Haibane Renmei - On Existing in Two Worlds

On Existing in Two Worlds

Interpretation is a curious thing.  In any sort of work that appears fantastical we inherently seek it as a means of understanding, that whatever is before our eyes in truth stands for what cannot be found before them.  “Reki’s smoking evidences her self-destructiveness.”  “Rakka’s speckled wings represent the self-absorbed sorrow growing in her heart.”  We cannot see feelings and beliefs, but we can see their effects, and so naturally represent them as such.

Haibane Renmei is a series that is commonly seen in such a light.  Ask most people who have viewed it and their answers will be similar: it is a representation of the afterlife.  Whether it be purgatory, or the bardo, or whatever schema is applied, it is in the same vein of ideas.  Narratively, I would say that this interpretation is unassailable; the core developments of the two main characters revolve around their coming to terms with the feelings that led them to end their previous life.  Therefore, what we are viewing is a human story set in Yoshitoshi ABe’s fictional interpretation of heaven (or one of its departments).

For years, I was satisfied with this answer… and yet something scratched at the back of my mind.  I could tell that the structure was incomplete for on looking closer it spectacularly failed to account for the variety of small details.  I have read people’s attempts to come to grips with some of these.  Are all Haibane suicides?  If so, then why are there small children?  Is this a multi-purpose limbo for those not ready to move on?  But… why can they die here too?  What kind of concept of the afterlife involves that sort of possibility?  The best response I could muster was that the incompleteness of the answers was to emphasize that they were not the point, and that we ought to keep our focus on the human-emotional dimension that forms the core.  A delightful defense of a beloved series, but a complete hand-wave on my part.

This was the condition which I approached a rewatch with a friend about a month ago.  Upon finishing it I was left with a new thought and a conviction: I had been wrong, and by extension that a great deal of my well-intentioned analysis on Haibane Renmei was in error.

Where are we, really?

Let us begin with the setting, before assigning it a name, for that is what lies at the crux of the issue.

Glie and the areas surrounding it are ancient.  It is difficult to point to any one factor that gives this impression.  Perhaps the ruins that abound in the forest, but one gets the sense even before then.  That somehow the people regard this place as having always been here, that the walls have always existed, and that nobody has ever known a time when their world was not this way.

Yet it changes.  The people are born, grow old, and presumably die.  The shops that are here now in the town have not always been here.  Old Home (and the Abandoned Factory) were once occupied but now are not, both falling into disrepair like the rest of the ruins.  Old Home won’t be here forever… but this place will.

A short aside on the topic of ruins is warranted here.  When I see Old Home I am given the sense that it is dilapidated but not sad, and it reminds me of an insightful blog entry I once read on the Japanese (or East Asian in general) attitude toward ruins.  They aren’t tragic.  I think as Westerners we habitually see things falling apart as evidence of failure, the ruins of Greece or Rome witnessing the splendor of a great era lost.  I do not believe that is the intended implication in Haibane Renmei.  Yes, things are falling apart… but they are always falling apart.  People were once here, now they are not, but they may be here once again.  There is no despair associated with the long-forgotten abandonment of Old Home.

Speaking of civilizations, it is another curious aspect of the setting that one cannot properly place Glie in time.  It is clearly modeled off of a continental European town, perhaps some peaceful urban center in Silesia that could have existed in the last few hundred years (an aspect, I suspect, that adds to the sense of foreignness for ABe).  Yet there is a factory; the people have electricity and listen to the radio (from where?).  The windmills outside the town give electricity, but are built of corroded corrugated metal, producing an effect akin to steampunk’s marriage of new technology to old aesthetic.  Glie is not only ancient-but-changing, it is now-but-not-now in a twilight yesteryear.

Finally, this place is part of something greater even as the walls enforce ignorance of it.  The Haibane seem to have memories of elsewhere (this place is not “home”), even if they cannot confirm them, and those beings which can pass this barrier, the birds and the Toga, are unable to tell the Haibane what lies outside… but they can bring hints in guidance and books.  The secret of the walls is not that there is nothing beyond them.

