(Warning: The following contains MAJOR SPOILERS for Future Diary. Also, be advised that Future Diary is incredibly violent and dark. Use discernment, and, as always, don’t pirate.)
We have come to it at last: the climactic end of our season of Penance. The Holiest of all weeks. If ever there was a point in time worthy to be characterized as the moment of the Consecration at Mass, the entry into the dark Holy of Holies of the Temple of Old, or the climb into the Chamber of Fire within Mount Doom, it would be this week; this week whose famous ceremonies bring us into the very Sacred Heart of the Divine Mystery, and show us the infinite height of divine love and the utter depths of human depravity.
Sadly, this year most of us will not be able to be physically present at these great mysteries. We may see them livestreamed, or may pray them in our missals in silence, or, if we are essential workers, we may only have time to lift up our hearts to God for a few spare moments. Yet, even this time of hardship is an opportunity for us. Remember that St. Patrick made great spiritual progress when he was a slave in pagan Ireland, cut off from the sacraments, and that the great monk St. Anthony of Egypt, when asked who the holiest person he knew was, replied that it was a physician who, though he had no time for long prayers, was tirelessly serving his neighbor. Both are comforting thoughts.
Our priests, however, will still offer the liturgy of Holy Week, even if they do so alone. On Sunday the Palms were blessed and carried in procession, offered in worship of Christ for one glorious moment before being set aside to be burned for next year’s ashes. Then, for those who attend the Extraordinary Form of the Roman Rite, like myself, the priest divested himself of the festive red and once more donned the mournful purple, as he and the other sacred ministers read (or chanted) aloud of the humility and obedience of Christ even to death on the cross (Phil 2:5-11) and the Passion according to St. Mathew (Whereas the Ordinary Form, having a three year cycle of readings, will alternate between the Passion Narratives of Mathew, Mark, and Luke depending on the year, the Extraordinary Form always uses the same readings every year). Holy Monday will see Our Lord anointed at Bethany (as well as Judas exposed as a thief). On Holy Tuesday the Church will present to us the Passion according to St. Mark, and on Holy Wednesday she will read for us the Passion of St. Luke alongside two readings from Isaiah: the trampling of the wine press of God’s wrath (Isa 63: 1-7) and the canticle of the Suffering Servant (Isa 53:1-12). (The Ordinary Form, on Holy Tuesday and Holy Wednesday, will instead feature two readings for St. John’s Gospel, contrasting St. Peter and the traitor Judas).
Finally, the three holiest days of the year: The Sacred Triduum of Holy Thursday, Good Friday, and Holy Saturday. In the Middle Ages, when those performing public penances were exiled from the Church on Ash Wednesday, Holy Thursday would find them reconciled and granted absolution, so that they might fully partake of the Triduum Liturgy with the rest of the Faithful (hence, in the Extraordinary Form the reference in the Collect to Judas and the Good Thief, St. Dismas). As on Sunday, the garments of mourning will be laid aside, this time in favor of pristine white, for a brief moment of joy: the Institution of the Holy Eucharist and our Lord’s command to following His example of humble service to our neighbors (though the feet washing will most likely be skipped this year). The Blessed Sacrament will be taken to the Altar of Repose, left for the adoration of the faithful until midnight, when (tradition holds) Our Lord was seized from the Garden.
Then will come Good Friday, the day without a Mass, public or private, when the clergy wear vestments of Requiem Black (Purple in the Ordinary Form) and the Church laments the sacrifice of her Bridegroom, the True Pascal Lamb, with ceremonies and prayers, including the chanting of the Passion according to St. John and the unveiling of the image of Christ Crucified for the first time since the day before Passion Sunday.
And then, on the evening of Holy Saturday, the mother of all liturgies. The Pascal Candle blessed, lit, and processed into the church in total darkness, the Exsultet chanted, and an unusually large number of readings from the Old Testament (Up to seven in the Ordinary Form, four in the Extraordinary Form Missal of 1962, twelve in the Pre-1955 Easter Vigil, which is making a comeback in some places). Then the Litany of the Saints, and the baptism of the Catechumens (likely postponed this year), followed by the ringing bells, the Gloria, and the first Mass of Easter. No heart could behold such a spectacle and remain unmoved with joy. Christ has risen at last, triumphant over death, bringing all his followers, whether faithful, newly reconciled, or newly born of Water and Spirit, together into his glorious resurrection, in a foretaste of that Eternal Life He has ready for those who love Him.
