Hollowed Out: Exhuming an Ethics of Hollowing in Tite Kubo's Bleach
Author(s): David John Boyd
Source: Pacific Coast Philology , Vol. 50, No. 2, Special Issue: Familiar Spirits (December
2015), pp. 242-267
Published by: Penn State University Press on behalf of the Pacific Ancient and Modern
Language Association (PAMLA)
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/pacicoasphil.50.2.0242
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Hollowed Out
Exhuming an Ethics of Hollowing in
Tite Kubo’s Bleach
Dav i d J o h n B o y d
U n i v e r s i t y o f G l a s g ow
Abstract: This essay explores Tite Kubo’s hit manga series Bleach (2001–2015) as a forerunner
for a contemporary revival of Japanese supernatural narratives, often referred to as yōkai shōnen
(“spiritual adventures”). Specifically, this exploration approaches Kubo’s manga series as a
philosophically enriched text, one aware of and in dialogue with various theological, political, and
phenomenological strands of thought. This essay asserts that in this aesthetic and philosophic
bricolage, Bleach approaches complex theories on death, subjectivity, politics, and ethics
that vibrantly resonate in the backdrop of a critique of Japanese modernization. This critique
is nuanced, pinpointing problems of technological and political progression to ideological
superstructures inherited by the West. Bleach is multifaceted in Tite Kubo’s critique of modern
Cartesian thought, one that not only approaches the problems in philosophically and prosaic
arguments, but often through the reflexive nature of the media he utilizes in manga and anime
culture. In a Levinasian survey of Kubo’s vast universe, this essay hopes to illustrate that Kubo’s
solution to twentieth- and twenty-first-century Japan resides in an ethics of the nonhuman, the
yōkai, or as he calls them in his series, the Hollow.
Keywords: manga, Tite Kubo, Bleach, yōkai shōnen, Levinas
We stand in awe before that which cannot be seen, and we respect with every fiber that
which cannot be explained. —Rukia Kuchiki, Bleach: The Day I Became a Shinigami,
Episode 1
Pacific Coast Philology, Vol. 50, No. 2, 2015
Copyright © 2015 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA
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Someone who dies: a face becomes a masque. —Emmanuel Levinas, God, Death, and
Time, 12
Introduction: The Rise of Millennial Yōkai Shōnen
In the late twentieth century, popular Japanese manga, anime, and video
games focused heavily on post-human and technological fantasies of “the
immortal human” in the machine, narratives commonly characterized as
mecha (“robot”) shōnen (“adolescent action stories”) (LaMarre 212). Japanese
cybernetic sci-fi narratives, popularized by series including Mazinger Z
(1972), Mobile Suit Gundam (1979), and Macross (1982), have become synonymous with manga and anime culture. Scholars, critics, fans, and historians
have typically interpreted the mecha genre as a metaphor for a modernized
Japan. Susan J. Napier claims in The Fantastic in Modern Japanese Literature:
The Subversion of Modernity that these series are “essentially a celebration of
advanced technology and hegemonic warfare,” a kind of futuristic nostalgia
for the interwar period (7). Moreover, the supremacy of the mecha genre has
become emblematic of a postwar Japan; like the popular 1980s Transformers
action figure, Japan has succeeded in entering modernity as a national entity,
military-industrial force, and capitalist enterprise by consistently producing
and transforming bodies, physically, psychologically, or politically.
The founder of Studio Ghibli and guru of manga film Hayao Miyazaki,
traces the development from plow to plane to PlayStation in his last film, The
Wind Rises (2014), traversing the many mechanized bodies of the Japanese
nation-state through a retelling of the prewar Showa period. This film, like
the majority of his works, allegorizes a critique of overdevelopment, claiming that ideologies of technological, political, and aesthetic progress quickly
devolve into delusion, disillusionment, and destruction. Miyazaki has loudly
decried the history of Japanese modernity as it came into being in the form
of totalitarian technocracy, imperialist militarism, industrial capitalism, and
state scientism; from his early works like Castle in the Sky (1986) and ­Princess
Mononoke (1997) to Howl’s Moving Castle (2003), Miyazaki has viewed Japan
in the world imaginary as a tragically schizophrenic identity machine, simultaneously rich in its desire-production and aesthetic innovations, yet tainted
by an obsessive hunger for truth, authenticity, and ascendance in the development of the modern nation-state. Reading alongside Ethics, Politics, Subjectivity, Japanese mecha shōnen narratives focus on what Simon Critchley calls a
“tragic hero . . . possessed by ate, the violent drive for truth that leads to what
Heidegger calls ‘ruin, disaster,’” which formulaically mirrors the position of
the Japanese state as tragic; Critchley concludes that this ate is “a necessary
or need insofar as it is only by opposing the inauthentic historical ground
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of the polis that Dasein can become authentically historical” (221). In other
words, the tragic heroic force of ate places the hero’s sovereignty and Being
well before the state; the postmodern Japanese state can only come into being
after the mecha pilot-hero wills it into existence through sheer martial skill
and technological ascendance. Hence, from feudal pastoral agrarianism to fascistic military-industrialism, from neoliberal consumer-capitalism to postapocalyptic wasteland, Miyazaki blames this possible no-future on Japanese
ate, which manifests as an unchecked celebration of technological advancement and individual exceptionalism.
Thomas LaMarre argues that the popularity of mecha—primarily with male
audiences in both Japan and the West—developed out of a fascination with
“the mechanical and the biological,” with the convergence “between mecha
and human,” a dialectic that is informed by “male ‘mechaphilia,’ a variety
of technophilia directed toward the mechanical” (212). Moreover, the mecha
mode, LaMarre explains, dwells on narratives of engineer lads turned intergalactic fighter pilots, with a thirst to transcend the shackles of humanity by
willing to overpower the universe in their tricked-out nuclear-loaded rigs.
LaMarre warns that “underlying the tension between scientifically rendered
deadly mecha and fluidly drawn immortal humans (well, men) is a fascination with techno-scientific modernity that literally draws boys into militarism, spurring totalitarian forms of identification with the nation-state” (212).
According to this argument, the origin of mecha media has been afflicted
since its inception by a nightmarish fantasy of a globalized, postindustrial
military complex, doubly Fordist and fascist in its futurist fervor, a vision reliant on dreams of technological transcendence, post-human cybernetics, and
interstellar apocalypse.
Even while the figure of the mecha continues to define Japan’s postwar cultural identity with elements of mechanical flux, change, and evolution, the
popularity of mecha has waned substantially in the collective imaginary, and is
slowly giving rise to fantasy narratives of many transcultural nostalgic pasts. In
the last fifteen years, the most popular manga and anime series have been fantasy narratives that are in staunch opposition to the mecha craze of the 1980s
and ’90s. Eiichiro Oda’s magical realist pirate epic One Piece (1997–current),
Masashi Kishimoto’s ninja-inspired fairy tale of Naruto (1999–2015), and Tite
Kubo’s samurai poltergeist romance Bleach (2001–015) have topped the charts
since the turn of the twenty-first century, the latter having sold 82 million
copies of manga volumes worldwide according to the 2014 sales reports of
Weekly Shōnen Jump’s parent publisher Shueisha (2). Napier accounts for the
popular revivals of Japanese spiritual fantasy as a fierce cultural and ideological
rejection of Japan’s own distinct form of hegemonic modernization. ­Reading
the rise of spiritual fantasy manga as a Romantic reaction, Napier notes
that “the Japanese fantastic inherently questioned the dominant ideology of
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progress and modernity, raising the issue of why such an escape [of fantasy]
should be necessary” (13). While One Piece and Naruto seem to subvert the
ideology of Japanese progress and modernity through their own ludic nostalgia for a freer world in the past, Otto von Feigenblatt argues that these series
are more conflicted, reflecting “the Japanese state of mind encompassing a
yearning for modernity, or postmodernity, as well as a strong nostalgia for
the past, both real and imagined,” which further complicates Japan’s ability to
move beyond its traumatic past (116). Following von Feigenblatt’s lead, I view
Kubo’s Bleach as ideologically nuanced and complex rather than a simple or
simplistic reaction for or against modernity and postmodernity.