Why are the Haibane here?

Now to turn to the second key aspect of the series: the nature and treatment of the Haibane.

The Haibane are lovingly neglected.  Or perhaps neglectfully taken care of.  Even though we feel sure that this place exists for them they are not allowed to be central.  No Haibane is integrated into human society, and so cannot aspire to power and its diversions.  The same is true of money; Haibane cannot use currency, and so not acquire wealth either.  There is an element of one might call monasticism here, that the Haibane have a higher purpose than to be obsessed with the wrong things.  The deprivation is intentional.

However, they are expected to work, which is another oddity in the metaphor-as-afterlife.  What the Haibane are here to do requires that they be active, meet others and learn from them, find their role and purpose, and so be useful to all.  Work is not about gain but development.  Indeed, on the few occasions when the scripts come up short, when the Haibane cannot “pay” for their food or clothes, they are given freely.  As with their gentle ostracization, “payment” was always an excuse to get the Haibane to do what was best for them.

This place is not without risk, however, and more than anything this presents a problem to a straightforward heavenly interpretation.  The Haibane are provided for in some measure, and there is a sense that no great calamity such as war or famine will ever visit this place, but they are not completely swaddled.  They have to be wary of falling off a cliff, or freezing in the winter, or especially of getting too close to the walls that lie between here and beyond.  They also don’t necessarily get along with each other, despite all being here for the same reason.  Ultimately, there is suffering and strife, and in some measure it too plays into their development.

As for what the Haibane truly are… nobody seems to know.  They are related to the walls like the birds, one of the select beings that have come from beyond them and will depart on their Day of Flight.  Of course, that is only myth.  The Haibane don’t know what happens on the Day of Flight either.  It’s like the delightful story that Rakka helps Nemu complete about the beginning of the world:

“When God took into his hand the halo glowing over his head and held it high, it became the sun.  God waved his staff, and the nothingness was ripped into two, one forming the sky and the other the land.  However, the line was skewed, thus creating mountains and valleys.  ‘It was a mistake, but it is just as well,’ said God.  When God drew pictures on the land grass and trees grew, and birds and animals came to life.  God then envisioned creatures that looked like himself.  But these creatures were failures, because they were too similar to himself.  So he colored their wings charcoal, made holes in their halos, and named them Haibane, and tucked them away in the back of his head.  After that, God created human beings that did not have wings or halos.  This time, it was a satisfactory creation.  Completely content God, despite himself, fell asleep.  The Haibane, destined to be erased, were hence able to escape from his head.  When God awoke, the Haibane were already floating in the sky.  However, ever tolerant of mistakes, God decided to let the Haibane and their tiny world be.  This is why the town of Glie is still floating somewhere today, where it is neither on land nor sea.”

Nemu and Sumika could never find the answers about where this place came from or what lay beyond the walls, mourning the impossible knowledge.  Eventually, as Sumika tells Rakka, she had to give up and start a family instead, living a proper life in the place she had been given.  Despite this being the afterlife, God doesn’t make much of a showing in Glie.  But this doesn’t stop the wondering, or indeed the imagination, for the Haibane do not seem to fit without a story to explain them.  The myth supplies all the essentials: their divinity, their quirks, and why they have been seemingly left alone in this place, flawed but potentially happy.

For the Haibane are strange.  Unlike any vision of spirits I have ever heard of, their wings do not come easily.  They tear from the back with excruciating pain, leaving blood and fever in their wake.  This scene to my mind is crucial, for it sets the tone for the series: there is a fundamental physicality to the events.  One might even call it the “mundane” that balances the permeating otherworldliness.  How do the Haibane get their halos?  By having them made in a mold of course, and what might seem magic in their floating above the head is counteracted by Rakka’s struggles to keep it (and her hair) straight.  This afterlife is so woefully normal.

