Some Reflections on Subahibi, for my friends Yuqumi (@yuqumi_) and Dani.
This text originated as a private correspondence and deliberately retains something of that origin. What began as a reflection on Kagami gradually shifted its center of gravity toward broader and more ambitious horizons. Its aim is not to offer an exhaustive exegesis of Subahibi, but rather to map one of the aesthetic and philosophical architectures that runs through it: the one that finds one of its most privileged interlocutors in the young Nietzsche. If this essay often proceeds by way of detours, it is because its object, too, only reveals itself through reflections. Rather than presenting a systematic demonstration, what follows seeks to trace a constellation of ideas—a network of correspondences. I should also clarify that what follows is a necessarily imperfect English translation of my original Spanish text. Since I have not been able to consult the corresponding English editions of much of the bibliography—some works are, of course, originally in English, while many others are not—I have translated the sole direct quotation myself, despite the obvious limitations of doing so.
1
I shall begin from one of the young Nietzsche's fundamental intuitions, condensed in The Birth of Tragedy: existence finds its justification only as an aesthetic phenomenon (die Welt gerechtfertigt). I contend that this idea also constitutes one of the foundations of Subahibi, understood—among many other things—as a cosmodicy in which life and the work of art ultimately become indistinguishable within a rigorously holistic perspective.
In this early Nietzsche, the logic of subsumption still prevails. Multiplicity appears as the manifestation of a single will, still conceived in the Schopenhauerian sense. In much the same way, each protagonist's particular world in Subahibi—generated through the continuous feedback between perception and will, under an unmistakably Wittgensteinian influence—retains its status as a unified whole only from the standpoint of the individual subject. Ultimately, however, all of these perspectives refer back to a single metaphysical unity that both contains and orders them: Ayana.
Note. Throughout this essay, I use the term "worlds" only in the sense of present regimes of perception. To reduce them to merely individual perspectives would, of course, impoverish the ontological structure of Subahibi; for the present argument, however, this provisional simplification will suffice.
From this standpoint, Deleuze's observation that The Birth of Tragedy remains a work still susceptible to dialecticization becomes easier to understand. Multiplicity remains redeemed within unity; particular beings still find their truth in that which exceeds them. The continuous absorbs difference beneath the principle of individuation, justifying it precisely by redeeming it. Only then does one of the young Nietzsche's most unsettling statements acquire its full weight: true wisdom consists in learning to behold human beings as phantasmagorias.
Knockin' on Heaven's Door is perhaps the most radical literalization of this intuition. Yuki's ghost—whose presence deliberately oscillates between the cognitive and the physical within Tomosane's particular world—reveals, through a distinctly otaku sensibility and sense of humor, the constitutive discontinuity of existence in Subahibi. Epistemological ambiguity thus passes seamlessly from the neuroscientific discussion aboard the train to the sexual encounter between the two characters. Anyone who has read the visual novel attentively, from Down the Rabbit Hole to this supplementary chapter, will hardly perceive this as an anomaly; rather, as a paradigm.
2
If Kagami can become a privileged symbol within Subahibi, it is because the young Nietzsche had already described, with extraordinary precision, the aesthetic horizon from which such a symbol becomes intelligible. His metaphor places us among Ionic rather than Doric columns. The choice is anything but accidental. Here, the Ionic embodies the serenity of measure, the clarity of form, and the enchantment of a beauty reconciled with itself; the Doric still remains beyond the field of vision, as the primordial force whose excess that beauty contains without ever revealing. Before allowing us to enter the temple of Dionysus, Nietzsche first compels us to fall in love with Apollo. In his own words:That such an effect is necessary would surely be grasped intuitively by anyone who could somehow find themselves transported—even if only in a dream—into the existence of ancient Greece: walking beneath lofty Ionic colonnades, raising their gaze toward a horizon outlined by pure and noble lines, seeing beside them, in luminous marble, the reflection of their own transfigured figure, while around them men advance with solemn dignity or move with graceful delicacy, their voices and rhythmic gestures sounding in perfect harmony—they would surely lift their hands toward Apollo and exclaim: "Blessed people of the Hellenes! How great Dionysus must have been among you, if the god of Delos deemed such enchantments necessary to cure your dithyrambic madness!" Yet an aged Athenian, gazing upon them with the sublime eye of Aeschylus, would reply: "But say this too, strange foreigner: how much this people must have suffered in order to become so beautiful! Now come with me to tragedy, and join me in offering sacrifice within the temple of both divinities."
(Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy*, translated from the original Spanish edition cited in the bibliography.)*
The metaphor lulls us to sleep. We forget horror and surrender ourselves to the sheer self-evidence of beauty. Marble seems sufficient unto itself; before long, we too find ourselves reflected in its surface.
Note. The notion of suffering will be addressed here only partially. Its development within Subahibi—and, to an even greater extent, within Sakurano—extends far beyond the scope of these pages.
Note. Every reference to Greek antiquity throughout this essay refers to Nietzsche's Greece. It does not appear here as a mere historical object, but as the point from which a particular aesthetic worldview is articulated. It is that worldview—and not classical antiquity understood as a unified tradition—that enters into dialogue with Subahibi.
3
That initial enchantment—the Apollonian phenomenon—constitutes, I would argue, both the essence and the meaning of the mirror symbol throughout SCA-DI's work. It is hardly accidental that the symbol's first narrative crystallization takes the form of Kagami, whose name literally means "mirror."Note. References to Sakurano will be inevitable. Although Uta and Toki were ultimately published as independent works, SCA-DI originally conceived them together with Subahibi as a single "Trilogy of Happiness." The later editorial reorganization did not alter the project's spiritual and symbolic continuity, which this essay will consistently treat as a single artistic horizon.
4
"The exquisite edifice of Apollonian culture," Nietzsche writes, "must be dismantled" in order to behold what truly sustains its architecture. Only then do we recognize ourselves in the very materials of the metaphor: "our transfigured figure reflected in radiant marble." The mirror ceases to be an object and reveals itself as a structure. In Subahibi, that structure takes the form of solipsism: each world can recognize itself only through the repetition of itself.Decadence no longer produces supplement, but repetition. The Dionysian does not consist in looking, but in looking beyond. In looking where the image is no longer enough. The mirror merely returns what has already been seen; it duplicates, orders, and stabilizes relations. It never creates. Against the almost magical serenity of that repetition stands Nietzsche's evocation:
"How much these people must have suffered in order to become so beautiful!"
Pure suffering is the aesthetic justification of every symmetry.
It is the primordial asymmetry.
The Anti-Mirror.
From this perspective, scenes that initially appear almost impenetrable acquire an entirely new meaning: Kagami's martyrdom at the hands of the enraged crowd—a genuine Dionysian chorus led by Takuji—or the final revelation of Kagami as the apparition of the rabbit plush. The siege of the Titans makes the whole web of mirrors tremble.
5
For the young Nietzsche, the aesthetic justification of the world requires that tragedy never exhausts itself in its own appearance. Apollonian beauty, by itself, is never enough. Every work of art must constantly point beyond itself; only then does it cease to be an object of contemplation and become a form of truth. Compassion remains captive to the surface of suffering. By itself, it cannot justify the world. Tragedy does not redeem because it moves us, but because it reveals. Only the Dionysian source generates supplement; the mirror, by contrast, can merely counterfeit it. And yet that tragic, Dionysian world—dissonant in itself—maintains a "strictly reciprocal proportion" with the naïve world of Apollonian illusion. Both belong to the same harmony, although neither can behold that harmony from within itself. Where does the reconciliation between measure and the immeasurable take place—that coincidentia oppositorum in which form comes to harbor what exceeds it? How can the formless find its justification in form?Nietzsche's answer passes through music. The "beyond of the audible" descends into the image without ever exhausting itself within it. Myth is precisely this mediation: it renders visible what, by its very nature, remains inaccessible, stretching the limits of all things. The stage preserves the individual from an immediate fusion with that beyond; music, by contrast, never ceases to point toward it.
This is why the paradigm is not Socrates but Oedipus. For the young Nietzsche, the intellectual listens to mirrors, whereas the saint listens to the Sphinx. One remains captive to images; the other ultimately destroys them. It is no accident that Oedipus tears out his own eyes: only beyond light can true vision begin. Read through the philosophical horizon of Subahibi, Oedipus appears to violate precisely what Wittgenstein would formulate centuries later in the seventh proposition of the Tractatus: he attempts to cross the boundary of what can be said. By solving the Sphinx's riddle—whose knowledge of the human’s being and of their true identity was presumed to belong to the gods alone—he transcends his mortal condition in an undeniable failure of σωφροσύνη (sophrosýnē, prudence). It is by offending Nature itself, the Apollonian disposition of the stage, that he sees it collapse upon him in punishment, culminating in incest with his own mother [1]. It is no accident that the first manifestation of this rupture takes precisely the form of incest: among the gods it is a recurring motif; among human beings, it can appear only as the sign of a nature that has ceased to obey its own limits. It is a dissonance that cannot be reconciled from within the human world.
