Himeohji Kagaya wrote:

personally, i thought of her as a proto-Utena of sorts.

I echo this sentiment. All signs and random beeping white hands point to her having something important to do with the whole dueling scheme. I think it's reasonably certain that the project she was a part of failed to some extent, but it was an attempt nonetheless.

I like Tokiko a lot. She's a prince who failed to protect the person she was trying to protect. In this sense, along with many others, she really is a lot like Utena. By the point when we first see her, she's already starting to give up hope, but what she tells Mikage gives evidence of a somewhat persistent determination to save her younger brother. Even the doctors, the ones who would be most capable to save his life, have told her that it's useless, and yet she refuses to accept her brother's fate.

Her background also seems to be a lot like Utena's. Tokiko is just Mamiya's older brother, so why is she the one looking after him and giving him shots? It could be that their parents died long ago, and that she was left to look after him on her own. A good portion of the prince-like characters have younger siblings to watch after, and having to do so seems to build up ideal qualities as opposed to someone who only looks after his or herself. Losing the little brother she is so determined to protect is like Utena losing Anthy, though rather than freeing him from his coffin, she's trying to keep him from entering one. (On the other hand, if it will merely extend his life rather than curing the illness, will that really be freeing him...?)

Like Utena at the end of the Akio arc, somewhere along the line she has gotten herself romantically involved with Akio, either in hopes of saving or brother, or simply for consolation. As the chances of saving her brother diminish, as does her confidence in her ability to save him. From what Mamiya says about her coming to this academy to meet him, Mikage seems to fit into the role of her prince, the one who could help her save her brother. In the end, it's that prince who takes that brother away from her.

Ten years down the line, she's stopped playing prince and entered the adult world. She's not protecting anyone anymore. Her hair is grown out long like Anthy, the Rose Bride, rather than the short cut identical to the way Utena wears her hair in the movie, and now she's living by what her husband provides for her. Could this be what Utena's life would eventually be like, had things gone differently?


I'm sorry. Any analysis I write off the top of my head is usually wrong, so forgive me if I was completely off target with that. I really haven't put much thought into Mikage's episodes, unfortunately. I know that I came up with a really important breakthrough in her character a few months ago, but I can't remember what that was.

I had discussed Tokiko briefly in our thread about Tatsuya.  Mostly in how she related to Mikage and how that had bearing on Mikage's opinion of Tatsuya.  But, hey, it's applicable.

Tokiko is originally the one that really desires eternity in the interactions between herself, Mikage, and Mamiya, not Nemuro.  We don't know how she comes to be in Akio's employment, though we can presume there was some quality in her Akio felt would be beneficial to his plots, otherwise she wouldn't be working for him in the first place.  Her job is to come oversee the project "to grasp eternity".  What's interesting is that she doesn't seem to be a scientist herself, more of an administrator or secretary.

But she's the right person for the job because of qualities in her personality and circumstances that speak to Nemuro.  Tokiko seems far more adult, even in flashbacks, than most of the characters in Utena.  She is self-possessed and a gracious hostess (as we see when she and Nemuro first meet).  The lipstick smears she leaves behind are also interesting...she's the only character I recall who wears makeup.  Certainly the only one about whom that fact is shoved in our faces.  I'm not entirely sure about all of the symbolism, but I think it speaks about her comparative maturity, her femininity, and her sexuality.  Because as self-possessed as she is most of the time, Tokiko has passion--she is dedicated to her brother, to the search for eternity for his sake, she is a sexualized being who trysts with Akio, she has strong feelings about wrong and right.  We see this passion burst out of her on several occasions (is it any wonder Nemuro found her fascinating?). 

This is interesting to me because in some ways it feels very traditionally "Japanese".  For the most part, Tokiko's public image is gracefully feminine and competent (without being arrogant or overbearing).  She tends to keep her family business and her sexuality reserved for privacy.  What I wonder is if she is, in fact, very good at maintaining her 'face'.  She slips up several times, after all.  It's also noteworthy to me that while she is at Ohtori, she acts as a "professional" in the workplace, but once she leaves she fulfills her female "destiny" of marriage to a man who "provides for [her] very well" (something along those lines).  Furthermore, we learn that, as adult as she seems, Tokiko at Ohtori still held on to some fairly "naive" ideals--for example, she goes to great and various lengths to preserve roses because she hates to see things die.

All this reminds me of Anthy's statement, "In the end, all girls are like the Rose Bride."  Tokiko in Nemuro's memories is someone who does a fairly good job of meeting the benchmarks of a very traditional female.  She cares for her physical appearance while remaining fairly conservative, she cooks & hosts, she defers to Nemuro's expertise (using feminine graces and compliments to cajole him into seeing her side), and she avoids public displays of strong emotion or sexuality.  Her (apparent) goal is not to be a working professional, but rather to found a family.  The reason I think of Anthy is that I wonder if Tokiko is an example of someone Ikuhara would accuse of suppressing their individuality and following society's pre-laid paths.  Because we see that Tokiko has reserves of curiosity, courage, and passion.  She is also, as the OP points out, more insightful than many characters in the series--I get the feeling she does grasp much about Akio and his plots that others miss.

