How Do You Solve a Problem like Araragi?

Just over ten years ago there was this 25 year old dude who was a kind of literary wunderkind. This dude was a serious literary dude and he totally ruled. He won prizes, is how you know. And he also won the support of the largest publishing house in Japan. This publisher, Kodansha, was super into this serious literary dude so they let his work define some of their most popular and groundbreaking publications: Faust — yeah, named after the fella who dealt with the devil — a lit journal marrying literary sensibilities to the stereotypically juvenile form of light novels; and Pandora — yeah, named after the “beautiful evil” of Greek myth — a similar vehicle where this dude first published the Monogatari series in 2005. This dude’s name was Nisio Isin and he is the best worst dude in anime.

We can’t talk about Isin yet. We will, but first we gotta talk about Katsushi Ota. Ota is the sole editor of Faust and Pandora, which means not only has he been flicking his bean for literature way longer than Isin — Ota’s been editing various pubs for Kodansha since ’97 — but he’s also Isin’s greatest enabler. Like all great editors, Ota lingers behind the scenes, which is why you can’t say something so bombastic as “This dude was a serious literary dude and he totally ruled” about Ota, at least not in public, because Ota’s work is more or less invisible. “He’s kind of a rebel in the publishing world,” says Del Rey Manga’s Mutsumi Miyazaki which for most folks is like saying he’s the hottest guy in the knitting circle. It doesn’t really seem like a boast, but for people who get it, yeah, it’s radical. Ota does shit like force his writers to go on boot camps and make them work for a hundred hours with only four hours of sleep, just to put a new spin on a new issue of Faust. This paperfucker is nuts. Which means he’s exactly the kind of paperfucker the global lit massif needs.

He is, at least, exactly the kind of paperfucker anime needs, which is why his enabling of Nisio Isin is so important, but also so goddamn frustrating. Because if Ota is Isin’s editor, why couldn’t he get Isin to spare Monogatari the toothbrush scene?

We’ll get to that.

So, Nisio Isin creates Monogatari in 2005 and in 2009 it’s adapted into an anime by animation studio SHAFT. SHAFT are the Brett Favre c. 2012 of anime: they’ve been around forever, they’re still better than almost anyone else in the game, but they know it… boyyyyyy do they know it. And, they’re likely to send their proverbial dicks in proverbial pics to a reporter. Not literally, just, they’re that smug. SHAFT didn’t really do shit until 2004, when they hired this 42 year old dude who was a serious animation dude and also totally ruled. This dude was Akiyuki Shinbo. How do I begin to explain Akiyuki Shinbo? He loves gradients, he loves grids, he loves backwards head tilts. As the director of Monogatari’s anime adaptation, Shinbo took the rich palette mixed by Isin’s verbosity and transmuted its character into visuals we’re gonna call downright sumptuous. One, because they are, and two, because ‘sumptuous’ so clearly evokes the feeling of what it describes, and this affair between form and content is exactly what we’re talking about.

Here’s the thing: as a serious literary dude, Isin loves his own words, and so much of Monogatari is characterized by its wordplay and linguistic games. Shinbo took that and ran, giddy like a cat chasing butterflies; in a literal sense, he paces the episodes with quick-cutting text-rich titlecards and rivals Isin’s mischief with language by using obscure or antiquated kanji to boot. What’s the parallel here? Like the dialogue in Godard films or the way the orange ninja turtle shouts “Cowabunga, dewwwwwd!” This is Shinbo using every aspect of visual language — including text — to express something subtextual.

Plus, Shinbo loves referencing other anime, and Isin, as both a serious literary dude and — shockah — an otaku trying to marry the two with his work, loves referencing other anime too. The union between Shinbo and Isin feels like the result of destiny, you know? In the same way an emotive ballad is better in minor chords than majors, Shinbo gives form to Isin’s intentions so adeptly it feels intrinsic.

