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Mikage is Utena’s trainer and antagonist in the Black Rose arc. When alive, he is named professor Nemuro and wears purple. When dead he wears blue.
See design - costumes - Black Rose arc - Mikage’s duel.
From Akio’s point of view, Mikage is there to train Utena’s power of miracles and make it strong enough to be worth stealing. From Mikage’s point of view, he wants to defeat Utena so that he can kill Anthy the Rose Bride and replace her with Mamiya. It’s ironic in multiple ways. For one, Anthy is playing Mamiya, so the two are the same person. For another, the real Mamiya is already dead himself, and Mikage doesn’t know it. By the time Utena meets Mikage, he is long dead. The blue uniform says that Mikage is an illusion.
Death is a key symbol in Utena as a whole, and the Black Rose arc nails it in. Death is the only eternity; to die (literally or metaphorically) is to achieve eternity and be in stasis—and vice versa. The students at the Academy are in coffins, metaphorically dead. Akio’s goal is to become eternal—to bring the stasis of eternal patriarchy to the world. When Mikage burns his building, he and the 100 boys become literally dead.
Akio gains power from the dead, and dead Mikage is one of his sources of power. The power of the patriarchy is its legitimacy, that is, people’s acceptance of its stories. A person’s story ends when they die and becomes eternal, in a sense. A major theme is the cultural revision of past stories to make them fit preconceptions. In Utena, because of that kind of revision, a person’s story becomes more powerful when they die. Better fitting the story to the audience’s expectations makes it more believable. Utena does not fit expectations; on the surface, it is unreal and unbelievable. The past with its accumulation of stories is more powerful than the present, when the stories haven’t been regularized yet. The Black Rose arc is about the power of the past, and how it is greater than the power of the present that we saw in the Student Council arc.
When we see Mikage alive, we are not seeing a flashback to true events; some points are inconsistent and not all can be true. We are not seeing Mikage’s memory; the dead do not remember anything. We are seeing the story of Mikage. The story is not true history. Probably much of it is true, but it has altered (or been altered).
Mikage appears when he is dead because his story has power. It is the same reason that Dios appears, even though he is fictional and is said to be dead. And see Ruka’s arc. Utena is about the power of stories, and its characters represent aspects of that power. The way I think of it is that Akio (the patriarchy) invokes Mikage’s patriarchal story, and what we see on the screen represents how Utena and others in the arc interact with his story: Utena learns from it even as she rejects him. Her story is ultimately more powerful than his, but she faces duelists who fell under his power.
When Utena first passes by Mikage’s building, in episode 14 at the start of the Black Rose, Miki tells her about the past fire and the boys who died in it. He doesn’t mention Mikage (or professor Nemuro). That is the invocation of the story. At the end of the arc in episode 23, Utena and Miki pass by the building again, and Miki says that nobody died in the fire but no records remain. The story is withdrawn and forgotten.
That’s the overview. For more on Mikage, see Black Rose arc, especially the events but also other sections.
Professor Nemuro. Before he dies, Mikage is called professor Nemuro. Older Tokiko still calls him that when she returns to the Academy. I think it’s likely that in life he was a university professor, not an Academy student. His story has been altered for Akio’s purposes.
Jay Scott <jay@satirist.org>
first posted 25 July 2024
updated 23 October 2024