Review of Fata Morgana no Yakata
| Subject | Fata Morgana no Yakata |
| By | Helpfulness: 14 Vote: 9.8kaisouroku on 2021-08-02 last updated on 2022-08-02 |
| Review | I'll be frank: The House in Fata Morgana has humbled me. It's been a very long while since I found my expectations so fully surpassed by a visual novel. Time and time again, at every point when I believed the spell about to be broken, my habitual cynicism was repulsed not only by the evidence of extraordinary creative labour in every domain of Fata Morgana's production—its distinctly Gothic art, its broad and inexhaustible soundtrack full of lively pastiche, the severe formal unity of its storytelling—but by an exegesis of thematic material rarely seen in visual novels, anime, and manga. This is a really great work, and with all its above virtues taken into account, probably inimitable in this medium. With that said, it's to my own discredit that the expectations I had of The House in Fata Morgana were mixed. I have been long tempted by its charmingly Europhilic (Occidentalist?) art, but the plain truth is that, most of the time, Japanese popular works engage with European culture only on a relatively superficial level. This is hardly a crime exclusive to them, and on the whole the Japanese are not so bad in comparison to some Western cultural production—think only of The Last Samurai or Memoirs of a Geisha—but the bridge between their sensibilities and the Western European mind is misted over and treacherously narrow. Clichés abound in describing this distance, of course: perhaps it's something to do with the conception of the self as purely atomic, or the perceived value of public self-expression, or that cosmopolitan, evangelical, and relentlessly anthropocentric bent of mind we call Christianity, which causes about as much confusion as we Westerners find in confrontation with the more syncretic, private, and practical Japanese understanding of religion. Certainly, one of the great Catholic novels of the 20th century, Silence, was written by a Japanese man, Endou Shuusaku; but he took as a thematic point the difficulty of planting the seed of Christianity in his native land. So, bypassing my own judgment, I'll take Endou's word for it: while I would certainly expect more from a literary text, I think it's perfectly fine that Japanese popular media borrow the flowers of European culture without a good grasp of how that foreign garden came to be germinated. However, this all becomes relevant in the present case because The House in Fata Morgana is primarily a European Gothic story. All the familiar components are there: ghosts of a supernatural past, a morbid yet Romantic medievalism, a fascination with death, a dreamlike and circuitous emotionalism, the superheated extremes of sin and godliness, saints and witches, torrid criminal passions and feverish bloodlusts, pious and/or spirited young women who meet dark fates, a melancholic gentleman brooding over his secrets in isolation—and animating the narrative, the Romantic spirit of yearning and overcoming. It's moody, florid, slow, afflicted by a heavy and fluctuating wistfulness, and shot through with the cloying scent of frankincense and mildew, which is just the way I like it. Naturally, the Gothic isn't unknown to Japan, or even to visual novels, but a familiar example like Tsukihime serves to illustrate that the themes and their treatment are liable to become something different. In Tsukihime, the febrile depictions of passion, crime, and madness remain intact, as do motifs like vampires and the degenerated wealthy family lurking in a gloomy old manor, but it's nonetheless a recognisably Japanese story in its core themes. For example, the Near Side routes display a thematic through-line of nature vs. humanity, which directly juxtaposes Arcueid, the instantiation of nature's vengeance on our species, with the Christian-rationalist-humanist Ciel, in a manner more redolent of Rewrite or even a Miyazaki movie than Dracula. Though this portrayal of the vampire is intriguing, mixing its traditional associations with sexual passion and horror with this new role as nature's scourge, the European Enlightenment contrast represented by Ciel is too narrowly restricted to be called comprehensive. She is ultimately a stranger to Japan, and the thematic question takes place not within European parameters but against them. But Fata Morgana is not set in Japan. There are only brief encounters with Japanese characters, who are, in the reverse of Ciel's example, foreigners to a predominantly European cast. It's for this reason that the themes of the story—the yearning of the natural self against society, divine irony, sin and salvation—stand out so remarkably. Make no mistake: the moment-to-moment scene and character writing bears many of the hallmarks of Japanese authorship; but Fata Morgana's treatment of these themes reveal an uncommon engagement with them. This is the final boss of Japanese Europhilia. There's little that can be said without disclosing spoilers, but I will furnish an example in as vague terms as is possible: there is a character in Fata Morgana who suffers from a congenital issue that disgusts people. Initially—and here my cynicism returned—I was concerned that this was only included for effect, or that would only illustrate the psychological suffering of the character and the injustice of particular socio-historical conditions, but as was always the case, the story put me in my place. Rather than narrow historical particularism or a psychological miniature, it tied beautifully back into the narrative by deepening the character's association with the theme of divine irony: that which is best will never appear in the form you expect it, and that which should be exalted and adored is oppressed and hated. It goes without saying that this idea has roots in the Christian religion (the Messiah arriving in the form of a suffering servant), and is so familiar a concept to most Westerners that many of us probably don't even notice its cultural recurrence. Throughout Fata Morgana, writer-director Hanada Keika's repeated and deliberate use of irony, often in conjunction with magical and religious motifs—the many encounters with saints in witches' skins and vice versa—gives this theme the weight of innate authenticity that can't be dispelled by anachronisms or trivial inaccuracies. Beyond the main story content, the side-story A Requiem for Innocence provides perhaps my favourite minor example: one character is praying for the dead in a graveyard and her companion asks her why she prays for them when the living are right here and surely need prayers