Utena - Nanami’s arc

In progress. Nanami is complicated, and I haven’t figured her out all the way. But I’ve made progress.

character

Episode 10 shows us how Nanami came to be the way she is. Her adoptive family values and pays attention to Touga, not to her. That’s ultimately why she clings to Touga. He is granted power. That’s why she becomes a needy and jealous power seeker: She wants to be like Touga—and therefore like Akio, because Touga wants to be like Akio. She takes on minions and orders Mitsuru around as a form of power, in order to earn the attention that Touga receives without asking. She feels abandoned by her family, and follows the example. She abandons the kitten in episode 10 and the egg in episode 27. She realizes she has done wrong, and sees herself as monstrous. All this crushes her self-esteem.

These are things that can happen in families, and not only families that Akio has screwed with.

Another strand of Nanami’s personality comes in because her adoptive family is wealthy. She feels entitled to the privileges of her wealth, including the power that Touga is granted. She is arrogant and vain; the Little People are to admire her. Her impractical dirty tricks like a snail in the pencil box are unlikely to work even if Anthy doesn’t trump them. She belongs to a character archetype that is centuries old, the shallow rich lady. The 18th century book A Vindication of the Rights of Woman by Mary Wollstonecraft describes Nanami in its introduction. For example, “The education of the rich [women] tends to render them vain and helpless.”

Nanami and Touga are adopted

Nanami and Touga were adopted together into their current family, Kiryuu. It was part of Akio’s plot to manipulate them both. I conclude that it was a package deal. The family does not value Nanami, so they would have rejected her for adoption. But they wanted Touga as an heir, so they accepted the package. They were told that the two are siblings. It’s one of two adoptions in Utena; see adoption for context.

Touga believes that he and Nanami are brother and sister. He’s enough older that he might know, and it could be true. Akio reinforces his belief, asking “when will you tell her the truth?” But the two do not have similar hair colors, though all other related characters do (Kozue and Miki, Anthy and Akio, Tokiko and Mamiya, Mrs. Ohtori and Kanae, even the metaphorical twins Anthy and Utena). The blood type evidence agrees, though it is not conclusive. I think that, most likely, the two are biologically unrelated. Akio, or his agent Anthy, put them together because they formed a package with some promise of developing the Power of Dios. If so, it’s cute irony that Touga was tricked to convince Nanami that they are unrelated.

How did Nanami and Touga come to be put up for adoption? There is no evidence. It’s easy to imagine that Akio had Anthy do some murdering. But arranging betrayal and abandonment could be as effective and less risky.

meaning

I’ll fill out this section when I understand Nanami better. In the meantime, I want to stick in a few points. Nanami is at heart a foil for Utena. But then, most of the characters are.

Nanami says that Touga is the only man for her. She is shown to be attracted to Miki and Akio, so it sure seems false. An Utena character does not have One True Love, but a range of shifting loves. But then, Miki is Hermaphroditus and not exactly a man. And Akio is Princess Kaguya. Unlikely-sounding claims in Utena often turn out to be true.

Nanami’s character is based on an old archetype, the vain and shallow rich woman. See A Vindication of the Rights of Woman for Mary Wollstonecraft’s 18th century description of the archetype. Mary Wollstonecraft saw it as real; she believed many rich women met the description. Maybe she was right!

Nanami is extensively compared with Utena. She is shown to be equal in some ways, and opposite in others. See web of characters - Utena ~ Nanami.

Utena takes fictional Dios as her role model and tries to gain his power and coolness. She does not understand that she is accepting a patriarchal role that will harm her and others. But because her model is a rescuing hero, and because Anthy refuses to be rescued, she finally hits on the idea of teamwork, each helping the other. Her ideals point close enough to the right direction that half of what she does is good and half bad, and she accidentally ends up doing what wins. Nanami takes Touga has her role model and tries to gain his power and coolness. He is selfish, exploitative, and arrogantly overconfident—like Akio—and Nanami is too. Her ideals point directly in the wrong direction, and nearly everything she does harms her, and often others.

