I've been gone ages I know. Probably can't blame that on being busy, insofar as I could have kept up with this, but chose to be as lazy as possible on the weekends. I can't promise I'm getting back into the flow (after all, an amazing two weeks almost, have slipped by since I finished Angela Carter's The Magic Toyshop, and set it aside, brimming with highlight tabs sticking out in between the pages, to write about for my series). I haven't done that yet, but I did write something a while back, which I meant to post sooner; I was just a bit afraid to. This one is directed more to the mostly defunct and inactive Manga-lovers group to which I also belong, but Limelite told me when I signed up for this slot in the Readers and Book Lovers group that there would be space for me to write about manga on occasion if that was what struck me.
Anyway, this week's presentation in The Magic Theater is...
I have read many mangas. Some interesting. Some great. More than a few that were awful. And so it is saying something that Boy Alice in Wonderland, done by Kobayashi Tamayo, is a strange but fascinating work that manages to stand out from the crowd in its uniqueness. As some readers have described it, and as its own conclusion (a short essay on Freud and Jung and the nature of art as a form of hypnotherapy), nods to, the story’s structure is grounded in the psychological; not the direct, matter of fact narratives that readers are accustomed to, but the spiraling, indirect method of symbols. There is so much in this work that I’m sure I've missed most of it, and the medium seems uniquely well-suited to the surrealism of the psyche.
That said, there is still a line of information that can be gleaned from the work; plot and narrative aren’t absent, even if they aren’t clearly sitting out on a silver platter with a sign above them saying "Eat me." When reading the work it's important to understand the fragmentation of reality (in essence, the sense of using the famed Wonderland motif), and the important pieces of the puzzle are crucial, as they provide the proper angle with which to view the work and its symbolism.
Some things are clear. Arisu Kudou the titular “Alice” is from the real world, his world is real, in the sense of being the manga's "real world". However in this kind of story one cannot rely on reality or plot to understand everything, as both are unreliable and subjective, which is the crucial factor in this manga. Arisu (Alice rendered into Japanese) gets on a bus, which, after a wild ride, takes him to an empty field where the eponymous bus driver vanishes. Upon finding a young, handsome man with white rabbit ears, (the White Rabbit), Arisu asks for help, introducing himself by name, and, his name being pronounced the same as Alice in Japanese, is taken up as her replacement by the White Rabbit for his liege, the Prince of Hearts.
Note these are all mundane details of plot, but the point remains the same: at the Prince’s palace Arisu tries on a wedding dress and is enchanted by his appearance. This is the axis that the entire story turns on. From this point onward the extended dreamlike sequences, (bringing in strange and distorted timelines), are each fundamentally Arisu's explorations—tepid at first—of his own femininity. In a manner, the biggest question that readers seem to have with this manga, based on the responses I read—is Arisu a boy or a girl—is that yes, he is a boy.
I find that within the manga there are statements that provide key details to understanding and appreciating it, and in this case, in chapter two, the real Alice (the mysterious figure who can wander through the dreamworlds and advises Arisu early on) declares, “[…] Your thoughts become reality, just like in a dream.” And so the back and forth scale begins to move on the Arisu's gender identity, within a dreamworld where his thoughts can bring change to his physical being. In every subsequent dream-world sequence, Arisu appears in women’s clothing, (something he complains about, but which the reader must judge to be the result of Arisu's own thoughts), and by Chapter 4, is shown with a woman’s body; more than that his appearance outside the pure dream—the pure and fluid symbolism and awkward, groundless sense of position (from the narrator’s position) that the manga does so well with Wonderland sequences—changes as well.
His transition goes like this:
This is him in at the beginning of the first chapter. He has an ordinary, boyish appearance.
This is him at the end of chapter two, and his appearance is still decidedly masculine, even though he is wearing a sailor outfit, a pop culture expression of girlish femininity, (which he, when finding himself wearing it, says thereon, ‘But it’s not that bad’).
Now that is him by the tenth chapter, covering his chest defensively, his frame decidedly smaller and softer, and his hair much longer. The unreliability of reality in this series (the fact that in this story, the reader is not supposed to follow the plot in a literal sense, but rather the more fluid and less precise expression of the psychological sentiment), comes into play here, as what we see must be interpreted as self-visualization. In this light, what happens is Arisu’s gradual change of self-image. Chapter 13 has an important scene where a more feminine than ever Arisu walks into the living room to see his family looking through their photo album. He joins them, but soon asks, “Why aren’t there any pictures of me?”
