Desire and the DJ: Psychoanalysis and “Ya Boy Kongming!”
This article contains extensive spoilers for the anime Ya Boy Kongming! (Paripi Koumei, lit. “Kongming of the Party People”) streaming in English on HIDIVE.
That the subject should come to recognize and to name his desire; that is the efficacious action of analysis. But it isn’t a question of recognizing something which would be entirely given…. In naming it, the subject creates, brings forth, a new presence in the world. …what’s important is to teach the subject to name, to articulate, to bring this desire into existence.
—Lacan, The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book II
The isekai genre is where an ordinary person from the modern world is dropped into another world (hence the name) with fantastic or magical properties. This often results in the protagonist having hitherto unknown magical powers and acquiring a bevy of one or more devoted romantic interests or otherwise living out a “power fantasy” where everybody loves them and they get to be a hero and all of the mundanity of the ordinary world is washed away. Or, just as often, for the transported character to act as a straight man or legible perspective in a world that is meant to be fantastical, irrational, or otherwise inexplicable to the audience.
The often superficial nature of the isekai narrative means that everybody clambers over each other to subvert or negate or complicate or otherwise invert the power fantasy to give it more of a sense of reality, heft, or depth. One such inversion is the “reverse isekai,” where a fantastical being from another world is inserted in our own, and clashes against the mundanity and absurdity in our own existence. The presence of this extraordinary character acts as a satire or critique or unsettling of our social milieu. While the traditional isekai format often acts to reinforce social norms or even work as a sort of cultural imperialism (A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court cannot help but argue for late 19th American century society in the face of a barbaric past, for instance), the reverse format permits an undermining of the existing order. Think here of the role of the Satanic hosts in The Master & Margarita: able to comment on the absurdity of modern life from an exterior vantage point, to challenge deeply-held beliefs as arbitrary or contingent, or simply to cause chaos and disruption within societal structures that are otherwise taken to be fixed.
“Ya Boy Kongming!” is, on paper, a reverse isekai. The premise goes: the historical tactician Zhuge Liang (courtesy name Kongming), on his death bed at the end of an ultimately unsuccessful military campaign during the Three Kingdoms period, wishes to be reborn in an era of peace. He is granted this wish and reincarnates in Shibuya, where he uses his experience as a tactician to help the musician Eiko Tsukimi achieve her dreams of stardom from humble beginnings in the club scene. However, unlike the assumed premise of the reverse isekai, “Kongming” is not really about a relationship between an exterior being to a society, or even really a commentary on social structures at all (the music industry and club scene, as depicted in the anime, have only a passing resemblance their real-world counterparts). Rather, I maintain, it is an anime about desire and introspection: the forms and goals of psychoanalysis shape the plot and the characters. Kongming’s reincarnation could be a hoax, or perhaps he could fail to exist as an exterior character entirely (and be merely, say, an internal monologue, commentator, or drive within Eiko) and the action would proceed more or less apace. The psyche, rather than the world, is the object of interest in the anime. It is a reverse isekai, yes, but it is an unsettling and intrusion into an interior rather than exterior world.
The incident of Kongming’s miraculous reincarnation provides the first clue as to the psychoanalytic aspirations of the work. We, the audience, are meant to take Kongming’s reincarnation as a miraculous but self-evident event. Kongming’s life-long virtues, or perhaps the sincerity or righteousness of his dying wish to live in a world without war, are rewarded by some magical force (the anime shows only a shot of a shooting star, but seems otherwise uninterested in the precise mechanism of reincarnation). We are to interpret that his spoken wish was so deeply felt, was his sole overwriting desire as he lay dying, that even the universe itself could not help but bring it to fruition.
