Nura

#AveMujica (A bit long to read) A reflection on the poetic and literary imagery of the loft in anime Ave Mujica—and why, to me, the idea of Sakiko residing in Uika’s loft is so uniquely compelling. It started because a friend mentioned: “Misumi Uika’s house only has a loft, just like the Wakaba house has a basement.” Here, I explore the deeper symbolism of the loft, guided by Chapter 1 of Gaston Bachelard’s of The Poetics of Space (La Poétique de l’espace*). When it comes to a loft, compared with spaces that symbolize the subconscious, instinct, nameless fear, darkness, and the sensual, the loft represents sublimation, daydreams, secrets, memories, and a shrine of rationality. In literature, hiding a woman in a loft/grenier and hiding her in a basement/cellar involve different psychological metaphors. Hiding someone in a cellar is connected to the Id and the discharge of desire. In more Gothic works, or in something more widely known like Bluebeard, it is associated with imprisonment, torment, pure malice, and destruction. Freud used it as a symbol of the Id; in Jung’s spatial metaphors, the cellar is an abyss of the unconscious where nameless fears accumulate. The loft, however, represents the Superego. The keeper’s purpose is to enshrine and treasure the person hidden there: to remove her from the dirty, chaotic surface of the secular world, raise her high above it, and place her in an almost metaphysically pure space.(Bachelard writes:“The house is imagined as a vertical being. It rises upward. It differentiates itself in terms of its verticality. It is one of the appeals to our consciousness of verticality.”) I think this is also why, in a lot of the early Uisaki fanworks with imprisonment and SM themes, many creators felt that a “basement” suited them better than a “loft”, and would even imagine that there was a basement underneath Uika’s apartment. (Although, in fact, the person whose house has a basement is Mutsumi. In the anime, Mutsumi is shown several times sitting in a moonlit basement. The way she curls herself up in the chair gives her a feeling of being psychologically abused and self-imprisoned. Sakiko in the loft lacks those elements and instead has another, stranger kind of flavor. This is what I want to get into next: imprisonment in a loft and imprisonment in a basement carry different meanings.) In Mujica, there are repeated hints of a prison like the one in Image-1. A traditional attic has a door and a lock, so the person hidden inside at least has a private space of her own. Modern lofts, however, are often high-ceilinged and open-plan, like Uika’s house. In practice, this is a completely transparent, upside-down Panopticon: a prison that looks down from above. We repeatedly see it from two angles in the anime. Looking up from the living room on the lower floor, the railings and edges of the loft mezzanine are completely visible, and we can see Sakiko working. Looking down from the loft, every trace of daily life is also exposed. Whatever Uika is doing in the living room, unless she is standing in the blind spot of the open kitchen, Sakiko can see it all clearly. This is an absolute violence of the gaze, while also creating a distorted symbiosis. Sakiko lives up high and should, in theory, be the one looking down from above—a symbol of superiority and divinity. But in reality, every movement of her life, every time she turns over in bed, even the disheveled state she is in just after waking up, is caught within Uika’s field of vision and hearing below, if Uika wants to listen. Well..I should clarify that I’m not saying Uika would really do this. I mean that deliberately choosing a real Japanese apartment with this kind of layout as the model for Uika’s home, and then having Sakiko live in the loft, evokes certain classical images and metaphors. In other words, what does this open-plan space lead you to associate it with? Everyone knows that a loft is not a room, nor is it an enclosed private space. Sakiko, situated above, resembles not so much the usual symbol of a throne of power as an exposed terrace on display. So how does the verticality and rational dream-space I mentioned at the beginning enter into the metaphor of their relationship? Generally speaking, placing someone in the highest part of a LOFT resembles the kind of ritual in which a saintly maiden is sent up into a high TOWER. The imprisoned person is at least treated with respect, but is unable to come down on her own—like Rapunzel in her stone tower, or Sleeping Beauty in the tower where she falls asleep after pricking her finger. These are all metaphors of vertical distance in the sense Bachelard describes. The “keeper” feeds her and looks up at her, projecting the softest and most sacred fantasy into that high-ceilinged space, while subconsciously believing that the world on the ground outside will defile her. It is a kind of psychological soft imprisonment packaged as protection and worship. Uisaki has an example of this too. At the very beginning of Episode 5, Uika does something that crosses a line: she hangs up the call from the agency to Sakiko after the breakup of the band. “でなくていいよ。