Dusk Maiden of Amnesia is a sweet,
funny romance between Niiya Teiichi and Yuuko Kanoe, complicated by
the fact that the latter just happens to be a ghost. Wait, that’s
not it…
What I meant to say is that Dusk Maiden
of Amnesia is a character-driven mystery, following the ghost girl
Yuuko-san as she and the members of the Paranormal Investigation Club
attempt to discover the truth behind her death. Hm, that’s not quite
right either…
The truth is that Dusk Maiden of
Amnesia is a dark and twisted, heavily psychological ghost story,
exploring both the past and present of the haunting of a certain
school, delving into sordid tales and dangerous manifestations of
supernatural vengeance. Er, you know the drill by now…
Dusk Maiden of Amnesia is all those
things, held together by some brilliant avant-garde cinematography, a
beautiful palette of fall colors and deep shadows, and a wealth of
engaging characters in what would normally be considered a very small
cast.
And there’s already something very
impressive about that. I kind of consider Dusk Maiden of Amnesia to
be two shows in one; the romance material and the horror material are
so far apart that there are scenes that look for all the world like
they could have been parts of two different shows. The mystery
aspects mostly serve to bridge the two. Many other shows have tried
to have two ‘modes’ in the same way that Dusk Maiden of Amnesia does,
and most of them fail bitterly, typically due to part of the show
spoiling or being spoiled by the rest, and the bits not coming
together in a cohesive whole. One show with that problem was Kaze no
Stigma, which I reviewed last month, regarding its comedy episodes
that just didn’t jive with the rest of the production. Dusk Maiden,
though, manages having both some very comedic elements and some
serious horror in the same production. They inhabit the same
universe, and not just because the characters are shared; you really
couldn’t have one part of Dusk Maiden without the other.
On the whole, the story does shift over
its run; it starts out with more lighter material, and the dark stuff
lays on heavier and heavier as the characters follow the mystery.
But in a sense there was darkness there from the start, and the good
times can carry through the darkest hours, so both begin intertwined
and remain inexorably until the end.
And yet, the most praiseworthy element
of the show remains its cinematography. Dusk Maiden of Amnesia took
a big risk with its visual style and artistic techniques, using empty
space, panels, and elements of movement, stasis, unity, or separation
in its visuals in order to convey more of the meaning and emotion in
many scenes – especially some of the more charged sequences, but
not only. As with the dual tone that could have been schizophrenic
if it wasn’t addressed with the right tact and integration, this
could have been monstrously distracting, but its use is smooth enough
that instead it’s incredibly effective. Taking a big risk ended up
yielding a great reward.
I’ll try to give some examples of the
stuff I’m talking about. In the first episode, Teiichi and Yuuko are
together in a fairly cramped dumbwaiter, going down a couple floors.
How do you shoot that kind of scene? Well, a basic idea might to be
shoot it mostly normally. The characters would be in cramped poses,
but you’d have an open view of the whole scene, as though you were
viewing a cutaway. A slightly more immersive idea might be to shoot
it all in extreme closeup. Treat the camera as a physical object,
that therefore can’t capture the entire scene as there is no such
vantage point within the walls of the elevator. Dusk Maiden of
Amnesia does that, largely… and also places the close-up images in
panels that scroll from the top to the bottom of the screen and off,
imitating the downward movement of the elevator. As one image
scrolls off the bottom, the next close up for the scene appears at
the top, utilizing the black ‘edges’ of the viewer’s field of vision
to create a new sensation in the scene.
I think that’s the only cramped
elevator scene in the show, but the general idea of the technique is
all over the place. For instance, while Teiichi can normally see
Yuuko (and is one of the only people who reliably can) there comes a
time where they can’t mutually see one another. During that stretch,
scenes between the two of them feature two different shots of the
same scene on screen at the same time, with a slight black space
between them. One of those shots will have Yuuko, the other Teiichi.
Even though the characters would be close enough to touch from the
perspective of an omniscient audience, because they’re experiencing
this metaphysical separation, and even though they have to share the
screen, they aren’t allowed to exist within the same frame, the same
world. Even if you don’t consciously realize it, this helps the show
communicate the frustrating distance and the barrier between them.
Because they can’t really be together at that time, the audience
isn’t privileged to see them together either, so you understand on a
much deeper level what they’re going through than you would if you
could see the ‘whole picture’. In a sense, the audience is going
through the experience of their separation as well.
