Utena - Black Rose arc

Yuuko. <- PreviousNext -> Final showdown.

In progress. There is more to say about Mamiya.

Black Rose duel combat - duel symbols - stabbing the black rose - Mikage’s arc - Mikage’s sword - Mikage’s costumes - Mamiya’s costumes - unattended offices.

contents

theme
inspiration
events
meaning
confession elevator
Tokiko and Mamiya
Akio’s suggestion
Utena confronts Mikage

theme

The past controls the present. That’s the big underlying idea of the Black Rose. The culture perpetuates itself, so that the ways of the past are the ways of today.

By implication, the dead are more powerful than the living. The 100 dead boys control others and turn them into duelists; it’s a direct representation of the dead controlling the living. In the show as a whole, Akio is metaphorically dead—only death is eternal—and he controls just about everybody (though not perfectly).

Utena faces the living in the Student Council arc, the dead in the Black Rose, and Akio himself in the Apocalypse Saga. Each is more powerful than the last.

inspiration

Black is Akio’s color, and is associated with death. That is all the inspiration needed to invent black roses for Utena. But fictional black roses are not uncommon. I know of two that seem particularly likely inspirations.

1. In The Rose of Versailles that Utena draws so much from, episode 21 is named the black rose. It starts a story arc about the extravagant villain Countess Jeanne de la Motte. Utena refers to the story arc, and equates Mikage with its villain when he says “you are you” and “I am me” in episode 23.

2. Yoshiya Nobuko (1896-1973, Wikipedia) was one of the founders of Class S. In 1925, she started a short-lived magazine named Black Rose (kuroshoubi, using a rare alternate word for “rose”). I expect that Utena’s creators knew about it.

events

Two threads of events. There are two threads of events. I’ll call them the past thread and the current thread. In the past, Akio exploits Mikage and the 100 boys to research how to use the dueling arena. At the end of this thread, Mikage dies. When alive, he wears purple; when dead he wears blue. Currently, Akio handles Utena. He trains Utena’s power of miracles in the arena, and simultaneously he becomes her friend—he grooms her so that he can bring her under his control and steal the power for himself.

There are deliberate inconsistencies in what we see: Not only does Mikage reappear after he dies, younger Tokiko does too. Near the end of episode 23, we learn that Mamiya originally looked different than we had seen him until then, in both past and current threads. Red roses appear in the current thread that are associated with Akio seducing Tokiko in the past thread. All these things are illusions, which are real to others in the same way that Akio’s illusions are real to others. Living Mikage wanted his memories to be eternal, and he succeeded to an extent. But the current version of his story has gaps that are filled in inconsistently. Some gaps seem to be filled in by Mikage confabulating memories. That is an illusion too.

The story is out of order. The Black Rose is told out of order, with the early events of the past thread shown in the last episodes, 22 and 23. Here are the major events in story order, as best I can tell.

• Akio makes separate deals with Mikage and 100 boys to research the dueling arena, starting with how to enter it. He separates them into different groups that do not communicate, so that only he has an overview of all they are doing. Compare how he isolates Utena from others, so that he can control her securely.

• Akio sends Tokiko to ride herd on Mikage. She soon calls him over to her house.

• Mikage and Tokiko are in love with each other (Mikage acts so and Tokiko says so—according to Mikage’s story, which might be wrong), but (like Utena and Anthy) misunderstand, communicate poorly, and don’t get together. There are complications here that I don’t understand.

• When the research is done, or nearly so, Akio (no doubt using his overview knowledge) visits and suggests the final missing piece to Mikage.

• Akio seduces Tokiko. Or rather, I think he seduced Tokiko before sending her to meet Mikage, and now he arranges for Mikage to see them kissing. He wants to impel Mikage to carry out his suggestion.

• Mikage does: He burns down his building, killing himself and the 100 boys. With his death he becomes the metaphorical ruler of the dead, with an underground lair where the dead boys are stored in drawers. Curiously, when a boy who died by fire loses a duel, his body is destroyed by fire. I like the idea that the boy’s body was already destroyed by fire, and the cremation is the story catching up with reality.

• Akio has Anthy play Mamiya to manipulate Mikage into using the black roses. But this seems to be out of order: The false Mamiya was already manipulating Mikage in preparation for Akio’s plot to control Utena while Mikage was alive. It seems to be a deliberate change to Mikage’s story, not a forgotten bit.

• Akio exploits Mikage to train Utena’s power of miracles in duels. The duels are lessons in school, with school desks arrayed in the arena/classroom. Utena starts out behind the desks in the student position, and her opponent is in front in the teacher position.

