aspect of contemporary male fashion in Japan is long bangs. I can't abide my bangs getting into my line of sight (pragmatics, not aesthetics). Yet you see it even on suit-wearing businessmen and news anchors. It brings out the old geezer in me. I want to throw things at the screen and shout, "Cut yer darned hair!"

Labels: cool japan, eye-of-beholder, japan, nhk, romance, sex, yaoi