The first episode does an excellent job
of letting you know what you’re in for in this show, at least for the
majority of its run. Oddly, it’s something of a moment out of the
middle of the show, chronologically speaking, while Episode 2 shows
us how the story really begins. We start following Momoe Okonogi as
she enters the Paranormal Investigation Club room and begins to put
together something like meeting minutes. The her pencil breaks and
the tip hits a little keychain doll on the table that, as Momoe roots
through her bag for another writing utensil, stands up to kick the
shard away. As Momoe continues, more paranormal things start
happening. Objects float around her and while it’s slightly humorous
that she seems oblivious to things while they’re moving, the deep
shadows when an object drops and the poltergeist activity enters her
perspective give it more of a horror feel. Then, Teiichi appears.
He seems to have a couple conversations at once, the one Momoe sees,
and another going on with the paranormal. Things, overall, get a
little sillier but then the Paranormal Investigation Club goes out to
investigate something paranormal. Momoe tells a creepy story she
heard about a dumbwaiter elevator, only for the device to come to
life and, when it arrives, a mysterious force to launch Teiichi in.
It’s played up as pretty sinister. Throughout the sequence there are
hints, here and there, of a ghostly feminine figure, but nothing
clear.
The show then plays those scenes over
again, except this time we can see Yuuko-san. She fiddles with items
in the clubroom out of boredom, teases and clings to Teiichi, and
annoys the heck out of the club’s third living member, Kirie (who can
clearly see her like Teiichi does). The sequence reaches the
elevator, which Yuuko calls and kicks Teiichi into, climbing in with
him for the scene I mentioned earlier. Compared to the first version
of the story, which was somewhat funny but also a little creepy, this
one feels like pure comedy, even including the ceremonious accidental
boob grab in the elevator.
From the very start, this establishes
the basic duality of the show, which is a very smart thing to do, in
my opinion. Thinking about it, Dusk Maiden of Amnesia actually plays
quite a lot in duality on a conceptual and structural level. The
show is both a horror-genre ghost story and a school comedy without
being a horror-comedy for the most part. The separation between the
lead characters, as enforced by standing on opposite sides of the
veil of life and death, is critical at several points. For
Yuuko-san, death and being a ghost is not just a weird quirk. At
times, like in the second run of the first episode, she may play it
off as that, but the separation she experiences from the living world
are fairly critical. Later on we’re even introduced to Shadow Yuuko,
a somewhat separate entity that’s the dark side of Yuuko’s ghostly
existence, and resolving their duality, whether that light and that
darkness can or should exist in a single identity, is core to the
show’s struggle in its latter half. Because the show trades in
things that have a double nature, it makes sense for the show to have
a double nature. Because it wants to delve into both sides of
divided matters, it’s important for the show to itself have two sides
to work with.
The second episode starts the story
proper, with Teiichi’s first meeting with Yuuko-san, the founding of
the Paranormal Investigation Club, and its first ‘job’ at the behest
of Momoe as well as its ultimate goal of uncovering the truth behind
Yuuko’s death, unlife, and lost memories. It also starts the
establishment of Dusk Maiden’s rules for ghosts, which bring us to
another critical topic that the show handles very well: The Rules.
When you write in a speculative fiction
genre – Fantasy, Urban Fantasy, most Science Fiction, most ‘punk’
genres, supernatural Horror, or anything else that makes a deliberate
break from the real world – you need to establish The Rules, and
hold to how your speculative elements function within their universe.
Poor indeed is the story that simply says “it’s magic” and
leaves it at that. A better story has a vision for what magic can do
and what magic can’t do, what fanciful ideas are real in this world
and which ones are still fiction. Even better stories understand
what The Rules imply for human experiences and interactions with the
(to the reader) supernatural elements, and have characters address
their abilities and limitations in a sensible matter.
To do this you need to set The Rules
and be consistent in their application and intelligent about the
consequences. There might be things that modify the rules, or bypass
them, or maybe the characters don’t understand right at the start,
and that’s okay. Especially when you have elements of mystery or
discovery, things can change on the characters (and the viewer). But
it needs to be explicit. You can disregard the rules of the universe
we the audience are familiar with, because you’re making a new
universe that the story takes place in. You can’t disregard The
Rules that you set for that universe.
