1.
I don’t think there’s really much required reading for Mawaru Penguindrum – but Murakami’s Underground is probably the main one. And it’s less for the first portion with all the citizenry interviews, and more for the latter portion on the cult member’s interviews.
I can’t ever know what goes on in Ikuhara’s mind, but the immediate story that stood out to me was the one about the young female initiate into Aum Shinrikyo. I have a secret feeling that this was probably one of the primary inspirations that went into the show.
This young initiate joined simply to learn a bit more on meditation. She wasn’t one of those indoctrinated into Asahara’s harem, or one of those involved in the chemical and biological weapon processing. Most of the time she just focused on her meditation skills and helped around with the lives of others in their Satyam. From the interview, she’s a bit of a kook (believing in astral projection and that she was a man before reincarnating) – but otherwise harmless.
So when she found out that the entire place she was in was actually a psychotic cult, she was extremely surprised.
Anyway, after the Sarin Gas Attacks, she and 10 other cult members decided to use the cooking skills they learnt from their life in Aum Shinrikyo to start an honest bakery. Of course, once word got around that that was going on, the police started to hound them and people started to avoid them.
“The police still hang around outside our store. If people are about to go in, they stop them and check their ID, then warn them that the shop is run by Aum. I suppose they have to make a show of actually doing something. Sometimes the police ask for bread and we give them some. When they ask for more we tell them to pay for it.
“Sometimes we take cakes we’ve baked to people in the neighborhood and chat. They say things like, “We were afraid you people were up to no good, but it seems like you really are baking bread and cookies.” The media’s influence at work.”
Either way, that seems like the blueprint for the primary set-up of the Takakura family.
2.
One of the notable things about Underground is the fact that Murakami seems to have a greater voice in the latter half of the book. In the first half he’s just going through the recounts of various citizens who had their lives suddenly disrupted by the Sarin attacks. In the second half he starts to ask more questions, challenging beliefs, as if he’s actually intellectually engaged.
It probably helps that some of the cult members seems to have the same intellectual interests as Murakami. They’ll talk about how they were more or less lost in life and had to go through soul-searching and pouring through existential philosophy and all that – eventually taking the Raskolnikov path and deciding that society was too fucked up already. They chose asceticism. Murakami then makes the statement about the cult stemming from the darkness of Japan itself, rather than being its own intrinsic force of evil – which later became the main thematic crux of Penguindrum.
3.
The critique “it tries too many things from too many genres and fails” makes a false presumption. It presumes that a work in question has decided to actively engage with a so-and-so genre thoroughly. So it presumes that the goals of the work in question had to do with sustaining the standard of the genre in question.
An example where the critique is valid (in view of success): “Steins;Gate has a lengthy stretch that is definitively Slice of Life, and a lengthy stretch that is definitively Thriller Action. It has sustained the standards of both genres, and thus it can count as a show that successfully integrates both genres.”
Yet, for a show that merely co-opts elements but never sets itself up as a hoping to live up to those standards, but has a completely different standard altogether to aim for – the criticism fails. It makes about as much sense as saying that Italo Calvino’s “If On A Winter’s Night A Traveler…” failed as a whole because it was unable to finish the various genres that existed within the framework of the book.
Same applies for the criticism “fails to comment thoroughly on social issues it brings up”. Which was, incidentally, one of the attacks made against the famous and popular Annie Hall by Woody Allen. Critics lambasted the movie for failing to deal with the issue of Annie’s drug abuse – despite the fact that it was a great romcom and commentary on relationship issues in general.
Mawaru Penguindrum is a series that seems to do a lot of things in a lot of genre, but, really, it aims only at one primary thing. It co-opts all those parts together to primarily answer a single existential theme – Fate and our effect on others.
4.
Of course, the thing about existential themes is that they’re abstracted enough to unfold in a variety of ways. This is because existential themes erupt from life due to a simple problem. The fact that we’re bound to a physical plane but we ‘feel’ something reaching outwards towards higher stuff. Some of us choose to ground these things through Mythologizing. Others choose to formalize it in the form of things like Logic or Mathematics. Some others choose to dissolve the issue by attributing it to something within the physical plane itself (scientific reductionism). And, of course, many people choose to be apathetic towards holding a stance on it.
Words that exist within this realm are words like Fate, Destiny, Spirit, Soul, Mind, Object, Concept, Tao, Meaning, Redemption etc… actually the word ‘Existential’ itself exists in this realm. I only used it because it’s the word that everyone uses when they want to refer to these things. The other word that people usually use is ‘2deep4u’.
And Penguindrum is primarily concerned with things at this level. It uses a social issue (Aum Shinrikyo) as a base to create the setting, then does whatever it takes to build up until it manages to come up with a structure reaching out to that. Furthermore, due to Ikuhara’s general interest in fairy tales and general mythologies, the structure is a Mythologic one.
4.
I will now tell you the secret of how to create 2deep4u works.
The answer is to find a basic mythological structure, distill it into primary symbols, and then replace those symbols with random things like ice-cream and roses. Then proceed to build your plot around that new mythological structure.
Using an old example from Plato’s Symposium: At first human beings were two bodies joined into one. Then Zeus became angry and used his thunderbolts to split them apart. Thus both parts are now running all over the world searching for each other, which is the key to love.
