Prison School, the Folk Tale

Function of the Happy End
Function of the Tragic End
Propp’s Morphology in Japan
Kiyoshi’s End and Chiyo’s End
Mari, the Villain
Gackt, the Hero
Kiyoshi, the Boy
Anzu and Shingo, the Perfect Couple
Chiyo, the Giver
Hana, the Queen-Bride
Sinking in Sight of Port

Today, I am going to speak about how good triumphs over evil, and how sometimes it does not. About what is a “happy end” and what is it good for.

Happy End

Tolkien, in his essay “On Fairy-Stories”, does a deep dive into the plot and structure of tales about the supernatural where the main story is a hero’s journey into an otherworldly and magical place. He puts an emphasis on how a happy end is part of these stories and comments on how it’s a kind of joy when a sudden resolution, through coincidences and after overcoming many dangers, evokes a special indescribable reaction: it brings tears to your eyes – special tears of joy and gratitude for the happy end. The Professor says that no matter how primitive, somewhat stupid or basic the plot, it nonetheless affects you with a transcendental happiness that remains.

As an example, he cites a Scottish fairy tale that’s analogous to the Russian tale “Finist, the Brave Falcon” where the bride is looking for her missing bridegroom, spends 3 nights at his side so he doesn’t marry another. This is a widely traveled kind of story going back to Cupid and Psyche, and in a more tragic variant, the Augonauts’ Jason and Medea. She stalls the wrong bride with gifts, the 3 magical items that she earned along the way, to buy time to keep trying to wake her groom. But he has been affected by a sleeping potion and doesn’t wake up. She keeps telling him that she has been waiting for him for so long, searched for him for so long, labored so much to get this far, so won’t he wake up and look at her? (and in the Scottish tale, it’s read aloud as a little rhyme) And on the third day, he wakes up and looks at her – that’s the moment of this transcendent happy end. Another example is the “Tale of Tsar Saltan”. I think that nobody who knows Russian can read the original lines without them moving their very soul: “…And his heart began to leap, \ “Am I dreaming in my sleep?” \ Gasped the tsar in stark surprise, \ Tears a-streaming from his eyes …” - and that’s exactly it, that’s that very emotion.

Tolkien equates this feeling with the one that Christians get from reading the gospel – the miracle of the resurrection of Christ: the victory over death, 3 days of mourning and then the miracle that wasn’t expected, but hoped for. What he means by this comparison with the religious feeling is that you can see that the happy end isn’t meant to be a sedative, or escapist, but as a reminder, as Nabokov had said under similar circumstances – a reminder of other ways of being where these kind of relations between darkness and light are the norm. Really, that’s how it should be everywhere and it’s worth reminding people about it. It’s more difficult to remind adults – to quote Borges, we are so poor in courage and hope that we do not have the bravery to believe in happy endings. I will go over situations where the happy end isn’t in harmony with the story, but for the time being, let’s take a moment to remember this correct way of existing.

Tragic End

Now, what about the use of the tragic end? Maybe it’s even more useful than a happy end, especially in the times we live in? Without a doubt. For me, the unhappy end, the bitter end, that must create a catharsis of a Greek tragedy, the story of Oedipus searching for his father’s murderer who discovers the murderer inside himself and himself to be the murderer – that’s a tremendous feeling. Without a doubt there are stories that cannot lead to a happy end. Take Don Quixote as the perfect example – not the Don Quixote from children’s books, but the original Cervantes Don Quixote. This is why Cervantes’ pinnacle of artistic achievement is the 2nd volume of the novel. And, probably, the most bitter pages are the last half, maybe even the last third, when Don Quixote stops believing in his own invincibility and starts to suffer defeats. He had failed before, and that was fine, however, now, he recognizes those defeats as defeats.

