The above is a piece I wrote and formatted for the Issue II of Sunday School – a zine accompanying an event series taking place annually at New River Studios, North London. The theme proposed by its editors – musician and organiser Dom Stevenson (YAWS, Keno, Casting et al.) and the artist Minerva Amiss – was “The End of Eternity” after the novel by Isaac Asimov, drawing on the piece of the same name by the experimental electronic artist Russell Haswell.
Responding to this prompt, I chose to imagine events in the overlapping worlds of the anime series Revolutionary Girl Utena (Be Papas, 1997) and the life and works of Yukio Mishima (1925-1970) on the morning their stories reach a point of terminal bleed-over that initiates a process of mutually cataclysmic reckoning.
The text reads as follows:
PART 1: MORNING
A breeze from the west stirs the dormitory blind, a grey patina of petrolium and plaster dust coating the windowsill and floorboards beneath. This nocturnal effluvia affects all within a mile of the Ohitori Academy. Yet unable to bear the static heat of the past several nights, Utena Tenjou threw the windows wide. She is rewarded with dreams of howling masonry and strep. For, every night, the school’s illimitable wings and collonnades reconfigure, turned by an unseen hand in adherence to the capricious firmament’s revolutionary promise. But, in the dormitory building, Eternity has a different name, and entropy another god. Utena drinks the water from the plant pot on the mantlepiece, ejecting a plume of grit and rosewater from her parched lips, and pulls the shutters down. Still sleeping, Anthy shivers, and mutters something about stoplights.
PART 2: UNIFORM
“Why are you still wearing that boy’s uniform?” Utena turns on her heel to face the ghost of her tutor. “This Uniform was cut on the Rue de Cléry in the arrondissement Sentier!” she spits, “My tailor? He, I share with De Gaulle!” The words fall dead in the silence of the empty landing.
This “De Gaulle” in her mind has no face. Just a military bearing and a well fitted topcoat. He is one of a number of such entities that have lately occupied her thoughts, spun from fragments of incomplete memory, and their names are Marinetti, Von Harbou, Mizutani, and Hirohito, amongst others. Utena once tried to find their lost faces in the photographs that adorn the dormitory walls, and the busts and portraits crowding the lobby. It is among these she stands, now, but with preoccupations elsewhere. For there is something in the air that tells her that someone was here, departed recently and in haste. As if the door should be ajar. As if an oath of moment should still hang in the air. As if a car should still be heard, gunning down the driveway with an appalling fierceness of intent.
PART 3: LAWN
Tiring of this spectral company Utena stands on the balcony, drawn by the sound of raised voices and the clatter of arms. Below her the Student Council members conduct military exercises on the lawn, under the unseeing eye of Apollo. Saionji and Touga wrestle upon the decimated rose bed, slender limbs glowing with striations of fresh blood. Jury’s foil deftly scars the letters ST-JA into the poet god’s alabaster thigh. Miki is twisting the screws and applying fresh duct tape to a contraption of his own design, as Naname stalks the undergrowth for suitable target practice.
Utena recalls a scene several summers gone when she and Anthy had shared tea and thoughts of futurity on this same lawn. That was in the days when Anthy awoke for more than an hour each day. Her decline could well have begun that afternoon, as if broaching the very strangeness of youth and their conjoined fate had altered its trajectory. Utena slept in her uniform that night, and had risen with a rose shaped bruise from the pommel of her blade just above her hip. Since then it had begun to acquire lacerations and stains from unremembered duels. The worst of she found in her back with an answering slit like an exit wound in her breast. A phantom pain joins these twin ruptures, and as it passes Utena wonder at her own frame, and its preternatural absence of blemishes – deathless, and immutable as silver. Her eyes turn inexorably to the ring, granted by her prince so many aeons past, and she wonders what would happen were she to take it off.
PART 4: SHADOWS
Utena finds her locker in the corridor – the one that which now connects the Gläserner Saalbau and the Bridge of Sighs. Amidst the flurry of declarations of undying love and Student Council newsletters accumulated since she last checked, there is one item unlike the others. Choking down a sudden fear, one she has never known in waking life, Utena snaps open the wax seal.
Meet me in the duelling arena. I require only your nobility, and your blade.
*GOGAI – GOGAI – GOGAI*
The shadowgirls burst forth upon the blank wall’s stage. Their fleshly counterparts are nowhere to be seen, though someone somewhere still turns the handle of the ancient gramophone as it sputters its interminable loop.
GIRL 1: Tatenokai hurry – Ichigawa drills in one hour. We must strike before the day’s distractions sap the courage from this new generation.
GIRL 2: Shochō, the car broke down, we can’t get it started!
GIRL 1: Then we shall take Shinohara’s, that worked perfectly last week!
GIRL 2: Shochō, he hasn’t shown up yet! He and Takizawa went out drinking last night and haven’t been seen since!
GIRL 1: Then we shall take the flying horses. Quick, my lance!
GIRL 2: I think you dreamed those, sir.
GIRL 1: Then only one recourse is left to us.
GIRL 2: Sir?
Utena Tenjou drops the letter and looks again at her hand. The ring that bears the Rose Crest, the one that she has worn since childhood, turns from silver to lead. The taste of petrol hangs heavy on the air.