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Neji's Birthday Story Thoughts

In an effort to remind myself this blog exists and to use it I am going to ramble a bit about Neji's Birthday Story which we are blessed to have not one, but two translations of now. All the birthday stories are pretty gut-punchy, and I think they all reflect the increasing depth and understanding Towada has and wants to impart about these characters. I think Seven Winds is also a really clear example of this, and it's fun to watch these deeper parts of the characters get explored.

Happy Birthday, Neji-senpai.

This is long — what can I say, I’m just a ramblin’ man.

So I’ll put it behind a cut. I’ll be referencing and/or spoiling Neji’s route, Fumi’s route, Kai’s route, Neji’s story in Seven Winds, the bonus story for the Tamasaka day novel, and several more things besides. I’m sure there are things whose reference number has gotten lost in my head. It’s as bad as Neji’s room in there, I’m sorry. Neji's birthday story is in a strange place in the timeline. Where as Suzu's works easily on his route and off of it by not really involving much of the route at all, Neji's has the problem of either being after some really drastic events, growth, and realizations, or not being there. I think it leans towards the former, but the uncertainty lends it a really interesting flavor.

In the bonus story for the Tamasaka Day novel, we get Fumi's musings about Neji, about how even he doesn't really always know what he means or what he feels, and that he seems, to Fumi, often to be drowning in his own head and thoughts. Fumi states in that story that he feels like Kai, because of his own past, is probably better at getting Neji when he's lost to the ocean of his thoughts like that, but that it risks pulling them both under.

Fumi's pretty sharp, and there's something to this, but this is also a moment like the one on Neji's route where he says that Kai and Fumi, despite having unusual (doing a lot of heavy lifting) childhoods, are far better than he is at knowing who they are and translating that onto the stage. Then when you play Kai route, the central theme is that Kai both doesn't know himself at all, and struggles to translate the desires he finally lets in into anything but a kind of frantic emotional reaction, on or off stage. And Fumi will spend summer training camp's final night talking about how he can only glimpse who he is in moments of turmoil. Kai, too, sees Neji and Fumi as more worthy of their place in the world of theater, as real talents he thinks he lacks. They're all kind of a mess.

The cakes Kai and Fumi bring in Neji's birthday story echo the cakes that Neji and Fumi bring Kai in his, too.

In the final story in Seven Winds, Fumi watches 1Q hanging out and laughing together and thinks about how he and Neji and Kai just... don't really do that. And thinks. Maybe I should just go up to Kai and talk. None of them have the experience of just having friends. This is something none of them really understand or know how to approach, and are not very well equipped for it. But Neji and Fumi try to reach Kai, try to get him to express a preference, even just for a cake flavor. Even if they fail, they keep trying. Fumi talks about Kai coming back day after day in rehearsals even when Fumi was a jerk about it, and Kai talks about always running to catch up, even if he never fully grasps what Fumi is asking of him. And Neji, with his friend-fiction, with his plays and direction constantly trying to push them both into realizations. For the stage, of course. Friendship, as Neji says. It really is amazing. It's a new and strange concept for the three of them. And so we have this story, which is about that friendship, and the roles they each play in it, in this uncertain space that may or may not be taking place after the events of Neji's route. As Fumi muses, the guy has been drowning for a long time. Those opening lines, the questions of death, of genius, the metaphor of the ocean. They're always there, just under the surface, regardless of if the wave has crested or not. Fumi, after all, seems to be the member of Quartz most keenly aware of whats happening on Neji's early route, who gets more and more haggard as those few weeks drag on, checking in on Neji holed up in his office. Aware of Kisa's secret and probably having half the pieces to put things together, and several major pieces Kisa herself doesn't quite have just yet. Fumi knows where this is heading. There's no other reason Mr. Carry the Class on my Shoulders and Protect Kisa would be that frank in asking that she keep an eye on him. He knows as soon as that call comes. He knows, so clearly, in what he says to Neji when he comes back. He knows, and he didn't know what to say to stop it. He's probably known for a long time. Kai is more reserved on Neji's route, commenting only at the very end that the two of them never talk about it, and that maybe they should. They have a moment, a brief fleeting moment, during the Arata Forest short story, where they almost do, almost share a sentiment about Kisa's obvious experience with loss, but nothing comes of it. Kai says, on 3/6 that he thinks maybe Neji has just been playing a version of Neji Kokuto who is okay with what happened. The Arata Forest story is in his head, but compared to this, very shallowly. Most of that story isn’t about Neji at all, but this play he’s put together, and how it’s going. This class he’s adopted and in turn been adopted by. We get a small peak in the last seven winds story, where he’s bouncing bits around in his head, but this birthday story goes deeper than we’ve ever gotten a peak at before, into that drowning mess Fumi was talking about.

