“Let me disclose the gifts reserved for age/ To set a crown upon your lifetime’s effort. / First, the cold friction of expiring sense / Without enchantment, offering no promise / But bitter tastelessness of shadow fruit / As body and soul begin to fall asunder. / Second, the conscious impotence of rage / At human folly, and the laceration / Of laughter at what ceases to amuse.
And last, the rending pain of re-enactment / Of all that you have done, and been; the shame / Of motives late revealed, and the awareness / Of things ill done and done to others’ harm / Which once you took for exercise of virtue. / Then fools’ approval stings, and honour stains. / From wrong to wrong the exasperated spirit / Proceeds, unless restored by that refining fire / Where you must move in measure, like a dancer.”
These chilling words come from T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, my favorite poem since my teen years. A half-remembered ghost introduces the poet to the horrors of looking back. So does a half-remembered friend in one of the most unsettling anime out there, ranking first on TWWK’s creepy anime for Halloween. From the New World is a tale about increasingly bloodstained memories and scarce glimpses of hope. But, as hard as it may be to look at as these topics, they shed light on the Christian concepts of sin and redemption.
A word of caution, though. This show is aggressive. It will suddenly age up its characters from kids to teenagers to adults, Arcane-style. It will play important character moments off-screen, as memories pushed aside. Its characters’ sexuality is dubious and not completely under their control, with explicit yuri and yaoi in episodes 8 and 16, mixed with the creeping feeling that something is wrong. The violence is hard to swallow, and the less-than-heroic actions of the cast, ahem, disheartening.
Still here? Let’s dive in, then!
The First Arc: Gifts Reserved for Age
Familiarity and bone-chilling horror sound like opposites, but they might not be. From the New World opens as we look at the Earth, the shot descending from the skies and closing in on present-day Japan. On a lazy evening, three teenagers suddenly use their newfound psychic powers to kill multitudes in seconds. Blood splashes the pavement, evoking school shootings or terror attacks. Cue a group of children playing in the countryside, their silhouettes dark against the sunset. When Dvorak’s Ninth Symphony sounds in the distance, it’s time to go home, as they argue about who won. Meet humanity, a millennium from today. Spoilers ahead!
We are introduced to Ibaraki, Kamisu, District 66. Our protagonist Saki Watanabe is being welcomed into the Temple of Purity by a Buddhist-looking head priest. The starry sky shines above. The temple maidens wear masks. Saki is told she is outside the “Holy Barrier” for the first time ever, and cedar sticks are kindled for her passage into adulthood. As the fire rises and the monks sing, the priest says: “Look at the flames.” Saki’s powers manifest. She can control the fire! Do you, dear reader, know the glorious horizon that appears when you discover a new ability? That new universe of possibility? This is it.
Saki remembers how, the night before, her things started moving around her. Terrified, she shouted for her parents, who cried with relief. “It’s a spirit of blessing!” they said. “This?” Might it be a good thing, then? “Stop! That’s enough!” says the head priest, interrupting her reminiscing. She is told to throw all her “earthly attachments,” including her newfound power, into the fire, and thus reach enlightenment. “Let us give the power that the heavens granted you back to the gods.” Saki does so, and cries bitterly.
Saki’s “devotion” is praised and her power, restored, united to a mantra. Now, she can join Sage Academy and start her adult life. Doesn’t this experience ring true to our lives? Humans have power, if not usually the telekinetic kind. As children, we all learned that our hands, our minds, our words could impact the world. Our desires could fuel an action, and become fulfilled. We were free, and could become more and more adept. There is wonder in that, and also danger. Because some of these desires are ugly to look at.
Do good. Reject evil. Most children learn these tenets and honor them by sacrificing some of their desires to serve those around them. For those who thank God for their talents, considering them received blessings, this is also a way to honor and imitate Him, through loving sacrifice. In a close-knit, religious rural community like District 66, the uplifting social mores can seem solid as stone. But this particular community is not interested in good or evil. It uses these words to wield power. Why? Wait and see.
Saki is assigned to Group A, six kids who become close friends. Many children grow up in a proverbial village that helps raise them, a firm and unchanging world where justice always has the last word, a Cosmos aiding their development. We cultivate our moral sense by imitating examples and following social rules, people we admire, and the tales of heroes. Repeated good acts turn into virtues; our fire burns brighter and stronger, and we become better versions of ourselves as we look ahead.
Other kids, sadly, are awakened too soon to chaos and malice, including their own. But for all of us, our moral life eventually gets muddled, and we discover that we do “sway left or right,” as the Bible warns us not to. Aristotle says that virtue is the wise middle path between an excess and a defect: between pride and self-hate, cowardice and imprudence, cruelty and laxity, and so on. Balance is tricky, and the instances we feel we have achieved it are as rare as they are rewarding. More often though, we don’t know if our motives were pure.
