The Tatami Galaxy

So as a disclaimer: I had read the Tatami Galaxy a while ago and typed up various thoughts about it. I recently finished the Tatami Time Machine Blues and figured I’d do a writeup of both my thoughts.

The Tatami Galaxy was originally an anime I had watched a long long time ago. I found myself liking it a lot, even to the point where I considered it one of my favourites. I found myself wanting to read the original novel, so when I saw it on sale I figured it was as good a time as any.

The first thing that really struck me when reading the novel was really appreciating how well the anime adapted the monologues of the main character. I remember a joke floating around back in the day about how if you watched the anime subbed, you were essentially reading a novel with how fast the subtitles were, and how many there were as well. Just reading the first few pages of the novel is enough to clarify why that is the case, as the main character has many, many, many rambling thoughts.

What really drew me into the book and what I really appreciated about the prose (shoutouts to the translator) is its almost whimsical nature. I know a lot of people don’t necessarily like it. However, I love the way it flows and it’s fun for me to follow along. The main character is (intentionally) pathetic, and the cast of characters is… whacky to say the least. They’re a fun bunch of individuals, and I think their roles in the story make it a fun journey to go through.

Of course what really makes the Tatami Galaxy so good to me though is the sort of message it tries to convey. As a brief oversimplification, the novel is divided into four parts, each part of which the main character seeks his rose coloured campus life. He laments that the path he had chosen wasn’t what he desired and that if only he could go back in time and choose a different path, perhaps he could’ve found what he was looking for.

Unfortunately for him, that’s never the case. He meets Ozu, he goes through trials and tribulations, and while he does end up with his crush Akashi (though not elaborated on), he still cries over how it wasn’t the rose coloured life he was looking for.

Something that the novel does really well in my opinion is that it reuses monologues and scenes in an effective way. The main character often laments things in similar ways which drives in the point that the novel ultimately is trying to say, in that which (and there’s a more eloquent way to say this I’m sure) all roads in the past lead to the future. He claims that doing something else would save him from the tragedy that is his current campus life, though as the reader we know that’s not true. Instead we see him get to the end, just in different steps. This is further crystallized in the last part where he lives in the (gasp) Tatami Galaxy and witnesses the infinite realities.

There’s a lot of other things that I really liked so I’m just going to ramble about them. This line came up in the anime as well and it was one of my favourite scenes. The main character is talking with Higuchi about his struggles, when Higuchi dispenses some wisdom. “What defines us as beings are not our possibilities, but our impossibilities.” (shoutouts to the translator Emily Balistrieri for doing in my opinion a really good job)

I like this line a lot because I feel a lot of motivational media almost always talks about it the other way around. You can do it! Nothing is impossible! Etc. So it’s a bit refreshing and almost weird to see a character who’s giving a motivational speech to talk about how your impossibilities define you. He even goes on to add “Entrusting your hopes to something as flimsy as your possibilities is the root of all evil. You must accept this you of here and now, you are incapable of becoming anyone else.”

Those last two lines I think do a great job at explaining what he means. It’s impossible for someone to know all the things they can do. Maybe it’s possible for me to be a chef, maybe it’s possible for me to be a professional video game player, maybe it’s possible for me to win the lottery, etc. To think about all of this is madness, and this is shown throughout the novel as the main character struggles with thinking about all the things that could have been. To put it in other words, it’s very easy to say what you cannot do, it’s very hard to say what you can do. That aspect of it to me is quite inspirational. You cannot change what you’ve gone through. That is something that is an undeniable truth. That’s easy to say. But what can you do in the future? Who knows.

Another aspect of the stories that I really liked is the fortune teller and the idea of what “Colosseo” is. Throughout each arc, the fortune teller tells the main character that there will be an opportunity he has to seize. However she also goes on to say how there will be things that look like chances that aren’t as well as things that don’t look like chances that are. What an unfair conundrum for someone to be in. How is someone supposed to seize their chance against such unfair odds?

But the next part of what she says may be a one off line, but I think it’s something important to think about. She adds that “It looks like you’ll live a long life, so I’m sure you’ll be able to seize one at one point.”

A lot of stories I feel tend to focus on “don’t miss your chance!” This fortune teller goes against that, saying that even if you miss one of those chances, there will be more later on. It’s another message that (to me) is almost conveyed briefly, but I think it’s a nice message the book is saying. Many things don’t convey that life is longer than just the story itself, so it often feels like characters only ever have that one shot (obviously barring other things like life or death choices, but this book doesn’t talk about that… sort of). From a personal perspective, for lack of a better term, it’s… comforting to think about. I think ever since I was younger I was so obsessed with how if I messed up now, the rest of my life was doomed. But that was never true, sure it may have pushed some things back or it may have caused delays or setbacks, but much like the main character’s different choices, those things I may have thought were life-setting may not have been as life-setting as I have thought.