Layered Reality

This is where we begin to approach my thesis: that while an interpretation of Glie as the afterlife is not incorrect, it is insufficient.  If one reflects on this, it is somewhat inevitable.  Unless we believe that ABe is actually writing with knowledge of the afterlife, using metaphorical details as code like some sacred text, there is no purpose to the exercise.  What is the point of exegesis if it is only for a single person’s fantasy?  One would have interpretation but not insight.

What I propose in its place is that Haibane Renmei is making a greater point: that the plane we live in now is mysterious.  It no doubt did not escape many readers that as I detailed the setting and Haibane above that the same phrases apply to real humans as well.  Ignorance of their condition, struggling, connecting, and upward-reaching yet unable to fly with the wings they have mark their existence.  Viewing the anime it is almost impossible to miss the application of its ethos to one’s own existence; the purpose of Rakka and Reki isn’t to illustrate the afterlife, it is to illustrate this-life, and so too does this hold for the entirety of the setting and series.

At this point my observations may seem banal.  I have written some nineteen hundred words thus far only to remark that one should pay attention to the message, for it is what is most important.  My purpose, however, is not quite this, for that was my old position: maintain the moral, consider the irregularities as superfluous.  It is an uneasy truce, with such exclusivity selling the achievement of the series short.

What Haibane Renmei has done is made it impossible to separate the afterlife from the this-life elements.  There is no way that they can be pried apart, and every attempt only results in unassemblable shards.  Ignore the afterlife and one will be arrested by the narrative realities; Reki, Rakka, and all the other Haibane have assuredly died.  Yet view it only as the afterlife and the confusions multiply as to what kind of heaven ABe is trying to represent with manufactured halos and spiritual hazmat suits.  There is no singular set of interpretations which will suffice.

In this way, the irregularities are symbolically meaningless… but thematically essential.  They bring into conjunction two ideas, two conceptions we have, the afterlife and this-life, and in the process have siphoned off the essential mystery of the former and infused it into the latter.  This is what makes Haibane Renmei a religious work.  It isn’t the choice of iconography in the wings and halos (which ABe himself reportedly said were inessential).  It isn’t that it takes place in an afterlife of a particular tradition.  Nor is it even that it encourages people to be compassionate.  It is that it postulates another dimension to human existence, and in doing so evokes that fey feeling one sometimes gets that there is a world behind what is in front of one’s eyes.  Haibane Renmei lives in that world, which we mistakenly thought were two, but under its prompting can contemplate as one.

Concluding remarks

Interpretations are curious things.  We can use them as tools to improve our understanding, unpacking the symbols to find the meaning behind them.  Our mind, particularly what one might call the subconscious, seems particularly prone to using symbols over words, and we find that representation is a natural form of communication in art.  However, I think that sometimes we also fool ourselves by thinking that if we have a symbol for something (much as if we have a word for something) we understand it.  There is a highly-intelligent and well-meaning desire to acquire a rational interpretation for things, and that having assembled it as one assembles a model airplane it can be placed neatly on the shelf for display.  It is, however, done with.  Something one has achieved not something one any longer contemplates.

There is a scene in Contact, a movie I have not viewed for years but which has stuck with me ever since, where the film’s protagonist Dr. Ellie Arroway finds herself in an ethereal place talking to an alien who appears as her deceased father.  The film does not maintain that this is an afterlife either, its trappings being stringently those of acceptable science fiction, but the conversation that results has a deep affinity with Glie.  Ellie does not know where this is, and when she asks of the alien who built it and how it came to be, he says that they don’t know either.  Whatever they might be is beyond us, but that does not give them a privileged view into the mystery either.  They too feel that they are only at a waystation.

As I draw to a close, I do not wish to seem as though I am hostile to symbolic interpretation or that its pursuit is useless.  Haibane Renmei contains many lovely little metaphors within it; Rakka’s rebirth from the well, climbing out of the place that she had thrown herself down previously physically and mentally, helped by others but still having to pull herself out, is an exquisite piece, and it is but one of many that support its message.  I am confident that more await, and that when unlocked are similarly enlightening.  Haibane Renmei is well worth that effort.  But before beginning on such a journey, I would invite the reader to ask where they are first.