• Utena wins the training duels, one after another. Along the way, she visits Akio frequently. As in the Apocalypse Saga, Akio decides what Utena is to do and ensures that she chooses “on her own initiative” to do it. It’s not that he has such perfect control; he’s not fully certain how she will react. It’s more that Utena is easy to manipulate.

When Utena visits Mikage before the final duel, the young Tokiko passes by on her way out, leaving Mikage and the Academy. In the scene of Tokiko at Mikage’s office door saying her farewells, he is wearing blue, already dead. Tokiko says he dismissed her, but that sounds like Mikage’s imagination. I take it that Tokiko left after Mikage died because Akio sent her away; she was no longer needed to manipulate Mikage. In saying her farewells Tokiko sounds resentful but tries to portray herself as newly free. I think that reflects her real feelings when Akio sent her away. Her feelings somehow pass through to Mikage as if he had confabulated the scene of her leaving to make the story self-consistent. Mikage has great power: The imaginary Tokiko is an illusion so real that others can see her. Others see ghostly Dios when Utena calls on him in a duel, but Tokiko is solid.

• The decades-older Tokiko visits Akio to cheat on her husband. On the way to Akio, she passes by the dead Mikage. In presentation order, we see this in episode 22, before Utena visits Mikage in episode 23.

A detail I don’t understand: When we first meet older Tokiko, she is in the process of standing up. We see an orange sunset sky, and Tokiko rises from below the frame and unfolds herself as if she had been on the ground. I imagine she was kneeling to pay her respects at Mamiya’s grave. But to have her stand up as if from nowhere is curious. It’s as if she were rising from the dead herself, though I don’t know how to make sense of that. Does it mean that Mamiya’s grave does not exist, so it is not shown? If so, there is no real Mamiya and both versions of Mamiya are figments.

• Utena defeats the endboss Mikage in the final duel. Mikage starts out in the student position behind the desks and Utena is in the teacher position. She has learned well. I think its main purpose is to return Mikage to his state of silent death—to inactivate him until he is needed again. He is shown to be thoroughly confused. I suppose that the inconsistencies in his story are getting out of control. Akio tells Mikage the truth, so that dead Mikage graduates and becomes adult, which is to say, he vanishes from the Academy as Utena does later.

• The Black Rose is revealed as a dream. Everybody wakes up from it and forgets the events. But the events did happen, and their effects remain. Everyone forgets Mikage and his events after he leaves the Academy, and they slowly forget Utena and her events after she leaves, but Utena’s revolution is no less real. It’s a sign that Utena is dead after she leaves (she is actually half dead).

meaning

The Black Rose arc is about dead Mikage passing along his patriarchal power to Utena. Akio arranges for Mikage to train Utena’s power of miracles.

Utena’s easy training is first, her hard training is after. The Student Council arc is about the immediate influence of the living. Utena learns from Saionji, Touga, and everyone in between. The Black Rose arc is about the permanent influence of the past, which is greater. Possession by a black rose is a direct depiction of the dead controlling the living; see duel symbols - dybbuk. Akio has a long history book of patriarchal stories, starting with Greek myths, to teach new generations how to behave. The dead can be powerful immortal symbols. See every passing candidate gets a Black Rose arc below for more on my conclusions.

The Black Rose points straight at Utena’s meaning. The dead are in stasis, and those in stasis are in effect dead. Students at the Academy are in coffins and do not grow up. Akio’s goal is to bring eternity—stasis—to himself, the patriarchy that rules the world. Akio wants to kill the world. In the story, he develops the power of miracles in Utena and intends to steal it from her and murder her. In the allegory, he intends Utena to become a powerful immortal symbol, a patriarchal story that (like Utena) wins through despite all odds, so that everyone believes it. Her story is to be remembered forever, which is to say, she is to be dead. She is to be the Euclid of the patriarchy, setting the curriculum for millennia to come.

At the end of episode 22, older Tokiko tells Akio that a plant’s flowers must die before it can bear fruit. She seems to mean that stasis is bad. She has given up her on wish to preserve flowers: The students should be allowed to mature, as she did after leaving the Academy. Akio agrees, but he has a different meaning in mind. Just then, a black rose is plucked from its basin—dead Mikage is to duel Utena. Akio agrees that the students are flowers, and agrees that they should die to bear fruit—literally die and bear the fruit of reinforcing Akio’s reign. I think Mikage’s parallels with Utena mean that Akio intends to handle Utena like Mikage: She is to die and bear fruit for him.

