bananafishmetas

[bananafishmetas]

Ash and Recognizing His Innate Goodness

I’ve talked a lot about my belief that Ash was, from the very beginning, an innately good person, and that, while Eiji gave Ash something extremely special in giving him, for the first and only time in his life, the experience of what it felt like to be unconditionally love and accepted, I don’t think you can give Eiji, or anyone else in Ash’s life, credit for making him a GOOD PERSON.  I think Ash just always was, it was just that his life was so hard and difficult from so early on, that he had to develop this hard, cold exterior as a way to protect himself.   But it wasn’t something created in him through the kindness of others.  I think the reason Eiji connected as deeply as he did with Ash is because Eiji was able to see past that armor and see Ash for who he really was.  He saw how much pain Ash was in, how much it cost him to have to do the things he did, that he wasn’t some emotionless monster, and that he never was in danger of even becoming one.  The one time the two of them really fought was when Eiji started to make the same mistake everyone else had made, thinking, because Ash was doing the things he was doing, it was because he was losing sight of his own humanity.   The same way Shorter accuses Ash in Angel Eyes of becoming like the people who abuse him.  Just like he was with Shorter, Ash is incredibly upset that Eiji would think that, and gets extremely angry, because it’s not true.  It hurts Ash that Eiji could think that.  That he could believe Ash could be someone who hurt others just because he can, or because he wants to.  Ash isn’t killing Arthur’s men because he enjoys it, or because he wants to.  He’s killing them because if he doesn’t, they’ll kill him and all of his own boys.  He’s doing it because Arthur and the rest of them forced the issue by refusing to back down.  Ash gets no pleasure out of what he’s doing.  Just like he got no pleasure out of seducing Ricardo.  It’s an act necessary to survival, and that’s all.  Eiji eventually comes to understand that, and that’s the real turning point in their relationship.  That Ash didn’t kill because he was a devil or a demon or a ruthless killer. That Ash didn’t kill because he was a bad guy.  He killed because he had no other choice if he wanted to keep living and if he wanted to protect those he cared for.  

There's so many things that point to Ash having an inherently kind and caring heart. The fact that he cares as much as he does about everyone around him, even before he really gets to know Eiji, like Griff, Skip and Shorter, and everyone in his gang.   A good example of this is the fact that Ash is only working with Dino at the beginning of the story still because he needs the money in order to pay for Griff’s medical bills.  Dino is Ash’s worst abuser, his longest abuser, and the last person Ash wants anything to do with.  But he keeps working with him just so he can care for his big brother.  He subjects himself to being around a man who raped him repeatedly as a child so he can have a way of keeping Griff safe and alive. This is the definition of self-sacrifice.  This is before he ever meets Eiji.  Definitely Ash was influenced by Shorter and Eiji, in terms of how he was able to open up and be outwardly softer and less harsh, but other people don’t determine for you what’s in your heart.  They can’t create a capacity to care in another person.  That has to be inborn.  I feel like the fact Ash is as good as he is from the start of the story really proves he always had a strong, moral inclination. Really it’s in SPITE of all the horrific pain Ash has been through that he's as good as he is, because anybody with a shaky or nonexistent moral foundation, if they had gone through even a fraction of what Ash did, would have turned out viciously cruel.  Yut-Lung is a good example, actually.  Yut-Lung has been through similar experiences, though not entirely the same, as Ash, and he acts in ways that are entirely selfish and petty.  Yut-Lung didn’t really have anyone in his life to help guide him, but even despite this, we see moments of regret and remorse in him, because he isn’t ENTIRELY without goodness.  Still, he’s noticeably selfish, self-centered, petty and vengeful in a way Ash never was. Even at his lowest and most desperate moments, even when he was most alone, with no friends and no one to support him, Ash never hurt anyone who didn’t first hurt or try to hurt him, and he never hurt anyone out of spite, or jealousy, never tried to take anything away from someone just because they had it and he didn’t.  Ash, from the very beginning, only ever acted out of self-defense. Even with positive influences like Shorter and Griff and Eiji, if Ash hadn't started out with having a strong, natural sense of right and wrong, given the truly massive scale of his suffering, he would have been a lot more morally corrupt from the start. The greatest tragedy of Ash, I think, is that he's really such a good person, who's been forced into such an awful, brutal existence through no fault of his own, and it's driven him to hate himself. I think the whole point of Banana Fish is to show the true damage that child abuse can cause. That it can take a good person like Ash and make him believe he's a bad person.

I think people can influence you, definitely, and can influence the way you turn out, but I also think there's an equal balance between nature versus nurture. I don't think you can create a strong moral nature in someone if it doesn't exist from the start.  It’s why you can find genuinely bad people who have never experienced anything traumatic in their lives, and they still go out of their way to cause harm to others. Like basically everyone in the story who abused Ash.  It’s also why you can find people who have experienced truly traumatic things, and they’re still good people deep inside, wanting to do the right thing, even if they’re also damaged and maybe don’t always understand how to go about it.  Like Blanca, and of course even more so Ash himself.  If that goodness DOES exist from the start, other people can nurture it and grow it and give it a safe place to express itself, and that’s what Eiji and Shorter did for Ash.  But you can't give a moral conscience to someone who doesn't already have it. Kind of like you can't create talent or intelligence in someone. They have to be born with it, and then you can develop it. I just think, with everything we know about Ash, about the way he was from the start, the way he reacted to things, the things he tried to achieve, like keeping his friends and family safe, even trying to spare enemies of his, trying to break free from Dino, etc… and the things he didn’t ever care about,  like money and power, the way he cared about people, the value he placed on human life, despite all the hell he'd been through, etc... it shows that he always had a good heart, he just lived in a world where if he let that show, it would get him killed. Which, the most tragic thing of all, it eventually did.

One more point to make about all of this is a parallel we see between Private Opinion and Angel Eyes.  There are scenes in both stories in which Blanca and Shorter see Ash smile and laugh genuinely, in the carefree, childlike way children do, and they're both struck by how sweet and cute Ash is. Because they're seeing Ash as he really is in those moments. This sweet, adorable little boy.   They’re amazed and stunned, because it’s the first time they’re actually getting to see the real Ash, and it's so at odds with the detached, uncaring facade Ash usually wears. Ash shows that part of him to them in moments of lighthearted, carefree abandon. He smiles and laughs like that around them after he's come to realize he can trust them, and that they won't hurt him.

I think what's important to remember is that, as horrific as the abuse Ash suffered is, and honestly, it’s about as bad as it can possibly get, it never defined WHO Ash was.

The abuse he suffered destroyed his life. Absolutely.  It ruined his life.  It changed, irrevocably, the course and direction of where he ended up. It changed and affected the way Ash interacted with people and situations.  It altered and affected the way he behaved.  It forced him to harden himself, to become harsh and blunt, to cut himself off in order to survive, to push people away because he couldn’t trust them, and because he was thrust, through no fault of his own, into a desperate, cruel world of violence which made him dangerous to be around.  It damaged him in permanent, irreparable ways, emotionally and mentally.  Caused him to develop dangerously low self-esteem and other, deeply unhealthy habits and ways of thinking.  It made him hate himself, made him think of himself as worthless and not deserving of love. It caused him painful and overwhelming stress and anxiety, and forced him to live in a constant state of fear and uncertainty, leaving him unable to ever relax, unable to stop, unable to be himself, unable to be a boy, unable to just LIVE.  It affected and changed and dictated every aspect of his life.

But the one thing it never changed, the one thing it never altered, was who Ash was fundamentally inside himself.  The abuse destroyed his life, but it never destroyed HIM.

Despite it all, Ash never stopped being a good person.

This is so vitally important to the story, I think. To realize this about the story. Ash's abuse didn't turn him into an abuser. It didn't make him a bad person. Ash says to Foxx, right before Foxx rapes him, that he can do whatever he wants to him, because it doesn't matter, because Ash's mind and spirit are his own. He's telling Foxx that no matter how badly you treat me, no matter how hard you try to make me like you, I never will be. I'll never be as ugly as you are. Ash never lost himself, despite the sickening hell he suffered, and I think that's exactly in line with the message of Banana Fish. That even if you've suffered trauma that's destroyed your life, it doesn't mean that trauma defines who you are. It doesn't mean that trauma has destroyed you, or made you a worthless person. That your trauma isn't WHO you are. It's something you've been through, maybe even something you can never move past, but it doesn't mean that's all you are as a person. It doesn't mean that's what you are as a person.  That bad things happening to you don’t make you a bad person.  They may affect the way you act, the way you behave, the decisions you make, but it doesn’t change what’s in your heart.  And Ash’s heart was always golden.

#Banana Fish #Ash Lynx #Meta

[bananafishmetas]

Random and Various Banana Fish metas

I think, more than anything, whether Ash intended to kill the baseball coach or not, and yeah, like you said, he was more than jusified in killing that monster, he was simply too young to understand the full consequences or implications of what killing a person actually was.  An eight year old might have a vague, undefined understanding of what death is, but they can’t fully grasp the reality of it, the finality of it, etc… So I think, even if Ash took the gun with the full intention of using it to kill the baseball coach, he couldn’t possibly have had a full comprehension of what killing another person actually meant, and that’s important to understand.  There’s a reason they don’t hold a child really responsible even when they kill another person.  Their brains aren’t fully developed, and because of that you can’t expect them to fully grasp the consequences of taking another life.

I also don’t think there was any malicious motivation behind Ash’s killing here.  This wasn’t a “revenge” killing, but simply the desperate act of a child who knew and had no other way to defend himself, because nobody else was helping him, and he probably feared that, eventually, if he didn’t do something, he would be killed himself.  Him paying the baseball coach may have kept the guy from killing him right away, but still, the guy was a child murderer, on top of being a child rapist.  When you have those kinds of sick, twisted urges, more likely than not, you’re eventually going to give into them.  I think the baseball coach would have killed Ash eventually, and Ash knew that, or had an idea of it.  On top of which, he obviously just wanted the rape to stop.  I can’t even imagine how horrific it all must have been, especially with knowing his own father wouldn’t and couldn’t do anything to help.  I guess one of the saddest things then is how Ash was forced into doing something as traumatizing as killing someone when he was too young to even really understand what that meant.  What that must have done to him emotionally and mentally, how that must have damaged him, is heartbreaking to think about.  

Also, it’s interesting that the original text doesn’t contain the line “When I came back one day.”.  I never thought Ash had followed the coach to his house, but that this had clearly become a routine, where he came for Ash, either during little league, or just simply took Ash off the street and brought him to his house to rape him, and then sent him away.  This is also confirmed by Ash’s dad saying the coach had “dragged Ash to his house a few times after that.” The exclusion of that line in the original text just confirms that then, that the coach brought Ash to his house on his own, clearly intending to rape him again, when Ash shot him.  Well, that’s confirmed also by the panel of Ash sitting up in the bed with his shirt open.  Ash must have known that the coach would at some point come and take him, bring him to his house and rape him again, because he’d done it multiple times already.  And so he took his father’s gun because he didn’t know what else to do to stop it.  Nobody was helping him, nobody was offering him any kind of protection.  Ash had the gun with him as a means of defense at that point.  He took it to protect himself for when another, inevitable attack would occur, rather then to seek the coach out with the sole purpose of killing him.  He didn’t follow the coach, hide, and then jump out and shoot him.   He didn’t attack the coach first.   He used the gun only after the coach had him on the bed and had begun to undress him.  Only when he was already in the process of being, again, sexually assaulted. That’s purely self-defense, not a malicious intent to murder.  

