MIKAMI MEDITATIONS PT. 2

 This post could have been a "near-myth" post, but as I get closer to finishing my reading of Takashi Shiina's GHOST SWEEPER MIKAMI, I want to keep all the SWEEPER stuff in one bundle.

In the first part, I provided an overview of early installments of the 1992-99 manga series with respect to the imaginary psychology of the principal characters: ghost sweeper/exorcist Reiko Mikami, her lustful assistant Tadao Yokoshima, and her other assistant, mild-mannered female ghost Okinu (who reincarnates into a mortal body late in the series). In MEDITATIONS 1, I questioned whether or not there was a thymotic romance between Mikami and Yokoshima in the series as a whole. I strongly suspected Shiina had that intention, though, based on a page I reprinted from a 1993 sequence entitled "Dad's Here." In it, Yokoshima-- who's never received the slightest encouragement for his erotic approaches from Mikami-- welcomes his father Daishuu to Tokyo, though the older man is more than a little extreme in his behavior toward his son.

Daishuu, though still married to Yokoshima's mother, remains the sort of smooth heartbreaker Yokoshima would like to be. Then by a sequence of events, Daishuu goes on a date with Mikami, which ties Yokoshima up in knots. He dreams that the ten-years-older Mikami has married Daishuu and becomes his mother.

 

  For her part, Mikami never shows even a slight interest in Daishuu, not least because he's married, though Daishuu almost certainly wants to seduce the ghost sweeper to become a mistress. "Dad's Home" ends with a meaningless comic brawl between father and son.

  While "Dad's Home" had no direct impact on the series' direction, clearly Shiina had it in mind when, about two years from the series' conclusion, he created a bookend-story called "Mom's Home." Yokoshima's mother Yuriko visits him, declaring that she intends to divorce her husband and have Yokoshima live with her. Yuriko even acts just as rashly as her husband did on his earlier visit.

      

Upon meeting Mikami and Okinu, Yuriko describes her reasons for wanting to divorce Daishuu for cheating (though he will turn out to be innocent of this particular charge). She also makes Mikami very uncomfortable when she describes how she Yuriko married Daishuu after having been forced to beat him up several times for inappropriate behavior.

 

However, Yuriko has another similarity to Mikami: she's a high-roller businesswoman, and she plans to leave Japan with her son. Privately she tells Yokoshima that if either Mikami or Okinu will speak up to keep the young man in Japan, she'll let him stay-- though Yokoshima can't simply ask the women to intercede. So just as Yuriko plans to fly out, Yokoshima uses a magical device to impersonate Mikami-- only to get exposed when the real Mikami shows up.  

   
 

Yuriko, however, is less concerned with her son's mendacity than with Mikami overstepping her bounds, punishing her former employee, when it's obviously the mother's right to punish the errant child (which she does, even while talking to Mikami). Only one thing can save Yokoshima: a full confession of Mikami's feelings for him.

 

  Well, that and one other thing-- the timely arrival of Daishuu, who brings proof that he didn't cheat on Yuriko. Immediately Yuriko drops the whole matter and leaves with her husband. Mikami's confession of her feelings is rendered incomplete, allowing things to go back to the status quo. And for good measure, it's suggested that Yuriko may have manipulated things to make sure her boy got hooked up with a proper mate-- a mate just like the girl who married dear old Dad.  

MIKAMI MEDITATIONS

My next mythcomics post will deal with a moderately obscure manga, GHOST SWEEPER MIKAMI (1991-99), and so part of this essay will be to explicate the manga's rationale and the background of its main characters. But I also want to use elements of this series to illustrate a special dynamic about epistemological patterns in fiction: that, unlike the patterns that human beings ascribe to aspects of reality, fictional patterns proceed not from cause to effect, but from effect to cause.

Every author who utilizes epistemological patterns in his fiction is naturally influenced by those found in reality. But whether the author is the organized type who plans out everything, or the type who flies by his pants-seat, authors in general first conceive of the effect they want to make with their characters/situations and then work backwards to justify the cause of the effects. The justification may not even be one that is currently validated by the dominant intellectual culture. Freudianism is not as validated today as in past eras. But when an author wants his story to invoke the psychological potentiality, Freud supplies the needed rationales for works ranging from MOURNING BECOMES ELECTRA to "Superman's Return to Krypton."