One of the most popular stylistic responses to mecha is yōkai (“ghost”),
or supernatural adventures like Kubo’s Bleach. It must be noted that mecha
and yōkai are not completely antithetical. Rather, the seemingly antagonistic
styles and modes are ideologically doubly bound. Masamune Shirow’s Ghost
in the Shell (1989), Hideaki Anno’s Neon Genesis Evangelion (1994), and Shoji
Kawamori’s The Visions of Escaflowne (1996), for example, are manga and
anime series that cerebrally deconstruct post-human experiences by thinking
through tech, complicating the technophilia of the genre’s earlier forbearers.
These series engage with matters of the spiritual, religious, and mystical imagination. While these series rely heavily on Western and Eastern religious allusions, they are often steeped in an intersubjective and psychological mode of
examining the spiritual world populated by various ephemeral phenomena.
The existential experiences that occur in all three texts are often psychedelic,
hallucinatory, and out of this world. LaMarre examines the trippy ending
of Evangelion, in which full animation devolves into a monochrome-limited
animation of furiously formless sketches and doodles on the protagonist’s
face. LaMarre argues that this scene is emblematic of the avant-garde mecha
response to technological determinism and the mechanization of society:
“Existential crisis is technical crisis, and vice versa. The animation reminds us
that this crisis is not just about a subjective point of view. Rather that animation gives us an exploded view of the psyche” (182). Even while both mecha
and yōkai investigate Platonic dualism and Cartesian subjectivity (examining the mechanized automaton and the magical cadaver as metamorphic vessels that function as a broader allegorical landscape for twenty-first century
Japan), the mecha mode assumes the existence of the psyche and other modes
of subjectivity even as unstable mutations of rupturing centers. As we will
see, yōkai shōnen in contrast places subjectivity into question by associating
the many forms of what we call “self ” with ghastly apparitions, spiritual doppelgängers, and diabolical doubles without form.
In this context, Bleach may be the most explicit contemporary popular Japanese response to the Cartesian concerns of mecha shōnen, accomplishing its
critique by redirecting, in a critical yet enthusiastic fashion, Japan’s gaze away
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from the postmodern icon of the mecha and toward the premodern icon of the
yōkai. As Michael Dylan Foster reminds us in his foundational study Pandemonium and Parade: Japanese Monsters and the Culture of Yōkai, the figure of the
yōkai helped in the formation of both Japan’s premodern and modern identity. Unlike mecha, the image of the yōkai is much less obvious, and far more
difficult to pin down as a figural concept. The word itself has been translated
as “monster, spirit, goblin, ghost, demon, phantom, specter, fantastic being,
lower-order deity, or, more amorphously, as any unexplainable experience or
numinous occurrence,” and it further “weaves together strands from other discourses—encyclopedic, scientific, literary, ethnographic, folkloric—to create
a discrete discursive formation of its own” (Foster 2). Largely drawn from the
oral folk tradition of ancient China and medieval Japan, Foster notes that the
formation of yōkai in the Japanese imaginary became codified in historical
literature, illustrated bestiaries, scientific journals, natural histories, and discourses on theology. These scribal forms of media allowed for the collection
and categorization of yōkai forms in the written word and drawn image, further legitimizing the yōkai as an intellectual and aesthetic discourse.
Foster traverses four “important historical junctures” in the formation of
yōkai discourse, which he asserts paralleled the transformation of Japanese
cultural identity: “the Edo, or Tokugawa, period (c. 1603–1867), particularly
from the 1660s through the 1780s, when yōkai made a name for themselves in
both serious encyclopedic taxonomies and playful illustrated catalogs”; “the
Meiji period (1868–1912), especially in the 1880s, as yōkai underwent a radical reevaluation in light of Western scientific knowledge”; “the first decade of
the twentieth century through the 1930s, when yōkai were refigured as nostalgic icons for a nation (and individuals) seeking a sense of self in a rapidly
modernizing world”; and finally “the 1970s and 1980s, as Japan asserted a
new identity after its rapid recovery from the devastation of World War II”
(4). Foster extensively excavates the fourth historical moment of yōkai’s resurgence in postwar Japanese children’s culture, primarily by interpreting the
origins of yōkai shōnen in manga and anime. He claims the rise of modern
yōkai media was largely informed by Shigeru Mizuki’s cult classic GeGeGe no
Kitaro (1963). Like Bleach, Mizuki’s manga wistfully tells the adventures of a
boy-ghost named Kitaro and a group of his undead friends who go to monster school, make mischief, and rediscover long-lost spirits forgotten by the
human world. While Napier celebrates the entire fantastic mode, Foster warns
that yōkai fantasy invokes a certain kind of historical amnesia:
Yōkai are all the most desirable as representatives of a lost Japanese nation because, as
denizens from an otherworldly past, they can be invoked without also calling up distasteful this-worldly memories of, for example, colonialist and militarist ventures. At a
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time when, as one scholar of social memory puts it, “much of the current p
­ reoccupation
with the last is less about paradise lost than skeletons in the closet,” the very otherworldliness of yōkai ensures that they remain untainted, uncontroversial, and remarkably safe for fetishistic consumption. Perhaps this is one reason for the ongoing yōkai
boom: yōkai are spooky, but they are fun-spooky and, ultimately, much less threatening than the serious ghosts of the human past still haunting the present. (208)
Unlike the formation of a futurist mecha-Japan that seeks to push modern
Japanese Dasein into the furthest reaches of historical authenticity (which
for Miyazaki entails cosmic domination), the yōkai tradition averts its gaze
at the future, diving deep into Japan’s richly mythic past, no matter how real
or imaginary. Yet, while mecha celebrates technological progression, yōkai’s
revival appears within a haze of traumatic amnesia that prompts many postwar artists to seek their solutions in technological digression, demilitarization, and isolationism. If we follow this train of thought, we may note that
while mecha seeks the nuclear end-times so that someday we might wipe clean
the slate of human existence, yōkai seeks to return to a time when the slate
was already still clean.
For the focus of this essay, I attempt to introduce an addendum to Foster’s
analysis of contemporary yōkai media. I argue that a generation after Mizuki’s
influence, a millennial yōkai shōnen inspired by Bleach has emerged to produce a space for the publication of nuanced and self-reflexive series that foreground philosophical discourses on death, war, and ethics. Most specifically,
this millennial movement blends together the martial arts melodrama style
of shōnen, popularized by Akira Toriyama’s Dragonball series, and the yōkai
mode of Mizuki. Thanks to the success of series such as Yoshihiro Togashi’s
YuYu Hakusho (1990–1994) and Rumiko Takahashi’s Inuyasha (1996–2008),
Bleach’s emergence helped redefine a genre that is now burgeoning, splintering, and mutating. Millennial yōkai shōnen series including Tsugumi Ōba and
Takeshi Obata’s Death Note (2003–2006), Atsushi Ōkubo’s Soul Eater (2004–
2013), Yana Toboso’s Black Butler (2006–), Kazue Katō’s Blue Exorcist (2009–),
Toka Adachi’s Noragami (2011–2014), Noriyuki Konishi’s Yōkai Watch (2012–),
and recent adaptations of Atlus’s Shin Megami Tensei: Persona video game series
(2013–2015) produce transhistorical discourses on gods, death, and time that
are framed in a unique blend of premodern/modern/postmodern, indigenous/
colonial, vernacular/hegemonic, and Eastern/Western folklore, history, philosophy, and aesthetic traditions. By critically reading Bleach’s unique approach
to mecha, yōkai, and shōnen, I hope to illustrate that Kubo’s text oscillates
between technology and spirituality to imagine new strategies of resistance
to an overdeveloped, postindustrial, consumer-capitalist Japan; or, perhaps as
Kubo might remark, resistance to a Japan without a soul.