Dusk Maiden of Amnesia is really good
about using The Rules. We learn a first set in Episode 2 (with some
information on them in Episode 1), which are The Rules as understood
by Yuuko-san. Yuuko can do basically anything a human in her
position could do, and nothing more; she can’t pass through solid
objects, fly, teleport, possess objects or people, or any of those
other ghostly things. Most people can’t see or hear her most of the
time which (as per the first episode) seems to extend to objects she
is actively manipulating. It’s unclear at least at first why Teiichi
might be an exception, but you could easily suspect it has something
to do with their meeting and another fact: when placed in the right
frame of mind, people see what they expect to see, rather than just
nothing. Because of this, Momoe (who believes she is being stalked
by a murderous ghost) can see a version of Yuuko when the time,
place, and mood are right for a ghostly encounter, but what she sees
is an absolutely terrifying apparition as opposed to what Teiichi
sees (a fairly normal girl in a white robe – likely a ‘ghost’
costume from Kabuki theater) and stops seeing her when she believes
the ghost has been exorcised.
Already, more creative intelligence has
been shown with their setup (namely, the use of altered perception)
than many shows use when addressing The Rules, especially when The
Rules regard ghosts. As the story unfolds, Dusk Maiden of Amnesia
continues to make use of the same overriding principles, and when
something changes it’s because something has changed in-character.
Changes in Yuuko’s behavior or relationship with her world are
indicative of something important. This especially comes due in the
second half of the show.
Kirie – actually Kirie Kanoe, a
relative (grandniece?) of Yuuko – gets her own introduction in
short order. Like Teiichi, she can see Yuuko in a fairly persistent
manner, but she initially sees her as and later also sees a shadowy
monster Yuuko, and there’s a serious question: which one of them is
seeing the truth? This ultimately builds to the interactions with
Yuuko’s other half – Shadow Yuuko.
Now, while Shadow Yuuko is teased
earlier, she really comes into her own in the second half, which also
has more ‘meat’ to its plot. Shadow Yuuko both is and isn’t the same
entity as Yuuko-san. In short, Shadow Yuuko is everything Yuuko
isn’t, or more precisely the parts of her that she’s lost and
rejected – including most of her negative emotions and large chunks
of her memory – and Shadow Yuuko is not happy with being the
cast-off slag that must possess all the suffering and negativity that
Yuuko threw away. It’s an interesting motif, and while this is
hardly the only treatment of such a being (others that come to mind
for me are The Transcendent One from the video game Planescape:
Torment and Dark Alice from the stories behind the card game Force of
Will), it is a version that gets a ton of time, effort, and respect.
Because the truth is that Yuuko-san
didn’t rise from her grave as an ironically vivacious, fairly
flirtatious, positive, and powerless amnesiac ghost. The truth –
as we’re shown when Teiichi is forced to relive Yuuko’s last days of
life and experience everything she experienced – is that Yuuko
suffered deep betrayal leading to an unfathomably torturous death and
returned as an Onryo.
An Onryo is a hard concept to translate
– the localization just says “vengeful ghost” or “loathsome
ghost” or the like, but if you’re listening it’s clearly a
different word than “yurei”, which is otherwise used as “ghost”.
The West has lots of words for different hauntings, some of which
(like “poltergeist”) you’ll even hear as loan-words here in Dusk
Maiden of Amnesia, but we don’t have a punchy equivalent to the
Japanese concept of the Onryo. We are familiar with them – the
films “The Ring” and “The Grudge” are both adaptations of
Japanese horror films depicting Onryo. Of the two, “The Grudge”
(at least in title) cuts closest to the core idea of the Onryo: a
spirit powered by a spiteful grudge that will never die. Their
hatred is potent, and the curse they bear spreads, almost like a
plague. They aren’t satisfied and they don’t go away lightly,
spreading a circle of misery and destruction that exceeds even the
scope of their proper revenge, catching everything they reach up in
the curse. Short version, they’ve got a bone to pick over their
deaths and their indiscriminate wrath means they are bad news for
everything, not just whatever or whoever or whatever is really the
issue.
The same Yuuko that’s a sweet and funny
love interest for most of the show is also an unnatural creature that
can best be likened to a natural disaster. It’s food for thought.
What changed between that and the Yuuko we know was that at the last
moment, she tried to give up her revenge, rejecting the part of
herself that hated and became her Onryo shadow, as Yuuko herself
became the amnesiac ghost we know.
