Seigi-kun’s Speech, and a Cross That Is Only Clean (MMM_Memento Mori Machina)

Viscera put out a piece on September 23 that reads FISH DREAM (『魚の夢』) by MMM_Memento Mori Machina as 転倒したキリスト教文学, “inverted Christian literature.” The title is 邪悪な聖典, an evil scripture. As I read it, the argument is that the novel keeps the grammar of sin, paradise, fall and judgment and turns the values over, and that when God withdraws, the empty seat gets taken by the self, by science, by pleasure, by justice. The last line of the article is 誰もが裁けるようになった, everyone has become able to judge. Mei wrote about the article too, on September 30, and I read that twice before I touched the novel.

Then I did the plain thing and opened the Japanese of Part One to the two places the article leans on, so I wasn’t only trusting its version of them.

The first is the chapel. The Witch invites the narrator to a meeting in the 礼拝室 next to the library and says the room is empty and that the emptiness feels very good: なにもないのがとてもきもちいいのです. She explains that when it was cleared out they found the mark where a cross had hung, and that the hospital was built over an old church, which is why only that room is stone. Later the narrator goes there alone. Behind the altar the whole wall is a dingy gray, and the place where a cross seems to have hung looks whitish and bright. Then the next sentence: 無論、実際にはひかっていたのではなく、そこだけよごれていないだけだった. Of course it wasn’t actually shining. That spot just hadn’t gotten dirty.

I had been picturing a glowing outline, which is what you get from reading about it secondhand. The text won’t let it glow. It is clean because something hung there while the rest of the wall collected dust. I don’t want to build anything on that yet. It just stopped me.

One more thing about that room. The Witch is the one who says the emptiness feels good, and she is also the one who says freed. Viscera reads the emptied seat as something that gets filled, and Mei, as far as I can tell from the post, reads it as staying empty, which is the scarier option. In the chapel scene I read this week, the emptiness is just there and a woman is pleased about it. I can’t tell yet whether that pleasure is the kind of thing the speech I get to below is afraid of, and I’d rather say I can’t tell than pick a side because both of them have written well.

The second place is the long speech by Seigi-kun, in the chapter before the one where he and the Witch face off (the chapter title says so: 正義と魔女の対決). I had only the article’s quotes in my head, and the speech is longer and angrier than I remembered. He says that what we now call 性の解放・性の自由・性の肯定, sexual liberation, sexual freedom, sexual affirmation, is all just 動物回帰の願望, a wish to go back to being an animal. He says it is not right to release everything: なんでもかんでも解放すればいいというものではありません. And he describes the order turning over in plain words. 頭脳は肉体に支配される, the head comes to be ruled by the body, 上半身は下半身の奴隷になり, the upper half becomes the lower half’s slave.

That is the inversion Viscera describes in the sex cosmology piece, body over spirit, and here it is said by a character who treats it as a plague. He wants the whole cycle cut off. Near the end he says 人類は奴隷を探していたのではなかったのです。主人を探していたのです, humanity was not looking for a slave, it was looking for a master. People wanted to give up their own will, thought and judgment, he says, and just feel good.

This is uncomfortable for me because “liberation” is the word I came in with, in the first post. It is the word Seigi-kun spends the speech attacking. And the Witch uses a word from the same family when she tells the narrator he has been freed from himself (解放されている). So the two characters who hate each other seem to be describing the same shape, the head under the body and the will handed over. One calls it a disease and one calls it release. If that is right, what I misread might not be the sex at all. It might be the choosing. That is a guess, and I know the narrator warns that people who explain the Witch only zoom in on the part they can understand.

Two cautions. Seigi-kun is a character, and the article itself says that what characters say isn’t the novel’s verdict. I also haven’t reread his chapter with the Witch, so I don’t know whether she answers the master line or just walks past it. And the article and Mei both write about Part Five, the massacre in the chapel and, for Mei, the ending after it. I haven’t reread Part Five in this round, so I’m not going to say anything about it.

Next I’ll read the chapter where they face each other, slowly, and see what she says to him.