Haibane Renmei E2-7

This review was comissioned by @tzar1990


Haibane Renmei! Been a while since I saw the pilot episode of this series (in part thanks to @Aris Katsaris' fast-laneing of it), and I've been fairly eager to get back to it ever since. Granted, the other pair of Yoshitoshi Abe series I reviewed also had very strong starts before eventually getting too obtuse for me. But then, his contributions to those other series seems to have been mostly visual rather than anything to do with the writing, whereas Haibane Renmei was his baby through and through, so that might not be a factor I should consider.

Anyway. Last time, a girl named Rakka had a dream about falling from the sky before waking up and hatching from an insectoid chrysalis in a rural community of angel-like creatures called haibane. Rakka proved to be a haibane herself, as the following 24 hours saw her undergoing a painful biological process that ended with wings growing from her shoulders, and her new people ritually provided her with a halo to go with them. So far, the main characters include newborn haibane Rakka, and her kinda-sorta mother figure Reki who has been guiding her through her development.

It seeeeeeems like the haibane are dead people reborn into an afterlife world where they live as angel-ish things, what with Rakka seeming to have general knowledge and a vague sense of being *from* somewhere before the dream that brought her into holometabolous angelic life. It also seems like whoever designed this afterlife (or whatever this is) isn't terribly good at what they do, what with the insectoid body horror that seems to underly all the pop-culture-heaven aesthetics.

The existence of haibane children among the minor background characters might be a hole in this interpretation, but it's possible they died as children, or that most haibane are reborn as babies or small children with Rakka's hatching as a teenager being an anomaly (the haibane did find the size of Rakka's chrysalis to be unusual, so it would make sense if most of them are born as smaller children who emerge from smaller xenomorph pods)

Well, let's see if any answers are forthcoming in these next six episodes!


The second episode, "Town and Wall," is mostly exposition, but it's necessary exposition that finds away to illustrate most of its data points naturally while also telling about them. The world that the haibane inhabit is simultaneously larger and smaller than it initially appeared, and some of its contents make me rethink my initial hypotheses. For instance, the haibane aren't the only people in the area as it turns out. There are also normal, wingless, haloless humans, referred to in-universe as "humans," with whom the haibane have a complicated relationship.

The town of Glie and its surrounding fields are surrounded by a high stone wall with only one gate. No one is allowed in or out, and no one knows what's beyond; even the books in the town library contain no information about the world outside.

The haibane inhabit a monastery complex within the walls, and their existence here seems to come with a collective vow of poverty. Each haibane is obligated to find productive work for the human Glieites. What passes for their payment is a kind of credit they receive from a distant, powerful organization called the Haibane Renmei (or "Charcoal Feather Federation"). This credit can only be spent on used or discarded goods; it is forbidden to sell or even gift a newly made item to the haibane. Anything they don't want to get secondhand, they need to produce themselves.

It's not clear where the haibane's food comes from. I've done enough food rescue work to know that a modern town this size easily throws away enough food to keep a few dozens outsiders fed, but Glie seems to be at an early 1900's tech level and I don't think nearly as much food got wasted back then. Granted, there's also enough empty space within the walls that the haibane could conceivably be growing enough food for themselves in their spare time as medieval monks sometimes did.

Anyway, Rakka is going to need to find a job. For the time being, she has a little bit of initial credit that she can unlock by signing her name in a special notebook and giving the shopkeepers one of her own wing feathers as a kind of receipt. The shopkeeper we see them buying used clothes from is...the kind of paternalistic jerk who thinks he's being nice to the haibane just be doing business with them at all. He may or may not be representative of the general population, but the fact that the show is letting him be their onscreen face suggests that he probably is.

While her new friends are leading her around town, Rakka also happens to witness one of the ocassional emissaries from the Haibane Renmei organization when he comes through the gate with his retinue. All of them are masked and silent. The Emissary himself appears to be a haibane, but his wings are covered in strange, bound-up wrappings, and he wears a hole-filled mask that gives an impression of there not being a face at all underneath.

Apparently, the wingless people (called the "toga") marching around the Emissary are the ones who are actually in charge. However, they are not permitted to use their voices within the walls of Glie, and so the Emissary communicates with them using a kind of sign language and translates for the townsfolk. In addition to compensating the locals for haibane credit purchases (low in value though those are), these Haibane Renmei parties also provide some other kind of trade that the townsfolk rely on.

The Emissary briefly seems to stare at Rakka through his eerie, hole-ridden mask, and when he does there is an ominous squawking from the ravens perched on all the nearby rooftops. But then he looks away, and that's all.

Rakka's companions fill her in on there being two basic cohorts of Haibane living at the monastery complex; young adults like themselves, and children (called "young feathers").There are no old haibane, but they seem to have a lot of dealings with the town's human elderly. They are housed in different buildings, all of which have shitty, barely-functional electricity and running water on the Haibane Renmei's dime, and the young adults are the ones basically supporting the rest with their labor-credit secondhand goods.