You have to think Ash must have been terrified, when he realized what had happened.  After his experience with the police before, them not only not believing him about what his coach had done to him, but then blaming him for it, and then with how useless and incompetent his own father was in protecting him, that’s when he decided to run away from home, probably scared he would be blamed again and punished, even though he hadn’t done anything wrong.  The whole set of circumstances must have set off the notion in Ash that he HAD done something wrong though, given the way he was treated by all of the adults around him.  That, coupled with the horror of seeing a person shot to death and bleeding out on the floor, knowing that you had caused it, along with all the trauma of the repeated sexual assault, would have caused irrevocable damage to Ash’s mental and emotional state.  Trauma so deep, it no doubt would have affected him at even a subconscious level.  Just this one experience alone would have been enough to probably require a lifetime of therapy to deal with.  As it was for Ash, he ended up being plunged into a world of nonstop nightmares and hellish misery for the rest of his life, suffering trauma after trauma, all easily on par with what happened in Cape Cod.  I don’t think people ever stop to really, fully comprehend the kind of hell Ash went through in his life.  If they did, they might understand better why it was he chose to die in the end.

//

ash-in-the-rye

You’re going to shoot yourself in the head. If you do, I’ll swear never to lay a finger on him. Can you do it?

This scene is so heartbreaking.  Jeeze man.  There’s no hesitation.  No fear even.  Just acceptance, because Eiji’s life means more to him, Eiji’s safety means more to him, than his own ever will.

Yut-Lung’s shock too.  He doesn’t at all expect Ash to actually do it because he doesn’t understand selfless love, while Ash embodies the concept here.  Despite thinking he knows who Ash is, this stone cold killing machine who feels nothing, Yut-Lung is completely wrong.  He gets angry afterward because he doesn’t get it, doesn’t understand how Ash could love Eiji this much, because Yut-Lung himself has never loved anyone, and because he was desperate to prove that Ash was just like him, and instead, Ash proves to him how they’re nothing alike at all.  I think it’s interesting too, because what Yut-Lung is trying to do, besides just his petty jealousy driving him to want to take away from Ash something he himself doesn’t have, is he’s trying to use Ash to replace his own brother’s as an enemy, to give Yut-Lung’s own, empty existence meaning, something, or someone, to define himself against.  He tries to force Ash into that role, just like all of Ash’s other abusers, seeing Ash as not a person, but as a thing that exists solely to fulfill Yut-Lung’s own needs.  Trying to shape Ash into this heartless monster for his own pleasure and sanity.  But that isn’t who Ash is, and he refuses to be anyone’s puppet anymore.  Yut-Lung doubles down on his efforts to rip Eiji away from Ash after this, letting his petty jealousy roar out of control because he wants to punish Ash for daring to defy the role Yut-Lung has chosen for him.  This goes back to what we see Ash say about his abusers throughout the story, that they always get angry when he dares to fight them off, like they can’t believe he would dare to ruin their fantasy.  This is exactly what Yut-Lung does too.  

I think, in the end, when Yut-Lung finally understands that Ash isn’t like him at all, and he never will be, when he finally accepts that, that’s when we see him give up the game of trying to make Ash into what he wants and lets him be, which is more than you can say for most of the people who abused Ash.  At least Yut-Lung could accept it, finally, and stop.  I think, in a way, he was able to, because Ash himself never really held any hatred towards Yut-Lung.  He never wanted to hurt Yut-Lung, not really.  We see Ash say to Cain, after the standoff in the museum, “I should have killed him when I had the chance.”, and Ash has this resigned, sad smile on his face as he says this.  There’s no anger there, no disgust even.  Just a quiet exhaustion and acceptance.  Like he knows Yut-Lung could very well be his demise (and tragically he is, if inadvertently), but even then, Ash feels no real malice about it.  He just looks tired. He just wanted to be left alone.  And I think, in his own, screwed up way, Yut-Lung could sense that, could sense that Ash, despite all that Yut-Lung had done to him, never really hated him, and maybe Yut-Lung even felt some gratitude for it, and was able to realize his own pettiness and cruelty for trying to hurt someone who had never hurt him.

//

emeraldeyes23

I love this scene from the manga where Ibe’s crying for Ash. Sadly his feelings towards Ash just don’t come through in the anime...

I guess you can’t just animate every little scene😔

ash-in-the-rye

Ibe represents the whole fandom here.

cosmicjoke

This is one of my favorite scenes, and one of the moments that stuck out the most to me in Banana Fish.  Ash tells them he’s sending Ibe and Eiji back to Japan soon, and talks about himself in the usual, self-deprecating way which defines so much of how he sees himself, when he says Eiji will be okay because he’ll “be sick of me” by the time they go back.  

Ibe’s heartbreak over Ash is so vivid, and captures the sense of tragedy in Ash we all see and feel in such a raw, visceral way.  He sees what a good person Ash is, how self-sacrificing he is, how much he gives up to help all of them.  He isn’t blind in his perception of Ash like most of the other characters in the story, seeing Ash either as some sort of dangerous, devil-like animal, or some emotionless object to be possessed.  He sees Ash for who he really is, is aware of Ash’s innate kindness and even sweetness, and it breaks his heart, because he also knows how alone Ash is, and how none of them can really help him, the way he so readily helps them.  Ibe grows emotional after Ash tells him how much he wishes he could have seen the pictures he took of Eiji, and there’s such a profound sense of wistful, longing melancholy to Ash’s words, the naked dream of a better life, which he knows he can never have, but still expresses a desire for.  He sees how Ash doesn’t begrudge them for it, despite that.  How he doesn’t hold it against them, for having what he doesn’t.  Instead he’s happy for them, and hopes they continue to live a good, long life.  This is in such stark contrast to how Ash is expecting to die soon himself, and I think Ibe can sense that too.  He starts to cry because he sees how deeply Ash cares about the people around him, and how willing he is to give up everything to help them have what he doesn’t.  It’s the definition of selflessness.  He says “When I think how he must feel, doing this- I just, you know…”  He knows how hard this is for Ash, sending Eiji and him back to Japan, how much of a loss it is for Ash, but how willingly he’s doing it because keeping them safe and giving them the opportunity to live is more important to him than his own happiness.  Ibe cries, because it hurts him to see someone so good thinking so little of himself, dismissing his own wants and needs as unimportant.  It hurts him to see such a good kid in so much pain, and yet, despite that pain, having a heart so big and generous, he wants and fights for others to have that long, better life that he knows is impossible for himself.  

Really, this is the defining quality of Ash’s goodness.  

Even in his own suffering, loneliness, hopelessness and pain, he was never jealous, or resentful, or angry at others for having what he didn’t, or couldn’t.  Freedom, friendship, love, hope, happiness.  A normal, long, peaceful life.  Rather, he sought to protect that life for them.  Something which for him had only ever been a distant dream.  If he could  give them that thing he had always longed for, but never had, then to Ash, that was worth every sacrifice of himself.

“He’s a good kid.  He’s such a good kid, you know…”

//

Anonymous asked:

Hi:) May I ask what your personal interpretation of the Bf ending is? Did Ash chose to die or not? If he did, what do you think was the reason for his decision? And did he believe Eiji's letter? Sorry if this has been asked before and I bother you with these questions...

silverquillsideas answered:

Hello Anons! It’s not a bother at all! Thanks for asking! I’ll club these two together since there’s going to be a lot of overlapping parts.

I feel like the more I try to delve deeper into why and how the ending was written the way it was, the more number of interpretations open up. I’ve talked about my views on the ending in the above posts, and as for whether he believed Eiji’s letter, my answer is yes, definitely. I’ll elaborate why below.

First off, when I read the manga and later, GoL, it always occurred to me that Ash’s death wasn’t immediate, that he had time to drag himself back to the library and collapse slowly from blood loss, and the same is repeated by Sing in his musings in GoL “in the long long hours before death, as blood slowly drained out of your body”….so, I believe that the stab wasn’t lethal, and that Ash’s death was, ultimately, by his choice.

Now coming to why he chose what he did. These interpretations are entirely my own, and they are called ‘interpretations’ for a reason, there will be other equally valid points held by the fandom, and that’s completely okay. This is just how I see it. I re-read the manga recently, and this time, I tried to look closer at all the subtle hints at how the ending was kind of… foreshadowed in a way?

I’ll begin with the way Ash was constructed as a character : he was multifaceted, complex, a genius with superhuman reflexes and intellect, he rejected all kinds of authority and the law, since he never had reason to trust them all his life. Ash conditioned himself to be ruthless and put on a hard front at all times, since that was the only way he could have survived in the world he was thrown into from the tender age of seven or eight. He used his physical beauty as a weapon, a shield to disarm opponents, so that they never got any hint of his lethal side until it was too late; it was simply another tool in his fight for survival. Eiji is probably one of the first and only ones to get a measure of what Ash really is like, by the time we get to the arc of Shorter’s death. He comments on this :

Curiously enough, we, as readers get to know this along with Eiji, that Ash has this duality to him : on one hand, he is the cold and ruthless killer and gang-boss, the wild, untamable Ash Lynx. on the other hand, only with Eiji, he can be the carefree 17 year old Aslan, the little boy Griff loved, who’s scared of pumpkins and gets flustered when teased, and loves to bicker with Eiji over silly things.

Its this humane side of Ash we all latch onto. The facade of a killer that Ash has to put on for the rest of the world, falls apart when he’s with Eiji, and we can see that : we realise that it’s a shield he has to hold up for his survival so that the truly compassionate, softer side of him can survive. Eiji sees through it, we see through it. But does Ash? His self image is exceedingly negative.

This becomes a recurring point of arguments between Eiji and Ash throughout the manga. A constant pull and push of opinions on who Ash truly is, who he can be. Eiji tries so hard to pull out the humane side of Ash, the one who is Aslan, back to the surface, so that Ash Lynx may not forget who he really once was. Eiji lets Ash be vulnerable, he makes him laugh, allows him to be silly, he tells him that it’s okay to be scared, to be hurt, because Ash is deeply hurt, only he has trained himself to never acknowledge that even to himself.

Does Ash consider himself entirely worthless? I beg to differ. He relies on his intelligence, his skills and capabilities, and he had confidence in them. He has his gang members to protect and lead, even before Eiji shows up. He has his pride as a boss, and his constant refusal to be controlled by Dino or other characters who hold authority (and consequently, abuse their powers to further their own greed).

