In which we get another almost 100 page chapter oh boy!
But we also get MOKONA COVER, so who's complaining! It is so striking and gorgeous, I would absolutely buy that wall tapestry. @ every merch store; where is my Mokona wall tapestry??
But the cover as a whole gives us several layers of reality that all blend together, and since it’s a flat image we get more of that magic it’s difficult to tell exactly where one layer ends and another begins. We’ve seen it in a lot of xxxHolic covers but I adore it every time. It’s such a fun way to convey an idea subtly and in a way you don’t even have to notice - it doesn’t change anything if you miss it, and the image is just as pretty without it, but once you notice it builds up an idea that runs parallel with the overall plotline.
The layers of reality we can spot are:
The tapestry of the moon and birds, with part of a sakura tree - featuring Mokona. Within the reality of the image the tapestry is a flat image hanging on the wall.
The wider room with a little display table and incense holder, with sakura tree branches that visually align with but don’t cross into the tapestry. However they DO cross into:
The sakura tree pattern on the incense holder, lining up perfectly with the room!branches like they cross realities to get there.
And finally the room!branches also twist outside of and around the border of the image itself - which takes them out of that level of reality, but also moves them back and forth, going both in front of and behind the border in different spots, which is a really unique blend of different layers all intertwining together.
Also, Mokona! Though he’s sitting inside the tapestry and looking at the moon, it’s entirely possible that he’s not actually part of the tapestry, and is just visiting. Anything is possible in an xxxHolic cover!
Lastly I just really appreciate the visual impact of so much of the image being completely parallel vertical lines, from the pattern on the tapestry to its dark borders, the grain in the wood of the incense stand, the tassels, the xxxHolic title text in the very centre frame, and the actual borders of the cover itself. It delivers such a nice set of ‘boundaries’ as it were, all of which are being beautifully transcended and mixed together by the ‘sakura’. Very appropriate, and very gorgeous!
But anyway that’s the cover! Let’s look at the the chapter itself below:
I’ll start by saying the customer-adjacent person we meet in this chapter has a bunch of content warnings attached, so I’ll leave that section of the plot until the very end of the post. That way you can read all the fun stuff with the main characters and leave before the darker turn if you so wish! Things will be slightly out of order but it flows well all the same.
We begin with Doumeki telling Watanuki what he and Himawari found in the last chapter, and Watanuki recognises the building as the same one as the Internet Addicted Customer from much earlier on in the series.
Which is great! However don’t forget the boys are fighting.
Or not quite fighting. They’re tension-ing.
It’s unironically amazing.
Watanuki is trying to push Doumeki away, in a sense, and is making no secret of trying to annoy him - as he mentions a little later.
However Doumeki refuses to concede or even rise to the bait of being annoyed - he is calm at all times and is just doing what he does.
And it leads to this LONG GAZE between them:
Which is just such a beautiful panel! The different colours in their clothing, the split right down the middle of the page between them, their faces being visibly on different levels but still gazing directly at each other, and the Iconic Yuuko Smoke bleeds into both of their panels, but in that beautiful way where it doesn’t break the border at all. It’s great. It’s evocative. It shows how they’re SO CLOSE, literally right next to each other, but they’re so far apart at the same time, and kept that way by all the space between them.
And then the moment is broken.
Doumeki slides out of it naturally but WATANUKI DOES NOT. There is a quite a physical reaction to whatever emotion he goes through with the breaking of this moment, and I think you could read it in a number of different directions.
Either way, he disparages Doumeki about not changing. WHICH? THE LAYERS TO THAT STATEMENT.
Watanuki commenting as if it was a bad thing that Doumeki never changes
Watanuki himself being the one who is actually physically not changing, due to his role in the store.
Watanuki also ACTUALLY changing in his role in Doumeki’s life, shifting from close friend to ‘boss’ or whatever he’s pretending it is.
Doumeki still being here as the last bastion of things that aren’t changing in Watanuki’s life - and so OF COURSE he is the same, it’s the whole point of him being here.
And also that hint of disappointment? That Doumeki’s reaction to Watanuki has not changed? As if Watanuki was very much hoping for a different reaction from Doumeki just now?
It’s just so rich, and says so much more than Watanuki thinks it does. WHAT DO YOU WANT, WATANUKI? WHAT DO YOU REALLY WANT?
(We may never know.)
(HE may never know)
Meanwhile, when Watanuki goes off to address other matters Doumeki considers the egg.