ずっと… ここにいていいから(You don’t have to answer it. You can just… stay here forever.)”She then asks Sakiko whether she would still be willing to stay here, in her loft, even without Mujica. Here, hanging up the phone is an excessive act of protectiveness: the “outside world on the ground will defile her” idea I mentioned earlier. Asking Sakiko whether she wants to stay is the keeper hoping that the god she has enshrined will not leave her shrine.Japanese household miniature shrines (神棚-かみだな, Image-4) are often installed high up near the ceiling. From this perspective, I also especially love the way Episode 2 is written when Sakiko first arrives at Uika’s house. When Uika is thinking about where to let Sakiko settle, Sakiko HERSELF chooses the loft.(Naturally, there is basically nowhere else to choose from lol, but that is precisely why it is interesting that the scene deliberately has Sakiko look toward the loft). She is drawn to it. Once we look back at the scene after the story has ended, we can see that it may even function as a double metaphor. Her mother’s doll is placed beneath the moon, echoing the “Loftmoon” metaphor from the puppet show in the first half of Mujica. Then, at the end of the story, when Sakiko declares herself a god in Episode 12, this loops back to the same idea: in Episode 2, she had already climbed into the mini shrine of Uika’s house by herself and become the being to be worshipped. From beginning to end, that is exactly what she was.(What a perfect closed loop!) There are two more points that can be extended from here. The first is Bachelard’s idea that everything that shines is looking (Tout ce qui brille voit).This also appears in Chapter 1. The faint light in the mezzanine high up in Uika’s house (Image-2) is actually the “eye of the house.” It is keeping watch (veille), surveilling (surveille), and waiting (attend). And the solitary watcher possesses a hypnotic power:“Can we not say that the light coming from a solitary watcher, from an obstinate watcher, takes on a hypnotic power? We are hypnotized by solitude, hypnotized by the gaze of the solitary house.(Ne peut-on pas dire que la lumière venant d'un veilleur solitaire, d'un veilleur obstiné prend une puissance d'hypnotisme. Nous sommes hypnotisés par la solitude, hypnotisés par le regard de la maison solitaire.)” The keeper, Uika, runs around in the secular world during the day, seemingly the person who holds the key and controls everything. But her soul has already been drawn to and locked onto that faint light and that gaze high above. She is constantly anxious about losing what she has, and the moment there is even a little gap in her attention, she starts worrying. The instant she steps through the door, she instinctively looks up to check. Episode 5 shows all of this: when she comes home with pudding, the first thing she looks at is the loft. After Sakiko leaves, Uika walks home and looks from a distance toward the apartment, where there is no longer any faint light indicating that Sakiko is still there (Image-3). Uika is afraid that the faint light in the loft has gone out. If the shrine is empty, the keeper’s own psychic universe will collapse instantly. (I also really love that dim orb of light. It symbolizes the “faint light” of Sakiko’s existence in the house. So notice that whether Uika comes home and makes two cups of coffee in Episode 5, or writes the lyrics for Imprisoned XII in the loft in Episode 10, that little orb is never switched on. Sakiko is no longer there, so the faint light no longer exists, and Uika’s world gradually collapses. I also love how especially shadowy the loft is… but that connects to Junichiro Tanizaki, so I’ll leave it aside for now.) Therefore, Sakiko, hidden up high, becomes the only light and anchor in that space—in Uika’s apartment. This is where the power relationship undergoes a beautiful inversion. The person who “imprisons” someone else becomes the most humble believer and servant outside the prison door. This is why the loft provides so much information—and so much deliciousness—in