Monogatari means story and Bakemono means monster. Isin’s wordplay again: Bakemonogatari, the first season of the series, means Monster Story. I always found it interesting that bake and baka sound similar in a way that the title sounds like it might’ve translated to Idiot Story when Araragi, its protagonist, is treated like a fuckwit. Yeah, Araragi is Our Guy, the audience insert character vague enough but defined enough with which to empathise. He’s surrounded by beautiful women who need his help sorting out problems with otherworldy oddities. This sounds like some Highschool DXD juvenile wankbank bullshit, but you’ve got the benefit of knowing a little bit about its creators now, which I didn’t when I had that reaction while reading its Wikipedia page for the first time. I watched it anyway because nobody would shut up about it (by which I mean the angry nerds in /r/anime) and it seemed like, hey, monsters and magical powers: maybe we’ll get some sweet fight scenes.

There are hardly any fight scenes. There is talking. And talking. And talking. And talking. And maybe a little action. But mostly, a lot of talking.

And this is what some of the angry nerds hate about Monogatari! It is “pretentious” which I imagine is lobbed by the same wangs who sneer at Evangelion’s ending as being “2deep4me” and Psycho-Pass for “just chucking in heaps of references to philosophers to pretend it’s edgy.” If you don’t understand something, that’s fine, but you don’t gotta get so reflexive about it. Critical thinking: like the sound of one hand clicking, it’s fun once you get used to it, and not that hard to do on your own.

But these conversations aren’t boring! The key is they aren’t just exposition, although they will lull you into suspecting they are. What seems like a tangent will unfold into a fertile branch, pointing towards the motivations of its actors. Meanwhile, SHAFT keeps it loose, cutting through abstract and concrete imagery to advance the tone and pace of the dialogue. These exchanges are charged with kinetic energy thanks to Shinbo’s direction and become the action of the series; certain fight scenes are terrifically stylish and aesthetically refreshing, but the dialogue is just as animated.

If Monogatari has a central thesis, it’s probably the repeated lesson of Araragi’s drifter mentor and monster specialist, Oshino Meme: “People have to save themselves. One person saving another is impossible.” Araragi has this total savior complex but unlike Highschool DXD and the thousands of other high school harem series in which pubescent, average dudes feel compelled to help their beautiful companions for the sake of all-consuming lust, Araragi doesn’t have much of a sexual drive. There’s a lot of sexually charged scenery, but Araragi’s moments of overt sexual impulse are played more for gags (and this is my main problem with the series; again, We’ll Get To That.) Instead he seems far more driven by struggling with this concept of wanting to help people but suspecting that, ultimately, they can only help themselves.

This happens right off the bat. Senjougahara Hitagi, a tall, lithe, purple-haired student seems like a classic tsundere — outwardly cold to mask an intensely feeling interior — which she even references, and Araragi is skeptical, because to be a tsundere you have to have hidden feelings, and after threatening to kill Araragi, he suspects she doesn’t feel anything at all. Araragi takes Hitagi to Oshino Meme and instead of curing her, Meme forces Hitagi to confront the demon cursing her, and ultimately the curse is lifted. Did Meme save Hitagi, or did she save herself?

Very slowly over the course of the first season, Shinbo and Isin show — and this is crucial, that they show — that Hitagi is incredibly uncomfortable with intimacy and compensates with directness. After twelve episodes of increasingly relying on each other to navigate the sly surreality of their high school existence, Hitagi and Araragi finally have a frank and difficult conversation about their real feelings and Hitagi explains part of why she’s become so cloistered, telling Araragi that she can’t promise him everything in that moment, but slowly she feels like she’s becoming more comfortable again.

That ambiguity between whether it was Araragi’s influence or a person’s self-determination repeats itself throughout the series so invariably that the answer could be this: there is no dichotomy between saving someone and them saving themselves. The two are intertwined. Moments of revelation are always induced by external influences. Which means even though living with other people can feel unbearable, they also present the possibility of salvation.

