MIKAMI MEDITATIONS PT. 6

 In the first MIKAMI MEDITATIONS, I hadn't read the full corpus of the 1991-99 GHOST SWEEPER MIKAMI manga, so I followed the only available information source for a particular datum: the age of the female lead Reiko Mikami. Wiki claimed that Mikami was 31 years old, but I never saw anything in the original manga that even came close to confirming that inaccurate info. However, upon re-reading one of the later arcs, "Relentless War," Mikami's age is decisively stated-- at least. as decisively as anything else that appears in an amateur online translation, the only source for the SWEEPER stories in English.

So there's no question that Mikami is 20 years old, only three years older than her high-schooler colleague Tadao Yokoshima. His age of seventeen is frequently repeated, and maybe artist Takashi Shiina felt he had to keep reminding readers of Yokoshima's status, since he spends so little time in school. There's some degree of change in the characters' attitudes and circumstances during the span of the series, but SWEEPER is a static series timewise, so no one really ages. In an early story, Mikami tells Okinu that she considers herself a "mature woman" and her ardent suitor Yokoshima to be a "brat." Mikami also avers that the student needs another ten years to catch up with her, which might have impressed me as her admitting to considerably more years than twenty. And then there are a couple of late stories where Yokoshima insults Mikami by calling her an "old hag," which certainly sounds odd if only three years separate them. 

However, I am aware of one other manga, ZERO'S FAMILIAR, in which a teenager calls a woman of only twenty-three years an "old woman." So there's some probability that this was a familiar type of joke in Japanese culture, a slam meant to be aggravating but not technically accurate.

Had I thought about it, an early story, "Love Needs Its Time," shows that Shiina always had a loose sense that Mikami and Yokoshima aren't far apart in age. At the conclusion of "Time," Yokoshima flashes back in time to when he was a baby, and a very young Mikami, possibly just three years old, encounters him.

  Mikami's age puts an interesting spin on the first time Shiiina depicts Mikami and Yokoshima meeting as relatively mature entities, in a sequence from the arc "The Right Stuff."

              

The main point of the flashback is to regale readers with how the Mikami/Yokoshima relationship got set in stone from the start: the lust-monkey makes some foolish pass at his boss and she beats the hell out of him. However, the flashback is more important for offering a deeper motivation for Mikami to hire the high-schooler. As I've said before, if she was truly repulsed by Yokoshima's advances, Mikami would just fire him and look for another cheap employee to do her heavy lifting. 

The internal chronology of "The Right Stuff" also mentions that Mikami's mother Michie died (or rather, faked her death) five years previous to the "static time" of the ongoing series, which would make Mikami fifteen at the time. One presumes she finished both high school and her training as a ghost sweeper under her sensei, so she's about twenty when she opens her agency. Clearly she wants to be an independent businesswoman, and she appears to have no romance in her life. The only time Shiina showed her evincing any interest in romantic life was when Mikami was ten years old and crushed on the older Saijou. Yet he had only filial feelings for her, and thus one may assume that, for all intents and purposes, Mikami's turned her back on romance at this crucial time in her life. 

Mikami wants to carry on her mother's profession of ghost-sweeping, but for reasons I've discussed elsewhere, she also intends to make a lot of money from it. She's aware of her phenomenal looks but views them only as assets in attracting a customer base. She may not be totally immune to flattery, though, since after scorning Yokoshima's clumsy come-on, she responds to his verbal praise with the interesting sentence, "Since you're so honest, I'll forget about that [attempted assault] from before." In other words, before Yokoshima has said anything about being willing to work for cheap, Mikami unfreezes a bit at his compliments. She starts unburdening herself as to how she thought she'd hire a good-looking guy to help sell her image to customers, but she was afraid she'd have to pay a lot of money for such an assistant, which would cut into potential profits. Yokoshima knows he's not good-looking, but he's so besotted with Mikami that he offers to do her dirty jobs for a pittance. However, in practice, Yokoshima does gain some additional remuneration whenever he peeps on his boss in the shower, and she brings this up frequently-- though again, it doesn't bother her enough to make her sack him. But does she keep Yokoshima around purely because she saves money by employing such a doofus to do all her hard work? She almost certainly enjoys holding on to her money and may even get some sadistic satisfaction at beating him down when he propositions her, apparently wanting to keep her virginity as much as a big bank account.                 