the metaphor and depiction of their relationship. The second point concerns the stairs leading to the loft. Episode 12 has that somewhat daydream-like scene of the two of them lying in the loft. (Let me reiterate: in reality, a loft could not possibly be illuminated that brightly. This is a metaphor created through light, shadow, and color to reflect the characters’ state of mind, like so many scenes in the Mujica anime). Uika is the one who goes downstairs to make coffee, and this is followed by the imagery of Sakiko declaring herself a god. The loft carries certain images of dreams and wishes. In Bachelard’s phenomenology of space, once the mind enters the loft of dreams, the staircase has only the meaning of ascending (ascension) because going downward means returning to the banality of the secular ground. The loft is “the most tranquil solitude(la plus tranquille solitude**)”. Sakiko gains an extreme peace that is undisturbed by the secular world, but the price is that her existence remains suspended in midair. The moment she touches the ground, she loses her sanctity. (This is why I have always supported the idea of Sakiko continuing to work on Mujica in the loft. The imagery is simply too perfect. She climbed into the shrine herself to become Mujica’s god, after all.) In pure reverie, one never descends again (je ne redescends jamais). So when she says:“もう少しだけ、まどろみに浸っていたい(I want to remain immersed in this drowsy dream just a little longer)”, she is disturbed by the smell of coffee rising from the ground floor. Apart from all the coffee metaphors we have already talked about, there may be another layer here: even while she is acting as this god and living in this dream, she still needs ordinary life—the coffee that keeps her awake—to support her. But this is also secular banality, and she resents the fact that it is nevertheless unavoidable. What an endearing little god. In truth, Sakiko has tumbled down from her "lofts" and "high towers" into the earthly mud many times: first, running away from the aristocratic Togawa estate upon learning of her father’s exile; second, leaving the loft after the band collapsed in Episode 5; third, after being dragged back into the Togawa tower and facing exile to Switzerland—a distant tower beyond her companions' reach—she flees to Shodoshima to find Uika. In the end, she chooses to return to the shrine of Uika’s loft, resuming her place as her little god. The loft is a profoundly fascinating symbol. Sakiko could certainly walk down the stairs whenever she wishes; she could set foot on secular ground, choosing to share an ordinary, domestic life with the keeper who worships her—which itself represents a gradual reconciliation with "coffee." Yet she remains on that elevated mezzanine in Uika’s home. So long as she resides in that loft, the foundational dynamics of their bond and the impression cast by that spatial imagery will always carry this evocative, endlessly intriguing shade. And that is, undeniably, quintessentially Mujica. --- *The Poetics of Space (La Poétique de l'espace) Author: Gaston Bachelard I also highly recommend this book to anyone interested in how architectural spaces affect people psychologically, or in how works of fiction use space to create symbols and metaphors. Bachelard is also an author whose ideas and theories of poetics I personally think may have been referenced during the conceptual and world-building stages of Mujica. His other works on poetic theory include: The Psychoanalysis of Fire, 1938 Water and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Matter, 1942 Air and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Movement, 1943 Earth and Reveries of Will: An Essay on the Imagination of Force, 1948 Earth and Reveries of Repose: An Essay on the Imagination of Intimacy, 1948 The complete passage from Bachelard is: **L'escalier qui va à la cave, on le descend toujours. C'est sa descente qu'on retient dans les souvenirs, c'est la descente qui caractérise son onirisme. […] Enfin, l'escalier du grenier plus raide, plus fruste, on le monte toujours. Il a le signe de l'ascension vers la plus tranquille solitude. Quand je retourne rêver dans les greniers d'antan, je ne redescends jamais. (p. 52) “The staircase leading to the cellar is always descended. It is its descent that remains in our memories; it is the descent that characterizes its dreamlike quality. […] Finally, the loft staircase, steeper and rougher, is always climbed. It bears the sign of ascension toward the most tranquil solitude. When I return to dream in the lofts of the past, I never descend again.”