[fignae]

The Chinese fansub group, YYK, recently released the 25th Simoun episode. With it came a translation note from their TL, glyco. They took these words 「落ちる」("ochiru") and drew another connection from it, in addition to the obvious Western connotation of the Biblical Fall we already know. It is Sakaguchi Ango's 1946 essay, "Darakuron" (『堕落論』, i.e. "On Decadence"). glyco quotes these lines from the essay:

戦争に負けたから堕ちるのではないのだ。
人間だから堕ちるのであり、生きているから堕ちるだけだ。
だが人間は永遠に堕ちぬくことはできないだろう。
なぜなら人間の心は苦難に対して鋼鉄の如くでは有り得ない。
人間は可憐（かれん）であり脆弱（ぜいじゃく）であり、
それ故愚かなものであるが、堕ちぬくためには弱すぎる。
…
…
…
堕ちる道を堕ちきることによって、
自分自身を発見し、救わなければならない。

They then give a translation, in Chinese. The corresponding paragraph can be found on the web, in English, translated by Ian Smith, which I'm quoting below. This is the concluding paragraph of the essay.

We are not going to fall because we lost the war. We are going to fall because we are human, simply because we are alive. But can we save humanity from an eternal decline? Why is it that the human heart cannot face up to extreme hardships with the strength of steel? We are delicate and frail and thus strange creatures, but we are too weak to keep from falling into decadence. In the end we must kill the chaste virgin, we must devise Bushido, and we must prop up the Emperor. But we must each kill our own virgin, we must each devise our own kind of Bushido and our own Emperor; it is essential that people descend down their own correct path and they must descend to the very end of that path. It is also crucial that Japan fall in the same way. We must save ourselves by discovering ourselves once we have fallen to the bottom of the path of decadence. Political salvation and other shortcuts are nothing but superficial folly.

Contrary to how this post looks, I don't think the reference is absolutely significant. I'm in two minds about it at the moment.

Nonetheless, it is academically very interesting. Sakaguchi wrote this after Japan's defeat in World War II. His thesis contains the idea (sorry, I haven't read it in detail) that the nation can pick itself up in the wake of defeat, even that the fall is necessary in order for the nation to discover itself again. This idea has severe resonances when applied to Simoun.

Also, the two notions of the fall as Biblical and the fall into "decadence" can arguably co-exist; there doesn't have to be a contradiction. Besides the similarities they share, the controlling motif behind them both is, after all, the behemoth that is "modernity", a combination of technology, capitalism and politics that culminates in change, and more importantly, the self-awareness of change. I could waffle on about how Simoun fits "Western" literary history, but that would take time and knowledge I don't have at my fingertips.

That said, wrapping all this in the nutshell of a child growing up and falling and learning is a great metaphor, one that leads us on many possible avenues of thought. We'll never know the work's creator or his unconscious with any intimacy, I must disclaim, but I like knowing that the Japanese collective unconscious contains such an element.

[See Ian Smith's essay and translation of Darakuron for full text.
Also see the original text by Sakaguchi Ango -- and the picture of the wing, the wing!]

For those who didn't hear the word... which is most of you that may have included me (oh god, I wrote all this about a word?!), it appears in Episode 1 and 25 and, er, I don't know where else.