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A Specter Is Haunting Japanese Manga . . .
Kubo’s critique is importantly grounded in a response to what Slavoj Žižek
refers to as “the spectre of the Cartesian subject,” a philosophical poltergeist
that has lingered too long in the eternally war-torn universe of the twentieth
century (1). It is important to note that like Žižek, I will be referring to Cartesian
as a philosophical abbreviation for the Occidental, or more specifically, the
Greco-Christological philosophical tradition after Plato, Aristotle, A
­ ugustine,
Boethius, and Aquinas. As many post-postmodernists like Critchley and
Žižek have shown us, it is not easy simply to pin Descartes as the one and
only founder of modern subjectivity. In postmodern philosophy and aesthetic
theory, however, it is the Cartesian subject (and perspective) that has come to
mean something broader, an epistemological and historical catch-all for what
Augustin Berque calls the “classic modern Western paradigm (CMWP),” which
he further describes as a teleologically grounded, epistemologically dualist,
scientifically inflected humanism, “elaborated by Bacon, Galileo, Descartes,
Newton,” that systematically and taxonomically separates essence/existence,
subject/object, good/evil, nature/culture, premodern/modern, and machine/
spirit (25).
Reading Bleach from this philosophical backdrop, I believe that millennial
yōkai shōnen resist Cartesian or CMWP dialectics by exploring the transient
experiences and adventures of adolescents who befriend, collect, and ally
with hundreds of ghastly, quirky monsters, samurai-like shinigami (“death
gods”), and shamanistic mages and wizards to defend the world of the living
(or dead) from destruction. While Anne Allison’s Millennial Monsters and
Hiroki Azuma’s Otaku: Japan’s Database Animal have explored the indexical
categorization and commodification of monsters in Japanese digital media, I
am more interested in how these fetishized ghastly objects and spooky images
have created an afterlife of their own.
The story of Bleach is quite familiar for any yōkai shōnen fan; the protagonist, Ichigo Kurosaki, is a fifteen-year-old delinquent who has the ability to
communicate with lost souls, which he begins to notice not long after the mysterious death of his mother. In Bleach, restless spirits called Hollows infiltrate
the post-Fordist Tokyo suburb of Karakura Town, threatening to devour and
destroy it like in any great monster-of-the-week flick. As the manga tagline by
Tite Kubo explains, “The instant the boy took the sword in his hand, everyday life up until now announced its end,” detailing Ichigo’s transformation
into a shinigami (also called a Soul Reaper), a spiritual warrior that leads lost
souls to their final resting place; this transformation begins by Ichigo’s death
and resurrection, an existential fate he accepts in order to save his town, his
family, and the spirit guardian of the region, Rukia Kuchiki (“Chapter 1: Death
& Strawberry” 1).
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Note how the eternal conflict in the series is initially anchored and hierarchized by the categorical, identitarian, indexical, and taxonomic difference of
spirits, just as Foster described in the practices of Edo period yōkai revivalists.
Early on in the series, Rukia illustrates an encyclopedic entry which is yōkai
inspired; this manga strip teaches Ichigo and the audience about the different
spiritual tane (“species”) that exist in the universe (“Death and Strawberry”
20–21). The doodle, although comically designed in a kawaii (“cute”) aesthetic, draws from an older yōkai tradition of categorizing the spiritual world
in the form of the word, the image, and other epistemological categories. We
immediately learn here that even in the otherworld there are ontological binaries between the benevolent Plus spirits and the malevolent Hollow spirits,
both of which need the help of a Soul Reaper to lead them to the otherworld.
Inheriting the yōkai and shōnen heritages, Kubo illustrates that in order for
Ichigo to successfully protect his loved ones, defeat the hungry Hollows, avoid
capture by an army of the presumably good Soul Reapers of Soul Society, and
stop Sōsuke Aizen, the series’ main antagonist, from destroying the world of
the living and the dead, the undead hero must ally himself with many unsavory spiritual entities, master and embody the powers of his magical blade
named Zangetsu—known in the series as a zanpakutō (“soul cutter”)—and
simply defeat Aizen by getting stronger through several different levels of
self-mastery and transformation.
An initial surface reading of Bleach’s plot may detail a whole host of contradictions. First, we might read the struggle in the series as an allegory of
what Andrew Terjesen calls tsuyoku naritai (“I want to become stronger”),
or evolutionary tales of perfecting the body and overcoming obstacles (157).
Like the same Heideggarian ate described earlier, these martial narratives
(usually framed by tournaments and duels) link together the violence of
physical combat with the epistemological struggle for truth and authenticity.
Moreover, this tragic heroic mode enters into the vernacular mode of shōnen
“crafting stories and images that fixate on the intricate details of . . . bodies
coming apart and transforming into upgradable models,” which in turn promotes an ideological defense of progress and ascendance over mere humanness (­Allison 138). Powered by postwar ideologies of Nijonjinron (“Japanese
exceptionalism”), one might compare yōkai with mecha shōnen by simply
analogizing evolutionary scientism and cybernetics with magical spiritualism
(von Feigenblatt 114). The objects of integration and weaponization, which
in Bleach are signaled by the spiritually-imbued swords and death masks,
resemble what Heidegger calls Zuhandenheit (“ready-to-hand”), tools created
for coming into being as a perfect, sovereign subject (69).
Additionally, these narratives of teens-turned-undead further romanticize
their permanence and promote their ascendance, since it appears that they are
always-already dead. In YuYu Hakusho, the tournaments in the underworld
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lack a true existential weight because the heroes are already dead and very
unkillable; sure, they may lose a match, but they do not lose their afterlives.
All the viewer expects is the recursive evolution of the character’s superpowers. One might ask, then, how are these stories any different from the mecha
desire for immortality in the machine when yōkai views immortality in the
cadaver? This essay will examine these striking philosophical contradictions
as the basis of Bleach’s immanent critique of shōnen, further illustrating how
Kubo’s stylistically multivalent and philosophically reflexive process interrogates the position of finitude, mortality, and the end in a genre of unendings.
Red in Tooth and Claw: The Law of Las Noches as
Political Theology
Let us first start with Kubo’s antagonist Sōsuke Aizen, best defined by his
mecha influenced onto-technological schemes and bioengineering dreams of
transcendence. Aizen is characterized by Kubo as “the gaze into the sun,” the
ambitious sovereign who seeks to shape the world in his own image (Bleach
SOULs 130). Like any mecha shōnen hero driven by ate, Aizen’s ideals internalize
Western Enlightenment philosophy and scientism, obscuring and perverting
his own vision of the future. Establishing the initial allegory of “the sovereign,”
or as Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt writes, “he who decides on the exceptional case,”
Kubo’s Aizen arc is primarily concerned with Japan’s history of fascism and
dictatorial power (5). Importantly, we have to look to the source of Aizen’s
defense of fascism in the context of Schmitt’s combination of Heideggerian
metaphysics and Nietzschean nihilism, which produces a fatalistic materialism that relies on the objectification of consciousness as its catalyst.