Doumeki is still lingering in that ~maybe egg~ zone, where he’s still considering everything that’s happening and whether or not he should be using the egg. It’s the deeper level to every interaction with Watanuki, where Watanuki says a lot of things but never what he actually means, while Doumeki says almost nothing but is deeply worried the whole time. Neither one of them is actually voicing what they really feel. And it seems like this will just continue until something finally changes - or unless Doumeki finally decides that THIS is the time to use the egg. But for the moment, it's not now.
Though like, what will the egg even do? We still don’t know! I do think Doumeki is waiting to spot the invisible line in the moment that might mean that Egg is the correct option. Sadly life is a turning out a bit more grey, a little too complicated to parse, and so he continues to suffer in silence.
But he’s not the only sad person in the friend group! Hi Himawari!
Himawari can only talk to Watanuki over the phone - a problem thI presume is only made worse with Watanuki refusing to learn how to text people on a cellphone. (And now I wonder, is his refusal a front? Does he refuse to text as an excuse to push Himawari away as well? Or does he genuinely just hate to text? Hard to tell with Watanuki!)
Worse, their conversation is a little bit stiff, a little bit awkward.
They both put in the effort to make it SOUND friendly but there’s a distance between them you can FEEL. Watanuki stands in an empty hallway, staring at a blank wall. He does not sit down - there is nowhere to sit - he stands still in this one liminal area for the entirety of the call. He is surrounded by straight lines and empty space - echoing the idea of the cage. And it’s a cage he’s putting himself in. He could put the phone ANYWHERE in the store (presumably), but he’s chosen to only answer calls in the empty hallway with no decorations or pieces of furniture. Calls are not to be enjoyed. They are to be brief, transitional, and not to linger too long.
It’s a great effect, especially since this is a manga, and so we (the reader) COULD have seen Himawari on the other side of the phone if Clamp had chosen to draw it - but we don’t! We never see her in this chapter. Himawari is known in voice only, which matches Watanuki's experience. Though in his case it is on purpose.
Especially when Himawari lingers right on the edge of actually talking about why, but doesn’t quite cross the line.
So it’s clear that Himawari isn’t thrilled with this situation either, but that it’s a boundary that Watanuki himself is keeping in place.
And in that top left panel you can SEE a glimpse of his actual feelings on this. While he summons a kind face and a smile while he’s actually talking (to make it sound more convincing) he does carry the heaviness of the distance between them, and apologises for it.
On the plus side, they are able to clearly communicate that they love each other, which is nice!
On the down side, once Watanuki puts down the phone he is visibly all alone, just as he intends to be.
We get the full context of this exchange from Doumeki and Mokona - where it’s revealed that Watanuki is deliberately keeping Himawari away from the store to keep her safe.
He also can’t visit her in dreams, because it has a “bad effect” on her (whatever that means specifically) - and so they’ve been reduced to this long distance friendship where Himawari can only visit one day a year. (In this instance, Watanuki's birthday is the compromise they've landed on)
It’s a sad situation, of course, but it also says a Lot about Watanuki specifically. After all, this is Himawari! He used to be obsessed with her. Their friendship was joyful and important to both of them, since they both have long histories with loneliness and lack of friends, but Watanuki has grown to the point where he is enforcing this distance willingly and on purpose - for Himawari’s own wellbeing, and also for Watanuki’s wish. He would not have had an easy time with this boundary pre-timeskip, but in the present? Watanuki is very used to this distance, and though he feels the sorrow of it, he upholds it without question.
I’m not sure that the takeaway is that he’s choosing Yuuko over Himawari, but more that he’s choosing one side of his life over the other. He seems willing to slip further and further away from the living in order to push himself deeper into the supernatural world, and closer to Yuuko’s eventual return. And the cost of that is all of his friendships slowly cracking and falling apart.
Except for Doumeki, who refuses to leave.
And he’s not exactly thrilled about the situation either, but he is CHOOSING this every day, and he remains Watanuki’s final actual link to the real world.
There’s one more thing I will talk about before the actual customer. At the end of the chapter Watanuki talks with Haruka, and he admits one of his deep fears - that he’ll forget Yuuko too.
Haruka intuits that it’s this that is leading Watanuki to keeping Yuuko’s things around him all the time, like the pipe. I think we could stretch that further and link it to Watanuki’s willingness to leave the world of the living behind - after all it was living people who forgot about Yuuko the instant she disappeared. Watanuki wants to seep himself in the supernatural side of things to have the greatest chance of remembering her, and not allowing her to slip from his mind entirely when he isn’t watching.
It’s QUITE the existential scenario for him to navigate on the fly, but this is the path he’s chosen.
Actually there's one more last thing I will slip into this safe half of the post - the way Watanuki handles his investigation.
By which I mean, Watanuki gets around his “can’t leave the store” boundary by traveling through the world of dreams instead.
