Aslan Jade Callenreese is really Holden Caulfield, a theory.
Okay. Not really. Ash and Holden are two different characters in their own stories. I mean, yes, they do share mannerisms but that’s not what I want to talk about here. I want to talk about this ending right here. MAPPA, you’ve done it again.
TL;DR: The ending credits seem like a pretty good allusion to The Catcher in the Rye, perhaps expressing Ash’s true feelings towards his purpose on the Earth.
Thought the story, Banana Fish is chock-full of allusions to great American writers. I mean, the title Banana Fish in itself is an allusion to the short story, A Perfect Day for Banana Fish, which was written by... yep! you guessed it! J.D. Salinger. And if you have ever sat through an American high school English class, you’ve probably read The Catcher in the Rye, a novel about sixteen-year-old Holden Caulfield who travels to New York City to discover his purpose in life after being kicked out of his prep school.
In The Catcher in the Rye, Holden explains to his younger sister, Phoebe, that he doesn’t wish to have a normal career or life. Instead, he wants to be the protector of innocence. He says, “What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff—I mean if they’re running and they don’t look where they’re going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That’s all I’d do all day. I’d just be the catcher in the rye and all.”
On the surface level, Holden is portrayed as unstable, but really, he wants to be the barricade for children as they move into adulthood, preserving their innocence in a way that he wasn’t allowed to under his circumstances.
Wait a minute... young man wants to protect the innocent from “falling off the cliff” of cruel and unwashed reality? Hm. Sounds like another protagonist we know. A protagonist who would protect a certain boy with his life and refuses to let said boy fire a gun or see him as a monster. And boy, it sure does look like Ash is calling Eiji back, but back from where? Is there a cliff just beyond the horizon that we cannot see? Whatever it may be, it’s hard to ignore the wheat-field as the animators make it pretty clear that the scenery is an important detail to the story.
Innocence is a common theme, if not the main theme, in Banana Fish, both in regards to the consequences of destroying that innocence and the ordeals it takes to preserve that innocence. I mean shoot, you could almost say that Eiji looks child-like in this shot below. Like he is running through a wheat-field, unaware of the danger up ahead. Irony is not lost in this scene.
All in all, I don’t think it’s a coincidence that MAPPA decided to use a wheat-field as the background to the ending credits and honestly, I appreciate that they are keeping the trend of using American literature to express the characters’ true feelings.
Final note: Not that I’m saying there’s a relation, but Caulfield and Callenreese sound pretty close together ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