Shinbo makes a couple other things about Isin’s world clear. It’s never explicitly said in the light novels that parents are unusually absent, but Shinbo literally cuts ’em out of the picture. In the dozens of hours of Monogatari so far, Araragi’s mum gets the most screen time — about two or three scenes — and she’s always shot from the neck down. Hanekawa, another classmate who needs Araragi’s help, is the ward of two adoptive parents who loathe her, and they’re only ever shown as fuzzy, grey specters — their connotation as black clouds hanging over Hanekawa’s life are the totality of their existence in the show’s perception. The only adults with any serious presence are errant anti-heroes and antagonists: the con artist Kaiki, the arrogant and unhelpful Gaen, the morally ambiguous Oshino Meme. These three were all high school companions and occultists and presented as kind of like the antecedent to Araragi’s group. Hitagi has a past with Kaiki, Hanekawa — precocious but humble — is always battling not to feel inferior against Gaen, and Araragi is always comparing his own lived experiences with the advice of Oshino Meme.

But whether parents or drifters, adults in Isin and Shinbo’s conception are figures of conviction. Araragi’s mum is a police officer and lawful to the point of seeming zealous and uncaring. When Araragi takes in Hanekawa after her house burns down, his mum warns her that the Araragi family will not become her family, the house will not become her home, and so she makes Araragi look naively optimistic. Araragi’s mum is attempting to preserve order, whereas Araragi privileges compassion even at the risk of chaos. And that’s interesting! Maybe Araragi’s ideas about helping people, even reluctantly, are inspired by his parents’ work as police, in which they’re (ideally) tangibly saving lives? For a kid trying to determine if he can actually save anyone at all, that philosophical certainty is probably VERY appealing. But his mum is also the antithesis of Araragi, and more like Kaiki, Gaen and Meme in that she seems jaded by her own experiences. While the teenage protagonists of Monogatari are constantly reiterating their perspectives, the adults have discrete beliefs about how the world is and how one should be within it. And so there’s a sense of limitless potential in the main characters, these uncomfortable viscous solids being altered by their environments with a timer on when they’ll finally settle on a mold.

But, so, that chaos and lawlessness is where the show runs into problems, and these aren’t problems on like, an unjustifiable level, by which I mean they’re mostly defensible moments, I reckon, but they do make it impossibly difficult to show your friends this series without having your exegesis ready to turn in when those moments come.

Which is what I meant by the toothbrush scene. Which is what I meant by Araragi’s overt sexual impulses being played for gags. Which is what I meant by We’ll Get To That. We, finally, have gotten to that.

There’s a scene in Nisemonogatari — the second season, which focuses on Araragi’s younger sisters, Karen and Tsukihi — where Araragi brushes Tsukihi’s teeth. This is one of the most famous scenes in the show and recurringly makes it to the all-topics front page of reddit, at which point a bunch of unsuspecting folks call all anime fans pedophiles and /r/anime wonders if they deserve it. The scene is erotically charged with intense, lasciviously moving close-ups and audible gasping drawing parallels between oral hygiene and sex, made even stranger by Araragi and Tsukihi’s sibling relationship and their age difference. It is fucking uncomfortable to watch.

This is Shinbo and Isin fucking with their audience and the tropes of popular culture and to put it in context, you need to know that so much of Monogatari is defined by which perspective the camera is exerting, i.e. you could say it’s so charged because it’s exhibiting the most repressed and forbidden aspects of Araragi’s libido. Like Hitagi, Araragi is suuuuper repressed and uncomfortable about intimacy; when his internal monologue turns sexual, he either seems stultifyingly bored as if struggling with the objective banality of sex, or hyperexcited to the point of it seeming satirical and unrealistic; in both cases, his lust feels disingenuous. But suddenly Araragi finds himself in this shocking circumstance where he’s confronted with intimacy, so the point is this: he’s not imagining brushing his sister’s teeth as a sexual act, but instead that a moment of familial intimacy is as powerful and feels as transgressive as a sexual encounter. It’s a reminder that Araragi is still immature, even though throughout most of the rest of the series — which is told predominantly from his perspective, where his self-conception is obviously warped — he seems totally capable.

