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shrimpchipsss(Spoilers for the manga)
I finished reading Nana and have been riding the sense that there is no future for the characters.
No future because the story is cut short by Ai Yazawa’s health and the manga’s hiatus since July 2009. No future because the story ends with the death of Nana’s boyfriend, Ren. No future because the structure of the story is a recollection of the events of Nana and Hachi’s lives when they were 20 years old, with flash forwards to the present day. No future because the last chapter (and Ren’s death) is the defining moment that gives context to why the flashforwards have had an overhanging desolation to them.
I’m not sure how much of this was planned leading up to Ai Yazawa’s hiatus but there’s something kind of elegant about the anime ending with the first flash forward and the manga leaving off when we reach the schism that divides the story that is being retold and the repercussions to the years-later “present day.”
The “no future” feeling got me to finally read (skim and listen to some lectures and interviews about) No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive by Lee Edelman which I’ve been meaning to get to ever sincex_los ’ fic In Service.
Basically, the theory posits that queerness, being assumed to preclude biological reproduction, and definitely not fitting the model of the hetero nuclear family, is punished by society and that queer people should embrace not existing for the sake of reproduction and furthermore embrace the death drive and jouissance as a radical politics.
It’s an interesting concept; it gives a bit of meat to the usually annoying r/childfree thing. But we still live in a society? Some queer people want or have children? Refusal can be radical; surely this is a freeing concept for those who don’t want children, and I enjoy that his alternative is basically hedonism, but it is a fairly introspective politics and has the potential to be antisocial. Which is fine, but I’m not alone in finding this frustrating. A peek at YouTube comments shows that people hate this guy, and it was very funny to find out out from my friend Zoe (miss_coverly) that he gets criticized, particularly by poc and queer theorists, for embracing a very insular idea of antisociality and rejecting the world, which is a form of privilege in itself.
The usefulness of this theory as a base for your personal politics aside, what I find it EXTREMELY FASCINATING for is in considering Nana’s characters and their reproductive decisions.
1.
Whether or not to keep her and Takumi’s baby is a pivotal plot point for Hachi’s life and one that is contrasted by Nana refusing to have Ren’s child when it appears that Ren would like to have one with her. Both women’s decisions cause all kinds of interpersonal issues that trap and free them in different ways.
For one, when Hachi decides to keep her baby, Nana freaks out and tries to maneuver things so that her homosocial triangle conduit Nobu will take responsibility for the baby, thus tying Hachi and the child closer to her. Nobu rejects this plan and criticizes her, saying that if she wants the child so badly then she should be its father, which of course she can never be.
This is one of the tragedies of the story—Nana who does not want to be the mother of Ren’s child but does want to be the father of Hachi's child. Nana who is gender nonconforming and handsome and brash. Her desire to protect and care for Hachi’s child is queer, since Nana and Hachi are both women, and colored as ridiculous to other characters like Nobu, which fits right in with Edelman’s observation that sexualities that are seen as not conforming to the (re)production of the established social order are identified as threats to the social order.
This goes for Nana’s personality as a woman as well. She is Takumi’s foil—both of them are controlling, domineering, and harsh, and both try to exert their will over Hachi, but Nana is punished for her actions because they threaten the cisheteropatriarchal social order while Takumi is rewarded for being an assertive man.
Basically, there is no future for Nana. Her desires are incompatible with reproductive futurity. She is a cis woman and attracted to men, but she can’t create a future for herself within the script of the dominant social order. All that is left for her is to imagine or yearn for death. This is echoed in the recurring refrain where Nana asks Ren, “Hey Ren, if I died, would you die with me?”
2.
Let’s get into Nana and Ren’s relationship which over the course of the manga slowly falls apart even though they clearly love each other. For the first two years of their relationship, Nana and Ren were in the band Blast, which Nana continues to be the frontwoman of. Ren eventually leaves Blast to join the band Trapnest in Tokyo, abandoning Nana until they reunite in Tokyo and rekindle their relationship.
For a while it appears that the two of them will try to make things work even as Blast rises to become Trapnest’s rival, but during one of their fights, Nana yells at Ren not to write music for women that aren’t her.