Anthy harasses Nanami beyond all bounds. I suppose that since Anthy loves Utena, and Nanami is Utena’s opposite, Anthy hates Nanami. Alternately or additionally, vengeful Anthy seeks revenge for the episode 3 dance party. Utena bothers Nanami too, when the “ball flies farther than expected,” and shows no interest in Nanami’s reaction. Neither likes Nanami.

Nanami is a farm animal. She is equated with a cow and a chicken. She becomes a cow, of course. And she lays an egg. Chickens appear after she is rescued from charging animals, and Anthy gives the name “Nanami” to a cow and a chicken. Like a farm animal, Nanami is raised to be exploited. Akio exploits her, and Touga exploits her. Anthy exploits her because Anthy takes joy in vengeance. The story exploits her to show off its themes.

the dance party

The episode 3 dance sets up the Anthy-Nanami relationship. The story arc looks straightforward: Nanami harasses Anthy, Anthy harasses back much, much harder. But I find a hint that it may be more complicated; see Anthy’s gloves at comparisons - destroyed clothing.

Maybe the purple gloves mean that Anthy, her dress dissolving, is deliberately manipulating Utena into playing her prince role. Or maybe that Anthy is already brewing her revenge. But the explanations don’t convince me.

Nanami becomes a cow

Nanami famously turns into a cow in episode 16. A lot of people think it’s a filler episode, but that ain’t so. Besides what I write here, see the episode’s shadow play.

Second: Many parts of Nanami’s story are time-reversed relative to Utena’s. Akio challenges Nanami first intellectually, then emotionally in episodes 31 and 32 (below); he challenges Utena first emotionally then intellectually in the show as a whole, and in the final showdown challenges. Even Nanami’s moon rabbit story in the cowbell episode is time-reversed. Nanami walks uphill and Utena walks downhill. Nanami predicts Utena’s events. Nanami becomes a cow in episode 16, Utena implicitly in episode 36.

Nanami turning into a cow is depicted as Anthy’s plot. But the meaning of turning into a cow as lusting after the patriarchy implies that Nanami was already a cow—she can’t appear on the screen as a cow unless she already is one. In Utena, we see characters not as they are (everything on the screen is an illusion); we see them as the role they are playing. Nanami acts increasingly like a cow as the episode goes on, but she does not look like a cow until she understands that she is playing the role of a cow. She had to look around and see where she was, in the same way that Utena metaphorically looks around outside her coffin in episode 37. Anthy’s plot is a hoax that harms Nanami but teaches her about herself, in the same way that Akio’s harmful sex dates with Utena make Utena more thoughtful.

At the end of the episode, Nanami switches from cowbell to nosering. She wants to be led around by the nose by men. Utena rescued her from lust for the patriarchy, but only briefly. It seems to have grown stronger.

in heat

Reader Kary suggested to me that, as a cow, Nanami is in heat. Her frequent mooing, especially at night and loudly, is a sign of it. There is no proof, but it slots in so neatly with the episode’s other symbols that I believe it.

Two birds. Just after Nanami proudly tells the female teacher that she’s wearing a cowbell, we get this brief shot of two yellow birds flying out of the trees toward the sun. The greenery is Anthy’s cultivation of the students, teaching them to love the patriarchy and seek their princes. The sun is Dios, every girl’s prince. Yellow is Nanami’s color and means jealousy or envy. Two birds together signify romantic attachment, and not only in anime; they can have similar meanings in classical Chinese paintings, and Japan imported parts of the tradition.

Nanami is a cow because she loves the patriarchy, and here are the symbols to prove it. The two birds that stand for Nanami and her desires fly freely; Anthy’s manipulation is complete (at least in this aspect). The yellow matches little Utena’s yellow and means envy of the prince; for Nanami, envy of Touga. The birds fly to the left; Nanami’s desire is based on illusion.

Dona Dona. A little later is the Dona Dona story of the calf carted away for slaughter. Nanami imagines that the cowbell makes her special. I guess it does in a way. But Touga exploits her as always, and she is devoured like a fish. The cowbell traps her and metaphorically kills her, which foretells Utena defeating Nanami-as-cow.

