Tuesday, February 11, 2020

MYTHCOMICS: DEADMAN WONDERLAND (2007-2013)


SPOILERS  SPOILERS SPOILERS

The word “apocalypse” originally connoted an unveiling of the reality underlying the illusion of ordinary life. For several generations, the Japanese people lived in the shadow of a real-life catastrophe, that of nuclear devastation brought on when scientific research uncovered the titanic powers hiding beneath physical phenomena. With the cessation of war, the nation eventually returned to the lesser rigors of daily existence. Still, in Japanese cinema  normalcy was periodically menaced by an incarnation of chaos in the form of a dragon breathing atomic fire.




DEADMAN WONDERLAND takes place in a fictional future, though for the most part the world looks almost indistinguishable from that of modern-day Japan. However, the world of viewpoint character Ganta Igarashi does have its own apocalyptic shadow: that of the patently fictional Great Tokyo Earthquake. Ganta, like most of his middle-school peers, knows nothing about the cause of the cataclysm, which occurred when he was a small child. In his innocent existence—going to school in a rebuilt Tokyo and enjoying a mild home life with a father who’s barely seen during the entire series—Ganta doesn’t know of the link between the disaster ten years ago and Deadman Wonderland. Like most Tokyo citizens, Ganta doesn’t know anything about the Wonderlannd, except that it’s a private prison that broadcasts gladiatorial contests between its incarcerated residents. Certainly Ganta doesn’t know that the bizarre edifice just happens to exist at the former epicenter of the quake.




Innocent Ganta soon gets an education in hard knocks. One fine day, all of the students in his class are slaughtered by a weird, super-powered being whom Ganta describes as “the Red Man.”  Ganta alone survives the massacre, and since no one else beholds the spectre of the true killer, the authorities find it expedient to condemn Ganta as a mass murderer.  In no time, the young man is sentenced to the life of a prisoner in Deadman Wonderland, the first step in his journey to knowledge—not only with regard to the prison’s relevance to Tokyo’s apocalyptic history, but also to the youth's own familial background. As is often the case, children suffer for the sins of the previous generation.



On Ganta’s first day “in stir,” head guard Makina tells him, “Absurdity is your new reality.” To the reader, one patent absurdity is the way the prison operates. Though Ganta and his fellow inmates wear collars that can stun them if they rebel, the Wonderland doesn’t otherwise restrict their movements. Though some areas of the prison are off limits, inmates are allowed to wander from cell to cell, much as if they occupied a college dormitory. But this freedom is perhaps explained by the fact that though not every prison is termed a “deadman,” all of them receive periodical doses of poison from their collars, and so will perish if they don’t labor to earn an antidote called “candy.”  The gladiatorial games, which citizens on the outside believe to be fake spectacles, exist to make money for corrupt warden Tamaki, though even his strings are being pulled by a darker mastermind.



The real meaning of “deadman?”  For reasons relating to the cataclysm ten years ago, many inmates have mutated, acquiring a weird super-power called “the branch of sin.” In essence, the deadmen (and deadwomen) have the ability to make weapons out of blood from their opened veins.  Spikes, whips, flames—deadman-blood seems as malleable as the energies of a Green Lantern’s ring. Ganta himself proves to be a deadman, and finds that he can shoot blood-projectiles from his fingers like bullets from a gun. Ganta must use this new talent to preserve his life in various contests, even while trying not to become corrupted by the perverse indifference of both convicts and officials.



But the prison’s greatest absurdity is Shiro, who seems to come out of nowhere and doesn’t occupy a cell like the other convicts. Shiro, a teenaged albino girl with white hair and red eyes, displays immense strength and agility, though she doesn’t initially show deadman-abilities. She acts as if she knows Ganta, though he does not reoognize her, at least initially.  Shiro usually talks like a small child, though she can sometimes speak in more adult tones, and not surprisingly it’s eventually disclosed that the two of them did know each other as children. Warden Tamaki and his overseer know all of Shiro’s secrets, though, and these villains aspire to use the convicts of Deadman Wonderland for insidious purposes.

Like many “new fish” sentenced to prison, Ganta is an uncorrupted innocent who seems doomed to be overwhelmed by the evil of both the prison and its prisoners. Most of the support-characters whom Ganta encounters have manifested their deadman-powers in line with suffering various personal traumas, and they essentially embrace the Wonderland’s horrors rather than confront their own demons. But Ganta, despite his apparent “everyman” nature and comparative weakness, becomes a rallying-point for his fellow trauma-victims. Minatsuki, a vicious, foul-mouthed patricide, initially scorns Ganta for his bleeding-heart empathy. But after she’s been exposed to his relentless purity, she finds herself seduced by the prospect of hope. Ganta’s loyalty to one friend even leads his temporary inmate-allies to reject him for a time. Yet Shiro, in one of her rare moments of eloquence, brings the lost sheep back to the fold by telling them, “If bad memories are stronger than you are, don’t blame it on Ganta.”



This and other lines evince the common theme of WONDERLAND: the uniquely Japanese take on Nietzchean self-overcoming. I’m tempted to the belief that no one but a Japanese author could have a hero rage, “I want to become strong enough to beat the crap out of my weaker self.” Ordinary life is seen to be an illusion, and yet a necessary illusion for all that. Ganta and Shiro are linked by the sins of the older generation—in particular, of Ganta’s deceased mother, one of the scientists who unleashed both the earthquake and the “branch of sin” mutation.Yet through the efforts of her children, real and adopted—through Ganta’s persistence and in spite of the the monster hiding behind Shiro’s seeming looniness-- it turns out that even deadmen can resurrect themselves. WONDERLAND’s many wonders cannot be explicated in a single blogpost. However, in contrast to many of the narratives that pretend to evoke the lunatic spirit of Lewis Carroll, authors Jinsei Kataoka and Kazuma Kondou succeed in creating a world no less governed by insanity. Yet they also manage to show how, in the vein of Dante, one must descend to the deepest circles of hell before one has any hope of returning to the world of light and comparative sanity.    

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