Homunculus
a review by DrFlapJack
a review by DrFlapJack
The subject of brain damage and mental afflictions is one that is never short of interesting stories to study and write on. Like the story of Phineas Gage, who accidentally launched a tamping iron through his own skull and miraculously survived the loss of a significant amount of his left frontal lobe and an infection of the brain. I don't know about you, but if I was still kicking after taking a giant metal pole to the head I would be exceedingly proud of myself. Or the life of short story author Thom Jones, who suffered from frontal lobe epilepsy, which would cause him to experience dissociative fugues. These episodes would be the inspiration behind his story A White Horse. Or perhaps the curious case of Clive Wearing, who contracted an encephalitis infection that destroyed his episodic memory, but left his procedural memory intact. These are all pretty tame, though, compared to the disturbing mindscrew that is Homunculus. They say life is stranger than fiction, but I find that hard to believe sometimes when I encounter fiction like this.
The concept of the homunculi and their designs are based on the famous 'little man in the brain' illustration used in psychology.
Trepanation is a process where a hole is drilled into a person's skull. Examples of trepanation as far back as the Mesolithic period have been found, and it is one of the oldest known surgical procedures. Believe it or not, it actually had a practical purpose. It could be used to treat hematomas, cerebral edema and relieve intracranial pressure, much like a craniectomy. I've also seen stories of beatniks doing it to themselves in order to "be high all the time." (Don't know if it actually works, but seems like a bad idea regardless of its efficacy). This idea of doing it to achieve some sort of mental enhancement is what Homunculus is based around.
Homunculus also relies on the concept of the Id, Ego, and Super-ego. The Ego is the pragmatic, rational part of the psyche; the Id is the collection of unconscious desires and fears that lurks deep beneath the surface; and the Super-ego is the mediator between the Id and the Ego. It coordinates instinct and rationality in order to create our sense of what's right and wrong. Now, most of Freud's ideas are pretty stupid, but I always kind of liked this one. It makes sense if you think about it. People are pretty good at lying to themselves and burying things they don't want to think about. Often times people do odd things and don't even understand why themselves. That's their unconscious rising to the surface and influencing their conscious actions. It's sort of like the "We all wear masks in our everyday lives" concept. What people show to others is only a small fraction of who they really are. It would take a master psychiatrist to drag the Id into the open. Or perhaps a hobo with a hole in his head might do the trick.
In most 'exorcise the ghost' plotlines, the protagonist is not really the main focus of what's going on. They're usually just a convenient point of view from which the audience gets to experience the supernatural strangeness and the more interesting characters. But in Homunculus, it's the opposite. The environment and the other characters are the conduit through which the audience gets clues about the primary object of interest: our "hero", Susumu Nakoshi. Everytime you learn more about the people and world, you learn more about Nakoshi himself. In a bizarro world full of uncanny valley characters and monstrous mirages, Nakoshi manages to stand out as the strangest enigma of them all.
The bulk of the mystery of Homunculus involves piecing together the mind and motivations of Nakoshi. How did he end up losing his job? What is he trying to accomplish by living on the outskirts of the park? Why does he keep lying about the smallest of things? It's clear from the moment you see him that there's more to him then meets the eye. His bland attitude and lying habit hide a deeply empathetic man with a buried longing to be understood and accepted. Despite his pitiful origins, I could never really bring myself to truly sympathize with Nakoshi. He is a very selfish individual by nature, and he doesn't puzzle over the homunculi out of any sort of altruism. He just wants to understand himself better, and is naturally drawn to people in whom he can see reflections of himself. Not to mention his slow mental decline causes him to cross quite a few lines, which makes it hard to hold onto any positive feelings towards him.
Now, you might think that Nakoshi's descent into insanity might, just might be caused by that gaping hole in his noggin. But personally, I think he probably would have eventually gone crazy with or without the trepanation and the homunculi. They were just the catalyst. It's pretty clear that even before the experiment he had some toys in the attic, if you catch my drift. Something would have ended up setting him off sooner or later.
