Sometimes I get embarrassed about having lived with my cultural roots in subculture. I was born in an era when what might have been called “mainstream culture” had vanished, so I’d also like to protest that I had no choice.
Ordinary people only ever exist as “sub” in the first place. Stirred by post-war Japan’s brief moment of prosperity, we were bourgeois in mood only, and, anxious that our substance didn’t match that appearance, we were hungry for culture; thus, unable to enjoy popular media, we humbled it by calling it “sub”—I know that. But I can’t help but feel ashamed that I’m still watching what we used to call denki kamishibai (electric picture stories)—that is, anime.
I went to see Evangelion: 3.0+1.0 Thrice Upon a Time. It has been 26 years if you count the TV broadcast, which means I have spent half of my life following this story through to the end. After such a long time together, what I think is that you could abstract all the backstory, foreshadowing, and so forth, and I wouldn’t mind. As tales of the heart have been and will be, I suppose this was a story about the still-unsolved nature or business of being human.
We’ve recounted conflicts between parents and children since the age of myths. It’s an inevitable issue that comes with being born and living; everyone must solve it for themselves, but we project onto others and suffer because of it. The fact that Hikaru Utada, who is the daughter of Keiko Fuji, sings the theme song, is emblematic of this as well.
At the end of the conversation Gendo Ikari had with his son Shinji in this film, where did he find himself? Did he succeed in his plan to make humanity one by returning the whole race to nothingness? Or did he fail in his plan through the resolution of his inner conflict? I felt like the ending could be taken either way.
The desire to find a path to unity in order to heal the sadness of losing someone you love was familiar to me.
My mother died when I was 17. Though she had an incurable illness, she lived those 17 years. My father’s grief was profound, and at her cremation, without a care for who was watching, he scooped up a bone and ate it. Watching him crunch on it, I thought, Well, I can’t compete with that. Was it love or attachment? Either way, I didn’t feel it that strongly.
Four years later, my father remarried. To me, it seemed that he struggled to endure the loneliness of this life. And I understood that. It’s his life, after all.
Following the marriage, under the influence of his second wife, he became a Jehovah’s Witness. I objected to that. It’s not that religion is bad. I just couldn’t forgive him for choosing fundamentalism. My mother’s funeral was performed in the Sōtō Zen style. What’s wrong with Zen? I told him, “Don’t go trying to fill the holes in your heart with that stuff.”
And this is what he said to me:
“Don’t you want your dead mother to be revived?”
Ohh, I see. Left speechless, I fell silent.
After Armageddon, the dead will be revived and given eternal life. If we suppose that eternal life is impossible for bodies of flesh, does that mean, then, that rather than being revived as living flesh, we would be thrown into an eternal space where we will never part from each other again—that is, where we become one existence from which it is impossible to separate?
That eternity is timelessness, and the hopes my father placed in revival struck me as a reckless attempt to find some peace by returning everything to nothingness.
A few years ago, while interviewing him about his life thus far, he murmured, “My life has been pointless.” He built a fortune within a single generation and lost it. But apparently he didn’t find his life interesting despite that.
I sensed that the emptiness he felt stemmed less from the loss of the assets than from the loss of his wife. I wondered about the standing of his current wife. But he must have had a void that couldn’t be filled no matter how he tried.
Still, does he sincerely hope to trade his emptiness for eternal life? Gendo Ikari projected his conflict onto his son and neglected his conversation with himself. Perhaps my father hasn’t confronted himself enough, either.
At the end of the year, my father broke a femur. Miraculously, his condition seems to have improved, but as his spinal stenosis worsens, he’s having more and more trouble walking. I’ll probably be returning home more often going forward. I need to try to talk to him so that he can have conversations with himself during the time he has left.
Post originally in Japanese March 20, 2021
Translated by Emily Balistrieri