Yet Shiina almost certainly knew the persuasive power of the "hot girl falls for homely guy" trope, so as early as the Volume Four arc "Dad's Here," Okinu suspects that Mikami harbors tender feelings for Yokoshima despite his considerable demerits. Yet Shiina waits until the late arc "Right Stuff" to depict the original dynamic that prevailed when the sexy exorcist met her stooge-- and that flashback takes place during a real-time story in which Yokoshima has harnessed his psychic powers to a level that almost surpasses Mikami's abilities.

Yet Shiina was careful not to undermine the comical tension, so Yokoshima never transcends his "stooge-self" and Mikami always remains the harsh mistress. The capstone story to the entire series, "Break Your Destiny," shows Mikami as a true tsundere, unable to dispense love without putting her potential paramour through the wringer to make sure of his devotion. The two of them being closer in age, though, makes it seem as though their perverse relationship came about in the same period of life wherein more normative couples usually date and get married for the first time. That makes it more likely, at least for proponents of the "hot girl/homely guy" trope, that this fractious couple will be able to unite at some future date as well.          

MYTHCOMICS: "THE PROFESSOR AND THE PIXIE" (OUT OF THE NIGHT #17, 1954)

OUT OF THE NIGHT was an ACQ title that lasted 17 issues from 1952 to 1954. I'd mentioned in an earlier essay that I'd read very few of that company's offerings from the 1940s and 1950s, so I decided I'd finally sample NIGHT because it was a short run, and because it ended right before the Comics Code became a force for publishers to reckon with. Issue #17 is dated October 1954, which means that it was probably on newsstands two or three months previous, probably the summer before the Code was instituted in September of that year. What I found from this brief survey was that, in contrast to the ACG scripts of the 1960s, OUT OF THE NIGHT published a fair sampling of creepy stories (mostly written by head editor Richard Hughes), albeit including none of the gore favored by other pre-Code publishers. In contrast to the absolutely scare-less "horror" titles of DC Comics of the early 1950s, at least the OOTN stories allowed the monsters to win roughly half the time. Since the only two Hughes stories I'd reviewed on this site were in the nature of Thorne Smith romances, I wondered if Hughes had allowed himself to tap darker currents when he was providing most of the "straight" horror stories. What I found, though, was mostly adequate formula terror, with none of the deeper resonances that make a mythcomic, and in OOTN at least, the only story that qualified for my criteria was-- a Thorne Smith type of fantasy.                                           

    This story, which I'll abbreviate as "Pixie," is a good example of how a mythcomic can portray psychological symbolism even though none of the characters possess anything like a simulated personal psychology. We open at a girls' college, Smathers by name, as the pipe-smoking Professor Dobbins seeks to ignore the lovelorn glances of his students. Hughes wastes no time on whatever past interactions Dobbins may have had with the fair sex; all we know is that he doesn't want to truck with adoring females. Based on the cinematic screwball comedies that probably influenced Hughes, Dobbins is probably supposed to be a normal healthy male who's cut himself off from real romance like the Cary Grant character in BRINGING UP BABY. He does nothing to invite the attentions of yet another adoring female, this one a pixie from the spirit world, but the reader is from the first page ready to see Dobbins taken down a peg.                                                                                                              

The Pixie doesn't even specify that she was looking for Dobbins in particular when she got her boss, "The Sublime Creep," to send her to Earth hunting a mortal husband. She just has her "spirit beam" trained on Smathers College so that she can blend in with all the female students, because it goes without saying that an all-girl college is the perfect place to hunt for men. Since the Pixie never makes any attempt to play student, I suppose readers should assume that once she caught sight of Dobbins, love at first sight prevailed. Dobbins does not reciprocate and wants the Pixie to go away so that he can get back to the fascination of grading papers. Just as the dean is about to walk in on their tete-a-tete, the Pixie tells Dobbins how to banish her. The dean doesn't see the Pixie, but he does see the level-headed young man acting the fool.                                                         

    

For once, though, the stuffy character's embarrassment isn't the only reason to bring about a threat to his pecuniary fortunes. Apparently even though Dean Crabtree is the only one who sees Dobbins playing Napoleon, the dean's loose-mouthed enough that both the faculty and the student bodies all find out that he's become addle-pated-- though the primary reason for his dismissal is that Smathers College is out of money. Dobbins blames his ill fortune on the Pixie, and when her spirit beam manifests in his office that night, he becomes aggressive, planning to "hustle [the Pixie] right back to the Sublime Creep." The reader is spared from seeing him attempt to do this when a fanged demon, implicitly male, pops up and socks him.    