If I were Ikuhara, I would first distill each part of the myth to a primary movement. Union – Separation – Seeking. The abstract undertone of this myth is the idea of ‘Connection’, that strange fact that we can innately feel such a deep bond with something that exists outside of us, yet also the paradox that we can never really co-opt fully what goes on in their mind. The Symposium myth changes this fact into a Curse From God. (Eva, for that matter, changes this fact into an alien invasion)
My Improvised Ikuhara plot goes like this: In a rose covered school with shojo-esque graphics, Heroine A is a member of the Tennis Club. Then a new teacher, Heroine B, arrives and takes over the club and sets up a new school tennis tournament with the final goal to reach “The Serve Of Reunion”. Heroine A falls into an inexplicable Yuri fervor for Heroine B and strives to achieve “The Serve of Reunion” Each match that Heroine A plays is with a club member that symbolically illustrates the theme of ‘Connection’ through a psychologically and very artistically rendered backstory that they shout at the Heroine while playing their games. While this is going on, a conspiracy plot is unfolding that reveals that both heroines actually met beforehand in the “Greenhouse of the Eternal Bliss” where one of them gave the other a mystical red-colored tennis ball that was stolen from a world Tennis championship member Villain A. It then turns out that Villain A (who is drawn like a Bishounen) is also the principal of the school, in an abusive relationship with Heroine B, and also the cause Heroine A to lose her memories with the “World-Breaker” tennis racket. Eventually this culminates into a weird battle that takes place in the “Greenhouse of the Eternal Bliss”, which now happens to be cursed and overrun with Villain A’s evil sunflowers, where Heroine A has to uses the red tennis-ball to shatter the greenhouse with “The Serve of Reunion”. Afterwards both heroines ruminate over the fact that the greenhouse is no more, but the world is a huge place to live in.
5.
The thing about the above improvised plot is that it’s based on a simple and well-established myth. Ikuhara usually combines multiple things at once to form his mythological base.
I’m sure the primary mythological structure of Mawaru Penguindrum has already been elucidated by countless blog posts up there. To me, it seems to be a mix between The Book Of Job (a bet between two divine entities over the suffering of a single human soul, and a rumination on the meaning of suffering in general) and Prometheus Stealing Fire (a tale of going against a divine power for the sake of human development, and receiving punishment).
This entire thing is explained elliptically in a fairy-tale that occurs in the middle of the series of course.
Ikuhara’s variant on the Prometheus tale is to link it up with the idea of terrorism by painting it as Promethean children who have to bear the weight of their parent’s stolen fire. And, more or less, every character has to deal with this sort of backstory, interlocking into one another.
It’s made even more complex when you have multiple mythological levels and domains. Divine Entities -> Societal Forces -> Organizations -> Individuals.
Yet, Ikuhara actually structured the reveal of these forces to unfold in quite a well-arranged manner. It begins as a battle between Individuals, and then Organizations are brought into the picture. Then in episode 10 the Divine element is hinted at, before coming into strong play a lot later. All this unfolds among a dizzying spectacle of general surreal imagery and visually exciting scenes drawing (but not being tied down by) all sorts of genres.
6.
I’m always on the lookout for possible abstract structures to create strange fiction. If you’re ever trying to be the next Murakami or Ikuhara, the fastest method is to just pick up some philosophy book and start thinking about how you can replace every abstract term like ‘categorical imperative’ or ‘Dasein’ or ‘Labour Theory of Value’ or ‘language games’ with a random symbolic plot element (“The Penguindrum”, “The Diary”, “The End Of The World”, giraffes, candy-canes, Christmas Trees, blueberries, toilets) and create your own post-modern mythological structure. Then tack on the rest of your characters to react against or elucidate that mythological structure.
(I think changing abstract structures into action packed magic-lingo heavy action scenes is something that Kinoko Nasu has been making an entire career out of)
Then there’s basing it on already existent mythologies of course, like the Bhagavad-Gita, Taoist Koans, Chinese & Indian & Japanese & Greek & Egyptian & Norse Mythologies, Gnosticism (a fan favorite), Faust, Peer Gynt, Lovecraftian mythology.
Writers who have already chunked a good deal of the stuff into their own works would be Hesse, Borges, Kafka, or analyzers like Freud, Carl Jung, Joseph Campbell, Ligotti (True Detective used Conspiracy Against The Human Race) or Julius Evola. Alice in Wonderland and Kenji Miyazawa are also fan-favorites. If you want to be obscure, steal from Carl Sandburg’s Rootabaga Stories. Maybe some concepts from Akutagawa – who also loved appropriating stories from varied myths.
Alternatively, some poets have already done half of the work for you – such as Wallace Stevens in his major long philosophical poems: “Notes On A Supreme Fiction”, “Esthetique Du Mal”, “The Owl In the Sarcophagus”, “Sunday Morning” etc…
You can probably find good choices to steal from in Romanticist Poets, Plath, T.S Eliot (Four Quartets), John Donne (both Poems and Sermons), Rilke, Holderlin, Edgar Allen Poe, and the Fitzgerald Rubaiyat.
One of the reasons why Nietzsche has influenced so much out there is because he’s also done half the work for you in Thus Spake Zarathustra. Also he has about 5 or so sparring ideologies inside him, so there’s plenty of material to work with. Kierkegaard wrote in an idiosyncratic style where he took on several different writing styles for characters embodying completely different ideas, so he may work too. I’m sure someone can come up with something from his “The Immediate Erotic Stages or the Musical Erotic” since it splits up nicely into three different parts each based on a Mozart Opera
Speaking of Music, you can even steal structures from Symphonies. Mahler Symphony 1, for example, has programmatic notes for each movement based on a poetic concept.
7.
Yet, even with an abstract structure, the trick is to create enough of a sense of disbelief to allow the higher stuff to flow in. That’s where the actual art part comes in.
Well, if you don’t have the animation skills of Ikuhara or the writing style of Hesse – it’s probably not going to help much. If you’re cheap, follow what the Wuxia genre set up and turn it all into humongous battles of people screaming poetry, sword moves, death and magic at each other.
