groundhog day, otaku style.
Click to viewあなたはちょっと開けた
わたしの心のドアを
あなたはドアを開けた
まるで世界はパラレルワールド
You, just a little, opened
the door of my heart
You opened the door
The world is really a PARALLEL WORLD
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The Tatami Galaxy, infinity, and the dilemma of wish fulfillment.
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I posit the following: We live our life making mistakes, and in the end every work of fiction is a single act of wish fulfillment-- let's do it one more time, let's do it right, let's do it better. Let's start over.
(This has probably been posited elsewhere. I don't claim to be original.)
Recently, I've been talking to a lot of people Older Than Me about what it's like being an adult. In general, the thing I've come away with is the fear of repetition. It's not so much the work, as the fact the work is always the same. Every day, you have the same conversations, the same arguments, the same annoyances, the same working lunches, the same commute back stuck in traffic. More than just failure is the repetition of this failure. The idea that even if they were to have chosen another job, all jobs are the same-- they are always going to be boring. They will always be let down.
As heretical as this might sound, this is the thread of emotional truth that connects Tatami Galaxy with Endless Eight and Groundhog Day. We luxuriate in the schadenfreude of their failure not because we want to see them fail, but because we don't want them to have an easy way out. After all, our own boredom, our own failures, have no easy solution.
The Proxy Proxy War is a perfect example. After so many successors, Higuchi and Jougasaki, and after them Ozu and Watashi, are still fighting the same pointless war. They never break out. They don't "learn" like Phil or Kyon. They just pass on the uselessness to another generation. The "final battle" is only important in continuing the pointless battle. It's the ultimate reversion of feuds in shounen manga. Compare the Proxy Proxy war to, say, the Hyuugas in the Naruto series-- the "current generation" of the Konoha shinobu are determined to break down the branch family system. In other stories, a hero would create change. In episode four, our hero is consumed by the myth of the proxy proxy war.
But episode 11 is why I disagree that Tatami Galaxy is the anti-slice-of-life anime. I think Tatami Galaxy is still about wish fulfillment, about perfection, about the rose colored campus life that Watashi dreams of. The last episode of Tatami Galaxy is about subverting the subversion. It's not just the act of heroism in trying to save Ozu. It's that things work out for Watashi. His past failures don't stick.
The thing is, the repetition of everyday life, the day-in day-out grind, is not a time loop. Our lives are not a time loop. Even though we can learn from our mistakes, we can never escape from having made them. They stick with us. They are a part of us. It might be better for Watashi to go with the flow. After all, for Watashi, he can start over. He has a clean slate every time. Like Celeste says, we know he's going to break out of his loop. We're just waiting until he does it. It is not that any of the choices of women is wrong and we are judging him for that; rather, we are judging him for not making a choice at all. Watashi knows how to get Akashi, how to befriend Hanuki, how to run off with Kaori, how to meet Keiko. He just never follows through. But Watashi can start over again and, by making the same mistakes, by episode 11, his path is clear. He knows what choices he needs to make and can "go with the flow" to make them.
We don't have the luxury of making the same mistakes in the same situations over and over again until we reach the right conclusion. By the time we've made all the mistakes Watashi does, we'd be out of time. That's where Tatami Galaxy starts diverging from real life, from you and me. That's where we realize that "Watashi" is not watashi. He is Kyon, discovering how to end Endless Eight. He is Ataru, tricking Mujaki. He is Phil, the ubermensch, who breaks out of February 2.
I like all the theories already in place about what is the "reality" of the Tatami Galaxy: the Borgesian labyrinth, the ode to human honesty, the recursive cycle of reincarnation. It is coherent, convincing even, to say that the alternate tatami worlds force Watashi to come to terms with who he should be in reality and that episode 11 drops him back into reality with the memories of his past mistakes. But I would take it one step further.
Watashi is a Haruhi-type God, and the last episode does not bring us back to reality at all.
Watashi once lived in the "reality" of episodes 10 and 11, where he is a hermit who secluded himself in his 4.5 tatami room and things happen around him. Then one day he wakes up with the powers of God. (Where do they come from? Maybe the moths.) So he begins to create his ideal world, over and over again. In the beginning of every episode, he creates what he believes is the perfect world. In every episode, the perfect world fails him. At the end of every episode, he destroys the perfect world, and rebuilds it from the ruins. This explains the constant fluctuation of the timeline. More precisely:
Episode 10 is an extended metaphor for the rest of the cycle. In that there is a "reality", Watashi stuck in the infinite tatami room loops is that reality. It's not that there are actually an infinite number of Watashis. Rather, at some point Watashi realizes he is not the same as the other characters in his world. For instance, in the ending of episode 5, what is Watashi trying to shut out when he blocks his window with Honkawa boxes? What does he think the other Watashi is? A ghost? But why the sudden monologue about "refusing to believe"? It seems to be me the better answer is that the Watashi living in the iteration is beginning to realize he is the Tatami Galaxy god. He is trying to deny it, but it becomes undeniable. And why not? Episode 5 is when he starts playing the most with the basic storyline. Ozu is not his friend, he actually meets a raven-haired maiden, a flesh and blood one. Akashi doesn't even come up until the end, like an afterthought.
