Iwa ni Hana

This has to be the funniest series I came across since Usavich – only the comedy is obviously a camouflage for a deeper message about life at large and a prelude to a bittersweet ending.

I think I made a new year wish some years ago that Director Shinbo Akiyuki (新房昭之) would make a come-back artistically and quit wasting his tremendous talent on mindless projects. I am pleased to see that Arakawa Under the Bridge is the challenge he undertook and passed with flying colours. I liked the story so much that after watching all 13 episodes of the first season, I also checked out up to Vol. 10 of the manga by Nakamura Hikaru (中村光), and below are some desultory comments with spoilers.

Arakawa Under the Bridge (荒川アンダー ザ ブリッジ)

1) At the very beginning, the story struck me as being a clever mix of:

• Little Mermaid - Nino rescued Kou’s from drowning in the river and asked him to make her fall in love.
• Kaguya-hime / tennyo tales – Nino has bad memory and may forget Kou if they are parted only for a day. This may foreshadow that Nino will likewise forget Kou when she departs from earth – as tennyo are traditionally said to forget about their earthly life the moment they regain their robe of feathers.
• Tannhäuser - A knight spent a year in a subterranean realm called Venusberg, where he worshiped the goddess Venus. He left it behind to return to God, before eventually returning to Venusberg again. (By the way, Neil Gaiman also created a TV series called Neverwhere inspired by the Tannhäuser legend, and the story is similarly about an underworld of weird individuals.)

2) True to tradition, Kou is the modern reincarnation of the typical prince from a fairy tale – handsome, intelligent, generous and all that. At the same time, he is also an extreme representation of the Apollonian man. The sun god Apollo was Zeus’ favorite son and had achieved herculean feats even in his early youth. He embodies reason, knowledge, order and civilization in his person. I was not surprised that Kou is seen as good teacher by the residents under the bridge (the sun throws light on the darkness that is ignorance, so to speak). Naturally, one of Kou’s motives in becoming a teacher is to establish order and rationality by teaching the residents knowledge and common sense (Apollo is the law-giver – ie. he determines what is right).

You can see other Apollonian traits in Kou at the scene where Hoshi challenged Kou to compete in a musical contest to see whose music was more to Nino’s liking. The way the usually mild-mannered Kou was infuriated reminded me of many myths where the god Apollo was also challenged in music by a nobody and crushed his opponent without mercy.

Kou is challenged by Hoshi to compete in a musical contest.

Another scene is where Kou was infuriated at being called a himo (ie. a man without job and lives off a woman who loves him). There he also went on a tremendous rage in spite of his usual gentle self.

Here I have to digress a little to talk about about the myth where Apollo was challenged by Cupid in archery. Apollo mocked Cupid’s arrows, and of course, in the end Apollo is cursed by Cupid’s arrow in that love flees from him. Archery is really a symbol of achievement in the Apollonian mindset – you take aim (ie. set a goal) and you shoot (ie. achieve that goal). The Apollonian man is essentially a goal-setter and an overachiever, and work is a source of his pride. Likewise, the Apollonian man is prone to think that “love” is an achievement – you are “loved” because you have achieved A, B, C and can provide X, Y, Z. In other words, “love” is a prize in reward for hard work or a fair exchange of “things”.

Kou wakes from a nightmare where his father sings "himo, himo, himo..."

To come back to the story, this kind of “love” may sit within the circumference of Kou’s family motto of “never being in debt to others”. It takes a while to get to Kou’s brain that there is another kind of love happens without any reason and asks for return. It is interesting to note that later on in the manga, his asthma (which breaks out whenever he is in debt to others) is cured, but instead he gets a new “disease” where his heart and lungs are in pain whenever Nino is angry at him…

3) Now a word on “Venusberg” – or the world under the bridge in the story. On the surface, it is the polar opposite of the “normal” world above the bridge. To use a cliched phrase, there Kou learned to “connect to his femininity”. Later on in the manga series, he also acquired the Feminine Mind which he can channel into at will (don’t ask…).

What is less obvious is that the world under the bridge is probably a protected area where Nino is guarded. For all the nonsense that goes down under, you can see something like a hidden order. In the manga, there are hints that Kappa, Sister and Maria have been with Nino from the very beginning. I think Kappa is the mysterious man in kimono who was able to override the decision made high up in the government to evacuate the area. Sister and Maria are probably Nino’s hidden bodyguards. I think Nino is probably really from Venus, and my guess (since this is still not clear from as of the end of Vol. 10 of the manga) is that things are as they are under the bridge because she willed it. Moreover, her will is allowed to materialize because someone (not sure who yet) is interested in observing how a Venusian behaves in a natural environment. In other words, the world under the bridge is really a miniature Venus.

Kou in the shadow of his father

On a symbolic level, obviously Nino is very different from the Venus-archetype as we know it. In fact, Venusians are said to not fall in love in Vol. 10 in the manga. That may explain her only wish to Kou, which is to fall in love.

I can see the relationship between them heading at full speed towards a bittersweet end. Of course I am interested to see how the Venusian mystery stuff unfolds in the story, but I am more interested to see the impact of this love after they parted ways, which brings me to something I thought of on a more personal level -

4) This is purely a private observation based on my limited social circle of overachieving individuals across a wide age range. I have to say that the “Venusberg experience” is definitely the X Factor that determines how high these individuals reach later in life. The “Venusberg experience” typically follows this pattern: In the late teens or early twenties, an accomplished young person falls in love with an unlikely and impossible person, completely goes off the rail from the usual elite track for a year or two (typically against the protests of family and friends and teachers etc), gets burnt or betrayed in love in a really bad way, recovers, and heads back the elite track.

An emotional experience of that magnitude really mirrors a trip to the underworld you only read about in myths or legends. There are typically two things that happen after these young persons return to the elite track: either they completely spurn what they experienced in Venusberg and turn completely cynical, wolfish and one-sided, or they integrate that experience and emerge as a fuller personality of greater depth, vision and intuition into human feelings. It is usually the latter type that has greater success and are happier in the long term than the former type. I think Kou’s father is the former type, and it remains to be seen which type will Kou will turn into.

To put it another way: if Kou were my business rival, I would not be that afraid of him at all if he had never had that “Venusberg experience” and come out of it as the latter type.

(Note that the “Venusberg experience” may not come to just about everyone though.)

5) Other points of interest:

• I am curious to learn who was the skilled carpenter under the bridge who helped with building Sister’s church.
• The iron-masked were a lot taller when they appeared at Kou’s welcome party, then one of them shrunk, and finally both of them shrunk to their present height.

So what did you all think of the series so far? What are your guesses about the Venusian mystery and what do you think will happen at the end?