(One of my favorite parts of the Easter Vigil is the fact that the Risen Christ does not appear in the Gospel Reading; the first time we see Him is when the Host is elevated at the Consecration).
So why, you may ask, have I taken this week, of all weeks, this week of sacred drama that displays the love of our Heavenly Father and the triumph of Christ over Satan, and paired it with one of the most creepy, most violent, and arguably most nihilistic anime shows of all time? I am referring, of course, to Future Diary.
Future Diary is the story of Yukiteru Amano, a shy 14-year-old boy who was practicing social distancing before it was cool. Yuki (as everyone calls him) is content to let life pass him by, recording everything he observes around him in his cell phone diary and conversing with his imaginary friends, Deus ex Machina the god of time and space, and his assistant, the manga-obsessed demon Murumuru.
He clearly has some kind of undiagnosed depression going on, and no wonder: he’s bullied at school, his parents are divorced, and his mom, the only parent still in his life, works long hours, leaving him by himself the majority of the time. Then, one day after school, Deus ex Machina offers to change Yuki’s diary so that it can predict the future. Yuki accepts, thinking it’s just one of his fantasies.
But when Yuki wakes up the next morning, he finds that all his diary entries for the day have already been written. And all of them are 100% accurate. Although very much freaked out, Yuki sets about using his diary’s new powers to ace tests and avoid ambushes by bullies. But just before he can get comfortable with his newfound power, he notices that one of his classmates, the beautiful and popular Yuno Gasai (pictured right), has left a sculpture on her desk that looks exactly like Murumuru. He also notices that Yuno has started to follow him everywhere.
Turns out his “imaginary” friends are real, and he’s not the only one with a future diary.
Fortunately, he soon learns that Yuno doesn’t want to harm him. In fact she has an insane, and I do mean insane, crush on Yuki (While Yuki’s diary records everything he will observe in the future, Yuno’s only tells her what Yuki is doing every ten minutes). And while Yuno has been stalking him for some time, at present she’s trying to save his life from a serial killer, who also has a future diary. Together, Yuki and Yuno manage to kill the serial killer with a well-placed dart to his cell phone diary (if the diary is destroyed, the user dies).
But the drama has only begun. Yuki quickly finds himself standing before Deus ex Machina, along with Yuno and ten other people, all of whom have been given future diaries. Deus tells everyone that they have been enrolled in a survival game. They have three months to murder each other, and the last one alive will succeed Deus ex Machina as the next god of time and space. Deus then reveals Yuki’s identity to the others, declaring that Yuki is the one he wants to win.
Overnight, Yuki has gone from an ordinary teenage recluse to an unwilling participant in a much more dangerous and higher stakes version of the Hunger Games, with Yuno Gasai as his only reliable ally. (In a survival game with godhood as the ultimate prize, a yandere with a crush on you is the only person you can trust to always protect you and never betray you, even if she does make you feel uncomfortable.)
What follows an action-packed thrill ride as Yuki and Yuno fight, kill and/or ally with the other diary holders. They are quite a crazy cast of characters: in addition to the serial killer, there is a police detective, a psychotic four-year-old boy, a teenage cult priestess, a pair of orphans-turned-lovers, a kind woman who runs an orphanage (she’d never kill anyone; her kids, on the other hand…), an radical atheist terrorist, a foppish dog breeder, a politician, and a blind vigilante with hypnotic powers (all of them are also named after Roman gods. Yukiteru is named after Jupiter, Yuno is named for Juno, etc. The full list is here, and the 2nd into below shows them all).
All the while, Yuki starts to warm up to Yuno, and it looks to be the beginning of a very weird, but adorable romance.
That’s when Yuki finds the dead bodies in Yuno’s house.
(Last warning… MAJOR SPOILERS ahead!)