And oh boy does it. We see it a bit around Winter Arc, the way Neji starts to talk in the metaphors of the world he’s been working on, taking on Havenna’s color in talking about sin and the like, but it’s always a bit unclear, given that Neji writes these plays, which is the chicken and which is the egg. Bird metaphor very much intended as that comes back over and over in this story as well. If the chick cannot break out of its shell, it will die before Ishida confirms he’s riffing on Utena, or however that quotation goes. In this we see Sissia of the Central Nation’s influence. The Great Kokuto Sarafumi ceasefire. Scattering ashes to make flowers bloom. And of course, Revolution.

But there are so many metaphors mixing in and out here, which is wonderful to see so clearly in a canon story like this. Neji extends his own metaphors to the point of absurdity, the baby bird and the bird seed it is owed. Chicks forever being born, forever dying, forever being born again.

He gets carried away by his own inertia, lost in his own extended metaphors, and it’s great to see Kai being able to just be there, pulling him back into the present. Maybe that’s what Fumi meant, about Kai being a bit better about grabbing him, because Fumi will play into the banter, keeping it light enough to float on the surface, making what he could say but isn’t saying clear enough that Neji picks up on it a few times, but never pushing too hard. Neji says in the story that Fumi gives him the grace of pretending not to see it all, all the mess that he knows he is.

I think the part of the story that strikes me the most is his discussion of always picking the hardest path, and why. He’s describing a kind of algorithm against regret, knowing regret is inevitable anyway. It’s a classical existentialist dilemma he paints here, philosophical dizziness of freedom (freedom being a theme word in Jack Jeanne). You must choose, and every choice precludes all the others. By picking the hardest one, Neji tells himself (or really, tells himself he’s telling himself) he can close the curtains around it, make the stage, make it the only path. Why the hardest and not the easiest? He doesn’t say, maybe because it means he can tell himself he at least tried - he didn’t shy away, so if/when the regret lands, at least he has that. But beyond that, what I actually find even more fascinating is what comes after. He constructs this grand sweeping thesis on himself, on his actions and his faults and then goes “That’s just what came to my mind just now, though. I have no idea if it’s true. My brain does that, sometimes. Just makes up a story, whether or not it actually fits who I am, who can say.”

I’m not sure I’ve ever seen this explored quite like this in fiction before, and I love it. We are the stories we tell ourselves, and once you realize that, where does that leave you? Each understanding, each breakthrough, each realization — these are all stories, too. That’s the only real way to understand the world, isn’t it? Stories we tell ourselves, stories the world tells, stories we tell each other. How do you find the shape of the ocean by tracing the waves? What does that even mean? What do “you” mean? That’s another thing that all of 3Q comes back to, each from their own angle. The question of who they actually are. Kai says he doesn’t know very much about himself. Fumi is constantly shocked and amused by his own emotions. Neji has no idea who he even is without defining himself only by his talent. His Seven Winds story hits its climax there, in his admission to Kisa that he doesn’t even know if he’s Neji Kokuto anymore, now that his brain isn’t working the way Neji Kokuto’s Brain works. Kisa, in her narration, says she was waiting for that admission. Waiting to tell him he’s still the same person.