In the main arc of Bleach, for example, Aizen betrays Soul Society by stealing a mystical and biotechnological invention known as the Hōgyoku, which
is also referred to as either the “Crumbling Orb” or the “Breakdown Sphere” in
the series. This magical orb grants the wishes of its user. The inventor of the
object, Kisuke Urahara, wished to dissolve the spiritual barrier between Soul
Reaper and Hollow, most obviously read as an allegorical barrier between self
and other. Urahara hopes that by dissolving the barrier he will be able to end
the eternal war between the two spiritual factions. In contrast, Aizen decides to
use the orb to become the ruler of both Soul Society and the home of the Hollows called Hueco Mundo. Gazing deep into the sun, Aizen hysterically proclaims upon high: “No one stands on the top of the world. Not you, not me, not
even gods. But the unbearable vacancy of the throne in the sky is over. From
now on . . . I will be sitting on it” (“Chapter 178: end of hypnosis 10 [No One
Stand on the Sky]” 219–20). In Aizen’s empty boast from the heavens, Kubo
illustrates that the conflation of Nietzschean nihilism and Schmittean sovereignty is the true allegory of evil in Bleach. It is in the “sovereign decision” of
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taking the empty seat of the universe that Aizen comes into being, depicting a
Heideggerian fantasy of reification, deification, and transcendence. As Aizen’s
sovereign Dasein ushers in his new fascistic state of Las Noches, the old capital
of Hueco Mundo, we must note that his dream of heroic ascendance is further
emboldened by a Darwinian defense of techno-biological determinism, racial
exceptionalism, and political survivalism. This kind of social Darwinism is
materialized in Aizen’s perverse political ontology, as he defiantly proclaims
to his former friend Shinji Hirako while the two fight above Karakura Town:
“All living creatures place their faith in someone more powerful than them and
they cannot survive unless they blindly follow that person. The recipient of
that faith then seeks out someone in an even higher position in order to escape
from the pressure. . . . In this way all kings are born and in this way all gods are
born” (“Chapter 383: TOO EARLY TO TRUST” 17–18).
It is in this context that Kubo responds not only to the mecha mode, but
also undermines the traditional reliance on speciesism and social Darwinism
in the shōnen mode that Terjesen and Allison have observed in their interpretations of the genre. In Bleach’s third narrative arc, we are introduced to
the home of the Hollows, known as Hueco Mundo. Hueco Mundo was once
ruled by the undisputed “King of the Hollows,” Baraggan Louisenbairn, who
Aizen coercively deposed so to reterritorialize the kingdom of the dead as his
new base of operations. Hueco Mundo is primarily influenced by Mexican
death cults and folklore, the most obvious of which is the iconic Hollow mask,
resembling the papier-mâché masks worn on Dia de Los Muertos. Importantly, Hueco Mundo and its capital, Las Noches, resembles the Mayan underworld known as Xibalba, an eternally dark desert kingdom with hundreds
of individually built structures and spires, not unlike the cylindrical, marble
towers spread throughout the wasteland of Kubo’s Hueco Mundo (Tedlock
31–32). In Xibalba, demons judge the dead either by duels or by the sacrificial
rites of ulama, the Mesoamerican ballgame in which the stakes are very high:
the winner lives in eternal peace and the loser suffers in the dark desert (33).
Like Xibalba, Hueco Mundo is also a horrifying Darwinian hell. Here Hollows
hunt and consume each other until they attain a highly developed evolved
humanoid state. Traumatized by the eternal experience of their own crushing spiritual alienation, like the beast-like demons in Xibalba, Hollows function solely as killing machines, consuming in excess and tormenting the weak
for the sole purpose of growing beyond their existential baseline. In episode
158 of the anime, Sado Yasutora, one of Ichigo’s best friends, observes Hueco
Mundo as such: “In this world, there is no such thing as comparable power.
Power always changes; it’s animalistic. Small leads are always created” (“Right
Arm of the Giant, Left Arm of the Devil”).
Additionally, in episode 284 of the anime, we see a Hollow by the name
of Emilou Apacci evolve to a level of humanoid sentience and self-awareness
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encased in the beautifully stylized body of a stag. Along with her unlikely
allies, Mila Rose the lion and Sung-Sun the serpent, Apacci survives against
all odds in the horrorscape of Hueco Mundo. As the three huddle together,
Apacci laments that “the weaker become a part of the stronger. That’s the law
of Las Noches” (“Chain of Sacrifice . . . Harribel’s Past”). The hellish horror of
Hueco Mundo is best illustrated by what LaMarre calls “the logic of social
­Darwinism . . . translated bluntly into Japanese as a brutal hierarchal c­ onceit,
‘the strong eat the weak,’ which effectively yokes the idea of ‘nature red in
tooth and claw’ to that of survival of the fittest” (59). LaMarre illustrates
that this form of speciesism manifesting in manga culture is influenced by
­Japanese Nijonjinron. In an attempt to overcome race, class, and gender, the
use of animals as identitarian markers heightens a naturalized, imperialist
commitment to social Darwinism (60). For Kubo, this evolutionary component of shōnen inherently disregards the terrors of ontological separations.
Hueco Mundo continually regenerates a separation between self and other, so
as to enforce a terrifying state of pure agon, of unending arena-like competition. In Kubo’s vision of hell, there is one law: devour the weak or die trying.
While many scholars like LaMarre have effectively interpreted speciesism
and social Darwinism in postwar Japanese media as a reflection of prewar fascism and authoritarian tendencies, so too does Kubo but in a far more reflexive interface. It is in the shōnen medium that Kubo depicts evil in the form
of a sovereign representation of political ontologies, which Aizen embodies
by weaponizing and militarizing thought. Here Aizen’s power resides in his
sway of knowledge-production, pushing the logic of Progress to the furthest
extent, on the edge of reason into the totalized space of power and war; it
is Aizen’s hyper-Cartesianism that informs and defends fascist political theologies and post-human ontologies that transform the world into an array of
power-objects, tools for sovereign subjectivation.
This, I believe, is the backdrop to Kubo’s philosophical and historical critique of totalitarian thought and the ontology of war; Aizen’s paradise of
Hueco Mundo is an internalization of militarized ideologies, from Heideggerian ate to social Darwinism. As we see later in the series, Aizen experiments
with forbidden technologies (including the Hōgyoku) that dissect the bodies
of Soul Reapers and combine them with unstable Hollow souls, creating one
synthetically hybridized organism. This process is called Hollowfication.
Learning from the Hobbesian and Darwinian hell of Hueco Mundo, Aizen
seeks to recreate life out of the law of his exaggerated cosmic vision, one that
resembles and mimics the bombastic and metaphysical rhetoric espoused by
one of Emperor Hirohito’s cabinet philosophers, Kazunobu Kanokogi, who is
described by Christopher W. A. Szpilman as the “pioneer of Japanese totalitarianism” (77). Szpilman claims that Kanokogi interpreted World War I as “a
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life-and-death struggle between totalitarianism and soshikishugi (ideology of
organization),” and most importantly, an existential and political necessity for
survival: “Only by living in a totalitarian way can we be truly alive . . . so to
reject totalitarianism would be to reject life itself ” (qtd. in Szpilman 75). Szpilman concludes that “Kanokogi held war to be ‘historically inevitable’ and necessary, even if, he conceded, it was also ‘tragic,’” defended through “modern
and ‘scientific’ social Darwinism” and a philosophically charged “glorification
of war” that resembles Heidegger’s formulation of the tragic heroic discourse
of ate and Dasein production (76).
In a similar historico-political backdrop, Samuel Weber continues, illustrating how Carl Schmitt viewed sovereignty in Weimar Germany as the heroic
process of ushering law into a coming into being: “It is by virtue of the decisive or rather, decisional intervention of a singular subject that ‘law’ can be
endowed with ‘life,’ even though from the point of view of normative legality it is a life born out of ‘nothing,’ created ex nihilio” (35). Alongside Weber’s
reading of law and political power, by comparison it is the law of Las Noches
that shapes Aizen’s political ontology. Life, in Aizen’s ontology, is synonymous
with strength, more than enough strength to survive, as Kanokogi writes. Thus,
Aizen’s ascension transforms life and law into singular objects of power. In
other words, Aizen’s evil is expressed by his direct assault on the meaning
of life, challenging the sanctity of life through an ontological hierarchy of
authentic and inauthentic expressions of transcendence: for him, the most
authentic form of transcendence is born in the objective, the technological,
and the truest avatar of the real: war.