Mikage is an illusion, at least after he is dead. At the end of episode 23, Akio tells Mamiya “from the start, he wasn’t here.” I suppose he means from the start of the Black Rose. (Mamiya is an illusion too; that was the start for Mamiya.) In the story, Mikage appears, takes action, interacts with others, and so on, like other illusions. It represents people interacting with Mikage’s story.

If Akio means that Mikage never existed all, then he is a fictional story, like Dios. I can’t rule it out, but I don’t see that interpretation as fitting well with other parts of Utena. I think Mikage is at least based on a true story. What we see does not all fit together because the story changed, or has been changed. A more likely meaning is that Mikage was never at the Academy when alive. Before he dies he is called professor Nemuro; maybe he was a university professor and Akio transplanted his story to the Academy. It fits everything we know.

Why do the events of the Black Rose disappear from the timeline? In the story, a whole arc’s worth of Black Rose events and duels occur. Then at the end, they are forgotten. It is as if they had never occurred, though their effects remain. Utena’s power of miracles is stronger after her training; her relationship with Anthy has progressed and she realizes that Anthy is not free; she has met Akio and Kanae and learned various other things. Utena is not the only one affected; Kanae has met Utena too. A clue suggests that Utena dreams the Black Rose: She falls asleep at its beginning and wakes up at its end.

The Black Rose arc is metaphorical (like everything else). Above I talk about patriarchal stories, but there is more to the influence of the dead over the living. A child absorbs their own culture unconsciously, without trying and without realizing it, in the same kind of way that they learn language. I think the Black Rose represents the unconscious absorption of patriarchal culture, ultimately passed down from the dead (from earlier generations). Other than Akio, the characters do not remember the events of the Black Rose because they absorbed them unconsciously. What you never realize you learned, you don’t remember learning; the event in effect never occurred. Even Anthy does not remember being Mamiya (though that plausibly might have a different cause).

confession elevator

The elevator where Mikage interviews his prospective victims as he lowers them to his underworld lair. Evidence is that I picked up the term “confession elevator” somewhere and kept it, though I don’t remember when or where. Anyway, since then I have compared it to Catholic confession and concluded that it doesn’t have much in common. I thought it might be like Jungian analysis, but that’s not it either as far as I can tell. A goal of Jung’s was to bring unconscious information into awareness, but victims in the confession elevator don’t notice their unconscious desires. It’s at least not alike in that respect. I think all Mikage needs to do is determine that his victim is disturbed enough to be taken over by a black rose. All are, except Tatsuya.

See reflections - confession elevator for a few details.

Nevertheless, the regression of the butterfly back to its egg symbolizes a return to childhood and an examination of the origin of the victim’s disorder. In Utena everyone is messed up, and the confession elevator interview brings their disorder into the light. That is, the darkness. Their unconscious desires show in the duel—or some of them do; I don’t think all the underlayers come to the surface. So the elevator interview does not constitute Jungian analysis in itself, but possibly the interview plus dybbuk possession and duel do.

Every victim has a different reaction to the confession elevator and Mikage’s lair. Utena characters are varied and complicated.

Tokiko and Mamiya

The two are parallel to Utena and Anthy. See Utena + Anthy = Tokiko + Mamiya. (Utena is also parallel to Mikage. Utena’s story echoes everywhere, as an influential story should.)

Tokiko’s roses

Red roses stand in a vase and lie in a bouquet on a table at the left of the frame.
Episode 15, roses
Withered red roses lie in a bouquet on the grass.
Episode 22, faded roses

In episode 15, as Utena visits Akio by herself, the camera makes a long pan from right to left and finally shows red roses at the far left. We can guess that they go with the red and pink roses that Anthy asks Utena to deliver to Akio to set up the First Seduction in episode 33.

At the point, all we know about the roses is what we can see. We can only associate them with Utena, since she is present. There’s a vase or planter, and a separate bouquet, which might correspond to Anthy’s source of roses and the roses cut to present to Akio. The vase is blue-green and is decorated with letters S, which like other S shapes in Utena must stand for Class S. The bouquet wrapper is blue-green with more green, for control. That’s it! There’s not enough information to guess what it’s about.

The bouquet reappears in episode 22, withered and dropped on the ground, and then it becomes interpretable. The roses are associated with Akio seducing Tokiko, parallel with Akio seducing Utena in the First Seduction. The roses edge over the shadow line, saying that something underhanded is going on, and the green grass and wrapper are turning yellow for jealousy. I suppose it is Akio’s green control over Tokiko and Mikage (Akio’s control passes through Tokiko to Mikage), and for Tokiko’s jealousy over Akio’s other lovers. I think the withered roses are for Akio sending Tokiko away after Mikage dies, and by then Tokiko should know that Akio (as Anthy says) does not discriminate when it comes to girls.

