After a rambling, almost stream-of-consciousness first episode, The Tatami Galaxy follows up with one that essentially gives the game away. We soon learn that our protagonist Watashi is stuck in some kind of loop, a Groundhog Day-esque cycle that keeps him forever repeating the first two years of college. This is bad news for Watashi, but likely a necessary conceit from our perspective; after all, in a story this scattershot, fast-paced, and circuitous, it’s necessary to have some structure for the audience to hold onto. And so we find ourselves hanging desperately from Watashi’s shoulder, as he moves from the tennis club and prank-related infamy to his school’s illustrious film club.
Focusing on a film club feels very appropriate for a show about cyclical experiences and lifestyle tourism. Film encourages us all to covet the glamorous lives of others, and could be seen as a kind of voyeurism all by itself. Episode two’s first moments make this connection clear, as our “heroes” Watashi and Ozu actively spy on club president Jougasaki, candid cameras in hand. Though it’ll be a long time before Watashi realizes that the substance of our lives is what we make of it, this focus on the film club underlines the fact that the quality of our lives as witnessed by an observer will always be a reflection of the observer’s frame, and the level of sympathy they bring to their narration of our lives.
This first sequence also offers a fine example of how The Tatami Galaxy’s visual looseness echoes its narrative choices. As I mentioned, the fact that The Tatami Galaxy proceeds with nearly stream-of-consciousness levels of narrative looseness would naturally make it a hard property to grab onto; and to counterbalance that, the show’s rigid meta structure gives us consistent signposts. Unsurprisingly, this concept of signposts guiding us through darkness also carries over to Galaxy’s visual design.
Episode two’s first shot is staged with all the wobbly lines, flat colors, and loose borders you expect from a Yuasa production. But like most of his scenes, this shot is not intended to convey an “objective reality,” it is intended to simultaneously echo a character’s perspective and provide a visual dramatic throughline. More conventionally geometric backgrounds wouldn’t better facilitate the drama of this shot – all we need to see is the contrast between Watashi and Ozu’s small light in the dark against the giant light of the window, a perfect articulation of their covetousness, surreptitiousness, and coming battle.
The jump from that to actually viewing their camera feed also offers a fine demonstration of Galaxy’s two principle visual modes. The Tatami Galaxy is an endlessly inventive show that’s always eager to dive into visual experimentation in order to illustrate some point, but the majority of its scenes fall into some negotiation between the fanciful linework and flat colors of that first shot versus the mundane, quasi-realistic imagery of the camera’s eye. This combination essentially offers a mix of Watashi’s life as he pictures it, versus his life as it’s observed in offhand, immediate moments. Fanciful visions of Jougasaki living as a king are contrasted against hyper-specific shots like the moment you realize a cicada is right beside you, conveying life itself as a mixture of big-picture interpretations and sharply remembered specific moments. It’s a strange alchemy that I personally feel offers as good a take as any on “the experience of life as it is lived.”
In Watashi’s case, simulating the experience of life as it is lived implies a whooole lot of fanciful embellishment. As our questionable hero once again initiates his familiar friendship with Ozu, his initial pronouncement that he was tricked into this relationship begins to feel a little suspect. It’s a clever quirk of Tatami Galaxy’s structure that our protagonist can thus receive characterization laterally, as opposed to through conventional, chronological development. As Watashi repeats the same protestations about his innocent desire for a rose-colored life, and the toxic influence of Ozu on his fortunes, Tatami Galaxy’s overall structure undercuts his argument with its unavoidable depiction of the reality that wherever his life took him, Watashi and Ozu would end up pulling off the same bitter crap.
In light of this, it seems easy enough to already accept that our narrator is unreliable, and his fortunes as he articulates them don’t really have much to do with his actual life situation. That might seem like a spoiler or something, but given we’ve already run through two wildly different life stories with equally fanciful turns and equally bitter ends, there’s really not much room to trust Watashi at this point. That’d be an issue if The Tatami Galaxy’s ultimate point was “Watashi is lying about his life experiences,” but that point seems entirely secondary to what this show is really about. While many stories end on the revelation that their narrator is responsible for their own fortunes, content that this itself is a satisfying punchline, Yuasa’s very style of depicting the world inherently accepts that all narrators are unreliable, because all narrators are relaying their own life experiences. That’s not where the story ends, that’s where it begins – embracing a wholly untrustworthy mode of storytelling, Yuasa seems to tell us “of course the narrator is unreliable – but isn’t the world as he sees it a whole lot of fun?”
And it certainly is. Unconstrained by the need to set up Watashi’s immediate situation and social circumstances, episode two proceeds as a farcical and one-sided war between the bitter Watashi and the movie circle’s president-king, Jougasaki. While constantly portraying Ozu as the truly black-hearted collaborator, Watashi conjures images of Jougasaki as a king, a lech, and even some kind of fascist military ruler. While Ozu crows Watashi’s bitter thoughts about Jougasaki’s crowd-pleasing filmmaking, our hero seems to more or less accidentally experience a pretty sweet college experience, as he creates a series of deeply personal, almost certainly terrible, and undeniably interesting short films. And after his tremendously indulgent works get him kicked out of the film club entirely, he embarks on his greatest project – a thundering takedown of his nemesis, Herr Jougasaki.
Watashi’s final film ends up being a testament to both his myopia and his hypocrisy. Claiming that, “in order to save the underclassmen, I decided to willingly take on this villainous role,” he engages in the same vein of petty, bitter dickishness he embraced throughout the first episode. Though Ozu’s initial description of Jougasaki’s crimes include a predatory photo session that really would demand a takedown, that session is mysteriously absent in the final product. Instead, all that product contains is a brief lifetime of bitter envy compressed into a character assassination bullet. “Jougasaki doesn’t like you as much as you think,” “Jougasaki gets bad grades,” and “Jougasaki has weird sex fantasies” are the crimes put on display, a tableau that reveals more about the viciousness of the cameraman than the audacity of the subject.
“I preferred your earlier films,” is Akashi’s ultimate review. “This one was of questionable character.” By letting his jealousy of Jougasaki’s seemingly perfect existence overwhelm his own quest for happiness, Watashi once again accomplishes nothing more than dragging others down to his own level. After the bitter envy and righteous effort and thunderous debut, Watashi ultimately finds himself alone in that tatami square, thinking back on the time Akashi made him promise to film a true love story. That love story still exists, at least in partial form – turning on the camera, Watashi watches himself and Ozu embrace over that inescapable Kyoto bridge. But Watashi cannot feel joy for these characters, even though they’re his own creations. Lashing out at the happy lovers, he embraces his first, worst instincts, and the clock turns back once more.
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