And so this episode was almost fully about Mirai and her recollections, but this time with way more emotional impact, making clear the fact about Yuuki that people might have suspected and/or known since episode 8. I suppose I was thoroughly surprised by only one scene (not shown in this episode, but in episode 8).
First of all thanks to TP for confirming with me which disorder exactly Mirai is suffering from. Since it is crucial to understand Mirai’s condition, I have to touch on it first. Mirai suffers from what is a pretty well-known psychological disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), but I doubt there are as many cases as we might think possible of a person projecting an image and bringing that person “back to life” through hallucinations and illusions, like Mirai has done. It is not entirely impossible, but I am loathe to think that it might be complex PTSD. A likelier candidate is psychogenic amnesia (thanks to Orange for pointing this out) whereby Mirai suffers from the dissociative kind of the disorder, since she only blocks out Yuuki’s death, but remembers everything else.
The projected image of Yuuki is actually more like Mirai’s mind realizing the horrible truth since episode 8 halfway – that Yuuki is dead and Mirai has, in order to protect her young, emotionally wrecked mind from breaking down, conveniently “forgotten” it and made an image of Yuuki. The start of her “remembering” Yuuki is dead can be traced to near the end of episode 9, where she is reminded due to the stretcher passing by her. She refused to think further along that route then, trying hard not to remember instead, but she will soon be forced to face the truth.
Of course, his death has already come to pass, and she did not really cry a whole load at the time; rather, she went into forced denial in order to protect herself from the reality (and the shock it would bring) of his death. This whole scene was a little contrived, but it showed how Mirai’s mind was trying to get her to slowly accept the truth, even if she kept rejecting it. Yuuki, at this time, seemed, again, like an idealistic representation of who he truly was.
For example, Mirai subconsciously hoped that Yuuki had liked her pictures of frogs while she had been studying for her entrance exams in the past, hoping that those pictures could somehow had made up for her lack of attention to him (while he had been alive, importantly). It gets all the sadder when you realize all Mirai is doing is trying to console herself into thinking that she had done at least something for Yuuki while he was still alive.
Where the hell did they get the horse from? If it were a normal situation I could understand the various reasons a horse might appear here, but a few days after a quake? Sure, it is a good thing to bring a horse (which you could call a novelty) in to distract the children and give some folks something else to focus on, but why a horse? And that outfit of the rider? Seems like some amusement park thing to me.
This whole scene with the reunion of Mirai and Mayu served two great purposes – the first is to convey the message (not really that delightful to me) that both Mirai’s parents are alive and well, and the second is to convey the subtler message that Yuuki has died. Where is he during this entire conversation? Mirai suddenly could not find him though he was just there. It seemed quite impossible that Mayu could not notice Yuuki if he had indeed been there; Mirai was not that far away from Yuuki either.
What makes it more interesting is how Mirai meets Mayu (a close friend of hers, getting emotionally closer and closer in terms of the people she meets throughout the series, as she moves closer to home) and Yuuki’s close friend Itsuki before making the sickening realization that Yuuki is dead. It takes people who truly knew Yuuki and Mirai to drive home the fact that Mirai is growing up, but has also lost someone dear to herself at the same time.
Mayu’s statement, “I wonder what’s going to happen now” is a fairly accurate summation of what everyone must be thinking, now that the earthquake and its physical aftermath (such as aftershocks) are almost past them. Truly, the world has broken, not just for Mirai, but for hundreds of thousands of others, perhaps millions, and the predominant question in everyone’s mind has to be what Mayu said.
I wonder at the significance of the chestnut tree. Does it actually symbolize something in the Japanese culture? The importance of it here, at least superficially, is how Mirai, Yuuki and Itsuki all helped to plant it before the great quake. Is Mirai perhaps asking if Yuuki had wanted her to join in the planting of the tree in order to try and get his sister involved in the same bright future of the tree as he saw in her?
It may just have been as well that Mirai did not meet her parents till after she knew for sure Yuuki had died. Recall that Mari had left a message for Mirai’s parents regarding the death of Yuuki, though we are led to believe that neither parent still knows he has died. For example, neither Itsuki nor his mother mentioned that, or made any sign that they knew he had passed away.
Where on earth is Yuuki? Mirai and Itsuki looked at the same window but saw different things; the latter saw no one there.
