Good literature, I think, makes us feel our membership in the human race. It engenders within us an empathy and a love for living things that can be hard to come by during the natural course of our everyday lives. That’s no small feat, and it’s one of the reasons I’m so averse to selling short the pursuit of entertainment, a very potent and available kind of self-reflection.
By that definition, Bokurano is good literature.
If I look out my window, I can see (despite the clouds) that the sun has just set behind the apartments across the road and the wooded mountainside. And if I look long enough, I can almost see the towering Zearth, poised to defend our existence at the expense of another, and at the expense of at least one too-short life within our own. Any minute I expect the ominous Dung Beetle to appear behind me, to tell me to stop whining because it’s my time.
Maybe I’m waxing melodramatic, but that’s the impact of Bokurano. Everything from the everyday issues to the rape and murder and the giant robot fights is acutely human. We may not know we’ll die tomorrow defending the earth, or that we could die tomorrow as a byproduct thereof, but we will die, someday, having done something. And that something that we’ve done, that series of decisions, will contribute to the shape of our world and irrevocably eliminate an infinite array of possibilities in favor of the one that is. It doesn’t seem like such a big thing when we aren’t forced to fight and die for it in a 500-meter-tall robot, but in a way it’s amazing that things happen precisely the way they do.
It’s difficult to discuss Bokurano in a way that isn’t especially personal. Ghostlightning opts for a personal approach, too, pointing out the sheer number of questions the story raises, and concluding by withholding his answers.
The children of Bokurano get to confront these questions. I witnessed different answers. I don’t really know which ones are the right ones. Perhaps there aren’t any. This sounds like a cop-out, and maybe it is. Bokurano is showing me how cruel my own cowardice can be, in avoiding to give my answer.
But I do have an answer. I’ll give it when I’m chosen to pilot the giant robot. That’s my condition and my promise. You’ll just have to forgive my reticence for now. Instead I invite you to read Bokurano, and answer these questions for yourself. I think these will be far more interesting to you than anything I say here. [Ghostlightning, "Missing: My Moral Compass (Bokurano took it away; I suspect the Dung-Beetle)"]
I can only agree with his methodology here. Bokurano’s questions are of the sort that are useful as long as they remain questions. And if he has an answer at all, he’s certainly a step or two ahead of me.
I was stricken by the amount of human beauty and triumph Bokurano manages to fit into 65 chapters. You may (if you’re anything like me) find yourself crying not for the characters’ inevitable and usually unsurprising deaths, but for the optimism and personal accomplishments they manage in their few remaining days or weeks. Perhaps ironically, the freedom to be so positive may be one of the strengths of tragedy: in accepting the inevitable negative traits of human life early on, and in giving us time to come to terms with those traits, a tragic work is free to explore that which is worth celebrating without cheapening its characterization. As long as suffering and death remain a constant presence, it hardly matters how happy or accomplished the characters become; we know the price they’ve paid to get there, and the price they’ll pay in the future, and so we’re able to believe in the fictional world as a substantial place. Aristotle’s catharsis, or something like it, happens during reading, not after, and the narrative offers us joyful moments that we can appreciate to the fullest due to our early-onset emotional clarity.
Is it emotionally manipulative? Sure, but it’s masterfully done. All literature is emotionally manipulative; that’s the point. Good literature earns your consent and your participation in the manipulation, and again, Bokurano is good literature.
I don’t have anything to say this time that’d be especially useful to the discerning critic of Japanese media and culture. Bokurano flayed me alive, so to speak; imagine if all of Evangelion had the same general feel as the last few episodes and End of Evangelion, and you’ll get the idea. It’ll be a while before I’m ready to intellectualize it. But it at least deserves a recommendation.
It reassures me that we arrived at the same place. Even better, you reassure me in making the claims that I hesitate to do:
The first child’s death… I couldn’t get over it, though I just had to read on. How can this story do that to a character so casually? Then I find out about the inevitability, and the more the bones of the narrative are exposed, the less it mattered all sudden: knowing what lies in the end for each of them as their number is called made no difference to how I ended up feeling.
Sometimes it’d be like waking up from a dream as if the Zearth itself stepped on my chest.
So I just had to read more, having failed to come to terms with each character’s doom; and I’d read more and more. And before I knew it I had fallen in love with the character design: Kitoh’s impossibly spindly women, and spindlier little girls. And it would ask me the very same questions again, and I won’t be able to answer again; and I’d just read more…
…now I find myself reading Kitoh’s Narutaru, which feels like one long Bokurano story arc at times; featuring the spindliest little girl as its protagonist. It’s nowhere as heartwrenching as Bokurano, but I feel that it isn’t really trying to — being more concerned with being beautiful, which I daresay it is.
Wait… by that equation, wouldn’t Clannad Kanon AIR et al be considered… good literature?
If they’re masterfully done I suppose (haven’t seen/read/played).
Man now you simply have to watch Clannad. HAVE TO. It’s about FAMILY.
Well, I do like that Key emotion-porn stuff. I don’t pretend that my blanket statements about “good” literature are based on anything other than personal preference, but it is fun to imagine Air, Clannad, et al. as part of some lofty canon (or, dare I say…lofty Kanon!?). I’m sure that’s the case for a certain kind of blogger (by which I mean CCY).
@Monsieur Ghost — Well, I think that fiction is manipulative insofar as it’s rhetoric. I’m pretty unromantic about it.
Maybe I’m just bitter that I have such a hard time writing it.At any rate what you went through while reading is pretty recognizable to me. The Zearth stepping on your chest is a good way to put it, I think. I was left with a kind of…weight, I suppose, that’s hard to describe.
I thought of that long-range spear looking robot in Hawaii piercing my… NVM
I wonder, if one realizes that ‘good literature’ manipulates his emotions, how is he still able to become emerged in it?
Look, if the impact of a Key game is in how it subjects the player to emotional shock, wouldn’t the ‘realization’ of the fact that these emotions are ‘artificial’ somehow devalue your experience?
If we take the above to be true, wouldn’t the most ‘enlightened’ gamers be ‘deluded’, in a sense?
And wouldn’t the most ignorant gamers be the only ones who received the ‘full’ experience of the game, therefore making them ‘enlightened’?
An interesting question, and I’m not entirely sure how to answer it other than by assuring you that I am still able to immerse myself in a story. To acknowledge that fiction is rhetoric is to acknowledge that fiction has always been rhetoric, but, being rhetoric, things you might’ve read as a wide-eyed youth still had the effect on you that they had. Given that, I’m able to acknowledge rhetoric’s really quite incredible ability to influence a reader, and to allow myself to be so influenced. I don’t go into a story seeking to untangle its rhetorical mysteries, generally; I go into a story with an openness, even a willingness, to be affected by language. At that point it’s really a matter of the language doing its job well where I am concerned. And as far as I’m concerned, the emotions experienced during reading are by no means artificial; they aren’t prompted by everyday life situations, but they’re validated insofar as they even need to be in being felt, I’d say. I’m not sure I answered any of your questions well at all, but again, I’m not sure I can explain myself properly at this point.
Lol. Missused ‘emerged’ in the above. Still needs improvement.
Haha, I didn’t even notice. You shouldn’t have given yourself away!
It’s called being humble. You have to recognize your own mistakes to improve.
[...] it’s difficult to share the experience you’ve had with it with anyone else. I wrote a brief post about it a few months ago, but I didn’t say much beyond “I liked it.” How can I? [...]