Giorgio Agamben in The Coming Community invokes Emmanuel Levinas’s
work on evil, which similarly responds to the Nazi philosophies of Schmitt
and Heidegger:
Evil . . . is the reduction of taking-place of things to a fact like others, the forgetting of
the transcendence inherent in the very taking-place of things. With respect to these
things, however, the good is not somewhere else; it is simply the point at which they
grasp the taking-place proper to them, at which they touch their own non-transcendent matter. In this sense—and only in this sense—the good must be defined as a selfgrasping of evil, and salvation as the coming of the place to itself. (15)
The ontology of totalitarianism invokes a philosophy of objectification here;
for example, Aizen inherently disregards the value of any object or phenomenon, replacing it with the illusion of fact and measurability to form ontologies
of power. In a confrontation with Ichigo, Aizen boasts, seemingly misquoting
the classic Nietzschean text, On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense: “There
is no such thing as ‘truth’ or ‘lies’ in this world; there never has been. There is
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only plain, hard facts’” (“Chapter 397: Edge of the Silence” 13). This reliance
on Nietzsche is philosophically important, for it is Nietzsche who calls the
worlds of phenomenon into question through his gritty nihilistic materialism,
which irrevocably shaped existential and postmodern thought. It is, however,
the adaptation of Nietzschean philosophies of skepticism that are unnerving
in the political theologies of the fascist era. As Francis Pike also reminds us,
Kanokogi was “a genuine academic and philosopher” who wrote his master’s
thesis entitled Friedrich Nietzsche, The Philosopher of Free Spirit and the Prophet
of the Übermensch, turning quickly to German totalitarian nationalism and
existential philosophy while studying and lecturing at the University of Jena
(48). Here we see that the often misappropriated Nietzschean overman archetypal trope, popularized in contemporary Japanese media by the world-usurping villains in Studio Ghibli films and in video games series like Xenogears
and Final Fantasy, embody the horrors of a different king of Progress; like
Colonel Muska in Castle in the Sky, Kefka in Final Fantasy VI, Aizen fills the
role of the maddened Faustian scientist, a Promethean maniac disguised as a
political visionary who believes in nothingness to the furthest degree that only
misanthropic dreams of human extinction floods the realm of the real. Aizen,
among the other shōnen arbiters of totalitarianism, must be characterized as
an emblem of what Critchley calls “the active nihilist,” the raging overman
who “finds everything meaningless, but instead of sitting back and contemplating, he tries to destroy the world and bring another into being” (Infinitely
Demanding 5). Therefore, Aizen as the sovereign of Soul Society and Hueco
Mundo, decides to bring in the law of Hueco Mundo into the realm of the real
because of this distinctly excessive blend of Darwinism and Western nihilism,
promptly defended by the legalistic and philosophical dreams of Heidegger
and Schmitt. Thus, the coming into being of the law of Las Noches heralds
Aizen’s radical scientific and nihilistic view of Nature that cannot escape its
own ontological deification of sovereignty as subjectivity.
Shattering Spheres, Dissolving Barriers: An Ethics of Hollowing Out
As we have seen, Kubo’s critique of modernity begins with Aizen’s political ontology and is followed up by a philosophical solution to the phenomenological problem posed by the Darwinian, Schmittean, ­Heideggerian, and
Nietzschean sophist Aizen. Contrary to Aizen’s replication and use of the
Hōgyoku to rule the universe, Aizen’s rival and Ichigo’s sensei, Urahara, created
the Hōgyoku to explore the relationship between Soul Reaper and Hollow.
Kubo’s thirty-sixth manga volume and eleventh anime season entitled Turn
Back the Pendulum retraces the origins of Aizen’s betrayal 101 years before
Ichigo’s saga begins, and establishes the ideological and dialectical schism
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formed between Aizen and Urahara. As Kubo describes, Aizen stumbled upon
Urahara’s research before the prototype of the Hōgyoku was created. Aizen
postulated that by dissolving the barrier between Hollow and Soul Reaper,
he could create awesome, unknowable weapons of mass destruction that he
could wield against the politically ineffective, stagnating bureaucracy of Soul
Society. Urahara’s preliminary research was initially a project of scientific
and objective curiosity. After Aizen uses the Hōgyoku on Urahara’s friends
in a grotesque experiment, Urahara copies the original Hōgyoku to heal his
friends from the poisonous Hollowfication process. In just the use of an object
of power, we can see how Aizen and Urahara understand ontologies of power:
for Aizen it is simply an item with use-value, and for Urahara it is a kind of
technology that has endless utopian possibilities.
Near the end of the Aizen arc, however, Kubo subtly reveals that the
Hōgyoku appears in the form of a blue sphere, one copy created by Aizen and
Urahara’s original. Both spheres owned soon became absorbed into one larger
sphere that Aizen designed, and that the true power of the greater Hōgyoku
was not to simply absolve the barriers between Hollow and Soul Reaper, but
to grant the wish of its user. In an uncanny reading alongside prewar literary
critic Hideo Kobayashi’s 1929 essay Samazama naru isho (Different types of
designs), we may read the Hōgyoku as not merely a technological object of
power, but rather as an emblematic idol of modern consciousness in Japan.
In other words, the Hōgyoku represents the paradoxical future of a Japanese
Dasein determined by ideologies of teleological progression. Thus, the war
between Aizen and Urahara is very much a war within a confused, schizophrenic twenty-first-century Japan, horrified yet dependent upon overdevelopment and ideologies of objectivism, constantly hounded by Hegelian
dialectics, teleological historicism, technocratic fetishism, global capitalism, and an always complicit yet confused state of living orientalism. Kōjin
Karatani, translating Kobayashi’s work, continues onward, seemingly describing the Hōgyoku as the “sphere” in question:
Kobayashi wrote that for him “the consciousness of an era is neither larger nor smaller
than the consciousness of the self.” In other words, what we call “reality” is already
nothing more than an internal landscape and thus, in the final analysis, self-consciousness. Kobayashi’s repeated and persistent attempts to reach, not ­“objectivity” but the
“object” might be seen as an attempt to “shatter the sphere of self-consciousness.” (qtd.
in Karatani 34)
We can read Kobayashi’s project as Kubo’s grand narrative plot twist and
primary philosophical flourish: Urahara and Aizen’s projects are processes
that diverge based solely on the definition of objectivism and the object itself.
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Urahara and Aizen must reckon with an object that seeks to give wishes, or
put another way, to project manifestations of self-consciousness upon the lifeworld of reality itself. Urahara’s process of attempting to “shatter the sphere of
self-consciousness” is a process by which the Hōgyoku’s field of objectivism
may be not be purged, but reinforced once again as a manifestation of the
wielder’s assertion of Dasein. Although Aizen seems to be the very force to
create the world in his image, so too does Urahara.
This dialectical double bind is truly the crux of the series: Urahara sought
to dissolve the barriers to establish a utopic vision that would end the war
between Soul Reaper (Subject/Self ) and Hollow (Object/Other), yet he internalized the same modern designs as Aizen by still believing in the assertion
that techno-ontologies will save the day. However, unlike Aizen, Urahara
learns from his philosophical mistakes quickly. In an attempt to atone for
unleashing such a terror upon the world with his research, Urahara seeks
to redeem himself in exile, primarily by training Ichigo to perfect his own
form of Hollowfication. It is here that Kubo illustrates the complex process
of ­Hollowfication which translates into a certain hollow ethics, one in which
barriers are separated and spheres are shattered, all for the hope of binding
together subject and object, Self and Other.
“We Felt Death Up Close”: Exploring Yōkai Finitude as
Pacifist Phenomenology
In his exile, Urahara demonstrates that the ability to control the powers
between Soul Reaper and Hollow begins by denying sovereignty and ontological pursuits of Dasein; this denial manifests as an extinguishing of a centralized human self that reinforces itself through survival and self-­affirmation.
