MYTHCOMICS: "THE MAN WHO CAN SUMMON A STORM" (GHOST SWEEPER MIKAMI, 1995)

 As I write this, I've not yet finished reading the entire GHOST SWEEPER MIKAMI manga online, but paused at Volume 2 (1996), three years from the feature's conclusion. In MIKAMI MEDITATIONS I opined that mangaka Takashi Shiina intended to provide an epistemologically grounded psychology for his starring character Reiko Mikami, as to why she was both a peerless hero and a money-hungry businesswoman who exploited at least one employee. However, Shiina chose to dispense elements of that psychology in dribs and drabs. Shiina's biggest "drab" so far, 1995's "Storm," does not provide a total psychology for his heroine, but I'm seeing a strong pattern suggestive of Adler's compensation theory. So I'm writing this essay without reading all of the available volumes of SWEEPER, as something of a test of my method, before finishing the series and seeing what else the artist has in store.

"Storm" doesn't concern any sort of real tempest, and so far as I can tell, it's a metaphor for psychological upheaval. The story starts out largely with the status quo, although after roughly four years of acting the fool, Yokoshima has upgraded his skills, enough to function as an assistant ghost sweeper. But his ability to charm the skirt off Mikami remains non-existent.

Then Mikami learns that there's a competing GS outfit nearby, one subsidized by the Japanese government. She seeks them out, only to find that she knows the head of the agency-- and Yokoshima sees an unusual sight, that of Mikami acting "girly."

Saijou, head of the "Occult G-Men," lived with Mikami's family when she was just a child, because Saijou was training in GS skills with Mikami's mother. It's soon clear to Yokoshima that although Mikami calls Saijou "brother," her attitude toward him is hardly fraternal. Yokoshima immediately assumes that Saijou hopes to conquer Mikami's heart, especially since Saijou is taller, more handsome, and a stronger GS fighter than Yokoshima. However, it's soon disclosed that Saijou really doesn't see Mikami romantically, and his main purpose for seeking her out is to recruit her for his agency. And Mikami accepts, even though government pay is nothing like the money she makes as a private agent.

      

A flashback established that Saijou was the first crush of ten-year-old Mikami, and that she even confessed her feelings to him, though he didn't for an instant take her seriously. To be sure, Mikami only joins Saijou's agency on a probationary basis, and she expects Yokoshima and Okinu to keep running her private business, making big money for her. The young man, knowing Mikami better than Saijou does, enlists some of Mikami's colleagues to make the GS business more profitable than ever. However, when Mikami visits her agency, she's clearly depressed to see it functioning well without her.

Mikami overcompensates by trying to throw herself into her g-men work, but Saijou has seen the way she acts with Yokoshima. He gives Mikami a minor assignment to get her out of the way while Saijou has words with Yokoshima. The younger guy still believes that Saijou is a romantic rival despite the latter's denials, but Saijou still has only fraternal feelings for Mikami, and so he tests Yokoshima in battle. Yokoshima knows he's physically outclassed, so he not only flees battle, he humiliates Saijou with a variation on the old "order 100 pizzas for your enemy" trick.

   

However, Saijou accidentally pushes Mikami over the brink by giving her a mundane assignment--lecturing to schoolchildren-- that he'd easily perform with his altruistic mentality, but which is like poison to the high-spirited exorcist. Saijou, Yokoshima and Mikami's other friends find her in a hospital, not responding to anyone. She mechanically repeats the word "money," but doesn't respond when Okinu holds a pile of cash in front of her nose. She also doesn't respond when her first crush speaks to her. Then Yokoshima declares that her coma-like status means that he can take advantage of her, and Mikami immediately snaps back to normal and elbow-slams him. Saijou realizes that even though he only wanted to work with Mikami for non-romantic reasons, she's more suited to non-altruistic pursuits, so he fires her and returns her to Yokoshima. However, Saijou gets the last laugh by duplicating Yokoshima's "100 pizzas" trick, which has the added effect of putting the hapless schmuck back in the crosshairs of Mikami's wrath.

 So in "Storm," Shiina isn't quite ready to tell his readers exactly what makes Mikami coo-coo for currency. He does show that ten-year-old Mikami crushes so hard on "brother" Saijou that she acts just like a self-sacrificing female, willing to do anything to please her man. Yet when she tries to do it in her mature years, the effort almost destroys her, even though she can face down ghosts and demons without blinking. Further, whatever gave Mikami "gold fever" apparently happened between her pre-teen and teenaged years, going by the story I summarized in MIKAMI MEDITATIONS. "Storm" suggests to me that after ten-year-old Mikami was left behind by her crush when he sought altruistic pursuits, she overcompensated by pursuing a parallel course of heroic action, but only when she was well-paid. So she both followed Saijou's example and deviated from it.

