“Condensing the Media Mix: Tatami Galaxy’s Multiple Possible Worlds,” in Canadian Journal of Film Studies, 21:2 (Fall 2012)

MARC STEINBERG CONDENSING THE MEDIA MIX: MULTIPLE POSSIBLE WORLDS IN THE TATAMI GALAXY Résumé: Cet article identifie quelques unes des distinctions générales dans les pratiques narratives transmédiatiques plus précisément entre ce qui, en Amérique du Nord, a été appelé la culture de la convergence des médias et ce qui est connu au Japon comme le media mix. Rédigé à partir d'une lecture de la série d'animation La galaxie Tatami {Yojôhan shinwa taikei, 2010), cet article illustre les différentes approches de la cohérence diégétique à l'intérieur de chacune de ces formations industrial-médiatiques. L'article s'inspire des concepts leibnitzien de compossibilité et d'incompossibilité pour dresser un cadre théorique permettant de comprendre les différences dans la création de mondes médiatiques. En lisant La galaxie Tatami comme un meta commentaire sur la pratique du media mix, l'article vise aussi plus généralement à développer les termes pour l'analyse d'œuvres transmédiatiques. For it cannot be denied that many stories, especially those we call novels, may be regarded as possible, even though they do not actually take place in this parficular sequence of the universe which God has chosen' s it a coincidence that stories of multiple possible worlds proliferate in a world of proliferating media forms? Is it a coincidence that multiple possible world narratives are on the rise in an era of the intensified migration of works across media? It would seem not. Yet here is the rub: contemporary discussions of transmedia storytelling tend to presume a necessary unity and consistency across media. In part this presumption is informed by a focus on Hollywood media producfions; in part it is informed by the absence of a more nuanced understanding of transmedia narrafives and the worlds they presuppose. Hence, we need to rethink what a world is, and what it means to discuss the consistency of a world, in order to develop a more adequate theoretical model for what is going on in the multiple possible media worlds at present. One place to start is to look at a particularly poignant, metacritical reflection on multiple possible media worlds in the Japanese context, underiaken by the television anime series. The Tatami Galaxy {Yojöhan shinwa taikei, literally. The Mythical System of the 4.5 Tatami Mat Room, 2010), offered up by the enfant terrible of Japanese commercial animation Yuasa Masaaki.^ The uniqueness of The Tatami Galaxy is that it condenses the I CANADIAN JOURNAL OF FILM STUDIES • REVUE CANADIENNE D'ÉTUDES CINÉMATOGRAPHIQUES VOLUME 21 NO. 2 • FALL • AUTOMNE 2011 • pp 71-92 logic of the transmedia movement of the so-called "media mix" into a single series. As such it presents attentive viewers with a visual theorization or parable of the function of the media mix. The media mix, broadly defined, is the popular and industry term used in Japan to denote the multiple media formation developed across a single franchise. In its most typical form, a given property begins as a comic or novel, is adapted to a film or animation series, spawns soundtracks, toys or figurines (for children or adults), video games and production notes, along with the requisite newspaper articles, magazine features and advertising. The term media mix originates in markefing discourse of the 1960s, but in the 1980s it comes to designate the anime and film franchising with which it is currently associated. It names the entire phenomenon of transmedia storytelling that Henry Jenkins and others have, in the North American context, called "convergence culture." Important questions of a comparative nature arise here. Are there significant differences between the terms media mix and media convergence, as well as the practices they designate, that prevents them from being collapsed into a single phenomenon? Axe there notable differences between the Japanese media mix and North American media convergence such that we should make efforts to distinguish them? Do the different terms designate the same phenomenon, or are there differences not only in terminology but also in the practice of transmedia storytelling, from Japan to North America? The position I adopt here is that, on the whole, there are significant differences between the practices these two terms designate, and that these differences should be noted. In this iirticle I propose to sketch a somewhat speculative, and inevitably generalizing account of these differences, developed through a reading of The Tatami Galaxy, and focused on the distinct relations between totality and world found within Japanese versus North American media-industrial formations.^ I should acknowledge that there are dangers in reifying the differences between industrial practices, or the differences between nafions. There is a real porosity in these media practices that allows them to seep past national boundaries with ease. Consequently we can find media mix-style practices in North America, just as we can find convergencestyle practices in Japan. Nonetheless the differences between media mix and convergence are marked enough that they deserve to be noted. Indeed, an analysis of the Japanese media mix such as I will undertake it here will also allow us the chance to questions some of the assumptions underpinning the North American model of media convergence. While work will remain to be done to fiesh these differences out in full, this article aims to offer some conceptual parameters by which to understand these terminological, and media-industrial differences—as well as provide a useful reading of one of the most compeUing anime series of recent years. Seeing as the specificity of a phenomenon is often signaled in the analytical work that describes it, I will begin with a comparison of the uses of the two terms by two representative figures: the convergence culture advocate Henry Jenkins, and the media mix developer Ötsuka Eiji. I wiU move from there to a consideration of the multiple possible worlds theory of the 17"^ century philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. 71 MARC STEINBERG As it turns out, Leibniz's work and the neo-Leibnizian theory developed by Gilles Deleuze has much to offer this project of developing a general distinction between the media mix and media convergence. It also provides some conceptual distinctions that can ground future analyses of transmedia works. Indeed, if Charles Sanders Peirce's theory of the indexical sign formed the critical crux of attempts to come to terms with cinema in an age of digital transformation, Leibniz's theory of multiple possible worlds may well be the critical tool we need to grapple with media in the age of convergence—and divergence."* Following on my discussion of Leibniz, I will suggest that we read Tatami Galaxy as a metacritical presentation of the phenomenon of the media mix that would seem to embrace divergence more than convergence. And in this the series allows us to extrapolate differences in industrial pracfice: Japanese media industries have tended, since the late 1980s, to embrace a model of media divergence, while Hollywood has tended to stay closer to a model of media convergence.' This is a tendency, not a simple opposition. As such counterexamples can be found in both media industries. Just as many Japanese media mixes fall back on a model of convergence, there is no dearth of Hollywood examples of divergence. Still, I will suggest here that, taken as a whole, the generation of multiple mixing worlds tends to trump a single converging world in contemporary Japanese media mixes. MEDIA CONVERGENCE VS. THE MEDIA MIX As one of the key figures within studies of convergence, Henry Jenkins likely needs no introduction. A passionate advocate for the importance of considering fandom within media studies since the 1990s, he has continued this work into the 2000s, using the concept of convergence culture to make the case for the significance of fans and fan activity in contemporary media culture. In what is perhaps his most widely read work on the subject. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, Jenkins suggests that media franchises are not made by companies alone, but depend for their success on the participation of fans in the consumption of their products.