I’ll go ahead and call it now: Durarara!! will be my favorite show this season, mostly because it’s all about something I really enjoy, something that’s prevalent enough in anime that it’s part of the reason I’m an anime fan in the first place. Let’s call it…interstitial urban mythology? That’s sort of awkward, but I guess it’ll have to do.

By “interstitial urban mythology” I mean the magic that happens around and between the more obvious bustle of city life (suburbia included). As Cuchlann puts it re: Bakemonogatari, it’s “the weird underbelly that, it turns out, lurks below everyday life.” He adds that, for Koyomi Araragi, “the spiritual realm is…overlaid on top of the mundane one” — maybe there’s a distinction to be made between overlay and interstice; Durarara!! seems pretty self-consciously concerned with the latter.

The Dullahan strikes in abandoned warehouses and beneath overpasses while, elsewhere, perhaps mere yards away, life carries on as usual. Shizuo Heiwajima (who, allegedly, probably won’t talk to you if your life is normal enough) throws vending machines and people down side roads, and the Ikebukuro crowd, concerned with mundane business, doesn’t seem to notice. People disappear between Ikebukuro and Shibuya. Magic isn’t everywhere at once — it’s not so obvious, and if you aren’t careful, you may discover too late that you’ve stumbled into Faerie.

Of note, also, is the “urbanness” of the magic at play here. That is, it’s seated in the symbolism of city life. Our faeries and fiends are gangsters and general troublemakers, or hide their headlessness with motorcycle helmets. On the other hand, we’d have something like Ookami Kakushi:

Here, magic “happens” in an urban setting, but it’s far more traditional in the imagery it invokes. We learn that those who live in the old side of town aren’t even particularly fond of the developed area across the city. But in Durarara!!, as in, say, Aria, we see how people continue to bring their creative agency to bear despite living rather differently than they did a thousand years ago. In a place like Japan, where geography begets myth, it’s only natural that cities would have their own kind of magic.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 11th, 2010 at 3:51 am and is filed under Durarara!! (Anime), Ookami Kakushi. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.