We later find out that two of the dead bodies are Yuno’s parents. (We’ll get to the third body later). Yuno was adopted at a young age, and her adoptive parents expected nothing less than perfection from her. When she reached adolescence, her mother became even more strict, often locking Yuno in a cage for long periods without food for minor infractions. Yuno’s father responded by intentionally spending more time at work, which in turn caused Yuno’s mom to become even more unhinged. Finally, Yuno locked both her parents in the cage, hoping to show them exactly what they were putting her through. But she left them in there too long, and they starved to death. Wracked with guilt and despair, Yuno decides she has nothing to live for.
Then she meets Yuki. The two talk after school one day, and it comes up that Yuki and his parents were planning to go on a stargazing trip. But now his parents are getting divorced, and the trip won’t happen. Yuno offers to see the stars with him instead, but Yuki, though touched, says that he really wanted to see the stars with his family. Yuno then says that she’ll marry him someday, and then they can see the stars as a family.
Yuki thinks she’s kidding. She isn’t.
From that moment forward, the sole focus of Yuno’s life has been marrying Yuki and going stargazing with him. (It’s a tragic, nihilistic goal, but it’s better than devoting your life to getting a hold of McDonald’s Szechuan Sauce.) Yuno is willing to go quite far to achieve this, and her antics range from comical (trying to sabotage Yuki’s confession of love to another girl while wearing a pink bunny mascot suit) to very dark comedy (running through her school, triggering motion sensitive bombs while shouting “Die! Die! Die!” after a group of her fellow students betray Yuki and hand him over to the terrorist diary holder) to horrifying (lying awake at night, dead-eyed, and saying in a monotone voice how glad she is that Yuki’s mom is a nice person and that she didn’t have to use any of her “tools.” The camera focuses on Yuno’s bag, which holds several sharp knives). As for the end of the game, Yuno tells Yuki repeatedly that when he and her are the last ones standing, she’ll let him kill her so he can win.
It should be noted that not everyone in the survival game has the same amount of enthusiasm. Though at least half of them start out gung-ho for becoming a god, others are more reluctant. Yuki and Yuno, for instance, only care about survival (Yuno is fine with dying, but not with Yuki getting hurt). The police detective, Keigo Kurusu, doesn’t want the prize either; he just wants to stop the carnage, and when Yuki’s identity is revealed he’s the only diary user who promises to protect him. Kamado Ueshita, the orphanage owner, also isn’t interested in winning, especially if it means hurting anyone (her “kids,” however, think this makes her a perfect candidate for godhood, and have no problem with killing in her name).
But all, save Kamado, start to crack as the game goes on. To students of Rene Girard, this should not be surprising. Those in the survival game are rivals of each other, whether they want to be or not, and it is impossible to fight against someone for an extended period of time without starting to imitate them. Imitated actions quickly turn into imitated desires, and even the most principled individuals are not immune to the pull, and one crisis is all it can take to push them over the edge. This is what happens to detective Keigo Kurusu: upon discovering that his son is dying of a now-incurable disease, Keigo starts playing to win, even betraying Yuki and Yuno, desiring the power to save his son at all costs. (By contrast, Minene Uryū, the atheistic terrorist, goes from being Yuki’s most bitter enemy to being one of his most stalwart allies. She grows somewhat fond of Yuki overtime, and starts falling for Chief Investigator Masumi Nishijima, Yuki and Yuno’s new ally in the police force. Good desires can also be imitated).
Finally, Yuki also succumbs. After watching his parents die and being helpless to stop it, Yuki vows to become a god so he can bring them back to life. It is certainly awesome seeing Yuki go from a passive wimp to a Yuno-like badass.
It is significantly less awesome to watch him betray, sellout, and/or murder (or allow Yuno to murder) his remaining friends and allies.
The last of these to die is Aru Akise, a teenage detective-in-training who is only slightly less obsessed with Yuki than Yuno is. (In truth, Aru is an artificial human created by Deus ex Machina to observe the game.)
(More spoilers ahead!)
It is Aru who discovers the identity of the third body in Yuno’s house: Yuno Gasai. Aru assumes that the living Yuno is an impostor, but a dramatic DNA test proves that she is the real Yuno. Aru eventually solves the riddle and shares his findings with Yuki… right before Yuno decapitates him.
