Wouldn’t it be wonderful to stare up at the stars, secure and certain of your place within their grand design? To not see the cosmos as a sprawling reflection of all the opportunities you’re conceding, all the moments you’re wasting with every second not harnessed to your true purpose? To truly know who and what you are, your current self and your ultimate intended function? In a universe as vast as our own, the idea that each of us has some destiny that we must seek, some specific route that was made for us among the countless potential paths we might tread, feels more like a hopeless lament than a call to action. And yet some truly do seem to have found their calling, treading confidently forward with certainty at their side.

Unfortunately, with his philosophy of greatness having been so utterly dismantled, Hachiman no longer possesses such certainty of purpose. He sees only an unreachable beauty in the night sky, prompting him to ponder why we build electric lights to blot out that beauty. His musing seems to echo an underlying uncertainty regarding Werner Locksmith’s conquering of the cosmos, but his fellow Von Braun trainee Sally takes him at his word. Replying without turning from her work, she offers the simple, obvious “you can’t stay in the dark if you’ve got stuff to do.”

The differences in their perspective reflect a fundamental difference in their approach to life. Sally does the work she needs to in order to get by, while Hachi cannot be content simply to exist, to live and die and pass on from the world. His life must have meaning, his everyday tasks possessing more long-term significance than simply the acquisition of his daily pay. His human actions must all serve some grand future purpose, and that purpose itself must be one that will echo through time, ensuring he is remembered for his accomplishments. Faced with the unforgiving void of space, Hachi is determined to flaunt its indifference and somehow grasp eternity.

Of course, Hachi is fundamentally misguided in this pursuit, as Planetes’ second volume thoroughly demonstrated. Though he seeks the austere immortality of a figure like Locksmith, he is most fundamentally driven by human concerns, by a need for connection and sympathy for his loved ones. But in a world where anything but a Locksmith-level accomplishment is considered practically meaningless, the assumed routines of a worker ant amongst countless other worker ants, he still feels unable to content himself with the sentimental, allegedly “cowardly” embrace of ordinary happiness. And thus, he drifts.

“Why was I so angry? And why was I in such a hurry? I have no idea.” In the wake of his revelation on the moon, Hachi feels unmoored from his own emotions, incapable of recognizing the desperation to cling to something important as authentic to his new personality. When you live in service of some grand, impossible dream, every second that passes is a second that’s potentially been wasted, a second you could have dedicated to the dream, a second these foolish drones with their regulations and red tape have stolen from the dream, even at the cost of their own species’ advancement. But when you’re actually alive in the moment, appreciating each day for the unique experiences it alone can offer, it’s hard to understand that mania that drives manic dreamers to live in perpetual toil and aggravation.

Rather than a brave explorer whose name will echo throughout history, Hachimaki now envisions himself as a very different figure: a wounded, clearly dying cat he once saw back on earth. In spite of its crumpled body, the cat still dragged itself across the highway, painting a bloody path towards a moon it would never reach. Was Hachimaki ever any more than that cat, deluding itself into believing there was more to life than this, dragging its body towards an unreachable luminance? Was Locksmith’s voice in his ear no more than the voice that calls to this cat, telling it to continue moving forward against all reason? Was it more honorable to heed that call than the call of his sentimentality? Who was really the fool here?

The specter of this cat haunts him as he attends a Jupiter project press conference, seemingly poisoning the validity of his crewmate’s words as they extol the grand importance of this project. What wounded you, Hachi? What compelled you to draw your carcass across the pavement, called by some astral body you can’t hope to reach or understand? And if you don’t continue dragging yourself forward, what else is left? Collapsing from stress and awakening among his crewmates, he finds himself back precisely where he started, before he caught a ride on Locksmith’s ambitions. “I don’t feel like doing anything,” he admits, no longer driven by either the dream of the Great Man or the joy of life’s simple pleasures. It was this initial feeling of alienation and disillusionment with the everyday that prompted him to embrace Locksmith’s dream, but with the certainty Jupiter provided stolen, he no longer knows what might fill his void of longing, or actually make him happy.

