Since posting this mythcomics essay on one of the stories in Reiji Miyajima's THE SHIUNJI FAMILY CHILDREN, I've kept monitoring the series. It's not likely to come to a conclusion any time soon, given that Miyajima created five possible romantic subplots for the male hero. The newest installments, Part 44 and 45 (both untitled according to the online translation I read), concerned one of the sisters whose relation to her not-brother Arata has not yet received a lot of attention. This is the "science-nerd" Seiha, on whom I briefly commented in the earlier essay. I've no insight on where Miyajima might be going with this subplot, but I found one page interesting for the following philosophical reflection on altruism.
The plot-context of Seiha's meditation, conveyed to her rather puzzled brother-in-name-only Arata, is that moments before this conversation, Seiha was assaulted by a couple of punks who thought she'd accrued a slutty reputation due to school-gossip. Hunky brother Arata shows up and chases the punks away, so that all Seiha suffers is some brief manhandling. Arata seems to recover from the experience very quickly, for she immediately launches into a lecture about how "self-sacrifice and self-importance are two sides of the same coin." Is she trying to distance herself from the unpleasant experience? Quite likely, and she qualifies that her general opinion of altruism does not affect her feeling of gratitude to Arata for his intervention. However, given her earlier lecture about the chemical determinism of human biology, clearly these thoughts are not new to her. One might assert that, based on what the artist reveals about Seiha's life, she might be the type who distances herself from all experience in her attempt to take a dispassionate, quasi-scientific view on life.
So, since Seiha admits that she has been the beneficiary of Shiunji's altruistic action-- an action one assumes he would have taken for any woman, from real sister to perfect stranger-- why veer off into a discussion of how an individual act of "self-sacrifice" is inevitably tied to that individual's sense of "self-importance?" The reader doesn't know, yet. I considered another possibility: that Seiha also might be seeking to de-emphasize any instinctive feminine reaction to her being a defenseless young woman "saved" by an armorless (but maybe not amour-less) knight. Saying that Arata was motivated in part by his own sense of self-importance perhaps takes away some of the "savior glamor." Her last remarks bring the conversation back to the fact that they're not real siblings, so that his rescue isn't a response to blood ties. But I don't know how seriously to take the idea Miyajima puts in Seiha's mouth: the idea that their non-relation should negate basic altruism, such as defending an imperiled woman whether one knows her or not. Presumably Seiha would say that this form of altruism too would be compromised by the "other side of the coin," though this seems like false rhetoric at this point.
I may revisit Miyajima's concept in future posts. For now, I'll note that this short reflection resembles a much more developed line of similar thought in one of Mark Twain's last works, the 1906 essay WHAT IS MAN? I have not read this in twenty years, but at the time I found it massively impressive. This too I may seek to revisit in future posts somewhere down the line.
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