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typellblog · 1 year ago

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Suruga Devil - An Analysis

Something I’ve been thinking about is how even though Oshino disappeared six books ago, some way or another a specialist manages to crawl their way into every arc. Almost irregardless of the circumstances, these kids need someone to explain the problem to them. To bring them face to face with the truth they haven’t quite realised yet.

In Hanamonogatari, though, advice might be the last thing that Kanbaru Suruga needs - despite, or perhaps because so many different people want to offer it to her.

I’ll be riding my arc formula all the way from Bakemonogatari until the wheels fall off, so I think here I want to talk about the title again.

Suruga Devil. Isn’t that odd? It almost sounds like we’re dealing with the exact same oddity as her first arc. Except there’s a different Devil-sama in this one, someone who has more devil parts than Suruga herself. Numachi Rouka is also an oddity, by virtue of being already dead, and by that logic Suruga must be the ‘victim’ of her haunting.

The theory is floated here that all ghosts work similarly to Hachikuji. They hang around because of a certain regret, and people with a similar regret or issue are the only ones that can see them. What, then, is Rouka’s?

I think there’s something to be said for how obviously she wants to play basketball with Suruga again.

Even in a series full of unreliable narrators Rouka is unique in that we don’t get to see her internal narration, just how she chooses to present her life story to Suruga. There are hints that she was spinning it a bit - Higasa mentions that ‘family issues’ Rouka hardly talked about also contributed to her suicide, not just the broken leg.

Frankly I see in Rouka someone trying to put up a strong front to hide how severely something actually affected her. She refers to herself derisively as misfortunate, acknowledges the suffering that it caused her, but still tries to make herself seem distant from it, like it’s something she’s already dealt with. Like her misfortune-collecting has made her happy again.

Her initial attitude is hostile, confrontational. She seems like she’s trying to upset Suruga, describing her own activities in a tone that makes it obvious how unapologetic she is about the scumminess of it all. She wants to feel powerful, in control of the situation, even if it means she has to come off as an asshole.

In their final match Suruga leans into it, matching Rouka’s hostility and desire to compete with her rather than running away from it. I want to say it’s a way of paying her final respects.

Rouka says she didn’t feel like she ever suffered a clear loss in life. Her injury didn’t come from a dramatic final showdown. Losing her scholarship didn’t make it impossible to continue schooling. And her leg’s rehabilitation didn’t make it impossible for her to live on. But at the same time, all of these things ground her down until she didn’t know what to do. Rouka says you can run away from almost every problem, and she did. She ran away from school. She ran away from getting a job. And in the end, she ran away from life.

Kaiki remarks to Suruga that she can’t run away from all her problems. In his case he makes it brutally literal, but in an emotional sense he’s not somebody Suruga can ignore either, this weird older dude that has a history with her mother. Koyomi and Hitagi apparently told her to run away as soon as she met him, but they must not have considered he might have no ill will towards Suruga, not do anything that justifies running away from him.

When Rouka gets on top of Suruga and draws close enough to kiss, she could run. She knows she could run. She doesn’t. Did you want her to kiss you? Some things you can’t run away from, because deep down you don’t want to. Like the dark reverse side of a wish.

For Rouka, the Rainy Devil is a competitor. It actually does something to solve people’s problems, where her method allows these anxieties to work themselves out by having the people in question do nothing at all. Some things are only made worse by worrying about them - in the hands of the Rainy Devil these problems that may have worked themselves out over time instead get escalated into potentially life-destroying issues. Rouka isn’t one to make use of the devil’s arm, Suruga thinks. She would simply run away from the problem, not rely on external means to solve it. She’s strong like that. Strong enough to pretend her problems don’t matter to her.

Only to pretend, though. The phrase “It’s better to regret doing something than regret not doing it” comes up. Rouka is of course on the side of regretting not doing something. A third path between victory and defeat. It has its advantages, Suruga does acknowledge it. But it can’t resolve anything. Rouka’s problems still exist, she just isn’t facing them. What Suruga does is make Rouka confront her and in doing so symbolically confront everything. It gives her a clear reason for her loss. It lets her let go.