^ Moreover, as digital media have become a constitutive part of media franchises, fans have taken increasingly active roles in the development and survival of a franchise. Media operate not through one-off acquisitions, but through the perpetual consumption of a particular franchise, whether through in-store purchase, online blogging, web searches, or offiine discussion. Collective intelligence is the name of the game, and the model of the passive consumer has been replaced by the active "prosumer"—a subject who is as much a producer of her or his media experience as a consumer of it.' What I would like to hone in on here is Jenkins's discussion of the part-towhole relationship of media franchises. It is here that we begin to see the contours and limits of Jenkins's image of convergence. Put more directly: in Jenkins's account, while hardware diverges media converge, narratives converge, and fans converge. Take The Matrix series, one of Jenkins's primary objects of analysis. Within The Matrix franchise each "piece" of the work—whether individual film, video game, Animatrix animated segment or comic book—gives a clearer picture of the whole. The principle underlying this is "additive compre- MULTIPLE POSSIBLE WORLDS IN THE TATAMI GALAXY 7 3 hension."^ "The animated films, the game, and the comics function in a similar way for The Matrix, adding information and fleshing out paris of the world so that the whole becomes more convincing and more comprehensible. "' The invocation of the term "world" is by no means arbitrary; as Jenkins notes, "[m]ore and more, storytelling has become the art of world building, as ariists create compelling envirormients that cannot be fully explored or exhausted within a single work or even a single medium."'" As he writes elsewhere, "world building is part of the structuring logic of the new transmedia franchises."" If the "whole is worih more than the sum of the paris"'^—and here the "whole" should be understood to be roughly analogous to the concept of the world—it is also because the whole is never exhausted by any of the parts; it must be built, sought after, consumed, and imagined from pari to pari. Synergy, or the principle that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts, is at the core of the model of transmedia storytelling Jenkins elaborates in his chapter on The Matrix franchise, and this "transmedia impulse" is, Jenkins concludes, "at the heari of what I am calling convergence culture."" "A transmedia story unfolds across multiple media platforms, with each text making a distinctive and valuable contribufion to the whole."'* Key here is the presupposition that the whole is singular, and consistent. Walter Jon Williams attests to this imporiance of consistency in an account of his experience wrifing for the Star Wars franchise. Writers for the franchise must maintain consistency with what is known as the "Expanded Universe," a universe or world that is singular and, to the greatest possible degree, free of contradiction.'^ Within this convergence culture, consumers are hunters and gatherers of information, putting their informational catches together to form a total picture of the transmedia world in question. The emphasis here and in convergence as a media practice is on the (re)constitufion of the whole based on the assembly of distinct paris. This consumption and compilation of fragments in order to gain a greater picture of the whole or the world of the work in question has a familiar ring to it, for those familiar with analyses of the Japanese media mix developed in the late 1980s by crific and media producer Ötsuka Eiji. Ötsuka was central to the formulation of the contemporary model of the Japanese media mix, working in the 1980s for Kadokawa Media Office, a subsidiary of Kadokawa Books and a company on the frontlines of media mix practice headed by Kadokawa Tsuguhiko. While I offer a fuller smalysis of Kadokawa's work elsewhere, it bears repeating here that the model of the media mix developed around Kadokawa Tsuguhiko in the late 1980s itself marked a shift from a film-soundtrack-novel bounded model of the media mix (pioneered by Tsuguhiko's older brother, Kadokawa Haruki), to a relatively unbounded model of the media mix that saw no limit to transmedia serialization.'* It was within this context that Ötsuka developed his theory of narrafive markefing. Published in markefing journals such as the in-house journal for the massive ad firm Dentsü, and collected in the volume Monogatari shohiron (A Theory of Narrative Consumption) published in 1989, Otsuka's work is concerned with the relation between part and whole, and the active contribufion of fans in the consumption of narrative texts. In an analysis of the Bikkuriman 74 MARC STEINBERG Chocolates freebee campaign from the late 1980s, Otsuka isolates the mechanism behind narrative consumpfion.'^ Ötsuka suggests that each commodity—whether an episode of an anime, a weekly manga instaliment, or the sficker from a chocolate candy that bears a fragment of a narrative on its reverse side—should be seen as a "small narrative."" Consumers use these small narratives to access the "grand narrafive" that lies parfially concealed behind them. Each small narrative gives the consumer a greater sense of what this grand narrafive is, fueling consumpfion. Finally, and this point is key, once the consumer has attained a sufficiently broad understanding of the grand narrafive, they are empowered to produce their own small narrative. Each consumer then becomes a producer in her own right. While Ötsuka developed this theory as an analysis of the particular phenomenon of chocolate freebees, in fact this mode of consumption was already widespread by the time of his wrifing, and is epitomized in the fan producfion of amateur comics that are sold at the Comic Market, held periodically in Tokyo and elsewhere across the country. How does Ötsuka's account of the media mix differ from Jenkins's account of convergence? The key lies in their respective conceptions of the relation of parts to whole. Everything hinges on the concept of convergence, as it turns out. Jenkins's model, as we have seen, is one of additive synergy. From part to part, we slowly approach the vision of the whole. At first, Ötsuka would seem to be offering us the same model. And yet there is a fundamental point of ambivalence: fan production. Fans, Ötsuka notes, take an existing narrafive series and reconfigure it, spinning narratives of a sexual relationship between two lead male characters of a series, in the "official" version of which no such relationship exists. Yaoi, or Boys Love, are two main genres of fan producfion that take a "friendship" between male characters and transform it into a narrative of male-male romance. Would a narrafive that takes a heterosexual male lead and pairs him with a male lover constitute the same world? According to Ötsuka's descripfion, it would seem as if it were the same world evoked in both the original and the fan-fiction. The terms "world" and "variafion" that he uses to describe this state of affairs would seem to confirm this: there is a single world traversed by mulfiple variafions." Moreover, each variafion would be characterized by the particular viewpoint it offers onto the ostensibly identical world. This, at least, is what Ötsuka seems to be saying when he writes that, within a given animation series, the "accumulation of settings into a single totality is what people in the animafion field are accustomed to calling the 'worldview.'"^° A given anime narrative is thus "merely the extraction of a series of events that occurred during a specific period around a single individual arbitrarily chosen to be the central character... Theoretically speaking, this also means that countless other dramas could exist if someone else were made the central character. "^^ Ötsuka compares this to the logic of a video game, wherein "[e]ach individual 'play' using the same video game wiU offer up a different development depending on the player and the game."