Utena removes the cowbell. Dona Dona returns as a background song. When Nanami sees Anthy’s red sweater, she finishes her cow transformation and charges like a bull in a bullfight. Realism is not part of it. The fight is supposed to remind the audience of a Spanish-style bullfight (Wikipedia), where the aim is kill the bull with a sword thrust to the heart, and an Utena duel, where the aim is to destroy a rose that stands for the opponent’s heart.

In other words, Nanami is both a cow and a bull in a bullfight—she is female and male. Of course, Utena is the same. She identifies as a girl. But the winner of a duel is the metaphorical husband of the loser, and slashing the rose with a male symbol means sex: The rose is a vagina. See duel symbols - Utena conflates weddings and funerals. Utena removing the cowbell is the bull mating with the cow. So Utena too is a cow and a bull. It’s part of the close tie between Nanami and Utena.

Above I said that Utena removing the cowbell foreshadows her victory. But her victory walks a tightrope; the same event foreshadows her corruption. To remove the patriarchal cowbell is rebellious, but a violent bullfight or duel ending with Utena taking control over Nanami is itself patriarchal. Utena’s progress marks a retreat, in the same way that her failures mark advances; see thoughtfulness.

As in a Black Rose duel, when her cowbell is removed Nanami sleeps the sleep of forgetting. Utena’s victory is seemingly without effect, and Nanami shows up next with a nose ring. Anthy’s cowbell is essentially the same as Anthy’s black roses: The victim has a change of heart (the black rose is “your new heart”), behaves with aggressive arrogance, is defeated, and forgets.

Nanami’s Egg

Episode 27 touches on a lot of topics. I keep adding to this list, and I doubt it’ll ever be complete. Eggs return as a symbol of pregnancy in the First Seduction - Utena’s babble.

• The egg of the world. The egg is the egg of the world, as we are shown at the start of the episode. It’s why Nanami is associated with chickens. Is it a what-comes-first joke? Nanami or the egg?

• Menarche, a girl’s first menstrual period. Nanami is in the right age range for it. She finds the egg in her bed, rather than blood, but otherwise it matches up. Her adoptive family does not value her and left her in the dark. Her confused and then fearful reaction seems realistic.

• Lesbian. The egg is a female symbol, but it is elongated. It can be taken as a symbol of queerness in general, or lesbian tendencies in particular. All events in the episode are consistent with it. Menarche is an event of sexual maturity; it is notionally when a girl might start to learn about her own sexual orientation. (Though there may be clues from early life, as in the sandbox dream.) Nanami is surprised and confused, then alarmed. She fears ostracism for her strangeness. She tries to protect the egg, her unfamiliar feelings, from breaking. She seeks information from Miki. She loves the egg as if it were a baby, which can be interpreted at least two ways: As self-esteem, wanting to grow her own loving feelings and become more mature herself; or as love of women since the egg is a female symbol. She accuses male Mitsuru of being incapable. Anthy wonders who the father is, a reminder that no one can be the father in a lesbian relationship. Following up, Touga implies that Nanami is betraying the family specifically. Nanami hides her rejected queerness in the woods, but can't free herself from it. Being hidden and ignored turns it huge, like the cat in the episode 10 shadow play, and monstrous as in episode 16. This analysis is inspired by a message from Horseteeth.

• Sex education in general. It’s not available to Nanami. When Nanami meets Mitsuru near the start of the episode, the first thing he says is that physical education has been changed into a girls’ health class for the day—that’s the sum of it, maybe one hour in the year. Akio’s system does not value her either. As she herself complains, “It’s inexcusable that I was left so ignorant.”

• Ostracism. Already feeling abandoned, Nanami fears ostracism—being abandoned by others. She feels she has a degree of specialness and social superiority, but she is insecure about it. She is terrified of being rejected as a weird “space alien”.

