An American Writer's Thoughts on Japanese Animation

Echoing Through the Haze: KagePro Songs Analysis (Part 1)

This is where it all started: The songs that make up the core of the Kagerou Project. Therefore, this is where I’m going to start with more detailed analysis of KagePro’s elements.

Now, I’m not a music person. I appreciate a carefully-arranged series of select air pressure waves as much as the next guy, but I’m going to admit I don’t have the background and vocabulary to talk about these songs in more advanced musical terms. I’m more of a story person, including visual storytelling, and that’s the direction I’m going to approach KagePro from, viewing these entries less as “songs with PVs” and more as 3-5 minute short films. Some elements might be shared with the music, like pacing, and I can talk about how the sound design fits together, but I am going to be mostly going through the story the songs tell.

Because of that, at least for this article I’m going to limit myself to a selection of KagePro songs, most of which will be the ones that aren’t exclusive and have good PVs, though I may need to cover or at least touch on others. Because, while I might enjoy listening to some of the album exclusives with a translated lyrics sheet at hand, it’s a very different experience to watching the animations. While the songs interconnect, working through where and how they do isn’t trivial, and there’s not a clear list of where to start and end, which is part of why I’ll be doing selected entries. So let’s dive in with…

Kagerou Days

(Original PV | English Cover with Wannyanpoo’s Fan PV)

Kagerou Days (or “Daze”, but I’ll use the less-common “Days” interpretation for the song to keep it distinct from the Novels, Manga, and Phenomenon) isn’t the first song created for the project, but to my understanding it’s the one that really exploded in popularity, hence why “Kagerou” appears in the overtitle rather than, say “Mekakucity” that graces the anime and albums. Perhaps it’s because Kagerou Days is one of the easiest of the songs to parse in isolation. Others will usually tell you enough to ‘get’ what’s going on but due to the short time they have leave some elements out, out of focus, or in the background. Here, the story is contained. It’s not explained what the supernatural element is or where it comes from, but that’s not something you actually need to know in order to enjoy Kagerou Days as a full story; it’s admirably well contained.

The story of Kagerou Days is this: Over the course of August 14th and 15th, a boy (Hibiya) hangs out with a girl (Hiyori), until a point where she’s suddenly hit by a truck and killed. After a moment of horror, the boy wakes up on August 14th thinking he’s had a bad dream. As he hangs out with the girl, though, he starts to notice that the events of the day are falling out exactly like his “dream”. Right before the inciting incident for the truck accident, he takes her away from that place, only to see her suffer a different fatal accident. And we return to August 14th. The scenario plays out again and again, and the boy has to watch the girl die in numerous ways for, from his perspective, ten years of trying to find an out from her demise and the loop. After so much bitterness and sorrow, the boy finally gets the bright idea to sacrifice himself to the truck, pushing the girl out of the way at the last second and taking the hit himself, hoping that this will break the cycle. After that, we cut back to, when else, August 14th. Only this time, for the last seconds of the song, we’re following the girl instead as she mourns having failed, presumably to save the boy, implying that they’re both experiencing their own versions of the loop, remembering the iterations in which the other dies.

In song form, perhaps, but it’s a really effective and well-told story. For a four minute video there’s buildup, surprise, mystery, suspense, and even a functional twist. Some directors can’t do all of that in two hours. It is, admittedly, open ended, but to my mind in a way that catches the imagination. It’s left up to interpretation or theory how these kids got into this time loop, what it means, and how (or even if) they can actually get out. It’s a great ambassador piece for the project because it invites you to engage with it and makes you want to know more about the spider web of stories that spreads outward from Kagerou Days.

Maybe that’s why it’s kind of got two PVs.

The original PV very much reflects the song’s status as, while not strictly the first KagePro song, one of the first few. It still has a good rhythm to it, but you don’t actually see a whole lot… there are a few images that are panned around and a couple abstract moments, but the visuals are dominated by the lyrics. You can still follow it, and it supports the lyrics telling the story well, but it’s not exactly animated and doesn’t really tell the story on its own. More critically, it doesn’t add a whole lot to the words music. The blood and good thousand-yard-stare from the most common ‘shot’ of Hibiya aren’t nothing, but they aren’t necessarily a lot either.