The whole board over there where Yuuki is looking at, as you might guess, contains the words “Mirai” (future). Is Mirai finally getting the message that Yuuki has been trying to tell her since the start of the series, that she does have a future? Yuuki may not have explicitly said it, nor implicitly tried to get the message across; he may not even have fully understood it himself, but now, her mind is interpreting all the signs, and she is learning that Yuuki (bravery/courage) was the only thing she needed to face her future. And, it is even more so now that he has gone.
How can someone so young disappear so fast without telling anyone he was headed to the toilet?
Mirai keeps crying when she now talks about Yuuki, especially since she started to refer to his acts as though it were in the past. Her mind is starting to wake up to the horrifying truth, especially recalling all that Yuuki had told her throughout the series, such as how he wanted to go back to Odaiba to see the bridge. It is not the bridge however that Yuuki wanted to see, but rather the experience of seeing it with his family as they once were – a happy, unbroken family. His memories of it are clear because it was from a happier time, something he wanted to share with his family (and more importantly, his sister) again.
Mirai started crying almost right after Yuuki’s conversation with her about his penmanship and her name. Why would she do that if he was indeed there? Why would she feel so sad? Even she could not understand it herself, but it is quite clear in fact that she is only telling herself how much she missed Yuuki and how she never really got to know/talk to him enough before he left her, even though he tried to tell her as much as he could.
This whole scene felt damn contrived to me. It was so convenient how Yuuki seemed to portray her conscience leading her on to save Itsuki, and how later, she does conveniently save Itsuki and bringing him to a safer spot out of the room near where she thought Yuuki to be, thereby saving both herself and Itsuki (thanks to Yuuki’s image).
Mirai immediately calls out only for Itsuki and not Yuuki. How can that be? She saw him going in as well.
The difference between Mirai’s mind and reality is mortifying. Any doubts that Yuuki is dead are now cleared for sure.
Saved by her own projection of Yuuki. How contrived.
So the black tag back in episode 8 really meant the person had died, but the significance of it all and how it seemed to jerk Mirai’s memory, if only a little, of Yuuki’s death (which she put out of her mind) went past me. And the whole operation theater scene was fake, a total dream. Boy, was I surprised at that revelation. Thoroughly pwned, I might add.
The scene in which she was with Mari and saw the dead person’s tag was real by the way – Yuuki had already passed away by then and the nurse had merely asked after the possible causes that might have led to his death (remember that there is no real past/present tense in the Japanese language).
So the bright light in episode 8 outside the hospital served as the starting point for Mirai’s repression of her memories of Yuuki’s death. Mirai was in mental shock at the time and went into PTSD, and being young as she was and having someone now so dear to her lost to her forever must have been a blow her young and fragile state of mind could not take, and thus it ran away in denial.
Goodbye for real, Yuuki. You will forever live on as St. Yuuki now.
The message here is not just referring to the message Mari sent to Mirai’s parents, but also the subtle hint that it is sending out the same kind of message to everyone who watches this and might have fall into the same kind of situation as Mirai or others throughout the series. A strong way to end this episode as we head into the final episode of the series.
General Impressions
As I said, any and all doubts regarding Yuuki’s death are now cleared with his image coming right out and telling Mirai the truth behind what had happened back in episode 8, and what her mind had been protecting her emotional state from till now. Since all the signs were there, I was hardly surprised (you can also thank LeaHanyan for the inevitable spoiler that I received on Twitter, which might have influenced my bias for the past 3 episodes including this one), except at that lack of the operation theater scene as part of the truth. I got owned, BONES. Very very nice way of putting this series in a light that must hit home at the viewer. One of the best series of the year already, which I suspected when you first announced it in spring anyway.
Now, all that is left to see is how Mirai will come to terms with her broken world – the world that has broken for her in terms of the loss of the one who might very well have, with his death, pushed her to her future, her own younger brother, Yuuki. Has he given her enough courage indeed to pursue her namesake, that is to say, her own future? We now head into the final episode of this very-much-human series.
I particularly liked how the light shone on him at this point, showing us he already is an ephemeral presence.
Further Reading
ghostlightning no longer believes Yuuki is a saint, for he kept leading Mirai on. Yet he agrees (and disagrees too at times) with me in my post in various ways; the thing is how we both look at it. Yuuki, to me after all, is not there, but a projection by Mirai of the idealistic Yuuki, from her own memories and her own idealization of her younger brother. That, for me, makes it all the sadder watching her wake up to the revelation of his death. GL also picks up on how the real Yuuki kept lying to Mirai (and so did the dead one); I mentioned it was inconsistency of this sort that also leads the viewer on.
psgels may be no psychiatrist, but he had the same idea as I did throughout the last 3 episodes, for he wrote that “The sad thing wasn’t just Mirai realizing the death of her brother, but rather the subtle differences between the dead Yuki and the remains of the real Yuki: the things he wrote and did when he was still alive.” This is along the same line of thought as GL as well.
