xxxHOLiC and youkai manga

[starlady]

Under the influence of Michael Dylan Foster's Pandemonium and Parade: Japanese Monsters and the Culture of Youkai, I realized that xxxHOLiC and several other prominent anime and manga can be classified as youkai manga, and may well be understood as such by Japanese audiences without ever having to label them thus explicitly.

I'll deal with xxxHOLiC first, because it's the one with which I'm most familiar. In his book Foster devotes extensive attention to Yanagita Kunio (1875-1962), the renowned folklorist and inventor of minzokugaku or folklore studies. Foster divides youkai into two components, the mysterious and the weird, and in his consideration of Yanagita he quotes the folklorist from a 1912 essay: "And so in the end, all we can say is that human beings themselves are indeed the most mysterious [fushigi] thing in the universe" (145). This is almost exactly what Ichihara Yuuko says in the prologue to xxxHOLiC, and what Watanuki says at the beginning of xxxHOLiC Rou: "Of all the living things in this world, people themselves are the most mysterious of all."

CLAMP's invocation of Yanagita becomes even more resonant in light of Foster's discussion of one of Yanagita's essays from 1917 called "Hitotsume-kouzo" (One-eyed Rascal). In this essay, Yanagita offers a theory about the prehistorical origins of a certain one-eyed youkai, proposing that in olden times members of the community marked out for sacrifice had an eye put out to denote their status, and though the custom died out the belief that, in Foster's phrase, "a one-eyed person could receive sacred intelligence from the deities remained" (146). The origins of Kitarou, in Mizuki Shigeru's manga, anime, movie and print media empire, having only one eye are immediately clear, and the fact that Watanuki in xxxHOLiC and Ginko in Mushishi have only one eye seems not only natural but almost overdetermined. If they didn't have one eye, it would be impossible to trust their insight into the otherworld. Indeed, Ginko actually resembles Kitarou strongly, not only in their lacking a left eye but in the floppy hair they use to disguise the lack.

In xxxHOLiC Rou it's revealed that Doumeki forsook science to study minzokugaku, a choice that Tsurugi Kohane made as well; the discipline that Yanagita founded reached its height in the 1930s, and their decision only throws the fact that in xxxHOLiC CLAMP never use the word "youkai" into sharper relief. Terms such as 'mono' and 'ayakashii' and 'yuurei' appear frequently, but their all-purpose signifier has been expunged. Doumeki and Kohane might reasonably have chosen to major in youkaigaku but for the fact that such a choice would undoubtedly bring home to the readers xxxHOLiC's status as a youkai manga in a way that might very well destabilize the suspension of disbelief or ironic imagination necessary for readers to enjoy the work.

Nevertheless, it is clear that HOLiC is a youkai manga, insistently locating a nexus of the mysterious and the weird (Watanuki's shop) in the middle of present-day Tokyo and finding mysterious things both in customs kept alive only in the otherworld and in insistently contemporary devices such as computers and the TV.

The other thought I had, in light of Foster's discussion of the kuchi-sake-onna, a new youkai who terrorized Japan in the late 70s and early 80s, is whether or not Li'l Slugger of Kon Satoshi's anime Paranoia Agent might be considered a youkai. Given the fact that he is both a harbinger, an instantiation of and a resistor against the contemporary social problems detailed in the anime, and that he generally appears only at twilight or at night and only when his victims are alone, Li'l Slugger's status as a deliberately created, mediated youkai seems clear.

References
Foster, Michael Dylan. Pandemonium and Parade: Japanese Monsters and the Culture of Youkai. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009.
--------------. "The Otherworlds of Mizuki Shigeru." Mechademia 3 (2008): 8-28.

Comments

[snarp]

Yanagita offers a theory about the prehistorical origins of a certain one-eyed youkai, proposing that in olden times members of the community marked out for sacrifice had an eye put out to denote their status, and though the custom died out the belief that, in Foster's phrase, "a one-eyed person could receive sacred intelligence from the deities remained" (146)

I had not heard about that! That's interesting.

Reading this, it's almost surprising that Saiyuki doesn't really fit into the category at all. Its youkai, though they're called youkai, are basically humans - there's nothing alien about them. And Hakkai's lost eye doesn't give him any special otherworldly insight. (He has more common sense than anyone else, but that's different.)

[starlady]

I don't think there's much if any factual basis to Yanagita's theory--more likely, there's just no way to know--but his ideas were clearly very influential.

And Hakkai's lost eye doesn't give him any special otherworldly insight. (He has more common sense than anyone else, but that's different.)

