Travis Hedge Coke
Patricia Highsmash
Chiho Saito’s Revolutionary Girl Utena: After the Revolution
by Travis Hedge Coke
A twenty year anniversary coda to Revolutionary Girl Utena, a story which has been told and retold in multiple media (television, comics, film, stage musicals, theatrical motion picture, video game), by going further in the timeline then other versions, Chiho Saito (Magnolia Waltz; The World Exists for Me) has, in After the Revolution, what seems to be the final word and the final shaping. Except for concurrent musical stagings and that there will never a final word.
Revolutionary Girl Utena has always been a difficult property to fully grasp, or even confidently lock down. An auteur work without an auteur (or, with several), Revolutionary Girl Utena is not even the preferred rendering of the title in English. Members of the authoring collective, Be-PaPas, including Kunihiko Ikuhara (Sailor Moon; Yurikuma Arashi), prefer the translation, Girls Revolution Utena. Where would we be as an anglophone audience, if we had had for twenty years been thinking not of Utena as a or the revolutionary, but one of many people having a revolution?
Chiho Saito’s comic debuted before the television anime overseen by Kunihiko Ikuhara, however, Saito’s version has often been treated as a blueprint or side project by anime fans.
A brilliant artist and storyteller, between the two of them, Saito a greater tendency to public humility, this was her first work to break into the English language markets, she was making her version more conservative watch in a magazine that skewed to a younger age bracket than the anime, and she is a woman.
After the Revolution is Chiho Saito unfettered by a magazine aiming young and conservative, or by comparisons or parallel narratives handled by Ikuhara or by famed screenwriter, Yoji Enokido (Neon Genesis Evangelion; FLCL). After the Revolutuon is Saito’s comic, her voice, her lines, her talent.
And, yet, of course it is shaped by the confluence of all other versions and all her collaborators’ interpretations and hopes.
A love and anamnesis comic.
An anniversary comic hinges on the past. Saito said one of the earliest decisions for After the Revolution was that these older versions could not stray far from the designs created to represent the characters as teenagers. A practical concern, ensuring audiences recognize and have a nostalgic reaction to the characters, it reinforces how stuck in the past these characters have remained.
One of the greatest concerns was that Saito’s new comic would reveal or explain too much. That we would know and understand the title character’s wonderful future, left so wide open earlier versions of the story.
Utena’s role is of guide, reminding these people she wants knew, that the revolution is theirs as it is hers.
Focusing each of the three chapters on a couple who have not escaped their teenage dynamics, even if they approach their mid-thirties or forty, allows Saito to keep Utena and her beloved as a guiding, talismanic force. There is no longer a worry for spoiling the journey of the title protagonist of Revolutionary Girl Utena, because there is, in this version, no consistent protagonist.
The television series took time to decenter and emphasize perspectives and intimacy with characters other than Utena, but we returned to her, we re-centered on her.
Each of the principle couples in After the Revolution is both a romantic couple and not. They are sexualized couplings that also derive difficulty from that, in their cases, socially unacceptable aspect.
The first chapter, After the Revolution, focuses on Saionji and Touga, two men who have been close since early childhood, now tracking a painting back to their alma mater. Both victims of childhood sexual abuse, the chapter is an examination of predatory alliances and toleration as a victims coping method.
When Saionji questions how Touga, with whom he shared a childhood sexual relationship, could work with a rampant child abuser, Touga says, “life is frail and unreliable… I’d rather transform ephemeral life into immortal art!”
In Beautiful Thorns, the middle chapter, competitive fencer and model, Juri Arisugawa is reintroduced to two people she has never fully left behind.
Are unconsummated sexual a romantic relationships those kind of relationships? One of those that can never be consummated or confirmed?
Juri is both fighting against Shiori and Ruka, trying to impress them, and trying to separate them as much as they try to separate each other from her. It is a triangle of denial, and ultimately, Ruka is as inconsequential as any other ghost to her, she only doesn’t know it.
Neither Shiori (who is my favorite character in all things Utena) nor Juri, I think, understand sexual or close in the way of the average person.
Closing the comic, The Eve of the Revolution concerns itself with sibling love, incest, self-lust and self-love. Twins, Miki is a composer and concert pianist, while Kozue has been in a coma for years.
Miki is free to speculate on his sister, but it is not she that is haunting him. His stress over her hurts him. The ghost is onanistic.
What Kozue sought may have also been masturbatory, or selfish, but what she needs from her brother, is not his conflict with himself, for pleasuring himself. She needs presence.
As Miki says, “We’re still walking a path of growth and change,” Utena helps the twins remember there is more than one way to be with someone.
Revolution is not an act, but acting. Revolution is a state of being, not having been. The girls’ revolution of Utena is for anyone.