One thing that kind of stinks about writing in this format is that, no matter how much prep work you do and how long you consider what you want to say, sometimes you just come up with a better idea later on. I don’t know that I’ve outright regretted anything that I’ve posted (aside from using language and slang then that I wouldn’t use now), but there have been times I’ve struggled with trying to interpret something, only to have “the answer”™ drop into my lap days or weeks later. This happened to me last week when I was writing my post for “Umibouzu;” despite the fact that I’ve watched those episodes many times and had a decade to ponder their meaning, it wasn’t until the middle of last week that I had half a thought about them that actually made sense. I sure wish that lightning had struck me on Sunday when I was writing the post! I won’t go into too much detail here; I’ll probably end up just posting an aside or addendum this week as I have time. I don’t want to steal the thunder from this week’s set of episodes, after all. I did, however, want to mention the situation because I know I struggle with knowing when a piece of writing is “finished.” I might spend hours editing, re-editing, and picking away at something without it ever being entirely where I want it to be. Finally cutting myself off can be painful, and I suspect there are others out there with the same issues. I just wanted to let you know you’re absolutely not alone!
I’ve been both excited about and dreading having to analyze this two episode story arc. I’ve mentioned before that it’s my favorite arc of the entire series, and the one I feel I connect with most personally. Having such a strong connection with something can be difficult, though. To see my own situation laid bare so clearly by people who have no idea you even exist leaves me with mixed feelings. It’s comforting to know that I haven’t been alone in my sorrow, but it can also be off-putting to feel as though I’m not unique and that my problems are just typical of human experience. It certainly doesn’t feel average when you’re going through your own traumatic experience.
Please be sure to check out previous week’s posts, and let me know if you’re enjoying the show!
Part 1
Ochou is in prison, awaiting the execution of her sentence for brutally murdering her husband and his family. Coincidentally, the Medicine Seller is sharing a cell with her (he had a run-in with a dissatisfied customer that ended poorly for him). In speaking with Ochou, the truth of her guilt begins to come into question. She doesn’t appear as though she’d be able to murder a group of people on her own, and she doesn’t recall exactly what actions she took to kill them. But she confessed her responsibility to the authorities, resulting in her death sentence. The Medicine Seller’s instincts prove to be sound, however; soon a mononoke with a roughly human appearance reveals himself and claims Ochou’s act as his own. He wipes away the Medicine Seller’s identity and takes Ochou to another realm.
The mononoke begins to court Ochou and reveals that he’s kept watch over her. He then asks her to marry him. The celebration is filled with the faces of other spiritual beings who are also said to have watched over Ochou. She feels as though a new path has opened up to her. But the Medicine Seller reappears and through his presence, information about Ochou’s relationship with her mother is revealed. This destroys the mononoke’s illusion. As the Medicine Seller and mononoke fight with one another, the Medicine Seller’s mirror breaks through the illusory masked faces of the mononoke. What is the true form of the creature who has taken root in Ochou’s heart?
Part 2
The Medicine Seller seals away the masked mononoke under its extreme protest, and presents Ochou’s life to her in four acts, through which he hopes to come to a conclusion about the actual mononoke’s truth and reason. All the while the sword of exorcism is chomping at the bit, teetering at the threshold of its release. Ochou relives memories of her childhood, learning to play the koto as her mother looked on. Ochou loved her mother, but her mother seemed more content to groom Ochou to marry into wealth than to nurture her with kindness. Her love only went so far as Ochou was obedient and accomplished at her studies. Her mother’s greatest joy seemed to manifest when Ochou was married into a samurai family at last; now her mother could go to the family grave without the shame that came along with losing everything.
The Medicine Seller continues to prod Ochou, asking her who she really killed, as it appears that this was anything but a straightforward murder. Because her love for her mother runs so deep, she’s loathe to admit the fact that in working to please her, she gave up every last one of her own desires. The fact is that the only person Ochou ever killed was herself, over and over and over again, as she molded herself to others’ desires. This reveals that the mononoke is actually the life she never lived, the choices she never made, and the prison she constructed out of her own situation. She is the mononoke. Having finally made peace with that, Ochou opens herself to the sword of exorcism. Suddenly, she’s back in her home’s kitchen, listening as her husband and his family demand more sake and berate her. This time, she looks out the window at the sky that gave her a small bit of joy so many times. Then, she’s gone.
