Reach Out to the Truth of My Life (Part Two)
June 8, 2023
This essay is Part Two of a two-part series on Persona 4. Click Here to Read Part One.
Persona 4 as: My High School Crush
When people ask me why I started learning Japanese, I usually say that it was because I like Japanese music and literature. This is partially true, but it is also disingenuous. These are the reasons why I continue to study Japanese all these years later. The reason I started to learn Japanese was because I liked Persona 4. I liked Persona 4 because I liked the girls in it. Let's put this another way: I started learning Japanese because I wanted to be an anime character. I wanted to be an anime character because I wanted to date an anime character.
Thinking about Risé Kujikawa right now feels like thinking about an old crush, or even an old girlfriend. Later in my high school career, I actually got a real girlfriend. Let me say this: pining after Risé Kujikawa from Persona 4 was much more fun than having that real girlfriend was.
That’s a joke. I mean, that’s mostly a joke.
Risé Kujikawa is a pop singer (an “idol” in Japanese nomenclature) who has come to the main character’s small town in order to take a break from the popstar life. She wants to quietly attend high school while helping out at her grandmother's tofu shop.
She wears her hair in fluffy pigtails, and is professionally cute. She is an idol, after all, but she is also down to earth and approachable in a non-superficial way. She is trying to be normal, and yet she can't help being an popstar.
Risé, without any input from the player at all, constantly expresses a deep love and admiration for the main character. This is interesting, and somewhat important. The goal of the social link with Risé is not, like with some of the other characters, to make her love you. The goal is instead to turn that one-sided love of hers into a mutual bond. The alternative (i.e. not doing anything) is to string her along, not acknowledging at all her obvious affection for you.
The wish-fulfillment here is off the charts. Not only is she a beautiful idol singer with the bubbly anime-girl personality that comes along with that, but she is also a real, authentic, down-to-earth human person who is intricately involved with your regular, everyday life, and she is unambiguously in love with you. Also, she is a year younger than the main character, and therefore refers to you as "Senpai." I mean, what's a teenage boy supposed to do? Not fall in love with her?
What's amazing is that, despite all this, Risé Kujikawa does, in fact, seem like a real person. Her perfection is not absolute, although delineating what exactly her "faults" are can prove difficult. While this trope may seem mathematically impeccable, it is not actually fool-proof. Like any character trope, it is possible and in fact likely that anime writers will find a way to make such a character completely insufferable. Perhaps, to some people, Risé Kujikawa is completely insufferable. All I can say to that is: I don’t understand how someone can think that. Maybe that says something about love.
Falling in love with an anime character is just one of those things that happens nowadays. It’s a rite of passage for the modern young adult. Maybe not everybody’s anime character is literally an anime character — maybe they’re a character from a movie, or a book, or maybe they’re not a character at all, and just a real person that they never get to talk to. My crush on Risé Kujikawa isn’t that different, really, from my crush on the girl in my English class in eleventh grade. I never spoke to her, and she never spoke to me. I liked the way she interacted with other people; the idea that I could ever become one of those people was as fantastical as the idea that I could become an anime character.
In fact, it was more fantastical. I eventually learned to speak and understand Japanese; I never learned how to talk to girls in my English class.
Slowly but surely, a lonely young man is dragged inexorably into the world of dreams. Risé Kujikawa is a dream girl. She’s a dream girl that we can all share, a dream girl with an observable personality and a recognizable face. She has a voice, and a story. We can hang out with her, in a way. We can spend time with her, and unlike the time within our own minds, this time moves forward. Our relationship grows over time, instead of being stagnant. Our story with her has a beginning, middle, and even an ambiguous ending.
We can date Risé Kujikawa, and choose what we say to her on these dates. It’s not real, but it’s almost real. It’s more real than my conversations with the girl from my English class. And so, I spend more time with Risé Kujikawa, more time thinking about Risé Kujikawa, than I do the girl from my English class. Eventually, I don’t think about the girl in my English class, or any girl from any of my classes. Why should I? What do they have that Risé Kujikawa doesn’t? How can they measure up?
This may sound insane, to some. Perhaps, this is one of the many little insanities that characterize each age of humanity. Dating-based video games are produced by people who know what it’s like to be young and lonely. They know that these video games will appeal to people who are similar right now to how they used to be. Some of them probably wish that such video games had existed when they were younger. They would’ve lost their minds to these video games. In fact, at this point, such games have been around long enough that perhaps they did in fact lose their minds to such video games, and are now spreading that mind-loss to their younger comrades in loneliness.