Yet Kongming’s immediate conclusion upon finding himself on the streets of Shibuya during a Halloween party (amid loud noises and apparent monsters) is that he is in hell, being tormented. You could imagine that one might be distraught with such a realization, but Kongming takes it in stride. He (as in the image above) even seems to noticeably relax when he is able to compartmentalize confusing stimuli (like being forced to chug tequila or go to a crowded club) as just fresh post-mortem punishments. Why is this? Why is hell easier to accept than wish fulfillment? I argue that this is because the very idea that our “deepest” desire could be met is antithetical to the operation of desire in the psyche, which is a fundamentally unfulfillable drive towards an ineffable object of fulfillment. That we might be punished for our shortcomings is easy to accept: that we will get exactly what we want is comparatively difficult and dangerous to even articulate, let alone internalize.
Compare to one of the iconic scenes from near the end of Tarkovsky’s Stalker, where the titular Stalker has finally, after hardships and danger, brought a group of people through the hazardous Zone and to the threshold of a Room that is purported to grant your deepest wish. Despite being at the end of their quest, none of the people involved have the courage to step through the threshold. Instead they sit, exhausted, in the dark and the damp. There are many reasons for this hesitancy, but the core is that revealing this deepest desire could cause the permanent unraveling of a person, and destroy both external and internal illusions of the self. We are not strong enough to face up to the burden of realizing our own “core” desire. The tale of a previous Stalker named Porcupine is an object lesson: he (we are told) enters the Room with the goal of resurrecting his brother, but is rewarded instead with immense wealth. Disgusted that his desires would be so selfish and absurd, he kills himself.
Kongming, too, now a sort of Shibuya Stalker, is unable or unwilling to grapple with his apparent “true” wish of a world without war. Despite the apparent heart-felt nature of his deathbed wish (confession?), he does not want rest: he is eager to resume his role as a tactician after encountering Eiko, and begins scheming from almost the minute he meets her. He initially mistakes her for a demon (she is wearing a devil costume, after all) and asks if he can assist her in battles in the underworld: not the behavior of a person sick (to death!) of war. The first episode is almost Faustian: he explicitly asks her permission to assist her in making it big as a musician, and seems to only “come alive” after she agrees. I wonder, here, if this is a form of avoiding personal responsibility or agency: if questioned he might say that, of course he wanted to live in a world without conflict or struggle, to enjoy a “retirement” from constant scheming and vassalage but, alas, he must help those in need, and adhere to his obligations, and so that is why he is “forced” back in the familiar role of scheming tactician. Even with the assistance of the supernatural, he is unwilling or unable to come to grips with his object of desire.
The Faustian (Jeevesian?) parallels take over here in that Kongming becomes less prominent as a character after Eiko agrees to accept his help (in keeping with the Wodehouse allusion, as with Jeeves’ hangover cure or Mulliner’s Buck-U-Uppo, many of his schemes rely on quasi-supernatural tonics). He exists to clarify Eiko’s own desires and bring them to fruition rather than exert his own personal drives. He is kept busy, but often off-camera, returning at the right time to reveal that he had prepared such-and-such for exactly the current contingency. He is not a “fish out of water”: while other reverse isekai might have their central character’s accommodation with the modern world take entire seasons or episodes, it is dispensed with here in a single cutaway to a clock while Eiko explains to him everything from world history to cryptocurrency. From that point on, Kongming is, trademark outfit aside, perfectly at home in the modern world, understanding everything from laundromats to social media to multiple modern languages without explanation or apparent effort.
What, then, is Kongming’s function? What does he do for Eiko? While he certainly assists with various parlor tricks around club venues and potential rivals, his main impact appears to be on Eiko herself. He never criticizes her singing or her stage presence: there are no Rocky-style training montages where he yells at her to do her best or push past her limits. Rather, he works on her own drives, desires, and self-conception.
In one of their first conversations after their initial bargain, Kongming asks Eiko to very specifically articulate her goal, what he will be working with her to achieve. As discussed above, this kind of work of articulating desire can be dangerous to the psyche. The conversation is therefore delicate, more like one you’d have with a psychoanalyst. Eiko brings up absent parental figures, a fear of disappointment and inability to deliver the perfection her mother asked of her, anhedonia, and even an allusion to a suicide attempt. All of this culminates in Eiko’s final goal for the series, to perform in a particular arena venue (as a synecdoche for “making it” in the music industry more broadly).
