What if you were born into a world that hated you and saw you as an inferior imitation of a person, but the world that belonged to you had been there, infinitely close, all along...?
Idea I got when I saw that someone had made Kris Dreemurr in Tomodachi Life: mod for TL or something like it where every so often, once you have enough citizens, your town/island/whatever periodically gets blanketed by a weird supernatural effect, let's call it a "Dark World." A subset of your citizens are subjected to these weird psychodramas based on their personalities, and they need to do JRPG stuff to make it go back to normal. The first time it happens, it unlocks a menu for each citizen specifying how likely they are to die.
Dying is rare either way. But it still happens! And I mean they aren't necessarily dead-dead, y'know? Like instead of dying, to borrow a Touhou bit, instead of having a bad time, a citizen might have a merry time! :)
The player doesn't need to know in advance, either. Merry disappears into the darkness in a way that doesn't leave a corpse, and then three Dark Worlds later there's this goddamn final boss called Yukari messing things up.
Or she disappeared into the darkness, but she's back safe and sound now that the Dark World's gone! ... or is she? There's someone or something who looks and acts like Merry, who has the same personality and relationships, but there's always something ... off about her now. She's never one of the citizens selected for the Dark World anymore, either. Meanwhile, you need to deal with that Yukari weirdo in each new Dark World. (And when you finally destroy Yukari, Merry has vanished from your town ...)
(Or, the OkiYuka divorce EXPLAINED (not clickbait))
I’ve been writing this piece ever since Taboo Japan Disentanglement came out, and I was aiming to publish it for Touhou Ship Week 2025 – before I ran out of steam. I have tried to make it as easy to follow as possible, but be warned that it’s written in a semi-academic style and it's about 3300 words long. Enjoy! You can also read it on Ao3 here.
Taboo Japan Disentanglement adds significant weight to some speculative headcanons I have about the difference between Yukari and Okina’s modes of operation/understandings of reality. Whilst you can read the titular taboo as that against crossing or opening up boundaries between worlds, I don’t think that’s the end of it. What Renko’s theory implies is potentially much more disruptive, even to the nature of Gensokyo itself.
I will preface this by saying that I know nothing about quantum mechanics and my Japanese is very rudimentary. I quote from both available translations of the album story, one on the Touhou Wiki and one by Kafka-Fuura. I’ve cross-referenced these throughout so as not to lean to heavily on one person’s wording as the basis for my analysis.
In Dr. Latency’s Freak Report, Renko and Maribel appear to agree on a theory of the relationship between science and fantasy:
“Merry said that if we refer to the world we humans observe, which is dominated by photons, as "the world here," then there are also countless "worlds beyond" dominated by other types of particles.” (DLFR 5, Wiki translation)
The Dr. Latency project privileges Maribel’s powers of vision as that which confirms the reality of these otherworlds, whilst also assigning (speculative/pseudo-) scientific explanations to the nature of the worlds and creatures she encounters. By the time of TJD, the pair have diverged in their understanding of this relationship – disentangled, perhaps?
Maribel
Maribel’s understanding of Renko’s theory is that Renko has betrayed the principles she lays out in Changeability of Strange Dream: that Maribel’s visits to Gensokyo are not mere projections of her mind, explicable by science and psychology. It is Renko who persuades Merry that “dreams and reality are different. Because of that, you can work to make dreams into reality,” in order to prevent her from losing faith in and therefore losing her powers (CoSD 11, Kafka-Fura translation). It is this notion of the difference of the fantastic that grounds Maribel’s perception of its reality. Fantasy is totally other to human reality; it cannot be incorporated into and explained by scientific thought, otherwise it ceases to be fantasy.
In TJD, Maribel sees her powers of vision as that which confirms and manifests the difference-as-reality of the fantastic. To her, it is Renko’s inability to see the fantastic which entails that she cannot conceive of it as something “beyond the bounds of human imagination” (TJD 3, Wiki). When Maribel sees supernatural phenomena, this means that it exists as an object other than her human self. Seeing implies a boundary, a difference between the viewer and what is perceived. Renko’s quantum theorising, from her perspective, does not manifest this absolute difference and therefore folds fantasy into the realm of the human, of science. She appears to be giving into the notion that “dreams are simply images shown at the back of your brain” as Renko herself puts it in CoSD (11, KF).
