Welcome weebs, normies, and followers of Christ Jesus, to the second season of Anime Lent! Each Sunday in this space we will explore the uncommon combination of Old School Catholicism and modern anime, with a fair bit of the philosophy of the late great Rene Girard tossed in. You don’t have to be a fan of anime or a Catholic to join in, but hopefully you’ll think better of both by the time we’re done, and my ramblings will have helped, in some small way, to make your Lent more fruitful.
Warning: The following contains spoilers.
Lent has begun, and on the First Sunday of this holy season, Mother Church braces her children for the impending spiritual conflict by showing us Our Lord Jesus Christ being tempted by Satan in the wilderness:
At that time, Jesus was led into the desert by the Spirit, to be tempted by the devil. And after fasting forty days and forty nights, He was hungry. And the tempter came and said to Him, If You are the Son of God, command that these stones become loaves of bread. But He answered and said, It is written, ‘Not by bread alone does man live, but by every word that comes forth from the mouth of God.’ Then the devil took Him into the holy city and set Him on the pinnacle of the temple, and said to Him, If You are the Son of God, throw Yourself down; for it is written, ‘He has given His angels charge concerning You; and upon their hands they shall bear You up, lest You dash Your foot against a stone.’ Jesus said to him, It is written further, ‘You shall not tempt the Lord your God.’ Again, the devil took Him to a very high mountain, and showed Him all the kingdoms of the world and the glory of them. And he said to Him, All these things will I give You, if You will fall down and worship me. Then Jesus said to him, Begone, Satan, for it is written, ‘The Lord your God shall you worship and Him only shall you serve.’ Then the devil left Him; and behold, angels came and ministered to Him. (Matt 4:1-11)
Coupled with an exhortation from St. Paul’s 2nd Letter to the Corinthians (and a whole lot of Psalm 90), the Liturgy urges us to go forward into battle with confidence. Our Lord, human like us in all things but sin, overcame the devil’s temptations of bodily comfort, vainglory, and prideful power. With His help, so can we.
As I did last year, the one aspect of this chapter of Our Lord’s earthly life I’d like to focus on is that Jesus went out into the isolation of the wilderness for His spiritual combat. Last year I discussed how isolation can be damaging to one’s mental and spiritual health unless the mind is directed towards a higher purpose. The same solitude that gives ample opportunity to really examine and correct one’s faults can instead be used to double down on them, turning one’s self into an even more cringe-worth train wreck of a person than before. (Looking at you, Tomoko-chan).
However, a certain degree of isolation is necessary for spiritual progress, as testified not only by the Catholic Church, but nearly every religious tradition on earth. In order to fight our personal demons, we must escape from those of other people. And not only those of individuals, but of large groups of people, whose own evil deeds, or fear of others’ evil deeds, creates larger than life monsters in whose shadows we dwell and cower. Some are laughable, like the Jewish Space Lasers. Others, such as the Vast Right Wing (or Left Wing) Conspiracy, have a much tighter hold and a more real “presence” to those in their grip, and inspire more dangerous reactions. We live in a society, and society’s collective imaginations can create horrors far greater than any individual can conjure up on their own.
Which brings us to this week’s featured anime: In/Spectre.
Kotoko Iwanaga was an ordinary (albeit rich) 11-year-old girl, until she was abducted by a group of Yochai (Japanese nature spirits) who beg her to become their goddess of wisdom. Iwanaga accepts, gaining the power to see and interact with ghosts, gods, yochai, and all manner of supernatural creatures. All it costs her was a leg and an eye. (She wears a glass eye and a prosthetic leg). So, she’s basically a Waifu version of Odin.