But this is, really, character growth from the Neji we see on his route, and it is in alignment with the Neji we get in his best end, with a specific, if incomplete, realization. A realization that he tells himself stories about himself, about the world, about his role in it and what its rules and demarcations are. It’s a realization that he’s prone to these grand narratives, even if, like all of Neji’s realizations about himself, he understands without understanding, realizes without fully realizing. His big grand psychodrama was a story - a story he told himself because he can only think in stories, and because having a story, a grand narrative with narrative beats and explanations and through lines makes the chaos of it easier to understand, he thinks - he thought. It gave him rules and a sense of agency as much as it set up its own catastrophe. If there’s a story, he can understand it, he can try to navigate it, and play a role in it. But here, like in his Best End scene, he steps back and realizes that maybe just because the story sounds compelling in the moment, that doesn’t make it true. There was never really a pact by which he sacrificed the rest of his life for his talent. There was never really a weakness he inherited from his father. This grand narrative he set for his life was only ever a story. And here we see in his own head what we were seeing through Kisa’s eyes in Seven Winds, and what we see in snippets on his route several times, of him trying to build new scaffolding, a new story, a new grand play of Neji Kokuto, whoever the hell that even is. A character, a character with demarcated edges and complexes and a role to play and lines to say.

A genius! A revolutionary! Kielce always was meant to be a mirror to the cast, on both a Watsonian and Doyalist level.

But that story, the story of “genius” is one he cannot quite shake. Not on his own, anyway. That “genius” is really the only part of himself that is worth anything, and the only way to relate to the world, and the only reason anyone would or could relate to him. It’s the ‘gear’ in his own story about himself and his place in it.

And it makes sense, for someone who thinks so completely in tropes and narrative that inside his own mind it’s just reference and stock characters and mixed metaphors in a trench coat. On his route, he says, in a way that’s voiced almost as a eureka moment, that everyone must still be putting up with him because they must like his silly clownish personality. Like this is a puzzle he’s been mulling over, why the class tolerates a genius-less Neji Kokuto at all. Must be because he’s a funny guy! Of course. Class clown, that is also a role he knows, and has played. Of course.

There is a role out there for the eccentric genius. There is a role for the mad artist. For someone who talks weird and can’t keep his room clean and forgets to eat and has never, really, had any friends before, so long as they are also a genius or a brilliant artist. That’s a trope, and one Neji is very familiar with. But without that? What’s an eccentric without its genius? A mad artist without their art?

Fumi says that ‘genius’ is a label people put on someone they cannot understand, and says that Neji doesn’t try to make himself understood, he’s just content to chase his own ideas for as far as they’ll take him.

Compare and contrast Neji telling Fumi, also a “genius” character that there is no one left, one Tsuki is gone, to “translate” him. To make him understandable to everyone else. That translator role is also something Neji is said to have played for Chui, another “genius” , that Chui lacks without Neji around.

One of my big complaints with Neji’s route is that no one ever explicitly challenges the idea of ‘genius’ and ‘talent’ that Neji has constructed for himself. Kisa sort of goes along with this story, this narrative, that its a thing, like the ancient conception of a gift from the muses, that one can just… lose. She never quite gets to the point of separating him from it, and her means of reassuring him are to tell him he still is a genius, after all.

Which is why I love what Kai says here, in this birthday story. No, Kokuto. It’s not your genius. It’s just you.

It’s a volly that lands clear over Neji’s wall of banter and bits and jokes and personas and masks right to the ooey gooey uncomfortably human center of him. “Such a “happy birthday” thing to say." Friends, what a concept.

He’s still uncomfortable with it all, with this idea of being a messy person that isn’t just a trope or role to inhabit. Of having baggage, and trauma, and anxieties. A past that he can’t shake, that he can’t quite make into something that only pushes him forward. But not being sure how to just be a human being is really the most human being thing of all.

We don’t know, as I said, if we’re supposed to read this as taking place after the tumult of his route - and thus after the ways Fumi and Kai, too, dealt with all that, or if we are meant to understand that “are you still alive?” is a question he’d be asking himself (very formally!) even without having nearly walked into the ocean. Because ‘nearly walking into the ocean’ is something that he’s carried with him regardless. Something Fumi could see, in that bonus story. Something Chui tells Kisa has always been visible in his eyes.

If it is post Neji's route, it’s interesting to see Kisa show up only at the end, only in the distance, only as one of Neji's many underclassman he is so overflowing with concern and thoughts and wishes for. Regardles, It’s a Neji still quite unsteady on his own two feet, in his own skin, but with friends by his side to nudge him back to standing when he starts to wobble.

