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.
Night on the Galactic Railroad, "銀河鉄道の夜", is a classic Japanese novel written in the 1920s which remains popular with children and adults alike today through both the book and the various film adaptations. In particular the 1985 animated film. It follows the journey of the young boys Giovanni and Campanella (depicted as cats in the film) on a train journey across the Milky Way, or through the heavens as the film puts it, which is more apt. It's a great film and really deserves your attention if you haven't seen it before.
I enjoy and seek out fiction that attempts to describe the mythical structure of the world. Dante's Divine Comedy and Milton's Paradise Lost both try to relay the structure of the world and the places of Heaven, Hell and of Earth within it. And of course the many Graeco-Roman myths of the underworld give another interpretation. Night on the Galactic Railroad gives us but another view at heaven, structured through a journey across our literal heavens; the milky way, starting at its northernmost point and travelling to the southern. We follow in the direction that the night sky rotates during a night: anticlockwise around Polaris, and so with our journey covering 180 degrees of rotation, it really is the journey of one night. I'll try to explain each location as we get to it, but there are many parts of the film I am unsure about so this is really just my interpretation. I've made a star map of the whole journey which you can follow along with here:
The first stop indicated on Campanella's map is the Swan Station, which is analogous with the constellation "Cygnus". As the train heads into it the pair see fields of grass and Gentian flowers outside. As this is the first area of heaven, I see this as the Fields of Elysium, outside the outermost wall. The Elysium Fields were vast plains through which souls would wander for eternity in some Classical religions, and in some Catholic traditions they were seen as limbo: the part of the afterlife not in heaven nor hell, but before both. The Gentian flowers probably have some meaning I don't know of in Japanese Flower Language, but in the West they have magical properties: a catalyst for communication between the the mundane and the fantastical, a perfect transnational symbol.
The Elysium Fields
Now the journey proceeds into Cygnus, passing by the Northern Cross. The Northern Cross is an asterism within Cygnus, and serves as the polar opposite to the much more famous and important Southern Cross. And, if you didn't know, an asterism is a pattern of stars that is not part of the canonical constellations, and they may overlap or be entirely within "true" constellations. Think about the Plough (an asterism) and its place within the Great Bear (a constellation).
The Northern Cross
The train then stops at Swan Station, and the friends explore the Pliocene Coast, a cascading pit of different locations including a replica of their hometown and an archaeological digsite. I can't work out anything about this section for the life of me so I have thrown up my hands. So I'll have to skip it.
As the train continues through the latter part of Cygnus we meet the bird catcher. A man who is riding the train to reach the heron fields, where he catches the birds to eat. This is another reference to the avian nature of this portion of the sky, with both Cygnus and Aquila (the Eagle) being nearby. This constellation is then capped off with a view of the Observatory at Albireo, Albireo being a bright star at the head of Cygnus. An enigmatic dark structure that seems to broadcast out messages into the darkness that lays ahead.
The Observatory at Albireo
Past the Swan we start to head towards the Southern hemisphere of the sky, a boundary guarded by the snake constellation Serpens, but first more passengers get onboard. They are victims of the Titanic disaster (quite contemporary with the original novel). And, just as the Titanic was travelling from one hemisphere to another and from the old world to the new, so will the Galactic Railroad. As we reach the celestial horizon the train passes through an apple orchard, the group of passengers share out an apple to eat, and although there is only one apple to start with by the end everyone has an apple for themselves, mirroring the feeding of the five thousand. I think the orchard represents Eden, endlessly bountiful but guarded by a snake, and the final and highest part of Heaven visible in the night sky before we enter the Southern hemisphere, as it was the closest place on Earth to heaven. Nevertheless, neither Giovanni nor Campanella take a bite of their apples, possibly out of some Persephonean anxiety, and the group all relaxes for the long ride, falling sleep.
When they awake they are travelling through vast fields of corn, the symbolic crop of the New World. They stop at the "Maize Station" which has a floating clock above it, the pendulum ticking back and forth. I'm not sure this area has any relation to the night sky, but it represents them arriving in the New World and the passing of time.
The Maize Station
Next the train enters Scorpio, and we hear the tale of the Scorpion that hunted other bugs all his life. But when he was being hunted by a weasel he threw himself into a well to avoid being caught, although he would die either way. And as he drown he repented that he could not even let the Weasel hunt him, which would have given the weasel what the scorpion had taken from so many others. Thus he had broken the Golden Rule. As he repented his body burnt up and ascended to heaven, where it became the burning flames of Scorpio. While the reference to Scorpio is clear, I don't think the story has any precedent and is a creation of the author, a nice fable for the Golden Rule.
Scorpio
The next constellation in line is Centaurus, one of the Southernmost constellations in the Milky Way. Here they see the Festival of Centaurus, a festival also held in Giovanni and Campanella's hometown. This marks the entrance into true heaven where the dead partake in the festivities seemingly forever. The station is at Crux, the Southern Cross. Here we see thousands of the souls of the departed alight the train and walk off towards the great cross, singing Hallelujah from Handel's Messiah. This is the height of heaven and the seat of God, the true cross where the dead must depart. But the pair of friends don't leave, they are the only ones not to do so and the train slowly moves away from the station and back in the darkness of the sky.
The Southern Cross
The deep darkness that follows is known as "the Coal Sack", a dark patch of sky next to the Southern Cross which is a strangely void of stars, despite being deep within the Milky Way. Campanella recognises it as the "Field of True Heaven" and where his mother must be. Despite Giovanni's protestations Campanella gets off and disappears into the dark, leaving Giovanni all alone. The Coal Sack is a mysterious extension to accepted heavenly lore, but the patch of space is actually closer to true South than the Southern Cross is, covering the Southernmost portion of the Milky Way arc. So there is something alluring about its lack of anything visible, as if there is something there we cannot see as mortal men, just as Giovanni can't see what Campanella can. With Campanella gone, our journey is at an end and Giovanni is sent back home alone, landing where he first set off with all remains of the Galactic Train vanished.
The Coal Sack
Sacred geography is a term that has gone out of fashion, but I think it can well be applied here. The Southern half of the Earth was a mystery through all of Western (and Japanese) history, and despite modern common knowledge the ancients knew the Earth was a sphere as well as we do today, but what was there they could only speculate. In Dante's Inferno it is the location of Purgatory. In many mediaeval mappa mundi it is either the seat of heaven on Earth or a mirror world of the North. The latitudinal directions have meaning too. The natural direction to move is West, along with the flow of time. To the East lies history and old truths, with the limit of Eastern travel being Eden itself (often placed in the location of Japan). We see in this film that the world becomes more symbolic and abstract as the train heads South, and once in the Southern hemisphere the locations become more metaphor than reality, incorporating symbolism of the mass migrations to the New World in modern history. This is paired with the often overlooked meaning of "heaven" as literally the sky, and so those things we see in the sky must be a part of heaven itself, the milky way a path. And if the journey is this beautiful what lies beyond the pearly gates? We'll have to wait to find out.