                                                     

Dobbins tries to escape via his upper-story window, but when the female students try to come to his rescue, he makes the odd decision to face the monster rather than create an "uproar." He returns just in time to see the Pixie show up and banish Fangface, claiming that his advent was just a mistake from the Sublime Creep's central dispatching.                                                                                            

The Pixie then confesses that she did have something to do with convincing the whole school that the prof was bonkers, purely to get him away from the temptation of other women. Dobbins still shows no sign of succumbing to her unearthly beauty, and he doesn't even look particularly sad when she vanishes again. However, he doesn't do himself any favors with the dean by telling him that he wasn't trying to jump out of the window to his death; he was just avoiding "a monster." Regardless, the female students hold a demonstration to keep Dobbins on staff, and it must be a slow news-day, since the place is "cluttered with reporters" covering this collegiate protest.                 

                   

On the third (consecutive?) night, Dobbins does seem to get a little concerned that if the Pixie doesn't join with him, she might get assigned to some other suitor. For her part, the angelic apparition shows up at the girls' dormitory, where a chance phrase from a student gives the Pixie an idea. She calls upon the Sublime Creep to send a bunch of spirits to the campus, which then possess (one assumes temporarily) the other glamorous student bodies, turning them all into ugly beasts. (This touch actually seems a better marker of feminine, rather than masculine, psychology.) Lickety-split, some news station decides to buy exclusive rights to the demonstration-story from the college, and Smathers is immediately saved from penury. The Pixie's more or less unselfish gesture causes the stuffy professor to fall for her, and their romantic coupling is ensured. I did find myself wondering less at any of the mythcomics' plot holes than at what kind of "defense job" a de-winged mythical entity thought she could seek in 1954. Now, if she had said she planned to get a job with the Comics Code Authority-- that would have made perfect sense.                                                                     

THE READING RHEUM: TANAR OF PELLUCIDAR (1929)

 TANAR OF PELLUCIDAR, ERB's fourteen-years-later sequel to the 1915 PELLUCIDAR, is one of the author's better spinoff stories, but it's best known for launching his "crossover project." In addition to spinning off the title character with only a token reference to former star David Innes, the authorial prologue-- in which ERB chats with radio-expert Jason Gridley about the supposed reality of ERB's fantastic stories-- sets up the action of the sequel TARZAN AT THE EARTH'S CORE. During the chat, ERB and Gridley supposedly get a very long radio-broadcast from Innes' buddy Abner Perry, telling them the entire story of prehistoric hero Tanar and ending on the revelation that Innes is still in the hands of enemies. At this point Gridley declares that he'll marshal forces to rescue Innes, said forces including the Lord of the Jungle, while Gridley gets a secondary hero-role as well as the standard romantic arc.                                                                 

  I'll touch on two quick points before getting to the main TANAR plot. The first is that, during the prologue, Gridley expresses the same opinion I did in my review of PELLUCIDAR: that Hooja the Sly was one of ERB's better villains, but that as far as ERB is concerned, the Sly One was sincerely killed off. The second concerns those now politically incorrect Black Monkey-Men from the first Pellucidar novel. The tribe does not come on stage in the course of TANAR, but the hero has a flashback in which he remembers being held captive by the tailed people, during which time they taught him the skill of bounding about the tops of trees. This past history comes in handy when ERB wants his caveman hero to swing through the forest with his lady love in his arms. If there wasn't such a time discrepancy between the first two books and the third one, I'd think that was the only reason ERB introduced the monkey-guys.                          