There is a totally tragic episode there that’s probably the reason why Dostoevsky said that when you die and appear before God, and he will ask what you understand about this life, it would be enough to show that book. It’s in those pages when Don Quixote ends up alone, sitting in a dark room by himself, and he no longer approaches that room as a castle where an evil wizard is imprisoning him – he realizes himself to be an impoverished and unlucky hidalgo. He notices that his stockings have started to run, He lies there and dreams of having a green silk thread. And after lying on his cot for a while he thinks that it would be fine to have a thread of any color just so he can fix the hole in his stockings – after all it would be shameful for a traveling knight. In that moment we feel very intense feelings of sympathy and commiserate. Don Quixote by definition cannot have a happy end – because what would that even look like? In his last duel, Don Quixote must defeat the Knight of the White Moon and marry Dulcinea? The problem is that he is not a noble knight, but a half-mad hidalgo, and Dulcinea is a peasant who smells of garlic. There cannot be a happy end here.

However, to leave some kind of hope, what I like about timeless stories, of which Don Quixote is most certainly is one, is that they can transform. I like that quite a lot that the same plot lines can lead to completely different ends, as long as you develop them differently. So, while Don Quixote gives us a tragic catharsis, it’s great that we also have the Orson Welles’ version. This movie was in the works for 30 and 3 years, like in a fairytale, and if for Cervantes, Don Quixote suffers defeat through disappointment in his own self, Osron Welles’ Don Quixote ends up disappointed in the surrounding world. He tell Sancho that he found another adventure to apply himself to – going to the Moon! Meaning the only place where Don Quixote can find hope now. Orson Welles couldn’t end it otherwise, without leaving at least some hope.

Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov called Don Quixote “an encyclopedia of cruelty”. He wrote about how in the first part the humor is truly medieval in the manner in which it comes from cruelty, but in the second part there appears a new tragic note that belongs to the Renaissance. The same Nabokov, in his lecture on Russian literature, the one dedicated to Dostoevsky, an author he did not like, said that tragic ends by themselves don’t cause the feelings of protest from the readers as long as they are creatively harmonious. All in all, one of the foundations of reading classic literature is in realizing that associating yourself with the hero is a child’s way of reading. It’s a necessary step in the development of our experience as readers. We, so to speak, inhabit the hero and feel what they feel and that’s why we want what’s good for them, so that we can feel good too. However, the adult way of reading is to associate with the author, the artistic creator of the universe, so then you no longer need happiness for the sake of the characters, but you need a harmony in the whole of creation that is in accord with the author’s universal laws. It seems to me – I’ll express my own thought – it seems that truly bad, and I mean it as a judgment, bad ends are not where the hero dies, but those where evil triumphs. No author of note lets it happen this way. The same Nabokov, due to his youth, or maybe frivolity, in works like “Camera Obscura” does allow the villainess to shoot the hero, but even there he leaves hints in the finale, like the inside out glove that Magda forgets at the crime scene, meaning that they will be found out.

Aristotle, in his “Poetics”, wrote that the audience finds it intolerable to see an innocent suffer. That a hero of a Greek tragedy, the one that suffers, is not entirely without guilt. The same Oedipus, he of course is a victim of fate, but his father – he killed, and his mother – he married. However the response of Christian art, through the main play of the Christian world, the Gospels, show an innocent suffering. And, as it turns out, the audience can tolerate it, and even feel their soul uplifted by it. Still, the Gospels do end in a triumph - the Resurrection.

Propp in Japan

So, I’ve talked about the catharsis of the happy end and how it’s a reminder of how the relationship between light and darkness should be in this world. How it imparts a transcendental happiness akin to a religious feeling, and how that feeling remains. And the tragic end that brings a cleansing catharsis and shows the care with which the author had crafted the world as to make that end an appropriate and a harmonious one. And how to appreciate a tragic end requires a certain degree of maturity and experience as a reader, and how even in the depths of tragedy, there could be an uplifting triumph that only adds to it and doesn’t cheapen the story. I think those are the axiomatic understandings we needed in order to begin looking at Akira Hiramoto’s “Prison School”, and what I mean by that is to begin looking at it as structuralists, using Propp’s morphology to guide us.