Here’s the thing: incestuous innuendo isn’t especially rare in anime. Some massive series have impressionable younger characters confusing sibling admiration with their nascent ideas of love and libido. This isn’t that uncommon in real life — kids are very dumb and can’t reconcile ideas that complex at the typically young age at which they first encounter them, which is one of the reasons laws about age of consent exist — but it’s rarely addressed in other fiction as innocuously as it is in anime, because, like that Monogatari scene, it’s fucking uncomfortable! Broader society isn’t ready to have mature conversations about these things yet, but the light-hearted way it’s played in anime is usually truer to life than fiction that uses the confused boundaries between young sibling relationships as Real Big Deal Moments.

Whenever someone has attempted to justify this scene in the past, it’s inevitably dismissed as merely a justification, and that’s totally fine. Pop culture discourse right now is heavily burdened with folks trying to justify the righteousness of every element of their favourite series, but it’s rarely fair or accurate. It’s better to wrestle with how your faves are failing than to tiptoe over dishonesty; sooner or later, someone’s gonna push you over. I won’t blame anyone for watching that scene and writing off Monogatari, even though I do sincerely believe it has something transgressive to say. I’ll only say I don’t think it’s the right thing to point to when you’re criticizing Monogatari as being juvenile.

The right thing is the fact that Monogatari squanders its goodwill with its other expressions of Araragi’s repression. While the toothbrush scene is momentous and telegraphed as a signifier of its characters’ personalities, the series gets dragged down elsewhere with cheap lewdness. The best example is that Araragi persistently sexually assaults a prepubescent girl called Hachikuji, and while Hachikuji’s storylines are some of the most moving in the series, her quasi-romantic relationship with Araragi hews far too close to the common and undesirable tropes of other anime which Shinbo and Isin were ostensibly parodying in that toothbrush scene. It just seems like a monumental failure on their part for subbing in deviance for what could’ve been a substantial but platonic relationship instead. The series already carries a compelling love triangle in which Araragi is torn between the metaphysical bond he shares with the vampire Shinobu and the romantic bond he shares with Hitagi, so the Hachikuji romance feels more like a frustrating appeal to lolicons.

Nobody should appeal to lolicons, folks. They are ruining anime.

Nisio Isin and Akiyuki Shinbo are Serious Dudes doing Serious Things in an Unserious Form. Light novels and anime are traditionally the arena of manifest bullshit — I say this as someone who has spent more time watching it than I have with people I consider close friends — and has featured some of the weakest and most conservative writing I’ve ever seen. But Isin and Shinbo’s stated goal is to subvert all that. They are Bojack Horsemaning this biz, using an ostensibly commercial and demographically young form to do something complex. You get it? There is a rich lineage to these goals. This is Andy canvasfucking Warhol type shit. This is Jenny billboardfucking Holzer type shit. This is Maggie memoirfucking Nelson type shit. You go in expecting ghosts and monsters and sweet babes and you get 22 minutes of talking and piercing, emotive sound design and the goddamn most downright sumptuous art a show about teenagers has ever used, and it better be, because you will stare at it, follow its delicate golden spindle lines between shadows cast by the waning sun through the classroom windows across the floor and up the chalkboard, for hours. You will take in the factories shaded with orange-to-purple and forests of trees shaded with white-to-blue-to-green as vague but evocative as all recollection and you won’t even know it, but you will feel it. You will, after imbibing this over several days, notice that the furniture in Araragi’s house, the layout of the rooms, the layout of the house itself, is as deliberate and mystical as the house of a childhood friend. In an industry which is constantly victimized by wage-slave animators and punishing deadlines, you will fucking marvel at the fact that SHAFT and Monogatari’s other staff appear to have spent Zen Buddhist-like periods of time meditating on the essence of every frame only to express it in a form as close to purity as humanly possible.

Katsushi Ota, that monster, would be goddamn proud.