I think the reason that Rouka is so confrontational with Suruga, so eager to play basketball again, is because she knew this on some level. She prefers to regret not doing something, but of course that means she still regrets not doing something. She still wants to do it, still wants to play a proper match and finish off their middle-school rivalry.

I wondered what Rouka’s specific regret was, as a ghost, and while that game is about as close as anything, it still feels like I’m missing the big picture. Rouka doesn’t just collect misfortune, she collects devil parts. The things that show up physically on your body to prove you made a wish. The things that remain so long as that wish isn’t granted. The physical manifestation of regret for a choice that still has Suruga checking the news every morning to make sure she didn’t do anything during the night without remembering.

Hachikuji gets people lost because she is lost. Rouka frees people from the regret of doing something because she herself never did anything about the situation she found herself in. It’s why she’s so interested in hearing the stories, along with the devil parts. People who did something she could never do. People who failed and became even more unfortunate than her, thus proving her right.

She takes the devil parts from people who don’t want them anymore. You can’t run away from something if you really do still want it, but Suruga is well over it at this point. Consider how Suruga deals with the devil’s continued presence in her life. Refusing to run out of fear that someone might be faster than her. She used the arm to pursue Hitagi to the point of destruction, but in equal measure refused to do so, and in doing so was unable to replicate Koyomi’s success. In that sense, when Kaiki says you can’t outrun everything, he’s telling her that it’s okay to lose. It’s okay to try, and then fail. It’s okay to just hand the arm over to Rouka and move on.

Higasa remarks that Suruga seems too positive of a person to have heard the Devil-sama rumor - because that’s the type of person Suruga is seen as. Polite, enthusiastic, direct, a star athlete, a hard worker, a rich kid, a goody two-shoes. The type of person who would take issue with Rouka’s methods. Rouka expects a fight, because in a lot of ways Suruga is Rouka’s opposite, someone who would slap her in the face upon hearing about what she’s doing.

At the same time, Suruga is the type of person to immediately second-guess that reaction. She lets Rouka’s hand sit on her chest for an uncomfortable length of time (the symbolic gesture associated with taking her devil arm!) because she feels bad about hitting her. Of course she would. She straps her arm to the wall at night because she’s scared of hitting someone again.

In other words, contrary to expectation, she’s the exact type of person that would encounter Rouka. The correct type of person to hear the Devil-sama rumor. The type of person that’s still burdened by the regret of a wish that turned into an obsession. Exactly the type of problem that can be solved, will be solved, simply by doing nothing.

I said I still wanted to talk about the arc formula, and here it raises an interesting question of where exactly the specialist comes in. Kaiki, of course, is prominent in this novel - but even though he helps, he hardly explains anything. He has a policy, Rouka tells us, of only sharing half his information. It’s a little like Oshino’s rule of balance, but even less helpful. He shies away from the spotlight out of what I imagine is self-preservation - running away from Koyomi and Hitagi in Karen Bee, blatantly subverting their expectations that he explain Karen’s oddity. He does it anyway, but it’s pointless. The fever disappears on its own.

Where Meme’s balance is to make sure he doesn’t interfere too much in others’ problems, ensure his surprisingly impressive spiritual abilities don’t create further disturbances in the course of solving them, Kaiki’s balance is to make sure he always has another opportunity to mess with people in the future, to ensure his practical-minded refusal to believe in spirits entirely doesn’t end up biting him in the ass.

Even so, we’ve come to expect someone to come and clear things up, explain that which our protagonist was too slow to grasp on their own, put a neat little tie on the end of things. Like Tooe Gaen, perhaps? Deceased but apparently no less of an authority on the supernatural. “The motivation for justice is envy of evil,” we’re told, explaining precisely what left Suruga so unsettled about Rouka. Rouka did what she could never do, just like Suruga did what Rouka couldn’t.