Normally, I wouldn’t consider fan works, but the second PV for Kagerou Days is kind of in a weird place. To my understanding, it’s what a lot of people associate with the song in terms of visuals, and the artist who created it (Wannyanpoo; a name that means, roughly “WoofMeowOink”) did go on to do work for the Kagerou Project, so I figure I can talk about it. It is, I would say, something of apocrypha; Hiyori’s design isn’t quite what she’ll look like in other official material, and some of the imagery is suggestive of supernatural elements that don’t actually apply to KagePro, like palette swapped shades of the kids emerging and interacting with them in place of, say, Hibiya’s own mental fatigue with the situation. True, you could see some of these elements (Especially, say, the world of clocks visited when the timeline resets) as symbolic rather than literal, but for others the PV seems to lean in the direction of these things actually happening, and trying to dig into those mysteries would lead you astray since they’re not really part of the Project.

On the other hand, the fan PV is very well put together. When I say that the KagePro PVs often do resemble short films this one (despite technically being a fan work) is one of the ones that goes the farthest to prove it. It is pretty much fully animated, and uses a lot of imagery, even small touches, to add to the story. Not everything it adds ends up being true to KagePro, but viewed in isolation it’s a strong and cohesive project. The creator, when putting the PV together, also did an excellent job of being true to the source. For instance, I mentioned that Hiyori’s design is off… but Hibiya’s is pretty much correct since the original PV showed it off a good deal and there was plenty to work with. Even the look and feel of the PV, with its high contrast between blood red and sky teal and heavy use of white, is clearly inspired by how the original was handled and is something that will emerge again in the visual design of the project. As long as you know what it is, I think it does add to the experience of Kagerou Days.

In terms of how it weaves together, Kagerou Days is a song with fairly few obvious connections, and most of them are very deep in the project at least in terms of how you want to look at it in order to actually understand, being the second or later appearances of other characters. So to continue, I’ll be picking the start of another thread…

Yuukei Yesterday

(PV)

Yuukei Yesterday (“Yesterday Evening” or “Sunset Yesterday” if you prefer) is a very different song from Kagerou Days in terms of its content and tone, so much that you would be easily forgiven for not expecting them to belong to the same thing. In the immediate, it’s a song about a (very tsun) Tsundere (Takane) experiencing her crush (on Haruka). It’s got the typical Tsundere fixings: denial of her feeling, lashing out in anger and frustration because she can’t handle her feelings, and getting into comic situations because of all of it. Our new Tsundere friend is a clear firecracker with a mean glare and the boy she has a crush on seems both sweet and exceptionally oblivious, and you would be forgiven for considering that to be what there is to the song, especially given the bright and colorful paper doll style a lot of it takes on.

The ending, however, does present something of a twist. It’s not as obvious as Kagerou Days’ twist, but it’s certainly there. Throughout the song we see the main characters paired with alternate versions of themselves, seemingly drawn by the characters. In the last few lines of lyrics (the 2:50 mark in the song), though, we instead see Alternate Takane in full color, like a person who actually exists (I dare say probably in higher detail than most of the rest of the song), making a desperate run through a sunset city while the lyrics talk about how she means to tell Haruka how she feels, her face full of desperation and fear despite a glimpse of happy possibilities. This is absolutely a case where the PV puts in a lot of work. If you just listen to the song, rather than watch it, it doesn’t really sound like there would be any stakes on moment of breaking into a run to tell him. They’re school friends, so even if her pent-up emotions being released in a torrent demand that something happen right now, she can always tell him later. The PV’s imagery paints a different picture; the palpable desperation in Takane’s face suggests that there’s some important reason why she has to be running, and not waiting any longer, and her crying out to god at the end doesn’t feel as frivolous as it otherwise might. The song does round off with some happier visuals, flashbacks to the two of them hanging out with friends (Shintaro and Ayano, who we’ll get to in good time), and an image of Takane surmounting the hill in the sunset city with a leap that looks kinda joyful when combined with the bouncy, bright sound of the song.

This is one you can just sort of enjoy on its own, especially as a more fun and upbeat entry, but it introduces (in a chronological, rather than production sense) some important notions, forming the background of Takane and Haruka and the groundwork for their alternate forms, Ene and Konoha.

Headphone Actor

(PV)

Headphone Actor follows up with Takane, undergoing a fairly strange experience. We see her here in her alternate form(/costume), the one she was running in at the end of Yuukei Yesterday. And, once again, she’s going to be doing an awful lot of running, starting when, during what otherwise seems like an average day, a voice on the radio declares that it’s the end of the world. She puts on her headphones to calm her nerves when a voice comes over them – it sounds just like her own voice and tells her that if she can make it over a particular hill in time, she’ll see what’s going on and can be saved.

Naturally, Takane starts running. She makes her way through the streets, where everyone is quite naturally going crazy – screaming, crying, praying, rioting… it’s the end of the world after all. Takane stays fixed on her mission: Get over that hill to see what’s beyond and, in doing so, survive. The Takane-voice in her headphones reminds her of the countdown, but at last she makes it.