Possibly due to my distrust and dislike of the protagonist, I felt strangely detached from what was happening. I looked at these strange people and their strange problems the way one might look at a bug in a glass jar. I observed their behavior with great fascination, but no empathy. I didn't really care how it turned out. I was just along for the ride, come what may. This sense of detachment permeates the whole manga. Nakoshi is detached from both the world of the destitute and the world of the prosperous. He is detached from both other people, and himself. He is forever trapped as an observer, looking in but unable to commit to either world. He attempts throughout the story to breach the barrier by trying to influence the people around him, but in the end all it did was set him even further adrift then he already was.
This detachment contributed to a feeling of deep distrust in the characters and the dubious veracity of their words and actions. Everything I witnessed I treated with great suspicion. After all, everything we see is through the eyes of a pathological liar. All that he says and sees are tainted with his twisted up worldview. This is the reason why the homunculi we see represent only one single facet of an individual's personality. Nakoshi is looking for parts of himself in other people, projecting his own problems onto them, if you will. He sees only what he wants to see. And what he wants to see is not always a good representation of what's actually happening.
Of course, we musn't forget the best part of the story, Ito Manabu. Despite his somewhat off-putting behavior and questionable fashion sense, he is the closet thing the story has to an anchor on reality. He provides insightful commentary on the storie's themes and symbolism and what they all might mean. His presence is absolutely vital, as he keeps Nakoshi, and by extension the folks beyond the fourth wall grounded. Manabu is almost as unreliable as Nakoshi, so he hinders understanding of the plot just as much as he helps it along. He himself admits to being squeamish about the idea of the supernatural, and is quite unwilling to accept that what's going on might be beyond the ordinary. Even so, I found myself clinging to him more and more as the story went on and Nakoshi's grip on reality became even more tenuous.
Homunculus is told with an almost disturbing frankness. Nothing is ever really held back from the audience. If it happens, you'll get to see all of it in vivid detail no matter how disturbing it is. There's a pattern that i've seen a lot of writers overuse: Tease that something unspeakably terrible will happen in the next episode or chapter, then subvert it in the next installment by convenient interruption or revealing that it was actually something else altogether. This pattern is noticably absent in Homunculus. Everything the story teases is carried out, with nothing to put a stop to the madness. Hm, Nakoshi's getting ready to drill a hole in his own head? I bet Ito will rush in and stop him. Oh. Oh wait, he actually went through with it. And it's all on screen. And now he's poking it with his finger. Welp, I guess I didn't really need to eat today anyway.
Many readers will find this brutal honesty to be something of a double-edged sword. Some scenes become rather bitter pills to swallow because of it. But it's important to remember what kind of manga Homunculus is. It's rather silly to complain about a horror manga being too unsettling. Of course it's gonna make your skin crawl, that's the whole point. I do think certain scenes could have been written with a little more delicacy. However, the saving grace for all this distressing imagery is the fact that there's a point to it all. It's not just for shock value. The author has an idea he wants to get across and that's what he does, regardless of how uncomfortable it might make his readers. This kind of daring gives me a bit of cautious respect for Hideo Yamamoto. I like to see authors taking a few chances. Of course, you'll find a lot of readers having the opposite problem. Some of the weirder scenes skirt dangerously close to crossing the line twice. I personally found much of the story to be rather hilarious, intentional or not. It's up to each individual to decide whether Homunculus is closer to a psychological horror, or a black comedy.
To me, Homunculus was a cautionary tale on the precarious balance between the within and the without. People can't live by lowering their heads and closing themselves off. We need to look at other people, and we need them to look at us. But we risk losing ourselves in the process. We are mirrors. We reflect the people and things around us. All that we touch, all that we see, everyone we meet. All of it influences us, makes us who we are. If we're not careful, we'll lose ourselves in the reflections of other people's fears and expectations.
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