28/50: my body is a cage (psyche delico, "tourou no ori")
Usually, a house is haunted because a presence will not leave it. But sometimes a house is haunted because it will not allow you to leave it. Sometimes a haunted house is a physical location, a tangible collection of rooms and walls and doors, which traps you. Suddenly you become the presence that will not—cannot—leave. Sometimes, the house that is haunted is not a house, but a single dark room, and when it haunts you, it crawls under your skin, takes up residence in your chest, until your heart becomes a door into that room, from which there is no escape. You are the house. The house is the presence. Neither of you can leave.
And so, Psyche Delico's "Tourou no Ori." Delico's eponymous cage of the praying mantis is all at once a concept, a person (or at least a concept of a person), and a physical location for her characters. We open on Ikurou, the second son of the Touma family, coming across his father consorting with a feral young man in the dark prison of a room. The feral young man's smile is predatory. His limbs, long and white, wrap around Ikurou's father's body. "It was as if he was being eaten," like a praying mantis consuming its prey, Ikurou thinks. Years later, Ikurou learns that the feral young man is his older brother Ranzou, kept hidden away and frozen in nonverbal infancy for over 20 years. When their father Touma Seiza dies, leaving behind a vindictive will that grants everything to Ranzou and gives Ikurou no hope of inheritance, not even upon Ranzou's death, Ikurou must decide what to do with Ranzou—whether he is able to free them both from that dark prison at the heart of the family house or whether he will drag them both down into further degradation.
(spoilers for all of "Tourou no Ori" below)
If Nakamura Asumiko explores catharsis, and Asada Nemui operates on dread (x), then Psyche Delico is constantly circling around a core of inevitability. When things go well, it is kismet; when things go poorly, as they often do for her characters, it is predestination. One senses in her stories that we are always the unintended products of someone else's actions, that if fate has something in store for us, it made its move a long time ago, and we (the readers are included as part of the "we") have no choice but to see it play out. Her characters walk down the path of destruction on their own two legs, that is true, but is it really a choice when there is only one road, built specifically for you? While Ikurou is portrayed eventually as the spider in the center of "Tourou no Ori's" web, by volume five, all the characters in the story are simply playing out the hand dealt to them years ago by Touma Seizou, who set everything in motion by sleeping with his sister Hanae to beget Ranzou. When she learns that she has inadvertently adopted as a son not only the product of her husband's infidelity but the product of her husband's infidelity with his own sister, Ikurou's mother Mitsue (understandably) totally loses it and (less understandably) lashes out at a young Ranzou, choking him to the point of seizure and pleading with her husband to leave Ranzou to die.
This moment is the proximate cause of the events on which "Tourou no Ori" opens, around which the literal and metaphorical cage is built. Seizou never forgives Mitsue and, by extension, Ikurou, and his punishment of Ikurou from beyond the grave is an attempt to make Ikurou pay for Ranzou's perceived disability: how do you like knowing you will waste your life serving the older brother whose life you wasted? (Never mind that a bigger effect on Ranzou's arrest development is likely the completely isolation and repeated sexual assault—by Seizou!—from age seven onwards.) Seizou's icy treatment of Mitsue, who sacrificed her feelings and her dignity and even her body (it is revealed that at Seizou's request, she slept with Seizou's business partners) to please him, drives her to the point of psychotic breakdown, leaving Ikurou all but an orphan with only a retainer-cum-manservant Miyama Norihiko as his sole ally. It's not a surprise that Ikurou puts himself wholly in the hands of the one person who professes to love and support him unconditionally, even if Norihiko is possessive, manipulative, and coldblooded to a laughable degree, the strawman of the "toxic red flag groomer seme" stereotype which TikTok warns us about. It is, however, a surprise to learn in volume five that Norihiko too is Ikurou and Ranzou's half-brother.
No matter how far Ikurou runs (and he does not, or cannot, run very far), he is trapped in the palm of Seizou's choices. The Touma family is the house; Seizou is the presence. They cannot be free of him, and he is the curse that will not, and cannot, leave them.