But was that enough to hold out till the end? More than the battles with Dino or Mannerheim or Foxx, I think Ash had to fight bigger battles with himself, about his own perception of what it means to be accepting of who you are as a person, and what you choose to believe in within yourself. Throughout the manga, we see this constant warring : we have literally everyone telling him that keeping Eiji by his side, is him being selfish, that Eiji isn’t there to salvage Ash’s guilt, that letting him go would be better for both of them. And Ash is conflicted, he wants to have this connection, this friendship with Eiji above all else, it becomes his single motivator in the entire second half of the manga : to protect and keep Eiji safe

By the time Yut Lung manipulates Ash into giving up Banana Fish and go into Dino’s captivity for Eiji’s safety, Ash is already too far gone on his bond with Eiji. he pulls the trigger without a moment’s hesitation. If it meant keeping a loved one safe at the cost of his own death, Ash was ready to make that choice, perhaps for a very long time.

Ash was someone whose actions always did the talking. The fact that he had allowed himself to care, to demand or crave for himself the comfort of a selfless friendship, or even love, is more of an indicator of him slowly growing to value himself as a person, to try and love himself a little more. He acknowledges this openly to Blanca : that there is nothing that made him happier than being with Eiji, of knowing that at least one person in the world had tried to see himself for who he really was, had tried to make Ash see that too.

The conversation between Ash and Eiji about the leopard in the mountaintop, about Ash’s views on death and what it means to live, is one of my favourite moments in the manga. Ash had never feared death, but he had never wanted to die himself. Even though, at numerous points in his life, death had seemed like a peaceful, enticing alternative, compared to the hell he was going through. Ash states that he views himself as the leopard, trudging on and on upwards to the summit, until it collapsed. His conflict was on whether the leopard was facing downwards or up? Was he trying to came back home, or simply go on until he could no longer carry on?

The journey of the leopard paralleled Ash’s own. All his life, he had been forced to go on a steep, uphill climb, against whatever harsh trials his life threw at him. In the end, would he be too tired to carry on? Too tired that he would want to give up? Or Would he still have the strength to try and find his way back down?

Eiji pulls him back once more : he reminds Ash of his own humanity, that people were not obligated to remain as the leopard in the story forever. In the end, we are all human beings who can have a choice, to find our way back home. And Ash, after a thoughtful pause, agrees with him.

But agreeing with an idea on principle is a far cry from putting that into practice.

As the arcs progress, Eiji gets shot, and Blanca again harshly reminds him of what his reality was, that Ash and Eiji’s worlds were, as he saw, too far apart for them to exist together. And Ash is torn by guilt. His one objective, of keeping Eiji safe, had somehow started backfiring. He pleads with God, to take him instead, in exchange for Eiji’s safety. And that was when I personally got the foreshadowing, that maybe the ending could only be either one way or the other.

It’s interesting that Eiji voices almost identical words, that he’d take Ash’s place any day if he could, that he wished Ash would never have to hold a gun anymore, before he takes a bullet for Ash without a minute’s hesitation

There was always a residual sense of guilt with both Ash and Eiji about Shorter’s death. Eiji breaks down crying in front of Sing, and he wasn’t even an instigator in all the events that happened. I can’t imagine how much more Ash would’ve been carrying around with the knowledge that he was the one to pull the trigger, under extreme duress or otherwise.

That brings me to the involvement of Lao. Shorter’s death had triggered a mistrust between the Chinese gang and Ash. Even though Sing, because of knowing the truth, had ceased blaming Ash altogether, Lao didn’t go anywhere near. His only goal was to protect his brother, and his hatred for Ash magnified when Ash pointed a trigger on Sing in the mad rampage immediately after Eiji was shot. Sing understood Ash’s rage, and he apologized and desperately attempted to make up for what he saw as a ‘betrayal’ from the Chinese side. But Lao, stubbornly refused to acknowledge Ash, even though Sing tried multiple times to reason with him. Had Yut Lung’s childish grudge against Eiji not prompted him to abuse Lao’s familial ties with Sing, had Lao been more reasonable, had Sing communicated with him better after the end of all the fighting…. The list of ‘what ifs’ go on.

In the end, Ash’s decision was prompted by all these moments adding up together. He had vowed just the day before to Blanca, that this time, he’d never see Eiji again, in order to keep him from harm’s way. Did that mean that ultimately he never learnt to love himself? That’s difficult to answer.

I believe that to some extent, he did realise how much he was valued as a person : by his friends, his gang, Max, Blanca, Cain, Shorter, and most of all Eiji. He never admitted out loud how much Eiji meant to him and vice versa, but it was always proven by their actions and confirmed by the words of those who were close to them.

Ash knew how much it hurt him to see Eiji wounded because of him, and I get the inkling that he could at least guess that Eiji would be equally devastated if their places were reversed. But he ultimately chose to eliminate himself from the equation : the solution, according to him, that would keep all the danger away from everyone he wanted to keep safe. That is the dark side of love, of how far you’re willing to go to protect those you hold dear.

Just as Eiji took the bullet for him, just as Ash himself had no hesitation in pulling the trigger back then, I see this last choice also as a final act of sorts, keeping good on his prayer to God : Eiji’s safety in exchange for his own. It wasn’t a perfect decision by any means, there were n number of ways a different choice could’ve been as good, but I feel than in his final moments, Ash was really too weary to keep on pushing forward.

It brings me to your question, anon, in the end, was love enough to save him from himself? Did Eiji’s constant attempts to bring out Aslan, win out against the shackles Ash Lynx put on himself?

In those few moments immediately after reading Eiji’s letter, we see the way Ash reacts : his eyes fill with hope, disbelief, love, and a hundred other emotions as all thoughts other than Eiji’s words flee his mind. Eiji’s reference to the leopard was especially important : he gave Ash a reminder, once more, that even lost souls have a way of coming back home, and that one’s humaneness was something we discover throughout our whole lives, it’s not just expressed by a handful of actions. Eiji reminded Ash once more, that it was okay to hope, to dream, and to live for himself. And that was what prompted Ash to take off running. In those few moments, it really looked as if Ash had finally broken free of all that was holding him back.

But at the end of it all, I feel that Ash Lynx won out. The question of saving us from ourselves, of realising our self worth, is a complex one. Ash was happy in the simple knowledge that Eiji had loved him back unconditionally. All his life, it was the one thing he had never received, and in his final moments, that mere confirmation was like a closure of sorts for him. It wasn’t fair to either of them, but it was how things finally ended.

In an ideal world, we’d have no doubt seen Ash and Eiji having their happy forever after, given everything that happened, but sadly, the author chose to write in Lao, as if to prove a point : that more often than not, dreams and reality are separated by just one moment of carelessness, one second of letting your guard down, and for Ash, that moment was fatal.

ash-in-the-rye

Beautifully written♥

cosmicjoke

One thing you bring up too, which I think is really important in understanding why Ash let himself die in the end, and wanted to examine more, is the weight of his guilt.  Particularly, you mention Shorter’s death, and Ash’s role in that death.  Ash HAD to kill Shorter in order to save Eiji (which ties into what you were saying about the lengths Ash would go to in order to protect Eiji and keep him safe).  Even at this fairly early point in the story, we already see how much Eiji means to Ash.  I remember when Ash is chained up and being tortured by Arthur, when they bring Eiji into the room, Ash gets this incredibly warm, loving look on his face when he sees him, calling out his name, palpably relieved to see Eiji is alive and okay.  Ash already loves Eiji at this point, I think.  So when he’s forced into this situation where he has to watch his best friend gone insane with the drugs coursing through his veins, thrown into a murderous rage against Eiji by it and the people who have done this to him, Ash is made to make one of the hardest decisions of his life.  Either let his best friend kill Eiji, or save Eiji by killing Shorter.  

Ash was no doubt already consumed by guilt over the fact that he’d let both Shorter and Eiji get involved in all of this in the first place.  If you remember, near the beginning, when Ash first escapes bail and is looking for Shorter in Chinatown, he tells Shorter that he wants him to stay out of what’s going on between him and Dino and Arthur.  Shorter flat out refuses, even using emotional manipulation on Ash by making him feel guilty over Skip and “all the others” who have died for “such a pig headed boss”.  Ash doesn’t want Shorter or Eiji involved at this point, because he knows how dangerous it’s going to be, going up against Dino.  He’s ready to take that fight up on his own, WANTS to take it up on his own, because he doesn’t want anyone outside of himself getting hurt.  We already see a self-sacrificial tendency in Ash from the very beginning.  He does the same when he goes after Skip and Eiji after Arthur’s boys have abducted them.  Ash, without hesitation, gives himself up to Arthur when Arthur threatens to shoot Eiji.  Ash doesn’t even know Eiji at this point.  He literally just met him a few minutes before.  Ash from the start showed a willingness to trade his own life for those he loved and cared about, and even those who he didn’t know, but who he deemed innocent.  It’s important to note here too how Ash tells Shorter’s guys to let the assassin go that’s been sent for him, and Shorter is miffed and scolds Ash for “playing softball” still.  Ash tells Shorter there’s no need for it, that it would only cause more trouble for them.  Ash, even before he really gets to know Eiji or has Eiji as an influence in his life, shows a powerful moral conscience.  He doesn’t want to hurt or kill anybody he doesn’t have to, and acts in ways entirely selfless in nature to protect people he cares about and even just people that were roped in by accident, like Eiji.  Anyway, Ash gives in to Shorter’s manipulation, even saying he feels like he’s been “had”, but not refusing Shorter’s demands.

Tie this back to later down the line, when Shorter’s been forced into betraying Ash by Yut-Lung by threatening to kill Nadia, and it’s all of Ash’s worst fears from the start come to fruition.  Ash was afraid of this very outcome, which is why he didn’t want anyone involved in the first place.  Now he has to watch as Shorter is driven insane by the very same drug which turned his own brother into a vegetable, and make a split second decision to end Shorter’s life in order to save another, and to release Shorter from the pain of his suffering.  Ash did nothing wrong here.  He did the only thing he could.  But, think about what it must have been like, knowing you’ve just killed your best friend.  That your best friend is dead by your hand.  Ash looks at his hands immediately after he’s done it, like he can see the blood on them, his expression one of stricken grief and horror.  

Ash could only have thought, at this point, that all of this was his fault.  That if he had just stuck to his guns a little harder, and refused to let Shorter or Eiji get involved like he had originally been planning, then none of this would have ever happened.  That just serves to amplify the already overwhelming sense of guilt Ash feels over having killed Shorter with his own hands.  Ash would have felt awful guilt already, even if it had been someone else to end Shorter’s life.  But it’s made exponentially worse by him being forced to choose between two people he loved.  

Ash’s reaction afterward, the way he begins sobbing, and begging Arthur to end his life then and there, tells you everything about what the weight of that decision does to Ash.  It overwhelms him with so much grief and guilt, that he wants in that moment to die.  He’s in so much pain, that he wants to die.  It’s the first and I think only time we see Ash actually beg someone to kill him.  We see Ash risk his life plenty of times to save others, but here he wants to be killed, he actively seeks to have his life ended, because he’s just had to do the worst thing imaginable, and already doubtless blames himself for the situation arising at all.  The weight of Shorter’s death, and the guilt he feels over it, nearly destroys Ash in that moment.

