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.