And in making it, she realizes she was on the Truman Show the whole time: the town is some sort of science experiment, and the lab-coat clad scientists applaud Takane’s success even as they shatter her reality. The town’s not needed any more, so might as well toss in a bomb and blow it to hell. Takane, in this vision, lived her whole life in a box, and can only gaze on the ashen ruin that used to be her whole life.

The voice from the Headphones speaks one last time, saying she’s sorry, as a faint outline appears to speak those words.

Now, there’s a good deal to unpack from Headphone Actor. First of all, it’s clearly not 100% literal. It’s not exactly framed as a dream, but some of the details are extremely dream-like. There’s a good reason for that, being that Headphone Actor (Along with Kagerou Days and at least a couple others) depicts an experience within the Heat Haze, which can distort time and reality to the extreme ends. Second, there are elements that tie back, elements that tie forward, and multiple ways you can read some of the elements, giving you a different perspective on the characters depending on how you look at it.

The ties back, at least as we’re regarding it, are those to Yuukei Yesterday. In terms of production it was Yuukei Yesterday (17th song) calling back to Headphone Actor (4th song), but in terms of the arcs of the characters, it’s the other way around. The big one is, of course, Takane’s run for the hill. In Headphone Actor, she’s running to escape the apocalypse. In Yuukei Yesterday, she’s running to tell her crush how she feels. But the scenes are clearly basically the same thing, including Takane’s appearance, the color scheme, the hill motif, and her desperation as she runs. There are a few ways you could look at this. I think the most natural is that the events of Headphone Actor are something of a metaphor for how things happened in Yuukei Yesterday; much like a dream, the Heat Haze seems to borrow elements and repeat or reinterpret them, so it’s not entirely strange that if “Running up a hill at sunset, with a tight time gun” was weighing on her when she entered the Haze, it could become part of her Heat Haze experience. By that metric, Headphone Actor would, in some ways, be an exaggerated retelling of the ending of Yuukei Yesterday. Personally, knowing more about the project and how the Heat Haze works and how, at least in most routes, Takane ended up entering it, this seems pretty likely. However, there’s another take that’s at least interesting food for thought.

In Yuukei Yesterday, for the majority of the song, the Takane of Headphone Actor is not the real Takane; however, at the end, when she’s desperate to tell Haruka how she feels and has to make the run in order to do so, it is the Headphone Actor Takane we see, with no hint of the action from Real Takane. So, I think it’s possible that the implication is, from another direction, about the depth of Takane’s feelings. Rather than Headphone Actor modifying Yuukei Yesterday by showing us a nightmare version of her run. Yuukei Yesterday could be meant to modify our understanding of Headphone Actor, giving us more insight into what Takane is thinking when she’s running to escape the end of the world. Specifically, if you take this interpretation, there’s at least a meaningful part of Takane’s mind that needs to make it to safety, because she still has something so important to tell Haruka. Finally speaking her mind would be the great motivator there, in some senses her reason if not to live than at least to push through a terrible situation when it might otherwise be easy to see the scenario as hopeless and give up. A desperate need to hold on (particularly to love), against seemingly impossible odds, is a theme that comes back in the Kagerou Project. We see it in different forms in the stories of Shintaro and Ayano, the story of Marry, the story of Hibiya and Hiyori, and even the story of Azami that forms the foundation for the others – it’s hardly a stretch to say something like that might be intended for Takane and Haruka as well.

I would normally deal with the forward link in the next song in the chain (again, next as the characters would experience it) but there’s a bridging song that’s Album Exclusive, so since I won’t be going into full detail on it I’ll address what needs to be covered here. At the end of Headphone Actor, the copy of Takane’s voice she heard over her headphones is given an image. It’s just an outline and only there for a second or two, but it’s not quite Takane’s outline. Rather, the image belongs to Ene, hinting at (or, arguably, establishing) the link between the two characters, that Ene is an alternate version of Takane. This is made more explicit by the song “Ene’s Cyber Journey”. Takane’s body and mind are separated and her mind (as Ene) enters cyberspace and is lead to the computer of her old friend, Shintaro Kisaragi. The song basically acts as a bridge that’s half Headphone Actor and half the next one in Ene’s timeline, solidifying the connection that would be otherwise fairly easy to miss. Technically the next step in Ene’s line is Artificial Enemy, the first song created for the Kagerou Project, but since its PV is literally a still image and its story material will be covered again from a different perspective, we’ll catch back up with Ene when we get to Lost Time Memory. For now, it’s time to start down a different road.