So the Watashi wandering the worlds of Episode 10 is merely a construct. He is the embodiment of Watashi's increasing meta-realization that he controls his own world. The tatami world of episode 10 is, as Michael says, the "observation post". But I posit, differently from Michael, that the real reason Watashi cannot dabble in those worlds is because the Watashi of the observation post is not real. He is, in a way, Watashi-tachi. He is us, on the other side of the screen, he is the one to whom Watashi shouts, "Who is the one responsible?"
Then what is the world of episode 11? I would argue that it is Watashi's "ideal world". Somewhere, the real Watashi, not the observation-post!Watashi, realized both that he was creating these worlds and how to create his ideal world. Observation!Watashi never escapes the tatami galaxy-- rather, the tatami galaxy collapses in on itself, turning into the perfect world as realized by the real Watashi, taking Observation!Watashi with it. When Observation!Watashi leaps across the river to get to Ozu, when he sheds his beard and clothes and becomes "naked", the two Watashis merge. The moths that gave him power cover his ideal world with his power. He is both Watashi and God. He has become Watashi, Destroyer and Creator of Worlds.
Remember episode two, where Jougasaki can create movies that appeal to the public, but Watashi can only create movies that star him and Ozu in a constant loop, and only Akashi enjoys them, and it predicted most of the storyarcs of the subsequent episodes (the proxy war, the love triangle, the infinite tatami rooms)? How, in the end, he wanted to make a pure-hearted romantic film as his final work?
This is in fact what happens. When Watashi finally breaks free of the iterations, he creates that film, except instead of a film, he creates a "world", a pure-hearted romantic world where he returns the Mochiguma to Akashi, where he can communicate with her without being a moron, where he takes her to Neko Ramen, where he saves Ozu, where Ozu is a true friend, not the "worst contact". There are little clues that this world is still not "reality." Ozu breaks his leg because Watashi has, since episode 5, known that Ozu will break his leg falling off the bridge. Akashi is waiting for Watashi to bring up a promise she has never heard from him. Ozu is a "slippery evil character" because that's what Watashi dreams of in episode 10. The characters are still living on the back of a turtle; in fact, only the world on the back of the turtle exists.
Does this sound familiar? It did to me, because it's basically the plot of The Disappearance of Haruhi Suzumiya. Watashi is both Yuki, creating her dream world, without any of the trouble of the real world, and Kyon, choosing the world that he wants to exist. He is both Haruhi, making the world reset the day before summer break ends, and Kyon, trying to break free from the resetting. He is both Kyon, creating time loops to solve his own time loops, and Haruhi, being manipulated by a time loop.
Episodes 2-9 are Watashi's Tanabata. Why do things happen in the Haruhi Suzumiya world? Because we already know they will happen. Kyon saves himself because he knows he's going to save himself, Haruhi goes to North High because Kyon knows she is going to go North High, she knows that espers and time travelers and aliens exist because Kyon knows she will create espers and time travelers and aliens. Similarly, the Cheery Cleanup Crew exist because Watashi knows they exist to sell bikes to make money. He sells the Birdman plane as part of the Cleanup Crew because he already knows the Birdman plane will be sold by the Cleanup Crew. Ozu fails to fly the Honkawa blimp because Watashi already knows the blimp gets shot down. Watashi must create surveillance on Jougasaki in episode 2 in order to give the Watashi of episodes 6-8 a reason to continue living with Kaori. In episode one, when Ozu says "I'm not sure myself' when asked how jumping off the bridge and Watashi's love life relate to each other? That's because Watashi hasn't explained it to himself yet.
Episode 10 is Watashi's endless eight. Why do Watashi's other worlds fail? It's not because he can't achieve happiness in them. It's because he fails to answer the question, "What do I want?" Watashi fails at flying the Birdman glider because he failed to ask, "What do you want from me?" just as his failure to answer the question, "What do I want from myself?" forces him to keep creating worlds. What the galaxy is punishing Watashi for, what Watashi is punishing himself for, is expending effort in a goal he neither understands nor believes in. Why struggle pointlessly? You must understand yourself and what you need first. Up until then, he has only thought about his world in abstract terms-- a raven haired maiden, a friend, a rose colored human life. As Mystlord puts it, Watashi breaks out because he realizes he was in love with Akashi's smile. "He fell in love with something so grounded in reality and so sincere, not with the 'raven haired maiden' as he constantly pined for in previous episodes." Even in Episode 10, when he realizes he wants to leave, he doesn't know what world he wants to leave into. It's not until Episode 11, when he realizes he wants rice, Neko Ramen, Ozu, Akashi, human contact-- paralleling some Watashi out there realizing the same-- that he is able to create the perfect world and leave.