Anyway, fourteen years after the conclusion of PELLUCIDAR, David Innes' prehistoric empire is threatened by seafaring invaders called Korsars. Innes' forces repel the attackers, who unlike the primitives possess huge sailing ships and firearms. However, Tanar-- the son of one of ERB's many tedious noble savages-- is taken aboard one of the ships. Tanar encounters the ruler of the Korsars, an older man known as "The Cid," and the ruler's teenaged daughter Stellara. The Cid-- whose people will later be revealed as descendants of Barbary pirates who blundered into the earth's core--wants Tanar to reveal the process by which Innes' scientists compound gunpowder, since the Korsars' formula is faulty. Tanar is a warrior and knows nothing about chemistry, but he allows the Cid to think that he Tanar can be of assistance. As for Stellara, she and Tanar go the same way as every other ERB couple: falling in love at first sight and not being able to express themselves.                                     

  In fact, though Tanar's episodic adventures wandering about the earth's core are just par for the course, the romance between the hero and his lady is better than the average Burroughs romance. ERB captures much of the hormonal confusion of youth as Tanar and Stellara quarrel while displaying unconditional loyalty toward one another. In two of the roaming adventures, ERB creates a couple of primitive societies he may have meant to be mirror-images of one another. The first is Amiocarp, a tribe in which the members express love very openly, in marked contrast to Tanar and Stellara, who can't manage to know their own hearts. The second is Hime, a tribe in which all the members constantly show hatred and contempt for one another, which represents the fractiousness between hero and heroine-- though of course true love wins the day in the end.                         

This time the heroine has two unwanted suitors. The first one, Bohar, is encountered on the Korsar ship during Tanar's captivity, and halfway through the book Tanar kills this rival. Then, very late in the story, Tanar and Stellara get hauled to the Korsar base, and ERB belatedly reveals that the Cid intends to marry off his daughter to a brute named Bulf, whom Tanar also slays in due course. Strangely, the Cid doesn't ever have a reckoning for his crimes, and as far as I can tell, he doesn't appear in the later books. This might be understandable if the Cid was genuinely the father of Tanar's beloved. However, thanks to one of ERB's more intricate birth-mystery plots, Stellara reveals that she knows that she is not the child of the Cid, even though he thinks that she is. (Their few scenes together also display only contumely toward each other, so one assumes the Cid was not much of a daddy.)                                                                           

                                                                                                                                       Further, since childhood Stellara has known that she was the child of a primitive chieftain, and that her mother was stolen in a Korsar raid before being "married" to the Cid. There's some amusement-value in the author's decorousness about sex, since it goes without saying that for the Cid to believe Stellara his progeny, he has to have had sex with the deceased mother at some point. A contemporary author might have pictured Stellara as lusting for vengeance upon the false parent who raped her mother. But that wasn't in ERB's wheelhouse for whatever reasons. The author does devote some space to having Stellara find her way to her original tribe, where she meets her real father. But ERB seemed to be avoiding any discussion of the relationship between the heroine and the Cid-- who never even learns, so far as the reader knows, that he was tricked into raising another man's child. And even though the Cid doesn't suffer for his act of rape-- I don't even think he has any major scenes in TARZAN AT THE EARTH'S CORE-- one might imagine that the slaying of Bulf, who explicitly would have taken Stellara by force given the chance, provides a substitute for the non-punishment of the novel's main villain. (ERB also never imagines what would have happened had The Cid forced himself on Stellara's mother more than once, but the erudite reader may argue that he did, but never learned that he was "firing blanks," as even people of ERB's time would have comprehended.) ADDENDUM: After TARZAN AT THE EARTH'S CORE, Gridley gets another one of those loquacious radio broadcasts, this one relating the entire story of the 1931 FIGHTING MAN OF MARS.         

MYTHCOMICS: "SPLAT-OUKA" (THE SHIUNJI FAMILY CHILDREN, 2023)

Anyone who partakes of Japanese manga, particularly in the allied genres of romance and comedy, soon notices that the manga-authors work a lot of clansgression into the mix. I use the term "clansgression" here because it includes not only romantic combinations including literal incest, but all combinations that seem like "transgressions against proper clan-relationships." THE SHIUNJI FAMILY CHILDREN is a recent production of this kind, authored by Reiji Miyajima, who gained fame for the roller-coaster rom-com RENT-A-GIRLFRIEND.