Together with Kuro Sakuragawa, her seemingly reluctant boyfriend (she persisted until he gave up), Kotoko travels around Japan, solving mysteries for her supernatural subjects. It helps that Kuro also has strange powers: he can instantly revive from death, and every time he does, he can shape the direction of the future. Centuries ago, the mad patriarch of the Sakuragawa clan desired to obtain the power of the kudan, a yochai that gives 100% accurate prophesies when it dies. Unwilling to risk his own life, Sakuragawa experiments on his family members, forcing them to eat kudan flesh. Most of them die horribly, and the ones that do gain prophetic powers die after making predictions. Sakuragawa tries to subvert this by serving the kudan meat with mermaid flesh, which according to legend grant the one who consumes it immortality. Again, most of the test subjects die horribly. But the experiments continue long after the Sakuragawa patriarch dies. Kuro Sakuragawa is one of few successes of this unholy experiment, and he has all the emotional baggage you’d expect from this ordeal. The fact that his former fiancé left him after discovering his powers didn’t help.
After a couple of introductory episodes, the plot picks up dramatically when Kotoko and Kuro encounter their toughest opponent yet: Steel Lady Nanase.
Super-strong, super-violent, and unable to be killed, Steel Lady Nanase has begun haunting the city of Makurazaka. Rumors of her on the internet abound, all of them agreeing that Steel Lady Nanase is the ghost of Karin Nanase, a J-Pop idol crushed to death in Makurazaka by a falling steel beam. At the time of her death, Nanase was being accused of killing her own father, and she had run to Makurazaka to hide from the press. Given the circumstances and the lack of (human) witnesses, none of the believers in Steel Lady Nanase can agree on whether her death was a suicide, homicide, or an unlucky accident. Neither is there any consensus on why her ghost is appearing and attacking people. Some say it is her anger at being wrongly accused, others that she was a murderer angry at society. All they can agree on is that Steel Lady Nanase exists, and on what she looks like, thanks to a painting posted on her followers’ website.
It is the fact that Steel Lady Nanase looks exactly like this painting that tips Kotoko off to her true nature. Steel Lady Nanase is not a ghost, but a Tulpa: a monster of the imagination created and sustained by people’s belief in her existence. The only way to defeat her is to convince her followers that she doesn’t exist, a task that becomes more difficult as the number of sightings and dead bodies rise. What’s more, the mastermind behind Steel Lady Nanase is none other than Rikka Sakuragawa, Kuro’s cousin, cursed with the same powers that he has. She runs the Steel Lady Nanase website, she painted the picture of Steel Lady Nanase, and she uses her powers to ensure that the maximum number of people believe in her murderous monster.
While all the characters are enjoyable in their own right, it is Steel Lady Nanase herself that fascinates me the most in this show. True, she has zero personality, being Rikka’s spectral puppet, but her creation and existence via the power of believe resonates strongly with the theories of Rene Girard. I’ve spoken of him before in this space. In summary, Girard believed that archaic gods were created by a similar process to Steel Lady Nanase: a community in crisis accuses someone who stands out from the crowd of terrible crimes, they murder the accused, and the resulting wave of catharsis and good feelings lead them to believe that their victim is supernatural, the bringer of both crisis and of peace. The founding murder is ritually reenacted via sacrifice, either of human beings or of animal substitutes.
Now, Karin Nanase wasn’t murdered by her community of fans, but she still died, and her death is the central event for the Steel Lady Nanase community. Their frequent discussion, reflection, and theory making of the events surrounding her death and the motivations of her “ghost” serve as a substitute for ritual reenactment: while they are not dropping steel beams on humans or animals, they are keeping her death constantly in mind. This is what unites and sustains the community, and by extension, the existence of Steel Lady Nanase, and the dynamic is little different from a community that worships Zeus or Osiris.
