MYTHCOMICS: PERFECT HUMAN BEING (2010?)

In an earlier essay, I mentioned the sheer length of the manga-series THE WORLD GOD ONLY KNOWS, and the mythopoeic potential of its basic concept, even though I didn’t find any examples of hyperconcrescence in the twenty-odd stories I’d read. Now I’ve discovered one arc that qualifies as a mythcomic, situated a few episodes beyond the hundred-mark. I’ve chosen to entitle the arc PERFECT HUMAN BEING after one of the episode-titles.

A quick recap: high school student Keima Katsuragi and his magical-girl sidekick Elsee have had a great deal success in their common mission, to identify female mortals who have been possessed by fugitive spirits from the domain of hell, and then to exorcise the spirits and return them to their proper place. The hell-spirits are less important to the narrative than the means by which Keima has to exorcise them. For reasons that are still unclear, the youth has exclusively devoted himself to the practice of sim-dating. His current mission forces him to interact with real girls in some way—befriending them, romancing them, or studying under them—in order to heal some broken part of the women’s spirits, thus causing the possessing spirits to flee and be captured. The interactions are always G-rated, and the former victims of possession largely forget the experience, thus clearing Keima’s path for further exorcisms.

Keima’s newest challenge is another high-school student, Akari Kurakawa. Whereas Keima turns his back on real experience in favor of the idealized scenarios of sims, Akari is similarly disenchanted with the imperfect nature of the experiential world. Instead of depending on pre-fabricated games as Keima does, Akari hopes to build an artificial human being who can incarnate her ideal of perfection. However, she’s not really scientifically gifted, and can only create very primitive robotic constructs, no better than one would expect of a high-school student.

Keima, having received indications that Akari may harbor a spirit, attempts to get close to her by professing interest in her project, and even tries to help her by devising a human head for the primitive robot. Having decided that the wound to her spirit is romantic in nature, given that Akari is an outsider, Keima approaches her romantically, and kisses her in the hope of quickly exorcising the spirit.

Akari’s problem, however, is not one of thwarted romance, and to prove it, she kisses him back a few times. This not only throws Keima off his game, it proves her point about the imperfection of experiential life, showing how easy it is for him to become flustered about such a minor gesture. Keima resents having been manipulated, complaining to Elsee, “I am not affected by the real!” Nevertheless, his only avenue to complete his task turns out to be intellectual, to find some way to undermine Akari’s concept of “perfection.”

I should parenthetically note that the original Japanese script may contain subtleties regarding whatever terms are used for the English words “ideal” and “perfect.” But going by the English translation, the author’s intent is to describe a discontinuity between the two conceptual terms, whatever their cultural influences. For Westerners since the days of Plato and Parmenides, the ideal is not infrequently synonymous with the perfect.

In a concluding dialogue, Keima tries to provide reasons as to why perfection might not be an admirable state of affairs. It’s not a dialogue such as Plato might provide, devoted to discursive discussions of ideal concepts. Rather, Keima evokes the symbolic conflicts between the imagined state of perfection and the ideal of love, not surprisingly since the latter is his ideal, even though expressed through artificial surrogates. He attests, “I think the ideal world… lies somewhere… but that world might not necessarily be a perfect world.” Imperfection, both in real life and in the worlds of fantasy, is necessary to motivate people/ characters to do things: “they don’t stand still and instead move forward.” In contrast, he elicits a vision of a world where everyone is perfect and identical, and thus no one needs anyone else. Akari comes to the realization that “the reason I chase after perfection is because I am incomplete myself.”

Yet, though Akari gives up her robot-project for the time being, she also frustrates Keima’s paradigm, for she disappears before Keima’s eyes without unleashing any spirit-fugitives. The arc’s denouement shows Akari conferring with another character, making clear that both of them are part of some more involved scheme that will in future involve both Keima and Elsee. But whatever the author chose to do with Akari in further episodes, PERFECT HUMAN BEING by itself provides a piquant inquiry into the nature of human abstractions, and the ways they do or do not apply to the human condition.