Soon Yuki and Yuno are the only two diary users left. But Yuki, having fallen in love with Yuno, is in no rush to kill her, even as Deus dies and the world starts to fall apart.
Yuki and Yuno consummate their love the night before the world ends, and it is here that all their secrets come out.
Yuno, for her part, reveals that she already asked Deus if being a god came with the power to bring people back to life. It doesn’t, and she didn’t bother to inform Yuki of this until now. Meaning Yuki’s parents, and his friends that he killed, are never coming back. Yuki, for his part, proclaims that he loves Yuno too much to kill her, and proposes a double suicide. He then, off handedly, tells her about Aru’s last message.
And that’s when Yuno tries to kill him.
(Ending Spoilers! Last chance to turn back!)
Yuki is only saved by the timely arrival of Minene Uryū, who, unbeknownst to all, was saved from death at the last minute by Deus, and given a portion of his power. Deus had begun to suspect that something was suspicious about Yuno and Murumuru, and kept Minene around as an insurance policy.
Minene saves Yuki, and reveals the truth about Yuno: she’s from the future, and she’s already a god.
Yuno’s original survival game ended the same way the one we’ve been almost did: with Yuki and Yuno as the last ones alive, and agreeing to a double suicide. But Yuno backed out at the last second, reasoning that once she was a god, she’d be able to bring Yuki back to life. She discovered too late that it wasn’t possible. Wracked with guilt and despair, Yuno used her new powers to transport herself and her world’s Murumuru back in time to replace their past selves (Yuno’s by murder, Murumuru’s by imprisonment) so that Yuno could play through the survival game again, this time ensuring that Yuki wins by killing her. (Murumuru is just in it for the fun.)
But she has failed again; Yuki is in love with her as she wanted, but because of that he refuses to kill her. With her identity revealed, she now sees no reason not to kill Yuki and try again. (As she puts it, “If you won’t kill me and you want to die, why shouldn’t I kill you?”).
Yuno and Murumuru travel back in time again, this time with Yuki and Minene in hot pursuit. They arrive in the past, two years before the survival game begins.
(This time travel stuff gets confusing, so to simplify, I’ll use the show’s terminology: The 1st Word is the world Yuno is originally from. The 2nd world is Yuki’s world, and the one we’ve been watching thus far. The past Yuno and Yuki travel to at this point in the story is the 3rd world.)
But Yuki’s traveling into the past causes many unforeseen ramifications. John Bacchus, the politician diary user and the inventor of the future diaries, has a diary that lets him see everyone else’s. And the moment that Yuki arrives in the past is the very moment that John turns his on for the first time. 3rd John Bacchus (and 3rd Deus) are able to read 2nd Yuki’s diary, and to find out that their planned survival game has resulted in universal annihilation (twice!). Alarmed, Deus calls off the game before it starts, and sends 3rd Murumuru to intercept the time travelers.
Meanwhile, Yuki makes a valiant attempt to save 3rd Yuno. 1st Yuno, realizing that she doesn’t have it in her to kill Yuki, tries to trap him in an illusionary world in which he never met her, with his parents alive and his first crush falling head over heels for him. But Yuki’s love for Yuno and sheer willpower allow him to break free.
Unable to kill Yuki and seeing no alternative, 1st Yuno kisses Yuki and then kills herself.
2nd Murumuru, having freed herself and imprisoned her 1st world counterpart, declares Yuki the winner and transports him back to the 2nd world.
Time passes, and the 3rd world turns out better than the worlds before it. As the survival game never happens, none of the diary users die, and almost all of them avoid the traumatic events that damaged them in the previous worlds. 2nd Minene stays in the 3rd world, warning 3rd Keigo to get his son to a hospital in time to save his life, and marries the 3rd world’s Masumi Nishijima and has babies with him. 3rd Yuno’s parents, faced with almost losing their daughter, soften up and stop abusing her, and she grows up to be normal and psychologically healthy.
But there is no happy ending for Yuki. Traumatized by Yuno’s suicide, Yuki allows the 2nd world to slip back into a formless void, and spends countless eons staring at the last entry of his diary.