AND - alarming revelation - he mentions afterwards that if he had tried to do this and failed that it would physically hurt him (similar to if he doesn’t judge a price correctly?)
WHICH, you know, is yet another reason that this is a hyper dangerous thing that he’s doing. On top of the PREVIOUS already dangerous reason, in that the more he does this the more chance there is for him to never come back to his body.
So, you know! That old Syaoran charm - constantly putting yourself at more and more risk just because :)
I’m sure it’ll be FINE, and all these repeated warnings are all for NO REASON AT ALL.
So we can see why Himawari, Kohane, and Doumeki are So Incredibly Worried about Watanuki all the time - it would be wild if they weren’t, with Watanuki putting himself in high risk scenarios again and again and again and again. Who WOULDN’T be worried?
Ok, now that we’re almost 2000 words into this post should we talk about the customer arc?
And here we will put the big content warning, so feel free to drop out here and you won’t have missed the larger series plot threads.
~
The customer-adjacent person we meet has a plot centered around domestic abuse. A character ends their own life (off-screen) and at one point Watanuki has his throat cut - though he is fine and is largely not affected.
If that's fine, feel free to keep reading, but if not you haven't missed anything other than the specifics of how Watanuki gets the Red Pearl. The Jorōgumo gets what she wants in the end and the request is wrapped up.
~
I'll just put a little space here:
So! When Watanuki dream-travels to the apartment to investigate, he stumbles across a new character:
She is heavily injured. The first time he goes there it becomes clear that she’s living here with her romantic partner, and her injuries are because he is repeatedly beating her.
This alarms Watanuki so much that he accidentally wakes himself up, and has to visit a second time to actually have the conversation properly.
And if there is one plus side to this situation it’s Watanuki’s outfit. That thing slaps!
Meanwhile, while they’re talking they hear the sound of someone jumping to their death off the top of the apartment. The woman does not seem overly affected by this, but clarifies that it was her partner, and that she had expected this was about to happen.
It turns out she is supernatural in essence and does not age, meaning that while she has been with her partner for 40 years he is now 62, but she still looks the same. She intuits that this scared him into repeatedly beating her out of rage, and when he couldn’t take it anymore he ended his life.
However she says she didn’t mind - that she could live with the physical pain if it meant “helping” his emotions, and she would deliberately not heal herself (despite that meaning she lived in pain the whole time) to keep him “happier”.
This is not presented as a “good” scenario, or a healthy one - Watanuki is shocked and appalled the entire time - but the supernatural nature of this character means that she is so out of touch with the living experience that this scenario was acceptable to her. She didn’t mind, as long as it “helped”.
The horror of it all aside, this is a clear and direct parallel to Watanuki himself, who is steering himself the Supernatural path and has also stopped aging. Watanuki also has the same drive to “help” other people even if it hurts him or puts him in danger, as he sees this as an acceptable trade.
Also, this is not subtext! She says it directly:
For Watanuki this SHOULD be the start of some kind of wake up call. Here is a future that could be his; living detached and broken and injured and attacked and alone, all in order to help others until it finally ends tragically and he loses all ties to the human world. It's not guaranteed to happen, but it IS the path he is setting for himself with his current actions.
ALSO. This should be a bit of a warning sign on another level as well - as in, how he treats Doumeki.
I don’t mean to imply that Watanuki’s actions are anywhere near the violence directed at the mysterious woman, but! They are a parallel. In both pairs there is a supernatural being living with a human, and the relationship has been allowed to sour due to their differences. And while Watanuki would never be capable of the horrible cruelty we see in the other relationship, we DO see him treating Doumeki less than kindly, on purpose, in a misguided attempt to drive him away.
Like the mysterious woman, Doumeki takes all of Watanuki’s (ADMITTEDLY MUCH MORE MINOR) mistreatment without complaint or comment, and he does it because he thinks it will help. He stays around because he cares for Watanuki, just as the mysterious woman cared for her partner.
If Watanuki were a bit more open to criticism about his own behaviour, he should see the faintest echo of what he’s doing reflected in this situation. If he were being fairer to Doumeki, and himself, he would just talk to him instead of trying to drive him towards quitting.
But will he absorb this lesson? It remains to be unseen!
And I do apologise if the parallel comes off as overly dark - it's quite a heavy subject matter, even for CLAMP.
But back to things that happened in the chapter, at one point in the conversation the mysterious woman realises she doesn’t have to “pretend” to be human anymore and reverts to her more supernatural form.
Watanuki clarifies later that she is mermaid-adjacent, or specifically a Yaobikuni, which he describes as a human who ate mermaid meat and gained long life.