As always, Hachi finds his moments of deepest internal honesty within the void, where there is nothing else for him to focus on or hide behind. Alone on the lunar surface, he speaks to the voice of death, or god, or at least something that answers back. Asking about his path, he is told it is a circle, to which he angrily responds “so I have to go round and round forever?” To this, the voice offers the simple, obvious “you don’t have to do anything.” Even this metaphorical space kitty understands that Hachi is putting too much weight on himself, too much pressure on his every choice. He was seduced by a promise of something more than everyday happiness, but he hasn’t even had a chance to enjoy everyday happiness in the first place. He believes human value is determined by accomplishments, by prizes won, because he has never tried to live, and thus discovered the value we accumulate across our seemingly mundane, “purposeless” days.

To this voice of the cosmos, things are much simpler: “You are human. You are Hachimaki. You love Tanabe. These will give you strength.” Hachi has so divorced himself from mundane happiness, so dedicated himself to seeking the most forbidding possible horizon, that he has lost the ability to perceive kindness and community as anything but a trick, a trap intended to drag him away from his lofty goals. But even after spending all this time chasing the void, the voice inside assures him that “if you can see darkness, you can also, by contrast, see light. It just looks so unfamiliar to you.”

That unfamiliar light is exemplified in Ai Tanabe, who we swiftly learn was actually abandoned as a baby on her adoptive parents’ doorstep. While Hachi frets about not knowing where home is, Ai truly doesn’t know who her birth parents are, but seems to have no difficulty embracing the comfort of love and family. This is not actually surprising; Hachi’s childhood was likely dominated by his father’s absence, which he was forced to rationalize as serving some great project, obviously something far more important than spending time with his son. But Ai was raised with love, and knows that a close-knit support structure is the most essential element of any life. Hachi in part has no “home to return to” because his home was always a way station, a place from which he looked up at the stars his father had escaped to and dreamed of making an escape of his own, accomplishing things that made sense of his lonely childhood.

If Hachimaki is the doomed cat chasing the stars, then Tanabe is that cat’s accommodating owner, taking it home when it’s overwhelmed by the hostility of the cosmos. So it goes for an actual cat Tanabe adopts; slated to be put down after its owner’s death, she brings it home to her parents on earth, building a family out of lost hopes. Even Tanabe’s relationship with space is healthier than Hachi’s; while he sees it as something he must conquer in order to prove his worth, an inhospitable antagonist he must perpetually challenge, Tanabe actually feels perfectly at home in orbit. Home is wherever the people she cares about are; it is not one plot of land, it is a bond between loved ones.

Meanwhile, Hachimaki now finds himself haunted by dreams of speaking with an alien, an alien who wishes to return to his impossibly distant home. Hachi has carried himself so far from any sort of authentic values or desires that he is now uncertain who he is, or how to find his way back to himself. Confessing these dreams to Sally, she seems to understand, saying that “right now your mind is trying to perceive the vastness of space.” Hachi’s hopes of becoming a Great Man were his original answer to the cosmic insignificance of any human life, of the smallness we feel in the face of creation. With those hopes shattered, he sees no grounding, no safety, no port in the storm – until Sally embraces him, and reminds him of warm arms he felt once before. We need not illuminate the entirety of the cosmos; if a single light remains on a familiar porch, we might always find our way home.

Falling into a contended sleep, he finds himself once more in that same dream, but this time with Tanabe at his side. With that simple change, the tenor of the dream changes entirely; this is not a vision of longing or loss, but a shared moment of beauty. Perhaps the infinite vastness of the universe need not be a harrowing, alienating sight, a condemnation of your own infinitesimal existence. Perhaps human beings were actually meant to glimpse this wonder from the sidelines, pushing forward in their own small ways, but prioritizing and embracing ordinary happiness and the people they love. So it goes for dream-Tanabe, who recommends they get some food, prompting Tanabe to wake up starving. He wants something! Though Jupiter and the stars await, at this very moment, the thing that would make Hachimaki happy would be a meal shared with the person he loves.