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In chapter three, Norihiko, then in high school, is walking home from school when he spots a young Ikurou watching a horsehair worm crawl out of the body of a mantis. "The mantis cannot be saved anymore," Norihiko explains to Ikurou. When the worm enters the mantis, it destroys the mantis' reproductive system and takes over the mantis' brain, such that it becomes attracted to the water and drowns itself. Well, Delico is many things as a writer, but she is not subtle. Norihiko knows he is the horsehair worm, and that Ikurou is his mantis. He will crawl, one way or another, into Ikurou, and together they will both drown.
A young Ikurou saw Ranzou as the mantis, both the monster and the prey, something that ate others up in its greedy love, something helpless, childish, stunted, that cannot understand human language and cannot protect itself. But in the end, as Norihiko divined from a very young age, Ikurou and not Ranzou is the mantis. Ranzou, with the help of Ikurou's wife Sachiko, is able to learn and evolve. Ranzou alone is able to leave behind the curse of the Touma family, walking into the light with his former caretaker Kenichi, while Ikurou ends up trapped—by his own volition—in the dark room that once held Ranzou, with a man who wants to eat and be eaten by him. Nothing can save Ikurou anymore.
The swap is so comprehensive that Ikurou even fulfills the incestuous fear-fantasies he projected onto Ranzou. Early in the story, Ikurou has a hysterical vision of himself caught in his own half-brother's seductive thrall; by the end of the story, it is Ikurou who has unknowingly seduced his half-brother Norihiko. Ikurou is disgusted by what he sees as Ranzou's invitation of his own father's amorous attention, but later, in what I think is "Tourou no Ori's" crowning moment of transgression, Norihiko pins Ikurou's id like a butterfly when he accuses Ikurou of wanting to be kept by his father. That's disgusting, Ikurou tries to say, but his body and the narrative betrays him. When Norihiko assaults Ikurou in the aftermath of forcing Ikurou to whore himself out to a business partner, Delico renders Norihiko faceless and shadowy, just like Ikurou's memories of his father. In the intervening chapters, Delico has not gotten less wicked or more subtle. Her point is blaring in 100pt neon letters: Ikurou has become his mother and his imagined brother, raped and rendered powerless, hysterical, by his father through Norihiko.
There are a number of stories that are in the same vein of "Tourou no Ori": the first oneshot of Kunieda Saika's "Bannin" collection, Watase Yuu's "Sakura Gari," even (especially?) Tezuka Osamu's "Ayako." These stories mix and match plot elements like potpourri: a not-too-distant past, a rich and storied family hiding a sibling frozen in a perpetual juvenile state either physically or intellectually, incest that breaks containment and pervades an entire family, a windowless prison room in the bowels of an old family house, the tragic and suspicious death of a mother, a manservant who knows and does too much, an overall air of economic anxiety and social disintegration. Like "Jane Eyre," the hidden sibling may be mad, in both senses of the word. Like "Rebecca," a house may be set on fire. So convinced was I that there must be some common Japanese ancestor, some Edogawa Ranpo or Akutagawa Ryuunosuke that cast the mold, that I trawled through the internet for summaries of famous Japanese detective or modern literature, only to conclude the similarities are simply because the story elements are so obvious. If you want to write a family drama that is a haunted house for its characters, you will always end up with "Tourou no Ori."
What makes "Tourou no Ori" unique, then, is Ikurou. Ranzou's resilience is to be expected, as is Norihiko's deviousness and possessiveness. But what Delico proposes through Ikurou is that depravity is its own kind of innocence. It knows nothing but itself and as such, can neither control nor be responsible for its consequences. Ikurou is not the resentful seductress of Masataka from "Sakura Gari" or even the naive libertine of Ayako. Instead, Ikuro is helpless, able to achieve peace only by surrendering to the depravity around him. Once he does so, and totally gives himself over to Norihiko, he is transformed: angelic, at peace, truly smiling for the first time in the entire series. Is nobility only to be found by fighting fruitlessly against doomed predestination? Surely, Delico argues, there is grace in accepting that some of us can only live damned lives. Ranzou and Ikurou are mirror images, their innocence a rejection of the world. They transcend our everyday realities, one by being untouched, and the other by letting depravity burn him up.