-^^ Yet how far away from the central narrative world can a program stray before the worldview is irrevocably transformed? Does not each variation in turn presuppose a different worldl The multiplicafion of narrafives and the corre- MULTIPLE POSSIBLE WORLDS IN THE TATAMI GALAXY 7 5 sponding multiplication of worlds is indeed how the contemporary Japanese media mix operates. Contrary to Ötsuka's explicit conception of a single world, his conception of fan production and his own media practice In fact presumes the coexistence of multiple worlds. As Kawasaki Takuto and Iikura Yoshiyuki have recently argued, the media mix strategy must be defined against the practice of the "transplanting of a selfidenfical narrative across multiple media," a practice they historicize as a pre1994, pre-media mix model of "mulfimedia development."^^ The media mix proper should be understood as: A creafive method that sees the parallel, simuhaneous, and mulfi-medial production of a series of works with a self-idenfical "character" {kyarakutaa], each of which develops [distinct] narrafives making use of the pariicularities of each medium. The contradictions that arise from each medium's distinct narratives are handled by treating them as "parallel worlds"; by ignoring them; or by using these contradictions as the ingredients for readers' "deep readings," "documentafion" or "play with the setting."^* Here Kawasaki and Iikura ariiculate some of the main traits of the media mix: character-centrism, transmedia development with divergent stories in different media, and the potenfial conflict (or proliferation of worids) that arises from this multiplicity of platforms. What we have here, and what we should ultimately understand Ötsuka to be ariiculating, is not merely an additive logic, but a transformafive one, where each drama or medium offers a potenfially divergent world. Returning to the logic evoked by Jenkins, is it really possible to assimilate the narratives of boy-boy love into the otherwise heterosexual worldview presumed by the so-called "original" work? Does this open model of producfion not suggest the potenfial for narrative world divergence, rather than convergence? And if this is indeed the case, how should we understand the difference between convergence and divergence? MULTIPLE POSSIBLE WORLDS Here we may tum to the seemingly obscure, but in fact remarkably useful theory of "simple substances" or "monads," developed by Gottfried Leibniz.-^' What makes this work so useful is its articulation of the relationship between individual monad and world, and the typology of relafionships it offers (convergent or divergent, compossible or incompossible]. If convergence culture and media mix practices are organized around the creafion of narrative worlds what we require is a clearer understanding of the relafion between individual or monad and its world, and a more concrete disfinction between convergent and divergent worlds. Kawasaki and Iikura accurately depict the media mix situation, wherein media mixes' propensity towards divergence is often accounted for through either the narrative appeal to parallel worlds, or to an appeal to consumers to work out potential discrepancies between narrative lines. What remains to be fieshed out is exactly at what point we are no longer in the same world, how we can account for this 76 MARC STEINBERG divergence, and what becomes of the part-whole relation when divergence is introduced. The work of Leibniz, particularly as it is extended by Gilles Deleuze and when re-read in light of The Tatami Galaxy, offers us the necessary tools to develop a nuanced understanding of the pari-whole and character-world relations in the potential proliferation of worlds within transmedia narratives. Leibniz is the philosopher of multiple possible worlds, of which our actual world is only one (albeit the best one). According to Leibniz, God creates the world before he creates the monads which exist therein.^' Conversely, each monad contains within itself the entirety of the world in which it exists. Two monads can be said to exist in the same world insofar as they reflect the same series of events or circumstances which make up this world, each from its own perspective.^' Each monad contains the world in its entirety; since monads "have no windows through which something can enter into or depart from them,"^^ they cannot be causally affected by any other monad, except when they are pre-programmed from the beginning of time. While the monad cannot be causally affected directly, it is in fact a reflection of the entire universe; each monad is a "perpetual living mirror of the universe" such that any change in one part of the world would require a change in all the reflecting monads that inhabit it.^' The consequence of this double presupposition of closure and reflection is that a monad—or individual—is assumed to have an essential connection to its world. It is around this essential, predetermined relation between a monad and its world that Leibniz develops the key concepts of compossibility and incompossibility. While the example of Adam in the Garden of Eden is often evoked by Leibniz and his interpreters, we might take a more recent, historical example: 9/11. IWo persons can be said to exist in the same world insofar as for both individuals the twin towers of the World Tïade Center were destroyed on September U, 2001. Given that 9/11 is a historical event and is therefore a contingent (rather than necessary) truth, it is within the realm of possibility that another historical present exists in which 9/11 did not occur, George W. Bush was not re-elected president and so on. In fact "counteriactual histories" of these kinds abound in popular culture. For Leibniz this is not science fiction but merely another possible world that involves a distinct series of monads. Two persons are said to exist in a compossible or convergent world insofar as a series of events in one person's world matches the other's. Two persons are said to exist in incompossible worlds if within one person's world events exist which do not exist in the other's. It is not impossible for a world to exist in which 9/11 did not happen; it is merely incompossible for an individual who has experienced the event of 9/11 to exist in a world where 9/11 did not occur. Similarly it is incompossible for an individual who experienced 9/11 to live among other individuals in whose world 9/11 did not occur. As Deleuze formulates it: "Compossibles can be called (1) the totality of converging and extensive series that constitute the world, and (2) the totality of monads that convey the same world."'" "Incompossibles," on the other hand, "can be called (1) the series that diverge, ¿ind that from then on belong to two possible worlds, and (2) monads of which each expresses a world different from the other. "'' God, argued Leibniz, is the guarantor of compossibility and the harmony of all within each world, and MULTIPLE POSSIBLE WORLDS IN THE TATAMI GALAXY 7 7 is the divine knowledge that chooses the best of all possible worlds. Leibniz scholars tend to follow the philosopher in emphasizing the compossible. Deleuze, following the lead of theoretical fiction writer Jorge Luis Borges instead, takes a more productive posifion for understanding the media mix, putfing a good deal of thought into incompossibility. The incompossible, as Deleuze formulates it, does not mean impossible or incompatible, it merely involves a different conception of the world—one that includes divergences instead of excluding them." To be sure this involves a different worldview than that offered by Leibniz and his God-selector, but this is precisely the point. We are now better positioned to answer the question: what is a world, and what are its contours? A world, much like the narrative worlds of contemporary media, is defined by the series of events that infiect them, and the kinds of individuals that inhabit them. A possible world is defined as "the maximum set of compossible individuals"; once that maximum set has been reached, new worlds must be conceived in order to account for other, incompossible, individuals.'