Let’s remember theory a little. We have Propp, Vladimir Yakovlevich, and there’s also Joseph Campbell, an American author who borrowed the concept of the “monomyth”, from Joyce, meaning a kind of a proto-plot that repeats in religious teachings, fairy tales and art. Both of them, Propp and Campbell – Propp earlier, and Campbell later, and as it seems to me, Campbell also involved a large number of unnecessary sources, like Freudian dreams, the kind that at the time was customary to share with a therapist, but both of them worked on morphology. Meaning the elements that comprise the plot and have sequence, as well as an expansion and a contraction. Propp’s main discovery, I think, is that that the plot can have any number of these elements, there may be fewer, there may be more, but their sequence is defined by a certain logic. Campbell called it “hero’s journey”, and his most famous book, “The Hero with a Thousand Faces” reveals it to be a circular path.

Since we are talking about a Japanese author, I think I should mention structuralism in Kabuki. Now, Japanese traditional theater is something I am not at all familiar with, so I only want to bring this up as a dilettante and a curious outsider. Nonetheless, what it seems like to me, is that there is one shared element structure that Kabuki has with Propp’s morphology – and that’s the “Jo-ha-kyu” rhythm. Translated as “beginning-break-rapid” or “slow-fast-faster”, these are 3 sequential stages of a theatrical story. This could be expressed as an “introduction – action – paradigm shift” kind of a triptych. Take for example “Madoka Magica” where in the introduction we learn about our heroes and their origin stories, we see them defeat the witches, only to learn that witches are actually former magical girls and that any one of our heroes can become a witch. What a twist! The story doesn’t end with just one jo-ha-kyu, it’s followed by the next as the show carries on with this somber realization, with heightened stakes and newfound tensions. The fun thing is that not only are the jo-ha-kyu chainable, they are also recursive, where each of the three functions can themselves be broken down into 3 jo-ha-kyu, ad infinitum, provided the author is crafty enough. You can reliably find this clever rhythm in almost any anime, and any number of Japanese arts. All I can say is that you should use this knowledge wisely, perhaps even finding a smooth transition from your interest in anime to a new interest in theater. More so, look how Propp’s morphology maps neatly to this rhythm:

“jo”:

“jo”: the hero violates a rule which leads them to the villain
“ha”, the villain fools the hero, or commits a murder, abduction, curses or threatens a marriage
“kyu”, the hero realizes they were unwittingly complicit in the villainy and now they need to get a magic item or go on a quest to set things right, leaving the security of their home for a second time, not to naively violate a rule, but with determination

“ha”:

“jo”: the hero looks for a magic item or the donor of the magic item
“ha”: the hero passes Baba Yaga’s trials with the help of their magical helper and wins the magic item as a consequence
“kyu”: the hero faces the villain, struggles and defeats them with the help of the magic item, in the process becoming marked in some way: a scar, an injury, change to their hair, or a new cosmetic item like a ring

“kyu”:

“jo”: the hero is pursued or delayed on the way home - another adversary wants to eat them. They overcome this ordeal in some way that often changes their appearance
“ha”: the hero returns home, but is not recognized – there might be a false hero at home, or another villain or plot and intrigue that requires the hero to accomplish one more difficult task to unmask the false hero and set things right to prove themselves
“kyu”: the hero is given their recognition, they gain a new appearance that reflects the fruits of their hard labor, their wounds healed, their missing limbs restored and their looks generally improve. Finally, the hero brings a hard won reward to their community and get their reward: a coronation, a wedding, restoration of peace and prosperity, what have you. Depending on the story, the villain also suffers punishment.

I think that this is one of those East meets West situations that’s just beautiful, like how the Japanese 4 and 9 combine to match the Western 13 in inauspiciousness and bad fortune. With this said, I consider it appropriate to research how the “monomyth” theory and Propp’s morphology apply to a Japanese story. Let’s begin!

The Two Endings

Do you know the page that presaged my reaction to the ending of Prison School? It was after the tables have turned on the Shadow Student Council and they become prisoners. Due to what is probably the deepest sense of gratitude over a single borrowed book I’ve ever seen, Risa is paying Andre back by attempting to give his abandoned husk an experience he would appreciate. “Cheer me up???” he howls, witnessing the complete dissipation of the object of his adoration, the personality of the Vice President – “This is the most sadistic thing you’ve ever done!” - with the story ending on Kiyoshi’s “Maybe I haven’t changed at all” and the full page of the wicked Chiyo, consumed by hate, same as her sister, I think, to me, that’s the most sadistic thing Akira Hiramoto every put to paper – it’s a right hook followed by a left cross, one-two punch to the chin, and this is the point where I tell you why I am refusing to accept one of these pages, and you should too.