Here's what I wrote about the manga series for my review of the anime TV show:             

Starring character Reiko Mikami is a "ghost sweeper" in her late twenties or early thirties, and she uses a variety of supernatural weapons to exorcise troublesome ghosts and demons who plague modern-day people and businesses. Mikami is as courageous and resourceful as the best heroes, but she's also extremely mercenary, taxing her customers with huge bills so that someday she can become a rich woman. She's also slightly larcenous-- one episode displays her knowledge of burglary techniques-- and she constantly underpays her male assistant, seventeen-year-old Tadao Yokoshima. She gets away with this because she's super-hot and knows that horndog Yokoshima will accept any wage just to scope her out. The fact that she's exploiting the youth, however, does not keep her from doling out brutal punishment to the teen any time he tries to feel her up, or even expresses a negative opinion of her. Yokoshima, for his part, is clearly meant to be the "goat" of the series, the one who has all the terrible things happen to him-- and because he's such an unregenerate perv, his sufferings are funny.

(NOTE 4-8-06: A closer reading of the manga indicates no support for the idea-- derived from both Wikipedia and Grokipedia-- that Mikami is 31 years old. In one specific story, she says she's 20 years old while Yokoshima is 17. I'll explore this facet of the series more thoroughly in a forthcoming Meditation.)  

Now, many long-running manga serials have exploited similar situations without imbuing their characters with anything like a psychology, and the first two years of SWEEPER seem like a lot of other comedy-oriented shonen manga: lots of high-powered action with some comedy relief in the form of a dumb guy getting clobbered. Reiko Mikami's first episode clearly shows her as a master of her ghostbusting craft, as well as her determination that anyone who needs her services must pay heavily for them. 

In contrast, she underpays assistant Yokoshima because he appears to be a subservient minion and even implies that she gives him fringe benefits whenever he peeps at her in the bath-- though when he goes so far as to touch her, or even to make lewd propositions, she beats the hell out of him. And yet, unlike similar serials like LOVE HINA and ZERO'S FAMILIAR, there's no internal rationale for keeping the fractious couple together. If Mikami is really repelled by Yokoshima's attentions, why doesn't she just fire him and find another cheap, horny teenager? 

 During the first two years of the feature, most of the stories were adapted to the aforementioned tv show-- though not the one entitled "Dad's Here." At the opening of the story, Mikami's second assistant Okinu, a naive young ghost, teases the sexy exorcist about being "gloomy" in Yokoshima's absence. Mikami asserts that she doesn't take the youth seriously because he's a lust-filled "brat" while she's a mature woman. Yet she hedges her bets by stating that if he ever did become a real man, she might reconsider her verdict. The rest of the story, however, just shows Yokoshima messing up as usual.      

Now, while the manga-artist Takashi Shiina doesn't expend a lot of time on a backstory for Yokoshima, the story "Love Needs Its Time" provides some basic info on how high-schooler Mikami became a superior ghostbuster by training under a Christian exorcist. In addition, Shiina is careful to show that the priest is too idealistic to ask for remuneration. Yet his student Mikami is nothing like her sensei, being exceptionally desirous of making lots of money once she sets up her own ghost-sweeping business. But Shiina doesn't tell the reader why she came to be this way: a fairly unique admixture of heroism and avarice. 

Shiina does bring up the subject intermittently, though. One story shows how an enemy de-ages Mikami into a little girl, after which even Mikami's sensei remarks on the differences between the cute munchkin and her money-hungry adult self. In my next post, I'll show how I think Shiina built up some of Mikami's psychology in order to render a partial answer, guiding his readers to get the effect he Shiina desired.

ADDENDUM: To relate the SWEEPER series to the "thymotic and epithymotic" categories I introduced in THYMOS BE THE PLACE PT. 4, Mikami's repeated clobberings of Yokoshima would be "epithymotic" if she were only concerned with defending herself. However, if she has, even on a subconscious level, started regarding Yokoshima as a potential mate-- in the event that he can become a "true man"-- then her assaults can be deemed "thymotic," in that she's trying to interact with him on a soul-to-soul level, even if she still wants to be "on top."

