Surrounded by millions of other people who one can almost never hope to find a true connection with, no wonder the residents of Tokyo Babylon's Tokyo are so lonely. Those who Subaru comes into contact with have given up on happiness, but because Subaru (and Hokuto) make an effort to come to understand them, they find hope. Tellingly for both the plot and the theme, when Subaru and Hokuto are discussing whether Seishiro is really one of the Sakurazukamori assassins, Hokuto says that she's not sure that they actually know Seishiro at all. That's the key to the series right there: You can't even really understand your best friend.
Later, Hokuto and Seishiro get a scene alone. Seishiro asks Hokuto whether she's ok with him seducing Subaru. She says she is, but threatens that if Seishiro ever hurts Subaru, she will kill him. It's strong foreshadowing, played for laughs.
The focus of volume 4 of Tokyo Babylon is on the living, not the dead. At a temple, Subaru runs into a woman who has begun the process of summoning an inugami, a dog spirit, to take revenge on her daughter's kidnapper and murderer. The woman is drawn with anguished lines etched into her face. Unlike before, Subaru doesn't try to make the woman happy. His failure to make a connection with the girls on the chat line in volume 3 showed him that in some circumstances, you just can't make someone happy. All you can do is make an effort to understand them. This is very similar to Hokuto's logic earlier, and it shows some character growth for Subaru.
Subaru, hoping to stop the woman from using the dog spirit and getting herself killed, summons the spirit of her daughter. Surely the daughter would want to see her mother happy, not destroying herself through revenge. The result is heartbreaking: the daughter cries out in pain and begs Subaru, who is the only person who can hear her, for revenge. For the second time in the series, Subaru's plan has gone horribly wrong. He was so unable to make a connection and come to a true understanding of the daughter that her request was the exact opposite of what he had expected. He lies to the woman and tells her "She wants you to be happy."
Anguished, Subaru runs to Seishiro's apartment, where Seishiro consoles him. Subaru worries that by lying to the woman, he has denied her the option of choosing whether to be happy or not, but Seishiro counters that only the woman could judge whether or not Subaru's lying to her would make her happy. If Subaru would not blame someone else for making a mistake, he should not blame himself for doing the same.
After Seishiro puts Subaru to bed, he punches a mirror and gloats that he is probably going to win his bet with Subaru. Again, I read this before, but I don't remember the exact nature of the bet. That makes the mystery of the overall plot that much more compelling, though I do know the outcome.
The second story in this volume follows another person who is desperate to be understood. Hashimoto is a high school student who is being terribly bullied and beaten by her classmates. Her teacher blames her. If she was just a little more outgoing, he says, she would make friends. She runs into a woman who professes to understand her - a woman who just happens to be the leader of a cult, which just happens to be under investigation by both Subaru and Seishiro, though for different clients.
The cult teaches that every person is a god, the most important person in the world, and that people must forgive themselves and others to be strong. Hashimoto follows the cult doctrine, praying every night, but the bullying continues. There is no easy way out, and the cult has no real power. Eventually, Hashimoto ends up getting stabbed in the eye by a classmate.
What ends up helping Hashimoto is Subaru. He listens to her story and does something new. This time, he doesn't try to make her happy. He tells her that he doesn't know what to say. He couldn't possibly come to understand what she's gone through, so he doesn't lie and say that he does. This honesty and kindness wins Hashimoto over. Like when Hokuto met the foreign woman, the true kindness and happiness was found in admitting that it was impossible to fully understand the other person, but expressing a willingness to try.
By contrast, the cult leader was like Subaru in the earlier volumes: professing a profound understanding when there really was none. Subaru was able to come to enough of an understanding with the spirits that he exorcised to send them away, but when he was confronted with real people with real living desires and thoughts, his understanding was inadequate to make them truly happy, or even to make a connection.
Subaru ends up confronting the cult leader, telling her that she can't save anyone. Seishiro comes in and puts Subaru to sleep once again. Then he tells the cult leader that her cult will become huge in six years, and so he has been hired to kill her. The assassination scene is beautiful, with magical spells represented by flowing cherry blossoms across the page and stark black backgrounds for contrast.
The cherry blossoms are especially meaningful because earlier in the volume, Subaru's grandmother told him that he must beware the cherry blossoms and not let them steal his heart. This clearly refers to Seishiro, who leans over the unconscious Subaru and attempts to remove the gloves that Subaru's grandmother told him to never take off. Sparks and light emanate from the gloves and deter Seishiro - for now. He says once again that he is about to win their bet, and leaves Subaru for "the final day".
No comments:
Post a Comment