The setup: seven teens, the two sons and five daughters of the titular Shiunji Family, have spent their lives together on their rich father's estate, his wife having passed away some time ago. In contrast to dramas in which full-blooded siblings fall in love with one another, such as ANGEL SANCTUARY, all of the siblings seem generally well-adjusted to one another. Youngest brother Shion doesn't interact with the sisters that much, since they seem to focus all of their teasing upon the oldest brother, Arata. From eldest to youngest, Banri, Seiha, Ouka, and Minami all give their handsome older brother-- who at age sixteen has never had a romantic relationship-- a hard time, accusing him, without justification, of looking at them lustfully. The one exception is the youngest sister, fourteen-year-old Kotono, who's too shy to tease anyone. Yet she also provides a sort of crack in their facade of normalcy, for her naivete causes her to profess a desire to marry Arata.

None of the siblings take Kotono seriously. Yet this transgressive feeling proves catching, thanks to a revelation by the teens' father on Kotono's 14th birthday. The siblings' supposed sire reveals that none of them are related to him or his late wife; all were adopted as infants or small children. Shion and Minami alone are siblings by blood, both adopted from the same source, and thus none of the sisters are related to Arata at all. After coping with their surprise, all of the adoptive Shiunjis, particularly Arata, strive to keep regarding one another as symbolic siblings. And yet, from the second episode on, all the females reflect on the fact that legally, any of them could marry Arata.

While the series is still too new to be sure if Miyajima has any deeper psychological myths he intends to plumb, there are some interesting indications. Older sisters Banri and Seiha seem content to tease Arata a bit more intensely, while the younger ones are more upset by the changed status quo. In the story "Twister Seiha," Seiha, a science-nerd type, talks Arata into participating in a game of Twister, while she lectures him on the human body's chemical makeup with respect to emotions of love and passion. Of particular interest is her emphasis upon "trust and other scientifically uncertain feelings." The sisters' trust in Arata in his capacity of "protective older brother" seems to be the gateway drug to considering him as a prospective mate.

"Splat-Ouka," the story immediately after "Twister Seiha," follows a similar pattern in using a game to expose possible true feelings. Middle sister Ouka, who at sixteen is the same age as Arata, has always deemed herself Arata's twin in a symbolic sense. She is also probably the most forceful of the sisters, for before agreeing to play, Arata reflects that in the past he would always win their competitions, and she would seek revenge by putting him in "a lock-hold." Being a well-bred Japanese boy, Arata would never fight back. Nevertheless, he agrees to play against her in the Nintendo video-game Splatoon, from which the story's title is derived.

This time, Ouka has upped her game, and she scores some victories in which her female icon bests his male icon. However, Arata finally decides to play to his utmost, and he begins winning. At this point Ouka reverts to her usual form, attacking him from behind with a headlock. He protests that she's hurting him, just as he did when he was younger, but Ouka won't back off. And then--

Arata finally exerts himself in this respect as well, throwing his smaller, lighter sister off and pinning her to the floor. He's subsequently aware that pinning down any female-- particularly one to whom he's not really related-- looks like he intends to have sex with her. He tries to normalize their encounter as just another "small fight" between siblings.

Ouka, however, expresses a very ambivalent sentiment, for she says that he's "a man now." Neither of them breaks down this sentiment, but it holds two likely implications. One is that Ouka pronounces Arata a mature male because he throws off the conditioning of politeness and uses his greater male strength to quit taking her abuse. The other is the context that a "man" is capable of initiating sex when given the go-ahead by the willing female. Ouka sexualizes his physical conquest of her in order to point out that the two of them could indeed have sex as could any unrelated male and female-- even though, as most readers will expect, nothing actually happens.

Ouka then disengages and goes her way, leaving Arata utterly perplexed. For the reader's benefit alone, she then utters a line that could be taken in a sexual manner or a neutral one: "Next time don't go easy on me." Given what the reader knows of Ouka, it seems unlikely that she wanted her ex-brother to ravish her, even using the definition of that word I specified in this essay. But what this fictional character may have "wanted," in line with her creator's intentions, was to test the waters of both Arata's feelings and her own. One may speculate that if he had lost control and ravished her, she might have accepted it without protest, because her assault on him held the strong possibility of provoking such a response. But since other stories emphasize that she fears the loss of her imagined sibling bond with Arata, it's possible that Ouka is playing mind-games with herself as much as with Arata, trying to figure out if she can replace one bond with another.