It’s a nice enough explanation, putting things into the dualistic perspective that Tooe seems to prefer. “If you can’t be medicine, then be poison, otherwise you’re just plain old water.” It doesn’t matter if you help others or hurt others as long as you do something, act in accordance with your nature, don’t let yourself be bound by the restrictions of society or conscience. Those are the type of people she seems most interested in, and the type of person Suruga ought to become as a result of this arc - someone who acts, as opposed to the inactive Rouka.

And yet neither her nor Rouka seem to fit into Tooe’s format. Rouka, despite being plain water, is still muddy. A swamp. That mud, composed of everyday misfortune, is nothing nearly so interesting as to be called poison. Suruga is even more confused. A flash-flood, capable of clearing up the dirt that Rouka collected?

Suruga didn’t envy Rouka because she was evil. The implication there is that Rouka took pleasure in shattering social boundaries that Suruga felt obligated to stick to. But Suruga has already experienced what it’s like to violently pursue one’s own wishes in disregard of the feelings of others. It’s not fun! Suruga is jealous of, if anything, Rouka’s coolness. Her ability to roll with the punches, accept what happened to her with a laugh, shamelessly use her misfortune and pitiability as weapons.

And Rouka, despite how she presents herself, was quite clearly not evil. Her offered ‘help’ is for entirely self-centered motives, and yet she’s much more concerned with the lives of others than her own. She does act like she doesn’t care about the people asking her for help, but all the same she does redirect those with more serious issues to the correct services. She did say she genuinely wanted to help Hanadori Rouka, the girl she met with the left leg, which is surprising from the perspective of Suruga’s vague animosity towards her, but completely understandable if you just think of Rouka as a normal girl.

Suruga is neither good nor evil, as Koyomi puts it at the end of the book. She didn’t do the right thing, or the wrong thing. Neither did Rouka. They simply couldn’t look away from one another. Looking away, like running away, is only something you can do if you don’t really want to look. Even if Suruga ran away Rouka would have kept haunting her. She had the qualifications for it. Similarly, I feel like Rouka simply couldn’t look away from people’s misfortune, from the devil parts. Oddities arise for a reason, people have to want them on some level, and perhaps that’s true from the oddity’s side as well.

Speaking of Koyomi, though, he’s the last to give advice. He encounters Suruga at her lowest point, where she doesn’t know what to do, and quite literally helps her get back on her feet. His specialist qualifications are a bit iffy, but this is a timeskip - he’s in college, he’s more or less overcome his coming of age stuff. The thing is, his advice is to ignore everyone’s advice. For Suruga to act like herself, act on her instincts. To do neither the right thing or the wrong thing.

Ironically, characteristically, she takes the advice anyway.

She’s immediately less unsettled around Rouka, more confident in how she wants to play it. I think about her bluntly stating she’s an exhibitionist. It’s a pervy joke, something that’s been oddly absent in this book so far. One of the things we realise, looking at the world from Suruga’s benefit, is that her perversion, her exhibitionism, frankly even her queerness and interest in BL was much played up for the benefit of Koyomi. At the same time, though, I don’t think that makes it somehow false or an inaccurate representation of herself. She was able to be more overt with these things around Koyomi, because he was accepting of it, and that’s a largely positive thing.

It’s not a coincidence that her meeting with Koyomi gives her the confidence to be more like that with Rouka, or that this line about exhibitionism actually ties into an important part of her character. You see, right after, Rouka says it must have been tough for her to conceal the devil’s arm.

I think about the arm as representative of the stigma of queerness, as something that paints her desire for Hitagi as animal and violent (even as it’s capable of finding perfectly healthy expression on the flip side), as something that she has to conceal from others. Recall how in Suruga Monkey her being a lesbian is revealed right after the arm itself, and it’s her sexuality that Koyomi finds the more shocking.

From that perspective, you could think about Rouka as helping the devil part bearers integrate into society by removing the outward signs of their queerness, their difference. She takes it all on herself, with her oddly dyed hair, baggy tracksuit, put-on limp. She takes it all on herself because she no longer needs to live in normal society. No longer can.