The timing of the roses in episode 15, before we have met Tokiko, suggests that Akio seduced Tokiko from the start, before sending her to meet Mikage. When Tokiko is leaving, she claims that she fell in love with Mikage. It might be true (I can’t disprove it), but I think the evidence favors that it is Mikage’s wishful thinking. See the next section below, visiting Tokiko at home. Still, there is a little evidence that she might: When older Tokiko visits, she looks wistfully at young Mikage. In the shadow play, she finds it sad to see him as a robot. She talks to Akio about flowers dying to bear fruit. She wants growth, and Mikage cannot grow or progress.

The threads overlap. The roses are in the current thread, but we saw that Akio had seduced Tokiko in the past thread. Mikage is not there and presumably does not know about the roses, so it’s not natural to think that he is falsely imagining them. It’s possible, though. The whole scene of Tokiko leaving Mikage is false, but it seems to have become part of his story, so it can appear in the present as an illusion. The roses may not exist either. The roses are associated with Tokiko indirectly; we never see her with them. They can be part of an imaginary scene in the story of how Tokiko and Akio got together. The color and shadow symbolism in the picture fits it.

visiting Tokiko at home

We’re shown that, before Tokiko showed up, Mikage did not much care about his work for Akio. Afterward, we see him working hard and apparently solving difficult problems. The switchover point is when Tokiko calls him over to her house, shortly after she arrived. The red roses say that Akio had his hooks in Tokiko from the start. Akio assigned her to motivate Mikage.

At home, Tokiko wears purple and black: Her costume says she is doing something corrupt for Akio. The interior and furnishings are tinted green: She is controlling Mikage. He dresses up, as if to impress her. She wears purple lipstick, which I take to mean that she wants him to think she is trying to attract him. She sets up the sob story of her younger brother’s illness, implies that Mikage is a genius, and suggests that he cannot love. It’s a setup to snare his feelings and dissuade him from acting on them. As Akio says, Mikage is to be permanently lonely. Akio works to isolate Mikage from other influences; it’s part of his regular schtick.

Mikage met the real Mamiya and eventually remembers his face, so the real Mamiya is alive at this point. I take his illness to be real, and caused by Anthy’s poison. But Mikage’s story now includes the false Mamiya, who manipulates both Tokiko and Mikage. I expect that Anthy really did manipulate them both then, and Mikage’s story later (by forgetting or by editing) came to conflate Anthy and Mamiya. Though there is an alternate theory that Mamiya never existed, but was invented as an after-the-fact disguise for Anthy.

Utena sees Mikage as an evil manipulator, and rightly so, but she has no way to detect the mastermind behind him. Even Anthy does not remember playing Mamiya. The puppet strings are invisible.

Akio’s suggestion

At the start of episode 22, Akio talks to himself—he does not know whether Mikage will fight (the wording does not say fight Utena in particular). But he doesn’t seem to have any difficulty setting up the duel.

Mikage is in his office, wearing purple. He is having trouble solving an equation. (I suppose it is metaphorical equation, given the mystical-looking symbols on the blackboard or yellowboard). Akio visits, and gives him an envelope sealed with wax, saying it is the first step to the power to revolutionize the world. There are five lines of writing (from Mikage’s eye movements as he reads), but we know from what happens next that it boils down to sacrifice. Mikage refuses, but Akio drops a dueling ring in the teacup Tokiko used and gives Mikage’s spiel that your path has been prepared for you.

Next, the camera follows Mikage’s path. He sees a handcart being rolled past, carrying a covered coffin like others we’ve seen before. Mikage follows it, but it disappears around a corner. Instead he discovers Tokiko and Akio kissing. He turns away—and there is the handcart with his coffin, waiting for him. Mikage’s path is to sacrifice himself and the 100 boys (or those who are still alive; some must have been in coffins wheeled past). The next scene is his building on fire. In the first shot after the fire scene, Mikage is back in his office, wearing blue, Akio’s message still on his desk.

Akio is doing two things at once, one in each thread of events. Mikage wears his purple outfit in his office and when following the handcart; it is the distant past and he is alive. But we have learned that that “your path has been prepared for you” is the lead-in to a duel. Akio gave the line to Mikage in the past, and Mikage repeats it to his victims in the current time. When Akio says it to Mikage in the past, it implies that Mikage is set to duel Utena now. Though, of course, Mikage died long before Utena was born.