Recall that Ren seems to want to have a baby with Nana. She rejects the idea due to her concerns about becoming unable to pursue her career as an artist, not having a motherly instinct, and having unresolved trauma from her own mother abandoning her, and continues taking birth control to avoid getting pregnant.
Edelman talks about how in a social order that is trying to reinforce itself, sex divorced from procreation is seen as meaningless and the way that the Child, and the mere possibility of the Child is a symbol of hope, redemption, and a future (13). I believe that this is true of Ren in the sense that a child would tie him and Nana together. I don’t think that he even specifically wanted to be a father but that he longed for proof. After all, he continued to wear the necklace that Nana locked around his neck (Sid Vicious reference) even when they were broken up and he was alone in Tokyo. And he proposes to her out of the blue right as their bands are putting out competing new releases and things are only becoming more chaotic.
There’s a sense that Ren was desperately trying to lock down the few “stable” things he had to hold onto at the time. Which brings us back to Nana’s freakout over Ren writing music for Reira and not for her.
I think there's a connection between reproduction (having a child) and creative production (songwriting) in their relationship. Their relationship started with them making music together, but now they are in different bands. And since they won’t have a child, and their marriage paperwork keeps being delayed in part due to Nana’s murky family situation, Ren begins grasping for some way to anchor him.
In the absence of some kind of stability or hope for the future, there is the death drive. At one point, Ren tells Reira that he wishes he could kill Nana so that she could be all his. You already know about Nana asking Ren if he would die with her if she died. Ren also chokes Nana during sex using her leather choker to the point that she blacks out which is doubly wild because Nana is a singer who needs to protect her voice. This is a het couple but that is a perfect encapsulation of Edelman standing up for queer people having nonreproductive sex and the way the death drive and jouissance are intertwined.
3.
The whole time all of this is going down Ren has some pretty destructive coping mechanisms. Since moving to Tokyo, he’s developed a drug addiction which alarms the people around him who know of it and, finally, Ren himself.
Edelman clarifies that the point of embracing the death drive is not the death drive itself but rather the disruption of the status quo via the refusal of reproduction as the only way of being (17). Unfortunately for Ren, he embodies the death drive not being chosen out of resistance but of being inevitable due to despair. I know it’s not a 1:1 but I find the dichotomy between [reproductive futurity] and [the death drive] interesting.
He is constantly isolated or on tour with his band members who he has codependent relationships with. His addiction is being fueled by one of the directors at his band’s company and is beginning to affect his motor control. And his relationship is at an impasse: no marriage, no music, no children.
As their issues mount, Ren avoids Nana out of shame, intending to get clean before seeing her again, which is quite a future- and hope-oriented intention despite how simultaneously self-sabotaging and avoidant it is. In a fit of inspiration and encouragement from Hachi, Ren finally decides to drive to see Nana for her birthday and crashes his car into the apartment he and Nana shared when they lived together. Call that a death drive.
4.
One last example before I close this out is about the Child:
There’s a whole other post that could be made about Hachi being a closeted lesbian who nevertheless caves to the pressure of comphet and also her own desire to be a mother (see her groupie relationship with Blast and her mother-son dynamic with Shin). But I think the compulsoriness of reproductive futurism and the way it actually operates as both hope and despair is extremely applicable here.
In an interview with the Dissenter, Edelman refers to reproductive futurism as a type of becoming that is actually a repetition of our being which actually prohibits a different future from happening.
Consider how Hachi and Takumi’s son is named Ren, and how their daughter Satsuki was named by adult!Ren before he died. And the way child!Ren looks just like Shin, who Takumi persecuted for having a romantic relationship with Reira while he was underage. The way Satsuki has a crush on Shin to boot. And child!Ren is the only person Reira will sing for after she tried covering for adult!Ren’s withdrawal symptoms right before he died by faking an illness and announcing that she was going to reevaluate the purpose of her voice. She was willing to stop singing for adult Ren, and to sing again for the child Ren.
History repeats itself; all we can do is reproduce what has already been!!