The divide between the two kind of
expresses one of the other things the show does – in addition to
the heavy-handed but beautiful cinematography, the show also spends a
lot of time juggling its themes. You see, this is both a love story
and a ghost story… and the show can switch tracks between the
romantic comedy, the faux-creepy ghost stories, and the honestly
creepy or deeply tragic ghost stories. Sometimes, it does so in an
instant.
This treatment… probably isn’t for
everyone. I like it well enough, but I can also understand how
someone would find it jarring. There is reason, however, and not
just gut instinct why I think it works here, rather than being
distracting. The reason is twofold. First, the fact that the show
trades a lot in duality, and the contrast between Yuuko and Shadow
Yuuko, does a lot to excuse the tone having high contrast. And, I go
back to the point about Dusk Maiden of Amnesia being, effectively,
two shows in one: A horror show and a romantic comedy alongside each
other, not really a blend of the two. If the show really blended,
the result would be muddy and confused. As it is, it knows what it’s
doing in each moment, and can bee intensely effective when it chooses
to be.
To be sure, the show finishes strong.
The last three episodes see Teiichi delving into Yuuko’s memories.
He experiences a town sixty years in the past, going absolutely mad
as an epidemic slaughters its citizens. There are a lot of charged
and tense moments, but because it’s also people living their lives
(and Teiichi seeing through his girlfriend’s eyes, everything that
she had seen. Everything.) there are some points where the
characters can laugh or smile, even if it’s mostly pretty grim.
Yuuko’s death is an extremely painful moment, as it should be… and
the next episode isn’t easy to watch either: Yuuko becomes unable to
see Teiichi because he has her rejected memories inside him, a state
that only truly ends when Yuuko and her shadow reconcile in an
absolute powerhouse of a dramatic scene.
The final episode has just the right
amount of everything. The mysteries are solved and loose ends tied
off, and Yuuko wants to spend the day on a ‘date’ with Teiichi. We
get a lot of her typical comic reactions, but there’s an undercurrent
that’s just a little bittersweet at times (again, moments separate
from the comedy) because we the audience see well before Teiichi does
that Yuuko is fading away. After all, the Rules were set: ghosts are
formed by powerful attachments and lingering emotions, and Yuuko’s
sixty years of sealed away rage and pain have been accepted and
healed. She can’t stay. The last two scenes as she and Teiichi face
her end are painful in the right way. Yuuko vanishes slowly, and
after she and Teiichi are both forced to accept what’s going to
happen, they spend what are to be her last moments together. As her
voice fails to reach the world of the living, they write messages,
and finally share a kiss as she disappears entirely. Though it’s
hard and painful, Teiichi tries to move on, slowly putting away his
memories of Yuuko (with wording reminiscent of her own rejection of
her dark memories) so he can continue his life. It’s a bitter but
poignant ending fitting for the sorrowful ghost story that is Dusk
Maiden of Amnesia….
… but the wacky romantic comedy gets its ending too. It turns out, you see, that love is an emotion that can linger as well as hate, and a kiss shared with one’s beloved is a hell of an attachment. In an instant, with the very first sound of Yuuko’s voice, the show takes one last hard swerve. The ending, like the show, is both – light and darkness side by side. I guess you could say that light ‘won’ in the end, since it got the very last ending, and I’d be lying if I said that the turnaround didn’t mess with me my first time through the show. But Dusk Maiden of Amnesia is a show that deserves not just to be watched but to be rewatched, and with it having settled first and then been revisited, I think the ending is just right as it is. The audience needs that final catharsis after the last three episodes have been primarily (not without exception, but primarily) tragic and to have both endings you can’t really do it the other way around. Plus, as I said, the show is amazingly good about its use of The Rules, and the bait-and-switch is ultimately consistent with everything that was established.
I enjoy this show a ton, it really is
one of my favorites. It’s based on a manga, and I’m really curious
as to whether the source material is even bet-…
… The manga does not have an English
localization. What gives?!
This is a beautiful show. A+ from me,
and that’s not a mark I would give often. It has ambition, it takes
risks, and it has the intelligence to make them pay off. This is a
show that can get me to legitimately laugh at a boob grab (not easy
since it’s usually such a predictable joke) and in the same episode,
not just the same show, actually bring on the waterworks.