Ayano’s Theory of Happiness

(PV)

The start of a different story, Ayano’s Theory of Happiness, telling a story in itself, but with details that are begging to be filled in by other material. The basic story is that Ayano Tateyama gains a few new siblings – adopted siblings with red eyes, who view themselves as monsters because of it. Ayano tries to be a good big sister to them, telling them that red is the color of heroes and playing make-believe to the effect just to see the poor kids smile a little more. It works, but the idyllic existence Ayano and her family knew is thrown into disarray by the death of her mother and something dark about her father. Ayano stumbles upon some darker threat to the lives and happiness of her family and her friends (Takane and Haruka, glimpsed briefly), about which she cannot speak. Basically, everyone she cares about is in jeopardy. She keeps her dread and desperation hidden behind a smile before finally hitting upon a plan to do with the red eyes: if she had some herself, perhaps she could save the future of the others. The PV shows her approaching a dark rift, facing some sort of supernatural terror, and while it’s not entirely clear either what really happened to her or what the story the rest of the world knows is, it is fairly clear that she’s gone after that, whether conventionally “dead” or not. From beyond, she laments that the people she cared for would probably be upset with her, but still hopes that the kids will really see her as a big sister and that her friends and family can hold on to happiness and love the coming days.

What the threat was, and why Ayano’s sacrifice defused it or was at least expected to defuse it, is probably the element of the Kagerou Project that is least well explained in the songs: I think the most understandable version of these events comes from Mekakucity Actors, but for what we have here? It is, in a lot of ways, the heart of the Project. Ayano, in her life and death, touched most of the other characters. We see them in this song; the focus is on her adopted siblings Kido, Kano, and Seto but there’s also time given to Takane, Haruka, and even Shintaro, at least in the PV. Speaking of the PV, it’s a good one, loaded with grace notes and embellishments that help tell the story more. For instance, the lyrics keep vague about the dark turn that Ayano’s life take, but the visuals let us in to the tragedy of her parents. The lyrics stay focused on her family, keeping the cope of the song tight, but in the visuals of the PV she also spares thoughts for her friends, some of which are in danger themselves as well as her family.

One big thing that Ayano’s Theory of Happiness does is, of course, establish Ayano. I know that seems obvious, but because of the role she fulfills in the story as a whole it’s important that we know who she is as a person. We see in Theory of Happiness that she’s a good, kind person… and not just passively kind either. She takes an active interest in the happiness of her adopted siblings from the beginning and more critically takes it upon herself to protect her friends and family, even at the cost of her own life.

In this song, Ayano mentions red being the color of heroes, and in the design of the Kagerou Project, it’s an important color – the eyes of Ability-users turn red, and there are a lot of sunset colors in depictions of the Heat Haze, not to mention the blood that some songs will indulge in (looking at you, Kagerou Days). However, most of the characters actually avoid it as a thematic color, perhaps because of its important status, meaning that red eyes don’t get lost. There are, however, two very notable uses of red by characters, and one of them is here: Ayano takes up a bright crimson scarf, at first as a way of helping get her new siblings to open up, but it does become a kind of signature garment for her. Later on, when she has to step up in agency, she adds a pair of red hair clips like her mother wore. Ayano’s use of red elements helps to highlight, through visual means, her death as a case of heroic self-sacrifice rather than the tragic suicide it’s elsewhere made out to be by those who don’t know the full story. The framing in the PV supports this. If you look at the shot at 4:08 in the PV, you’ll notice a few things. First of all, Ayano’s scarf is in full color (it isn’t always) and is fluttering out in the wind on both sides of her, giving her a bigger outline in that bright, vibrant red. Second, Ayano facing the rift here is presented like a shot of an action hero; it’s from a low angle and behind her, so she looks huge and even powerful, but what’s she’s facing, out in the distance, looks even bigger. It’s the same sort of shot you’d want if you were setting a powerful warrior up against an indomitable monster, except here it’s being used for an ordinary school girl because that’s the kind of spirit and determination Ayano has. She might be too humble to really consider herself a hero, but the framing of her actions in her own story say that she is, even if she’s a tragic one who doesn’t come back from that date with destiny.

Even after dying (and ending up in the Heat Haze, of course), Ayano still thinks of others. In the end of Ayano’s Theory of Happiness, she doesn’t know how her family is doing. She hopes well, that the people she cared about will go on smiling without her, but she does have some suspicion that everything in the outside world might not be sunshine and roses. To see how the outside world did, indeed, react to Ayano’s sacrifice, we turn to Shintaro Kisaragi.