^ A given world is defined by the events within it, and which the monads refiect in their being: "We begin with the world as if with a series of infiections or events; it is a pure emission of singularities. "''' A world is hence defined by the series of singularities it brings together, rather than, say, geographical territory. In the case of the Biblical Adam, Deleuze points to four singularities: "to be the first man, to live in a garden of paradise, to have a wife created from one's own rib. And then a fourth: sinning."" The world is convergent insofar as each monad refiects the same world, with the same series of singularities. The world would begin to diverge considerably should we add a fifth singularity to the list: "resistance to temptation. " This singularity implies a bifurcation, the possibility of not eating the apple. With this fifth element, the singularities no longer exist within the realm of convergence, but divergence: a different world appears on the horizon where the singularity of resistance to temptation dominates. There is a divergence of worlds between the one where Adam sins, and the one where he does not. The addition of a new term, then, offers up two possibilities. The first is that the term will add to the definition of the existing world, prolonging a given series. As such it would differ not much from the additive logic of transmedia storytelling that Jenkins identifies. The second is the possibility that the addifion of a new term will force a branching of the series, introducing a divergence that will ultimately lead to the generation of a new world. A world, for example, in which Adam did not sin, or in which the World Tïade Center was not destroyed. In tbis sense the addition of a single term can result in the multiplicafion of worlds, or, alternatively, we may find the coexistence of incompossibles within a single world—what in narrafive terms would be seen as the coexistence of contradictory events, or a break in continuity (example: an Adam who has both sinned (eaten the apple) and remained in the Garden of Eden). Terms, or singularities, do not merely add to an existing narrative, nor do they necessarily instigate a "breaking point," as Jenkins suggests, "beyond which franchises cannot be stretched."'' New terms may also create a branching effect whereby a single narrative bifurcates into two, three, and indeed multiple incompossible worlds, developed, in 78 MARC STEINBERG the case of some media mix works, simultaneously in different media (or in some cases, within different incarnations of the same medium).'' The specificity of the media mix in Japan can be said to lie in the general interest in the neo-monadological project of generating bifurcating series, and a tendency to deploy multiple, incompossible worlds. This is a general tendency, rather than an essential attribute of the media mix; nonetheless, this tendency is found in fan practices of reimagining narrafive worlds (with fans creafing the narrative world equivalent of counterfactual histories); and it has been a trend since the late 1980s within the media industries, as they responded to and incorporated fan pracfice into official media productions.'^ Finally, this tendency has been aided in no small pari by the intensity of consumption and the reliance on franchising series that have parallel developments in multiple media forms. Incompossibility is not only a radical and creative narrative possibility; it also makes economic sense. TH£ TATAMÊ GALAXY'S DIVERGENT WORLDS The Tatami Galaxy is a series that deals explicitly with multiple possible worlds, but suggests that divergence, not convergence, is what lies at tbe heari of the media mix. The Tatami Galaxy, it should be said, is relatively tame as media mixes go, at least when considering the basic level of its transmedia incarnations. It has the requisite media platform crossover, stariing as a novel by the same name penned by Morimi Tomihiko. In typical Kadokawa media mix style, the novel and many other works by Morimi were bought up by Kadokawa Books, which re-released them with cover ari by Nakamura Yusuke, the ariist who was also brought in to create the original character designs for the anime series. The television anime series is faithful to the novel more in spirit than in form; it takes some of the text, narrative and formal devices (repetifion first and foremost) and runs with them. It runs quite far, in fact. Produced by Madhouse and directed by Yuasa Masaaki, the series is one of the most conceptually rigorous, and artistically experimental anime series of the last decade." Blending media forms (photographs, live-acfion film, eel-style and digital animation, and even odes to cut-out paper animation), drawing styles (heavily processed, color-saturated photographic images, exaggerated or curved perspective within drawn images, characters that are at times three-dimensional and at other fimes completely flat) and rhythms of movement (from fluid and flowing to relafively still limited animafion, to slide show sequences, to the live-acfion digital video), it is a series that pulls all stops to visually depict a world that is at once geographically anchored and realistic (most events take place in recognizable sites around Kyoto) and fantastical. The television series of eleven episodes is rigorously divided into two segments. The first nine episodes generally begin and end with the same plot device. The narrator-protagonist (nameless, and known as "I" given that both the novel and anime are narrated in the first person), a third-year university student, recounts his expectations upon entering university that he would be met with a "rose-colored campus life," wherein he would encounter many people, have trysts with numerous women, and fall deeply in love with one "raven-haired MULTIPLE POSSIBLE WORLDS IN THE TATAMI GALAXY 7 9 Example of a scene from Yuasa Masaaki's The Tatami Galaxy (2010), Episode 2, that mixes a photograph (the torii gates), with drawn animation (the human figures) and cut-out style patterns (the trees). maiden" in particular. To start this life off on the right foot it is essenfial that he choose an appropriate club to join. Each episode, after a brief prologue, begins with this narration, a repeated animation sequence and the choice of a club, and ends with the complete failure of his rose-colored dreams of university life. Each episode ends in the present time, in despondent failure, and with the protagonist burning with the desire to restart his university life. We see an image of a clock rewinding, and the parficular episode's events stream by as if rewound on a video tape. The next episode starts from the beginning, only this fime the protagonist chooses a different club to join, and lives a different version of his world, albeit one in which he again makes the wrong choices, and wants to start his university life anew. The Tatami Galaxy protagonist's glasses reflect the rose-colored campus life he believes awaits him, and the variety of clubs that he can join. Still from Episode 1. 80 MARC STEINBERG Love interest Akashi's white Mochiguman collectible character commodity that the protagonist finds and hangs from the lamp in the middle of his room. Still from The Tatami Calaxy, Episode 3. Unlike most anime, then, this one is not a serial in the sense of having a narrative arc that spans multiple episodes, each episode building on the last. Nor is it a simple loop narrafive—a form of narrafive parficularly prevalent, as crific Azuma Hiroki notes, in anime-related works of the 2000s.'"' Differing from both the serial (which presumes a single world whose events unfold over fime) and the loop (which similarly presumes a single world, whose events are repeated over and over again). The Tatami Galaxy operates on the principle of multiple possible worlds. Each episode traces another path the protagonist could have taken, and each one— until the final episode—fails to take him towards his desired goal: blissful union with the raven-haired maiden. We have, then, images of multiple possible worlds, every one of which (save one) leads to failure. Moreover, in each world, regardless of his choice of club, the protagonist goes through a roughly parallel configLiraüon of events: he meets his best friend and nemesis, the demonic Ozu; he meets his final love interest (whom he fails to acknowledge as such until the end of the episode), Akashi; he encounters a mysterious fortune teller who repeats the same advice in every episode, each fime shorier and more costly than in the last one; and he finds, in a different location every time, a coUecfible character commodity: a white "Mochiguman," cherished by Akashi which he proceeds to hang on the dangling on/off cord of the lamp in the middle of his room . The final installments. Episodes Ten and Eleven constitute the second segment of the series. Unlike earlier episodes, university life seems neither enticing nor rose-colored, and the protagonist refuses to join a club. Instead, he becomes a "Tatami Ideologue"—preferring to remain in his room away from the cold, greytoned outside world. The 4.5 tatami mat room is the perfect size for a person, he tells us, and he spends more and more time there unfil one day he wakes up to find that the door to his hallway no longer leads to his hallway, but to another, seemingly identical, tatami room. It is his very own room, replicated. This room leads to another room, and that to another, each one almost the same as MULTIPLE POSSIBLE WORLDS IN THE TATAMI CALAXY 8 1 The "Tatami Ideologue" savours his 4.5 tatami mat heaven, shut away from the cold, grey outside world. Still from The Tatami Galaxy, Episode 10. the last. After the initicd shock of his discovery, the protagonist begins a voyage traversing tatami rooms, increasingly desperate to find an outside that he until then had little interest in. Here the meaning of the opening sequence of each episode becomes clear: the photographic traversal of one identical tatami room after another is a preview of the experience of the protagonist in the closing episodes of the series. As our protagonist traverses the rooms, though, he realizes that they are not idenfical; small differences charactedze each one, markers of his different possible lives. And so dawns the realization: the protagonist is in fact in a world that traverses all his possible worlds. He is in a state where he is able to see his multiple possible lives, to traverse them in the form of his tatami rooms, one adjoining the next, sideways, through walls, upwards and downwards through ceilings and floors. He is in a veritable veriical and horizontal complex of 4.5 tatami mat rooms that he traverses in a trans world journey. The protagonist finds himself in an endless maze of almost identical 4.5 tatami mat rooms. Still from The Tatami Galaxy, Episode 10. 82 MARC STEINBERG The endless series of photographic rooms traversed in the opening sequence to each episode in The Tctami Galaxy series. The first segment of the series, we realize, offered us a red herring: an image of a single world rewound at the end and restarted at the beginning of every episode. Untu the 10* episode such a reading would appear possible: the protagonist fails, time is rewound, he starts anew, this time making a different choice. This structure is also implied by the series' jokes, which play on repefition: repeated phrases across episodes, the repeated encounters with characters across episodes, some of which arouse a sense of déjà vu in the protagonist himself (the encounters with the fortune teller in particular). Yet by the second segment of the series, it is clear that things are otherwise. Despite the fact that the time rewinding motif and the parallel worlds interpretations are regularly mn together in descriptions of the series by its creators, in fact these must be treated as absolutely distinct.*' One interpretation presumes a single world in which fime is rewound and restarted, leading to another course of events; the other presumes multiple parallel worlds in which events repeat and differ, but the worlds remain fundamentally distinct and divergent. This parallel wodd interpretation is the one privileged by the 10* and 11* episodes—the key episodes of the enfire series—as well as by the opening and closing credit sequences, both of which visually suggest multiple parallel, if contiguous, 4.5 tatami mat worlds. But these last two episodes also suggest something further: that these worlds may intersect, resulting in the creation of a divergent yet co-existing incompossible worlds scenario.^^ So here, in the two sections of the The Tatami Galaxy series, we have two models of Leibnizian philosophy. First, we have multiple mutually exclusive, discrete worlds, each of which is compossible within itself, and which are to be understood as being parallel (if incompossible) worlds. And second, we have the co-existence of multiple actual, incompossible worlds. Indeed, the protagonist meets himself—or rather, another himself—over the course of his journeys through the infinitely extending and contiguous tatami rooms. These are not. MULTIPLE POSSIBLE WORLDS IN THE TATAMI GALAXY 8 3 then, unpopulated worlds, but multiple wodds that are populated by different, incompossible yet coexisting versions of the protagonist. The whole set-up in fact reminds one of the parable of Sextus found at the end of one of the few major works published in Leibniz's lifefime: the Theodicy. Here we find a rather remarkable passage, wherein the Goddess Pallas (Athena) explains to a dreaming Theodoms why God chose to make Sextus as he did. Athena shows Theodorus a series of different worlds (figured as rooms or halls), in every one of which lives a different Sextus: Thus you can picture to yourself an ordered succession of worlds, which shall contain each and every one the case that is in quesfion, and shall vary its circumstances and its consequences... You will find in one world a very happy and noble Sextus, in another a Sextus content with a mediocre state, a Sextus, indeed, of every kind and endless diversity of forms.''' Theodorus is shown one room after another, each of which containing a different Sextus, complete with the entire world that contained this pariicular Sextus. Hall after hall, the rooms continued to infinity: "The halls rose in a pyramid, becoming even more beautiful as one mounted towards the apex, and representing more beaufiful worlds.""* The apex of the pyramid contained the best of all possible worlds: the actual world, with the actual Sextus. This image of multiple rooms containing discrete worlds is uncannily close to that of the last two episodes of The Tatami Galaxy. Yet as the hyperplanar animation of the end credit sequence of each episode visualizes clearly, with this series we are no longer in a world governed by the distinction between actual and possible, regulated by God and the theological necessity to have the best of all possible worlds. The series of rooms is not arrayed in the shape of a pyramid. Rather the end credit animafion gives us a nonhierarchical, completely planar world of multiple possible contiguous worlds. Mimicking the birds-eye-view floor-plan maps {mxidori) used by real estate agents to diagram the spatial arrangement of an apariment, the end credit sequence of The Tatami Galaxy visually expresses the narrafive thrust of the series: one room connects to the next in an endless series of growing, shrinking, modulafing and proliferating rooms. Moreover, taking us even fariher away from Leibniz's model, these worlds are not hermetically sealed universes. Rather, they are intersecfing and, as we see in the last two episodes, crossed by a protagonist who is able to exist in incompossible fashion, across multiple worlds. THE VAGUE PROTAGONIST This suggests another difference from Theodorus's dream: in The Tatami Galaxy it is the protagonist himself who literally crosses the boundaries of his world, gaining the ability not only to traverse worlds, but to exist in a transworld, or incompossible state. He becomes a meta-character, a character who exists both within and across worlds.*' This brings us to an objection to Leibniz's account of Sextus that has often been raised and that allows us to point to a core element 84 MARC STEINBERG A still from the end sequence of each episode of The Tatami Galaxy: growing, shrinking and modulating rooms, represented in planar animation, recalling the birds-eye-view floor plans used by realestate agents. of the media mix ensemble: how is Sextus still Sextus, if he has chosen a different life path in each world? Is this really Sextus?"