Having sat outside all night in the middle of nowhere, Maribel is promptly subjected to an enormous tease. As she is shrouded in mist, she loses her “field of vision,” (TJD 4, Wiki), and also therefore her prized ability to confirm the reality/difference of the otherworlds. Teireida and Nishida (who I am not assuming are yet or still Mai and Satono) make it very clear that Okina thinks that Maribel’s epistemological and ontological stance is totally off the mark: “This girl, too, thinks that her own world is on the side of reality, doesn't she?” (TJD 5, Wiki). Okina (who I am taking as the ultimate agent in this segment) questions the fact that Maribel’s ability to see, differentiate, and confirm the existence of the fantastic relies on positioning herself as a stable ‘real’ human subject. The boundary Merry draws does not only confirm the fantastic as the fantastic, but differentiates herself (and the human world) from it as ‘real’. Her understanding is built on the foundation of binary, differentiated categories. If these categories are destabilised as such, it falls apart, and she loses the ability to make claims about reality.
In this segment also, the text introduces the theme of death. I do not entirely understand its significance to the story, probably due to ambiguities in the translations and my lack of Japanese. I am going to offer two readings of the dancers’/Okina’s taunt about immortality, dependent on the two different available translations of the first sentence in this section. Both are provisional and speculative, and they are not intended to be exhaustive.
Wiki translation: “As taboos were forgotten and phantasm shrunk away, death itself passed into fantasy.”
Here, ‘death’ is represented as a general concept, and associated with fantasy and lost cultural practices. On this reading, “has she convinced herself that she's an immortal human, I wonder?” (TJD 5, Wiki) suggests that death, incumbent upon all humans, is a quality which blurs the lines between ‘reality’ and ‘fantasy’ as modes of existence. Death is that which makes human vision and knowledge invariably partial, refusing modes of completion (of knowledge, self, systems) which might fully stabilise identity. This notion gels with Renko’s ultimate assertion of the similarity between humans and phantoms. Humans inevitably pass into a mode of existence where their ‘reality’ is dependent on memory and cultural practices, just like those of youkai and gods. Therefore, for a human to claim to be able to validate their existence as absolutely distinct from that of the fantastic would be an absurd claim of immortality.
Kafka-Fuura translation: “Fantasy bereft of the memory of their taboos diminish, defanged, until even their deaths are lost in oblivion.”
On this interpretation, death is not established a general concept which might condition the subsequent mention of immortality. This led me to consider what else Okina might mean by ‘immortal’. In Magical Astronomy, Renko says:
“Immortality doesn't imply the absence of death. Rather, it merely implies a state of existence in which the boundary between life and death disappears, and you exist as neither alive nor dead.
It'd be like a bona fide Necrofantasia—a practical realization of being in a world somewhere in between the world of the living and the Netherworld at the same time." (MA 9, Wiki)
It probably isn’t irrelevant that this sounds a lot like Schrodinger’s cat. If we read Okina’s taunt (which does use a different word for ‘immortal’) as referring to this mode of ‘immortality’, then she appears to be accusing Maribel of a contradiction. If Maribel thinks that she can straddle these worlds in a state of Necrofantasia (and it is not clear that she does, in this moment at least), she loses her ability to confirm the boundary between reality and fantasy via her stable position in reality, through her vision. The implication, perhaps, is that already, in approaching fantasy, in positioning herself as a medium – Maribel is undermining that belonging to the world of the real which validates her claims to knowledge. Her project is futile: fantasy can never be verified through categorical difference, because this difference is never stable or absolute. Her attempt to validate this boundary will always escape her, since she will eventually become an embodiment of its collapse.
Neither of these interpretations are, I think, conclusive or fully supported by the text.
Renko/Okina
To return to the heart of the matter, let us now skip ahead to Renko’s ‘heretical theory’. Completely regardless of its scientific foundation (or validity), its perspective conceptually overturns the basis on which Maribel thinks she can make judgements about reality in a manner not dissimilar to that suggested by Okina. Renko has taken the syncretism between science and fantasy postulated in DLFR and gone in the opposite direction to Maribel. She locates the ‘reality’ of fantasy not in a differential otherness to the reality of humanity, nor in an assimilation of fantastic phenomena to science and human rationalisation. Instead, she suggests a radical continuity between these modes of existence on a fundamental level: “this world isn't made of matter in the classical sense… It's not just otherworlds that are" (TJD 11, Wiki).
Renko’s theory refuses to privilege the human or the scientific as the stable point of ‘the real’, or even a stable category in and of itself. If differentiating human from phantom “isn't something with a simple answer” (TJD 11, Wiki), then this difference cannot be the basis for defining and verifying the nature and existence of these modes of being. With the notion of an empirical distinction between human and ‘phantom’ (fantasy) abolished, the fixed boundary between them is opened out into a fluid continuum, relative rather than absolute; revealing differentiation as that which creates these categories rather than that which discovers an already-separate fundamental nature.