For Urahara, the lurking threat of death always looms, and sovereign subjectivity asserted in the wake of the finite universe must be denied. This ideological matrix of nihilism and mysticism is essential in the development of
Kubo’s ethics of the nonhuman. Contrary to the theme song for Isao Takahata’s anime adaptation of Mizuki’s manga that claims: “Night tournies in the
graveyard are so much fun, ’cuz monsters don’t die. Never a sneeze, never a
sniffle,” even death gods can die in Bleach. Here we see Kubo depart from
the traditional yōkai revivalist moment seemingly because these narratives
escape the foreclosure of the end by celebrating infinity in the otherworld;
this simply dwells on the separation of finite body and infinite soul, a Platonic
dualism that undermines the permanence of death and the transience of all
things. In Bleach, however, we see that death is the great unifier and the ever
moving force in the series, the only force that can resist Aizen’s dreams of
transcendence.
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In episode 285, just before the final battle between a group of experimentSoul Reapers and their creator Aizen, a young, brash girl-warrior by the name
of Hiyori Sarugaki proclaims:
Shinigami are always in death’s way because of their existence and line of work. We
may die the next day. We may be talking at one moment and be dead in the next. No
one talks about it, but everyone has that thought in the corner of their minds. We saw
death up close. We felt death up close. That’s why we were able to cherish each day.
Death will eventually come to us all. But that’s what made us united. (“The HundredYear Grudge . . . Hiyori’s Revenge”)
Establishing the philosophical tone for the remainder of the concluding arc
in the series, Hiyori’s utterance reckons with finitude as a unifying property.
In this scene, Hiyori reckons with Aizen’s ideology of infinity with her rousing
speech, following up by donning her Hollow mask, unsheathing her blade,
calling upon its powerful transformation, and throwing herself headlong into
a foreseeably cataclysmic event. At the moment she reaches Aizen’s face, staring deeply into the eyes of the other, she is immediately struck down in an
instantaneous defeat. In this case then, the sequences of these existential gestures conflate into a simultaneously integrated and disintegrated tableau of
totality and infinity, which becomes embedded deep within the face to face
conflict.
It may seem that Hiyori fails, because (as we learn later) she shuddered at
the sight of death before striking Aizen down. The shuddering is important,
however, because it reflects Hiyori’s speech in the form of heroic action; her
fear of finitude is the grand gesture in Kubo’s reaction against the glorification
of war. This seems paradoxical, but let us read Hiyori’s traumatic shudder as
a reflection of her ethical relationship with the other; by doing so, we are able
to view Critchley’s association of meekness as resistance against the heinousness of war. In a reversal of Heidegger’s violent demand for Dasein, Levinas
writes at the end of Otherwise Than Being: “For the little humanity that adorns
the earth, a relaxation of essence to the second degree is needed, in the just
war waged against war to tremble or shudder at every instant because of this
very justice. This weakness is needed” (185). Critchley calls this an “experimental praxis of war waged on war—a nonviolent violence—that causes us at
each instant to shudder and tremble” (The Faith of the Faithless 226). Hiyori’s
charge is ethically charged, reflecting her inability to kill and yet her ability to
recognize finitude in the wake of her shuddering.
This paradox is further examined when Urahara trains Ichigo to face his
gravest fear of death. For example, Urahara explains the necessary ethical
weight of war and the loss of being even in a sparring session with the young
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Ichigo: “There is nothing, but fear reflected in your sword. When you dodge,
you’re afraid of getting killed. When you attack, you’re afraid of killing someone. Even when you try to protect someone, you’re afraid of letting them die. . . .
Nothing can be born of that” (“Chapter 97: Talk About Your Fear” 12–13).
In this moment, Urahara enunciates a similar ethics of the other, one that
demands an emptying and hollowing of the self by embracing the potentiality
of finitude, signaled by the blade. Urahara trains Ichigo to overcome Aizen’s
amassed sovereign power by inverting Aizen’s law of Las Noches, and in contrast, empowering Ichigo with what Critchley calls a “powerless power,” an
ontological recognition of the frail, fleeting nature of human existence (160).
Dasein comes from an action that reflects powerlessness in the self-sacrificial
mode of martyrdom and radical pacifism, rather than a tragically heroic mode
of willing through violent modes of becoming.
Feeling Hollow: Tracing Seppuku as Zen Ethics of Non-Becoming
There are three points in the series where Ichigo accepts finitude in the form
of the blade: once in the beginning, which grants him pseudo-Soul Reaper
powers; once in the middle, which grants him Hollow powers; and once at
the end, which grants him the power to defeat Aizen. This path of deflecting
Aizen’s law of ascension begins by sacrificing the self all together, which is
signaled by the sacrificial act of embodying the blade, strictly following the
ritual act of seppuku (“stomach-stabbing”). Inazō Nitobe demystifies seppuku
for his Western audience in Bushido: The Soul of Japan, writing that in the wake
of defeat, failure, or shame, seppuku “was not a mere suicidal process. It was
an institution, legal and ceremonial. An invention of the Middle Ages, it was
a process by which warriors would expiate their crimes,” and most important
for Kubo’s protagonist Ichigo, “apologize for errors” (64). For instance, Ichigo in
the very first volume is unable to forgive himself for letting his mother die by
the murderous hand of a monstrous Hollow, and nor is he able to let go of the
senseless loss of many innocent Plus spirits to the hands of relentless Hollow.
This act of seppuku is a ritual act of emptying the bowels, hollowing out the
body, and therefore we may read this as a bodily site for exhuming Kubo’s
hollow ethics of subjective emptying. It is no surprise that the ritual act of seppuku is a reoccurring theme within Kubo’s alternative world of Soul ­Society.
In the narrative, however, the physical act is abstracted into an ­intersubjective
mode in which the Soul Reaper must give up their human subjectivity to the
blade. In Kubo’s manga, the moments of the blade entering and leaving the
body is always highlighted in an excessive yet obscurely a­ rabesque style, perhaps like Greek tragic drama or dark Romantic poetry from Poe to Baudelaire. These moments are not reserved for gory shock; often these moments of
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mutilation illustrate an asymmetrical relationship between sharp sword and
soft body, a kind of assemblage that asks for each Soul ­Reaper’s to attain a
higher level of consciousness outside of pain, loss, and agony, which is often
referred to in the series as bankai (“Full Release”).
Furthermore, Nitobe describes the cerebral significance of the stomach
in ancient human society writing that “the choice of this particular part of
the body to operate upon [the stomach] was based on an anatomical belief
as to the seat of the bowels of the soul and of affections” (63). Nitobe examines many world religions to avoid the pitfalls of orientalist mysticism,
interpreting examples from the ancient Hebrews and Greeks to the Chinese
and Egyptians. He concludes that the stomach functioned as a spiritual and
­neurological machine in the premodern human imaginary before, as he writes
“Descartes . . . located [the soul] in the pineal gland” (63). In another critique of
the Cartesian revolution, note how seppuku in Bleach blurs the lines between
stomach (body) and head (spirit); Ichigo can only enter his mindscape to
wrestle with his different spiritual entities initially after his first seppuku.
Hence, the hollowing of the stomach here opens up avenues into the mind to
experiment with subjectivity elsewhere.
This kind of phenomenological experiment not only occurs in Bleach as
a response to bushido, but it can be read alongside the ritualistic practice of
what thirteenth century Zen Master Dōgen Zenji calls a philosophy of “emptiness” and “transience,” the practice of purifying a subject’s worldly relation by
recognizing the fleeting nature of all things. Dōgen’s Zen Buddhism strives to
deconstruct the violent objectification of the world by reidentifying subject,
object, and “the nature of things” through a mystic and transcendental lens,
as Eugene Thacker describes: “emptiness also inheres in the relation between
self and world, the self always positing something about a world that, by definition, must remain in part inaccessible to the self ” (Thacker, After Life 157).
While all Soul Reapers must accept the will of their own blades to reach a level
of enlightenment, Ichigo must further wrestle with the philosophical difference between accepting the blade and actively hollowing out the self until all
that remains is nothing.
