#a post about the impulse to disappear from the world; why i hate isekai; horror that isn't horror; and blurring fiction and reality

[fallynleaf]

(This is an afterword for Fate Unknown, my fic about the limited distribution short film 正体不明 that was produced for 行方不明展 "A Missing Exhibition". Contains full spoilers!)

"人間には 行方不明の時間が必要です" , roughly "People need time to be unaccounted for" is a line from a poem by Noriko Ibaragi that has come up repeatedly in Nashi's interviews as an inspiration for A Missing Exhibition. Here's an interview (in Japanese, sorry) where he talks about it.

He says that when most people hear the word "行方不明" (going missing/disappearing/unaccounted for/whereabouts unknown), they tend to think of missing persons, kidnappings, crimes, etc.

But there is also another side to it, which is "社会的な文脈からの解放" (liberation from societal context). This is the concept that A Missing Exhibition is built around.

I think the reasons Kashima and Tsunaka had for wanting to, well, "liberate themselves from societal context" in the original film were intentionally left open-ended so that the viewer could project whatever you wanted onto them.

I think, though, that the interpretation of the characters as gay is included in that, maybe even deliberately, and that it is maybe the most straightforward interpretation, considering how the big twist in the 正体不明 film reframes the whole exhibition as basically one big desperate labor of love that Kashima spends nine years putting together just for the mere chance that he'll be able to see Tsunaka again.

Nashi also talks about how there is either hope or despair in the concept of “行方不明” that the exhibition expresses.

Personally, I feel like rather than an either/or, it’s almost a simultaneous hope/despair, like there’s a despair that drives people to want to disappear from the world, but also a hope that there is somehow a better world out there for them that they can escape to instead. If there wasn’t despair, there wouldn’t be a reason to disappear to somewhere else, but if there wasn’t hope, there wouldn’t be a reason to try for a new world rather than just dying in this one.

With the 正体不明 film specifically, I think the ending sort of lets you choose whether the feeling it leaves you with is hope or despair depending on how you interpret what happens. Like, I choose to believe the characters get their happy ending, and that Tsunaka is able to come back and stay in this world and that he and Kashima can be together and get a second chance at happiness.

I dunno if I’ve ever talked about this here before, but I personally really dislike the isekai genre. I don’t like the concept of death being the only way to solve all your problems and let you live in a world you actually want to live in, rather than having to fight to change the world you’re already in so that it becomes livable.

I didn’t think of A Missing Exhibition in terms of isekai until I saw Nashi bring it up, but the thought that kind of stuck with me is that in some ways, A Missing Exhibition is about the world left behind rather than the world people go to. I realized that concept was just infinitely more compelling to me than the isekai premise. How do the people in the real world deal with the loss of the person who got suddenly isekai’d away? How do you find a way to continue to live in this world?

I love the fact that on the surface, A Missing Exhibition is about a whole bunch of people disappearing to other worlds, but the story in 正体不明 is actually about bringing one person back to this world. That’s just beautiful to me.

I refer to A Missing Exhibition as "horror" because it's a project made by a bunch of creators who are active in the modern horror scene in Japan, but what's fascinating to me about it is that 正体不明 actually isn't really horror (Nashi calls it speculative fiction instead). The story is much more gentle than that, and it's far kinder to the characters than horror tends to be.

I don't know why I find that so fascinating. Maybe it's just that there's something kind of neat about seeing the tools of horror storytelling applied in such a different way. Maybe horror creators, too, need some time where they can liberate themselves from the societal context of being a horror creator.

(Incidentally, Tokio Omori's immediate next project after A Missing Exhibition was producing a BL drama. Well, it was still very much an Omori work...)

I had some amount of trouble titling this fic. I won't go too deep into it because it gets a bit lost in translation, but the whole exhibition has a themed naming pattern around words which end in 不明 ("unknown"), with the two most important ones being of course 行方不明 (literally "whereabouts unknown"), which the exhibition focuses on, and 正体不明 (literally "identity unknown"), the name of the short film.

The actual exhibition was divided into four sections, dealing with missing people, places, things, and memories, respectively:

「ひと」の行方不明 was 身元不明 「場所」の行方不明 was 所在不明 「もの」の行方不明 was 出所不明 「記憶」の行方不明 was 真偽不明

In the interview linked above, they talk about the film 正体不明 as being basically a fifth part of the exhibition.

Seeing that, I thought, "well, my fic is the secret sixth part, then!" So of course I had to choose another 不明 word to fit into the naming scheme. I settled on 安否不明 (literally "fate unknown") because the story I wanted to tell is about what happened to the characters afterward.

Something I kept thinking about as I wrote the fic was about how you can survive a disaster without fully surviving it. There is of course that idea of people going to another world where their fate is uncertain, but I think, too, there is an uncertainty with coming back, like Tsunaka does.

The original 正体不明 film never defines exactly what was so hellish about the world Tsunaka came from, so I decided that his hell was basically a world with even more extreme capitalism and oppressive heteronormative norms than our world.