Irony, possibly? And the youkai's humanity as an explosion of the tropes about youkai?

[kaigou]

'Cept that Saiyuki is using a slightly different basis for its yokai-human tension, being a continental story and not homegrown-Japanese, but then on the other hand, Saiyuki's positions in re yokai isn't all that much different from other traditional ways to "become a demon". Hakkai killing a thousand people in one night (or whatever the max was) follows almost line for line one tradition of a way to morph from human to yokai; another was to kill an incredibly strong demon -- I guess the logic there is that if you're strong enough to beat a demon, you must be pretty demonic yourself.

Hakkai may not have supernatural insight as a result of his lost eye, but it always seemed to be that he was still quite perceptive, even sensitive, not solely to yokai/supernatural per se but just plain in general, to people or demons or animals. Which is a type of sight on its own, and one he definitely has in spades compared to his rather bull-headed fellow travellers.

[kaigou]

Obviously great minds think alike, because it was the same book that led me to see Kekkaishi and Nurarihyon no Mago in the exact same light.

[starlady]

Isn't it a good book?

[merin-chan.livejournal.com]

I thought about xxxHOLiC when I read Foster's book a year or so ago too, though not with such clarity or detail (I've only seen the anime. >.<) I hadn't thought of Paranoia Agent in that light, though. That's a really interesting way of approaching Kon's work beyond the psychoanalytic frameworks it usually invites.

Another series I thought of as a sort of "youkai manga/anime in other terms" is Mushi Shi. Have you seen it? The quasi-historical setting, where encounters with weird and mysterious beings take place in little furusato-type towns in the mountains, really reminded me of Yanagita. But I wonder if using that historical setting has the same kinds of destabilizing effects as (post)modern-day youkai manga like CLAMP's, or if it just reifies the idea of Japanese "tradition" that grew up in the 30's with minzokugaku...?

[starlady38.livejournal.com]

Well, not for nothing have I translated fifty chapters of the manga... :-)

Definitely Mushishi fits in the youkai tradition, Ginko and Kitarou have the same lack of an eye covered by floppy silver hair, it's an explicit homage by Urushibara I think.

It's been a while since I watched the show, and I still haven't read the whole manga, but I think it sort of splits the difference--the late-Edo styling, the furusato dentou-teki stuff, sort of screams Yanagita and his project, but on the other hand no one every says 'youkai' and calling them 'mushi' has a very different emphasis, I think.

Obviously Kon's stuff is very psychoanalytic (psychosomatic, often), but I tend to distrust psychoanalysis on principle, and I definitely think you can read Li'l Slugger as a youkai a la Kuchi-sake-onna. If anything, I think it's more interesting to think of the anime that way, and get into questions of belief and agency and mass culture and thought.

[ariadnechan.livejournal.com]

really interesting, that would explain the fascination of Clamp with eyes, but they add it the kind of marriage involve in giving your eye or part of it to another or lose it for another
(all powerful people thou)

interesting thing is in Mushishi no one say youkai like in XXXHolic.

the other interesting thing is that Ginko can't stay in place too much time, like Xiao Lang as in oposition to Kimihiro who can't leave the store or Yuuko who only could not stay away so much either.

[starlady38.livejournal.com]

the other interesting thing is that Ginko can't stay in place too much time, like Xiao Lang as in oposition to Kimihiro who can't leave the store or Yuuko who only could not stay away so much either

Yes, exactly. I can't shake the feeling that this is significant in some way that's probably related to beliefs about youkai.

And ditto about the eyes, too. Ginko has only one eye and no way to make up the deficit, unlike Kitarou, whose dad is a spirit-eyeball who rides on his shoulder and unlike Watanuki, who gets half of Doumeki's sight. The eyeball is a kind of symbol of the progatonist's singularity, or aloneness, and Watanuki and Kitarou aren't completely alone.

[ariadnechan.livejournal.com]

i don't know Kitarou, but if he have an eye of his father it is clear that the eyes also are symbols of spiritual or magical powers
like fay's magic residing in his eyes and idem in Kimiro case when Lady Spider said that his eye have a high price because of his power

There is another manga and anime "TACTICS" who took this theme in 1920 aprox. he has withe hair as Ginko and he is a folklorist and have similar powers to doumeki.

[starlady38.livejournal.com]

I'll have to track Tactics down, it sounds cool. There's a manga I'm reading now called Hokushin Denki in which Yanagita is actually one of the main characters, it's also interesting.

And yes again about the eyeballs. They are totes important, clearly.