Later still, when Ash finds Shorter’s mutilated corpse in that science lab, his reaction is just as extreme.  He collapses to his knees, beginning to sob and asking in a lost, horrified voice “What did you do to him?”, before he falls into a kind of detached state, his eyes streaming tears, but vacant in their expression as he shoots Dawson until the clip of his gun is empty.  This parallels Ash’s reaction to Sing’s men after they shoot Eiji, when Ash empties the clip of his gun into them, here showing extreme rage instead of empty shock.  After Ash kills Dawson, his emotions come flooding back in, and once more he collapses to his knees and just SCREAMS.  At the top of his lungs, Ash just lets loose a primal roar of grief and despair over what’s happened, over what he thinks he let happen, and over what he’s done.  This moment right here… this is when you knew Ash probably wasn’t going to ever, really be okay, not with himself.

I don’t think Ash ever got over this, and I don’t know if he ever could have.  Ash feels extreme guilt and remorse and pain over every life he’s taken, even as he’s convinced himself he doesn’t feel anything, simply because he’s trained himself not to be aware of those emotions while he’s in the act of killing.  Again, this is done as a survival mechanism because, if he’d allowed himself feel what he really did in those moments of life or death, he wouldn’t have been able to make himself kill, and he himself would have met his end long before if he hesitated like that in the world he lives in.  This kill or be killed world.  The tragedy of Ash hating himself because he sees himself as an emotionless monster who can’t feel anything when he takes a life is that it’s so untrue.  Ash was never emotionless.  He always felt too much.  He was overwhelmed by his sense of guilt and was never able to forgive himself for the lives he took, no matter how justified he was in taking them.

I think this relates back to Ash’s incredible intelligence, actually.  While Ash’s genius level IQ helped him survive all these years, it also, ironically, also ended up being his undoing.  Extremely, highly intelligent people like Ash are very often extremely sensitive.  They feel and absorb things at a much deeper level than people who aren’t as smart.  That’s where the idea comes from that being smart is painful, that it’s easier to be dumb.  Really smart people are often depressed because they see so much into things, and feel so deeply for it.  We don’t see the other characters in the story who kill nearly as guilt ridden or troubled by their actions as Ash is.  We don’t see them weighed down in the same way, or unable to move on and forgive themselves the way Ash is unable to forgive himself, unable to justify his actions.  Even as the other characters try to make Ash be more accepting of himself, and not feel so bad about everything, like when Cain tells Ash to stop giving himself such a hard time, telling him he’s a good friend and a great boss.  Ash doesn’t believe it.  He can’t.  

It’s ironic, again, that Ash has been convinced that he doesn’t feel anything, because the heartbreaking reality is, he feels more than all of them.  He cares too much, feels too much, and that’s why he can’t unburden himself from his guilt and grief and the trauma’s of his past.   In the end, it’s too heavy a burden to keep carrying up the mountain, and it’s in the knowledge of Eiji’s love, of knowing he’s somehow attained true and unconditional acceptance from another person, despite the hatred he feels for himself, that I think Ash finally found permission to at last place that burden down and find release from his pain.

Source: silverquillsideas

Banana Fish

Ash Lynx

Shorter Wong

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Commentary

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potato-in-glasses

bananaflavoredfish

Fly Boy in the Sky Appreciation Post

Credit goes to @treesha-san for providing these Fly Boy in the Sky English scanlations

Re-reading Fly Boy and thinking about how the reason why Eiji is so empathetic—the reason why he was easily able to see the lonliness hidden underneath Ash's facade of being an "intimidating gang leader" unlike anyone else had, was because he saw a piece of himself in Ash on some level. He too, had been doing the same exact thing in Japan. Putting up a front to dismiss any worries people may have about him, suppressing his emotions, isolating himself from the world...when Ibe first meets Eiji, he is almost completely closed off from others, focusing primarily on pole vaulting alone.

Over the course of Banana Fish, we see many instances of Eiji being compelled to watch over Ash from a far as well. One of the most prominent instances of this is when Eiji decides to go visit Ash at the library after their first argument. An experience he ends up sharing with Ibe in greater detail on the plane home to Japan.

In both instances, Ibe/Eiji can understand their pain for what it truly is, resulting in a powerful desire to protect the person they care for and admire.

Further along in Fly Boy, Eiji steadily begins to let his walls down, allowing himself the freedom to open up to Ibe's camera lense—and by extension, Ibe himself.

It should be noted that up until this point, Ibe has only experienced the Eiji tied down by anxiety and doubt, which explains why his description of Eiji as "a cat in the sky" is so significant here. Typically, cat symbolism is exclusively associated with Ash but in this case, it extends to Eiji as well. Mirroring Ash, Eiji was also a land-bound animal who was shackled to his fears/hesitation. It is only when he's finally able to break away from the things tethering him that he is able to essentially overcome the impossible and soar through the sky.

Ibe came into the picture at a time when Eiji felt extremely lost and his self-esteem was arguably at its lowest. Ibe was the one who believed in Eiji's potential when he felt everyone had either given up on him or were close to doing so. And it was Ibe who wanted him to realize his own tremendous worth more than anything. So it only make sense that his presence would serve as the catalyst for Eiji becoming more forthright in his actions.

This scene, to me, is also very reminiscent of Eiji's words to Ash when comforting him as he struggles to cope with the aftermath of Shorter's death.

Personally, I am of the opinion that it was Ibe's strong faith in Eiji during such a turbulent time in his life that likely inspired him to want to be that person for Ash even if he wasn't fully aware of it—someone who would never give up on him despite the odds. Eiji would've known better than anyone how suffocating it is to feel like there's nobody on your side and how empty said lonliness warps you. Because of Ibe, Eiji was finally able to find hope within himself and turn his life around. He has experienced what an immense impact just one person can make on someone's perspective. Now, he wishes to convey the same to Ash, who coincidently even states this Blanca.

In conclusion, Shunichi Ibe is a criminally underrated character and we should all love him a heck of a lot more.

ash-in-the-rye

THIS.

cosmicjoke

One of the lines that stuck out the most to me in Banana Fish was during the scene when Ash goes to see Max and Ibe, right before his fight with Arthur.  Ash tells them he’s sending Ibe and Eiji back to Japan soon, and talks about himself in the usual, self-deprecating way which defines so much of how he sees himself, when he says Eiji will be okay because he’ll “be sick of me” by the time they go back.  He leaves then, and Max and Ibe both sense that whatever Ash is going to do is dangerous and even life threatening.  Ibe than starts to cry, and Max asks him what’s wrong, and Ibe says, about Ash, “He’s such a good kid.  He’s just such a good kid.”.  Ibe sees what a good person Ash is, how self-sacrificing he is, how much he gives up to help all of them, just like Eiji.  He isn’t blind in his perception of Ash like most of the other characters in the story, seeing Ash either as some sort of dangerous, devil-like animal, or some emotionless object to be possessed.  He sees Ash is truly just a young boy who cares deeply about the people around him, and is willing to give up everything to help them.  He cries, because it hurts him to see someone so good thinking so little of himself, dismissing his own wants and needs as unimportant.  It hurts him to see such a good kid in so much pain.  I think this fits with what the OP is saying here, about how it was Ibe’s ability to see Eiji’s own pain and vulnerability which then allowed Eiji to see Ash’s.  Ibe sees it in Ash too, but of course, Eiji is the one who allows Ash to be that boy without fear, who allows Ash to feel human and truly accepted for who he is without expectation or demand.  Who makes Ash feel like he doesn’t have to be someone he’s not.

//

The four men who loved Ash- Rebirth translation

Every guy that met Ash was fascinated by him, but they all loved him in their own way. Let’s try to examine those four men.

- Banana Fish Official Guidebook Rebirth

More translation here tagged banana fish rebirth

Ash was born with exceptional intelligence, talent and an attractive appearance. But having natural good looks turn out to be harmful, as he grows up bearing sexual abuse starting from the early childhood. He stops believing in love from adults entirely, instead he learns how to live by using adults. It goes without saying his biggest patron is Golzine. With his plentiful resources and great authority, Golzine tries to control Ash physically and mentally, his body and spirit.

On the other hand, by letting Ash interact with the street kids it seems like Golzine is giving Ash freedom, but that is only freedom under Golzine’s range of control - it’s like the master letting his dog run in a dog park.

First Golzine saw him as nothing else than a sex object and a toy boy lover, but when he found out Ash’s talent and potential he started to raise him as his heir.

While it’s a very distorted form of love, Golzine was enchanted by Ash and in a sense he loved Ash enough to risk his life for him.

It could be said Ash’s abilities changed Golzine. In a way, Blanca implements Golzine’s ideal “Ash”. When Blanca started as Ash’s tutor by Golzine’s request, he saved Ash from the hell of daily sexual abuse.

Before Blanca knew it, Ash turned from an apprentice to a friend, and then…

Perhaps Blanca was the first “normal adult” Ash had encountered. The love Blanca feels for Ash is not sexual. It’s the love that a teacher feels for his favorite student to allow him to grow.

After his talent bloomed, Ash got confident and made up his mind to leave the nest and raise the banner of revolt against Golzine. That’s very ironic for Golzine. He tries to get Ash back by hiring Foxx, but it has the complete opposite effect.

Foxx tried to control Ash by sexually abusing him.

Foxx, who has a sexual sadist side to him, like the men who Ash has encountered before, tries to control Ash by power but that is just Golzine’s first mistake being repeated again.

It was a mistake because the Ash who submitted his own body in order to live was already gone. From Blanca Ash learned how to live as a human, by meeting Eiji he learned what love is.

On the other hand, although Ash was the boss of the street kids who respected and feared him, and even though he trusted them and relied on them as the like-minded comrades, Ash was lonely.

Ash tends to take care of others and has a strong sense of sympathy for other people. Despite hiding this strength inside of him, being attracted to Eiji like to a small weak animal might have been a natural course of events.

Ash, who protected Eiji in a cruel environment where death was always present, suddenly realizes somewhere in his soul that he had been protected by Eiji’s kindness, no, but by Eiji’s whole being.

That is called the selfless love of friendship. Ash is not lonely anymore.

Ash can show his true self, a young boy, only in front of Eiji !

cosmicjoke

This is interesting.  Of course, Eiji’s love for Ash is the only actual, true love out of all these men.  Golzine certainly doesn’t love Ash.  He wants to possess and control Ash, like a prized puppet.  Everything he does “for” Ash isn’t actually done for Ash at all, but for his own benefit and satisfaction.  It’s actually one of the moments in Banana Fish that most angered me, when Blanca was trying to convince Ash that he should be grateful to Dino for giving him an education and luxury, etc…  As if Dino had done all of that because he cared about Ash and his well being.  No, he did it because he saw Ash as a very useful tool and weapon that he could use to further his own power and influence, and to satisfy his own sense of control over this boy’s life, and to bolster his own, egomaniacle sense of self-import and legacy .  Dino only kills Foxx to save Ash in the end because Ash is DINO’S to kill.  Nobody else has that “right”, in the sick bastards mind.  Dino won’t tolerate anyone else killing Ash.  It either has to be by his hand, or by his orders.  Foxx is exactly the same.  He’s more sadistic than Dino even, but the way they view and regard Ash is exactly the same.  Ash is a means to an end for Foxx.  He wants to use Ash to take control of Dino’s empire, and because he gets a sick pleasure from controlling Ash, from the idea of submitting a kid as wild in spirit as Ash is.  

