Welcome to Maid Spin, the personal website of iklone. I write about about otaku culture as well as history, philosophy and mythology.
My interests range from anime & programming to mediaevalism & navigation. Hopefully something on this site will interest you.
I'm a devotee of the late '90s / early '00s era of anime, as well as a steadfast lover of maids. My favourite anime is Mahoromatic. I also love the works of Tomino and old Gainax.
To contact me see my contact page.
The number of official Touhou works is miniscule in comparison to the unofficial, but one interesting officially-sanctioned work is the "Whispered Oracle of Hakurei Shrine", released last year by Zun in partnership with a plethora of Touhou artists. The work consists of a book of omikuji (Japanese fortune-telling slips) for readers to pull and get a fortune reading of their own. There are helpfully 128 slips in total, with the suggested mechanism for randomisation being flipping a coin seven times to produce a 7-bit binary value between 1-128 (you must add 1 to offset into ℕ). Each slip contains a touhou character (there sure are a lot nowadays) with an accompanying original artwork, detailed fortune, and small comment on the character from Zun. The guys at touhouwiki.net have done a great job cataloguing and translating this publication, so you can try it for yourself online here if you'd like.
I rolled it at the start of the new year ("hatsumoude" I suppose) and got #53, Koishi (see above). Now I didn't spend much time with Subterranean Animism because its way too hard, and since Koishi is the extra stage boss there was no way I was able to reach her anyway. Therefore I know her purely through her inclusion in fanworks, and since TH11 is seen as either the first of the "newhu" games (or maybe the last of the "oldhu" games) I never got to know her on the same level as those from the TH6 through 10 and really wasn't acquainted with her actual lore (If you don't know anything about Touhou don't worry, its not necessary).
Each omikuji has an overarching "fortune" at the top, along with a broad description before jumping into specific categories at the bottom. Rather than any variation on a "吉" or "凶" fortune (good/bad luck), Koishi grants me "不明", "uncertain". And underneath her name the description ominously reads:
危ないなぁ...Its not a particularly comforting fortune, it sure seems more 凶 than 吉 to me, but it does make sense with Koishi's character. Koishi is a "Satori", a youkai with three eyes found in the mountains of Gifu Prefecture. With their third eye they are able to see into the minds of men and read their thoughts, and so it is the standard pastime for Satori to follow travellers through the mountains speaking all of their inner thoughts aloud for all to hear. Koishi, however, found that everyone hated this, and that people began to fear and avoid her because they didn't want her to read their minds. And so Koishi sewed her third eye shut, sealing off her clairvoyancy for good. And although people do no longer fear her power, the monkey's paw tightens because sealing off her principle sensory organ has multiple severe side-effects. First she loses the ability to empathise with others, the normal and invisible personal connections we build with others as we interact becomes impossible for her to achieve. When she talks to people they experience it only as a passing illusion, and once she has gone they can only remember the interaction as a vague memory or dream. Koishi finds that nobody seems to have any emotion towards her at all when they converse, as if they barely recognise she's there. Nobody can even remembers she exists unless its through her relationship with her elder sister, and she finds herself able to pass through crowds of people completely unnoticed and invisible. She truly becomes "the grey man", able to fully hide her presence from everyone and unable to create any kind of impression on anyone.
"Personal interaction is not a one-way street. When you consider the other's feeling you can make them notice you. When you stop that, people will no longer perceive you."Eventually this psychopathy morphs into full psychosis, with Koishi no longer able to use her conscious mind at all. She retreats into a child-like hypnogogia, living purely according to the innocent whims of her unconscious. According to her sister Satori, "She began to live like a pet cat, leaving the house for days and returning only according to her own whims. Nobody knows where she's going nor what she does there." Without motives or even concrete thoughts to guide her, Koishi begins to just wander the world of Gensokyo aimlessly. When she comes across a traveller she speaks to them in incomprehensible poetry, which manifests itself as disturbing and terrifying kaleidoscopic hallucinations for the innocent passers-by, even if Koishi doesn't realise it. And once she has left they are totally unable to recall her existence in the slightest, just that "something strange happened". Strangely enough, from the reports of those who have experienced this, they say that these illusions take the form of their own repressed fears and weaknesses that are hidden deep in their heart, and by being forced to confront them so bluntly it can result in a form of "therapy", letting them overcoming that complex.
To psychoanalyse Koishi is not hard, I'm sure her condition is Sun's illustration of the theories of psychology by design. Freud's Egodeath & Id domination. Jung's embodiment of "the shadow" and suppression of the conscious mind. Lacan's psychosis and intrusion of "the real". I shan't teach my readers to suck eggs, and I'll let you have the fun of discovering what she represents for yourselves, such is the community-driven nature of Touhou. But playing with such theories through his characters is one of the great things about Zun's series, with each game exploring complex scientific or religious worldviews by means of a narrative. I think its the reason people find so much depth in a seemingly simple set of games; every long-winded Engrish attack name or strange untranslatable proverb can lead the interested reader down a long rabbit hole of wikipedia articles and intellectual literature which is of course "by design". I think the general plot of each game follows the path of Reimu (surrogate for Zun) as he tackles the various tenets of a particular worldview, each character representing a core concept and ending with a metanarrative crescendo and discovery of "this truth". They act as stories of discovery as we are lead deeper and deeper into a world we are struggling to understand, whether that be a haunted mansion, mysterious forest or hell itself. For Subterranean Animism this theme seems to be Western Psychology, with Koishi representing the darkest aspect of this philosophy, although unfortunately my fat fingers have so-far prevented me from participating in the full "gesamtkunstwerk".
But by portraying these theories through the medium of characters and narrative it forces the player to involve themselves personally, rather than viewing the theories from the position of a disinterested observer. As I started to research Koishi I was struck firstly with how close-to-home her problems sat to me personally, and it was only later that I went into the details of what she symbolises. Koishi seals away her desires in order to avoid offending and upsetting those around her, but by sealing away her spirit she becomes lost and forgettable. I'm sure many of us struggle with this in the real world, trying to navigate acceptable society while keeping hold of our eccentricities. Byakuren Hijiri, the head priest of Myouren Buddhist Temple finds Koishi particularly disturbing because she is someone who has found a form of "enlightenment" by purging herself of all worldy things, but has not found the inner peace and goodness of the Buddha in doing so. We too will slowly become ascetics when we close ourselves off to the outside world. Even if at first you just hide your true interests and beliefs from others, you will eventually forget and lose them entirely, leaving only your shell performing a simulation of your former self. But as Koishi discovers, to rid yourself of those things that others hate about you is an act of self-destruction and will only lead to an even deeper rejection from society. When you refuse to interact with the world and others in an honest way you might, as Zun puts it, fall off the edge of the world.
