Interview with the Translator: Hills of Silver Ruins, Karma

Kate: In Book IV, Chapter 38 of Hills of Silver Ruins, Taiki needs to return to Mount Hou to recover from taking blood. In several books, Taiki implies that he has to pay for what happened in Japan, even though it was legally not his fault (he had no knowledge of the crimes though his literal physical presence was responsible for them).

Karma--what goes around comes around (at its simplest)--is a basic human concept. How embedded would you say the idea is in Ono's work? Does the philosophy extend beyond how Westerners conceive it? Or use it?

For instance, many of the Asian shows I watch give a little more credence to the idea of words/concepts (what has gotten thrown out into the universe) being fulfilled. Where Westerners might have characters overcome such a (superstitious) worry or congratulate themselves for their entirely invisible forward thinking, the Asian shows imply that behavior on-screen might actually, ya know, come true. (There's a kind of unreality about Western name-calling, which is why bullying theorists can entirely divorce themselves from the outcomes of their behavior.)

The opening "this is fiction" caveats are subtly different: Western art says, "No, no, I didn't base this story on anyone real. Don't go and sue me." Asian art says, "This is fiction. The actions in this series are for entertainment. They are not intended to urge or promote any particular behavior. Really."

Watch out! Don't go wishing for monsters because, as in Supernatural, they will likely show up!

Eugene: I think publishers and broadcasters in Japan are more likely to pull an episode of a manga or television series if it echoes (even coincidentally) an alarming current event in the news. There's nothing wrong with fiction "based on actual events" as long as it isn't too close for comfort. The shogunate insisted that Edo period plays based on the Forty-Seven Ronin, for example, always be set at a historical remove.

Of course, that was more about the politics of the situation, but a similar sort of restraint is still expected.

Karma is a key element of Buddhist philosophy. Karma arises out of a very cool Buddhist concept, the "storehouse consciousness." It is a cosmic database that stores a record of all your past personal actions. Not like a video recording, but rather the metadata, a set of attributes created from those events. This is what passes onto your next life, not a soul in the Christian or Hindu sense.

 As in Angel Beats, your soul is preserved if you get stuck in purgatory. Lord Enma, ruler of the underworld, can use his "Mirror of Judgment" to display a sinner's misdoings. But this record is wiped upon reincarnation. Only the store consciousness remains.

The feedback between the storehouse consciousness and the world around you creates a constantly updated decision tree expressed as karma. Especially in Shadow of the Moon and A Thousand Leagues of Wind, caught up in events beyond their control, none of the main characters "deserve" what happens to them. But as Clint Eastwood's William Munny says in Unforgiven, "Deserve's got nothing to do with it."

What matters is how you react to events (random or otherwise) going forward. In narrative terms, it's all about the character arc that results. Every action and decision changes the attributes in the storehouse in an ongoing feedback loop, pushing behavioral outcomes in one direction or the other. As Fuyumi Ono puts it, "the small stones accumulated in the past one day produce a mountain of results."

Self-help psychologists say much the same about habit formation. The important difference in Asian societies is that this is not seen as an autonomous outcome. The "year zero" approach won't work for individuals or societies because karma is always there. Not just human nature now (which will never be defeated by legalistic means), but that metadata going back as far as human beings existed.

Buddhism takes literally the famous saying by William Faulkner: "The past is never dead. It's not even past."