Thoughts and Reactions
As I’ve mentioned before, for a long time I’ve related deeply to this story arc (and it’s likely the bulk of this reaction section will elaborate on that – not sorry!). While I luckily never experienced the burden of living beneath a parent’s selfish expectations, I was for a long time in a situation where I felt fundamentally trapped. As the Medicine Seller repeats multiple times throughout the story, if you feel trapped in a place it becomes a prison, but if you don’t want to leave it becomes a palace. For a long time I was in a relationship that I chose to believe was the latter. I wore the mask of the happy lover, throwing my energy into being an enthusiastic host and playing into the role of the self-sacrificing woman, leaving myself little time to understand my own self and desires. I came into the relationship feeling as though it was an escape from loneliness, and it took me a long time to realize “loneliness” and comfort with being alone were two dramatically different things.
As the masked mononoke interacts with Ochou, it offers her an array of kind words and eventually welcomes her into marriage with him. The wedding has all the luscious trimmings and Ochou is hypnotically drawn in by the festivities. In the whirlwind of sake and dancing she seems ill-equipped to realize that all of it is nothing more than a distraction from the core of her predicament. A marriage makes a good comparison with a prison or a palace; though it’s just a pact between two people there are many aspects of the legal and emotional binding together of individuals that make leaving it a non-trivial act. The mononoke is better served keeping Ochou happy on the surface and allowing her to wear her mask, because if she begins to question anything within herself or becomes more focused on self-acknowledgement it will likely demolish the darkness in her heart that keeps him sustained. Letting herself be distracted by the bright colors and the mononoke’s proclamations of love helps her hold onto a brief (but ultimately false) sense of well-being. She believes this marriage to be an escape from her prison, just as many of us believe that marrying might be an escape from financial hardship, loneliness, or familial pressure. A successful, meaningful marriage requires so much more than that from the people involved, though – mutual respect, honoring one-another’s boundaries and choices, a belief in the other’s fundamental human dignity and a respect for the person that they are. If these things are missing and the act is just a move to escape from something else, then it becomes a trap.
The Medicine Seller references human faces as the facades or “masks” that we put in place to present only what we want the world to see (or what we want to convince ourselves is the truth). The faces we share with the world might be the ones that make us feel safe and protected, or they may be what we believe to be true about ourselves; it’s a dubious skill of human beings to be able to choose the persona that serves them. I have social anxiety and people are often surprised to learn that because I give off the impression of being relatively unruffled; that’s my mask. In this story arc this concept is represented well by the use of Noh masks. If you’re unfamiliar with Noh theater, it has deep ties with Japanese spirituality, and the the characterization is conveyed exclusively through strictly-codified dance movements and traditional masks worn by the main performer. The masks each represent either a character archetype (child, young woman, spirit etc.) or even specific characters in some cases. The masks are constructed of one type of wood and painted by hand. An incredible amount of effort goes into creating these visual facades that provide almost all the information that one would need to know about the person being portrayed. Human beings spend years constructing their own personal masks; Ochou’s mask began to manifest in childhood and became so much a part of her that it was eventually indistinguishable from her own face.
While I’ve never worn a Noh mask (nor danced atop a Japanese stage), like most people I’ve done many things to keep up appearances and to convince myself and others that everything was “just fine.” As my own situation deteriorated I expended a lot of energy insisting to myself that all was well, and made sure that others believed it. I was the hip gamer-girl who indulged her spouse’s eccentricities and accepted him, warts and all. Up for any new sex thing without question and willing to dose myself with mood-terrorizing hormones to ensure that children were never an unintended consequence of that. Feminist, but not too much and not when it came to myself. Willing to put everyone else first. While I never got to the point where I wanted to actively attempt suicide (even at my lowest point), as I allowed my boundaries and sense of self to be further desecrated I began to secretly wish that I would go to sleep and not wake up the following day, or that one of us would end up in some kind of tragic accident. The mask I wore was one with a smile and a laugh, as everything within began to shrivel and die.
Much like Ochou, what saved me was the realization that these feelings were all the result of something, and not something for which I could rightfully be blamed. At one point my ex demanded that I explain why I never shared these terrible, dark feelings as they emerged, why I let them fester to the point that they became toxic. I found the question fundamentally unjust, but it took me longer to come up with an answer to “why” that satisfied me (it’s hard to say if he’d be satisfied with it; I doubt it). Abuse is almost never an immediate swing of the fist or a first time argument that barrels out of control into name-calling. It’s someone, whether they realize they’re doing it or not, testing the waters, lightly prodding the Jenga piece to see if they can knock it loose without causing the tower to fall. It’s gaslighting so the target begins to question their own truth. Slowly boundaries are crossed, self-esteem is chipped away. It’s “not that bad” because there aren’t any bruises; in the meantime you’ve lost contact with your friends, your hobbies have stopped bringing you joy, and you feel like a ghost trapped inside your body. And it’s humiliating. Why would someone speak up about something they can’t even yet articulate properly, especially to the person they instinctually realize is causing the hurt? Especially when some of the people around you would blame you for having a hand in building your own prison.
