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elusivity 's review for:
Homunculus 1
by Hideo Yamamoto
This review is for the entire series, which is gross and terrible and horrific, like a Greek tragedy. Highly recommended.
Regarding the protagonist--a man deeply twisted by his apparently physical ugliness, more troubled than the reader could realize at the beginning of his journey. As the story progressed, we are lead to believe that maybe he is seeing some kind of ineffable truth, that he is becoming healed and a healer. Except the foreshadowing is everywhere, even before his trepanation surgery--these case files where all the past patients have gone insane; the homeless man who he "helped"ends up not reuniting with a long-lost daughter but hangs himself instead. However shitty and illogical, our psychological defenses sometimes are the only things that keep us from being destroyed by our underlying trauma, and the protagonist's self-centered need to prove that his "sixth sense" is "real" results not only in that death, but also in the death by trepanation of Nanako, another lost soul, drawn to his (insane) grandiose belief the way countless lost souls have been drawn by charismatic figures into cults and deaths.
What Nanako said of him is true--though he never truly listened nor accepted it as true, but doubled down on projecting his own issues onto her. She says his problem is he only ever wants to be seen, appreciated, and understood by OTHER people, yet never tried to see, appreciate and understand anyone else. He is always the victim, even though--in trying to make himself feel better--he threw money around, used women ruthlessly, participated in collapse of companies, destroyed lives and caused untold damage. He is doomed to forever suffer because he could never see anyone else as fully human. Even in the moments of his Christlike transcendence, he could only understand empathy by seeing other people as versions of HIMSELF, rather than seeing them for themselves.
I find it interesting and illustrative of the series' point that: the twist ending is virtually unacceptable to me at first, because the man was drawn to be so straight-forwardly handsome, and in manga, handsome = good = survival or a heroic end. Instead, of course, his handsomeness is merely fakery (complete plastic surgery), and his journey toward finding truth and acceptance through trepanation, equally fake. Leading to the 180-degree whiplash reveal that, instead of continuing the nearly-messianic feeling of universal love and acceptance in the second-to-last chapter, 1 year later he was retreading his disillusionment post-plastic surgery: tired of seeing only other people's trauma, yearning to be seen, he had turned into a psychotic, hole-drilling murderer in the very last chapter. He had learned nothing from the realization that artificial changes could not heal his inner trauma, and retreads the same downward spiral as before. Any artificial, dirty shortcut in trying to heal our pain could only ever lead back to the exact same path to hell.
Spoiler
This is actually a very accurate rendition of deep-seated psycho-trauma, and how it could plague us all our lives, just under the lid of our consciousness. This is true for each homunculus individual stories, as well as for the protagonist.Regarding the protagonist--a man deeply twisted by his apparently physical ugliness, more troubled than the reader could realize at the beginning of his journey. As the story progressed, we are lead to believe that maybe he is seeing some kind of ineffable truth, that he is becoming healed and a healer. Except the foreshadowing is everywhere, even before his trepanation surgery--these case files where all the past patients have gone insane; the homeless man who he "helped"ends up not reuniting with a long-lost daughter but hangs himself instead. However shitty and illogical, our psychological defenses sometimes are the only things that keep us from being destroyed by our underlying trauma, and the protagonist's self-centered need to prove that his "sixth sense" is "real" results not only in that death, but also in the death by trepanation of Nanako, another lost soul, drawn to his (insane) grandiose belief the way countless lost souls have been drawn by charismatic figures into cults and deaths.
What Nanako said of him is true--though he never truly listened nor accepted it as true, but doubled down on projecting his own issues onto her. She says his problem is he only ever wants to be seen, appreciated, and understood by OTHER people, yet never tried to see, appreciate and understand anyone else. He is always the victim, even though--in trying to make himself feel better--he threw money around, used women ruthlessly, participated in collapse of companies, destroyed lives and caused untold damage. He is doomed to forever suffer because he could never see anyone else as fully human. Even in the moments of his Christlike transcendence, he could only understand empathy by seeing other people as versions of HIMSELF, rather than seeing them for themselves.
I find it interesting and illustrative of the series' point that: the twist ending is virtually unacceptable to me at first, because the man was drawn to be so straight-forwardly handsome, and in manga, handsome = good = survival or a heroic end. Instead, of course, his handsomeness is merely fakery (complete plastic surgery), and his journey toward finding truth and acceptance through trepanation, equally fake. Leading to the 180-degree whiplash reveal that, instead of continuing the nearly-messianic feeling of universal love and acceptance in the second-to-last chapter, 1 year later he was retreading his disillusionment post-plastic surgery: tired of seeing only other people's trauma, yearning to be seen, he had turned into a psychotic, hole-drilling murderer in the very last chapter. He had learned nothing from the realization that artificial changes could not heal his inner trauma, and retreads the same downward spiral as before. Any artificial, dirty shortcut in trying to heal our pain could only ever lead back to the exact same path to hell.