Therefore, in this context Ichigo must accept the emptiness within himself
during the process of Hollowfication, relinquishing his humanity for something other-than-itself: a no-self which is represented by Tensa ­Zangetsu, his
spirit companion. Rather than overpowering the weaker side within as Aizen
demands of his Hollowfied army, Ichigo must bind himself to Zangetsu through
the ritual act of hollowing, of seppuku, as we see at the end of this arc. Ichigo,
after his training with Urahara, allows his sovereign subjectivity to melt away,
producing a transient no-self, which Leah ­Kalmanson defines as “the self, also
being empty of independent existence, is thus described as no-self ” (194). For
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example, Tensa Zangetsu boldly claims that in order for Ichigo to gain enough
power to defeat Aizen, then he must defeat the spiritual manifestation of his
zanpakutō in combat. Zangetsu boasts: “As if I care about what becomes of the
things you want to protect. Make no mistake, Ichigo. The things that you wish
to protect are not the things that I want to protect” (Episode 309). Seemingly
undermining Ichigo’s loyal code of protecting the weak, the two commit to a
brutally long battle. After what seems like months of fighting in the timeless
space of Ichigo’s mind, Ichigo begins to falter. The tenor of the battle shifts however, as he remarks: “Why is it that I sense only sadness flowing from its [Zangetsu’s] blade?” As Ichigo and Zangetsu face each other in the final moments of
the metaphysical battle, the spirit begins to shed tears. Shocked by the spirit’s
despair, Ichigo gives up the fight, letting his sword slip out of his hands at the
very moment Zangetsu appears charging full speed into his chest. Piercing
Ichigo’s abdomen, Zangetsu professes sadly: “Ichigo, do you recall what I said
when we started this fight? What I wanted to protect was you, Ichigo.” In this
final melodramatic moment, Ichigo relinquishes any survivalist impulse, any
sense of sovereign subjectivity, thus becoming the first most successful product of Hollowfication, the dissolution of an ontological barrier between both
opposing Cartesian ontological landscapes of internal and external.
Thus, the formless no-self (like the shadowy Zangetsu) rejects attempts at
objectification, description and identification, establishing itself as nothing
and everything, resembling the yōkai figures of the haunted apparition and
Kubo’s Hollows. The shades, shadows, and specters of the no-self linger and
haunt so to reveal the horrifying experience of finitude, articulated not through
logocentric modes of comprehension, but through the unheard cosmic scream
of beyond: “The [yōkai] other which resists my attempts at comprehension, is
presented to me in a scream that recalls me to the memory of my own screaming, my own trauma, my own ‘pre-historic’ experience of pain, an archaic
memory laid down in relation to my first satisfying/hostile object” (Critchley,
Ethics, Politics, Subjectivity 210). Not surprisingly, in the anime adaptation, the
same horrifying scream is heard in the form of the iconic Hollow howl each
time they enter the world of the living. Therefore, the ethical implications of
this phenomenological and ontological reading of Bleach allows us to experience a possible world that reflects the concerns of the marginalized, subaltern
other-as-nonhuman, further grappling with ethical dilemmas within naturalized humanist ideologies that manifest themselves into the realm of the real.
Powerless Power-Ups: The Yōkai Shōnen Mode as
Nonviolent Violence
As we have seen so far, Kubo’s complex argument began by undermining the
logics of totalitarian ontology as well as both mecha and shōnen modes. In
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resistance to Aizen, Kubo illustrates the ethical implications of Dōgen’s philosophy of no-self, which are similar to Martin Buber’s “I-Thou” paradigm and
Levinas’ ethics of alterity: “The first exiting from self, an eruption from being,
begins with the recognition of things” (Levinas, Alterity and Transcendence
99). By recognizing the “Other as object” in this antihumanist landscape,
Kubo’s project comes full circle like Jiro Yoshihara’s postmodern Zen circle
paintings. Similarly, Bleach cyclically traverses around the impossibly comprehensible space of existence, tracing its formless circumference through
meditations on the human and nonhuman, the self and no-self, and the finite
and infinite, the subject and object, all without separating the foregrounds or
backgrounds of the very painting itself. Unlike Yoshihara, however, Kubo’s
canvas is the martial arts melodrama of shōnen. In this tradition, Kubo’s philosophy of anteriority conflicts with social Darwinism, which as we have seen,
is consistently marked by the violent intrusion of objectivism and totality. In a
very real sense, Kubo utilizes the landscape of the otherworldly battlefield to
interrogate an ethics of the nonhuman within a medium and genre that revels
in traditional martial heroics.
Outside of Hueco Mundo, we see Ichigo and his allies struggle with killing
their opponents, even at their own risk. In every battle with an opponent in
Soul Society, Ichigo wins and refuses to kill his enemy, even after being beckoned to do so by his most brutal opponents. This nonviolent violence allows
Ichigo to form alliances with his enemies after resisting to kill them, moving
him forward in the narrative to build a coalition of disparate but willing allies.
In an epic battle against the berserker Kenpachi Zaraki, for example, Ken ends
the fight by advising Ichigo to die before defeat, to survive and get become
stronger above all else:
You want a reason . . . for fighting? Why don’t you just accept it already, Ichigo?! You
seek out fights. You desire power. Isn’t that right, Ichigo? Everyone who searches for
power, without exception, searches for battle! Fight, Ichigo! If you want the power to
control your enemy, take that sword in your hand and cut him down! That’s your only
option! That’s the road that continues in front of you and remains behind you, Ichigo!
(“Chapter 221: Let Eat the World’s End” 15)
Like the law of Las Noches, Kenpachi refashions a survivalist mode of
­ arwinian discourse into a philosophy of bushido (“way of the sword”). While
D
Ichigo does desire strength to protect his friends, he often rebuffs the way of
the samurai. Often Ichigo’s apathy toward bushido might be described as a
nonviolent resistance to violence, and a rejection of Japan’s glorified martial
past. Kubo’s ethics of the other is consistently marked by the violent intrusion of objectivism and totality, which as Levinas claims, asserts itself in the
form of war: “when reduced to [philosophical] evidences, eschatology would
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then already accept the ontology of totality issued from war” (Totality and
Infinity 22). By finally absolving himself of a sovereign subjectivity, Ichigo
resists ­Kenpachi’s speech even at the very moment that he is placed in that life
and death situation. This is how Kubo utilizes the battlefield to interrogate an
ethics of the other; these moments reflexively perform imagined yet conceivable ethical dilemmas.
As Critchley writes, Levinasian ethics begin in a space of impossible, asymmetrical praxis, in which the temptation of killing the other must be overcome
by gazing into the eyes of the defying other, specifically only “in a life-anddeath struggle where I am about to put the other to death, when ‘the sword
or the bullet has touches the ventricles or auricles of his heart’” (Critchley
224). At any point in time, when the two assailants in the series cross swords
and stare deep into the eyes of the other, Levinas reminds us that it is at the
moment in which the temptation of killing is the strongest, that the very rejection of such temptation is that much more necessary and redemptive. This is
because, as Levinas writes, “the other is the sole being I can wish to kill,” for as
Critchley concludes, “he or she refuses my sovereign will in an act of defiance
or resistance” (224). These ethics are thus very messy, and often brought on
through the failure to capitulate with nonviolent pacifism. In a more explicit
example, Izuru Kira, a fellow Soul Reaper lieutenant recognizes the very same
dire prohibition of murder that Levinas reminds us of, setting the tone for the
remainder of the final arc: “Battle is not a stage for empty heroics and nor is
it something to take pleasure in. Battle is filled with despair. Dark, terrifying.