Toumei Answer

(English Cover with PV)

So, this is the one Album song that I actually want to discuss. Because of its status, there’s not an upload of the original by the artist but the song and its attendant video (which is official) have been covered by JubyPhonic. I’d feel more bad about linking fan work when discussing the official material, but her English covers are kind of what first got me into the project, and while her lyrics may not be the most literal translation of the Japanese, they usually do a very good job at communicating the story and the intent while fitting the music extremely well. So if you haven’t been following along with songs in a language you don’t speak, maybe check her out.

As for the content, this is the first (chronological) song to feature very arguably the project’s main character, Shintaro Kisaragi, in a central role. He appeared briefly in the PVs for Yuukei Yesterday and Ayano’s Theory of Happiness, but Toumei Answer is from Shintaro’s perspective, giving us an outside look on the ending of Ayano’s Theory of Happiness. We see how Ayano befriends Shintaro – he’s a genius (never seen with less than a perfect 100 on his tests) but he also seems kind of sour and bored with the world. Ayano meets his attitude with a very different perspective – much like how, in Ayano’s Theory of Happiness, she teaches her siblings that their red eyes can belong them to heroes instead of the monsters they saw themselves as to begin with, Ayano seems to be the one thing that shakes Shintaro from his ennui, and her approach to the world as something wonderful is infectious: you can see it at about the 1:09 mark when his eyes, that are usually depicted as shaded or downcast not just in Toumei Answer but in most of the songs he’s in, light up when he sees Ayano, and he actually looks at something with a little wonder rather than jaded indifference (or shock).

Of course, then Ayano goes and commits suicide. That’s the story the world outside her battle with the Heat Haze gets: she jumped from the school rooftop and died, and most of the song is dedicated to Shintaro not just mourning her death, but attempting to understand. Shintaro seems to blame himself at least partially – not for causing Ayano’s death, it seems, so much as for failing to prevent it, by recognizing warning signs or just generally being a better friend to someone so precious to him. Scenes of Shintaro mourning are paired with flashbacks to his time with Ayano, and it’s easy to see that they had a strong bond even if he was a grump. With her gone, Shintaro has of course lost the light she added to his life, and if anything the loss weighs on him even more than mere absence. His test scores may remain perfect, but if it wasn’t a big deal to him before, it now aggressively doesn’t matter: the 100 was never the reward to Shintaro, so what is there without Ayano making her little paper cranes out of them, even if he might have claimed to not care before?

After Ayano’s death is made public, Shintaro both sees that others will likely forget her (in a brilliant small moment, watching a leaf fall from the vase of flowers left on her desk as a memorial) and curses himself for despite his great academic gifts, not being able to answer the problem that really mattered. At the end we see a mixture of memories and imagined possibility (an example of what he thinks he could have done, like finding Ayano crying alone so he would have known she had a problem), as well as Shintaro’s actions: He flees campus and is done with his alarm for school, retreating to the NEETdom we’ll later find him in.

While others may forget, Shintaro ends the song resolving not to, promising that he’ll remember Ayano’s smile into the future.

Toumei Answer, on its own, doesn’t really add new information we couldn’t glean from Ayano’s Theory of Happiness, Lost Time Memory, and Additional Memory (I’ll get to those latter two in good time), but it’s an important bridge for the emotions that run through Shintaro’s arc, and it’s good to have it at the point we do rather than relying on later material. It also does a good job at feeling real and close. In Toumei Answer there are no supernatural elements, not even hints like the ambiguous ending of Yuukei Yesterday that ties in with Headphone Actor. It’s just a song about a boy coping (badly) with the loss of a dear friend, events that were from his perspective part of the mundane universe we understand in every way. That’s something unique in KagePro, at least the “main line” songs I’m covering here; the project is very good at giving a lot of humanity to its characters, and handling their emotions tactfully as real people, but it usually does do so in the context of a scenario that is somewhere between surreal and fantastical. Toumei Answer is a big part of that for Shintaro and by depicting him totally in isolation from the weirdness that otherwise permeates the project, we a gain a better understanding of who he is in entirely human terms.

Hm? A real, emotionally effective and logically consistent portrayal of grief over the death of a (girl)friend driving a boy into seclusion as a NEET? I strangely feel the need to beat a dead horse over a four minute song doing this better than an eleven episode show somehow.

We’ll catch up with Shintaro when we reach Lost Time Memory, but in the meantime we’ve got Ayano’s adopted siblings to catch up with.

That, however, will be for next time – this analysis article is running very long, so part 2 will run next Wednesday. We’ve got some powerhouse songs to attend to, so I hope I’ll see you all there.