I don’t think there’s anything malicious in all this. They want the kids and adults playing their game to be happy. They want the player’s relationship with Risé Kujikawa to feel real, because then, maybe, the player won’t feel so lonely. It’s honourable, in a way. I mean, it’s not the game developer’s fault that people are lonely. There’s going to be lonely people no matter what anyone does. We can at least give them a friend, even if it’s not a real friend. We can give them a girlfriend, even if it’s not a real girlfriend.
I don’t know if falling in love with Risé Kujikawa was good for me. I did a lot of things as a teenager that weren’t good for me. Most of my life may not have been good for me. That’s what experience is: it’s about doing a bunch of things that aren’t good for you, and then learning from them. I do know that falling in love with Risé Kujikawa changed my life. I learned Japanese for her, even though the game was fully voiced in English, and I liked her English voice actor better. That’s how much I loved her.
Persona 4 as: a Dating Fantasy
Persona 4 is a dating fantasy masquerading as an anime masquerading as a video game. It may not seem fair to say “masquerading,” as it wears all three aspects on its sleeves, but when I consider the manner in which the game revealed itself to me, this is how it feels. I was first interested in Persona 4 as a video game, because I liked video games. I understood how they worked. I liked holding the controller and pressing buttons.
Eventually, it occurred to me that this game wasn’t like the other games I had played. Most of the time, you weren’t doing much but selecting items from menus and watching the actions on screen unfold. The real appeal was the characters, and balancing your lifestyle such that you could spend as much time with them as possible. These characters were just like me: they were in high school, and they were confused.
While I wouldn’t say they are necessarily realistic, they made more sense to me than the high schoolers on TV. TV shows were still stuck on outdated conflicts between nerds and jocks, each character inhabiting a stereotyped clique. My high school didn’t feel like that. It was just a bunch of weird people with overlapping interests and passions, trying to make friends, all while being absolutely terrified of the future.
Persona 4 doesn’t have jocks and nerds. Your friends are just a group of people who like to hang out. You hang out with people from the basketball club, from the music club, and from no club at all. The first guy you meet on the way to school happens to be friends with a girl who loves Kung-fu movies, and she happens to be childhood friends with another girl whose family owns a hotel. Bam: you have a friend group. This group grows as the game continues, mostly as a result of your investigations into the serial murder/kidnapping case. Meanwhile, your other activities introduce you to a cast of side characters that inhabit the school.
It felt, to me, that the people who wrote this game truly understood high school and teenagers. They understood how high school actually worked, and the problems that arose when hundreds of teenagers are thrust together in a building for 40 hours a week. More than that, they took those problems seriously. It wasn’t all played for laughs, nor was it blown out of proportion. It was just real.
This is, in fact, one of the defining characteristics of anime in general. From Whisper of the Heart, to The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, to Persona 4, to Neon Genesis Evangelion, what makes anime stick out from other styles of animation or TV is the accuracy with which it presents the inner lives of young people. In fact, one of the major criticisms of anime is that it often seems that this is all it can do.
For this reason, many people who like anime when they are young eventually get disillusioned with it as they grow up. At some point, you have to accept that these shows are made for young people with young people sensibilities, and either embrace that connection to your former self or move on. At this point, it’s difficult for me watch a high-school anime I’ve never seen and take it seriously. Those just aren’t my problems anymore. However, in the right mood, I can allow them to take me back, and remember what it was like to be the person who fell so head over heels for the medium in 2010.
Persona 4 was the catalyst for an obsession that defined my life during some very pivotal years. And the main component of this obsession, beyond everything else, was that I wanted to fall in love — and importantly, I wanted someone to fall in love with me.
This was the final form that Persona 4 revealed to me only after many hours of play. The dating fantasy. The love story of my dreams. Right there on the screen for me to experience.
A main character whose defining trait is being cool, brave, and heroic while not saying or doing much of anything. A blank slate to embody — a blank slate who every woman alive is in love with, or at least capable of falling in love with, given the right circumstances. It’s the most obvious and stupid fantasy in the world. It can be, and is, exploited in obvious and stupid ways by heaps of games and anime with minimal effort and maximal cynicism. But it can also be approached with care and precision: dating fantasies that appeal not to your base instincts and passions, but to something higher. Maybe not significantly higher — maybe only superficially higher, really — but in a way that seems more to approach what we often call “love.”