A newer meditation on a 1996 sequence, "Death Zone," provides the first direct testimony by Mikami as to why she hired Yokoshima, because he was "funny."

  

INNOCENT SADISTS, BROADLY PT. 2

 I'm reasonably sure that I've only used my term "innocent sadist" for fictional characters who commit sadistic acts, or express sadistic sentiments, while giving the impression that they are innocent of sadistic intentions. All of my earlier examples, both in earlier essays, in the two recent THYMOS BE DE PLACE essays, and in the previous INNOCENT SADISTS installment, have concerned characters in slapstick comedies. A couple of counter-examples, Sakura and Hatta Mari, committed their violent acts for reasons I judged be epithymotic, and thus not true sadism. I also noted that Kelly Bundy did not initially conform to the "innocent sadist" trope but eventually developed to become one, so that the majority of her acts were thymotic in that she either explicitly or implicitly took pleasure in their damaging results.

However, there are other forms of innocent sadist, and the one I'll address here might be termed the traumatized psycho-killer, who may have started out as an innocent but who is changed by trauma into a murderer, either for epithymotic or thymotic reasons.

The 1964 STRAIT JACKET provides an example of the epithymotic type. Murderess Carol Harbin appears to have suffered childhood trauma as a child, when her mother Lucy murdered both her unfaithful husband/Carol's father and the husband's lover. Years later, after Lucy is released from an asylum, Carol sets plans to get revenge on Lucy by making her appear to have committed new murders, but in such a way that one of the victims is her fiancee's mother, thus ending the mother's opposition to Carol's marriage to her rich suitor. In my review I acknowledged some ambivaence in STRAIT JACKET's script, asking, "is Carol really acting for sheer gain, or is she recapitulating these images as a sort of repetition-compulsion?" At present, though, since there's no indication that Carol would have gone through so much trouble to execute serial murders just in order to frame her mother, I'd say that gain was a primary motive for her repetitious murder-rampage, though her early trauma predisposed her toward crime.

 With the titular character of the 1981 OLIVIA, we see a psycho-killer more informed by a need for thymotic satisfaction-- and, oddly enough, her need takes the form of both an "accommodation narrative" and a "confrontation narrative" in one. As a child, Olivia witnesses her hooker-mother slain by a berserk customer, one who's apparently not caught and punished. Having been told by her mother to play the part of Rapunzel in the fairy tale, Adult Olivia finds her "prince" in an abusive husband, which suggests her trying to accommodate herself to a world where men have superior physical power over women. However, Olivia has an episode where she subconsciously dresses up as a prostitute, lures a john into a compromising position, and then confronts her buried demons by killing him for the actions of her mother's murderer. Olivia only does this once, and then happens to meet a "real prince," with whom she has a brief affair-- also a confrontation with the force of negative masculinity represented by both her mother's killer and her husband. The two men in Olivia's life contend, and both the husband and wife disappear in one way or another. The Real Prince eventually meets Olivia again, who has tried to lose herself in a second identity. But the evil prince comes back into Olivia's life too, and this time the victim of trauma gets the chance to extirpate at least one source of her anxieties. From the way the film cuts off after Olivia has her revenge, one might assume that this victim of trauma actually finds thymotic closure in murdering the right target this time and so doesn't go on to further killing-sprees like so many of her kindred. Of course, those that keep killing for satisfaction also fall into the thymotic category for the most part.                  

THYMOS BE DE PLACE PT. 5

 I decided I needed to follow up PART 4 with a couple of variations on the thymotic/epithymotic word-pair-- but this time, taken from American rather than Japanese cartoons.

In my previous writings on thymos, I've drawn to some extent on Thomas Hobbes in defining what I now call "epithymotic" as actions taken for either "gain" or "security." The anime example I used in Part 4 was that of the character Sakura in URUSEI YATSURA, who repeatedly beats up Ataru to defend her personal security vis-a-vis not having him paw her. But a "gain" example can be found in the 1944 Warner Brothers short PLANE DAFFY, written by Warren Foster and directed by Frank Tashlin.