Kiyoshi did change – a lot. He started with nothing and ran through the whole Hero’s Journey, setting out as a boy and returning a man. Observe: Prison School begins strictly according to Propp with Absentation, Interdiction and Violation. Absentation is the lack – like when the fire goes out in Vasilisa’s house, and in this case it’s the Boys’ lacking in social skills and relationship experience, with. The Interdiction is the forbidding edict by the Shadow Student Council – the ban on opposite sex relationships of any sorts. The Violation is what lands the Boys in Prison and it’s consequences - peeking in the girls’ bath and learning to live out their first prison term. All the Boys are so lacking, they don’t even consider the girls to be people, but objects that they think they can only gawk at from a distance. Now, they are like the Three Stooges with the whole “woman haters club” gag – but more pitiful. I get a sense that they are so lacking that they do not even know how to begin approaching a relationship with a girl and have mutually enable each others’ resignation in all things social, and it’s their unmet needs that push them to gawking and creeping. Kiyoshi alone, the boy Kiyoshi that we meet in the beginning that’s sweating bullets from just by being surrounded by coeds calls it out as “plain creepy” and defiantly attempts to be the first to strike up an actual conversation with a girl. (Never mind that he can’t even get a single word out – remember that when we compare him to himself of later chapters). To give Kiyoshi’s morals full credit, let’s not forget that he also calls out the peeping tom plan as “illegal voyeurism” and when he thinks about the Boys seeing Chiyo, the first girl he manages to connect with over lunch and sumo, he considers pushing the lot of them off the roof. However, boy Kiyoshi is also weak willed – he can’t stand up to the Boys hyping themselves up with chants “death to traitors!” as they don their ninja uniforms – it’s a lot of pressure to conform, especially since the Interdiction on opposite sex relationships forces him closer with the rest of the Boys, it’s understandable why he caves and goes along, especially after he sees that Chiyo is not in the bath. We’ll get to Kiyoshi’s weak will later.

Mari the Villain

True to Propp, the Villain is clearly Shadow Student Council President Mari, the Crow User. It’s confirmed by her backstory and the dictatorial power of the Shadow Student Council – it’s a dead structure, unable to enact a peaceful transition of power. We must agree here that a king is wise when he understands when it’s time to send 3 of his sons somewhere. Because otherwise, as Campbell writes, the hero will become a tyrant. He has a very interesting passage about how in the tale of the Minotaur, the king of Crete was himself once a hero. Poseidon sent him a magic bull, but instead of sacrificing it, he kept it for himself. He did not perform the sacrifice. Strange things happen to his wife and she gives birth to the Minotaur, the king orders Daedalus to build him the labyrinth and now demands sacrifices from Athens – those 7 young men and 7 young women. He becomes a tyrant. When the hero becomes a tyrant, says Campbell, the process of regeneration halts, meaning the process of the endless recreation of life. And in this situation, every choice becomes a trap. Victory becomes a trap and defeat – a trap. Development and conservation, attempts to freeze time and attempts to change everything – nothing works. It’s necessary to renew with a new cycle, in which a new hero will pass through the maw of the monster and end up in it’s stomach, like Jonah, be reborn, lose his hair, will not sleep and not eat for some time and return a new man with a new bride and new gifts that are necessary for that society. More on the gifts later.

Gackt the Hero

During the first prison term, Gackt is shown to be a bit of a hero himself. Propp writes that oftentimes the hero returns either bald, or the opposite – forbidden to cut his hair. As often happens with initiation rituals, something always happens to hair. This is why different kind of “heterotopias”, as Foucault calls them, spaces of surveillance and power, try to do something with your hair: cut, shave, forbid coloring, or the opposite, color it in a specific way. If you end up in such a space or someone goes that far, know that it’s the Panopticon, it’s not a good place and you need to leave. Perhaps it’s a place of initiation and it needs to be lived through so that you can reach the next level in the hierarchy of your tribe, but maybe the best course of action is to hightail it. It’s interesting that Gackt, who prides himself on his long hair (one would imagine him tying it up like a certain legendary Chinese warrior from the first millennium AD as he immerses himself in commentary on the Four Books and the Five Classics), experiences an initiation ritual which gives him a much more handsome look. The hair he sacrifices to enable Kiyoshi’s first escape plan seems to do it’s job and grant him the death and rebirth befitting of a hero, so that later on, when the Boys despair over being on the verge of expulsion, unable to get the “Expel the Boys Operation” files, when even Kiyoshi resigns his fate, it’s Gackt that pushes forward, saying that this is the first time he finds himself among friends and how he had “gained comrades”.