Hanners likes the show because “This show isn’t about the faceless victims of a major disaster, it’s truly ‘real’ and in your face in terms of how it handles such tragedy.” This is of course something I agree wholeheartedly with.
Janette felt the whole episode was “executed poorly”, but she misses the point that Itsuki did get bothered by Mirai’s behavior, especially when she cried, and when he could not see Yuuki. She also mentions that the series never gave a reason for his death, when I mentioned one possible reason thanks to the newscaster at the end of episode 9, which was Crush syndrome.
Rednights had some good thoughts and believed that he can finally root for Mirai, but he still believes the part with the nurse (in episode 8) is fake, though I believe it was real (my reasons were given above). He also picked up on the plant a little more brutally than I did.
animewriter “felt that they dragged it out for way too long” (referring to the Yuuki ghost arc for the last 3 episodes) and that “by combining Mirai’s mental problems with Yuuki as a ghost was really too much.” Well, looks like he has yet to study psychology and be able to empathize with others, or met someone who had been in the kind of situation Mirai was in.
Lastly, Orion begins his post in the best possible way to sum up how Yuuki has been:
“It’s no mistake that Yuuki’s name (勇気) means ‘courage’. Throughout the story of Tokyo Magnitude 8.0, Yuuki more than anyone else has been the one who held on to hope, who had courage in the bleakest of circumstances. And now, even in death, Yuuki leaves behind his namesake.”
He goes on to say:
“Courage has never been simply about having no fear or feeling no pain. It is accepting those difficulties and finding ways to overcome them. It is about holding on to hope even when everything you rely on falls away…And yet when Yuuki passes away, Mirai still isn’t quite ready to stand on her own. So Yuuki remains.”
A very nice post that he has overall showing us how Yuuki has tried to show Mirai the true meaning of “courage” through the series, which I never really managed to go into detail to.
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The episode does seem like it employed a huge contrivance to drive home a point. It’s the difference between using Simon’s core drill in fighting the Spiral King and using the Giga Drill Breaker to open a coconut.
That said, it’s very clear now if it wasn’t clear before that Yuuki is the catalyst for Mirai’s better behavior, her thinking beyond her own concerns, her willingness to do good turns for others.
Mirai’s the Pope in her own religion, and she’s the one who beatifies and canonizes Yuuki. Now we can only pray that the show ends in a really powerful, yet sublime way.
My criticisms of the “delusion/ghost” Yuuki was not a criticism meant to show any lack of compassion towards Mirai’s situation, but a stab at the implementation of that part of the story. Because TM 8.0 only has 11 episodes to work with every moment of scene time is precious and I just felt that they spent too much precious screen time on that aspect of the story. I feel a tremendous amount of compassion towards Mirai because I’ve seen grown men break in highly traumatic situations during my 23 years in the Army. But, my post regarding the Yuuki/Mirai situation was a dig at the structural nature of TM 8.0’s narrative style for episodes 8-10.
Chris K.´s last blog…Animewriter’s mai waifu list.
ghostlightning: By “contrived”, I meant that they suddenly switched to something rather “cliche” or “generic” since this does happen in anime. The number of coincidences when she saved Itsuki was too much for me. But yes, Yuuki is the catalyst.
Chris: Ah, I read wrongly, sorry about that. I would still disagree though that the implementation sucked – it is quite clear that as adults, we might know or accept death, but for Mirai, who is but a 13-year-old and still rather impressionable (and mentally immature) the shock of the death of a closed one would rightly come as quite the blow and she would have to protect herself subconsciously from it. By focusing on Mirai, the show decided that it would focus on the possibilities of such an account happening not just in one person but in many, and especially from a younger one’s point of view. Then again from episodes 8-10, people were kept guessing a lot, though as I already said, the clues were always there (and blatantly so if you knew where to look) and really I have no complaints about the way they did it until Itsuki’s part.
Wow, reading this episode put a lot of insight in the show that I did not pick up myself, especially with the meaning behind certain events. Thank you very much, I realize that the episode was pretty awesome.
Janette´s last blog…Tokyo Magnitude 8.0 Episode 11-Final Episode