The Tatami Galaxy And The Art Of Adaptation

I recently received an English translation of Tomihiko Morimi’s The Tatami Galaxy. The book was adapted into an animated television series by the same name directed by Masaaki Yuasa, which currently has a place in my heart as the best piece of television I recall watching. Each chapter of the book and each episode of the anime follow the unnamed socially awkward protagonist through a different version of the college social life he could have had if he had become mainly involved with a particular club.

Having read the book now, I would like to put the TV series near the top of my internal list of well-executed adaptations. The top of that list goes to Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings. Jackson’s shamelessly butchered the source material to bring the setting of Middle Earth and the themes of the original books to movies which people actually want to watch. The book series, for all that it has inspired generations of fantasy enthusiasts, rambles around the most understated documentary of a war. Jackson combs the books for things which he could make into epic spectacle or tense conflict, adds lighting and a soundtrack to get you emotionally invested in the whole thing, and turns the characters into caricatures of themselves to reduce any confusion about what they do for the story. He isn’t above removing plot-relevant characters and scenes wholesale or brewing up a non-existent love story out of throwaway lines. He takes all of the inspiration sparked by a set of books which are difficult for the modern consumer to actually read, fans it into an inferno, and injects it directly into the viewer’s veins. People who haven’t really interacted in any other way with the genre of high fantasy still love The Lord of the Rings movies. A nerd obsessed with DND could, for decades, explain their hobby to anyone with even a toe in the common culture by saying “it’s kind of like we’re acting out a story in the Lord of the Rings universe together.”

While Morimi’s novel is far easier to read than Tolkien’s books, Yuasa adds to the impact of the story via his animation. There are more episodes in the show than chapters in the book, but only a couple of episodes did not come directly from one of the book chapters. Some chapters have enough misadventures to be split up into multiple timelines in the show, but Yuasa’s extrapolations of the absurd campus life flesh out the show. The show is in some ways more difficult to watch than the novel is to read. The narrater speaks at a rapid clip, and little cartoons with words flash up between some scenes, so if you’re trying to read subtitles, you might want to pause the show to read the text and then replay the scenes to enjoy the animation. Much of the protagonist’s frustration is sexual, and at times the show becomes flat-out uncomfortable for me to watch, whereas the subtlety of the book keeps the more visceral discomfort at arms’ length. The animation is constantly switching up styles, generally having flat backgrounds in the style of the characters, sometimes switching to what looks like slightly blurred photorealistic video with a distorted color palette, and sometimes switching to flat abstract pictures with no linework. The show is disorienting, both in terms of unexplained details of the world popping out of the woodwork which don’t get explained for several episodes and also in the sheer chaos of how many things are happening on the screen. However, I suspect that letting the chaos wash over you will allow you to pick up on everything you need to know even if you miss some detail. The show is many things, but not subtle. A lot gets repeated, as you might expect from a story about someone living part of their life over and over again. The protagonist is struck with deja vu, often skirting close to the fourth wall in callbacks to previous episodes he should have no knowledge of. The book protagonist refuses to admit that his earlier misadventures were a life well-lived once his life inevitably takes a turn for the better, whereas the animated protagonist narrates a resolution to stop pining after lives he could have led and enjoy the excellent one he has directly before the show resolves itself. I found myself wishing I had read the book first. I wonder if I would have interpreted the novel differently if I hadn’t been spoonfed a take-home message by the anime.

This post has been sitting around as a draft for too long, so I’m just going to incoherently write out a few more things and post the thing. The novel’s narrator is hilariously and unjutsifiably pretentious. It is at times unclear whether he’s oblivious or ironically self-depricating. The animated protagonist carries the essence of that attitude, but manages to be somewhat less insufferable purely because you there’s no infinite canvas for dry text which drills into his head. Part of the genius of the adaptation is in how whimsical schematic cartoons over a relatively restrained narrative get you into the protagonist’s head far more efficiently than pages of sarcastic text in the novel. In the end, this efficiency makes the animated protagonist far less believable than the one in the book. The ending of the series in particular doesn’t really make sense without positing timeline bleedover, but the vibes check out, and it’s not like the show was ever trying to be believable.