PLANE is set in a cartoon version of WWII, in which the noble American warbirds are having their plans stolen by the insidious Axis spy Hatta Mari. Hatta romances naive flyers into giving her their secret plans and then convinces them to kill themselves. The high command sends their best "woman-hating" pilot into enemy territory, Daffy Duck. Daffy is ambushed by Matta, who almost does melt him into a pool of goo with her ardor. However, Daffy rallies, giving as good as he got, and then tries to escape with the secret plans. 

As he tries to escape, Matta tries to kill Daffy in various ways, failing only because he's such a darn-fool duck. He swallows the secret paper to keep it out of her hands, but she seizes him and sticks him in an X-ray machine so that she and her leaders can see what's written on the paper. The big conclusion is that the secret is no secret, but the point is that all Matta's actions are oriented upon "gain," the gain of military advantage for her allies. There's no indication that she enjoys the activities of killing or seducing for their own sake, so all of her gain-focused violence would be epithymotic in nature.

Another flavor of the opposite category, the thymotic, appears in the 1952 Daffy Duck short THE SUPER SNOOPER (reviewed here), written by Tedd Pierce and directed by Robert McKimson. The flavor I described in Part 4 focused on the general pattern of Lum of URUSEI YATSURA. Whereas Sakura whales on Ataru to protect her own security, Lum does so because she's in love with him and wants to bend him to her will. This is a particular form of thymotic activity I've previously labeled "megalothymia," indicating that the person exercising his/her will seeks supremacy (though it's suggested that if Ataru settled down to be a good husband, Lum would become a good wife-- or at least, a better one than, say, Peg Bundy). 

The opposite flavor to megalothymia goes by the name of "isothymia," and it applies to the violence unleashed upon Daffy by the statuesque seductress, "The Body." Isothymia strives to bring about equality of recognition, and in SNOOPER's parody of gumshoe-fiction, Daffy-- a very different, often-self-defeating form of the duck than we see in PLANE-- barges into The Body's home in the belief that a murder's been committed. Because The Body comes on to Daffy, he assumes she's trying to cover up a murder she committed, so he starts tossing out wild scenarios about How She Dunnit.

 The Body is of course no more complex than Hatta Mari, but the script gives the former a little more nuance. The Body keeps trying to make whoopee with the detective, but he just keeps trying to justify his fantasies by setting up murder-methods and casting himself as the murder-victim. Of the four gags in the short, only the last one shows The Body lying back and letting Daffy half-kill himself. The other three culminate with the Body either shooting Daffy or dropping a heavy weight on his head. In two of the three, she seems slightly shocked when she accidentally precipitates violence on him, and in the third-- the rifle-scenario shown above-- the artists draw her in a stoic mode, neither pleasured nor troubled by her action of shooting Daffy a dozen times. The overall suggestion is that she's just patiently indulging the goofy gumshoe's fantasies, until she finally gets a chance to explain that he's in the wrong house. Prior to the revelation, she's only mildly protested her innocence, and when he finally agrees with her, she uses that as an excuse to go after him again-- and he flees, because he has no (theoretical) defense against the menace of wedded bliss. The Body does not show any passion to hurt Daffy, but she's willing to accomodate his fantasies if it keeps him close to her. And so the Daffy Duck (of this isolated short, at least) meets the matrimonial fate Lum threatens Ataru with, but without the implication that the guy's better half will always get her way with the help of electric shocks.            

INNOCENT SADISTS, BROADLY PT. 1

 

In THYMOS BE DE PLACE PT. 4, I gave two examples of my new categories, thymotic and epithymotic, as they applied to two characters from Rumiko Takahashi's URUSEI YATSURA venting slapstick violence on the same character, Ataru. One character committed violence in self-defense, to stave off Ataru's attentions, which I labeled epithymotic because it was not concerned with anything but self-maintenance. The other committed violence with the purpose of forcing Ataru to give her recognition as his proper wife and only love, and because it involved recognition, I labeled the action thymotic. The same thymotic characterization applies to all of Lum's actions, even those in which she takes the role of "innocent sadist," causing Ataru harm or humiliation without seeming to have any conscious intention to do so. 

I've most often used my term "innocent sadist," though, when analyzing episodes of the Fox teleseries MARRIED WITH CHILDREN. While I didn't feel like surveying every episode to support my views on the show's use of slapstick violence, I checked online summaries for the first two seasons of MWC to see how often, and in what ways, the two female characters acted the part of "dommes" to the male "subbes" of the series.      