• Teen pregnancy and motherhood are a common outcome of ignorance. Having come to terms with the egg, Nanami treats it as her baby, as if it had already hatched. Anthy wonders who the father is, but Nanami doesn’t get that far. She starts playing a motherhood role, without thinking at all about what it entails. But it’s a performance, and she doesn’t take it seriously. Her lighthearted child’s play makes a stark contrast with the serious events of episodes 31 and 32, when Akio confers false adulthood on her. She is not ready to face responsibility.

• Family issues. Nanami feels abandoned by her family. But as a mother, she can start her own family. In this part of the story, she treats the egg lovingly because she seeks a close, loving family.

• Children want to be adult. It’s a motif of Utena. I never wanted that, and I don’t know how common it is in real life. But it’s normal in Utena. Nanami admires Juri’s maturity because she (somehow) lays eggs the size of bowling balls... and is nonchalant about it. Other examples are Mitsuru and Utena, seen together in episode 18.

• Biological sex differences. Mitsuru offers to do anything for Nanami, and she counters that he cannot accomplish impossible tasks. She means he can’t lay eggs. She’s right, it’s an impossible task. Below the socially-imposed sex roles is an underlayer of biologically-imposed physical sex roles. Women and men have different reproductive incentives, owing to things like the physiological cost of growing a baby for nine months. Biological sex roles influence social sex roles, sometimes for well-founded reasons, but mostly, I suspect, for illusory reasons.

Nanami’s impossible actions align with Utena’s miracles, which are impossible actions that succeed.

• Abandonment issues. Nanami feels abandoned by her family, including Touga, and yet under pressure she abandons the egg. It’s like abandoning the kitten in episode 10. She sees herself as monstrous, and having treated the egg the same way, it hatches into a monster. The monster launches beams of yellow rings, meaning that the monster is Nanami herself. It represents family dysfunction passing to the next generation.

• Admit your ignorance. It’s another motif of Utena: It can be hard to learn if you act like you already know. The system of control tells you that you already know, and if you buy it then you can’t escape. See admit your ignorance for more examples. In the episode, Nanami does not admit her ignorance and goes further and further wrong. In the show as a whole, society does not admit its ignorance.

• Transitions. The egg of the world: You are in the egg, and it is a familiar and comfortable place, though confining. You hatch into an unknown and possibly dangerous outer world. It stands for the transition of birth, the transition of puberty, and the transition of “revolutionizing the world,” which itself has multiple meanings—reaching adulthood, escaping the patriarchal system, realizing truths. In principle, I think it is for all changes and discoveries which move you to an unfamiliar place. Nanami’s egg is inside-out in comparison: The inside of the egg is unknown. It’s one of Utena’s many reversals.

• Chu-Chu. At the end of the episode, the egg seems to have hatched and Chu-Chu returns to Anthy. Horseteeth pointed out to me that Chu-Chu hatched from the egg, an obvious point that I missed. I interpret Chu-Chu as Anthy’s dissociated feelings, or in other words, as a psychological coping mechanism for Anthy to survive her wretched Rose Bride role. But Anthy loves Utena, so we know she is fundamentally unsuited to the role. (In Utena, nobody is suited to Akio’s required sex roles.) Chu-Chu hatches from Anthy’s egg of queerness. Nanami hides her egg in the forest; Anthy hides hers in an imaginary friend.

• Leda and the swan. Nanami seems to correspond to Leda from Greek myth. Zeus fell for Leda and turned himself into a swan to rape her. Leda became pregnant, and laid an egg that hatched into Castor and Pollux. See myths - Leda, and also the next item below.

• Foreshadowing the end. The hatching egg lines up with Anthy at the end of the show: The same way that Nanami hatches from her own egg, Anthy is pregnant with herself, then free Anthy is born from herself. Free Anthy wears a white cap that is a fragment of the egg she hatched from—the egg of the world; see Castor and Pollux. It is Nanami going wrong versus Anthy, at long last, going right. Nanami can be redeemed too.