So then the story becomes, how do you recover from extreme heteronormative capitalist burnout? Can you ever truly recover from that?

I had some trouble writing this part because the short film really doesn't give us a whole lot of context about who these people even are outside of the exhibition. Like, what kinds of hobbies do they have outside of an obsession with disappearing to another world as teenagers? They're both probably extremely done with that concept now after everything they went through, haha.

I came up with birdwatching as a hobby for Tsunaka through kind of a roundabout way.

One of my Japanese study buddies had written about a book called How to Do Nothing by Jenny Odell, which had helped get him into birdwatching. I thought maybe having Tsunaka get into birdwatching would be a way to give him something to do while also maybe offering a bit of a balm to the harms inflicted on him by capitalism, so I actually paused working on my fic to read How to Do Nothing to see if that would give me some ideas, and it ended up being way more thematically appropriate than I had even considered.

The book actually literally addressed basically the same impulse that drives A Missing Exhibition: the whole desire to leave the world.

Here's an excerpt from the book:

One reaction to all of this is to head for the hills—permanently. In the second chapter, I look at a few different people and groups who took this approach. The countercultural communes of the 1960s in particular have much to teach us about the challenges inherent in trying to extricate oneself completely from the fabric of a capitalist reality, as well as what was sometimes an ill-fated attempt to escape politics altogether. This is the beginning of an ongoing distinction I’ll make between 1) escaping “the world” (or even just other people) entirely and 2) remaining in place while escaping the framework of the attention economy and an over-reliance on a filtered public opinion.

So the birdwatching in the fic is basically literally a replacement for disappearing to another world. It both offers the characters a way to heal and also helps treat the root cause of their pain and help them live in this world.

On a more technical writing level, it was also a great boon to me because I realized I could use it to create settings that closely parallel settings relating to people disappearing (an abandoned house, the beach, etc.) but give the characters a different reason to be there.

Also, this is a VERY subtle/fine-grained point that I don't expect anyone else to pick up on, but Kashima and Tsunaka actually have fundamentally different understandings of/approaches to birdwatching. Tsunaka sort of has Jenny Odell's approach (he actually gets into it in a very similar way to her: she started out observing crows at her house), and Kashima is stuck in basically "pokemon collecting" mode, haha. I think it's tied to the fixation on collecting he had to develop when making the exhibition. So he still has a ways to go before he's able to find the kind of peace in it that Tsunaka has found.

I had planned from the start for Tsunaka's PTSD to be a big part of the story, but something I actually didn't realize while planning but realized during the process of writing was that Kashima actually has some secondhand PTSD/survivor's guilt as well from all those years he spent researching people's disappearances. And just as the birds help ground Tsunaka, they also help ground Kashima a bit in those moments.

I had to spend some time researching birds in Japan in order to write this, and because this fic has a very specific timeframe, I also had to make sure the birds would be actually viewable in the places the characters were during the months that the fic takes place, so I spent some time browsing databases and also looking at Japan in iNaturalist. I found out about the short-tailed albatross and immediately knew that I was going to have to feature it in some way.

At this point, the fic started to veer more ecology/conservation focused, but I asked myself "what would Omori do?" and concluded the answer was "put more politics in" fgkdjhg so I ended up just embracing it. Sure, I'll turn A Missing Exhibition into a gay romance with overt anti-capitalist/ecological themes, why not?

Regarding the actual creators of the actual exhibition, I had a bit of trouble trying to reconcile the canon of the kayfabe creator of the exhibition (Kashima) with the actual creators (primarily Nashi and Omori, though Kondo was involved as well), who were themselves sort of part of the kayfabe.

Nashi, for instance, shows up as an onscreen character (as himself) in the first video for A Missing Exhibition, and he even got mentioned at the beginning of 正体不明 and was thus intended to be canon in some way in that work. I don't think Omori ever showed up onscreen for this project, though he has appeared in his own works in the past and clearly doesn't mind reality and fiction being mixed in this manner.

Even still, I actually didn't plan on them showing up in the fic, haha. It happened for a few reasons, one being that there really are not very many characters in this work, so I needed someone else for Kashima to interact with, and also this was another moment where I asked myself "what would Omori do?" and the answer was obviously "put himself in the work".

In any case, I'm grateful to the real creators for making A Missing Exhibition, and for them being extremely kind and welcoming to me when I reached out as a random LGBTQ fan overseas for whom their work resonated with.

I'm glad I started to become familiar with their work through this project, and I hope one day that more of their stuff makes it into a format that's accessible to an English-speaking audience.

Oh, by the way, there will be a book (in Japanese) coming out soon for A Missing Exhibition, though no word yet on whether or not it'll contain any new canon for Kashima and Tsunaka, or if its focus will just be on the actual physical exhibition.

I think I'd actually prefer it if the book was just the 5k characters of text from the actual exhibition, plus photographs of all the exhibits, and if it mostly left the canon from 正体不明 untouched. At most, I think I'd like just a small easter egg, like a photo of Kashima and Tsunaka together in middle school or something like that.

Though it would be nice to get proper full names for them...