I got into anime because of the love stories in Persona 4. The first anime I ever consciously watched was Clannad, a story with a similar concept: a high school boy who helps a whole cast of high school girls with their problems. There is one girl he likes best, and eventually in the second season they get married and have a child. The show is ridiculous in all the ways mentioned above, but it was also the first time I saw a love story between high school students presented seriously. These characters were actually in love, and despite all the anime nonsense surrounding them, the story of them making each other better people was heartfelt and touching.
Learning everything you know about love from watching anime is as foolhardy as learning everything you need to know about love from watching romcoms. Each will give you startlingly unrealistic expectations of how love is formed and how it develops.
Real people don’t act like anime characters. Anime characters aren’t real. At a certain point in one’s life, this may seem unfortunate, but trust me: this is definitely a good thing.
However, like I said above, we can’t help being lonely. Pining after fantastical imaginary girls is part of being human. Sometimes, we turn real people into fantastical imaginary girls, like I did with the girl in my English class, and sometimes we find fantastical imaginary girls ready-made for us by people whose job is to come up with fantastical imaginary girls.
Many internet-users will remember Grape-kun, the Humboldt penguin from the Tobu Zoo who supposedly fell in love with a cardboard cut-out of an anime girl in a penguin suit. Now, there’s no logical sense in saying that because a penguin does it, it’s a good or proper thing to do, because penguins do a lot of weird stuff that is definitely not advisable. However, we must recognize what lies deep within ourselves when we see it. We must recognize that that penguin’s actions, while perhaps “unnatural” in a certain sense, are not foreign to us.
We live as much in our dreams as we do in our real world. Everything we yearn for is real, every person we make up is real, and every story that touches our heart is real. As far as I’m concerned, Risé Kujikawa is as real as any other person I’ve never met.
The entire cast of Persona 4 — all the friends you make throughout the journey — are the same way. When Nanako goes missing, you miss her. When your uncle Dojima gets made at you, you feel that you’ve disappointed him. The game is a commitment of both time and energy; it takes up almost 100 hours of your god damn life if you finish it, and if you’re someone like me, who watched someone play through the whole thing, played through it myself twice, and watched the anime adaptation twice, then it’s taken up a whole lot more than that.
At this point, Persona 4 is no longer just a video game. I don’t mean this in the sense that it’s a “multimedia experience,” but in the sense that I often forget that it ever was a video game. As I’ve shown in this essay, it’s five or six different things, which in the end add up to one weird amorphous thing, a thing that found me at the most diagonal period of my life, when every interest I had suddenly bent askew, and I found myself over the course of a year transforming into a totally different person.
I got into anime, Japanese music, and Japanese literature, learned Japanese and even went and lived in Japan, all because I ran into Persona 4 as a weird and lonely 15 year-old. At the time, I wanted to write for magazines. A year later, I wanted to write fiction.
Obviously, I can’t lay all this at the feet of Persona 4. It would be pure mythmaking to make the claim that it singlehandedly changed my life in such a profound manner. But to deny its importance would be equally foolhardy.
It is impossible for me to talk about Persona 4 as it actually is: to say whether it is a good or bad video game. I can look back and see that the story is cheesy and often mean-spirited, and that its emotional climaxes don’t always come off. To this point, I can’t tell if I even like Persona 4. All I can say for sure is that I love it. I can’t help but love it. I love it in the same way I love my 15 year-old self who fell in love with it. If I met him now, he’d probably annoy the hell out of me. I probably wouldn’t be able to understand what’s going on with him, or why he acts the way he does. But I love him anyway.
Persona 4 is my 15 year-old self. It contains within it all his awkwardness, all his posturing, and all the fragility that lies beneath. It is his loneliness and his companionship. It was something he dwelt upon during his solitary hours, and it was something he shared with friends, both online and in real life. Its soundtrack was his favourite music. It was a way to define himself, a way to tie together all those myriad changes that were re-shaping his world.
He had no idea what he was doing when he let this game into his life. It was just the right thing, at just the right time. There is nothing I could discover now that could change my life the way this game did. It’s too late now. There’s only a short period in one’s life when that sort of thing can happen, when anything you see can change you forever. I’m living the repercussions of that period right now, twelve years later; I look back and I can trace everything I do now to what I did then. It’s amazing, really, that that 15 year-old kid hidden away in his room attempting to escape the world had that sort of power. He had no idea. Absolutely no idea. It was just a video game for him.
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