Later in that same chapter, he and the Prince (who has followed him into his everyday life from Wonderland, and continues to be intertwined with the most of the sequences in some way) get dragged off into another dream world where he slips, the Prince tries to catch him, and both end up falling into water—which is itself an obvious and important bit of symbolism (falling actually being a common and recurring motif in the manga) that, according to Freud meant considering giving into sexual urges and impulses, and in broader theories, also reflects insecurity and a lost sense of self-esteem amidst those insecurities.
Right after this scene, the Prince gives Arisu CPR, and affirms that Arisu's body is female, saying, “You’ve always been a woman,” (i.e. even born as a man, this is who you truly were). And for the first time Arisu seems to accept this as reality, epitomized by his menstruation, perhaps the most conclusive and irrefutable symbol of his own womanhood and the end of the last, small bits of self-denial. Viewing this as taking place in the dream world where his thoughts control reality, it means that Arisu-the-boy’s self-image is now completely that of a woman.
In a way, Chapter 13 represents a culmination and an epistemological keynote to all the manga's themes and ideas, and the plots therein. At the end of the chapter, returning home from his crucial foray into dreamlands, where femininity and his attraction to the Prince both become accepted and finalized, he returns home to a mother that doesn’t recognize and berates him for entering a stranger’s house so casually, (now in the “real-world” again—note the loose use of that term—but still with the feminine body and appearance of the dream sequence), telling him to leave. Here, his male self comes into the room and asks what’s going on; we see Arisu as he looked in the beginning; taller, with shorter hair and a masculine frame.
Self-visualization is key here. Arisu doesn’t visualize himself as that boy anymore, so the image, which comes from a world where he never got on the bus that took him to Wonderland, never got drawn into this exploration of his gender, is at heart an externalization of himself, since he can no longer represent himself with this image because it doesn’t represent what is in his heart.
There are some odd categorizations attached to this manga, written in 1993 and with many dated artistic elements that give it its distinct sense; that which belongs to the early boom phase mangas. I wouldn’t declare any of it fan service, nor berate it’s nudity for sexism; indeed to do so is unfair and illegitimate. Why? Because Arisu is the only character with agency. If there’s a shot of him nude, it’s to emphasize this agency in his choosing a female form, including the various traumas and symbolic anxieties that come about in subsequent dream sequences, including wolves, (a symbol in many other tales of womanhood, including several by noted British magical realist author, Angela Carter). The nudity in this work is mild, confined entirely to faintly vague frontal nudity that is always taken in conjunction with a view of Arisu’s entire body, including his face, and emphasizes the awkwardness and newness to which he approaches this manifestation of his internal femininity.
Even the Prince, the obvious-named Prince of Hearts, is a figure whose character (though not appearance) changes in certain sequences, and whose actions in any case seem to reflect the evolving inner desires of Arisu, (who has by this point lost his sense of place, having now no home, no family, and uncertain gender identity), meaning he lacks true agency as well and is more a symbol of male attraction for the transgender Arisu.
The manga is special because it is one of the few of its type that don’t descend into repulsive sex humor and objectification of women given the all too common plot trope of gender-shift, but rather does the opposite. Kobayashi Tamayo’s statements at the end really are conclusive and conductive to the over all tone and intent of the piece,
“Today we have something called “Collage Therapy,” which one could say is a variation of “Hakoniwa Therapy.” The technique here consists of assembling pictures in an attempt to create a metaphor for a certain mood.”
This is why I view the story as an excellent and illusive, a satisfyingly metaphorical and masterfully surreal exploration of a transgender teenage boy; as the author’s endnotes say, the metaphors are used to create a certain mood, not necessarily a clear story. And the manga, I must note, ends in cold, snowy dream sequence, on dark notes of insecurity, isolation, and uncertainty; a thoroughly ambiguous ending-note, one that suggest the long and uncertain future Arisu has ahead of him.
Through such surreal methods, Tamayo manages to instill in the reader the same sense of anxiety, misplacement, and unsure footing that the story’s character feels. The awkwardly named “Boy Alice in Wonderland” is thusly one of the most interesting, intelligent, and satisfying works of manga I have come across, one worthy of much more and much closer observation than I have given it, and containing mountains of symbols that tell a large part of the story line, which exists in tone more than plot. I would recommend it for anyone searching for something outside their normal range of materials, and especially to manga readers who want something a little deeper and more satisfying the ordinary, light-fare they come across.
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jw
Lastly, as a poster, I'd appreciate it if you, my reader, voted in my poll, as it gives me the best count of how many different users have read something I've put up. As a blogger, it is always nice to know that I am reaching people, so I like to have some accurate count of readership.