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When Ikurou eventually marries, it is to Sachiko, a girl from a branch family who admires Ikurou's tightly wound disposition but is utterly unready for the perversity of his family situation. Ikurou has no great love for her, but on Norihiko's encouragement, he tries—and catastrophically fails—to consummate their marriage. Her comforting him through his failure is the first time Ikurou bonds emotionally with someone who isn't Norihiko. Predictably, Norihiko ruins it.
I love Sachiko, and I think she would understand me when I say that I am repelled by a certain kind of narrative that drives its characters and the readers into a Bermuda Triangle of desperation. This is because I am a boring person, with a conventional range of emotions, and I am easily exhausted by drama. It is only right to extend a helping hand to someone suffering, Sachiko says as she tries to broker an emotional truce with Ikurou. But by the same vein, it is also right to despise those who will not allow themselves to be helped. Perhaps it is because I am so exhausted by Ikurou and Norihiko that I revere Sachiko's resolve, her determination not to get sucked into this mess. Though she ends up taking over the Touma enterprises and becoming Ranzou's guardian, she is very clear that Ikurou is no longer one of her monkeys and Norihiko is not her circus. If she was once sentimental, Ikurou killed that about her. She is able to bypass kindness to achieve, instead, clarity of purpose.
But "Tourou no Ori," like many other unforgettable bl manga about once-in-a-lifetime loves, is tiresome, dramatic, exhausting. It does not care about clarity or purpose. At the height of its dramatic power, "Tourou no Ori" presents the idea of a love so total in its obliteration that no one but the people caught in its trap can follow. Ikurou's wife Sachiko recognizes its insanity and coldly steps away from it. Ranzou's caretaker Kenichi unwillingly becomes a part of it, and suffers for it. Ikurou's former classmate Iida, who only realizes at the end that he too was in love with Ikurou, can only scratch meekly at its surface, hoping for an invitation.
The death of horror—and romance—is explicability. Few horror films are able to survive the reveal of the monster, and deranged romances rarely are stronger after one character's psychological evaluation. When we get to the explanation of Norihiko's past, it is pat and predictable. Forgive me, sensei, but no one following the series to its final volume could possibly think Norihiko was raised with anything but abuse and neglect. Who cares that his putative father may have beat him, or that he grew up in a family broken by poverty and infidelity? We knew all we needed to know about Norihiko from the third chapter, when he claims a thirst so complete that he has never tasted water and then identifies with a parasite that causes its host to drown. Like all the other characters in "Tourou no Ori," he burns with a greed that can never be satisfied. There is something rotten and wicked at the heart of the Touma family. It destroys everything it touches, Norihiko included. We need no other explanation. We must either mar ourselves by trying to interfere, as Kenichi and Iida do, or leave the deranged to their own devices, as Sachik does.
In the final escalation of a "toxic" relationship, there is a point where the only thing left is immolation. It is harder to live on in the apocalypse than it is to burn alongside it. It is easier in these stories to die, because then you do not have to contemplate what comes after. May the love of Norihiko and Ikurou never find me. But if it does, may I have the strength to respond appropriately. God grant me the strength of Ranzou, mute and barefoot as I carry my crying brother across a burning threshold. But if that is too much to ask, give me at least the determination to set myself ablaze, to burn down the house and my heart at the height of my inflamed emotions. Don't doom me to Ikurou's fate, my heart a haunted house, my love the presence that cannot leave and makes me a prisoner. Nothing can be worse than decaying at the bottom of a pit, waiting for love to slowly kill you both. That, to me, is the scariest story of all.
