The CLAMP Project: Episode 16: Tokyo Babylon vol 4

Can anyone ever really learn to understand another person? It's possible to get along with other people, and to feel empathy for them, but at the end of the day, how much do you actually know about your friends or family, let alone the people you pass on the street?

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".

The CLAMP Project: Episode 15: Tokyo Babylon volume 3

The 1990's Tokyo presented in Tokyo Babylon is a pretty terrible place. The world is going to hell shortly before its inevitable destruction. The environment is falling apart and even conscientious people like Hokuto embrace the hypocrisy of  using destructive products simply because everyone else is. It's a place where people are accosted on the street, where people struggle to find even the tiniest happiness or connection with others. 

With so little joy and happiness in the world, it's no wonder that the three antagonists of volume 3 embrace a fantasy of being special and different. They convince themselves over a chat line that they alone will be able to fight against an unknown enemy, and begin to do so through the phone lines. Subaru is hired to investigate them because they've been calling phone numbers that end in 1999 and casting magical spells over the phone.

Subaru's usual friendliness gets him nowhere - these girls are too far lost in their own delusions to listen to him - but he struggles on to save them for two reasons. First, he's a professional and is being paid to stop the girls. Second, he knows that if they continue to cast magical spells without the proper protection, they'll be hurt. But because he doesn't want to hurt the girls, he can't really fight back against them. He ends up getting knocked out on the floor.

Seishiro steps in to help, but in that incredibly creepy way that is Seishiro's trademark. He does something to make Hokuto pass out, and then steps up to the phone to fight back at the girls in the way that Subaru wasn't willing to do. The girls end up suffering some heavy psychological damage, and Subaru is depressed that he failed to save them.

Though Seishiro keeps professing his love for Subaru, I'm not sure that I believe it. He clearly wants Subaru alive, but I think that's more for the "bargain" that Seishiro brings up on the last page of this volume. Because Subaru's death belongs to Seishiro, his life does, as well. This is where I wish I remember more about exactly what happens. I know how the series ends, but I can't remember the details of why. I'd read ahead, but I only have four short volumes to go before I'll be reminded.

The CLAMP Project: Episode 14: Tokyo Babylon volume 2

In this second volume, we get two stories that help provide more insight into the characters of Hokuto and Subaru. Seishiro is around, but he remains mysterious.

First, Subaru goes to help a girl who has fallen into an unexplained coma after being raped by boys in her neighborhood. It turns out that this girl was his first love, Mitsuki. They suffered a misunderstanding in their youth: wanting Subaru's attention and kindness all to herself, Mitsuki told Subaru that she hated him for not being normal. Now, though, Mitsuki remembers him fondly and has been wishing for him to come and save her from her despair.

Mitsuki says that it wasn't fair that someone could take away her dreams and happiness, which is why she decided to never wake up, but Subaru tells her that if she never wakes up, she'll be taking away her mother's happiness - and his own. In Subaru's worldview, keeping other people happy is paramount, even if it requires sacrificing yourself. This is another direct contrast with Seishiro, who in volume 1 claimed that the only way to find your own happiness is by taking happiness from others.

The second story in volume 2 presents yet another worldview: Hokuto's. She saves a woman who is being accosted by several men. When they get to talking, it turns out that the woman is a sex worker and the men are the police. Hokuto doesn't work to keep others happy or to keep herself happy - she works to try to understand other people. While Subaru claimed that he wouldn't be able to understand Mitsuki because he wasn't her, Hokuto puts herself into others' shoes easily. She has sympathy for the foreign woman because she understands that service workers of any sort have difficult jobs. She even shows understanding for the police officers who she helps the other woman to avoid. Their jobs are also difficult and they're just living their lives the best that they can, just like everyone else. Hokuto won't ask questions of a stranger because it would be rude to make them answer if they didn't want to -- but if that stranger happened to want to talk, she's willing to listen and understand.

The foreign woman tells Hokuto that it's impossible for a foreigner to understand the Japanese mindset. What's telling is that Hokuto, the understander, doesn't contradict her. Hokuto says later that it doesn't matter where someone's from, that they're still people, but the understanding seems to work in one direction. Hokuto understands her new friend, but isn't understood in return. It's not an uncommon theme for the Japanese to see themselves as so different that others couldn't possibly understand them. I remember seeing a quote from a manga artist who was amazed that foreigners would be able to appreciate their story because they felt that it was so fundamentally Japanese that no one outside of the culture would get it.

So my question here is whether CLAMP was speaking through the foreign girl in claiming that no outsiders could understand the Japanese, or if they were simply echoing a popular sentiment. Hokuto says something later that shows what the CLAMP mindset might be: "You can't classify a person as an objective unit - as a "Japanese" or as a "Gaijin". You and I are basically the same, we're just human beings." Instead of asking whether "foreigners" as a group can understand "Japanese" as a group, the important part is that each individual person can do their part to understand the other individual people, regardless of what group they belong to.

The CLAMP Project: Episode 13: Tokyo Babylon vol 1

A quick note: I'm reading the Tokyopop 7-volume version of Tokyo Babylon, not the new omnibus versions. I've read that the new omnibus versions are very nice, but since I already have the Tokyopop version, I'm not going to go out and buy something new just because it might be a little better.

This is probably only my second or third time reading Tokyo Babylon. My first exposure to the characters of Tokyo Babylon was through their appearance in X, so I went into reading the series knowing what was going to happen, but not knowing why.  The impressive thing about Tokyo Babylon is that even when you know the ending, the series still works.

Perhaps that's because the hints of things not quite being right are dropped pretty early in the series. At the end of this first volume, we see the portentous first meeting of Subaru and Seishiro, where Seishiro tells Subaru that each cherry tree has a dead body buried beneath it and then tells Subaru that he will let him go - for now.

Years later, Subaru has forgotten that meeting, and has become as innocent as a teenage onmyouji can possibly be. Many of his actions are driven through the desire to make other people happy. He frees the spirits that he goes to exorcise by coming to an emotional understanding with them. He suffers his sister Hokuto's teasing about his relationship with Seishiro and lets her dress him up in outfits because that's what she enjoys. His openness and desire to please are putting himself into grave danger, but at this point in the story, he doesn't know that.

Seishiro, even at this stage of the story, is revealed to have a terribly pessimistic view of life. When a spirit reveals that she committed suicide, he scolds her for making trouble for other people. The only things he says that aren't dark are related to his professions of love for Subaru, which at this point, I don't believe are sincere. Somehow, Subaru and Hokuto don't see his dark side. They see him as a happy veterinarian who just happens to be the heir to a family of assassins.

I think that is largely Hokuto's doing. She fills in for what the readers of a typical boy's love story would be saying, encouraging Seishiro in his pursuit of Subaru. At one point, early in the story, Hokuto accuses Seishiro of having no intensity and being too happy-go-lucky. It's almost like Hokuto is writing her own doom. She loves drama and wants there to be more of it happening in her life, and soon she's going to get it.

So with Hokuto pushing Subaru into Seishiro's arms, neither Subaru or Hokuto notices that Seishiro says really shady things, or that he seems to be hiding who he really is. That's the key to the story: What seems like a typical boy's love tease is really hiding a dark destiny under the surface. Hokuto, by saying what the readers would usually be wanting, helps to hide what's really going on.