https://doi.org/10.67147/literariness.v1i3.008
The Diegetic Pursuit of Threat by Delineating Altered Identities in Takopī’s Original Sin and The Summer Hikaru Died
SHERLINE MODAK
Calcutta Girls’ High School, Kolkata, West Bengal
sherline.modak@gmail.com
Abstract: Graphic narratives from Japan have been prevalent since Katsushika Hokusai published his Hokusai Manga in the 19th century. The media evolved over the years, drawing influence from various fields and the changing conditions of the world. In this paper, I have chosen two works through which I aim to explore the ‘Other’– the outlander, the eldritch and the inexplicable– in a predominantly human world and its subsequent formation of identity in relation to the preordained Subject. I argue that this positing of the Other is influential in exposing the threat-inducing factors in the syuzhet and their intervention in the diegesis. Takopī’s Original Sin expands on the ineluctable cycle of abuse as an extraterrestrial being relentlessly attempts to rectify past events with the help of temporal reversal. The intradiegetic mode utilises this alien, christened Takopī, who observes and entangles itself with the lives of the children in order to spread happiness. To the socially-aware reader, the defamiliarised perspective of the Other creates a jarring dissonance that, in antithesis to that of the victimised children, enhances prevalent cruelties. On the other hand, The Summer Hikaru Died parallels the nature of eldritch monstrosity with that of the queer experience in an orthodox countryside. The geographical setting incorporates the interdependence of the human and the divine through folklore. Abjection is found within this encapsulating culture as the queer identity, stifled in an unaccepting environment, finds pleasurable catharsis in the otherwise revulsive blending with the supernatural. The paper contends that both narratives introduce the threat of hostility within the presence of the Other, only to subvert and focus it back on the Subject which self-proclaims and presumes itself to be normative and stable. Thereby, the demarcations of morality shift and transcend in the redefining of the Other as an altered but humanised seat of empathy, which amplifies the lack of values in humankind itself.
Keywords: Graphic Narratives, Speculative Fiction, Alterity, Abject, Decentralisation
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