Blanca is more complicated, but still, he doesn’t love Ash in the pure sense of the word.  He cares about Ash, as much as Blanca can care about anyone.  But I spoke about this in another post recently.  Blanca forces Ash back into Dino’s hold because he THINKS he’s doing the right thing.  He thinks he’s helping to ensure Ash’s survival by giving him back to Dino, and taking him away from Eiji.  So Blanca’s actions here are coming from a place of well meaning intentions.  But… when he sees what happens to Ash while in Dino’s possession again, the way he falls into such a deep despair that he literally and figuratively begins to waste away, he begins to realize his mistake, and that’s when he starts taking tentative steps towards helping Ash for real.  The thing to note about Blanca’s actions at the beginning, and what Blanca himself later comes to realize was his mistake, is that he takes away Ash’s ability to choose for himself, which, ironically, puts him in the same boat as Dino and Foxx.  Blanca DECIDES what’s best for Ash, without asking Ash what he actually wants or feels is best for himself.  Blanca DECIDES how Ash should live, without caring that Ash doesn’t want to live like that, or doesn’t want Dino’s offers and “gifts” and promises of “power”.  Blanca decides that Ash is incapable of living outside of a world of violence and crime, and so concludes that he can’t allow Ash to continue out there by himself, or continue on with Eiji in his life, because that doesn’t comply with what Blanca has DECIDED is best for Ash and his continued survival.  He never stops to consider that maybe Ash would rather risk dying just to have that brief taste of true love and friendship by Eiji’s side then go on struggling to survive without it.  Ash’s feelings aren’t important here. Ash’s decisions for himself don’t matter.  And so Blanca steals away Ash’s choice by threatening Eiji and forcing him back into Dino’s control.  Ironic, because it’s this very robbing of Ash’s own agency, his own control over his life and what happens with it, that all of his worst abusers are guilty of as well.  Blanca, without intending it, perpetrates the same crime against Ash that all these other, horrible men have.  He treats Ash like an object, like a thing that is his to control and steer, rather than a human being with his own wants and needs and thoughts and feelings.  The difference of course is that Blanca eventually realizes the horrible thing he’s done, and he works to amend it.  Blanca isn’t a bad person like Dino and Foxx, but he still doesn’t treat Ash like a person.  He still doesn’t understand that Ash has a right to choose his own path, or to make decisions about his own life.  Not until the very end, anyway.  And really, because Ash looked up to and trusted Blanca as much as he did, it makes this particular betrayal on Blanca’s part all the worse.  Blanca was the only adult in Ash’s life up to that point who had protected and defended him against his abusers.  Ash looked up to him as a kind of guardian.  As an adult man who didn’t want to hurt him like all the others, and actually protected him against those others.  But then he turns around and does exactly to Ash what all those other men had done before, taking away his choices, taking away his ability to decide and choose for himself what he wants and needs, treating Ash like his humanity didn’t matter, his pain didn’t matter, his feelings didn’t matter.  Dehumanizing Ash, just like Dino and Foxx and Marvin and all those other pieces of trash.  

Only Eiji ever treated Ash like a human being.  Only Eiji ever showed Ash that his feelings and his thoughts mattered.  That his pain mattered.

//

i-swim-best-free-for-the-team

Thinking about this scene again... Ash was in a really weak condition but insisted he needs to find Eiji and make sure he's okay. Ash wanted to say "I'm glad you're okay too" but he couldn't... Maybe he was scared or too proud. Hugging Eiji back must have been his way of getting his feelings through without words.

ash-in-the-rye

I’ve always loved this scene for two major reasons:

1. How quiet it is

Eiji just silently hugs Ash, tells him he’s glad he’s okay, but for the rest of the scene, not a single word is said. And any further words are also not needed. Everything that needs to be portrayed is just there. In Ash’s reaction, in his expression, in him returning the hug shortly after, in them just standing there, hugging each other in silence while the camera zooms out, giving them some privacy.

There’s just so much being told during that scene even though actually nothing is said at all and that’s not something you encounter in literature that often: A moment which is just perfect, even though it’s completely quiet.

2. Ash’s reaction

It’s such a tiny moment but it actually tells us so much about Ash.

His expression after Eiji walks up to him and hugs him. Surprise and uncertainty clearly written over his face, which raises the question of how long it has been since the last time Ash had been hugged by someone or felt the warmth of another human being in such a caring and loving way.

The visible hesitation he as returns the hug. We all know what he must have been thinking in that moment:

“My hands are dirty. And covered with the blood of all the people I killed. I don’t deserve this. I don’t deserve him, yet alone to touch him. I’ll only taint him, drag him down into my world of blood and crime, put him in chains, prevent him from flying.”

If it had been any other person, Ash would had never let them hug him, yet alone get so close to him. But it was Eiji and Eiji was always an exception to literally everything, being the only one able to tear down the walls he had built around himself and being allowed to step into his personal space. Eiji, who gives Ash warmth, comfort, love, happiness and also the possibility to act like a 17 year old boy when he’s with him. Eiji, who isn’t afraid of him and doesn’t treat him like some kind of almighty being or a monster but like an actual human. Eiji, who’s patient with him, doesn’t force him, doesn’t pressure him and above all, doesn’t expect anything from him in return.

Ash wanted to push him away, not wanting his world to swallow Eiji, not wanting to put him in danger, not wanting him to get hurt or killed. But he couldn’t push him away. No matter how hard he tried, Eiji still remained at his side, continuing to only ever give without taking something from him.

Ash knew he’s in love. He knew that for so long and he tried to fight it because he knew the world he lives in won’t allow this love to last. He fought against it over and over again, trying to return Eiji to his world to keep him safe.

And then, this scene happens. Eiji expresses how glad he is that Ash is okay and hugs him.

Ash wants nothing more than to hug him back, but he hesitates, his mind being filled with doubts and the fear of ultimately crossing the line and reaching the point of no return.

But Eiji’s there. Holding him in his arms. Letting him feel warmth, comfort, love and at home. And that’s when Ash just stops fighting. He allows it. He allows Eiji’s touch, allows himself to touch him back, to hold him, allows himself to think: “I want him to stay by my side”, allows himself to completely fall for him without resisting any longer and above all, Ash allows himself to just have this.

This little and short lived moment of bliss and contentment, of them standing alone on the rooftop in each other’s arms with little to no space between them.

At this exact moment, Ash allows himself to have this love and shortly after even makes clear to Eiji that he wants him to stay:

For once, Ash allows himself to dream, to hope that maybe they will both make it and Eiji won’t get hurt, won’t get targeted like the girl he was in love with at 14.

But sadly, this hope gets shattered the instant Eiji gets shot by Blanca, causing everything to head south from then on and marking the point of no return in the story.

cosmicjoke

Another awesome analysis @ash-in-the-rye​

Honestly, I don’t think Ash had probably been hugged since before Griffin left for war.  I really doubt Blanca ever hugged him, except I suppose that one moment, after Blanca finds Ash in that motel room, after he’s been raped by Marvin, and Ash was having a severe panic attack.  And we know nobody else in Ash’s life then would have hugged him, like Dino or any of those other pigs.  

I pointed out in a post of mine about Ash and Michael and Skip that we see Ash hug Michael, which is incredible in itself, when you think about it.  I’ll leave that commentary here, if you want to check it out: https://cosmicjoke.tumblr.com/post/616740970875207680/ash-skip-and-michael

But what you said here, about this hug on the rooftop being the first moment that Ash just finally gives in to what he’s been feeling for Eiji, and allows himself to dream that they could really be friends and be together, is so spot on.  It’s at this moment when Ash finally just accepts what Eiji is offering him, symbolized beautifully in him accepting and returning the embrace, and literally in him telling Eiji he doesn’t have to go back to Japan.  Ash tries to convince himself here that it’s better this way anyway, because this way he can “keep an eye on” Eiji and protect him directly.  Ash tries to ignore all of his own fears and concerns regarding this, because he’s never felt anything like this before, this kind of absolute acceptance and love from another person, this kind of kindness.  Ash has never really been shown real kindness at all, in his entire life, except probably Griff.  And so he tries to convince himself that it’s okay to hold onto this, if even just for a little longer, and dares to dream that he could have something like this in his life, this kind of companionship, in a life that’s otherwise been consumed by loneliness and despair.

It makes the eventual shattering of that dream all the more heartbreaking, as you pointed out, when Blanca starts to target Eiji, forcibly reminding Ash that his life never has been, and never can be, normal, and that means he’ll never be allowed normal things that the rest of us take for granted, like love and friendship and acceptance and even just the simple kindness of one person to another.  They’ll always be someone who’s trying to rip that away.

//

Gang leader Ash

vashak

I think what Eiji means by “exceptional” here is the same as the reason why Arthur hates Ash. Let’s unpack this.

Of course, I know nothing about how gang mentality works. From what I see in Banana Fish, I assume that in the world of gangs the laws of nature apply and one is relatively stripped from one’s own free will. Ash must have found himself in this world around the time he went to juvie. I think other kids who got influenced by his intelligence, charisma and fighting skills kind of stuck close to him to ensure their own safety by siding with the strong. And that’s how Ash became their leader. So just like how these kids chose Ash as their boss to guarantee their survival, Ash’s survival depends on how good a boss he is to his gang members. That means there is a very fine line between becoming a gang leader and being chosen a gang leader. Judging from the following two scenes, it’s not really up to whether the said gang leader wants to be boss or not.

Then there are scumbags like Frederick Arthur who will do whatever it takes to become boss without being chosen as one. Arthur can see that Ash with his natural leadership abilities has the potential to become the king of the underworld (just like Golzine wants him to be) and he wants so badly to be in his place. So he plays dirty to thwart him at every chance. Arthur can also see that Ash has no desire to rule the underworld. Ash doesn’t want any of the qualities he has that make Arthur green with envy. And this just drives Arthur mad. That’s why he hates Ash with all his guts.

There’s a pattern in Banana Fish in which Ash gets raped, is almost killed and finds himself in a situation where he has to do stuff he doesn’t want to like killing people, all because of the qualities he didn’t want in the first place.

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cosmicjoke

This is an awesome meta @vashak!  Thank you for sharing!

Particularly, I think it’s important to take note of the fact that Ash never wanted to be a boss.  Neither does Sing.  Both of them are, as you point out, chosen to take on that role by the other street punks, because it’s decided among those groups that people like Ash and Sing are most capable of offering them protection.