What we may know is that, down the line, the effects of failure can be serious. In this rural community of psychics, we hear of those carried away by the “dog in the henhouse” syndrome, who kill thousands in an ecstasy of destruction. We also hear of “Karma Demons” whose will has crumbled, and whose powers are at the mercy of their dark subconscious. Cruelty and weakness lead to a similar place: corruption, dissipation, and self-destruction. Instead of a godly sacrifice, a sin—a crime that darkens the soul.
We hear another story, too. Some of the kids just disappear. “Tainted cats” take those who bother the adults. Surely that is just legend, though. How could parents, teachers, sons and daughters, destroy and kill children who are as human as they are? Wouldn’t they die inside? Plus, in this society, the implanted “Death Feedback” augments this natural revulsion at the thought of killing, causing tetanic asphyxia or cardiac arrest if they do not give it up. Peace asserts itself.
And yet, our characters are secretly afraid. Occasionally, they find cold adult eyes watching. This is true for us, too. Occasionally, we see the hidden motives of the adult world. The double standards. The lack of love. The use of ethics not for betterment, but for control. The tainted motives. Even worse, we find that they were there all along. Our social institutions are compromised. Our families and friends are. We are. But perhaps not to the same extent? We didn’t start all this, after all. We can do better. As children, we might suspect that the world has bloodstained memories. We rarely think that they will become our own. But…
The Second Arc: Shadow Fruit
The suspicions get confirmed fast. The unthinkable happens. A camping trip full of friendship and budding love takes a turn toward darkness. A creature the village calls the False Minoshiro, a being who should not be listened to, tells our characters that after psychokinesis was discovered in 2011, our own civilization fell like a second Roman Empire, engulfed by murderous psychics, social collapse, and the bomb. Just like that, it was a thing of the past. An age of darkness had begun.
Hunter-gatherer tribes, murderous bandits and psychic empires were the new forms of social order, like in times past. But humanity’s new powers made the horrors of their moral failure all the greater. “For the Emperor of Merciful Light, murdering was as natural as breathing.” “Swarms of flies covered the cities as black fog. And the stench…” Our characters are relieved to learn that they descend from scientists, self-insulated from their contemporaries. But their relief turns out to be…premature.
The likely inspiration for these scientific villages are the communities of monks who, like St. Benedict, kept the classical culture alive after the fall of the Roman Empire. This is likely why Buddhist monks are a part of the mix. But these scientists were no monks. I have talked before about the paradoxes of the scientist humanist project, and its bloodstained reflections, a theme dear to anime.
The horror is ratcheted up. To survive at all costs, humans did the unthinkable. But what was it?
A few years ago, I was intrigued by Rod Dreher’s The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation. The then-Catholic thinker advocated a retreat to small Christian communities, possibly in the countryside. He was worried about survival, too: the survival of a way of life focused on virtue and faith. Similar approaches can be found in the Amish, who value manual labor and submission to God’s will, and in Shyamalan’s The Village.
Similarly, these scientists designed their “peaceful” communities around the way of life more likely to prevent the rise of Fiends or Karma Demons. But conventional virtue and moral education are not sure-fire, are they? So they added hypnosis, social manipulation, genetic alterations. They conditioned their people to act like bonobos, abandoning themselves to their sexuality to ease social tensions. This includes both sexes, friends and, we are hinted, even family members.
Repressed memories about the traumatic implantation of the “Death Feedback” arise in Saki as she hears about this. But incidents kept happening, and the villages developed the “Rotten Apple Theory,” a version of what Pope Francis calls the “Culture of Discard.” They would preemptively execute children showing any sign of wild or reckless behavior. Afterward, due to hypnosis, other children wouldn’t remember they even existed. Friends and siblings had been thus killed and forgotten in the “Society of Love.”
Tragedy, fear and callousness made this rural Eden a faded, soul-crushing hell. This is indeed “the bitter tastelessness of shadow fruit.” As the ending song puts it: “In my chest, I carry a green apple that wets my eyes.” Our characters’ dark enlightenment is complete when they learn that the so-called Bakenezumi, “Monster Rats”, mole-looking creatures that live in tribes, wage war and occasionally provide services for the humans of the villages, are talking, rational beings.
Out of necessity, though, the lost children get involved in the Monster Rat wars, using their powers to kill multitudes without second thoughts…or Death Feedback. It is just so easy, once you start doing it.
The Third and Fourth Arcs: Conscious Impotence of Rage
The real brilliance and the real horror, though, show themselves in the next arc. Our characters are teenagers now. As it turns out, they didn’t bring their society down. They didn’t escape it. They weren’t persecuted or killed, either. They are deep into bonobo-style sexuality, even knowing that they are being manipulated through it. Some are more troubled than others. Some are angry, but do nothing about it. This rings painfully true. For social beings lost in a muddled world, sometimes distractions are just too powerful.
Back in 2012, TWWK analyzed the demise of Saki’s first love, the clear-eyed Shun, betrayed by self-destructive impotence, by guilt and rage. This was the person Saki had hoped would save her and who she hoped to save. In the symbolic ending song, he is the boatman who helps her cross the flood, extending his hand, echoing the moment they sailed together under the stars. For him, the prodigy, to end up as a Karma Demon is a senseless tragedy. Only his kindness and her love give us a glimpse of hope.
