xxxHOLiC.

[starlady]

Utena's seiyuu, Kawakami Tomoko, died of cancer over the weekend at the ridiculously young age of 41. Utena was my first anime and will always be one of my absolute favorites, and Utena herself one of my favorite characters. Kawakami and her talent will be missed.

---

CLAMP. xxxHOLiC. 19 vols. Tokyo: Kodansha, 2003-2011.

In the end, this was one of CLAMP's less well-crafted manga, I think, which is saying something for a group that's well-known for their inability to consistently deliver satisfying endings (they should try to take a page out of Arakawa Hiromu's book for next time).

Don't get me wrong, there's a lot of things I love about HOLiC, starting with the art and the characters. The art! The art is gorgeous, and it only gets better as the series progresses; I would hold up volume 12 as an example of manga that is art, no qualifications. I've never seen dreamscapes evoked better than they are in that volume, and they are so, so beautiful.

I like the characters a lot, too, and I do appreciate that by the end of the manga they have all perceptibly come a long way, particularly Watanuki and Kohane, but especially, of course, Watanuki, as the protagonist and the viewpoint character. I recently reread volume 4 before I read volume 19, and it's striking to compare his earlier volubility and utter lack of knowledge about magic with his self-assurance and power by the end.

But oh, the price.

I think this is perhaps the manga in which CLAMP's own--misogyny is probably too strong a word, but sexism will work for our purposes here--shows through clearest. Every single one of Yuuko and then Watanuki's clients, with the exception of the TRC characters, is either a woman or a non-human. I said in the comments to one of my translations at some point that this is in some sense social commentary--consciously or unconsciously, CLAMP's narrative indicates that men have the power to grant their own desires in society, while women are reduced to beseeking supernatural agency, sometimes at a cost greater than they really want to pay, whether their problem is external or internal. And as much as I love Yuuko, for her power and her sexiness and her mystery, ultimately she too is a victim of CLAMP's inability to give adult women of (magical) ability a happy ending; instead, she's fridged to motivate Watanuki and, ultimately and recursively, Fei Wong Reed of TRC.

Let's talk about Fei Wong Reed, shall we? I think he's probably the single weakest element of TRC, which otherwise was a pretty great (if complicated) manga, and that's entirely because we never get to know his motivation for what he does. We are told at the end, however, that he wants to resurrect the space-time witch, i.e. Yuuko, and coffeeandink has a theory that FWR is, in fact, Watanuki from long after Doumeki's descendant used the egg on him. It makes a hugely creepy amount of sense, and I don't think that I can personally make sense of either manga any other way. It's fucked up in that painful and cruel way that CLAMP love, and just for that reason I'd be inclined to subscribe to it, but there are other things too. Both FWR and Watanuki wear glasses (though, I suppose, Clow did too), and I can easily see Watanuki's longing for Yuuko, deprived of his memories of her, sliding into exactly that sort of ruthless desperation that characterizes FWR.

Which puts the egg, and Doumeki's descendants' refusal and ultimate burden to use it, in another light. I think it's one of the single creepiest plot elements CLAMP have created, actually, especially since the manga--and Yuuko--seem to treat it as a matter of course. Of course Watanuki will want to forget one of the people he loves best, for the sake of his emotional quietude! Ugh, it's such a horrible thought; the last thing I would want is to forget the memories I have of the people I've lost, precisely because the memories are all that I have left of them. And the idea that Watanuki becomes FWR because he forgets Yuuko seems to me to indicate that forgetting is not, in fact, the path that we should desire. If anything, it's a powerful warning against it.

At this point people will say that very little of this is textually based, and I will say that you are right. But particularly TRC and xxxHOLiC have an interstitial relationship to each other, in which important parts of the story of each are never fully told in the other, and for that reason I don't think this sort of pontificating is wholly unwarranted. If anything, it's almost required.

So, all in all, a somewhat frustrating but ultimately worthwhile manga, I think.

Comments

[coffeeandink]

Yuuko says that FWR is the product of Clow's wish that she live, which ... I was going to say argued against him being Watanuki, but I'm not sure that's true. It depends on whether Clow's wish creates something from nothing or arranges events so that FWR happens. Ultimately, I don't think it's CLAMP's intended reading that Watanuki become FWR, but I'm not sure how much I care about CLAMP's intended reading.

