At the beginning of the year, I finished watching Demon Slayer on Netflix (based on the manga by Koyoharu Gotōge) and read Nuigurumi to shaberu hito wa yasashii (People who talk to stuffed animals are nice by Ao Omae), which I'd been curious about since last year. Comparing the two works, I’ve spent the beginning of this year thinking about fear.
In Nuigurumi to shaberu hito wa yasashii, fear means acting with indifference. For example, this book depicts a sensibility wherein telling someone you like that you like them, or being told “I like you,” feels like sudden, intrusive “violence” and ends up hurting someone.
As I read those parts, I remembered a grad student I met a few years back. He told me:
“Confessing your feelings for someone is annoying, so I don’t do it.”
For him it was “annoying” rather than “violence,” so it’s different, but I sort of understood where he was coming from—I had the same sense inside me. I approached Nuigurumi to shaberu hito wa yasashii with that partial understanding, but something really bothered me.
I don’t like getting hurt myself, and I don’t like recklessly hurting other people, either. With that clue in mind, I decided I wanted to get to know the world of this novel a bit better, so I thought about it.
Hurting. Hurting people is awful. That’s for sure. But if there exists kindness as a reaction to the fear of feeling or causing pain, maybe it’s not actually kindness at all?
An action that stems from the fear of “I might hurt someone” may just be lacking in love, I thought. This isn’t a critique of the novel, just the sensibility portrayed in it.
Separating The Things You Feel From You Feeling Them
I might get hurt. I might hurt someone—and that’s frightening. It’s a normal fear for a person to have. In fact, it’s so normal that we may miss something. What is being overlooked? Well, the person themself sees their passive behavior stemming from fear as “kindness.” That is, they are afraid, but they don’t see the fear.
The fear ends up fusing with you. You end up thinking that you are what you feel.
When that happens, who is it who is frightened? Not you. It’s another person inside of you. Someone who has been closer to you than anyone else for many years, built up through your experiences—an other you.
That other senses the act of liking directed at someone else as violence. But if the feeling that maybe your crush will find it violent stems from fear, then you’re not afraid of the right thing.
Might it not be that what we should really fear is allowing ourselves to remain so ignorant? Being delicate, or easily hurt, doesn’t guarantee richness of sensibility.
What Demon Slayer Gets Right
I think that easily wounded–ness describes one part of this era’s sensibilities. So it’s interesting, then, that Demon Slayer, a work that approves of the weak getting stronger, has so many fans. It strikes me as a proper Bildungsroman.
Kindness is only born of love, not fear. Protagonist Tanjiro Kamado manifests that with his entire body. And actually, the ones who turn into demons are those who, though seeking tenderness, are swallowed up by the trauma caused by their fear.
Couldn’t recognizing that the fear inside us is not ourselves but an “other” be a way to realize our own ignorance? Thoughts and actions that stem from fear are different from those that stem from love, and we must confront the source of our fear.
Confronting fear doesn’t necessarily mean that the weakness of trembling in it will disappear, or that you’ll never be hurt again. The weakness won’t go away. As long as you’re alive, getting hurt is inescapable.
People are weak and fragile. Thus, they get hurt. There’s no reason to fear that—it’s just the simple truth.
Translated by Emily Balistrieri
Social preview image © Koyoharu Gotōge/ Shueisha, Aniplex