Relating to the idea of chances too, the main character is always on the look out for what “Colosseo” is. In each part, something else triggers what his idea of Colosseo is. As the readers though, we understand that because each “Colosseo” is different, the idea of it is was bullshit all along. The main character took action of his own initiative. It wasn’t because of some “charm” or “sign”, he just thought he saw it when in reality he still came to the decision to act himself. I think many people tend to do something similar even if they want to admit it or not. “If X happens, then I’ll do Y”. Oftentimes (at least for me), X might happen, and I might decide not to do Y anyways. Sometimes X doesn’t happen, and I’ll do Y regardless. Assigning the action of “doing Y” to an arbitrary event “X” is bullshit, at least that’s what I felt this aspect of the novel was trying to say.

One last thing I wanted to talk about was I think Ozu is a really interesting character. He kind of seems like an antagonist (and is definitely so at times), but I think it’s more fun/interesting to think of him as almost a manifestation of the main character’s “call of the abyss”. He does all the nasty acts the main character thinks of but doesn’t have the courage to do. He’s the one who causes all sorts of trouble and chaos just for the sake of it. The main character when present has the ability to hold him back, but when he’s left unchecked, Ozu does all kinds of crazy things.

He’s impulsive, contrary to the main character’s restraint. He’s “evil”, contrary to the main character’s “good” (self defined). And that’s what makes Ozu such a good foil to the main character in all of these parts. Like he says, they’re connected by the black thread of fate. Despite how much the main character claims to hate him, needless to say, Ozu’s still a very important part of the main character, much like how our desires (dark or otherwise) are a part of us. It’s just a matter of how we keep them in check.

Geez, that was a lot I rambled on about the Tatami Galaxy. I do really love the novel, in some ways I think it’s better than the anime, though I think the anime is also worth a watch. Anyways, I actually very recently (today in fact) finished the sequel, the Tatami Time Machine Blues and also wrote some thoughts on that!

It was a nice, short and sweet, fun ride that I really enjoyed! The last part is more of an epilogue and wrapping up some loose ends and I think it does that quite well. I really enjoyed the way that for lack of a better term, it’s a grand story told through a very mundane perspective. Hell, there’s time travel! But it’s all about this rag tag group of characters and their adventures as they try to resolve what is ultimately a very simple issue.

One part that I was wondering if the author would bring up, and they do, is the concept of what it means for time to be a… predetermined construct for lack of a better term. Akashi and the MC comment on how that effectively their life is already prewritten, as demonstrated by the fact that the flow of time was always aligned. Their actions were effectively predestined and that they couldn’t deviate. It’s admittedly a bit of a bleak concept to me at least, I don’t really like the idea that there’s no such thing as free will.

But I think Akashi makes a nice little parting message about that at the end. We don’t know the future, so in that sense, the future is still ours to write. In other words, the past cannot be changed. But the future can be. So why worry yourself with the past? And I think that kind of encompasses with the overall theme of the Tatami Galaxy. Tatami Galaxy spends its time exploring all the different possibilities that the main character thought would lead him on that “rose-coloured” campus life, only for at the end the reader to know that all paths led to the same place.

Those reasons alone make me think that this is a really good sequel to the Tatami Galaxy. I also like how the book focuses a bit more on the “present”. In the sense that the way I saw Tatami Galaxy as focusing on how you shouldn’t worry about your wrongs, Time Machine Blues I saw as saying to not worry about the future so much and enjoying the present and what you’re doing now. It shows this a lot with contrasting how the main character worries about what he’s going to do now that the AC in his room is broken and as a result that fulfilling summer he had planned had gone up in flames. But if you look at all the other characters, at least Higuchi, Akashi, and Ozu, they’re all enjoying living in the moment. Akashi makes all these objectively bad movies, but never once does she look unhappy doing it. The end result to her may not be perfect or ideal, but I think it’s safe to say she enjoys the process and satisfaction of finishing something.

Even at the end, the main character starts to realize the summer he had thought he had wasted was actually spent quite well. He had fun with his friends (even if he won’t call them that), and the process of making that movie was valuable to him too.

For those reasons, I think this is a good story about what it means to live in the moment. It’s a good continuation of the Tatami Galaxy and I thoroughly enjoyed both novels. There’s something about the whimsical nature of the stories that draw me in and cause me to love them so much.