I was furious when I first read the ending, because it seemed to go against all the character development of the series that Watanuki would choose isolation and the hope for contact with a dead woman over his connection with his surviving friends. Having reread the whole thing, I have to reluctantly admit there are also signs towards his increasing sadness and isolation and his devotion to Yuuko, and his connections to the spirit world over the living world; it's not as much out of nowhere as I thought, although an ending where Watanuki left the shop for Doumeki and Himawari and Kohane would be just as plausible, or maybe more.

But the egg and the idea of healing = forgetting are still WTF?!?

I love the art and the characters, but that ending sits badly with me.

[starlady]

The whole thing is so recursive and convoluted, I really don't think any reading has much of a leg to stand on over any others. Certainly there's no conflict between the idea that Clow's wish created FWR and Watanuki progressing from himself to FWR, I think. I'd agree that that's not what CLAMP want us to think (as the oddly hopeful ending of Holic makes me think, anyway), but I'm indifferent to that too.

*nods* I think that's a good point about Watanuki's burgeoning connection to the spirit world--do we notice how the one wish Yuuko never grants is Watanuki's? Or, she granted it by basically removing him from the human world; things start to get particularly unreal from about volume 10 on. 12 is beautiful, but it's impossible to tell dream from waking in most of it, which is kind of disturbing.

I just--Watanuki as a virtual hikikomori seems like such a defeat, existentially, and even if CLAMP did acknowledge it somewhat with the birdcage language/metaphor, and at the very end, but traditionally the story of Rip Van Winkle or Urashima Tarô/Urashimako is a nightmare, not a comedy, and the inversion of that trope doesn't work for me at all.

I can see the idea of forgetting = taking away pain, but it's wrong.

[coffeeandink]

Doesn't Yuuko grant Watanuki's wish by making him too powerful for creatures to hunt him? Or perhaps he escapes spiritual predators by becoming a shut-in, which is, as you say, incredibly depressing.

The birdcage metaphor is both apt and incredibly disturbing. Huh. With the egg -- this life is only a cage, and Watanuki's only way out is to hatch again? It fits the imagery, but I hate it.

My other thought for Watanuki is that he grows up to be Clow, which I find less depressing than him growing up to be FWR, but that's not the world's happiest scale.

[starlady]

My other thought for Watanuki is that he grows up to be Clow, which I find less depressing than him growing up to be FWR, but that's not the world's happiest scale.

I could see that, but it makes me want to reach for the brain bleach. It's really sort of…Oedipal.

You're probably right about the interpretation of granting Watanuki's wish, I think.

[coffeeandink]

It's not like this crossoververse has shown a disinclination to Oedipal!

[starlady]

*cackles* Eyepatches all around! And then some (pseudo-)parental-child incest! And top it off with some amputations! And cloning!

Oh man, TRC/HOLiC almost fits within the clone-banging paradigm. Almost.

[coffeeandink]

Would you bang your mother's de-aged clone?

[starlady]

Would you bang your mother's de-aged clone given that your mother is a clone of your girlfriend?

[coffeeandink]

Would your aged-up clone bang your girlfriend's aged-up clone? ... Wait, that's not the creepy part.

Oh, CLAMP. I still don't understand why any of you thought any of that was a good idea.

[lady_ganesh]

Or, she granted it by basically removing him from the human world; things start to get particularly unreal from about volume 10 on. 12 is beautiful, but it's impossible to tell dream from waking in most of it, which is kind of disturbing.

YES. When you're flipping through pages trying to figure out when Doumeki (2.0) disappeared and Doumeki (4.0) took over, that is ... not of the good, IMO.

I honestly feel like they just ran out of ideas at the end, that maybe even what you've put together here is giving CLAMP too much credit. I don't know. When I first read it I just whinged a lot in all caps. I'm not sure I've progressed much beyond that.

[lady_ganesh]

(Oh, and I am here from animanga_news, hope you don't mind.)

[starlady]

Not at all, public posts are open to everyone! =)

[starlady]

I will say, reading it collected in volumes does help to smooth out some of the torturous pacing towards the end; it seems to hang together better than it did when we were reading it every other month in the magazine. And, rereading it, I also think that the switch between Doumeki and his grandson only happens in the very last chapter of the manga.