Ochou has the Medicine Seller’s play to help her realize the truth of her situation; it allows her to come to the correct conclusion since the truth becomes obvious as it’s laid out for her. I don’t necessarily think there was one thing in particular that helped me; nobody sat me down and said “this is what’s going on and we’re worried.” I was very good at hiding it all and it doesn’t surprise me that nobody noticed or felt the need to hold some kind of intervention. Sometimes all it takes is something small – the outstretched hand of a genuine friend or an opportunity to grow outside the bad situation itself (I had both). In any case, I thankfully came to the realization that I was acting as my own worst enemy and compounding my own treatment by not allowing myself to recognize it. Sometimes the mononoke really is oneself.
One of my favorite things about this story arc is that it’s never stated outright how real (or not) the fox-masked mononoke’s form is. Just as the entire episode walks the line between staged fantasy and reality, his actual existence is called into question throughout. He resembles the Medicine Seller’s alternate form enough that the common interpretation is that he’s either a spirit conjured by the Medicine Seller for the purposes of interacting with Ochou, or his other form itself. Because this episode is so focused on the rift that formed between Ochou the “mask” and Ochou the person, I find the thought that the Medicine Seller may have split his own aspects apart in some sort of solidarity with her to be comforting. The pipe he smokes is kind of the big tip-off for me; I don’t believe we see him use it in other story arcs (he does carry it in the cool figurine I have, however), but it’s prominently featured as a tool of the mononoke and the Medicine Seller takes a long draw from it at the end of the episode before leaving. There are tantalizing clues to support several theories, but as a general fan of the show and someone who’s intrigued by the Medicine Seller as a character, what I’ve always liked to believe is that the mononoke is some aspect of himself, and that he came to know of Ochou somehow and through his knowledge of her situation really did fall in love with her. I can’t help it – I’m a sucker for romance, even bittersweet romantic tragedy.
There’s also a lot of imagery that references split existences. I don’t usually talk all that much about film-making techniques here, but this series actually utilizes the frame in interesting ways to emphasize (even before we realize it) that Ochou has been of two minds (and perhaps two existences) throughout her ordeal and beyond. The quick cuts where half of her face is on the left side and the other half on the right side of the screen are just long enough to leave a striking impression on the viewer. They don’t linger, but their presence is enough to be disorienting. It’s a good compliment to the ghostly images of Ochou that represent her true self and unfulfilled desires. To me, there’s something powerful about the belief that, if we don’t honor ourselves to some extent, or even go so far as to deny our desires in pursuit of goals that aren’t our own, some piece of our psyche breaks away to make itself happy in our absence. Perhaps its why years of self denial (and even depression) feel more like emptiness than sadness.
Lastly, I’d like to mention Ochou’s (お蝶) name, which simply means “butterfly.” While I believe a lot of the character names in this series have some kind of meaning that can be interpreted from how they’re written, I think this one is a good example since it’s so short and to the point. I find it telling that her name references a creature who can fly; the one mental escape Ochou has from her abusive husband’s family is the sight of the sky through kitchen window. Only a small creature like a bird or butterfly could fly out through its wooden slats. She looks a bit like a butterfly too, with her large obi and brightly-colored clothing. Butterflies are usually short-lived creatures, their lifespans averaging something like a month in good circumstances. This may serve as a reminder to us – life is so short already, so why choose to spend it enclosed and suffering? In the final scene Ochou disappears from the room, seemingly without going through a door. There is something poetic about imagining her taking wing and leaving.
Next week’s story arc is one focused on something I bet many of us aren’t familiar with at all – the subtly-variable scents of expensive incenses. More broadly, it is about the terrible things that can happen when an object is valued more highly than the life of a woman attached in some way to it. I hope you’ll watch along again with me next time!
One reply on “Anime Book Club – Mononoke Week 4: Noppera-bou (Faceless Monster)”
this was a wonderful summary and thought-provoking reaction