It kind of explains more of Suruga’s hesitance to let Rouka go. It’s not like she wants to keep the arm. It’s not like it represents the truth of her sexuality in itself. She was gay before the arm and will be after. I think it moreso represents Tooe’s approach to identity and self-change. You can be whatever you want, but becoming is an inherently painful process.

We’d like to think that Tooe’s message was that you should learn to change yourself rather than relying on suspicious magical artifacts, but the fact that she exposed Suruga to that risk in the first place indicates she’s fine with danger as a teaching device. Fine with her daughter becoming poison. Maybe even fine with her killing someone.

In the end, all the arm does is give her an inferiority complex. Her admiration of Hitagi, her graceful running style, is built on the fact that Suruga herself doesn’t feel she can run like that. She’s faster, but also uglier, more desperate. Her admiration of Koyomi, his self-sacrificing nature, is built on her shame over not being able to help Hitagi more herself. She’s self-effacing, but also uglier, more jealous.

Suruga is glad to lose the arm, but she still feels uneasy about Rouka getting it. About being saved by someone else. Aren’t people supposed to just go ahead and save themselves? In this one thing, at least, Rouka is a more helpful specialist than even Oshino Meme.

On that topic, the last person to give Suruga advice is Rouka herself. At the end of their second meeting, Rouka tells her to live a normal life. Do all the things I couldn’t do. She’s a negative example, telling people to not end up like her. Just stay in the closet. This, too, will pass.

That, kinda sucks though. Integrate into society? Drop all visible signs of your queerness? Get a boyfriend? Rouka’s channeling old tragic yuri tropes for the last time she thinks they’ll ever meet.

Is that really what Rouka thinks? Does she really envy Suruga’s potential to be normal? To get a job? Because the opposite is precisely what Suruga envies about her - Rouka’s ability to ignore social expectations. The thing is, after their final match, the advice changes again. Who cares about studying for exams? Just start playing basketball again. This is really the only thing I can imagine Rouka envying Suruga for. It’s the path where she gets to make use of her arm again.

Saying that basketball is representative of Suruga’s queerness here is even more of a stretch than applying that to her arm, but there’s at least one important respect in which the analogy kinda works.

The way she wins the game.

Basketball is a game for more than one player. The phrasing is a little awkward - ideally it would read “Basketball is a game for two players” to make the comparison to romance even more explicit, but - that isn’t true, is it. So the fact that there are exactly two of them playing becomes a little more significant, I think.

They have to combine their efforts to get the ball into the hoop. That’s a disingenuous way of putting it, when they’re on opposite sides, but it’s still true. Rouka, after all, couldn’t get it in alone. That wasn’t her aim in the first place. She was just trying not to lose.

Suruga didn’t just let her lose decisively for the first time, she also let Rouka win. Rouka wasn’t passed to, much, when she used to play. This is the first time she realises that basketball can’t be played alone.

And, well, when you put it in that sense, basketball isn’t just representative of romance, it’s representative of life in general. When you look back on Rouka’s backstory, at this point, one thing stands out. She never relied on anyone else. She never had anyone to rely on. It’s so bad that she ends up in Suruga’s orbit. The anime opening portrays what it might be like if they had a closer relationship, but that’s something that had to be invented in retrospect, because they really didn’t talk much. They didn’t even properly play against each other much. But when it comes down to it, Rouka is drawn to Suruga’s family inheritance of the devil parts, Suruga’s family inheritance of an annoying conman uncle, and in the end, back to Suruga herself.

Suruga’s not the only person who ever truly understood her, as you might expect from a school rivalry situation. Suruga is simply the only person in a position where it’s even possible to truly understand her. The only person that could have drawn that final dunk out of her. The only person who could remind Rouka that she really did enjoy basketball, enjoy life.

In doing so, it serves as a reminder to herself, as well.

Thanks for reading, everyone! Call this the Pride Month special, even though I didn’t discuss the queer themes of this story as much as I would have liked. Next: Otori. Oh boy.

#monogatariposting #hanamonogatari #kanbaru suruga #numachi rouka

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