Hmm.

That evening, upon returning to the monastery, Rakka finds a welcome note from the Haibane Renmei waiting for her, with a greeting for her by name and instructions to attend a temple ceremony to initiate her tomorrow morning. The other Haibane attribute their knowing her name to Rakka having written it on that notebook and given the page to a shopkeeper, but Rakka isn't convinced that that's how the toga and their Emissary learned it. Rakka also is reunited with Reki; she didn't go out with the others today, instead staying back to get a room all cleaned out and organized for the new housemate. Reki proves her mother hen chops once again when Rakka has a sudden stress-induced vertigo fit (common for newcomers, it seems). A reminder that Rakka is still haunted by the hole in their memory that was her entire previous life and (presumably) the people she used to care about, as well as the ongoing pain and dysmorphia caused by her new wings (they still hurt, she still can't control them except accidentally while flexing her arms, and she still can't lay down on her back without sudden, aliennating agony). On the bright side, her halo is staying up on its own now.

Though to be fair, that may not actually be a good thing at all.

Other new information learned this episode:

1. Most Haibane are named after the dream they remember having before hatching. For Rakka, it's "falling." For Reki, meanwhile, it's "pebbles," as her dream had her walking down a moonlit pebble path. All of these dreams seem to involve a journey of some kind.

2. Either Rakka recognizes a random townswoman from her previous life, or she's into girls; she abruptly stops and stares after this unnamed girl in a way that could mean either "don't I know her from somewhere?" or "dat ass."

Maybe both.

The next episode, "Temple, Emissary, and Pancakes," starts with Rakka exploring her new home and being creeped out by how empty and poorly maintained most of the monastery is. The buildings are large, and the haibane are few enough that they can only inhabit and maintain a few parts of them. Rakka isn't the only one who the place creeps out; team mom Reki, for all the show that she makes of having her shit together and being fit to help others settle in, also seems to be having panic attacks borne of their environment, amnesia, and bodies all weighing down on them together. She tries to pass it off as just a silly sleeping mishap when Rakka finds her on the floor curled up under a sheet, and the lie is pretty obviously meant to keep Rakka from worrying rather than to save face.

The Haibane are all traumatized, afraid, and alienated, no matter how long they've been here. They just have learned to deal with it.

...

The understatedness of the show's musical score, and the volume and crispness of its sound work, really help it here. The quiet is heavy and oppressive almost throughout, and even when there is music it's usually very subtle and still comes across as a different flavor of silence.

...

After not getting anything out of Reki, Rakka goes off to make her temple appointment. Another haibane named Hikari walks her there; Hikari needs to return the metal-mold-caster she used to make Rakka's halo to the temple anyway. I guess they need to borrow that from the temple again every time there's a new "birth," instead of just keeping it at the monastery (we later learn that while Hikari has it borrowed, she also uses it as a pancake mould for the bakery she works at on the downlow, so that's funny). It turns out that the Emissary either lives here full time, or he just spends a day or two here after every procession he leads through the gate, because he and a small staff of equally intimidating masked angelfolk provide their reception.

While inside the temple, Rakka and Hikari are forbidden from speaking, just like the Toga are within the walls of Glie. Since they don't know how the sign language that the Haibane Renmei uses, this limits them to "bow your head to salute," "twitch right wing for yes," and "twitch left wing for no." Which forces Rakka to learn to move her wings independently really, really fast once the Emissary starts grilling her, the back pain be damned.

Well. Hikari returns her multipurpose halo-pancake shaper, and Rakka is given her official credit-checkbook that she'll be able to start buying used shit with as soon as she finds a job. Still, even just having a brief one-on-one interaction with the faceless Emissary is a harrowing experience. His voice actor definitely gets a good chunk of the credit for that.

The rest of "Temple, Emissary, and Pancakes," as well as the fourth episode "Clock Tower - Birds Flying," eases into being a kind of surreal slice-of-life series. The slow pace and looser order of events in this type of storytelling has always proven a challenge for me to review, but I guess the only way to get better at it is with practice, so here I go.

The following days see Rakka settling into life at the Haibane's ramshackle Glie monastery, getting to know her fellow prisoners(?) better, and learning to accept that for all that they're more used to this than she is, they don't know any more about the hows, wheres, and whys than she does. No one leaves town, neither Haibane nor human townsfolk. The only creatures seen entering and leaving the walls, save the toga and possibly the Emissary, are the birds that fly overhead.

These birds become a major motif over the course of this pair of episodes. The crows that pick through their trash outside the monastery in particular.

For one thing, Rakka has recurring dreams about the raven from her prenatal dream of falling. In that original chrysalis-dream, the bird seemed to be trying to prevent her from falling, clinging to and pulling at her, before eventually giving up and making a regretful goodbye when it couldn't stop her. In these new dreams, Rakka and the raven see each other through a bank of thick fog, and she tries to reunite with it, only for it to turn its back and fly away, leaving her alone in the fog.