The PILOT, while much less extreme in its use of violence than the later seasons, sets some ground rules. From the start, it's evident that Peg Bundy enjoys running husband Al down, so any time she causes him harm or humiliation, it's a given that she really means to do so, no matter what protests she may voice. In PILOT, she moves Al's alarm clock and puts a cactus in its place, and when he questions her capricious actions, she makes a lame excuse. For the length and the breadth of the series, Peg is a thymotic torturer: she does it because it gives her a buzz, not for any reasons of gain or security.

Kelly isn't quite as obvious at the beginning of things. However, for the first two seasons, the writers didn't really do that much with either Kelly or Bud. I imagine this was because the two young actors playing them were somewhat unknown quantities, while the two adult leads, O'Neill and Sagal, were the primary stars. Most of the stories in the first two seasons revolve around Al and Peg, or with their actions with their upper-middle class neighbors Steve and Marcy Rhodes. However, the PILOT does establish a degree of animosity between Kelly and Bud, though oddly, Bud's the aggressor. In one scene, he comes up behind Kelly, seated on the couch, and mimes cutting her throat with a rubber knife. Nothing more is said about the incident; Bud is nothing more than a typical annoying little brother. He annoys Kelly a couple more times in the first season-- he steals her diary twice-- before she really retaliates. And when she does so in the seventh episode-- the one entitled MARRIED WITHOUT CHILDREN-- the action goes a little beyond the mundane level of slugging him or giving him a wedgie. After it's established that Kelly's blasting out music from speakers in her room, Bud yells that "Kelly's tied my face to the speaker" in order to torture him with the racket. No reason for her action is stated.

Season Two doesn't have much more Kelly-sadism than the first season. The most notable episode is BORN TO WALK, the eighth one, in which Kelly gets her license to drive, and repeatedly threatens to turn her brother into "car meat." She never does anything overtly violent at this point in the show, though a much later episode had her run down her motorcycle-riding dad with a car. However, in the same episode Peg claims that at some earlier time Kelly shaved Bud's head, forcing him to celebrate Halloween that year by posing as TV detective Kojak. BORN TO WALK, though, seems to be the only second-season episode with that level of sadism.             

I won't go into all the ensuing seasons, but I would say that Season Three finally sets the Kelly-Bud relationship in stone, and to a mutual escalation in hostilities throughout the series, usually with Kelly getting the upper hand. THE CAMPING SHOW has Al, Steve, and Bud trapped in a rustic cabin with Peg, Marcy and Kelly, who are filled with hatred for men by their synchronized periods. At one point, the three women are alone in the cabin with Bud, and Kelly suggests, "Let's pretend Bud's a man and kill him." A little later, THE BALD AND THE BEAUTIFUL has Kelly torment Bud by pranking him that he's losing his hair, and when she asks Peg if she minds, Peg delivers the classic line, "No, that's why we had him!" From then on, even on those occasions when Bud provokes Kelly to retaliation, none of Kelly's actions can be considered epithymotic, because she, like her mother, enjoys male suffering far too much.          

THYMOS BE DE PLACE PT. 4

The last installment of THYMOS BE DE PLACE appeared in 2009, while the last time I wrote about Frank Fukuyama's magisterial application of Plato's "thymos" concept in a theoretical manner was 2015's MEETINGS WITH RECOGNIZABLE PRESENCES, which focused upon Fukuyama's extrapolation of "recognition" as the process by which human beings experience the abstract faculty of *thymos.*  

In contrast, the concept of literary sadism has continued to crop up fairly consistently over the years, but only in THYMOS Part 3 did I draw explicit parallels between the operations of thymos as described by Fukuyama (who does not address sadism in any way in END OF HISTORY) and George Bataille's formulation that the world of Sadean thrills belonged in the category of non-productive, esteem-related human activities.

Bataille's primary insight for literary criticism is the image he uses to present eroticism and violence as equivalent phenomena: "sensuous frenzy" (p. 192). Whether this adequately describes real-life sex and violence does not matter for the purposes of literary criticism, but I suggest that Bataillean "frenzy" does describe how fictional sex and violence impact upon the majority of readers. Bataille doesn't substantially address literature in EROTISM, except for the sensualized violence-scenarios presented by the Marquis de Sade, but elsewhere he makes the trope of "transgression against the norm" his hallmark, so I feel secure in adapting his terms for the purpose of literary criticism.