It is here that SCA-DI's reading converges with Nicholas of Cusa. That which exceeds every measure does not appear as one object among others, but as an infinity overflowing every conceivable form. Wittgenstein transforms that boundary into a problem of language; Nicholas of Cusa, into a problem of knowledge. In Subahibi, that beyond ultimately receives a proper name: Otonashi Ayana.
The ineffable.
The boundary at which both beginning and end reside, within the eternal recurrence of metempsychosis.
Dickinson's emblematic poem.
The primordial asymmetry.
Pure suffering.
The Anti-Kagami.
Returning to the opposition between Socrates and Oedipus, Mamiya undergoes precisely this passage. At first he remains trapped within a Socratic-Apollonian regime of self-reference and trauma. The cultivated façade he presents to his mother—composed of canonical literature, classical music, and intellectual discipline—is not a genuine opening toward spirit, but merely another Apollonian surface, another mirror in which to contemplate. Beneath it remain repressed the Dionysian-libidinal impulses that emerge in the form of his otaku-schizophrenic fantasies. Through music, through Kimika, through the homogenized crowd, and through the experience of LSD, Mamiya finally succeeds in breaking this barrier at the end of It's My Own Invention. Only with Kagami's destruction does the possibility of The End Sky open before him. Unlike Hera—a divinity of an altogether different kind—Ayana does not answer this transgression with punishment, a circumstance that, at least seemingly, allows Mamiya to survive where Kimika and the rest of the group perish.
[1]: Mamiya's relationship with Hasaki—particularly its sexual culmination—is often approached through moral interpretation. From the perspective adopted here, and from that of Nietzsche, Subahibi, and later Sakurano, such an approach remains insufficient. A work of art demands that moral judgment be suspended in order to ask instead about the aesthetic function of the event. Life itself requires us to go beyond: only by destroying Kagami can Hasaki finally be seen.
Note. That Kagami conforms almost programmatically to the tsundere archetype is far from insignificant. Her apparent banality at the beginning—further emphasized by the fact that both she and Tsukasa are directly derived from the Hiiragi twins of Lucky Star—belongs to the very operation of the symbol itself: the terrestrial and repetition. This should not be confused with the diegetic sphere of Mamiya's otaku paranoia, whose paradigmatic expression is Riruru. Denpa is power.
6
In the closing pages of The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche introduces an especially significant word: Wunder. The miracle. The appearance of that which no dialectic could ever produce and which nevertheless comes to pass. Nature, he tells us, tends toward the production of genius; what he never explains is how that miracle enters the world. Subahibi attempts precisely that answer. The miracle does not descend from outside existence; it occurs because life possesses the strange capacity to extend itself beyond itself. It does not remain identical to itself: it presents itself, transforms itself, reiterates itself without ever merely repeating itself. It leaves a legacy. Every genuine destruction proves inseparable from a creation. Both suspend the previous order of the world in order to make possible a new appearance.Let’s go to another beginning.
Wunder does not abolish suffering; it passes through it. It does not restore what has been lost, but makes it possible for existence to affirm itself again after loss. Ayana does not grant Zakuro a redemption understood as the negation of her life, but rather a Wonderful Everyday—some days whose very transience is enough to justify, retrospectively, all the suffering that preceded them. On the final day, the mirrors disappear. Identity ceases to seek itself in its own reflection and quietly returns to the sky. When the miracle comes to an end, the White World once again dissolves its forms.
During her brief passage through the White World—the boundary itself—Yuki inevitably catches a fleeting glimpse of what sustains the entire architecture of Subahibi: Ayana, metempsychosis, and the very limit of individuation. By identifying with and dissolving into that white world, she finds the answer to what fills the vessel; she need only listen to her former Yuki, she who died shortly after attaining the Truth. Only then does she choose to leave behind the realm of phantasms and, reclaiming her place in the world, utter the words:
"I was done being a ghost."
Yuki returns to the world—to her world—holding against her chest what she has finally understood:
"The world is a vessel. That which can fill the vessel..."
The answer remains suspended. Not because it remains hidden, but because it cannot be formulated as a concept. It must be lived.
That is Wunder.
That is also the only answer Subahibi offers to the question of the world's—and existence's—aesthetic justification.
It is what fills the absence upon which every identity is constituted. It is what fills the void.
In Sakura no Toki, it is what allows Naoya to take up his brush once again after having lost the "deranged beauty"—his own Wunder—that had guided him.
It is what allows the world to continue precisely where every justification had seemed to fail.
Life does not require a justification external to itself. By extending itself, by presenting itself, it justifies itself.
This, finally, is the only possible tautology.
Live happily!
7
The rest belongs to silence.
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