Deconstruction Monogatari —Part One—Geography
Michael Lee
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Deconstructionmonogatari
—NisiOisiN Palindrome—
其ノ壹
(Part One)
*In this series of articles we will examine key aspects of the SHAFT adaptation of NisiOisiN's dialogue-heavy Monogatari series of light novels. The anime is helmed by Akiyuki Shinbou, a director with a very distinct style, and the pairing of Shinbou and NisiOisin created something of a perfect storm of postmodernity.*
Anime World
Geography in anime is not constrained by the need for a physical location for the characters to move around in. Unlike a film where actors must work in a space that is limited by the physical world, anime geography allows characters to be filmed anywhere and at impossible angles to create perfect shots for a scene.
That is not to say that anime is devoid of logical, working geography. Within the confines of the anime world, the physical spaces align with the reality of the world in which they exist. Places are stable, and are imbued with cultural artifacts acting as shorthand to give us —and importantly, all characters in that world— a sense of familiarity with them. It is also a curious trend to see anime splitting the difference between the animeic and the real by rotoscoping real-world locations into anime scenes. That connection to the physical world serves to ground a series in an even more recognizable geography for the viewer; or perhaps further blurs the lines between the analog and digital, or the real and the copy.
However, the Monogatari series completely does away with any semblance of coherent geography. Places shown in the anime adaptation defy physics, are often unrealistic—or perhaps they're hyperreal—and are littered with signs, images, and signifiers that form a highly subjective reality. Monogatari is made up of a geography that comes almost entirely from the perspective of our protagonist, Araragi Koyomi.
If we read Monogatari in this way, there are a lot of theoretical avenues to explore, from place-identity and placelessness, to utopia and phenomenology.
Let's start with Araragi himself and work our way out into the world of Monogatari from there.
A World of My Own
One of the few places in this world that has stable geography is the Araragi home, and in particular, Koyomi's room. This space more or less resembles a normal Japanese high school student's room. Bed, desk, bookshelf, tv, radio, four walls—not a given in the Monogatari world—all make up a pretty standard room. If we are working with the idea that the geography of this world is constructed by Araragi himself, it should come as no surprise that his room feels like a place with some semblance of identity. This is a space that a teenage boy is going to spend a great deal of time in, and it stands to reason he is comfortable in that space and has some level of control over it. However, even stepping outside of his room, the Araragi household begins to contort. His sisters share a room, one with sky-high vaulted ceilings, a bunk bed with a spiral staircase, and an ornate cathedral-like window. The bathroom appears to be the size of an auditorium, with elaborate stained glass throughout. All of this fitting into what—from outside appearances—seems to be a normal-looking (but certainly sizeable), upper class Japanese home. we can only assume that the absurdist interiors of the home are simply a fanciful imagining of the space by Koyomi.
This being the case, we can look at this world through the lens of phenomenology, trying to make sense of Koyomi's lived experience and his relation to/movement through places while questioning the veracity of his perception—as only an outside observer of his story can do. Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos [APM for brevity] writes about the Utopia as being a "one-man dream" seen through one person's eyes only, invoking the Husserlian ego of spatial centralization. If we look at Koyomi's situation as being one of utopia as experienced through the one-man dream, the Monogatari world makes more sense. His perception of a place colors how it appears in the story, and the places he assigns more importance to in his dream geography appear to us as more coherent spaces. His bedroom, the bedrooms of some of the girls he visits, the places where he goes on dates—these places are clear to us, and are remembered as such by Koyomi. Other spaces, ones that either do not matter to Koyomi, or perhaps he has reservations about, have more exaggerated features, are often messier, or are devoid of any personality at all. These spaces have a geography that is less grounded in any kind of reality, and begin to take on the fantastical characteristics of Koyomi's lived experience of the space. Each space he remembers vividly also reflects the character the space belongs to. Now this could merely be that the character's design sense is a manifestation of their own personality traits, but it's seems too much a coincidence, given Koyomi's ego-driven geography at play here. Sengoku Nadeko's bedroom is bright, orderly, and uses an abundance of pink to appear stereotypically girly. This reflects exactly what Koyomi thinks of Nadeko, that she is cute and pure, the epitome of shōjo.
APM goes into detail about how a map is created egocentrically, with the body always at the center—in this case that body is Koyomi—thematizing the space in which he moves. Additionally, APM says "in order to overcome the overpowering sensation caused by the immersion to an unknown, unmastered space, the 'I' looks for a place to project its subjectivity amongst the hollowness of space." Now, if the Monogatari series is about Koyomi's journey into manhood, he is likely to find himself in "unknown, unmastered spaces" quite often, and as such, his ego is inclined to project a subjective identity or meaning to the places he goes. Thus, his idea of what Nadeko's room looks like reflects his own subjectivity. This applies as well to his actual girlfriend, Senjōgahara Hitagi, who deals with a fractured relationship to her family, and is working to better herself. Her home (initially described to Koyomi as a well-off building) appears to be a work in progress: the building covered in scaffolding, holes in the floor, and a missing wall that exposes her entire apartment to the outside world. This missing wall also allows the apartment to be framed much like a theatrical stage, perhaps reflecting Koyomi's feeling of anxiety towards the performative actions of being a boyfriend. Regardless, this represents another example where Koyomi's strong feelings seem to control the geography of the series, giving us a look into his ego writ large on the spaces he encounters.
