I have no intention whatsoever of episodic-blogging Durarara!! (I won’t have time, probably). But as long as it keeps impressing me — by which I mean, necessarily selfishly, working for and with me — I’ll no doubt continue to devote a bit of time every once in a while to figuring the thing out via bloggery.
I mentioned before that I’m particularly interested in Durarara!! because it deals with something I’ve been calling, reluctantly and for lack of a better term, “interstitial urban mythology” — that is, the magic that lurks in the places between the everyday, and takes forms consistent with the world we live in. The first episode introduced us to the Durarara!! mythos; the second, in providing another angle on certain events of the first, allows us a more intimate look at those interstices in which physics and logic become malleable.
First, though, what is an interstice? That is, is it necessarily a physical place? Maybe, but there’s a distinctly personal element to it, too. Consider this:
As the story develops, I can see that a lot of it will be about slowly peeling the layers off the people who inhabit this crazy neighborhood — waiting for the right moment when “reality” decides to reveal itself, to use the show’s words. In the first episode, Certy seems to be this completely otherworldly entity who is running roughshod on the town at random and according to her will alone. But in this episode, she’s shown to be a Badass for Hire of sorts, maybe doing a bit of work on the side while she looks for her head. [Shinmaru, "Durarara!! – 2"]
Interesting observations here — namely that the legends, the urban fae, can be as “layered” as more recognizably human characters, and that, depending on how one looks at it, the interstices revealed by chance or design are perhaps more “real” than, say, the normal school life with which the episode opens. I wonder, though, to what end the aforementioned layers are peeled. If the layers beneath layers are yet more layers, do they reveal more than the layers above them? Or is truth to be found in the spaces between layers, in the positions of layers relative to one another?
When Rio learns of her father’s infidelity, her concept of family life acquires a new dimension. But I don’t think that what she’s doing throughout much of the episode amounts to coping with this heretofore unseen dimension, or at least not directly. I’d say she’s simply trying to figure out how the new dimension and the old coexist, how they even can coexist. She tries to ignore the undesirable dimension, but she can’t; she tries to bring the dimensions together by letting her mother in on the secret, but this fails. The dimensions, the layers are what they are, and all Rio can do is try to keep from losing herself in the labyrinth between them.
It is, of course, while navigating her personal, internal interstice that Rio meets Izaya Orihara, alias Nakura (see 名/na and 倉/kura), the “informant” or “information-dealer” who lures her into the realm of physical interstices we’re introduced to in the first episode — first into the space between Ikebukuro and Shibuya, from which she’s spirited away, so to speak, then, via the friendly Dullahan, to an out of the way rooftop with a brief but bloody history of suicide.
At first glance it almost seems as though Nakura simply craves emotion of the sort he inspires in Rio (was he, I wonder, responsible for the revelation of her father’s secret to her in the first place?). But he’s not interested in emotion for emotion’s sake, or so he claims; he’s interested in the “ecology” of worry, the system of worry — much like this episode, in fact. It’s not clear whether this is typical of the sort of information informants deal in, but of course it wouldn’t do to have our Unseelie Court all figured out this early on.