But yeah, major pacing problems. And while I do think seeing Watanuki deal with customers on his own is functional after a point, they went overboard with it.

[lady_ganesh]

Yeah, I thought that too, but it annoyed me to have to go back and look, you know? It felt like a fakeout rather than something genuine.

I would've liked to see Watanuki deal with customers in less isolation, I think. I mean, I get that his isolation is part of the point, but it made it all the more disconnected and dream-like and hard to really care about. (That one chapter with the little guy who fixed Watanuki's pipe was my favorite of the later ones, and I don't think it's a coincidence that it was so much more about relationship than so many of the other sequences.)

[pseudo_tsuga]

I often don't like CLAMP's endings but this one of the few I hated. I can't even read earlier volumes right now because it felt like such a betrayal. I almost wanted to cry when I found out the solution to pain was to hole in on yourself even more, to forget. Ugh. I wonder if there's any fix-it fic out there.

[louderandlouder.livejournal.com]

Oh, my God, really? One of my favorite performances in all of anime. She was great in Hikaru no Go as well. Much too short a life.

[louderandlouder.livejournal.com]

xxxHoLic frustrated me almost beyond endurance (I actually quit reading the series about 20 chapters ago and haven't been able to come back to it even now that it's over). It's so beautifully rendered and the characterizations so interesting; I always think of selling back my early volumes, and then I take them down, leaf through them, and put them back. Doumeki in particular is about the best realization of his archetype I've ever seen.

But what can I say -- all of your complaints are legitimate, and I think your reading of Watanuki's fate is redemptive and plausible, wholly canon-based or no.

I thought there was a distinct point when CLAMP got too caught up in teasing the Watanuki/Doumeki pairing to retain any actual insight into their friendship and where it was going and how that ought to be timed. They made something with such a powerful emotional core and they got all tied up in the mechanics of the story, which is so often their vice.

[starlady38.livejournal.com]

They made something with such a powerful emotional core and they got all tied up in the mechanics of the story, which is so often their vice.

*nods* That's a good way to put it. I also would bet money that all the breaks they took, and the serialization switch right near the end, messed up Ohkawa's pacing to some extent, though I don't think the ending that happened differed too much from what they'd originally envisioned.

[aliettedb.livejournal.com]

Oh no--that is so sad. Her performance was amazing (and ditto on loving Utena. Nothing so far has come close to it)

[hikari-unmei.livejournal.com]

I can't agree more with all you wrote.

XxxHolic had a nice and original setting, good characters, beautiful, crafty art, and in the end, it made no sense. Unless, as you said, you assume Watanuki is indeed FWR, to who in TRC or XxxHolic we hadn't had more than a few words about his past. I started to see it coming, too, and I hated the idea. And still hate it. Why is it impossible for Watanuki, who evolved so positively, to achieve happiness? He's condemned to forget and mourn over Yuuko until he turns into FWR. Yay .___.

I seriously think CLAMP has some kind of "endingphobia" and/or "happinessphobia".

Some day, I'll re-read it all, and maybe I will hate it less. But not soon. I'm tired of CLAMP for a long while.

And sorry for popping out of nowhere. I just had to agree with you so much, hope you don't mind.

[starlady38.livejournal.com]

Not at all, all are welcome on public posts. =)

I don't know, some of their manga end fairly happily--Chobits, Angelic Layer, CCS, hell, even TRC manages to salvage a fairly hopeful ending out of the jaws of messed-up despair. I think Wish and Chobits come closest to Holic in terms of the violent dislike I have for what CLAMP put on the page--what is it with this obsession they have with (pseudo-)reincarnation and it being the magical solution to relationship problems?

Actually, it strikes me that pseudo-reincarnation as the route to romantic happiness is a trope in Japanese literature that can be traced back to The Tale of Genji, but at least in the Genji everyone finds the title character's obsession with his dead stepmother's niece (starting when Murasaki, the niece, is eight years old!) pretty damn skeevy. CLAMP seem to have missed that memo.

I've been enjoying Gate 7 a lot so far, but knowing CLAMP it will probably all end in tears. Tears of blood from a put-out eye after amputations.