Powerfully Happy
Below is an excerpt of my latest contribution for Humanum Review, published by the Pontifical John Paul II Institute for Marriage and Family in Washington DC. Most of my contributions have been theological analyses of anime series, and this one focuses on the first season of the anime series My Happy Marriage.
We are hardwired to long for happiness. But is happiness something that wells up from within us or is it sourced externally, and if so, what are its terms? More to the point, who sets those terms, and what does the answer say about our ability to engineer our own happiness?
Such are the questions I found myself asking as I watched the first season of Takehiro Kubota’s anime series My Happy Marriage. While I first thought it to be the romantic schlock that is now its own subgenre of anime, what changed my mind was the way that the question of happiness consistently framed the overtures between the show’s main characters. This question was brought into sharper relief by the show’s supernatural elements, talents ranging from casting spells and channeling fire to the reading of dreams. The application of these powers, the claims of ownership by those that possess them, and the mediation of those claims via the institution of marriage, is what keeps the question of happiness, and whether it is a function of power, alive throughout the series. From a theological lens, this raises the further question as to whether the diametrically opposed pursuits of happiness—Augustine’s self-serving libido dominandi or “lust for domination” on the one hand, and Paul’s self-giving kenosis for the beloved on the other hand—make any difference in refracting and contouring this exercise of power?
The protagonist of the show is Miyo Saimori, the daughter of her late mother Sumi and Shinichi, the patriarch of the Saimori family. What strikes the viewer in the first episode is the gaping emotional void within Miyo, set in train by her mother’s death and marked by a cherry blossom tree in the family garden. Following her death, Shinichi remarries another woman named Kanoko with whom he has another daughter named Kaya. Eager to secure their place in the Saimori family, as well as marginalize those in the old family structure, both Kanoko and Kaya take every opportunity to denigrate the memory of Sumi and abuse Miyo both emotionally and physically, reducing her to a mere housemaid.
What becomes evident from the first episode is how deeply Miyo’s family life is cloven by asymmetries of power and how relations between family members are forged because of those asymmetries. At one level, this is hardly surprising, for as Graham Ward notes, “every relation (and power can only be powerful with respect to relations) is a power relation insofar as it involves the distribution of differences, and some of those differentials (perhaps many) involve inequalities.”[1] Indeed, as Christians we know that even the Trinity itself, as well as the relations of love between the divine persons, is marked by an asymmetry rather than simple egalitarianism. These asymmetries are not antithetical to the Trinitarian relations of one person in the Godhead giving oneself in love to another, for it is rather the very differences that make self-giving possible. What is striking in My Happy Marriage is…
Read the fully essay by clicking here.
Find Matthew Tan’s other works on Humanum Review by clicking here.