Focusing on Ash specifically, it speaks volumes about his character that he accepts this responsibility, even as it isn’t something he ever chose for himself, or at all desired.  

We see in Angel Eyes, after Ash’s fight with Frankie and his men in the library, that the other inmates start treating him like a Capo, basically attaching themselves to him and showing deference to him, because they’ve realized Ash is strong, and can protect them.  Again, this is really important to point out, because Ash didn’t want this, or have designs to this affect.  Shorter even points out that Ash is made uncomfortable by the sudden deference, by the other inmates treating him like the leader, and Ash also shows confusion later on, when Shorter is talking about how Arthur tried to take a hit out on Ash because he could see Ash would eventually inspire that same kind of deference and following on the outside, making him a direct threat to Arthur’s rule.  Ash doesn’t understand what Shorter means, and expresses his confusion over it.  We also hear Dino talking about Ash to Arthur, explaining that Ash never had any ambition, directly in contrast to Arthur, who’s ambition knows no bounds, and how regrettable Dino finds this, because he knows if Ash did have ambition to be a boss like Arthur, there would be no stopping him from taking over every single turf in New York.  Dino initially sends Ash out onto the streets with the hope this will happen, setting Ash up to run jobs for him, whether that’s selling drugs or taking out hits on whoever Dino decides needs to be eliminated.  He forcibly injects Ash into gang life and culture, doubtless under various and horrible threats from Dino himself.  We know from Dino’s own words to Ash, and the way he mocks him by reminding him about how he used to cry with every job Dino made him do, that he was likely either threatening Ash’s life if he didn’t do as he was told, or threatening to put him back to work at Club Cod as a child prostitute.  And we know how horrifying that was and continued to be for Ash.  Ash didn’t want to be in a gang, or engage in criminal activities, but he didn’t ever have a choice.  He was completely under Dino’s thumb.  

Eventually, Ash does gain a loyal following.  It really becomes a substantial thing in reform school, and once he gets out, he doubtless has an entire crew that have attached themselves to him.  Again, because of his superior abilities, charisma and intellect, the other kids are just naturally drawn to him.  Ash doesn’t even have to try.  They just go to him because they can see he’s strong and capable of giving them protection.  But Ash never moves beyond this specific territory or specific group.  Eventually, he does come into conflict with Arthur, because that’s the territory Ash operates in, and of course he beats Arthur in one on one combat.  Further, the fact that Ash doesn’t kill Arthur, but spares his life, is more proof still not only of Ash’s ambivalent feelings towards killing, but of how he never particularly sought after the role of boss in the first place.  If he’d really wanted to solidify his position of power, he would have killed Arthur.  Again, this just all serves as proof of Ash’s reluctance to be in this role and position.

Ash never planned on becoming a boss.  The role was thrust onto him because of his superior abilities and intelligence.  The other street kids align themselves to him because they know he can protect them.  And even though Ash doesn’t want this role, he accepts it, because, and again, this speaks to Ash’s moral character, despite what he thinks of himself, and what others perceive him as, he feels a moral obligation and responsibility at this point to take care of these other kids who have selected him for exactly that.  He could easily refuse the obligation, and abandon them to be run by Arthur, who treats all of them as disposable.  Ash more than once proves his capability in handling himself.  He doesn’t need a crew to survive out there on the streets.  In fact, Ash is most effective and capable when he’s operating on his own, and doesn’t have to worry about anyone else.  His chances of survival are highest when it’s just him on his own.  And he’s not doing it because of any kind of loyalty to Dino, or because he thinks Dino will come after him if he doesn’t have a crew.  At the beginning of Banana Fish, Ash is already operating separately from Dino, and is only willing to work with Dino on equal terms, meaning they both benefit from whatever jobs they run.  He doesn’t operate out there anymore FOR Dino.  Which is also why he kicks those two members out of the gang at the beginning, for betraying him and going behind his back to run a job for Dino.  Again, Ash could have and probably should have killed them, but he showed them mercy instead, once more, because Ash doesn’t want to ever kill anyone if he doesn’t absolutely have to, and he has no actual desire for power.  He kicks them out because they’ve proven they can’t be trusted, which would endanger not only himself, but the other members of his gang and which, subsequently, they prove by immediately running to Dino and ratting Ash out, for which trouble they get themselves killed.

Ash accepts his role as boss because he cares about other people.  He understands that they’ve chosen him as their leader because he can protect them, and he takes that responsibility seriously and takes it onto himself willingly, even as he doesn’t want it and would in truth be better off on his own.  We see this proven also in the way Ash purposefully leaves his gang out of any truly dangerous business which is likely to get him or them killed.  He initially didn’t involve any of them in what was going on with Dino and Banana Fish, and didn’t want to involve Shorter either.  Circumstances led to all of them eventually getting roped into it, but Ash fought hard to keep everyone out, and was 100% ready and willing to take Dino on completely by himself.  He protects them constantly at risk to himself.  And it’s not only his gang that he tries to protect.  He tries to protect Sing’s gang, and Cain’s as well, by keeping them out of his war with Dino and Arthur.  Again, circumstances eventually lead to them getting involved, but Ash tried very hard to not involve them.  

It’s once more just an example of how Ash’s own choices and own wants and needs are never really something he’s allowed.  His entire life, he’s been under the control of one person or another, whether that be Dino, or Marvin, or any of the other men who have abused him, or even, unintentional though it may be, his own gang.  Ash’s life is more or less defined by his own free will and agency being robbed from him, and his endless, heartbreaking struggle to gain some small amount of it back.  

When Ash says to Eiji “I wish I could have been like you, Eiji.  I always wanted to live a better life than this.  A more normal life.”  He means that exactly.  He never wanted the life he has, he never asked for it, or tried for it.  It was thrust on him by other people, by other people’s decisions and other people’s needs and wants.  Ash was never asked what he wanted or needed.  Those things were never even considered.  It was just decided and chosen for him.  Like Ash says multiple times, he was treated by everyone around him like he wasn’t even a real person, like he didn’t have any real thoughts or feelings of his own.  Like he was just a doll, there for the benefit and pleasure of others, to do with as they pleased. One of the most tragic results of that, is that the life he has, has done nothing but bring him misery and despair and a crushing sense of guilt and self-hatred.  

It’s why Eiji treating Ash like a person means so much to him, and is so significant.  Because Eiji is the first and only person to ever actually do that.  To ever actually realize or care that Ash was a human being with his own thoughts, his own needs, his own feelings.  He was the first and only person to ever treat Ash’s pain like it mattered.

//

99adelheid99

throwback to another beautifully painful scene in banana fish :))))

Ash talking about how incredibly happy Eiji makes him is one thing to pull at your heartstrings, but for me, another one was Ash saying "I can't believe how lucky I am."

This boy who pretty much had no "luck" his entire life, whos days were mostly filled with hopelessness, and where almost every day was a struggle just to survive. This boy considered himself lucky, and even more so, couldn't believe how lucky he was. All because he met one boy who gave him everything and asked for nothing in return. And because Ash never got that once in his entire life, never got to experience such a pure form love, something so unconditional, Ash considered himself so incredibly lucky.

asurin

The sad thing is that, it really led him to his destruction. But not in the way everyone meant.

Ash let himself bleed out because he couldn't deal with the pain anymore, he thought to himself that he had lived his life already and experienced so much. And fulfilled his soul with the existence of Eiji, and with the affirmation that Eiji's soul is with him, forever, he chose to die because he felt happiness in that. I believe if he hadn't met Eiji, he would have gotten help instead of bleeding out for hours.

cosmicjoke

@ash-in-the-rye​ This scene is such a powerful, heartbreaking moment, and for all of the reasons you pointed out.  That he would call himself “lucky”, when his whole life had been the most unfair, cruel and wretched existence imaginable, all because he was granted a single chance at love and kindness… It speaks volumes about the pain and suffering of Ash’s life.  This thing that almost everyone else takes for such granted, the love and warmth of another person, whether it be family, or friends, or a partner.  A privilege that so few of us ever consider or truly appreciate, was something Ash had been denied his entire life, leaving him in a world of endless night and aloneness.  And so for him, having just a taste of that, just a taste of what it felt like to have another person truly care for him, and love him, without expectations or demands or conditions, was more than he ever dared to hope for, to even dream of for himself.  It meant everything to him, then.  More than all the money and power and luxury in the world could ever hope to match.  It’s Ash’s gratitude in this scene, for that simple, basic kindness which the rest of us are afforded every day, and which the rest of us take for granted, that makes this scene so emotional.  Ash’s gratitude for Eiji is so much, so powerful, for giving him something so simple, for giving him something which should never be denied any child, by right, that he’s willing to give up everything for him.  His life, his freedom, himself, just to keep Eiji safe.  

@asurin That’s an interesting thought, that if Ash hadn’t met Eiji, he wouldn’t have let himself bleed out.  Of course, if Ash hadn’t met Eiji, he never would have been left vulnerable enough for Lao to land an attack on him in the first place, so yeah, it’s a bitter and heartbreaking irony, that the one thing in Ash’s otherwise tragic life to give him true, pure happiness, is also the very thing that led to his destruction.

I agree with you that it was the gift of Eiji’s love that finally allowed Ash to be okay with letting himself go.  I think Ash felt, in that moment, that he had reached the ultimate happiness, the greatest joy he would ever know, the greatest peace, and with that feeling in his heart, with Eiji’s love in his heart, it finally allowed him the permission he sought to let go of all of his pain.  To set down the unbearable burden of his trauma at last.  He no longer had to struggle, for Ash, there was no longer a need to survive, because he’d found in Eiji’s love the one thing he’d always been denied, but had needed so very desperately.  The one thing all of his abusers had told him again and again he would never have, and would never deserve.  He found it in Eiji, and that was more than he ever hoped to have, and more than he would ever ask for.  For Ash, it was never going to be better than that, and so he took it with overwhelming gratitude, and with peaceful acceptance, let go the rest.

//

rottengirlrin

Skipper

Cursed thoughts

Did Ash save Skip from the same fate he faced or was he just a small child aware of the worlds evils? Skip didn't even bat an eye at Ash's little display for Marvin. Did he know about Ash? I pray he didn't face anything similar.

He is such a precious soul. Just look at that smile

I think we can agree Ash is a really good judge of character(We all love the gang) and we know he identified a lot with Skip. I'm sure at first he just didn't want another young child out there completely defenseless against people like Marvin, so he was quick to offer the boy a safe haven and he paid Skip, probably well too, to run errands just so he wouldn't resort to hood work. Ash was boss he didn't need to pay the "runts". And for a reason Ash trusted Skip so much. So much that he entrusted the kid with his biggest secret, a secret that would have Ash at the mercy of anyone who was looking for leverage over him, Griff. Sure tiny Skip obviously wasn't a threat to Ash but if you really think about it, the amount of trust he gave him is enough power to possibly become one, so damn. How great of a kid do you have to be for Ash to see so much potential in you and to completely have his guard down around you? He saw something in Skip and took him under his wing. I mean remember the bar fight? The kid was quick to act and cool as a cucumber. He even had some badass fighting skill. Maybe Ash taught him?