Kiyoshi the Boy

Similar to Koushun Takami’s “Battle Royale” where the characters’ development is accelerated to maximum speed through exposure to intense hardship and suffering, Kiyoshi’s growth is accelerated by his first prison term. While the rest of the Boys reveal that they are all “overjoyed to be bullied by such a beautiful girl” (literally pathetic, learned helplessness on display, however understandable - it’s the most attention they have received from the girls so far…), Kiyoshi alone forms and hardens his resolve with a “damn it I won’t bend to this violence”. This sets him on a path for growth for the rest of the story. What bothers him more is that he had lied to Chiyo – the object of his first success at bonding with a coed, and his guilty conscience projects feelings onto Chiyo’s neutral face when he catches a glimpse of her moving between classes, he thinks “look at those eyes, she must really detest me … I want to give her an honest apology” – he didn’t tell her the truth the one time he could have – when he was returning a fallen crow chick back into it’s nest, and Chiyo happened to be close by. That was an evocative moment that deepened their connection – he saw her smile and she shared her Grandmother’s maxim – that there is no such thing as a bad sumo fan. He can’t bring himself to tell the truth because he is anxious that he will lose Chiyo’s smile forever. Without experience, he doesn’t know how resilient a connection between people can be! In his mind, it’s fragile. He is still a boy, anxious and affected by fatalism, and that makes him a likable, relatable protagonist that I didn’t expect to see in this manga. This is to all the lost and petulant children on Reddit who shower Kiyoshi with opprobrium and slander his name – no, he’s not a “jerk”, not an “asshole”, he is just a young boy, inexperienced and often too weak to follow his own principles, torn between his peers and easily affected by mob mentality and his high libidinal energy. But he tries so hard, he follows his instincts and passions and he learns from his experience, and in the end, he redeems himself like he said he would. I stand in solidarity with Kiyoshi, what a great, delightfully flawed character!

Anzu and Shingo the Perfect Couple

So, after the Violation, Propp’s morphology prescribes Reconnaissance, Delivery, Trickery, Complicity and Villainy – and that’s how Anzu and Shingo bond, it’s their story. Reconnaissance is where The Villain makes their first big move, and that’s of course Mari, the Shadow Student Council president and her effort to attain knowledge needed to fulfill her plot (the Expel the Boys Operation) through spying. Delivery is the part where the recon succeeds and Mari gains the lead on her victim – recruiting Shingo as a spy and an “icebreaker” of the fraternal bond the Boys share as prisoners. Trickery is when the villain attempts to deceive the victim – with the “model prisoner” bit and the dates with Anzu. Complicity is when the victim is fooled and unwittingly helps the villain – that’s the “Grapes of Wrath” incitement of the 3rd escape attempt. You can guess what the Villainy phase is – it’s often the time when the Villain harms, abducts, steals, spoils crops, plunders, or… banishes and expels one or more protagonists. That’s just textbook Propp right here, and up to this point, the story of Prison School is just wonderful – the characters, the tension, the drama, the action and the hilarious gags. So, you see, Anzu and Shingo’s relationship is also rooted in an old and honorable formula – let’s agree that it had earned it’s right to exist and pursue happiness.

In the interest of time, I will not spell out the rest of the 31 functions of Propp’s morphology, because I think you get it by now, and if you were to look it up yourself, you’d immediately make the connection yourself. I’d rather spend the time now on my own judgment of Akira Hiramoto’s work, highlighting where he had done well and where he had transgressed.