The final battle against Steel Lady Nanase, therefore, is a war on two fronts. Kotoko tries to convince the online community that their ghost does not exist, while Kuro fights against a very real Steel Lady Nanase, using his frequent deaths to help Kotoko via his prophesy power. Meanwhile, Rikka is in the community arguing for Steel Lady Nanase’s existence, frequently killing herself with a knife in-between posts to activate her own prophesy power. It is in this battle that we see how alike Kotoko and Rikka are, using the same weapons and unholy powers with the same ruthlessness to accomplish their goals. Now, their goals are completely different: Rikka wants to create a god, one powerful enough to undo her curse and turn her back into an ordinary human. Kotoko, on the other hand, fights to uphold the current natural order, and so seeks to stop Rikka from creating a god powerful enough to overthrow the entire ruling pantheon (as Tulpas tend to do when they get strong enough). In the end, Kotoko defeats Steel Lady Nanase by convincing the community that Karin Nanase is still alive, having faked her death and propagated the legend of Steel Lady Nanase (including the murders) to cover her tracks.
This dynamic between Kotoko and Rikka perfectly illustrates the Girardian concept of Satan. Whether one thinks of him as a real spiritual being (as I do) or as an abstract concept, Satan is divided against himself. On the one hand, he is the tempter, drawing people into defying the social norms. On the other hand, he is the accuser, drawing attention to the deviant and calling for swift vengeance upon them, all for the preservation of social order. It is from this contradiction that human society emerges and sustains itself. Thus the lines between order and chaos, holy and unholy, are nearly always intermixed. Kotoko, like Odin with his unmanly sejour magic, does not hesitate to use Kuro’s unholy powers, or to spread lies to enforce the status quo, while Rikka could make the argument that she is also trying to restore the natural order by making herself human again, regardless of the cost. Nearly all social, religious, and political arguments come down to this dynamic, this interchange which justifies small evils in order to combat larger ones, which may or may not be real. Meanwhile, the Karin Nanase’s of the world are trampled underfoot.
For, as we learn during the course of the show, Karin Nanase innocent. Her father, unable to stand the humiliation of being supported by his daughter, wrote a note that claimed his daughter was trying to kill him, then threw himself down a flight of stairs, killing himself. In the end, Nanase was so broken that when she saw the steel beam falling towards her, she did not have the will left to step out of the way. Neither Kotoko nor Rikka hesitate to exploit Nanase’s tragedy to achieve their own ends. And this, for me, was the main draw of the show: the tragedy of Karin Nanase, the tragedy of the many innocent people gobbled up and destroyed by society, all for entertainment, political ideology, and the enforcement of our own narratives.
But Christ offers a different way. It is the story of Christ, of His Passion, Death, and Resurrection, of his wrongful condemnation by the mob, that strips the scapegoat dynamic of it’s power, and brings the truth of the Karin Nanase’s of the world to light. It is Christ who offers us a way out of these destructive narratives, and a way to destroy these monsters of the imagination that haunt us. How? By following Him into the desert and, ultimately, to the Cross. By being willing to die rather than play the blame game to feel better about ourselves. To take responsibility for our own actions, are reserve our severity for ourselves, that we might have compassion for others in place of wrath.
Not many of us are capable of retiring into the wilderness for the whole of Lent. Nevertheless, we should make it a priority this Lent to disconnect: to disconnect from the finger pointing narratives that give us comfort, from the obsessive anger over what we cannot change, and from the noise of the online and offline media that relies on shouting loud provocative nonsense to sustain itself. And as we redirect our focus towards God, towards our own heart, and towards our flesh and blood neighbors next to us, we will be surprised at just how many of the monsters disappear.
Go forth, my friends. Pray, fast, give alms, and tell Satan to get stuffed.
I apologize for the delay in posting this. I had originally intended to post this on Sunday, but being kicked out of my previous residence, moving into a house with no power, and the emotional distress of my current marital situation left me with less time to write than I had hoped. I will do my best to ensure that future entries in this series get posted on time. If you’d like to support me, check out my novel, Cain Son of Adam: A Gothic Tragedy, available in paperback and eBook formats on Amazon, and free to read on Kindle Unlimited.
Stay tuned for next weeks article:
The Heavenly Spouse: Fly Me to the Moon and the Transfiguration of Christ.
Blessed Lent!