Btw I also talk about Nana in my Yuri Zine essay, and so does my friend Zoe (miss_coverly) who helped me edit this!
Sources:
Edelman, Lee. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Duke University Press, 2004. https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~cavitch/pdf-library/Edelman_No_Future.pdf
“ENG 201 (Lecture 8.3): More on Edelman and Futurity.“ YouTube, uploaded by Benjamin Hagen, April 27, 2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-y0C9GkAo6w.
“#715 Lee Edelman - No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive.” YouTube, uploaded by The Dissenter, December 9, 2022, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R-kg4QRa3lc&t=2384s.
I finished reading Nana and have been riding the sense that there is no future for the characters.
No future because the story is cut short by Ai Yazawa’s health and the manga’s hiatus since July 2009. No future because the story ends with the death of Nana’s boyfriend, Ren. No future because the structure of the story is a recollection of the events of Nana and Hachi’s lives when they were 20 years old, with flash forwards to the present day. No future because the last chapter (and Ren’s death) is the defining moment that gives context to why the flashforwards have had an overhanging desolation to them.
I’m not sure how much of this was planned leading up to Ai Yazawa’s hiatus but there’s something kind of elegant about the anime ending with the first flash forward and the manga leaving off when we reach the schism that divides the story that is being retold and the repercussions to the years-later “present day.”
The “no future” feeling got me to finally read (skim and listen to some lectures and interviews about) No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive by Lee Edelman which I’ve been meaning to get to ever since
x_los ’ fic In Service.Basically, the theory posits that queerness, being assumed to preclude biological reproduction, and definitely not fitting the model of the hetero nuclear family, is punished by society and that queer people should embrace not existing for the sake of reproduction and furthermore embrace the death drive and jouissance as a radical politics.
It’s an interesting concept; it gives a bit of meat to the usually annoying r/childfree thing. But we still live in a society? Some queer people want or have children? Refusal can be radical; surely this is a freeing concept for those who don’t want children, and I enjoy that his alternative is basically hedonism, but it is a fairly introspective politics and has the potential to be antisocial. Which is fine, but I’m not alone in finding this frustrating. A peek at YouTube comments shows that people hate this guy, and it was very funny to find out out from my friend Zoe (miss_coverly) that he gets criticized, particularly by poc and queer theorists, for embracing a very insular idea of antisociality and rejecting the world, which is a form of privilege in itself.
The usefulness of this theory as a base for your personal politics aside, what I find it EXTREMELY FASCINATING for is in considering Nana’s characters and their reproductive decisions.
1.
Whether or not to keep her and Takumi’s baby is a pivotal plot point for Hachi’s life and one that is contrasted by Nana refusing to have Ren’s child when it appears that Ren would like to have one with her. Both women’s decisions cause all kinds of interpersonal issues that trap and free them in different ways.
For one, when Hachi decides to keep her baby, Nana freaks out and tries to maneuver things so that her homosocial triangle conduit Nobu will take responsibility for the baby, thus tying Hachi and the child closer to her. Nobu rejects this plan and criticizes her, saying that if she wants the child so badly then she should be its father, which of course she can never be.
This is one of the tragedies of the story—Nana who does not want to be the mother of Ren’s child but does want to be the father of Hachi's child. Nana who is gender nonconforming and handsome and brash. Her desire to protect and care for Hachi’s child is queer, since Nana and Hachi are both women, and colored as ridiculous to other characters like Nobu, which fits right in with Edelman’s observation that sexualities that are seen as not conforming to the (re)production of the established social order are identified as threats to the social order.
This goes for Nana’s personality as a woman as well. She is Takumi’s foil—both of them are controlling, domineering, and harsh, and both try to exert their will over Hachi, but Nana is punished for her actions because they threaten the cisheteropatriarchal social order while Takumi is rewarded for being an assertive man.
Basically, there is no future for Nana. Her desires are incompatible with reproductive futurity. She is a cis woman and attracted to men, but she can’t create a future for herself within the script of the dominant social order. All that is left for her is to imagine or yearn for death. This is echoed in the recurring refrain where Nana asks Ren, “Hey Ren, if I died, would you die with me?”