Chiyo the Giver

Now, Propp notices that the plot begins with the hero’s journey into the outside world, often through a forest – the enchanted forest, that’s really the kingdom of the underworld. He comments that the forest changes depending on the geography of the place where people tell the fairy tale: the hero could also climb a mountain, or descend underground (like into a cave, or a dungeon, or a … Prison), but in our, let’s say, Eurasian continuum, it’s a forest. There are some people that say that Kiyoshi’s fate is to be with Chiyo, but that’s bewilderment and ignorance. Chiyo does have a bond with him, but it doesn’t match any of the romantic interest roles that are in harmony with Propp’s morphology. Because you see, in the forest, the hero comes across two types of beings – the keepers of the boundary (Baba-Yaga the snake that guards the entrance into the underworld), and the second type – the donors, advisors and magical helpers. Oftentimes it’s the same character. Baba Yaga is like that, a staple of European folklore. She eats people, and she is pretty much your own mother. If you say the right things to her, not only will she not eat you, she will show you the way, reveal to you the all-powerful Mech-Kladenets (meaning “the sword of steel” or “the hidden sword”), or give you a mount fit for a hero, and then you can move on to the next stage of your journey. However, she also resides in the gingerbread house where she fattens up children before she eats them. I must say that our common European fear is that of cannibalism. The forest is where the cannibals live, and it’s customary to be weary of them. It must be one of our earliest taboos because it’s spoken about all the time.

Now, Kiyoshi certainly handles himself well with Chiyo – he has the sumo stationary, his protective item given to him by his mother that opens to him a way to Chiyo. This is like with Vasilisa the Beautiful and her doll, the vessel that keeps her mother’s blessing and keeps Vasilisa safe from Baba Yaga and allows her to get the skull of inexhaustible fire. Remember that when Kiyoshi passes Chiyo’s sumo test, he is really passing Chiyo’s grandmother’s test – “there is no such thing as a bad sumo fan” is her expression, not Chiyo’s. By putting the fallen chick back into it’s nest, he passes Chiyo’s crow test, causing her to repeat her grandmother’s saying, but Kiyoshi had really passed Mari’s test – “there is no such thing as a bad crow lover” is her expression, not Chiyo’s. (Even for the sumo date, doesn’t Chiyo prepare the rice snacks like her mother would? Is there space for Chiyo’s self-expression anywhere in the story?) For these meaningful interactions between Kiyoshi and Chiyo, we learn scant little about Chiyo’s authentic thoughts and ideas. Personally, I wasn’t sure who Chiyo actually was, aside from a canvas onto which Kiyoshi the boy projected his thoughts and dreams, and a vessel for keeping the maxims of the women of her family – a keeper of family’s matriarchal traditions, so to speak. Remember when Kiyoshi was about to sign his own expulsion papers in the Underground Student Council office, resigned and defeated, he is ontologically blind to the fact that if Mari wants him to sign his own expulsion letter that means that she has no power expel him herself? That’s when Chiyo busts in and saves him from self-destruction. Chiyo gives him the will to resist back and shows him that there is a way to survive catastrophes. Whereas before, Kiyoshi was ready to believe that one misstep, one secret revealed would be the end of his entire social life, having lived through his own expulsion (or execution, or death, really), he is reborn, wiser and stronger, defiant in the face of the Villain, Mari the Crow User: “I’m going to come back and redeem myself!”. I just don’t think that Chiyo is any kind of a bride, I think she is a Donor – a character that prepares the hero and gives him some magical object (in this case, resolve, hope or willpower) after testing them. Her affection and care for Kiyoshi is not romantic, but maybe even maternal, definitely familial, like her maxims that were passed down to her from the women in her life. Remember, according to Propp’s morphology, The Donor and Baba Yaga can be the same - the gate guard to the underground kingdom, and they eat people. The end where Chiyo becomes the next Underground Student Council president, the cannibal (another word for cannibal is, of course a … man eater), emitting and exuding in her sister’s hate and fear, all of a sudden feels quite harmonious and appropriate, like a well made tragic end should be.