And yet, if money was really all Mikami desired, she would have been pulled out of her coma by the presence of greenbacks. Instead, what awakens the sleeping beauty is not love's first kiss, but the (probably feigned) threat of rapine. Experienced readers are not likely to believe that Yokoshima would ever really rape a woman, in this story or in any other. He's a reader-proxy for very minor acts of molestation-- groping boobs, stealing kisses-- and in this story, he seems to realize, if only instinctually, that Mikami gets "fired up" when he molests her. In part, it stokes her ego to know that she can always kick his ass, while still feeding her sense of self-worth with his constant appreciation of her looks-- both pleasures she could never get from noble Saijou. Where Shiina will take his heroine from here, I don't yet know. But even if he goes in a different direction from "Storm," I expect I'll find his psychological twists just as engrossing. 

ADDENDUM: It belatedly struck me that although the title implies that the new character may be the "man" of the title, it seems to be Yokoshima who actually brings forth the full storm of Mikami's emotions, as opposed to causing her to repress them. That's assuming there's no special Japanese cultural meaning to the phrase, of course.       

MIKAMI MEDITATIONS

My next mythcomics post will deal with a moderately obscure manga, GHOST SWEEPER MIKAMI (1991-99), and so part of this essay will be to explicate the manga's rationale and the background of its main characters. But I also want to use elements of this series to illustrate a special dynamic about epistemological patterns in fiction: that, unlike the patterns that human beings ascribe to aspects of reality, fictional patterns proceed not from cause to effect, but from effect to cause.

Every author who utilizes epistemological patterns in his fiction is naturally influenced by those found in reality. But whether the author is the organized type who plans out everything, or the type who flies by his pants-seat, authors in general first conceive of the effect they want to make with their characters/situations and then work backwards to justify the cause of the effects. The justification may not even be one that is currently validated by the dominant intellectual culture. Freudianism is not as validated today as in past eras. But when an author wants his story to invoke the psychological potentiality, Freud supplies the needed rationales for works ranging from MOURNING BECOMES ELECTRA to "Superman's Return to Krypton."

Here's what I wrote about the manga series for my review of the anime TV show:             

Starring character Reiko Mikami is a "ghost sweeper" in her late twenties or early thirties, and she uses a variety of supernatural weapons to exorcise troublesome ghosts and demons who plague modern-day people and businesses. Mikami is as courageous and resourceful as the best heroes, but she's also extremely mercenary, taxing her customers with huge bills so that someday she can become a rich woman. She's also slightly larcenous-- one episode displays her knowledge of burglary techniques-- and she constantly underpays her male assistant, seventeen-year-old Tadao Yokoshima. She gets away with this because she's super-hot and knows that horndog Yokoshima will accept any wage just to scope her out. The fact that she's exploiting the youth, however, does not keep her from doling out brutal punishment to the teen any time he tries to feel her up, or even expresses a negative opinion of her. Yokoshima, for his part, is clearly meant to be the "goat" of the series, the one who has all the terrible things happen to him-- and because he's such an unregenerate perv, his sufferings are funny.

Now, many long-running manga serials have exploited similar situations without imbuing their characters with anything like a psychology, and the first two years of SWEEPER seem like a lot of other comedy-oriented shonen manga: lots of high-powered action with some comedy relief in the form of a dumb guy getting clobbered. Reiko Mikami's first episode clearly shows her as a master of her ghostbusting craft, as well as her determination that anyone who needs her services must pay heavily for them. 

In contrast, she underpays assistant Yokoshima because he appears to be a subservient minion and even implies that she gives him fringe benefits whenever he peeps at her in the bath-- though when he goes so far as to touch her, or even to make lewd propositions, she beats the hell out of him. And yet, unlike similar serials like LOVE HINA and ZERO'S FAMILIAR, there's no internal rationale for keeping the fractious couple together. If Mikami is really repelled by Yokoshima's attentions, why doesn't she just fire him and find another cheap, horny teenager? 

 During the first two years of the feature, most of the stories were adapted to the aforementioned tv show-- though not the one entitled "Dad's Here." At the opening of the story, Mikami's second assistant Okinu, a naive young ghost, teases the sexy exorcist about being "gloomy" in Yokoshima's absence. Mikami asserts that she doesn't take the youth seriously because he's a lust-mongering "brat" while she's a mature woman. Yet she hedges her bets by stating that if he ever did become a real man, she might reconsider her verdict. The rest of the story, however, just shows Yokoshima messing up as usual.      

Now, while the manga-artist Takashi Shiina doesn't expend a lot of time on a backstory for Yokoshima, the story "Love Needs Its Time" provides some basic info on how high-schooler Mikami became a superior ghostbuster by training under a Christian exorcist. In addition, Shiina is careful to show that the priest is too idealistic to ask for remuneration. Yet his student Mikami is nothing like her sensei, being exceptionally desirous of making lots of money once she sets up her own ghost-sweeping business. But Shiina doesn't tell the reader why she came to be this way: a fairly unique admixture of heroism and avarice. 

Shiina does bring up the subject intermittently, though. One story shows how an enemy de-ages Mikami into a little girl, after which even Mikami's sensei remarks on the differences between the cute munchkin and her money-hungry adult self. In my next post, I'll show how I think Shiina built up some of Mikami's psychology in order to render a partial answer, guiding his readers to get the effect he Shiina desired.