*^ The Tatami Galaxy would seem to pose the same kind of question: how can the protagonist still remain the protagonist across the series, if a different set of acts are carried out in each possible world? This also relates closely to the essential question of any media mix: what connects the different media incarnations of the mix? The answer lies in understanding the character to be at once a particular enfity and an indeterminate one. Though the protagonist may take a different path in each world, there is a relatively constant set of singularities that he passes through: entering university expecting to find a rose-colored campus life, living in a 4.5 tatami mat room, meeting Ozu, picking up a Mochiguman figurine, failing to grab his opportunity for true romance. Yet these singularifies define the protagonist in an open enough manner to allow for eventual divergences, incompossibilities, and alternative paths. Within or across incompossible worlds there is something in common, writes Deleuze: "there is, for example, an objectively indeterminate Adam, that is, an Adam positively defined solely through a few singularities which can be combined and can complement each other in a very different fashion in different worlds. "'*' Deleuze, following a formulation by Leibniz, calls this indeterminate Adam a "vague Adam." "There is thus a 'vague Adam,' that is, a vagabond, a nomad, an Adam = x common to several worlds, just as there is a Sextus = x or a Fang = x. In the end, there is something = x common to all worlds. '"" Similarly we could say there is a vague protagonist of The Tatami Galaxy, a cynical narrator, a 4.5 tatami mat dweller who cannot seem to make the right decisions and whose inability to make a move towards coupled happiness results in his total entrapment in the 4.5 tatami system. It is the same protagonist = x who we find at the beginning of every episode, even as the paths he chooses are different, and in so choosing becomes defined by his particular world. And it is MULTIPLE POSSIBLE WORLDS IN THE TATAMI GALAXY 8S most ceriainly this vague protagonist = x who in the second segment of the series wanders across the multiple possible tatami worlds as that vagabond who demonstrates the possibility of incompossible coexistence."" That is to say, there are two forms of the protagonist in The Tatami Galaxy, parallehng the twofold structure of the series (and also the twofold structure of any character more generally). In the first segment (Episodes 1-9), we encounter a muhiplicity of protagonists, each of whom is defined according to his world, and each of whose worlds is incompossible with the last one—even if we recognize clear overlaps and repetifions. The protagonist becomes increasingly determinate with every choice he makes, and incompossible with other worlds. In the second segment (Episodes 10-11), we find a protagonist who maintains his indeterminacy, who by choosing not to choose a club maintains a vagueness in relafion to his world, resulting in his world opening onto other worlds, allowing the protagonist to encounter other selves, other lives, other rooms in which different versions of "himself" dwell. Here the protagonist maintains an openness to co-existent incompossibihty; he lives in multiple worlds simultaneously. He is like the vision of a monad "in tune with divergent series that belong to incompossible monads" that Deleuze offers in the closing pages of The Fold; he is the model of the monad who is "astraddle over several worlds" and who "is kept half open as if by a pair of pliers. "^ In keeping with the principle of mulfiple coexisting incompossible worlds, the protagonist's jailbreak out of his endlessly continuing cell of individual rooms is accompanied by a mysterious swarm of moths that overwhelm the city of Kyoto. Officially unexplained, this massive swarm of moths is the simultaneous outpouring of Individual moths from the infinite number of 4.5 tatami mat rooms, each of which contained a single moth. Another clue that the protagonist finds himself in multiple coexisfing and composited worlds is the flickering change of clothes and forms of pedestrians, suggesting the continued superimposition of worlds. To be sure the series ends with the protagonist and Akashi united in romantic love, after which the series quickly wraps up, ironically suggesting that heterosexual union is the end of all narratives since there remains nothing to tell, which may be the fatal return of the best possible worid scenario. Yet this single ending is the result of the cooperation of mulfiple coexisting and incompossible worlds. DIVERGENT WORLDS? MEDIA CONVERGENCE AND THE MEDIA MIX RECONSIDERED Let us return here to the distinction between media convergence and the media mix to draw some conclusions from our reading of The Tatami Galaxy. The series, when read as a parable of the media mix, can be understood to be presenfing two disfinct models of transmedia storytelling. The first is a model of convergence: the eliminafion of incompossible elements from a pariicular media franchise, with each element adding a piece to the whole, or the world. This is the model we can find within individual episodes of the first segment of the series; each develops a different possible world, which Is internally compossible. 86 MARC STEINBERG Each episode presents what is potentially the basis for an internally consistent media franchise. Events in one medium cannot be contradicted by events in another medium. The totality and consistency of the world must be consistently maintained. Bibles, concordances or timelines may be created for pariicular worlds, and each piece is supposed to fit together like a puzzle. Additive comprehension is key to this model, and each element adds up to a whole, coherent picture. While exceptions abound, this model of convergence could be said to generally characterize the Hollywood media industries—and informs its description by writers such as Jenkins. The second is a model of divergence. The degrees of divergence may vary. It may be a simple issue of tone—where official parodies, 4-frame comics, or short episodes of web-based parody anime may be released for what is an otherwise relatively coherent, if serially episodic, narrative franchise such as Suzumiya Haruhi. Or the divergence may be more radical, including a fundamental split within the series itself—such as the "Real" and "Fake" diverging branches of Ötsuka Eiji's own Tajû jinkaku tantei saiko (Multiple Personality Detective Psycho, aka MPD Psycho), or the multiple incompossible episodes of The Tatami Galaxy. Moreover, divergence itself can be subdivided into two types: first, a multiplication of individually compossible but mutually incompossible worlds, hermetically sealed like the first nine episodes of The Tatami Galaxy; or second, an encounter of divergent worlds within a single incompossible world. The second type presents the possibility of a world reconceived; one whose boundaries are no longer the Leibnizian limits of compossibility, but rather encompass mutually incompossible but nonetheless coexisting events; a media mix that "works" with its mutual contradictions or incompossibles, rather than avoiding them.^ Such a world does not function merely through the progressive logic of additive comprehension, but addition conjoined with bifurcation. Every moment of addition potentially leads to divergence. In this second type of divergence, addition is conjoined with bifurcation insofar as the addition of one piece of information undermines the consistency of the whole and leads to a bifurcation into multiple worlds. As The Tatami Galaxy beautifully demonstrates, the media mix may work as much through divergence and bifLUcation as addition. In this sense we do not add plot, character or narrafive elements together to form a better picture of the single world of the diegesis; we instead are offered multiple, slightly different yet nonetheless overlapping worlds. If the trope of parallel worlds is so common to media mix narratives, it is because each strand within each medium potenfially constitutes a kind of parallel world, and each strand is simultaneously an addition and a divergence. Each new strand may add to the contours of a given world, or place us in a coexisting yet divergent one. Hence, we find that spectators pursue worlds for the pleasures of divergence that they offer—and not simply, as in the convergence model, for the joys of totalization." This The Tatami Galaxy demonstrates on a visual level: curved perspective, slide-show sequences of random objects and scenes, the liberal mixing of photographs and drawings, fantastical sequences meant to illustrate the inner hfe of MULTIPLE POSSIBLE WORLDS IN THE TATAMI GALAXY 8 7 the protagonist juxtaposed with live-action füm sequences, color schemes that change at the drop of a hat—divergence at every level of aesthefic production. The series visually demonstrates the importance of divergence to the operation of the media mix, and the pleasurable, productive impossibility of totalization that it brings with it. Media mixes work best, we conclude from The Tatami Galaxy, when they imagine worlds