Why might Okina’s perspective align more with Renko’s than with Maribel’s? When she is introduced in HSiFS, Okina disrupts the categorical difference between Buddhism and Shinto, which have been presented in Touhou as factional and opposed, instead revealing a hidden and buried history of their entanglement (see here). Okina is a bursting-at-the-seams excess of syncretic threads, an agglutinative assemblage which challenges any fan to demarcate the differences between figures, ideas, forces which make up her background. She is composed more, perhaps, of the processes of assemblage, interaction, syncretism, convergence, association – than of discrete constituent parts. Before the release of TJD, I had started to think in a creative-headcanon capacity of Okina as a representation of the unstable and arbitrary nature of the distinctions which structure Gensokyo’s existence. Her vision of existence is mycelial, rhizomatic, entangled – it cannot be neatly ordered into categories such as human/youkai or reality/fantasy.
If Okina is a secret and hidden god, it is because she represents that which must be excluded and repressed in order for these and other categories to function as constitutive of order, meaning, and existence in Gensokyo. I would personally resist seeing this entanglement as primal and original, existing before categorisation. The two translations diverge here, with the Wiki describing the Land of the Backdoor as the “completely vanished form of the world” and Kafka-Fuura describing it as “this world completely lost to our own” (TJD 10). There’s a significant difference here. Is Okina’s realm a separate world, or is it the original form of everything? Nevertheless, I think it is more useful to see Okina’s model of reality as representing that which a system of categorisations places outside of itself and tacitly defines itself against as the intelligible versus the unintelligible. In Gensokyo, the reification and separation of categories such as human and youkai have a practical exigency. This need not entail that Okina be adversarial to the project of Gensokyo. She clearly is not. What I would argue is that she represents its foundational prohibition and taboo; the fact that its constitutive boundaries and categories are neither fundamental nor absolute.
Breaking the taboo
I do not believe it is only the existence Renko’s theory that breaks the taboo which allows her to access Okina’s realm, nor only her overturning the Jizo statue. Rather, it is the fact that she refuses to position herself outside of the realm of fantasy or ‘dead culture’, as someone who cannot interact with or make an impact on this world. The conservation of Hitachi Province is associated with contemporary Japan’s sense of its own difference and distance from the past, a belief that it can isolate history in order to preserve it. When she kicks over the Jizo statue as an intentional act of taboo-breaking, Renko damages one of these preserved cultural objects. She interacts with this closed-off world, changes it, places it in continuity and connection with herself rather than leaving it as something distant and dead. Both Renko and Maribel break a rule, but the way in which they believe this rule to be ‘real’ differs. Maribel believes that the taboo is crossing boundaries. She respects the place as dead and conserved, different from herself, and she waits only to watch and visually confirm the otherworld. Renko refuses to acknowledge that such boundaries exist. She does not respect the conservation and ‘death’ of the place, and entangles herself with it on purpose.
Maribel doesn’t seem to see (or to remember seeing) anything in the mist: “Just after 10 AM on the morning I went, the mist cleared, and on the other side, there you were." (TJD 11, Wiki). The mist blocks her vision, the principle in which she invests all of her power to access and confirm the existence of the fantastic (interestingly, in older stories Maribel focuses more on the fact that she can touch and be touched by the otherworlds. This difference makes me believe that Zun is doing something on purpose here with the idea of sight). Renko, on the other hand, closes her eyes, which is the point at which she sees the land of the backdoor. This is the strongest implication we get that Okina ‘agrees’ with Renko’s theories, or that her nature aligns with them somehow. Renko rejects visibility, and therefore difference, as the principle which can affirm the fantastic. Quantum mechanics and the Copenhagen interpretation have presumably provided her with the model of an otherness which is not predicated on humanity in a binary structure, and which in fact vanishes when it is observed or measured (categorised, perhaps) by humans.
Conservation, reality, Gensokyo
What does Renko’s poststructuralist theory of quantum mechanics mean for Gensokyo? The description of Hitachi Province fascinates me here:
“As the Hitachi Region was designated as a Natural Cultural Heritage Site, it was a symbol of preservationist intervention, and a microcosm of what was happening on a national scale. Though it proudly presented itself as a model for what Japan used to be, with its expansive rice fields, the culture it was ostensibly trying to preserve was already long dead. If anything the region was like a ghost that had yet to realize its own demise” (TJD 8, KF).