One of his first pieces of advice for Eiko is curiously not about music at all (again, he rarely seems to have much directly to suggest about her performances, and her singing is occasionally not even shown on screen at all), but about pronouns. In laying out her history and anxieties, Eiko repeatedly uses “watashi nanka” to refer to herself, rather than just “watashi” alone. In this context, “nanka” adds a bit of informal humility and distance to her statements: the subtitles I was using translated “watashi nanka” as “little ol’ me.” After forcing her to articulate a desire, removing this hesitancy around her self-identity is one of Kongmng’s first successes: in the translation I was using, he even refers to her use of language as “fetters.” This is why training montages (and even practice sessions) are few and far between in this series: progress is made in the ability to change (or deepen) articulation of the self. Her later struggles have this form as well— to work with a producer to find her unique voice, to write a new song, to shake off amateurishness, or to otherwise find ways of more strongly mapping the self. Becoming a better musician is one and the same with knowing about yourself as a person, with just as many fits and starts of personal revelation as slows climbs of iterative progress.
I focus here on Kongming and Eiko, but the other characters have rich psychoanalytical journeys as well. I will discuss a few arcs briefly below:
The rapper Kabe-Taijin’s relationship with his alleged “rival” Sekitoba Kung Fu (an allusion to Lu Bu’s famous horse Red Hare) is also one that hews closely to the analyst/patient dynamic: Sekitoba, who has only ever lost a rap battle to Kabe-Taijin, apparently wants a “fair” rematch, which just so coincidentally seems to involve building the rapper up from a place of personal doubt and despair and towards self-actualization. As with Kongming and Eiko, Sekitoba could exist only as an externalized drive of Kabe-Taijin’s without much of the story changing. Kabe’s initial goal to overcome anxiety and stagefright, to attempt to deal with a sense of guilt from his own success and skill, could take place just as easily on an analyst’s couch as in an underground rap battle.
Nanami Kuon, lead vocalist of rival band Azalea, offers a contrasting notion of how the realization of desire can fail. While Eiko and her allies have done all sorts of odd things at the behest of Kongming and his schemes (from things like hanging Fresnel lights in random trees, to doping drinks with traditional Chinese medicine, to full-on computer fraud), Nanami is asked by her manipulative manager Karasawa to wear skimpy outfits, only pretend to play her instrument in concerts while using a backing track, and, most damningly, to only play Karasawa’s songs rather than her own. While absurd and counter-intuitive actions are par for the course for Eiko, they are personally destructive for Nanami, for precisely the reason that they are focused on the end of a specific desire, rather than the process of recognizing and articulating desires. Nanami is told to play along because this is the only way to be famous and successful, and she can’t endure it because being famous and successful, while perhaps her original spoken goal, is not her actual object of desire, or at least not the process by which she hoped to approach it. Kongming succeeds where Karasawa fails for precisely this reason: the manipulation of desire in service of constructing the self, rather than the manipulation of self in the service of desire.
In all, I have heard many competing descriptions of Ya Boy Kongming!. In one view it’s a Columbo-style inversion of the detective show (where the goal of the audience was to see how Columbo would unravel the identity of the already-known murderer) where the audience is trying to guess which stratagem from Romance of the Three Kingdoms would be used this time. In another it is just an idol show with a hook, a standard depiction of the rise to fame of a musician we’ve been encouraged to root for. But to me Kongming is different from those shows precisely for the mental, rather than thematic (or even musical) territory it covers. Other shows might engender fantasies where we imagine if we were as strong, brave, or powerful as the heroes in them. In Kongming, the fantasy is to imagine if we had our very own grand tactician in our corner, helping us to self-actualize. What schemes would he plot around the sweeping battles of our own lives?