I just wish we had more of a back story for a lot of the characters especially Shorter, Sing and Skip...he probably would have grown up to be as amazing as Ash and definitely cooler than Cain.

cosmicjoke

I think Skip had probably seen Ash get hit on and sexually harassed innumerable times.  We see Ash talk about more than once how his beautiful face had men constantly harassing him and making passes at him.  He tells Max that men have grabbed him just while he’s walking down the street and dragged him into alleys and shoved their hands down his pants.  It’s just an everyday reality for Ash, I think.  That, and we saw in Private Opinion that Marvin was still sexually abusing Ash even at 14.  We see Marvin take Ash off the streets, right in front of the other kids, to bring him to a motel to rape him.  And at the beginning of Banana Fish, there’s tense confrontation between Ash and Marvin, with Ash mocking Marvin, and Marvin making threats in return, calling him a slut and a whore, if I remember correctly.  It was probably pretty widely known among Ash’s gang that Marvin wanted to do bad things to Ash.

As for Skip, it really would have been interesting to find out how he and Ash met, and grew so close.  It’s easy to infer from the trust that Ash puts in Skip with taking care of Griff for him, and Arthur knowing that targeting Skip would be a sure fire way of luring Ash into a trap in his attempts to rescue him, that Ash deeply cared for the kid.  Not to mention how Ash reacted when Marvin shoots him.  I think Ash felt so protective towards Skip because Ash understood better than anyone how dangerous it could be for a kid living on the streets, and he understood the fragility and vulnerability of childhood innocence.

One thing that I don’t see get talked a lot about is where Ash was and what his life was like right after he’d run away from Cape Cod.  We know that Ash got picked up by Marvin when he was ten years old and brought to Dino, and we know that Ash ran away from home when he was eight.  So that means that Ash was living on the streets for two years, or close to two years.  I can’t even imagine how hard that must have been, and the kinds of trauma’s Ash must have faced as such a young child, alone and having to fend for himself on the streets of New York.  I’m sure Ash looked at Skip and wanted to prevent the same horror that must have been from happening to him.

//

Anonymous asked:

Do you think issues Eiji had with Ash that were especially visible during the time they lived together would have continued further if the plot didn't go in another way? Like feeling isolated in the apartment all day, Ash lying to him or not telling him anything, making decisions for him. Ash doesn't notice or acknowledge that, Eiji knows it's to protect him and it's nothing as dramatic as what Ash is going through but still, it's all about Ash, Eiji mostly rolls with it.

http-eiji answered:

I do wonder about this sometimes. I think it depends on what you consider “continuing” if we mean had the cat and mouse game between Dino continued for longer or if Ash had lived.

Because, if we look at the former, we know Eiji was beginning to start learning to defend himself and help out (such as learning to use a gun) I’m sure he would have gotten Sing and Bones and Kong to teach him more, like hand to hand combat and properly learning how to use a gun.

As Eiji would become more able to protect himself I wonder what would happen then, If Ash would go back to insisting he leave, if he’d let Eiji have more freedom or if he’d stay the same like Eiji was still the naive boy.

If we look at the latter scenario, I think there would still be issues but not the same. I think Ash would still be on edge all the time and worry about Eiji’s well-being even when there’s no threat. I think, with more time though, they would start talking about their issues more so they would help each other.

ash-in-the-rye

Eiji learning how to properly use a gun and being able to protect himself better is actually such an interesting concept because I can imagine that it had greatly affected Ash and their relationship, especially if it had come to the point where Eiji had needed to kill someone.

I still remember when episode 15 aired and some people were complaining about Eiji not shooting Yut Lung right then and there (as well as about Eiji not shooting Dino during the dinner party in episode 20). Not only would it have been pretty out of character for him, but it also would have affected his relationship to Ash.

Even though he had told Eiji he has to take care of himself if he wants to tag along right after stealing Charlies car and giving a gun to him before he tried shooting Dino on top of a truck, Ash later changed his mind and actually didn’t want him to use a gun:

It’s not because Ash thought of Eiji as naïve or too incapable, but rather because he simply didn’t want Eiji to lose his innocence, didn’t want him to possibly taint his hands with the blood of others because he knew it would have changed him and also because it would have meant that Eiji had become a part of his “world” which most probably would had prevent him from returning to his own.

If Eiji had learned to handle a gun and had indeed killed someone at one point, even if it had been out of self-defense, I think it would have taken a toll on both of them. On Eiji because he would have had to cope with just having taken a life and on Ash because he would have felt extremely guilty. No matter the reason, even if it had happened out of self-defense, Ash would have blamed himself for it. Because in his mind, he would have been the one responsible for dragging Eiji in all of this, for “making him this way”, for bringing him closer to the point of no return, for making him kill.

Ash wouldn’t have wanted that. He would have wanted for Eiji to stay out of this, to never touch a gun, to remain innocent, to not climb the mountain, to not get chained down to the earth by committing severe crimes but to continue flying and being free.

If it had resulted in Eiji killing someone, I’m certain Ash would have tried to send him back to Japan more than ever, seeing it as the last possible opportunity to get him out of there before something like this happens again. And just like in canon, he would have tried to completely cut ties with him.

Eiji learning how to protect himself by learning to handle a gun may seem like a good alternative, but the way I see it, it would have actually done more harm than good in the end.

cosmicjoke

Spot on @ash-in-the-rye  Ash, the more he gets to know Eiji, and the closer to two of them become, grows increasingly determined and adamant to shield Eiji from the kind of world he lives in.  This world of violence and crime and desperation.

Ash knows better than anyone what toll the taking of a life exacts on a person, what it does to a person’s mental and emotional health.  What you say here, about how Ash would have blamed himself if Eiji had ended up killing, had ended up becoming a killer, is completely accurate.  Ash feared deeply that by being around him, not only would Eiji get hurt and/or killed, but that he would end up being corrupted by Ash and the kind of life he had to live, the kind of actions he had to take.  We have to remember how Ash views himself to understand his actions too.  Ash suffers from deep self-loathing, almost exclusively because of the lives he’s had to take in order to survive.  If Eiji ended up in the same place as him, having to take lives, like you said, no matter the reason, when he’d been so innocent and pure before, Ash absolutely would have viewed that as an unforgivable failure on his part.

Several times we see Ash attempting to shield Eiji from all of that, hiding his gun, not telling Eiji what he’s doing out at night, not talking about it. He’s ashamed of himself, and he fears that Eiji, the first person to ever see him as and treat him like an actual human being, will start to view him as the monster, the animal, the demon that everyone else views him as.  He doesn’t tell Eiji what he’s doing because of the shame he feels, and the fear of losing Eiji’s love and respect, not because he thinks Eiji is naive or incapable.  And, like you said, Ash will do anything to keep Eiji from becoming what he thinks he himself is.  Will do everything he can to preserve Eiji, body and soul.  

It would have only added to Ash’s already crippling sense of guilt and self-hatred, if Eiji had ended up a criminal like him.  

//

ash-in-the-rye

Remember what Shorter told Ash in “Angel Eyes”?

Even though Shorter clearly feels guilty about giving him that “advise”, it’s still scary how it’s basically the same Jim had told Ash back then:

And after hearing that from Shorter, Ash’s first reaction is this:

Showing no kind of emotions on the outside, just keeping a straight, unfazed face. But we all know how frustrated and disappointed he must have felt like at Shorter saying this to him, how angry and fed up at hearing this “advise” once again he must have been, and how how he must have been thinking:

“No one can help me. All of you are the same. I’m all alone in this world with no one understanding anything about the hell I’m living in.”

cosmicjoke

@ash-in-the-rye Man, I totally forgot about that scene with Ash’s father, and how it directly parallels what Shorter tells Ash in Angel Eyes.  God, it makes Ash’s reaction all the more heartbreaking, for all the reasons you point out above.  That must have been what Ash was thinking, and Shorter even realizes it, as Ash walks away and tells him thanks for the advice.  Shorter’s internal monologue even says Ash had this look in his eyes that said “If you can’t help me, just keep your mouth shut”.  Exactly because of his experience with his father, no doubt, and the realization that, once again, like you said, nobody had any clue as to the hell Ash was actually living in.  It’s no wonder then, too, that Ash became so furious and upset over Shorter telling him if he played with people’s feelings, it made him no different than the assholes he hates.  Because, well, it’s just simply not true.  Ash only manipulated those who first tried to hurt him, and he only ever did it as his best and only means of defending himself.  That’s intrinsically different from the intention of his abusers, who did what they did because it gave them a perverse thrill to dominate and control someone, and to hurt them.  I think this is also why Ash later explains his intentions to Shorter, because it hurts him deeply, that Shorter could ever think Ash was anything like the people that abuse him.

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komorebi2460

“Sorry for keeping you locked up for so long. I hid away all your pictures, as if that would make any difference.”

— Eiji, Banana fish

ash-in-the-rye

This and this scene here that follows right after never fail to make me cry and is by far the most beautiful, but at the same time most painful scene in the whole series:

Painful because we get to see how happy and carefree Ash and Eiji have been during those two years they had spent together. But sadly, as happy as these short-lived moments were, they’ll also never come back, forever captured in these pictures, bound to remain mere distant memories.

It hurts to be faced with that realization and to imagine what could have been if Ash hadn’t died and it hurts to see Eiji having to come to terms with that realization during that scene as well.

But like I said, it’s also so beautiful, for various reasons even:

Keep reading

cosmicjoke

@ash-in-the-rye Brilliant commentary all around, truly!  But I’m particularly  moved by what you said here about the intimacy of the photo’s of Ash, and what they say about his relationship with Eiji, and the deep level of trust he had in Eiji.  Your point about Ash’s fear of having his photo taken, and that relating back to the abuse he suffered as a child, is so observant and accurate.  We see it referred to several times throughout about Ash being subjected to this kind of torture, of being filmed and photographed while he was being raped and molested.  One of the most heartbreaking and painful scenes in the entire series I think was near the beginning, when the cops have picked Ash up for Marvin’s murder, and that detective forces Ash to watch the films they found in Marvin’s apartment of Ash being raped.  This scene stood out to me so much, because it’s the first time we really see Ash lose control.  The first time we see him really have a panic attack.  He freezes up, starts sweating and shaking and after a few, weak protests to stop, he just shuts down and has this haunted, terrified look on his face.  It’s the first time we as an audience are really confronted with what Ash has been through, and confronted with the damage it’s caused him, and continues to cause him.  I mean, Jesus, I can’t even imagine the pain of an experience like that, both the rape itself, and having the evidence of his rape shoved in his face like that.  My heart was in pieces for Ash during that scene.  We also hear Ash make repeated reference to him being photographed for kiddie porn magazines.  So yeah, this experience of being photographed and filmed during what’s truly the most horrific thing that can happen to a child was obviously something that happened to Ash often, and left him deeply traumatized.