But the story isn’t over yet. (Note: this next part occurs in an OVA released after the last episode of the series. It isn’t streaming as far as I know, but it’s easy enough to find online).
3rd Yuno is drawn by a strange voice to investigate what happened the night she was nearly murdered. Seeking answers, she finds herself in Deus ex Machina’s realm, and encounters both Deus and 1st Murumuru. 1st Murumuru, now repentant, gives 3rd Yuno all of 1st Yuno’s memories, and Deus chooses her as his successor.
3rd Yuno uses her powers to break through into the 2nd world and finds Yuki. Overjoyed, they profess eternal love to each other as the stars blaze to life around them.
Future Diary is certainly an emotional roller coaster, and worth watching even if you already know the ending. But what does it have to do with Holy Week?
Future Diary depicts a world that we know does not exist, but that the human race has believed in for untold eons. That is, it depicts a world ruled by violence, in which supreme power belongs to those who can out-smart and out-murder the competition, and the gods watch not with condemnation, but with amusement. A world where the universe matters, but individual live is cheap and disposable. A world in which old orders, founded out of chaos by the unanimous lynching of a scapegoat, are in their old age consumed by unrestrained violence and chaos, until new orders, birthed by the death of new scapegoats, emerge from their corpses to replace them (how fitting that most of the ancients believed they were living in the literal corpses of the old gods).
In this sense it is fitting that Deus ex Machina seeks to find his replacement, the ruler of a new order, amidst an orgy of violence; given that the gods of space and time can die in this world, he probably became a god in a similar manner. But Deus also plays the role of a tempter to the diary users (You can become a god if you do something you know is wrong. Hmm… where have we heard that before?) Deus ex Machina perfectly fits Rene Girard’s (and the Bible’s) description of Satan, the ruler of this world that is both tempter and accuser, who draws the unwary into sin so that he might accuse them before God and men, and uses fear of the other and colossal pride to turn the mob against the innocent. (Though clearly, this mentality is still alive and well even among those who call themselves followers of Christ. Dare we examine how much we have bought into it ourselves?)
As for Yuno, she makes for a very twisted Christ figure, but she would be perfectly at home in a pagan pantheon, amidst the multitude of dying and rising gods and tragic heroes cursed by fate. This is probably one of the reasons she’s so popular among anime fans; mythological and religious stories have a strange power to tug our heartstrings and awe our minds. Yet I must point out that there are many similarities between the Alpha Yandere Yuno Gasai and the real God of Space and Time, Jesus Christ. Like Our Lord, Yuno willingly descends from her godly throne to live amongst the human world in order to save her beloved from death. Like Christ, she is single-minded in her mission to save her beloved, desiring only that she love him, even though she know that, if successful, it will end in her death. It reminds me, in a way, of a saying by C.S. Lewis, about how if you were to see an angel, you would be most terrified by the way they gazed at you with intense charity.
But of course, the most crucial difference between Yuno and Our Lord (Aside from Our Lord being God from eternity and Yuno being born mortal in time) is that Yuno’s mad love drives her to violence and despair. Our Lord’s love drives Him to lay down His life for us, praying even for the people who murdered Him. It is, as G.K. Chesterton put it, the difference between the Martyr and the Suicide, of supernatural hope and mere mortal despair.
How fitting it is, then, that at the end of Future Diary, that 3rd Yuno becomes the new god of space and time not by desire for power, but desire for Truth and to find her beloved. How fitting that, as in our world, the order of violence is succeeded by an order of Love, a love that spans time and space and is powerful enough to ignite the very stars. For this week, this Holiest of Weeks, we remember and celebrate the death of God. From that death was born a new order, or rather an ancient one: an order ruled not by strength and violence, but by weakness and humility, by love enduring beyond death, by a God who delights our loving one another and forgiving one another, and who really does have the power to raise the dead.
Thank you all so much for reading this series, and a special thanks to those of you who have read my novel Cain: Son of Adam. As a special treat for you all, I will be posting a final entry in this series next week. No spoilers: you’ll find out what anime I’m featuring after it’s posted. Stay tuned, stay safe, stay holy, and have a Blessed Holy Week and a Happy Easter. Christ be with you all.