I'm not saying here that the role of wife and mother isn't desirable, or is less admirable.  If it's really what you want, it's as good as any career you might choose, or any other path you might follow.  I just question if Tokiko didn't have a potential alternative destiny, and if she chose the oh-so-traditional path because she felt it was really her only viable option (because it's what she's "supposed" to do).  Her phrasing when Akio asks how she's been doing since she left Ohtori is what makes me curious.  And she comes back--why?  Is it because she role she played in her life after graduation was less exciting than the role she played while she was still at Ohtori?  Or was it really just to visit her brother's grave?

Whether or not that's what the series is implying, she's a pretty interesting and admirable character.

Last edited by rhyaniwyn (07-17-2008 04:13:43 PM)

Neato.  :-)  I think that's part of what I was getting at.

Tokiko has her merits and, to answer the original question, YES, she is more than a pawn.   I think we have indications that she has insight into Akio's character and the nature of Ohtori that most of the others lack.

But so far as what her leaving Ohtori means... Tokiko, I feel, is a "failed" Utena in some respects.  Rather than find "a way to stay curious, courageous, passionate, and yet still be an adult," Tokiko became a Rose Bride as an adult and chose to live a generic life.  She acquiesces to the image of womanhood her society and her husband desire.  She is "engaged" to the traditional role of woman as as wife and mother.

That is why she uses the particular metaphor about fruit.  I think it does reference bearing children on one level.  Tokiko considers bearing fruit to be her ultimate destiny.  Her life would be a failure if she didn't.  She doesn't even question that eventually that is what she will have to do.  But there is a part of her that longs for a different destiny--that is what draws her to the eternity project and what drives her to preserve roses.  However, at the same time she is intelligent enough to know that there is something very wrong with the stasis of Ohtori, something corrupt in it.  She's smart enough to get out, but she's not quite courageous enough to get out and live life on her own terms.

That is one of the things that draws Mikage to her--she would certainly be a person with whom to build a family; that's the life she's heading toward.  But those signs of the suppressed Tokiko that peek through from time to time could be why Mikage finds her so fascinating.  Those moments--such as her distracted musing on eternity, her confrontation of Mamiya in the garden, her passionate kiss with Akio, her reaction to Mikage when the Memorial Hall is on fire--indicate to me that Tokiko was suppressing parts of herself in order to fit a mold.

The items that Gio pointed out: her burial of her brother at Ohtori and her visit to Akio, as well as her statement about her life and her husband suggest to me that Tokiko's innermost longings weren't fulfilled by the life she chose.  So it's not that her aspirations lined up with the very conventional adulthood she gained, it's that Tokiko had tunnel vision about that one thing.

Last edited by rhyaniwyn (07-18-2008 05:44:36 PM)

brian wrote:

Failed Utena makes some sense but there is too much iconography that suggests Mikage is the failed Utena. He was trying to be a Prince, to save Mamiya and win Tokiko. I think this is some kind of foreshadowing of the main triangle. Mikage plays the Utena role, Mamiya plays the Anthy role and Akio plays the Akio role. So where does that leave Tokiko?

There's a lot of iconography going both ways.  Mikage and Utena have the same character design.  But Mikage hallucinates Utena as Tokiko; Utena even delivers to Anthy a line identical to one we saw Tokiko delivering to Mamiya.

Interesting, I'd forgotten that Nemuro and Mikage could be seen as two different persons.

Clarice wrote:

All the while I was reading this, I kept having the same thought. If Tokiko could be seen as a failed Utena, you could ultimately view the whole affair of Mikage and Tokiko as a sort of safely failed experiment. Any result it could have had would suit Akio in some way, but if she was supposed to be Utena, what was the big problem? Her age.

Perhaps Akio originally wanted to work with an older group, or was at least seeing if that was a viable option. The 100 duelists, Nemuro, and Tokiko are all over all older than the group he has in the series. Might burning the duelists have been Akio's version of a reset button after it became obvious they were past the expiration date for his particular needs? I've always wondered that Akio ends up working with such young people. On one hand it lets him play big bad grown up, on the other, he can do that with adults, and it's even more impressive when they cower. You kinda wonder if he doesn't occasionally prefer to play with the adults, and if the game, in various incarnations that failed, didn't at some point favor them. After all, it's a strange cast he picked for this farce. Nemuro is a senior, but so computerlike that his age is almost unimportant. He's as convincing as a 30 year old, if you account for how often scientists of that age are psychologically retarded. Tokiko is also quite ahead of her age, if you count for that most people in their 30s are still trying to act older than they feel internally.

Not that this trend doesn't continue. Except for Utena, who had to be youthfully innocent and pliable, Akio seems to prefer people that act older than they are when he chooses close associates. After all, I suspect many a MILF has refused to believe Touga when he says he's 17. Or 16. Or 15. Or 14. Probably started with the MILFs pretty quick, that one. Mikage is the same situation. Artificially so or not, he's certainly no high schooler anymore. Take it far enough and I wonder if the 100 duelists, and that whole affair, wasn't designed to artificially age a group of young people to an 'adulthood' more like Akio's. Tokiko would have been part of that, but she ended up being an 'adult' in the real world instead.

brian wrote:

There seems to be a common motif of adults sacrificing their young.