It's hard not to think of Gensokyo when I read this. The term ‘ghost’ calls forward to Renko’s exposition of reality at the end of the story. Inside Gensokyo, humans are set in opposition to gods and youkai, but from the perspective of the outside world, they too have passed into fantasy. One might speculate that this ‘phantom’ nature of Gensokyo’s humans is one of the hidden things that Okina presides over in order for Yukari’s system to function. If Gensokyo’s humans started to see themselves as part of fantasy itself (not just as humans living in a fantasy land), would they lose the ability to lend reality to the youkai? Or lose any sense of distinction between themselves and inhuman? Might this be one of Gensokyo’s taboos? I raised this idea in a fanfic once without ever expecting it’d have any bearing on canon.
Interesting also is the comparison between Gensokyo and the Hitachi region’s description as a poor representation of old Japan. In CoSD, Maribel mentions how people in the past didn’t distinguish between dreams and reality (CoSD 7, KF). Although she is talking more literally about dreaming here, this introduces the idea that before the separation of fantasy and reality (that is, the death of fantasy in the outside world and its relegation to Gensokyo), the boundaries between these two concepts may have been more porous, with the fantastic exiting in a continuum with humanity. Gensokyo’s architecture cannot support this kind of continuum, instead placing rigid boundaries between humans and youkai and essentially enclosing its humans within the village. Those who live outside of it are usually implied to either be eccentrics or youkai exterminators – that is, the very people who maintain this separation. Like Hitachi province, Gensokyo can only preserve ‘old Japan’ by isolating it and erecting boundaries which deny various modes of change and continuity.
So perhaps the foundational hidden taboo of Gensokyo is, indeed, to acknowledge that there’s not much meaningful difference between humans and phantoms. The Hakurei Barrier is referred to as a barrier of ‘common sense’ (see the PMiSS monologue). In particular, it relies on differences in ‘common sense’ between Gensokyo and the outside world. Outside of the barrier, humans view fantasy as completely unreal, nothing more than a projection of their own psyches. Inside Gensokyo, humans view fantasy as real but as distinct from themselves. What Renko proposes dissolves both modes of ‘common sense’, refusing to view fantasy as either internal or external to humanity. Instead, she positions it in continuity with the ‘real’, rejecting the supposed authority of humanity to arbitrate what counts as reality and what does not. As she says, “the mysteries of the quantum world are far too great for that!" (TJD 10, Wiki).
Conclusions
So, is Maribel Yukari? Isn’t this what we all wanted to learn from this story? I’m open to the ambiguity that remains about their precise connection, but if we are to read this as a step towards Maribel’s becoming-youkai, it is important that she ends up reluctantly accepting Renko’s theory at the end of the story. Even if Yukari falls very firmly into the ‘differential boundaries’ position in terms of how she operates, this might be the moment at which Maribel’s sense of herself as separate from the worlds she perceives (and therefore as human) starts to fall apart. Could it be that her powers are limited largely to sight so long as she believes that she is different from what she sees? Perhaps understanding herself as formed from the same processes as fantasy will enable her to take full control over her powers to manipulate boundaries, rather than just observing them.
As for Gensokyo writ large, Okina hasn’t explicitly been shown to be antagonistic towards Yukari’s project or philosophy. She sees herself as vitally important to Gensokyo’s maintenance, all the moreso if she is in fact part of what brings Maribel closer to becoming Yukari. As a complete headcanon, I like the idea of Renko as the destroyer of Gensokyo, with Yukari/Maribel as its origin point. Up until now, I didn’t really think this concept had much basis in canon or was well-aligned with Renko’s personality, but TJD gives it a little more support. It’s not that Renko is against fantasy, but perhaps she’s running out of patience with its position as different and distant, given that what she argues is so destabilising to the foundational principles of Gensokyo: against conservation and isolation, towards transformation and entanglement.
I offer this not as a theory about the authorial intent or absolute truth of this text, or as speculation about a definite direction the story will take. I want to make this clear because this is how a lot of fandom meta couches itself, and that approach doesn’t interest me. This is one of many, invariably incomplete readings you could make of this story – one which really excites me, and makes me think about Touhou in new ways. I hope it can do the same for you.
Works not cited:
By which I mean, academic texts which influenced my thinking in this essay, but which I’m not citing throughout in the conventional sense because I need a break from all that sometimes. A good 80% of the theory in this comes from Judith Butler.
Butler, J. 1993. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex. London: Routledge.
Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus. (Massumi, B. Trans.). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Massumi, B. 2002. Parables for the Virtual. Durham: Duke University Press.
And a bunch of Wikipedia pages on quantum physics from which I’m sure I learned very little.