2.
Let’s get into Nana and Ren’s relationship which over the course of the manga slowly falls apart even though they clearly love each other. For the first two years of their relationship, Nana and Ren were in the band Blast, which Nana continues to be the frontwoman of. Ren eventually leaves Blast to join the band Trapnest in Tokyo, abandoning Nana until they reunite in Tokyo and rekindle their relationship.
For a while it appears that the two of them will try to make things work even as Blast rises to become Trapnest’s rival, but during one of their fights, Nana yells at Ren not to write music for women that aren’t her.
Recall that Ren seems to want to have a baby with Nana. She rejects the idea due to her concerns about becoming unable to pursue her career as an artist, not having a motherly instinct, and having unresolved trauma from her own mother abandoning her, and continues taking birth control to avoid getting pregnant.
Edelman talks about how in a social order that is trying to reinforce itself, sex divorced from procreation is seen as meaningless and the way that the Child, and the mere possibility of the Child is a symbol of hope, redemption, and a future (13). I believe that this is true of Ren in the sense that a child would tie him and Nana together. I don’t think that he even specifically wanted to be a father but that he longed for proof. After all, he continued to wear the necklace that Nana locked around his neck (Sid Vicious reference) even when they were broken up and he was alone in Tokyo. And he proposes to her out of the blue right as their bands are putting out competing new releases and things are only becoming more chaotic.
There’s a sense that Ren was desperately trying to lock down the few “stable” things he had to hold onto at the time. Which brings us back to Nana’s freakout over Ren writing music for Reira and not for her.
I think there's a connection between reproduction (having a child) and creative production (songwriting) in their relationship. Their relationship started with them making music together, but now they are in different bands. And since they won’t have a child, and their marriage paperwork keeps being delayed in part due to Nana’s murky family situation, Ren begins grasping for some way to anchor him.
In the absence of some kind of stability or hope for the future, there is the death drive. At one point, Ren tells Reira that he wishes he could kill Nana so that she could be all his. You already know about Nana asking Ren if he would die with her if she died. Ren also chokes Nana during sex using her leather choker to the point that she blacks out which is doubly wild because Nana is a singer who needs to protect her voice. This is a het couple but that is a perfect encapsulation of Edelman standing up for queer people having nonreproductive sex and the way the death drive and jouissance are intertwined.
3.
The whole time all of this is going down Ren has some pretty destructive coping mechanisms. Since moving to Tokyo, he’s developed a drug addiction which alarms the people around him who know of it and, finally, Ren himself.
Edelman clarifies that the point of embracing the death drive is not the death drive itself but rather the disruption of the status quo via the refusal of reproduction as the only way of being (17). Unfortunately for Ren, he embodies the death drive not being chosen out of resistance but of being inevitable due to despair. I know it’s not a 1:1 but I find the dichotomy between [reproductive futurity] and [the death drive] interesting.
He is constantly isolated or on tour with his band members who he has codependent relationships with. His addiction is being fueled by one of the directors at his band’s company and is beginning to affect his motor control. And his relationship is at an impasse: no marriage, no music, no children.
As their issues mount, Ren avoids Nana out of shame, intending to get clean before seeing her again, which is quite a future- and hope-oriented intention despite how simultaneously self-sabotaging and avoidant it is. In a fit of inspiration and encouragement from Hachi, Ren finally decides to drive to see Nana for her birthday and crashes his car into the apartment he and Nana shared when they lived together. Call that a death drive.
4.
One last example before I close this out is about the Child:
“The Child… marks the fetishistic fixation of heteronormativity: an erotically charged investment in the rigid sameness of identity that is central to the compulsory narrative of reproductive futurism” (21).
There’s a whole other post that could be made about Hachi being a closeted lesbian who nevertheless caves to the pressure of comphet and also her own desire to be a mother (see her groupie relationship with Blast and her mother-son dynamic with Shin). But I think the compulsoriness of reproductive futurism and the way it actually operates as both hope and despair is extremely applicable here.
In an interview with the Dissenter, Edelman refers to reproductive futurism as a type of becoming that is actually a repetition of our being which actually prohibits a different future from happening.