One masterful parallel between Kiyoshi and Chiyo that I still think about is when Kiyoshi reaches his lowest point so far in the story (this is before his suicide attempt), after the disaster at the sumo date when Chiyo leaves him, when he is caught for his prison escape attempt, when the Boys turn on him and Mari the Crow User throws him in solitary – one parallel here is when on the first page, Kiyoshi is shown on the cold dark floor alone, despairing, “I can’t stand it here any longer”, locked up from without, the next page shows Chiyo in her dorm room, covered in blankets from head to toe, refusing let in or acknowledge Mari knocking at the door – she is locked up from within. Is Chiyo despairing with some variation of “I can’t stand it here any longer” as well? What visual storytelling!

Hana, the Queen-Bride

But, if not Chiyo the bride, then who? The interesting thing about female characters in fairy tales, gender roles are spread out in their own ways. Folklore is older than the social forms in which it is told. Propp wrote about this, of course, that the queen-bride or the hero-bride is not a maiden in a tower that’s waiting to be rescued. She’s a warrior, she’s a sorceress, she’s a competitor. Generally, she wants to kill the hero. She needs to be defeated, and that sometimes acquires rather crude forms in folklore. But, as the mare in “Koniok-Gorbunok” (Little Humpback Horse) says: “Since you managed to stick (in the saddle), then it’s you who should own me”. So, who can - good job, and who can’t got their head cracked on the road. This is why the gender roles are a bit unique. In truth, there is no story in folklore that hasn’t been told in both a female and a male variant. For every Cinderella, there’s a “Cinderel” – the youngest son who also sat at the hearth, scouring it for food, then left the home and returned in a golden carriage. So is true of the inverse – it’s all very fluid, actually. In Brothers’ Grimm “Mother Holle” (our “Morozko”), heroine goes to the magical being, does chores, receives the reward. Meanwhile the hero goes to Baba Yaga, does chores, receives the reward. I’d say that in folklore, there’s absolute gender equality.

So, if not Chiyo, then who matches the warrior queen-bride sorceress competitor type that needs to be defeated using rather crude forms? Well, that’s Hana, isn’t it? The karate master that’s always brewing up something in her tea pot, and burning up with murderous intent while brandishing cold steel and she fights her groom all the way to the end (indeed, even in the very last pages, she is grappling with Kiyoshi). I love the rising tension between Hana and Kiyoshi – it brings about so much of their co-evolution. At first we see Hana when the Boys are lynched at the public square for their voyeurism and she is merely an agent administering their punishment at that time. She returns to replace Vice President Meiko and gives the Boys the four-leaf clover assignment, still showing nothing but her casual cruelty with which she deals out corporal punishment. Only when Kiyoshi falls from the tree and catches Hana in a compromising position do we see the power dynamic change. Is this the first time when Kiyoshi wins back agency over his jailers? Still, Kiyoshi doesn’t resist or express his power – he is still lacking. Even in the next two encounters with Hana when she first confronts him alone at the garbage dump and tells him the terms of her vengeance, and then again when she finds him cleaning the toilets alone he does not resist and their interaction is just intense and threatening. Then, Hana’s next interaction when she escorts Kiyoshi to the infirmary, she attempts to get her revenge, that’s when he begins to resist – she picks up on it with her “you are really putting up a fight today, aren’t you?”. Hana never gets to her revenge, but it does set up the stage for what I would consider the pinnacle of Kiyoshi’s personal growth and the inflection point where he and Hana realize that the tension between them had turned from threatening to romantic and most importantly – mutual.

This, the second best scene in the whole manga, happens after Chiyo the Donor had revealed to Kiyoshi his hope, resolve and will, so Hana is no longer facing an inexperienced boy that’s paralyzed by anxiety and lacking direction. She is facing a Kiyoshi who says to himself “I understand how this situation works - whomever stays stronger mentally will win” and the author describes him as having “A superhuman level of reason” that “allowed him to keep his fear at bay”. This is how Hana and Kiyoshi kiss, with neither of them breathing through their nose, which reveals to Kiyoshi that maybe Hana and him are sharing the same thoughts and feelings. For Kiyoshi, this is a thought and an implication straight out of the heart of all sentimentalism - if they can share the same thought at the same time, then maybe girls really are human, maybe they really are equals that he can have a relationship with? When Kiyoshi thinks back to that moment with Hana, he calls their kiss “amazing”. For Hana, this first kiss is an inflection point where desire for revenge made way for romantic desire – it is a moment of co-evolution and it will be topped only by the very best scene in the whole manga.