differently, deploying divergence as a creative pracfice, and embracing bifurcation at the narrative as well as visual levels. This is not to say that additive comprehension is completely eschewed; even The Tatami Galaxy works at the level of addifion and accumulaüon as well as bifurcation; the repetition of scenes, dialogues, and the permutation of events would not offer the humour and conceptual stimulus they do if complete divergence was assumed to be the sole goal. In sum. The Tatami Galaxy proves to be so instmctive because it condenses the logics of convergence and divergence into a single media form—the TV anime. In so doing the series evokes in a metacritical fashion the productive co-existence of compossibility and incompossibility within the media mix as a post-1980s Japanese industrial practice. While this style of transmedia practice is not exclusive to Japan, nor necessarily found in all forms of the media mix. The Tatami Galaxy highlights a tendency towards additive bifurcafion and the creative proliferation of co-existing incompossible worlds that underpins much of media mix practice, and suggests its difference from the tendency towards the principle of convergence within the North American media industries. In so doing it diversifies our understanding of so-called convergence, suggests the complexity of media mix worlds, and allows us to develop a more nuanced conception of transmedia pracfice. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers of this essay for their encouragement, as well as their penetrating comments and criticisms. I would also like to thank Aaron Gerow for offering excellent feedback, as well as words of caution about overstating the unity of Japanese media practice. This arficle also benefited from the feedback from the participants of the International Convention on Manga, Animation, Game and Media Art (ICOMAG) 2012, where I presented a version of this paper. I am particularly grateful for the comments offered there by Alexander Zahlten, Jacqueline Berndt, Yoshioka Hiroshi ¿md Okamoto Mitsuko. NOTES 1. G.W. Leibniz, "On Freedom," in G.W. Leibniz's Monadology: An Edition for Students, trans. Nicholas Rescher (Pittsburg: University of Pittsburg Press, 1991), 185. 2. Rooms in Japan were traditionally covered with "tatami" or woven straw mats, with cloth brocades on their sides, and were (and often still are) measured by the number of the uniform-sized tatami mats that cover them. A room of 4.5 mats is a square room of approximately 9 feet by 9 feet. 3. I offer a more detailed consideration of the media mix in my Anime's Media Mix: Franchising Toys and Cbaracters in Japan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012). This article compliments my account there by honing in on the differences in industry practice I pass over in my book, between media mix and media convergence. 88 MARC STEINBERG 4. Other authors have begun this work. Angela Ndalianis in her Neo-Baroque Aesthetics and Contemporary Entertainment (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004) adopts a neo-Leibnizian approach to contemporary film and visual culture; and Komori Kentarô develops a neo-monadological approach in his theoretical analysis of contemporary detective fiction that has some parallels with the analysis developed here. See Komori's Tantei shosetsu no ronrigaku [The Logic of Mystery Novels] (Tokyo: Nan'undo, 2007), and his "Monodorogii kara mita Maijö Ôtarô" [Maijô Ôtarô seen from the perspective of monadology] in Shakai wa sonzai shinai: Sekai-kei bunkaron, ed. Genkai shosetsu kenkyûkai (Tokyo: Nan'undo, 2009), 197-218. 5. While he does not frame his discussion in terms of an opposition between Japanese and North American media industries, Thomas Lamarre emphasizes the importance of paying attention to media divergence in his work on Japanese animation, even as he cautions that we cannot ignore a certain economic convergence and technological confluence. See Thomas Lamarre, The Anime Machine (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), especially 302-313. 6. Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Oid and New Media Coiiide (New York: New York University Press, 2006). 7. While Alvin Toffler is said to have coined the term in Third Wave (New York: Morrow, 1980), it is commonly deployed in discussions of the active consumer of games and Web 2.0. See for example, Stephen Kline, Nick Dyer-Witherford, and Gregg de Peuter, Digital Play: The Interaction of Information, Culture, and Marketing (Montréal: McGill-Queen's university Press, 2003), 14. 8. Jenkins, 123. Jenkins borrows the term additive comprehension from Neil Young, formerly a significant manager and creator at game company Electonic Arts. 9. Ibid., 116. 10. Ibid., 114. 11. Sam Ford and Henry Jenkins, "Managing Multiplicity in Superhero Comics: An Interview with Henry Jenkins," in Third Person: Authoring and Exploring Vast Narratives, ed. Pat Harrigan and Noah Wardrip-Fruin (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2009), 304. 12. Jenkins, 102. 13. Ibid., 129. 14. Ibid., 95-6. A counterexample to the Matrix series that still works firmly within the principle of parts to whole may be found in the Watchmen series, wherein each instantiation (the multiple cuts of the film, the motion-picture comic) is merely a replication of the comic book to the greatest possible degree of fidelity, ultimate fidelity to the original here supplants transmedia storytelling. Still, this is the ultimate example of convergence in a more general sense, insofar as Watchmen attempts to exclude all possibility of divergence. 15. Williams describes the Star Wars "bible" and multiple "Essential Guides" that he was sent when contracted to write a novel for the Star Wars universe. Walter Jon Williams, "In What Universe?" in Third Person: Authoring and Exploring Vast Narratives, 29. Discussing comics in particular, Jenkins similarly notes that "Since the 1960s, fans have demanded continuity across not only the installments of the same superhero narratives, but also of all the superhero franchises published by the same company." Nonetheless Jenkins also notes that fans are increasingly engaged by what he calls "parallel continuities"—or what we will call incompossible worlds, which characterize the media mix. Ford and Jenkins, "Managing Complexity," 306, 307. 16. I deal with this shift in more detail in Chapter Five oi Anime's Media Mix. 17. While some, such as Azuma Hiroki (in Otaku: Japan's Database Animals, trans. Jonathan E. Abel and Shion Kono [Minneapolis: University of Minesota Press, 2009]) have claimed that this model has been superseded by a new model of "database consumption," I would argue that Ótsuka's analysis of narrative consumption is on the whole still as accurate today as it was in 1989. MULTIPLE POSSIBLE WORLDS IN THE TATAMI GALAXY 8 9 18. Ötsuka Eiji, "World and Variation: The Reproduction and Consumption of Narrative," Mechademia 5, ed. Frenchy Lunning, trans. Marc Steinberg (2010): 99-116. Originally published in Ötsuka, Teihon monogatarl shohiron (1989; Tokyo: Kadokawa shoten, 2008). 19. See in particular the chart that accompanies Ötsuka's essay, "World and Variation," 112. 20. Ibid., 107. 21. Ibid., 108. 22. Ibid. 23. Kawasaki Takuto and likura Yoshiyuki, "Ranobe kyara wa tajû sakuhin sekai no yume o miru ka?" [Do light novel characters dream of a world of multiple works?], in Raito noberu kenkyu josetsu ed. Ichiyanigi Hirotaka and Kume Yoriko (Tokyo: Seikyusha, 2009), 25, 23. While I agree with Kawasaki and likura's general differentiation here, I prefer to date the contemporary media mix from the late 1980s rise of Kadokawa Tsuguhiko's Kadokawa Media Office, as well as with parallel activities at Tokuma Books. 24. Ibid., 25. 25. For an excellent resource on Leibniz's "Monadology," see Rescher's annotated translation, G.W. Leibniz's Manadology: An Edition for Students. I should also like to acknowledge the usefulness of Franklin Perkins's Leibniz: A Guide for the Perplexed (London: Continuum, 2007) in offering a global picture of Leibniz's philosophical system. 26. Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. Tom Conley (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 60. This would seem to rhyme with the logic of contemporary media industries, where, as Jenkins notes above, the world is aeated before the individuals or narratives existing therein. 