Hachimaki thus sets out on a search for Tanabe, marveling all the while at the everyday wonders he was previously unable to see. With his eyes no longer solely focused on the horizon, he is able to appreciate the enchantment of his familiar space station, the fantastical sight of so many different people coming into space. Where once he saw these travelers as simple obstacles in the path of his grand design, he now sees himself in their emotions, in the close embrace of loved ones reunited. To seek perfection and live for the history books is to accept that you will never truly be happy, that you will live as an instrument rather than a human being. Hachi wanted purpose, but he never wanted that; now content in admitting his frailty, he realizes he wants this same sort of wholeness, this perfectly ordinary happiness. More than Jupiter, more than the accolades, more than eternity, what he really wants is to hear Tanabe’s voice again.

Back on earth and in the Tanabe household, Hachi finds something close to the opposite of his own family dynamic. Everyone here is eager for Tanabe to stick around and enjoy her time, and instead of being an absent dreamer, her dad is the homebody who’s always happy to see his adventurous daughter come and visit. With first his father and then Locksmith serving as his only models for behavior, Hachi was pigeonholed into a self-defeating evaluation of purpose that would simply never work for him, would never appease his own very human desires. But here in the Tanabe household, he sees that there are many other valid routes to adulthood, and that this humble repairman is truly, fully content.

In fact, Tanabe has the opposite problem of Hachi: she struggles to explain to her parents why she needed to leave for space, instead of staying near the people who love her. Even when happiness is close at hand, we cannot help the things we yearn for. Tanabe has much to teach Hachi about love and family, but she’s also drawn towards space by that indescribable longing, that desire to reach beyond the stars. She is not just some icon of domestic contentment; she is a dreamer as well, just one who understands that sailors must eventually come home.

With Tanabe crying in guilt and gratitude, Hachi reaches out, telling her he understands as he embraces her. At last, Hachi has something he can return to Tanabe, a way of thanking her for dragging him back from the brink. At last, he returns to that warm embrace, a place like so many others have found, but this one just for him. Hachi has always been essential, but not because he plays some glorious role in mankind’s inexorable conquering of the cosmos. Hachi has always been essential because he is Hachi – because to everyone who knows him, there is a Hachi-shaped place in their life that would be empty without him, a hole they could patch but never fill. The abyss of space will never be impressed by our efforts to illuminate it; but to the people we love, our hands around their shoulders are as irreplaceable as oxygen, as warm as the sun.

Gripping Tanabe’s shoulders, Hachi makes a final pledge: “no matter where we go, we always have to come back alive.” It’s a sentiment Hachi didn’t really get when his mother first made him promise it, but one he now understands perfectly. We hold no debts to space or to the future – it is only our selfishness, our audacity, that makes us believe we are beholden to such concepts. The ones we owe are instead the ones we leave behind, the ones who urge us off with courageous smiles, praying we shall one day return. It is to those people that we must offer thanks, and reward their trust by coming home to them

The two plan on a private wedding before Hachi’s Jupiter trip, prompting Hachi’s father to lay down one final piece of advice: “you’re part of a couple now, so you have to share your life.” These words are true and well-meant, but his son has fortunately already passed beyond the point where they are necessary. Whereas Hachi was initially motivated by the beauty of the Von Braun’s engines, he now sees rockets as inherently lonely creatures, “driven only by a need to escape.” Everything Hachi was doing previously was an attempt to flee his own insecurities, to latch onto the allegedly noble dreams of others in order to secure a piece of that certainty for himself. But Hachi is too human to share their dreams, and is now motivated just as much by the coming home as the embarking.

“I’m no longer alone, and that’s why I’ll survive,” he proudly announces to his spirit cat, to which it responds “that’s your big revelation? How normal.” It might not seem like much, but ‘normal happiness’ can be a hard mark to achieve. Many of us are desperate to believe our life has some significance beyond the mundane procession of our days, and turn to balms ranging from the pursuit of capital to the worship of a god in order to provide clear, undeniable meaning to our lives. The great trick of achieving happiness is somehow letting go of that fear, and seeing each moment as its own immeasurable reward. If you spend your whole life chasing grand meaning, you’ll miss the meaning that can be found in every second shared with people you love. We will always dream of sailing beyond the stars, of achieving grand feats that echo throughout history. But there is little warmth in seeking celestial grandeur, and little comfort in the applause of distant strangers. If we wish to truly be happy, we must first learn that happiness is close at hand.

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