Once she transforms she also cries the red pearl that Watanuki was sent here to find. She cries these pearls whenever her romantic partner dies, and she happily gives it to Watanuki.
On the other hand, the Yaobikuni had already promised this pearl to the Jorōgumo, meaning she was going to get it either way, and when Watanuki later passes it on to her he correctly guesses the reason she sent him in the first place.
It turns out, the Jorōgumo was mostly waiting for the Yaobikuni to be single - and sent Watanuki as a way to gauge whether it would be a good idea to go and start a relationship with her. Watanuki seems to think it will be good - the Yaobikuni is still waiting for a life partner, and if she is with the Jorōgumo then they will be a bit more equally matched. The Yaobikuni had earlier mused that this red pearl was likely to be her last - and this way, this would be true. As an immortal, the Jorōgumo won’t die, and so Yaobikuni won’t have to go through the pain of outliving a mortal lover again.
Diversity win! The horrible spider woman is a monogamous wlw.
Though speaking of horrible this conversation is a bit more dramatic in practice - namely, when she slits Watanuki’s throat.
She does it to make a point - that Watanuki is already deeply supernatural in nature. He does not age, he is not actually injured by this injury like a human would be, and soon he will heal as quickly as Yaobikuni too, possibly. She also says that, like the Yaobikuni, he will outlive all the humans he loves. She sets it out as a clear binary choice;
She poses it like he can only be one or the other.
The chapter also mostly frames it like he can only be one or the other. Trying to live in both worlds only lead to repeated tragedy for the Yaobikuni and the people she loved, until she could only barely feel any emotion that they died at all.
It remains to be seen whether this is actually the case - whether Watanuki DOES need to pick, or if he can manage to be a mix of the two somehow. When he answers her question it's with an "I don't know", and he explains that he's made this choice with no regrets in order to help people. WHICH, doesn't counter any of the parallels to the Yaobikuni in any way whatsoever, but at least he seems sure in himself.
It’s clear that the Jorōgumo enjoys fucking with him, and that she’s kind of trying to goad him down the Supernatural path - whether because this would be a benefit to her, or if she just wants to see him suffer, or if she's genuinely giving him a chance to consider the path ahead of him, it’s unclear! Either way, it’s a bit of a heavy exchange of ideas.
And jumping right to the end of the chapter, Haruka sings this song as Watanuki plays the shamisen:
WHICH... I have apparently hit the maximum number of images allowed, and so I can't add here, but the lyrics are:
To meet is joy
To part is pain
How good would it be
To meet but never to part
But when you're in love
There's nothing anybody can do
And it's LACED with all the same ideas from the earlier conversations, that being with someone you never had to say goodbye to would be sparing yourself the hurt of losing them, but that the pain of losing people is part of the fundamental experience of being human.
And we end on an image (sorry!) being reflected in a cup, of the red pearl, the mermaid tail, and a spider web all combined - of the new romance of the Yaobikuni and the Jorōgumo, showing that THEY at least will have their eternal happy lives together without losing one another.
Meanwhile Watanuki is just looking sad and thoughtful at all the ways it echoes with everything happening in his life.
This was for my first relief print assignment in my Intro to Printmaking class. I chose to use the optional theme of “Goes on and on” pretty loosely.
This was a bit ambitious for my first time carving, but I believe I did pretty well! I enjoyed the carving process actually way more than the printing process.
I had trouble maneuvering the printing aspect. The gloves get hot on the inside very easily, and combining it with the intensive ink rolling it turns into a gross sweaty sensory overload. Not to mention I haven’t yet mastered not getting ink on my bare hands at any point in printing.
Critiques for this piece were mainly the salt and peppering in some areas of the print, which is an easy fix now that I’m a little better at rolling on ink. That and the clarity of line in certain areas like the arm connecting to the torso. I’m quite proud of this piece and would love to revisit it.
Serene Disruption -
This piece was for Works on Paper, and it was self directed (do whatever you want). So obviously I drew CREATURES.
I honestly had a lot of fun making the composition and less fun putting it into practice. I didn’t have the time or motivation to add any sort of tree foliage so I just decided to cut it out and make that look intended. If I could go back to it, I’d use a different medium like acrylic or watercolor.
The goal was to simply make a peaceful scene with a bunch of “monsters”, something that should be abnormal to the human eye but is perfectly usual to the characters in the piece itself. I also was thinking of a The Wild Robot esque moment where opposing forces come together for a night of safety.
My class loved this piece during critique, they didn’t really have much issue with it besides maybe the color being unnecessary since my strong suit is black, white and optical grey. They said they wanted to see more textures akin to the grooves of the trees, and that I should lean into Japanese printmaking styles more because it’s something I’m successful at.