But the bottom line of Watashi's iterations as Creator is this: Watashi's ideal reality consists of complex people. In this complexity, he thinks he can find humanity. "There is no such thing as rose-colored," Higuchi says in the last iteration world. "Everything is all a bunch of colors mixed up."
Watashi begins by thinking his ideal world contains only two dimensional people, so he chooses slices of people for his iterations, until he has created enough slices of people, an infinite number of slices of these people, to create approximations of "real" people. He is like a writer, creating motives, enough motives, so that they make sense in the final draft, because they are merely snapshots in a larger, more complex person.
Hanuki is the best example of this. When we first meet her, she is drunk. Why is she drunk? In episode 4, Watashi handwaves it away: it's simply stated that she lives on alcohol and Castellas and licks your face when she gets drunk. But this is too easy. This is too pat. She is too simple. So he creates a rudimentary love triangle explained by the proxy war. And this carries over to the Keiko-Kaori-Hanuki arc. Here, Watashi does not know that when she gets drunk, she licks faces. Here, he doesn't know how Hanuki knows Jougasaki, just that she does. Here, there is some sort of vague love triangle that we're not sure the specifics of. Here, Hanuki and Higuchi are involved, but it is Hanuki that Watashi knows better, not Higuchi. Perfect. Watashi likes the mold so much he repeats it three times and then carries it into his ideal world. Complexity. Something to discover in Hanuki.
Episode 4's Neko Ramen scene with Hanuki is a suggestion of the cafe scenes we see in Episodes 6-8. The ramen shop owner suggests a sake contest in episode 4 that Watashi and Jougasaki carry out in 6-8. Episode 5's Kohinata is so distant, so fake, so surreal, and Watashi must ground her in episode 8 by revealing her to be Ozu and Akashi. Episode 6 is Watashi turning the Ozu-Hanuki-Watashi relationship from episode 2 on its head. Episode 6 introduces plot elements that are then explained in episodes 7 and 8. Why do the Kaori and Keiko storylines of episodes 7 and 8 never pan out? Because they are projections upon projections. Kaori's voice is a mere reflection of Watashi's own. He could never see her as real. Which is why in the ideal world, he gives her back to Jougasaki. Hanuki in episodes 6-8 is a real person, but notice the bait-and-switch of the end of episode 6. For a brief moment, she, too, "becomes" Ozu.
Perhaps equally as important, Watashi's previous worlds fail because he does not give enough complexity to himself. In each, he tries only to be pure, innocent, naive. But that's not what reality is like. We don't have to shut down the suggestion that Ozu and Watashi are the same person. Or rather, Ozu is a projection of Watashi's, a culmination of everything Watashi wants to be, much like the tension between Kyon and Haruhi. Ozu is the one who nets the raven haired maiden, Ozu is the one who knows how to live the rose-colored campus life, Ozu is the one who makes money (right before Watashi learns how to), Ozu knows how to talk to the Honkawa people without getting kicked out, Ozu can become the right-hand man of Jougasaki and Aijima. Watashi projects on Ozu what he wants to be. "I will be happy in your place," Ozu says in the first episode. When Watashi creates his ideal world, he "absorbs" Ozu back into himself. Hence the youkai face, hence Ozu becoming real, with real human emotions and a broken leg.
Kyon leaves Yuki's fake world because those people are not real to him. He needs the complications of his real world. He needs their problems. Watashi is the same. It's not that he wants honesty. Episode 5's cult counseling session proves that. Emotional honesty is laughable, open to manipulation. Perfect honesty never goes anywhere. The removal of the armor, the nakedness of Episode 11, scares him deeply. No, what Watashi wants is for each person to be "strange" to him. He wants to learn them, and for them to learn him. In his ideal world, Ozu doesn't recognize him, Higuchi doesn't know him, Akashi only knows he is the guy who owns a pair of gray boxers.
Such simplicity-- that we don't actually want to be understood.That we want to contain infinite depths, always.
The door of the eleventh episode opening doesn't lead to the outside. It leads to the last tatami room-- the "tatami room" world of the eleventh episode, Watashi's ideal world. He has created a room containing infinite tatami, just like he has created people that contain the infinite depths of their previous iterations. Watashi, still, is the ruler of his space. He's simply created a larger space to contain, just like the Watashi of the ideal world goes from 4.5 to 6 tatami. He created a room that contained all the other rooms by knocking down all the walls, floors, and ceilings of the infinite Shimogamo Yuusuisou. It is the house, the Room in the Zone, it is December 18th, it is February 2nd, it is limbo.
It is ultimately wish fulfillment.
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Take your head around the world
See what you get
From your mind
Write your soul down word for word
See who's your friend
Who is kind
...
It's almost like being free
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Many thanks to Michael of anime/otaku, who probably will never read this, but who convinced me that one could talk forever about Tatami Galaxy and never exhaust the subject. (By the way, Michael, I'm pretty sure Watashi in episode 10 was Jacques Cousteau, not Nemo.)