27. Leibniz, 19. 28. Ibid., 17. 29. Ibid., 24. As Leibniz puts it: "For it must be known that all things are connected in each one of the possible worlds: the universe, whatever it may be, is all of one piece, like an ocean: the least movement extends its effect there to any distance whatsoever, even though this effect becomes less perceptible in proportion to the distance. Therein God has ordered all things beforehand once for all." G.W. Leibniz, Theodicy: Essays on the Goodness af God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin af Evil, ed. Austin Farrer, trans. E.M. Huggard (La Salle: Open Court, 1985), §9, 129. 30. Deleuze, 60. 31. Ibid. 32. Deleuze writes that "the notion of incompossibility in no way reduces to contradiction" in Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 48. 33. Nicholas Jolley, Leibniz (London; New York: Routledge, 2005), 171. The question "what is a world?" is all the more pertinent given the rise, since the late 1990s of what is known as the "sekai-kei" or "world-style" genre of anime, manga, novels and games in Japan. On sekai-kei, see Gavin Walker, 'The Filmic Time of Coloniality: On Shinkai Makoto's The Place Promised in Our Early Days," Mechademia 4 (2009): 3-18. 34. Deleuze, 60. Hence the world is not a space per se, but a set of singularities that thereby construct a space—a model that follows from Leibniz's presupposition that monads or events precede spatial extension. As Rescher puts it, 'Time as well as space is derivative from the primitive characteristics of the individual monads"space and time follow monads and their events, and do not precede them. Nicholas Rescher, Leibniz: An Introduction to his Philosophy (Totowa: Rowan and Littlefield, 1979), 85. 90 MARC STEINBERG 35. Deleuze, 60. We can understand Deleuze's use of the term singularity as referring to what is singular about a particular individual, in contrast to what is ordinary. As other writers on Leibniz point out, merely saying "Adam is a man" does not state anything particular about him, whereas saying "Adam is the first man" does. See Hide Ishiguro, "Contingent Truths and Possible Worlds," in Leibniz: Metaphysics and Philosophy of Science, ed. R.S. Woolhouse (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), 66. 36. Jenkins, 127. 37. While incompossible series are most easily produced by the simultaneous and non-convergent serialization in different media, there are certainly works such as The Tatami Galaxy anime, or Maijô Otarô's novel Tsukumo J ku that offer masterful examples of intramedial or intra-work narratives of incompossible worlds. 38. The multiple conclusions of the landmark anime series Neon Genesis Evangelion (1995-7) could be cited as a prime example of this. Evangelion is of interest here both as an example of a Kadokawa-sponsored media mix, and as a work produced by a production company (Cainax) whose origins lie in fan production. 39. The Tatami Galaxy has the distinction of being the first television animation series to win the prestigious Japan Media Arts Crand Prize, Animation Division, in 2011. 40. Azuma offers as examples works that are either anime, or anime-related media like the light novel or the computer game. Azuma Hiroki, Gemuteki riarizumu no tanja Dobutsuka suru posutomodan 2 [The Birth of Cameic Realism: The Animalizing Postmodern] (Tokyo: Kodansha, 2007), 159-160. 41. Scriptwriter Ueda Makoto describes the series as "having a parallel structure, where in each episode time rewinds and loops." The footnote to this comment explains that Tatami Galaxy is a "'parallel worlds' story." Interview with Ueda in Yojohan shinwa taikei ofisharu gaido (Tokyo: Kadokawa, 2010), 112. Ueda himself uses the term "parallel universes" in a conversation with author Morimi, published in Yojohan shinwa taikei koshiki dokuhon (Tokyo: Ota, 2010), 72. Director Yuasa notes that the series gives the "feel that time has rewound in the next episode," even as he remarks on the parallel structure of the series. Yojohan shinwa taikei ofisharu gaido, 15. Morimi is explicit that this is a parallel worlds narrative in Yojohan shinwa taikei ofisharu gaido, 25. 42. One way to explain the play on déjà vu within the earlier episodes of The Tatami Galaxy is to follow one of Komori's justifications for adopting modal realism and the multiple possible worlds thesis. Within phenomenology, he writes, there is the concept of "protension"—a sensing of the future, or a possibly unrealized event in the future. This sensing of the future could be explained as the consciousness of an unrealized, other possible world, Komori suggests ("Monodorogii kara mita Maijô Otarô," 205). In line with this, the sense of déjà vu and repetition that the series plays on may be explained as a kind of general awareness of other possible worlds, an awareness more strongly felt by some characters such as the fortune teller, and the protagonist. In this sense the seeming linearity of repetition implied by déjà vu, and the temporal loop it implies can be explained away by appealing to a world in which other parallel possible worlds can be simultaneously perceived, if only in a vague sense (as déjà vu). 43. Leibniz, r/ieod/cy, §414, 371. 44. Ibid., §416, 373. 45. Here I draw on Azuma's description of the character as a meta-narrative knot that crosses media platforms, and enables the proliferation of narratives. See Azuma, Gemuteki riarizumu no tanjo, 125-7 46. Or, as a skeptical Jolley bluntly states: "an individual who did not cross the Rubicon would not be Julius Caesar but someone else." Jolley, 139. 47. Cilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, ed. Constantin V. Boundas, trans. Mark Lester (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 114. MULTIPLE POSSIBLE WORLDS IN THE TATAMI CALAXY 9 1 48. Ibid., 114-5. See also footnote 4, 345-6, where Deleuze acknowledges that Leibniz in fact rejects the formulation "vague Adam" in the passage where he initially puts this notion forward, but suggests that just such a notion of a "vague" identity informs the vision of the multiple Sextuses in Theodicy. Leibniz's passage on "an Adam whose notion was vague and incomplete" can be found in G.W. Leibniz, "Remarks on Arnauld's Letter," in Philosophical Essays, trans. Roger Ariew and Daniel Garber (Cambridge: Hackett, 1989), 69.1 thank Jérémie Ledere for suggesting the usefulness of Deleuze's take on the "vague Adam" formulation. 49. This object = x quality of the character may be connected to Ito Go's discussion of the "kyara" in Tezuka izu deddo: Hirakareta manga hy genron e [Tezuka is Dead: Towards an Expanded Theory of Manga Expression] (Tokyo: NTT Shuppan, 2005), 95-6, and 108-111. 50. Deieuze, The Fold, 137. This forced holding-open of the monad is an important divergence from Leibniz (for whom the monad must be closed onto itself, and pre-programmed), and the logical consequence of allowing for the possibility of divergent worlds. 51. The pleasures of consuming such a world may not be so different from the parsing out of (otherwise compossible) narratives within the recent trend of so-called "puzzle films" or "mind-game films." See Thomas Elsaesser's "The Mind-Game Film," in Puzzle Films: Complex Storytelling in Contemporary Cinema, ed. Warren Buckland (Maiden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009). 52. Of course this coexistence of incompossibles also dovetails with transformations in capitalism that see the consumer becoming an ever more active participant in the creation of worlds of consumption. Indeed, divergent worlds are as much a model for capitalist value-production and the activation of the consumer within contemporary capitalism as it is an example of aesthetic divergence-but this is an aspect of the media mix that I will have to pass over here. MARC STEINBERG is Assistant Professor of Film Studies at Concordia University, Montreal. He has published essays in Japan Forum, Animation: An Interdisciplinary Joumal, Parachute, Journal of Visual Culture, and Theory, Culture & Society. His book, Anime's Media Mix: Franchising Toys and Characters in Japan (University of Minnesota Press, 2012), examines the close relationship between animation and the media mix, and the material culture they share. 92 MARC STEINBERG Copyright of Canadian Journal of Film Studies is the property of Film Studies Association of Canada and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.