That is the way that it should be. That way, people learn to fear battle and
to choose the path of non-violence where possible” (“Chapter 323: Gloomy,
Ghastly and Full of Despair” 20). Kira concludes that if violent encounters
are considered heroic, then heroism is not the same path as redemption,
resembling Critchley’s claim that like Kenpachi’s boast, “all virile, heroic talk
of justified violence and just war will not suffice. Rather, what is necessary is
the acknowledgement of weakness” (Critchley 226). Kira’s greatest power as a
Soul Reaper is to weigh down his enemies’ weapons each time they strike him;
with the help of his zanpakuto named Wabisuke, Kira never loses a fight and
rarely kills his enemies.
However, even Kira lets his plumb line of nonviolent pacifism slip, resulting
in a definite ethical failure to the other. In a philosophically charged battle,
Kira’s Wabisuke struggles to overcome the brute strength of his enemy; each
time Wabisuke weighs down the monstrously bulky juggernaut, his enemy
grows more powerful. In an attempt at negotiation and deflection, Kira loses
his cool and commits to executing his enemy. After ending the life of his enemy
in the next volume, Kira looks to the heavens and makes a prayer: “Farewell,
warrior of the sky. I would appreciate it if you would not forgive me” (“Chapter
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324: The Reaper” 1–2). Unlike Aizen’s gaze into the blinding sun, Kira’s gaze of
transcendence is obscured by his tear-filled eyes, as he recognizes his own ethical failure. As the scene closes, we are reminded of Levinas’ look from above
and into the eyes of the cadaver: “the eyes turned toward the sky separate
themselves in some fashion from the body in which they are implanted” (God,
Death, and Time 163). Here we see another example of how Kubo actively participates and performs what Marilyn Ivy refers to as a “parapolitics of pacifism”
in this particular beat-’em-up series (23). The necessary struggle indicative of
phenomenological ethics enframes Bleach’s critique of modernity (in aesthetics, philosophy, and politics) as an active attempt at imagining the process of
decolonizing the Cartesian (linear) perspective of the object of vision by redirecting the gaze toward the hollowed out no-self; ethics are messy but they
must be practiced in difficult circumstances, Kubo seems to claim. Kubo’s work
seems urge his international following, one that Feigenblatt associates with
“the [diverse] religious aspect[s] of the story,” to think about utopian possibilities of negotiating with the terrors of modernity by confronting the ontologies
of war and the ethics of finitude primarily through the vernacular medium of
manga and anime and supernatural assemblages (112).
Conclusion: I See a Black Moon Rising
Unlike most manga artists, Kubo has made an emphasis of writing poetry on
the first page of each volume of Bleach since 2001. At first, most fans were
perplexed by his nonhuman poetics of ravens, insects, rocks, and bones.
These inanimate objects are never anthropomorphic, but rather, exist inverted
from humanist perspectives: humans function as ravens, insects, rocks, bones,
etc. While this approach to the world of objects can be associated with Shinto
animism in Japan or object-oriented ontologies elsewhere in the West, I think
Kubo’s exceptional understanding of nonhuman, disanthropocentric, and
antihumanist thought inherently mutates any particular framework placed
around his work, shattering any mode of epistemological categorization.
Hence, as the series wore on, each poem seemed to illuminate the darkened
corners of Kubo’s nonhuman project, thematically associating his entire macabre milieu with political and ethical engagements. In the twenty-fifth volume,
with an image of Hollow Ichigo on the front cover, a poem on finitude and
consciousness appears, detailing a complex relationship between the eternity
of death, the fleeting nature of life, and the impossible task of understanding,
representing, and comprehending the end. Like this poem, Kubo’s entire aesthetic project reveals a poetics of the nonhuman that enunciates the necessity
to confront the beauty of finitude and resist the possibility of transcending
into the sky to wrest the sun down from its perch.
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Thus, in the end, it is not the Rising Sun, nor the “the gaze into the sun,” but
the Black Moon Rising (the aptly titled volume) that gives life and meaning to
any and all experiences of the afterlife in Kubo’s universe. As Kubo illustrates
magnificently in his Nietzschean manga volume entitled God Is Dead, Ichigo’s
final technique he learns from Zangetsu is called Mugetsu (“Moonless Sky”),
depicted in a splash page as a cosmic horizon of darkness that blots out the
sun and moon, swallowing the illusory rays of the heavens that Aizen manipulated to fool the world (“Chapter 421: DEICIDE23” 12–14). Ichigo learns that
if he uses Mugetsu once, then he will lose all of his Soul Reaper powers that
he spent years developing in countless duels, battles, and wars. This is truly a
powerless power, one that Ichigo wields not to kill Aizen, but rather to resist
the sovereign act of taking another life. Ichigo instead deflects Aizen’s violence, severing him from his gaze into the sun. Mugetsu transports him to
a darkened horizon of nothingness for a short period of time before he his
detained by Soul Society and convicted for war crimes.
Mugetsu, by extinguishing Aizen’s teleological gaze and Ichigo’s powers,
alters the objectivist visions of the universe. This event functions as the primary metaphor of redemption in Levinas’ work: “In an age in which movement toward the heights is limited by the line of the summits, the heavenly
bodies—stars fixed in their positions or traveling along closed trajectories—
are intangible. The sky calls for a gaze other than that of a vision that is
already an aiming and proceeds from need to the pursuit of things” (Levinas,
God, Death, and Time 163). Speaking out against humanist philosophy and
Cartesian perspectivalism, Levinas demands a nonhuman gaze that blinds
the epistemological hunter of modernity. Kubo’s landscape of the blackened
moon and Levinas’ gaze of transcendence reminds us again of a transcendental vision of space uninhibited by the mechanistic, objectivist, and Cartesian
perspectives of modern consciousness.
This complex representation of deathly visions reflects the overall concerns of not simply Kubo, but of the millennial yōkai shōnen mode. It is no
coincidence that Kubo’s Hollows are curiously similar to other blackened,
amorphous, blob-like beasts in other Japanese “dark media,” ranging from the
Shadows of the Persona series, the Heartless and Nobodies in the Kingdom
Hearts series, to the hundreds of demons in the Soul Eater and Blue Exorcist
manga and anime series (Thacker, “Dark Media” 85). It is also no coincidence
that the heroes empower themselves by entering the darker-than-black sea
of otherness to emerge stronger, wiser, and ready to face any and all forms
of existential terror and political disappointment. By exploring the plight of
the restless yōkai, an ethical framework is constructed within the narratives
and allegories, seemingly asking for us humans to imagine an ethical realm
resolved within a nonhuman landscape, to become hollow all together.
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Thus, Kubo’s resurrected deathworlds and undead beings that define millennial yōkai shōnen circumnavigate the sovereign sentiments of mecha that
find no necessity in the mutable dead, as Schmitt writes: “something dead,
something inferior, or valueless, something lowly cannot be represented. It
lacks the enhanced type of being that is capable of an existence, of rising into
the public being” (Schmitt 243). Alternatively, if we accept Weber’s claim, “To
represent one’s own death is thus necessarily to misrepresent it,” then we must
again be reminded of the yōkai mediums of premodern Japan, those who
knew nothing of “misrepresentation” simply because they were documenting
phenomena they understood as active in everyday life (53). Unlike traditional
yōkai, however, Kubo succeeds in producing a new kind of nonhuman modernity in which Ichigo and friends enter the role of the astral travellers who endlessly surf the waves of space, time, and history until they find ways of opening
dimensional rifts into the realm of everyday life. These new portals into the
otherworld not only transpose the human unto the spiritual, but they specifically bring yōkai into the global imaginary as newly mutable, metamorphic,
and monstrous assemblages that breathe new life into our deadened realm
of eternal war, environmental collapse, and technological alienation. Just like
the amorphous yōkai, this philosophical survey of the millennial yōkai shōnen
mode ends by meditating on the empty and alterior, the apocalyptic and the
immanent, the ephemeral and the undead, hoping that Tite Kubo’s text continues to inspire millennial readers to contemplate the meaning of not merely
human life in a transient world of things, but to paint modern life in the backdrop of the beautifully darkened horizons of a nonhuman ethics.
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