A World of Unknown Nothingness
The flip side of this are the places that leave no impact on Koyomi, or ones where he feels less confident about projecting his subjectivity. More often than not, these spaces are left devoid of any meaning or cultural significance. They are non-places, they are placeless.
Spaces between the places that matter have, over time, lost their power to act as meaningful connectors, and as such, have entered the realm of the 'non-place.' The transformation of the urban landscape has led to an increased number of connections, but a decreased emphasis on how those connections interact with the social world. Spaces formed in this way become transactional, or instructional, as a means to an unspecified end. They are not built to enhance social connection. Marc Augé posits that these spaces—highways, airports, supermarkets—create solitary contracts with individuals, but with each individual who interacts with them, creating an unsettling solitude despite being in a space that may have many people.
The Monogatari series nails this feeling when we cut to B-roll of non-descript urban spaces, or our characters are seen moving through these spaces. City streets are devoid of people, and the street signs—objects in these non-places we make solitary contracts with—are multiplied to excess, overwhelming the screen—and presumably our characters' field of vision—hammering home the monotonous nothingness of the space. This is extrapolated further when we zoom out for wider views of the city. Often in the B-roll, Monogatari depicts large swaths of the city as mundane suburbia, featuring non-descript single-family homes, and identical apartment towers. John Agnew wrote of the 'commodification of place' that emerged in modernism as taking a romanticized approach to identity formation. This commodification led to devaluation of place, strangely enough. As the ideal sold to consumers of what kind of space a home should be was mass-produced ad naseum. This causes what Edward Relph describes as 'the casual eradication of distinctive places and the making of standardized landscapes that results from an insensitivity to the significance of place.'
If we take all this and apply it to reading the geography of Monogatari as coming from the subject position of Araragi Koyomi, it makes sense that the non-places he encounters are bland, monotonous, and often nonsensical. Snap cuts to empty roads to nowhere, signs repeat aggressively, stores don't have to be staffed by people. These things are all just background noise in his solipsistic utopia. The world presented in Monogatari comes from such an unreliable narrator that it is hard to establish any kind of grounding. It can only be seen as a geography centered around one person or else none of it makes sense—and even then, it’s still nonsense. A perfect distillation of this nonsense geography can be found in a short scene between Koyomi and the reanimated doll, Ononoki. They begin their conversation in front of a shopping mall/transit hub, cross one street and come across the unmanned corner store, which looks out upon a field of baobab trees. Moving through all of the geographic elements that make up Koyomi’s world in a mere five minutes. The mundane cityscape, the transactional non-place—though the corner store features a number of nostalgic signifiers that are surprisingly detailed for what is otherwise a non-place—and the fantastical subjective geography of the scenery. This is the utopia. This is one man’s dream.
The Real World
Think about how much we tune out in a day, especially with our eyes drawn towards devices that add to the solitude in the crowd. If we tried to construct a geography of our lived experience, the gaps would most certainly line up with the non-places described above. Could you give an accurate count of the number of intersections you pass on your commute? How about the signage along the way? We simply follow the instructions and put these spaces out of mind. As we drive past row upon row of tract housing, you rarely think about the people who live there, the repetition of seeing the same 3 or 4 house designs causes you to tune out completely. Monogatari is capturing that very essence, albeit in an abstract, postmodern way.
Conversely, when we think about the quirky subjectivity Koyomi applies to places he wishes to remember fondly, or as an important part of his identity, this somewhat hyperreal version of the real is the raison d'être of programs like Photoshop which can be used to enhance images to reflect our subjective tastes. Think of a photo you may have taken of wildflowers growing in a meadow. Likely, that lived experience was special, "oh the colors!" you'll rave, but the photo is shown to friends, and the colors don't pop like they did in your head. Photoshop steps in to help us impress upon the image our subjective feeling of that scene, creating a memory that reflects what we know we saw, despite the evidence to the contrary. It feels like this is what we see when we view Monogatari through Koyomi's lens. We get to see his lived experience of the world. How these spaces became the places committed to memory and how subjective his whole worldview might be.
The geography of Monogatari is one that plays with subjectivity, presenting us with the exaggerated and the truly mundane, set in stark contrast to hammer home how subjective a lived experience through spaces can be. Unlike most anime which prop up their geography as a beautiful fantasy world, Monogatari gives us both sides of the coin.
Michael Lee is the Editor of KOSATEN, and is currently pursuing research on Japanese fandom, with a particular focus on doujinshi and other fan-created media.