What EROTISM makes clear is that even though one may be experiencing fantasies of sex and/or violence through an intellectualized medium (Plato's "copy of a copy"), this is still the essence of a human (as opposed to animal) activity. He does not, as noted before, directly relate this to the subject of thymos, but because fiction is not the "real thing," it is not eros in the raw. Rather, it's closer to the nature of thymos in the same way that the sexual conqueror's boast, his tall tale of sexual conquest, represents thymotic rather than erotic stimulation.        

 

Most of my descriptions of sensual violence in literature have also taken the Bataillean POV. However, I have in various essays specified that there is a distinction between COMMON AND UNCOMMON EVIL. In short, the common form of evil is people doing bad things to another for the purpose of either gaining or protecting some concrete possession, even one's own bodily integrity, while the uncommon form is motivated primarily by the desire of esteem-based recognition. 

Thymos, as mentioned in previous essays, is one of the constituent parts of Plato's tripartite soul, which one Wiki essay sums up thusly:

• nous ("intellect", "reason"), which is or should be the controlling part which subjugates the appetites with the help of thumos.
• thumos ("passion"), the emotional element in virtue of which we feel joy, amusement, etc. (the Republic IV, 439e);
• epithumia ("appetite", "affection"), to which are ascribed bodily desires;

It now occurs to me that if the "uncommon form of evil" aligns with what Plato calls "spiritedness," then the "common form of evil" would align with the concept of "appetite." Further, though I'm in no way an expert on Greek language, I note that the word "epithumia" uses the same word-element found in "thumos," but qualified by the prefix "epi-." There are several contexts for the prefix "epi-" but here it seems to agree with this one:

1. Secondary: a consequence, by-product, additional, or lesser version.

   epilanguage is a second language used regularly for some purpose or purposes, epiphenomenon is an activity, process, or state that is the result of another, epitoxoid is a toxoid that generates less of an immune response than an original one

This would seem to accord with many if not all Greek oppositions between "appetite' and "passion," where the former is of lesser philosophical consequence than the latter.   

And now, with all these considerations in mind, I want to specify that only the "uncommon" operations of sadism are thymotic in nature, while the "common" ones are epithymotic.

This formulation may have a number of applications but I'll wrap up with just two, both from the manga URUSEI YATSURA, one of my "Domme Coms."   

Now, in URUSEI the male lead Ataru is the one who most often suffers comical outpourings of violence. However, some of these violent attacks are *epithymotic,* in that the attacker is retaliating in order to protect himself or herself. For instance, when Ataru is in full horndog mode, and seeks to grope a woman like Sakura, he gets slapped, punched, kicked or otherwise battered. Throughout the series Sakura has absolutely no romantic interest in Ataru, so whenever she hits him, it's for the "common" purpose of maintaining her bodily integrity by repelling unwanted attentions. This may not be exactly what Plato had in mind with respect to "appetite," but the correlation makes sense when seen through the lenses of Bataille and Fukuyama.

In contrast, the reigning champion for torturing Ataru is Lum, the alien wench who falls in love with him and demands that he reciprocate. As extreme as her actions are, they flow from a desire for thymotic recognition; that Ataru should recognize Lum as his one true love. Of course, if Ataru wasn't capable of feeling love for Lum, his continued tortures would just become dull, but author Takahashi is careful to keep hinting that on some level Ataru does reciprocate. However, he refuses to capitulate to Lum's attacks, and so continues to flirt with numerous other women, even though he has almost no chance with any of them and usually gets served just as Sakura serves him. So all of Lum's attacks, or her stratagems to otherwise manipulate her reluctant lover, flow from *thymotic* passion, which, while still comic, embodies the uncommon nature of love rather than common motivations like gain or self-protection.  

If and when I write further about these concepts, I'll probably cease to use any of Bataille's terms for these opposed operations and invoke "thymotic and epithymotic" instead. And as for what if any function Plato's concept of "reason" might play in these literary domains, that's a subject for some other essay.