• Buddhism. It’s an illustration of Buddhist beliefs. When Anthy and Utena talk in bed in the episode, Anthy brings up reincarnation and connects it to parents passing on their thoughts to their children (the patriarchy perpetuating itself). The people are mortal, their thoughts are immortal like their souls. But Buddhism sees reincarnation as an illusion due to ignorance and misguided desires, which Nanami showcases in the episode. The egg that hatches into a monster that is equated with Nanami stands for reincarnation. Like everyone at the Academy, Nanami is dead and in a coffin. For more, see religion - Buddhism - Anthy as samsara.

episodes 31 and 32

The two episodes are of a piece, and one copy of the prince story at the start of episode 31 introduces them. Nanami starts by taking a phone call for Touga, moves on to watching him in person, and it grows more intense from there. In episode 31, Akio undermines Nanami intellectually, by showing his incestuous relationship with Anthy. In episode 32, he undermines her emotionally, breaking her self-perceived special relationship with Touga. Her reactions show it:

Nanami in the confession elevator is distraught but not crying.

Episode 31, confession elevator

Episode 32, disowned

In both, Nanami looks directly at the camera in seriousness, and she is distraught and inner-focused—yet her expressions are different. On the left, Nanami has seen Anthy with Akio. She appears symbolically in the confession elevator, facing the truth of her feelings. Her shoulders are turned to frame right and her head is tilted to the right, the direction of truth (see turning left). The lighting is cold and Nanami is not crying. The colors of the dramatic abstract background can be taken as red for knowledge and black for Akio, or for emptiness. It’s a picture of coming to understand a distressing reality. On the right, Nanami overheard Touga saying she is not his sister. She is turned slightly to the left and her head is tilted to the left, the direction of illusions, because their biological relatedness has nothing to do with their emotional relationship. The lighting is warm and Nanami cannot stop crying. Her hair is coming loose. It’s a picture of emotional realization.

Akio wants Nanami to be intellectually and emotionally isolated and despairing... as one small step in a large plan to control and exploit Utena. His challenges to Nanami are parallel to his challenges to Utena in the final showdown.

events

• Episode 31. Nanami looks at photos as a storm approaches. She and Touga are drifting apart, she thinks.
• She sneaks into the shower to spy on Touga and steal his phone. Touga notices but pretends not to.
• She takes his calls and harasses the girls calling.
• The nerd boys carrying busts for art class: Akio stages an accident and rescue for Nanami.
• Blood types seem to show that Nanami and Touga are not related. She finds no baby pictures of Touga. The storm starts in earnest.
• Akio moves Nanami into his tower.
• She sees Anthy naked with Akio and can’t cope.

• Episode 32. Nanami eavesdrops on Touga and Keiko in the greenhouse. Keiko is in rebellion against Nanami.
• She takes a call from Akio, who sends her to Touga to start the car ride sequence.
• Her minions are in open rebellion. She beats them up, which keeps them in line for the moment.
• The duel.

the plot

As usual, Akio’s plot has more than one point. He isolates Nanami so that she can’t support Touga and can’t interfere with Utena. It is part of isolating Touga so that he can’t interfere either. And he sets up Nanami’s duel. Signs are that Anthy carries out the plot by tricking Touga: She suggests that Touga can control Nanami by the same methods that Akio uses. It appeals because Touga wants to deceive and exploit and wants to be like Akio. But the plot prepares Nanami’s mental state so that she rejects Touga and chooses Akio. She sees Anthy and Akio together and realizes that she does not desire Touga in that way. And she eavesdrops to hear Touga claim he does not care about her. As in the shower, Touga knew Nanami was there all along.

The storm in episode 31 goes with the storm over the church when little Utena hid in the coffin. It is Akio separating Nanami, like little Utena, from her family to make her susceptible. Akio’s staged rescue is like Akio, pretending to be Dios, rescuing little Utena from the coffin. He moved Utena into his tower earlier than Nanami, and later in the series Utena sees Anthy naked with Akio. In between, in the First Seduction, Akio takes Utena on a car ride. The rebellion of Nanami’s minions corresponds to Anthy backstabbing Utena. Nanami reacts with violence, which is temporarily effective but makes sure that the minions will continue to rebel. Utena reacts with acceptance, which is permanently effective.