MYTHCOMICS: ["ON THAT DAY, I MET SENPAI"], PLEASE DON'T BULLY ME, NAGATORO, PTS. 140-144 (2023)

 One compensation for the conclusion of the NAGATORO manga is that as a critic I can now view it as a finished work. Had I never seen the ending for any reason, I believe my determination in this essay-- that the manga is principally governed by the dramatic potentiality-- would still have been valid. But viewing the actual conclusion gives me the opportunity to reinforce that opinion.

My title for the essay, SO THE DRAMA, SO THE MYTH, held a touch of irony, since I argued that the particular set of NAGATORO melodramas I had analyzed did not have the "long range" symbolic qualities that I seek in pinpointing literary myths.

Thus, when I search for a psychological myth, I look for an elaboration of symbolic resonances into mythopoeic concrescence, which is only possible when the author is a "long-range" mode. A dramatic concrescence can be formed from any number of "short-range" emotional states, but that concrescence does not depend on any abstractions as does the mythopoeic type. 

And now that I've seen the whole design of the series, aside from a forthcoming epilogue, I can assert that all of the NAGATORO stories I've looked at so far are at best "near-myths." Only in one section, about ten installments from the end of the main narrative, does author Nanashi develop his characters into deeper symbolic presences. But the symbolism does not involve the Buberian arguments I invoked in my last two essays, but an opposition that arguably is more central to Japanese culture: the conflict between instinctual existence and a disciplined, reasoned outlook.

For almost eighty installments, Nanashi keeps the reader in the viewpoint of the male protagonist Naoto, a.k.a. "Senpai." There are two or three exceptions where the viewpoint is Nagatoro's-- she has a nightmare, she talks with her sister-- but the reader is never privy to Nagatoro's thoughts, while Naoto's thoughts are ever-present. As Naoto is drawn out of his protective shell by his "kohai's" teasing and demands for attention, he becomes more interested in learning more about her life apart from him. After Part 80, Nanashi begins developing parallel plotlines for the two protagonists with respect to the avocations they have pursued: Naoto with respect to becoming a better artist, and Nagatoro's with respect to mastering the sport of judo. Both avocations will become pathways to general career goals, as indicated by the final episode. But the paths followed also indicate the process by which each protagonist has assimilated aspects of the other's "strong points," with the tightly wound Naoto becoming more open to following his instincts, while Nagatoro becomes more focused, more disciplined.

Episode 140, the one from which I take my umbrella-title, is the first one to delve into Nagatoro's thoughts. Previous episodes have revealed to Naoto that though Nagatoro had been practicing judo since elementary school, she abandoned the hobby after suffering a humiliating defeat at the end of her last middle-school year. Up to that point, Nagatoro's judo depended on her innate abilities-- her superlative speed and her instinctive mastery of techniques. But a rival, one Orihara, was so frustrated by Nagatoro's superiority that she trained until she reached Olympic levels of accomplishment, and so handed Nagatoro her first real defeat.

During Nagatoro's first year at high school, she and her friends accidentally encounter Naoto, and get a look at the fantasy-manga he draws. In the first episode, the reader has no idea why Nagatoro chooses to bully Naoto far more than her friends, though it's soon evident that it's wrapped up in a physical attraction that she won't admit to others and barely admits to herself. According to her mental dialogue, her judgment of her senpai's art is ruthless, calling it "awkward" and "delusional." Yet at the same time, she senses that "he tried his best," and that appeals to her on some level-- an instinctual one, since Nagatoro, though she reads manga, does not have any interest in art as such.

There is, without doubt, a classic bullying-angle to her aggression: because of a failure in her own life, Nagatoro is moved to humiliate someone weaker than herself. But because Naoto becomes solicitous about her having abandoned her passion for judo, she forces herself back into the fray. In fact, Nagatoro's meditations on the past take place in the middle of a climactic battle with her rival Orihara at a school-sponsored judo tournament, with Naoto cheering her on. 