more. Her response is that it's important to pray for those who have no one to pray for them, which seems immediately and naturally Catholic-Christian. If anything, rather than superficiality, I almost sense in Hanada's writing an eagerness to display his impressions of Western European culture, which makes it charming and even a little flattering. I've focused on these thematic considerations here because they strike me as so notable, but it goes without saying that they are nested in a presentation that is no less sound. The soundtrack, in particular, is so extravagantly diverse as to make one feel like they've entered a whole new story whenever there's a major dramatic transition—which, given the frequents changes of place and period, is not far off an accurate description. Most notable is the rigorous unity of the writing: while many visual novels subject the reader to torturously inane and formulaic everyday life segments that evoke no more than misunderstanding of the superior models they're copying, small dialogues and minor events in Fata Morgana work much more closely in developing theme, character, or plot. Little details like a comic scene of two characters playing chess or a reference to a character's feelings about roses are not only there for colour but tie back into the narrative to create internal structure. While this isn't the only way to write a story, and there is something to be said for extraneous comic dialogue so long as it is clever, insightful, and funny, such dialogue betokens a storytelling preference for constructing narratives out of character miniatures. This can be done in a superior fashion—not only in VNs: Proust is all miniatures—but is particularly tedious in the hands of a bad writer. In Fata Morgana, the relative infrequency of these scenes in proportion to its sense for dramatic unity is a breath of fresh air, and it reminds one that there is no excuse for writers who have neither the need nor the skill to depict the mundane psychological and social lives of characters yet still persist in doing so during an unrelated story. There is one frequent criticism of The House of Fata Morgana worth addressing, which concerns its historical anachronisms. I reject this criticism on two counts: firstly, because there is no reason to suppose that a work like this ought to be a historical imitation, and secondly, because it is a problem without a solution. Gothic literature has always been interested in the power and terror of the past, but it's still a fundamentally modern genre: it doesn't seek to strictly imitate the literature or culture of the past. Rather, the past has typically been used in Gothic stories as a dramatic site for tales of a wilder and more gruesome nature, initially as a part of the 18th century 'cult of sensibility' and its increasing taste for the psychological intensity of the sublime. In other words, this isn't really historical fiction in the sense that it has anything to do with academic history. One can tut-tut at Fata Morgana for the presence of tea in 10th/11th century Europe or for its use of modern language, but you can do the same to The Mysteries of Udolpho, full of 16th century French and Italian folk who contemplate the aesthetics of the sublime and picturesque, gamble at casinos, drink coffee and ice, and speak principally like Regency era Englishmen ('Holy Virgin!' is periodically exclaimed so that they might be identified as Catholics). It's of little consequence to the dramatic integrity of the work. Furthermore, there is a serious question as to what constitutes 'authentic' language in The House in Fata Morgana, a story that takes place over one thousand years in multiple countries including England, France, Italy, and America, a question made more complicated by translation. Many of our notions of especially linguistic authenticity are arbitrary: for example, in English there is a perception that modern British English (perhaps with a few thous and thees thrown in) is more 'authentic' for a medieval setting, even if it bears no resemblance to Old or Middle English—even if that setting is France. Perhaps because we are some centuries into a world in which the elite legitimise themselves by education and moral character, the feudal barons of the Middle Ages, a military class who led their own private armies, are sometimes assumed to talk and behave in a frou-frou manner that suggests they care more about elegant parties and refinements than war. There are certainly popular works which narrowly focus on accurate representation of premodern life; for example, Ken Follett meticulously depicts of a Gothic cathedral's construction in The Pillars of the Earth, but the book is otherwise quite modern and psychological in its treatment of character. There's nothing wrong with that because the story plainly doesn't aim to imitate the highly archetypal characters of medieval literature. Rather than considering whether the detail of a work contradicts such-and-such historical or scientific fact, it would be more fruitful to question whether it contradicts the terms and precedents of the story. I find this inapplicable to Fata Morgana, and the criticism therefore to be unartistic. It's like complaining that an Evanescence song isn't in Latin. Why would you expect it to be? That this visual novel belongs to a niche within a niche is the only point which would prevent me from recommending this to any and all. The House in Fata Morgana is decidedly not for all readers; it's not even for every VN reader. The very characteristics that attract a reliable audience to Gothic stories—their baroque appearance, fatalistic morbidity, and heaving intensity—is kryptonite to many others. Hanada Keika has admitted himself that he plays more console adventure games than conventional PC eroge, and his claimed inspirations for Fata Morgana include the works of Gothic sci-fi genre writer Tanith Lee, the lengthy multi-generational Italian film La meglio gioventù, Kon Satoshi's kaleidoscopic masterpiece Millennium Actress, and Hanada's own experiences studying in Europe as a young man. As such, one shouldn't expect the storytelling formulae of a PC visual novel. However, there's no deception here: Fata Morgana is hardly likely to draw in anyone who isn't already intrigued by the aesthetic conceits promised by the art of saturated roses and vampiric-looking European people with enigmatic smiles and fussy, frilly clothes. For those tempted by that promise but concerned that they'll be left with a hastily scribbled IOU and a desire to retreat to something written before 1850, rest assured that the bond will not be broken. |
| 14 points |