Every passing candidate gets a Black Rose arc, I’m thinking. There’s no proof, but it lines up with the clues. Akio constantly tries new candidates to develop the Power of Dios. The nonspecific wording at the start of episode 22, which doesn’t say who Mikage will fight, suggests that he fights every duelist who gets that far. In particular, Akio’s past candidate Ruka must have passed his equivalent of Utena’s test in the Student Council arc. He likely went through his own series of training duels, finishing with a duel against Mikage, after which Akio had Mikage “graduate”. (Though who knows, maybe he had a different kind of training arc.) And the same for many earlier candidates. Once Mikage is dead he is timeless (“eternal”), and his story can be reused over and over. It fits with the shadow play of episode 22, which depicts him as a robot. The first thing the robot says is that robots do not age. Robots are for doing the same job over and over.

In the allegory, reusing Mikage means making use of the patriarchal power of his story. The dead can retain patriarchal power: They can have attractive patriarchal stories that people believe. They are one way that Akio maintains his power. When they die they, in effect, turn into immortal symbols that carry story power and pass along their values to future generations—Mikage trains Utena to pass along his patriarchal values. The same thing happens to Utena when she “graduates”, except that Utena’s immortal story power is anti-patriarchal.

If I’m right about Ruka, then it follows that Akio manipulated Mikage into suicide in order to turn him into an immortal symbol. Akio knows that the past controls the present. He thinks of the present as a way to pile more influence up for when the future looks back. Akio shares Mikage’s goal of eternity, in the sense of stasis.

Akio reuses dead Ruka to control Juri. He intends to murder Utena. Does he intend to reuse Utena to control others? Yes: He hopes to have the Power of Dios, the power of stories that people believe. That’s what the power of Dios is. Murdering Utena is part of gaining her power; it ends her story and makes it eternal, and allows time and the system of control to polish away any subversive bits. Utena develops the power, but her story ends up with the opposite polarity.

Utena confronts Mikage

In episode 23, Utena stands at Mikage’s wall of photos, waiting for Mikage. Tokiko walks past on her way out. Mikage appears beside Utena, and he sees her as Tokiko. Utena has seen the photos on the wall and realizes that Mikage is behind the Black Rose duels.

Tokiko just walked past Utena, but Mikage speaks as though she left him long ago. Well, she has been gone for decades, so that much is correct. He’s full of himself: He tells Tokiko (really Utena) that she doesn’t have to regret abandoning him, while before leaving Tokiko spoke of being dismissed. See when Utena visits Mikage above.

Utena and Mikage have a contest of will that is compared to her contest with Touga in episode 11; see comparisons - abstract attacks 2 and the comparison above it. But she wins this one. Mikage speaks of the duelists he exploited as having memories that they wanted to make eternal. He makes it his hook to catch Utena (the world needs your memories to be eternal, he says), and she is moved, but she can’t get over the fact that he was manipulating people. A prince can’t accept that. When it’s suddenly clear that he’s trying to manipulate her too, she hits him. See down catalog - Mikage. It is an unprincely action; I think she was pushed beyond her tolerance and reacted impulsively. She is frustrated and can’t find a good solution, but settles for challenging him to a duel. He goes to the confession elevator, the loser of the confrontation and the one to need counseling. He is counseled by an imaginary Mamiya.

Utena struck Mikage down with her fist, and now holds him down.
Utena’s hair is prince-length at the photo wall, up to when she hits him. When she kneels over him as he is on the ground, her hair falls forward over her shoulder and it’s hard to judge its length. The part that runs down her back, though, reaches halfway down—it is ordinary girl length. The long hair over Utena’s right shoulder means that she is doing violence, and that she is undeluded in her motivation for violence; Mikage really is manipulative. Utena and Mikage are shown to have long fingernails: They are both women in the situation, under somebody else’s control. It’s Akio’s control, of course.
Utena twisted Mikage’s left arm behind his back. Left is for untruth: She has seen through his deceptions, and now she attacks his power of deception, holding it so that he can’t use it.

Utena is doing half one thing and half another, as so often. She sees Mikage’s evil and wants to fight it. She doesn’t have a plan, but she makes an attempt. And she is falling into Akio’s plot, doing exactly what Mikage said she should do. Mikage says she should make her memories eternal; Akio wants to give Utena an irresistible patriarchal story and make it eternal. They are essentially the same thing. In fighting Mikage she is weakly fighting against the plot, while unknowingly giving in to it.

Jay Scott <jay@satirist.org>
first posted 11 May 2024
updated 12 September 2024