Nagatoro wins her match with Orihara. Yet while Naoto is glad for his almost-girlfriend, he feels that she's assumed a dominant role in their relationship once more. Amusingly, he imagines her as a malicious horned oni-demon, complete with an iron club and a tiger-skin bikini (which sounds more like Lum of URUSEI YATSURA than any traditional Japanese folk-myth.) And though in reality she presents no physical danger to Naoto, his fears are justified by the fact that she still loves to harangue him, presumably as a cover for her own feelings. Not surprisingly, Naoto flashes back to his first encounters with his kohai, when she attacked him with demonic sadism.

Thus, when the young fellow overcomes his trepidations in order to confess his feelings, he becomes far more outspoken than ever before, admitting that his first encounter with her was like a meeting with a wild beast. This doesn't exactly please a cute high school girl, and she retaliates that she thought of him as a "really really gross wharf roach." Yet Naoto simply rolls with the insult, admitting that her bestial attack served the purpose of dragging him out of "the shadows" and into "sunlight." 

Then, once Nagatoro works through all of her protests about Senpai's "grossness," she's finally able to admit that when they met, she was just as purposeless and adrift as he was, once she surrendered her passion for judo.

And so the young lovers reach a rapprochement as they finally become a couple, though once again, Nanashi reminds his readers that even if Nagatoro doesn't wield an iron club, she still has a lot of "the oni" in her.

After I selected this section of NAGATORO as the serial's only concrescent myth-discourse, I did a little research and learned that when Nanashi created his prototypical version of the series, in the form of a five-part webcomic, he ended that comic on a scene parallel to this one, with the Naoto-prototype confessing to the Nagatoro-prototype. I have not read the webcomic and from what summaries I've seen, it didn't go into a lot of character depth but rather portrayed its Nagatoro as a thoroughgoing sadist. This might make for an interesting comparison somewhere down the line, but as far as the series proper is concerned, the protagonists' struggle between the instinctive life and the life of premeditation remains the "master trope" of the narrative as a whole.

I SENPAI AND THOU NAGATORO PT. 2

 By the time of installments 22 and 23-- which I'll give the collective title of "Senpai, Let's Go to the Beach"-- the Naoto-Nagatoro relationship has settled into a rough routine. Naoto tries to remain aloof, and Nagatoro tries to pull him out of his shell. In this project she receives some ambivalent help from her girl-buddies Gamo and Yoshi, who also find Naoto amusing, though they're also entertained by Nagatoro's increasingly evident affection for her "victim."

So the foursome's trek to the beach to escape summer heat begins with the three girls mocking Naoto as usual. 

But being at the beach also highlights some sexual aspects overshadowed at high school, which involve Nagatoro seeking to get her share of "the male gaze" from Naoto.

Despite this exposure to nubile female flesh, Naoto refuses to gambol in the waves with the girls, remaining on shore. However, after a while Nagatoro can't resist ringing his chimes again. And in truth, Naoto hasn't totally distanced himself from the possibility of innocent fun, for Nagatoro soon learns that he's wearing swim trunks despite having claimed no desire to go swimming. 

Up to this point, despite having teased Naoto as an "it" (specifically, a sea louse), she's clearly trying to relate to him as a "thou" (a fellow being who needs to get out of his own way). But Naoto still plays hard to get. Nagatoro wants to apply sunscreen to his pale skin so he'll have no excuse to stay on the beach, and Naoto comes up with the excuse that only "lovers" rub lotion on each other's bodies.

This results in an extraordinary sequence. Since Naoto rejects her "thou" offer, Nagatoro rather easily slips back into "it" mode. Since the young student claims that he doesn't want to get lotion administered via her hands, she squirts some on him and then begins rubbing it in with her foot. Author Nanashi does not stint on showing that Nagatoro is clearly stimulated by making Naoto her footstool, and he doesn't show any desire to resist her rough ministrations. However, when her two friends try to join in, rationality asserts itself, and she tries to make them desist. 

Despite this display of teenage hormones, Naoto is fully slicked down with SPF, and he allows himself to join the girls at their seaside games. And the episode ends with Naoto admitting to himself that he enjoyed the idyll at the beach, even with all the teasing involved. With episode 24, Naoto will begin thinking that he shouldn't let Nagatoro take the initiative in their strange relationship all the time-- which becomes an important trope for the remainder of the series.