Oh oh!  There IS...and doesn't it fit in perfectly with Ikuhara's expressed theme of "young people not being able to find ways to live outside of pre-laid paths"?  Good one, brian. :-)

Akio takes the fruit of the rose and gets it drunk, opens it wide, pounds the bejeezus out of it, and then makes it into a delicious jam.

Shutin, that's a really interesting idea!

For reference, the full conversation, using ohtori.nu's script:

Beat 1 wrote:

Akio:  You... It's been quite a while.
Tokiko:  The Academy has changed a lot.  Just now over there, I saw Professor Nemuro.  He hasn't aged a bit since then, just like you, hmm?
Akio:  As long as they stay in this garden we call the Academy, a person will never become an adult.
Tokiko:  There's something wrong with that, though...

Beat 2 wrote:

Akio:  Are you leading a normal life?
Tokiko:  Yes, I am. My husband is a kind and generous man.

Beat 3 wrote:

Akio:  What did you come here for today?
Tokiko:  I came to visit my brother's... Mamiya's... grave.

Beat 4 wrote:

Tokiko:  Say, even you should know. To bear fruit, flowers have to cast off their petals.
Akio:  Yes, indeed.

I can read the subtext in this conversation in about a hundred different ways, and some of them are indeed quite combative.  The most natural interpretation doesn't seem all that combative to me; Akio keeps probing to see if he still has power over Tokiko, and she keeps showing him that he doesn't, and at the end he acknowledges that he doesn't.  But if he doesn't, then what is Tokiko doing in his planetarium?  Mamiya's grave, presumably, is in the ruins of Nemuro Memorial Hall, not under Akio's couch -- unless Tokiko is speaking very metaphorically.

So we might also read it something like this:

(Beat 1)
Akio: You have no power over me.
Tokiko: Want to bet?
(Beat 2)
Akio: You're no better than me.
Tokiko: Yes I am.
(Beat 3)
Akio: What do you want?
Tokiko: To put the past behind me.
(Beat 4)
Tokiko: And there's just one more thing I have to do.
Akio: All right.

That's a badass reading, but I can't quite get past the fact that Tokiko is an old lady by now.  Can she really think she can beat Akio?  Or maybe the last thing she has to do isn't to duel him, but to fuck him, as some kind of symbolic bookend.  But I don't know if I buy it.  Tokiko seems too self-possessed to want to relive that episode, floral imagery notwithstanding.

Which leads me to a chilling third interpretation:

(Beat 1)
Akio: You got away from me.
Tokiko: Yes, I did.
(Beat 2)
Akio: How did that work out for you?
Tokiko: Fuck you.  But I felt like I was running.
(Beat 3)
Akio: What do you want?
Tokiko: To be with my brother.
(Beat 4)
Tokiko: Kill me.
Akio: All right.

And I could go on all day with more interpretations -- some focused on Mikage, some on Utena, some on Anthy...

Gio, body language clues?

Here's the thing I see. Who else left the Academy and came back, after their lives were influenced by Akio? We can make an argument that Shiori was a normal student until she came back. But Ruka, isn't there a concept that he used to be on the Student Council? And Tokiko was directly manipulated by Akio. Isn't there a possible correlation between the two and what they wanted to accomplish?

Is there anyone else who left and came back?

Satyreyes wrote:

Mamiya's grave, presumably, is in the ruins of Nemuro Memorial Hall, not under Akio's couch

Sorry for the double post, but having rewatched the episode, I just realized that Mamiya might have no actual grave site at all, being that Tokiko laid down her roses on a plain stretch of grass away from any buildings/grave marks/Nemuro Hall etc.  Could that be because Mamiya did not leave behind a body for Tokiko to bury?  If the boy died in the fire at Nemuro Hall, then Tokiko should've left the flowers at the Hall; if he died from illness away from the Academy's grounds, then Tokiko would likely had him buried and giving a grave mark - whether close to Ohtori's grounds or not.    What actually happened to the boy on top of his being "dead"?  Could Mamiya's "death" merely meant that he "disappeared" within Ohtori and had since been beyond Tokiko's reach?  Was that part of the reason why she had to visit Akio years later?



I also noticed the shot of Prof Nemuro being flanked by research boys carrying uprooted/yet to be planted tree-sprouts that are leaveless/barren-seeming . . . I know that was supposed to signify the dry/futileness of the Professor's life back then, but now that I've watched Penguindrum, I can't help but think they're "Penguindrum Trees" related to the research - ones that continue to grow "apples" as more and more lives get sacrificed for the research . . . one of them having eventually made their way to Kanae's mouth years afterwards (I know, pure fanwank here)

Last edited by gorgeousshutin (07-26-2012 09:06:26 AM)