I have been watching the anime adaptation of Riyoko Ikeda's Oniisama E. Unfortunately I think this may be an important thing for people dedicated to Utena studies - Utenologists, if you like - to do, because it's led me to feel a kind of emotional kinship to Utena's director that I have never experienced before. I say unfortunate because the feeling I'm sharing with my imaginary Ikuhara tulpa is frustration, and unlike him I'm not in a position to do anything about it except post.
It's clear that Ikuhara straight up lifted a huge amount of Utena's visual language from the Oniisama E anime, which is, and I must stress this, beautiful. The manga is of course also beautiful; Ikeda was a generational talent, we all know this. The manga is an agonizingly stylish outpouring of inspiration and energy, stumbling over itself in its haste to get all its ideas onto the page. The anime, on the other hand, is the work of a professional nearing the end of his career (he directed most of the Rose of Versailles anime back in the 70s!) and it is assured, measured and a billion times more Art Film than it needs to be. You got your dutch angles, you got your heavy shadows, you got your divided frames and your narrowed fields of view and your abstract play of light on water. For Utena fans you also have very specific things like rapidly cutting away to some sports that are happening to punctuate the emotional impact of a conversation, or showing the same motion three times in a row (two quick one slow) for emphasis, or using an establishing shot of a particular piece of sculpture to establish that emotional conflict is about to take place, or asking the question "how many giant abstract stained glass windows can there possibly be at a girl's school", or. You get the idea.
This is all in aid of bringing us Asaka Rei, AKA Saint-Just-Sama, AKA The Angel of Death, AKA What If Arthur Rimbaud Was A Lesbian:
Our main character Nanako is a baby gay with a thing for tall women and Saint Just causes her brain to explode, as you might expect.
So: we watch our plucky young heroine falling in love with this group of magnificently fucked up women, most of whom play basketball. The manga is a frantically-paced three volumes and the anime stretches this out for three whole cours (13 episodes each.) As we get into the second cour things get even gayer, as we are shown events that are only alluded to or explained after the fact in the manga. We forget for a second, perhaps, how the manga ends. Despite our better judgement we are persuaded that things might go differently this time. Why not?
Then the men arrive.
Among many other things, Oniisama E is about socially inscribed bonds between people and what happens when they're not quite right - what happens when your brother isn't actually your brother, or if someone who isn't your sister is actually your sister, or if you're a girl and the person you're in love with isn't a boy. Nanako asks one of her cram school tutors if he'll be the big brother she never had (note, please, that she does not mean this in a romantic sense, even though everyone else assumes she does.) He is the titular Oniisama, to whom she recounts her adventures in the world of rich athletic crazy hot women in a series of letters. It turns out - and, spoilers for a 50-year-old manga from here on - that they do in fact share a father, but Nanako didn't know that when she asked him. This pattern ramifies out through the rest of the story, most critically in Rei's doomed romantic love for an older sister who refuses to acknowledge her.
So we have all these interesting questions on the table. What makes a real sibling? What makes a real love? What does blood have to do with any of it? And, most crucially: Lesbianism? Putting aside for a moment the fact that all these women are 17 at best and they're all having life-threatening romantic drama about events that happened when they were 12, some involving significantly older men, it's a rich thematic vein to be tapped. And how are these questions resolved?
Well, most of the women end up paired off with extremely boring men (including, unforgivably, butch basketball star and prince of the school Kaoru no Kimi. The still of her at the end in wife clothes bottle-feeding her new baby is diabolical.) The evil sadistic tall woman doesn't get a man, but that's because she's evil and the guy she was obsessed with all along ends up with someone else. The one definite lesbian kills herself. Our hero gets to have her brother - the gender of the romantic interest she meets to close out the story is, mercifully, left ambiguous, but you know how it's gonna go. This manga was written in 1974. What were you expecting?
In the manga, most of the buildup to the Extremely Heterosexual Ending happens offscreen, maximizing the amount of time we get to spend with the girls who are still allowed to be weird with it. In the anime, we get about halfway through and there the two of them are, taking up space. Henmi, the Oniisama, a man with a haircut for a personality. Takashi, Rei's elder brother, with his horrible white suit jacket. He looks nothing like Akio. He stinks of Akio. They appear as heralds of the non-apocalypse, vanguards of a stillborn revolution. And if I am Ikuhara watching this, there are ideas forming in my head.
Of course most of these ideas are incest-related, but that's Ikuhara for you. The important thing is that Shoujo Kakumei Utena patiently and thoroughly answers all the questions Oniisama E left dangling. No, the obsessive love you have for the person you imprinted on when you were a small child isn't romantic, it's a curse. No, the obsessive love you have for your actual brother or sister isn't romantic, it's a curse. No, the obsessive love you are ashamed of and won't admit to anyone even as it remains at the core of your being isn't romantic, it's a curse, even if it's gay. (Juri inherits her perfect french rolls from Miya-sama, queen of the obsessives.)
And at the end of 39 perfect, imperfect episodes: yes, the girls can love each other. Yes, they are allowed to escape this school. Yes, there is a place for them - someday, together.
Utena came out six years after the Oniisama E anime. It may be, in part, the greatest fix-it fic ever created. The Utena crew took this story and wrenched Rei's coffin open, pulling hard against every trope, every bit of social and cultural pressure. Maybe in a few years someone will do the same thing for Sarazanmai.
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