hontou ni sou omou?

Yuuko is asked by a housewife to grant a wish: to be able to quit the internet. Said housewife kinda gets molested by Yuuko in the process and, in the end, it’s really up to her. In the manga, this story moved me deeply and I’m glad that the anime conveys the meaning and atmosphere very well. It’s also becoming clearer to me that I enjoy xxxHOLiC episodes much more when Yuuko has a lot of screentime as (1) Watanuki is really irritating, especially when shouting at Doumeki and fawning over Himawari and (2) Yuuko is very oneesama. (;^_^)

As seen above, Yuuko systematically invades her client’s personal space. The physical process underlines and reinforces Yuuko’s psychological grip over the housewife as the time-space witch prepares her client for the choice she needs to make. It seems that, even in the end, the housewife still isn’t fully resolved. Her voice showed resolution but her body language said otherwise - she was trying to avoid Yuuko’s gaze and did not nod her assent which are two crucial signs showing strong positive agreement. However at least she didn’t touch her mouth or nose which is a sign the person is lying or at least uneasy with what she is saying. The closing scene (last screencap) shows the ambiguity of the conclusion; the struggle will be a long and constant one. I do think all this fits the standard body language reading templates as CLAMP is quite famous for attention to detail and women are much better at and pay much more attention to reading body language anyway.

Another thing that struck me about this episode/chapter was the Zen Buddhist philosophy that forms the basis of Yuuko’s exposition of addiction and resolution. This is not exactly surprising as one of xxxHOLiC’s themes is the exploration and celebration of Japanese myth, ritual and belief. Desire is natural (rather than resulting from the taint of original sin) and its expression is the result of the exercise of human will (rather than the work of the Devil). Similarly its restraint is the result of human will (rather than that of the Divine).

Just like the classical economists, this strain of philosophy recognizes human desire as being limitless which explains why desire can never seem to be satisfied. [Aside: This is also why Marxism went tits up as it which conflated human needs (limited) with human wants (unlimited).] That’s more or less why one can never, for example, have enough anime or anime goods. Most approaches to containing desire and addiction deal with attacking stimulus ("see no evil, hear no evil") or constraining the resource-acquisition base ("wallet am cry"). The problem is that being presented with stimulus and having any scrap of resource rapidly re-ignites desire and often exacerbates it - making up for lost time/ground in the form of an even larger binge. Recovering alcoholics or people who are trying to quit smoking or even people on a diet will know, feel, hear the physical sensation when seeing others enjoying a drink or a cigarette or a chocolate dessert - how quickly the chains of restraint crumble into rust; the beast walks the land again; through the cracks, the dark tide rises silently to the surface.

Yuuko’s approach starts with finding a reason to quit. The reason come from within one’s being. It cannot be for the sake of others as it is not within them that this desire dwells. Yuuko relentlessly pushes her to find the real reason, or not, to quit with a series of probing "Why"s which is also decidedly Zen. Often we or others trying to help us don’t push hard enough as the truth, far from being a shining light, can often be a very unappealing thing. In the vein of the alcoholism example, drinking oneself to death isn’t because the drinking itself is pleasurable (well, it is initially but only up a still reasonable point) but because the drinking drowns out the helplessness and the unhappiness elsewhere. Truly recognizing that means having to tackle that helplessness and unhappiness which the drinking was supposed to help one avoid in the first place. Besides alcohol, this also applies to binge-eating, sexual addiction and, even sometimes, evangelical religion. Thus Yuuko’s point about deciding not to quit, show real determination in throwing oneself completely into the addiction, which is also why people who are obsessively otaku, alcoholic or evangelical are all pretty scary people.

The episode doesn’t complicate the story unnecessarily with the issues above. It states simply that to quit, one has to have a good reason, after which action and determination are the expression of that reason. For the housewife, cold turkey is the only way as her desire is so strongly and deeply rooted. A successful end result would to be faced with strong stimulus (i.e. internet access) but that it slides off like water off a duck’s back and the heart no longer responds to it. To conclude, there are two nice quotes to go with this. The first, from Nie Che, Buddhist recluse from Hangzhou in 800 AD: “Even a three year old child can say this, but even a grey-haired man finds it difficult to practise.” And JFK: “We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.”