The very best scene is when Hana learns about Gackt’s “tripartite switch” and how while she was with Kiyoshi, she wasn’t the only one that was on his mind, meaning that he was also using that moment to prepare to defeat Mari the Crow User in detail by enacting his part of Gackt’s clever bit of strategy. This was Hana feeling the need to know how genuine that kiss really was! This portrayal of awkward but passionate young love is precious, this tension and probing in the dark, dealing with uncertainty was captured really well through the visual storytelling. After Hana takes her treasured selfies together with Kiyoshi, she encounters a man who had defeated the villain and returned victorious. So when he asks her “Why are you closing your eyes? I’m really going to…”, she tests him “Because if you so much as touch me, I’m going to kill you”. He calls her bluff, embraces her, coolly delivers this absolute boss move of a line: “please kill me”, and leans in to confirm the passion that has been raging in their hearts so that it’s without a shadow of a doubt. And then…

Sinking in Sight of Port

I wish I could say this scene was part of function 31 of Propp’s morphology – The Wedding, but it was not meant to be. We did have a true to Propp ending with function 30 – Punishment where the villain got exposed for her wicked deeds and dethroned from her position as President of the Shadow Student Council, supposedly clearing a path for Hana and Kiyoshi to ascend in her place. To borrow Churchill’s phrase, “the ship sank in sight of port” - the manga will continue for many more volumes, lose it’s fans during a never-ending-shonen style “tournament arc” and end up with that transgression of a line (“Maybe I haven’t changed at all”) before falling forever silent. I have shown here how Akira Hiramoto had followed the honorable traditions of Propp’s morphology, artfully creating amazingly entertaining situations along the classic fairy tale structure, and went on for 30 steps with nothing but sensational success, but floundered on the last. I suppose the author tried to go for another “jo-ha-kyu”, but only discovered that he couldn’t make lightning strike twice, and in a bout of burnout and ill will towards his own work, attempted to rob Kiyoshi off his queen-bride and nullify all their personal growth. I reject that end. Kiyoshi and Hana deserved better.

When the hero returns (and is recognized by his community), that’s when the happy end happens. And the final meaning of the returning hero is the return with certain gifts. The hero brings something. In the most archaic variants, he brings fire, he brings grain. He brings a skill: he taught people to grow corn, he taught people how to build houses. In more cultured variants, the hero brings peace and prosperity. “And they lived happily ever after” – the kingdom finally has peace. A lack is corrected and now the order is restored and continues. The hero returns not with a personal gift, but gift for the whole society. He returns with a common good. The common good should have obviously been Shadow Student Council Co-Presidents Hana and Kiyoshi collaborating on the much talked about Wet T-Shirt Competition.

Propp ends his “Historical roots of the fairy tale” with a conclusion, that, if I remember correctly, can be reduced to that, while it’s very important and not easy to systematize and collect plots, but studying the development of each and every individual story is also a task for researchers. And this task is much more rich and complicated. It also must be done. That means that one does not exclude the other. Let’s say that two of these approaches complement one another. And second, this approach seems important in it of itself, because I remembered how the philosopher Merab Memardashvili explained what drew him to philosophy. He said that it was because of a situation in which he was “ontologically blind”. He called this simple thing “ontological blindness”: when you put 2 and 2 in front of a man, the man, and even the whole people are not capable of, having looked at 2 and 2, are not capable of saying “4” because they lack Logos. As Memardashvili defined, Logos is what allows you to look at 2 and 2 and say “4”. So, this is why you need to read morphology of fairy tales, so that it would put your mind in order. It trains us in such a way that allows us, having looked at 2 and 2, it allow us to say “4”. Some say that it’s important to keep a certain king of ignorance, that if we learn how an artistic creation was made, we will lose some sort of a magical charm. Perhaps that’s true for children, but I think for adults, it won’t hurt. That is why I recommend everyone to read Propp. I never thought that analysis hinders enjoyment. Nabokov also didn’t think this way. He thought that, as he would say, precision of the arts and passion of pure science – that’s the right combination that is essential for a proper reader to have.