If it’s not meant to be after his route, it almost creates a sort of suggestion of the events of the route occurring some other way, maybe subtler, maybe not quite as catastrophic. Fumi and Kai’s approach to him feels like it carries the weight of something, and maybe that something is just an understanding borne of the evolution of their friendship. Of them being able to read him and his struggles as well as he can read them, to put them into scripts as one final acting puzzle on their respective routes — to work through and thus make them stronger on and off stage.

It’ll be interesting to see how the writing handles this problem in the sequel, that has to thread the needle between the revelations, however partial, of the character routes and a reality that can continue off of any of them, or off of Kisa’s route. It’s a writing puzzle I do not envy Ishida and Towada having to try to solve. Each character route works because it feels like something has fundamentally evolved in a unique way after those events, and so to see those evolutions in effect without them makes you wonder if some other version might have still happened, some other way. Was all of this rambling and excuse for me to say “but 3Q version of 1/17 real actually?” How could you accuse me of such a thing! What’s with all those knowing stares?! I have no agenda at all! I am as pure and innocent as a baby bird just hatched from its eternally recurring egg, okay? Neji’s whole “revolution!” bit at the end does make me excited to see what they’re going to do, going forward. There’s a lot being set up quietly for the politics of Tamasaka and the troupe to play a much bigger role, and I think this story positions Neji and his iconoclastic tendencies in a fun place in how that might evolve. He is also Chui’s ex-partner and the author of I Am Death, which gives him additional cache in the messy political scheming.

It’s also interesting to put alongside Fumi, in particular. I actually wish we got more of that in this story, though I suppose it would have pulled the focus a bit too much. But for all Fumi is chastising him for this, these thoughts Neji is expressing are extremely close to the way Fumi talks about his family in his first event. Though quite a bit more impatient. The resistance to the calcification of tradition, to its formality and hierarchy, to the ways in which trying to preserve the art can instead stagnate it — these are all things Fumi’s route addresses with regards to his family’s tradition. They are also things Chuza mentions, though rather unconvincingly, too, as a kind of lip-service more than anything that feels real or genuine. That guy will for sure be involved with the politics of whatever happens. Fumi’s route almost foils the too of them, but we haven’t really had a head to head show down between artistic revolutionaries and a guy who just wants to keep his position in his little kingdom, but is happy to use those words. It’d be fun to get.

Fumi’s whole arc with his family is also something that hypothetically could all have happened behind the scenes even off his route, but which leaving ambiguous will do interesting things with, especially if Tamasaka’s style is a lot closer to what Fumi was running from than Univeil, which I would guess it is. Which leaves Kai. The one who knows how to pull Neji out of the water. The guy who can cut through Fumi and Neji’s runaway banter and straight to the point. He’s still settling into understanding himself and his own immense talent. I think back to Levi, the ringmaster, the one who holds it all together in Kielce. The project may have been Crowley, the revolutionary’s idea, but it’s Levi that actually leads the troupe. I wonder how that will shake out in Tamasaka next year. Kai certainly makes some progress in the common route, but we don’t get to see that much of where he is off his own route in terms of understanding himself, and understanding why Neji gave him that role. The Kai at the end of Kai route is at a very different point than the Kai at the end of any other route. Neither are quite where they need to be, so there is for sure room to grow — that’s very true of Fumi and Neji as well. The question is where we’re going to be starting from, and how that will end up being portrayed in the expanded setting beyond Univeil’s gate. Whatever it is, I’m excited to see where they’ll take these characters next, and I feel extremely vindicated reading Neji’s weird extended metaphor blender of a brain in action. Haha, I called that. Haha I *do* that. I’m sure I could ramble for another several thousand words. I’m sure I could have said all this with several thousand less. As Neji says, somewhere, Kai can say something in 5 minutes that he'd go off on random zigzags about for the better part of an hour. I’m sure I’ll think of something else, and regret not including it. But that’s the messy, narrative-less path of life, isn’t it? All of which is to say, if you want this baby bird’s chirping about something missing here, or more about something already a song and a half long, I can squawk for hours. Pages. Whatever. Pick your metaphor. Revolution!

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