For another, the other haibane all seem to read and project a lot into those crows. The young feathers believe that one day, their own wings will grow large and strong enough to fly over the walls like the crows do and escape Glie. The adult haibane and the human townsfolk all either strongly like the crows, or strongly dislike them.

And...there's one recurring subplot, involving the crows' attempts to eat their garbage, that's either strong foreshadowing or a truly massive red herring. Rakka asks another haibane, Kana, if the key to keeping the crows from making a mess of their garbage might just be to leave food out for them so that they don't have to raid the trash. Kana, suddenly showing a new face and expressing sympathy rather than hostility for the birds, explains that making the birds feel too welcome in town will make them not want to leave it. Which in turn would mean denying them the outside world that they should be able to roam and fly through freely.

Other slice-of-life snippets all have some common themes. Or at least, easily connectable ones. Getting the Little Feathers to eat their vegetables to ensure that they'll grow up, paired with the reveal that Reki (who seems to have been here the longest, and deflects any questions about her own lack of self-care by finding someone else to worry about and take care of) avoids eating her own vegetables just like the kids.

In "Clock Tower - Birds Flying," Rakka starts looking at the workplaces of the other Haibane to try and find a place that'll hire on another one. It's not all businesses in town that do this and let the Haibane gain credit; just certain specific ones. The employers are, almost uniformly, prickly, but seem to genuinely care for their Haibane employees under the surface. One of them, a clockmaker, also obliquely admits to being worried that the haibane he's gotten to know will be "going away" soon.

So. Yeah. The show pretty clearly *wants* the audience to think that the haibane are here in Glie on a very temporary basis as part of a growing up process, and they need to avoid getting too comfortable there or they'll have trouble moving on to the next stage.

Combined with the aesthetics, the implications that they have human lives they forgot about before being reborn here, and some other details, well, I think I have a theory. A theory of what the show intends the audience to think at this point, regardless of whether or not it's going to pull out the rug in one more episode or whatever.

...

The intro sequence also, now that I've seen it a few times, has some implications in it. The visuals revolve around the other Haibane looking up from their various activities around Glie and seeing a golden meteorite descend from the sun overhead.

They run toward the main building to get things ready, with Reki in particular rising to the occasion. Shots of the descending meteor are alternated with close-ups of Rakka surrounded in a field of light particles and curled up in a fetal position like she's in during the end credits. She's obviously riding that meteor, either physically or in some kind of metaphysical sense, and her birth-dream is closer to reality than most of the others'.

After reaching ground level, the meteor becomes a crawling little mote of golden light that darts across the ground like an insect. Finding its way in through an open window and then twitching its way across the monastery floor. In a room that looks a lot like the one Rakka was hatched in.

It eventually wriggles its way into a crack, and then a bloated, alien-looking plant shoot erupts through the floor from that spot. It has green leaves, but the main mass is recognizably similar-looking to the pod that Rakka will eventually hatch out of in the first episode.

Hence the conversation in the pilot about having to "find where it went" before it became a birthing-pod. This is the process by which a haibane enters Glie. Rakka's pod growing unusually large before finally hatching may have some significance, or it may not.

...

So, putting it all together.

This isn't a heaven, or even a parody of heaven. It's purgatory.

There are at least some interpretations of purgatory that have it as less of a place of *punishment* per se, but of purification. The suffering endured by souls in purgatory is a side effect of the transformation they are undergoing, rather than a penalty purposefully inflicted on them. The light of God burns away sin, so the sinful have to endure the burning for a while when they find themselves engulfed in that light, until the impurities are all seared away.

The angelic wings causing pain and discomfort when they grow in: is this because the wings are alien appendages that don't belong there, or is it because the sinful body rejects their divine presence?

The toga unable to speak while within the city. Is it because the voice of god is deadly to those unworthy to hear it? The more obviously angelic-looking Emissary has to do the talking for them: much like the relationship between archangels and seraphim in some versions of angelology?

Not everything fits. For instance, the adult haibane all appear to be women, whereas the "young feathers" are both sexes. Why would the demographics of a purgatory-realm look like that? Also, what are the "humans" of Glie, in this case? Demons? Simulated characters who exist to be part of the process? Actual humans on a planet that's having parts of it used as a purgatory realm through a divine rental contract?

The haibane not knowing what it is they need to atone for, on account of missing memories, might be part of the challenge. Or it might be another unfair detail in a generally unfair system.

Anyway. Like I said, the show could pull the rug out at any time. Up until now though, I do think it's trying to give the impression that Rakka and the others are dead people in a type of purgatory, and that getting too fond of living in it will not bode well for their hereafters.


That's 3 out of 6 episodes in this order. Hopefully I'll be more sure of myself after the second half.