The memories of love are powerful things: they spark the acts of heroism we see in this troubled tale. They are strong enough that the hypnosis won’t completely repress them. Some moments in our lives shine over our entire world, spreading clarity like lighthouses. We embrace virtue once again. We see our protagonists at their best during the next arc, but this is an ambiguous story, where their good intentions have horrifying results. Others are all too eager to exploit them.
The last card this arc has to play is Saki’s interview with Tomiko, head of the Committee of Ethics, a woman much like Saki herself, who has compelling arguments to support this cursed system. As a young nurse, she witnessed the last “fox in the henhouse.” She assisted in eliminating all the rotten apples. When she calmly explains the logic of this merciless preventive war to Saki, the feared tainted cats play like kittens behind her back. She hopes that Saki will, one day, be her successor. In Tomiko, we see Saki’s future.
“Join me, and together, we can rule the galaxy” has only one answer, am I right? Of course not. At age 26, Saki has broken up with Satoru, her remaining friend, over something minor, and is working under Tomiko as a minor bureaucrat. Specifically, she is working at the Department of Mutant Management, which oversees the Monster Rats and occasionally has entire tribes exterminated in a day. Only as a last resort, you see. Discard Culture resists containment: it rapidly evolves into a full-fledged culture of death.
And thus, the central theme of the show rears its head. We viewers are its Committee of Ethics, about to pass judgment on Saki and the “new world.” We know the very real horrors these villages fear. We know the utilitarian argument and its results. We have heard about logical and moral education, parental guidance, Buddhist initiation, Codes of Virtue, psychology, zen, yoga, drugs, hypnosis, and brutal repression of humans and Monster Rats. Now, we’ll decide: Whose Peace? Which Justice?
The Fifth Arc: That Refining Fire
“And last, the rending pain of re-enactment.” Looking back, the new world is monstrous: arrogant, foolish, murderous. It engulfs the next generation in its structure of sin. It preemptively exterminates the Monster Rat tribes without consideration or compassion, although it is evident that they are the psychics’ moral equals. When they finally rise up, rejecting their so-called “gods,” it seems the time of reckoning has come. But it’s all about the methods. Squealer the Monster Rat is conducting a racial extermination war.
The insightful Bobduh considers Squealer the unsung hero of this story, and Squealer indeed presents a damning case for the prosecution. Nevertheless, I deem his actions a dark mirror of Tomiko’s (mirrors are everywhere in this story). He lobotomizes his Queen and destroys his culture to conform it to the humans of old. He conditions psychic children from birth, deceives and murders those he had promised a safe harbor, and shows callousness towards the lives of his men. All for the sake of the Cause.
The show maintains its ambiguity, but I think it hints that the dark impulses behind Squealer’s ideology are similar to the ones behind his masters’. Fearful symmetry! Monster Rats are humans, for good and ill. My own unsung hero, instead, is Squealer’s thematic foil, Kiroumaru, the Monster Rat general who lays down his life to end the rebellion. The one who saves both psychics and Monster Rats.
When Saki was a kid, Kiroumaru risked everything to protect her and her friends, ignoring his orders out of pure mercy. A stout, gentle, fierce warrior, a holy samurai, he speaks the truth and takes the high road when dealing with prejudice and hatred. He searches for weapons to protect his people from the capricious psychics, but stays loyal in their darkest hour. In a world in which survival justifies all manner of evil, he is prepared to die just as he has lived.
Kiroumaru doesn’t retreat into isolation: he serves his people in a world of tribal war, mutual enslavement and murderous psychic overlords. He fights against extermination even if his cowardly allies might decide to exterminate his people afterward. If Tomiko presents a flawed case for the defense and Squealer, a tainted case for the prosecution, Kiromaru grants life to the new world out of mercy. He breaks the cycle.
If moral balance is essential but impossible to bring about using law, knowledge, or control, what can we do? The Gospel tells us of a force good enough, loving enough, to break the universal cycle of evil: God, who chooses to enter this occupied land, suffer its darkness, our darkness, and lead us into a truly new world.
Kiroumaru’s loving sacrifice brings Shun to Saki’s memory. There is hope for our sinful humanity: redemption through merciful love. “From wrong to wrong the exasperated spirit / Proceeds, unless restored by that refining fire / Where you must move in measure, like a dancer.” Jesus Christ is our half-forgotten friend, our refining fire, our merciful, bloodstained General. In Him, we accept death for our sins and walk forward. It hurts, but it heals.
Saki and Satoru start this dance. They save Kiroumaru’s Queen Mother, and as many Monster Rats as they can. They uncover their human nature, disguised by the vile scientists. Saki, who received mercy, chooses mercy for the killer of her family and her friends. In the ambiguous final scene of this ambiguous show, Saki and Satoru bring a new life to this world. Have things changed? I dare to hope. When it comes to my sins, I dare too.
From the New World (Shin Sekai Yori) can be streamed, if one dares, at Crunchyroll.