Consider how Hachi and Takumi’s son is named Ren, and how their daughter Satsuki was named by adult!Ren before he died. And the way child!Ren looks just like Shin, who Takumi persecuted for having a romantic relationship with Reira while he was underage. The way Satsuki has a crush on Shin to boot. And child!Ren is the only person Reira will sing for after she tried covering for adult!Ren’s withdrawal symptoms right before he died by faking an illness and announcing that she was going to reevaluate the purpose of her voice. She was willing to stop singing for adult Ren, and to sing again for the child Ren.
History repeats itself; all we can do is reproduce what has already been!!
Btw I also talk about Nana in my Yuri Zine essay, and so does my friend Zoe (miss_coverly) who helped me edit this!
Sources:
Edelman, Lee. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Duke University Press, 2004. https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~cavitch/pdf-library/Edelman_No_Future.pdf
“ENG 201 (Lecture 8.3): More on Edelman and Futurity.“ YouTube, uploaded by Benjamin Hagen, April 27, 2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-y0C9GkAo6w.
“#715 Lee Edelman - No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive.” YouTube, uploaded by The Dissenter, December 9, 2022, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R-kg4QRa3lc&t=2384s.
no subject
Date: 2024-05-15 02:41 am (UTC)YESSSSS!!! This goes so hard, it's definitely giving way more fuel to my need to read Nana (like you said on twitter I think the spoilers are gonna enhance that), but also No Future.
Really interested in the application of the death drive here, it's a deep pool but this draws on it in such a cool way. Gets me thinking about the urge not only to die but to fuck up one's life completely. And based on the themes you're talking about here, it seems like everyone in Nana does that a lot.
Really great read, thanks for sharing it!!
no subject
Date: 2024-05-15 02:28 pm (UTC)And seriously, I feel like when I found out that Ren was going to die I was like oh yeah, duh, the dude already feels like a ghost this just makes sense.
Thanks for reading and commenting, I really hope you enjoy Nana if you get around to it! It's really a shining example of comphet fueling both queer tragedy and straight tragedy 2 me
no subject
Date: 2024-05-15 02:58 am (UTC)Have you read any of Yazawa's other work? It sounds like Nana gets a lot darker than Neighborhood Story or ParaKiss. I haven't read ParaKiss yet so IDK about that one, but in Neighborhood Story there's a recurring joke of the main character and her girl best friend being mistaken for lesbians until the main character starts dating her love interest. So Yazawa seems to know lesbians exist but like. I'm not sure how serious she is about it. It would be cool if the queer subtext was intentional but even if it wasn't death of the author is valid
no subject
Date: 2024-05-15 02:20 pm (UTC)Also a slight disclaimer that the manga "ends" with the immediate aftermath of Ren's death in ch 80 but has an additional four chapters that start setting up a new arc. Hilariously, mangadex randomly inserts the first three chapters of the story between chs 80 and 81 so I thought it was over and was shocked at how I felt like it wrapped things up nicely for a hiatus drop-off. and my friend Zoe had to be like oh no.. the new arc begins and THEN it cuts off. But imo if you kind of think of the last four chapters as their own separate thing it leaves off in a way that feels quite neat to me!
no subject
Date: 2024-05-16 03:10 am (UTC)I've been reading the viz releases of Neighborhood Story for review and enjoying them, and while it does have sad moments it feels more within the realm of typical shojo sadness. Like the main character's dad left her family but then he comes back and she has complicated feelings about it. Which is cool! But not as dark as it sounds like Nana ends up being. It's also very focused on the girls' relationships to the men in their lives over their girl friendships, unfortunately. But the fashion is incredible, just peak Y2K Harajuku looks 24/7. Really fun to look at.
no subject
Date: 2024-05-16 01:44 pm (UTC)Honestly the fashion and style influence aspect of Nana, and which feels like it really pervades Yazawa's work, really got to me, I ended up getting a bunch of piercings in the style of Nana and Ren after having just my lobes pierced for over a decade.
no subject
Date: 2024-08-11 05:42 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-08-11 03:00 pm (UTC)