With that truth in mind, it makes what you pointed out here all the more extraordinary.  That he was able to trust Eiji that much, with something as intimate as taking his photo when he was, as you said, just being himself.  Just this 17 year old boy who had never been allowed to BE that until Eiji came into his life.  That the photo’s are all of Ash as he really was, tells you everything there is to know about his connection to and relationship with Eiji.  Eiji captured Ash’s heart and soul in his photographs.  Not the feared beast of the youth gangs of New York, or the prized possession put on display by Dino, but just a boy, seeking desperately for someone to see him for who he really was.

I think Sing’s realization about why it was Ash loved Eiji so much, when he thinks to himself that Eiji was probably the only one who ever really saw Ash’s pain, relates perfectly to this.  Ash fell in love with Eiji because Eiji was that person who finally found him.  That person he always sought in his otherwise suffocating loneliness.  The first and only person to see who he really was, and to see the hurt he carried with him, and to CARE.

I also love what you said about how we never learn what the context of these photo’s are, and how because of that, they remain intimately private moments shared between Ash and Eiji.  Memories that belong only to them.  Feelings that only they shared.  And now Eiji is the keeper of those memories, and those feelings.  He’s the one who remains, the custodian of Ash’s memory as he truly was.

In that way, too, you can see the ending of the story as Eiji accepting this role, to be the one to share with the world the truth of who Ash Lynx was.  To keep him alive in his own heart and memory.  To validate Ash’s existence, and not let him be forgotten by time.  I think that too would have helped Eiji to heal and process his own grief.  To know he could give that to Ash.  To make sure Ash’s life hadn’t been lived in vain.

//

Anonymous asked:

Have you ever wondered if Ash knew that choosing to die in the letter that Eiji was telling him how he felt about him, if he knew he would keep Eiji to himself forever, if not his response to Eiji's promise to him, in his twisted way. That Eiji would be attached to him and he would never forget? It's morbid and sad but it's almost like peace to think about it as I remember Eiji's life.

iamtrashforash answered:

Hi, Anon, I have certainly seen this interpretation around — Sing himself seemed to hold a variation of this view regarding Ash’s motivations. However, I have to say that my personal headcanon of Ash lends a very different perspective to his final moments in the library.

I think to have such logical progression about Eiji requires a great deal of selfishness from Ash’s part. The internal struggle between his desires to keep Eiji by his side and to keep Eiji safe is not a minor theme in Banana Fish. The weight of Eiji’s own will gave them their time together, while Ash’s attitude towards Eiji’s personal safety had always been utterly selfless, to the point of self-destruction (partially fuelled by self-hatred, some might argue).

I do not subscribe to the theory of Ash calculating his death as a way to “own” Eiji. On the other hand, the theory of Ash choosing death to guarantee Eiji’s continued safety does not ring true to me, either. People, enemies and allies alike, are quick to paint Ash in their own not-quite-human images of him: bewitching beauty, computer-like brain, beast-like instincts, a leader, a tool, a demon, an angel…. Eiji’s perspective in the Banana Fish series arguably serves a single purpose: to humanise Ash and let both Ash and the audience see him as who he was. An eighteen-year-old boy, incontrovertibly human. An extraordinary one, but so achingly human nonetheless.

My personal theory of Ash’s state of mind in the library is based on two things: the fact that the finale is an emotional one, not a logical one; and my own attempt to reconcile Ash’s humanity with the weight he had placed on Eiji’s shoulders. I don’t think many people would argue the claim that the finale is a twist demanding certain suspensions of disbelief and, to an extent, riddled with plot holes. It is an ending meant to rouse and rile emotions, not to act as a satisfying denouement of a detective/mystery/action-adventure story. It is late ‘80s and early ‘90s melodrama.

I accepted the ending on my first read-through; it was only in hindsight did disbelief start to seep in and I began to question, if not the choice, at least the execution. But I still remember how I — and I think most of the audience — was with Ash when he read through that letter, was with Ash when he let Eiji’s love pour into him, was with Ash when he threw away all the caution that he labelled “cowardice” to the wind, was with Ash when he let go of all the weight of his past and who he thought he was and who people said he was to run to Eiji and answer Eiji’s call instead. For those brief moments, he forgot about dangers and risks and calculations; he was simply a man, running towards his love.

(This was not a theme newly introduced in the ending. Ash had had to guard himself since too young an age. He lacked the privilege many of us takes for granted: the right to simply exist in the moment. Eiji somehow managed to let him taste this privilege from time to time, and Yue Long did not miss the implication of this fact.)

When Lao shattered the dream, we shattered along with Ash. He returned to “reality” for a while, but then he chose to slip back into that moment of existing in Eiji’s love, by gathering those sheets of paper off the pavement and by making his way back to the library to read the words over and over again. Some have said that he chose to die then because he knew he had Eiji’s love. My thought process is slightly different: when he made that choice, I don’t think he was choosing to die; I think he was choosing to exist in love, and it brought about his death. For Ash, everything — his past, his pain, his life, and death itself — fell away in the face of Eiji. There were no calculations to be made; he was too busy being in love and being loved in return.

I don’t think he would ever forgive himself for what he did to Eiji, even though it was neither his choice nor his fault. Many people have said that they did not have closure, that the ending did not feel real, until they have read Garden of Light. I think it is partly because the finale feels like a dream, and the dream is the most intoxicating one there is: of a man existing purely and simply in love.

cosmicjoke

Amazing analysis all around @iamtrashforash  That’s a truly beautiful and I think maybe the most accurate interpretation of why Ash died in the library that I’ve seen yet.  That he was so overwhelmed and consumed by Eiji’s love, that the struggle to survive, and all the stress and effort and tireless, unending frenzy that went with it, simply fell away with the warmth of Eiji’s love, and Ash could, in those final moments of his life, simply, and for the first time, really LIVE.  That sounds so plausible to me, and is so in line with everything we know about Ash.  He chose to live in the moment, exist in the moment, and because of that, he slipped into a state where the encroachment of death didn’t even register for him, and was no longer something he was even aware of needing to fight against.  That’s a truly brilliant analysis.

I think you also have to consider that anger is one of the stages of grief, and Sing’s own ideas regarding Ash’s “motivations” was most likely fueled by that.  He was angry at Ash for leaving him and Eiji behind, which is normal for people grieving the loss of a loved one, for the pain they’re left with.  I doubt Sing could have really even meant that, as the very notion that Ash had any motivation, or “plans” at all in those last moments is absurd.

He was bleeding to death, for one thing.  So to think that he could think in terms that complex and elaborate is totally unrealistic.  His thoughts would have been indistinct and vague at best, extremely jumbled and confused at worse.  Secondly, it would totally contradict everything about who Ash is, the kind of selfless and heroic actions he takes all the time, and how we see him behave throughout the entirely of the story.  The word you choose here is really important and vital, I think, in countering this notion that Ash calculated his death as a means of possessing Eiji’s soul.  You used the word “owned”.  

Ash’s whole life was a constant struggle to break free from people who thought they “owned” him.  From people who treated him like an object and a possession, not like a human being.  All those men who sexually abused him and controlled him and threatened him into doing their bidding and satisfying their desires.  Ash felt more fury and pain and disgust at those people than anyone else.  The people that wanted to lord their power over others, and control them, and “own” them.  He felt totally repulsed by that kind of behavior, and that kind of possessive, selfish, entitled attitude.  Ash expresses at several points obvious disdain and distress towards those who want to dominate and control others, who want to submit others to their will.  Ash would never do to someone he loved, or even anyone at all, the very same thing that was done to him, the very same thing which ultimately destroyed his life.  He would never do that to anyone he cared about, let alone Eiji.  He would never try to “own” Eiji.  Not on purpose, anyway.  Even when Ash manipulated people, it was only ever in self defense, or in defense of those he cared for, not because he was on some sick power trip.

The last thing Ash would ever want it to cause Eiji the kind of grief and sorrow he had to carry around after his death, or for Eiji to feel like he could never love again.  All Ash ever wanted was for Eiji to be happy and safe, and to live a good life, and all of his actions throughout the entire series are geared towards that, like you said, to the point that he’s willing to sacrifice everything of his own to that cause.  He’s ready to die for Eiji, to throw away his freedom for Eiji.  Everything.  There’s also the point that Ash very much hated himself, and what he thought of himself had a direct impact on his belief that Eiji was better off without him.  He realizes that Eiji loves him, in the end, despite it all, and that’s more than Ash ever thought he would receive in his life.  Just the knowledge that he was loved by another person, without condition.  Ash would never be selfish enough to demand more than that, because he never thought he deserved even that much.  He could never forgive himself for the lives he’d taken.  He felt blessed, and happy beyond words, to know that Eiji simply cared about him at all.  And he was ready and willing to give up that happiness and love for Eiji’s benefit in the end.  To keep Eiji safe.  How anyone could think that Ash would purposefully let himself die because he knew it would “keep Eiji’s soul with him forever”, and that if he died, Eiji would never be able to love again, is beyond me.  Just from a physical perspective, Ash was dying, and to think he could think that clearly, and formulate some far fetched, not to mention vague, intangible plan like stealing someone’s soul to keep with him for all time, while suffering profuse blood loss, is ridiculous.  More than that though, to think Ash felt anything but pure gratitude and thanks for the love he received from Eiji is a failure to understand Ash as a character at all.  Ash didn’t ask or demand Eiji’s love.  Early on, he even tried to refuse it as a way of protecting Eiji.  Eventually, with Eiji’s persistence, he simply accepted it, and with absolute gratitude and a feeling of profound disbelief, that he could ever be so lucky as to have anything like it at all, in a life otherwise filled with misery and loneliness.  A feeling of utter gratitude, that an a boy like him, who’d been treated his whole life like he was worthless and only existed for the pleasure and amusement of others, who was always treated like his own thoughts and feelings had no weight or validity or meaning at all, could receive the love of another person, and that for the first time in his life, was treated like an actual human being who’s own wants and needs MATTERED.  Ash never believed he deserved it, he never felt like he was deserving of that kind of unconditional love or treatment, and was more or less in shocked disbelief that he had it from Eiji throughout the story.  And so how could he then suddenly decide that he was going to selfishly execute a plan which would ensure he had it forever and nobody else could ever experience the same?  How could Ash purposefully and with intent decide on something like that, when all of his actions and thoughts and even private expressions directly contradict such a notion?  When he himself felt so undeserving of it in the first place?

This idea that he would purposefully want to hoard Eiji’s love and soul for himself, with no regard to Eiji’s own happiness, doesn’t square with Ash as a character at all.  Ash suffered so much in his life, to a degree basically incomprehensible to most human beings, and in the end, he had this one happiness, this one light, which was Eiji’s love, and which Eiji gifted to him.  Ash never demanded it of him.  Eiji gave it freely.  To call him selfish for wanting to keep Eiji by his side, and never with the intent of it being forever, always with the understanding and acceptance that it would one day end, is an awful and inherently wrong way to view Ash’s friendship with Eiji.  As you said yourself, it was Eiji’s own strength of will that kept him with Ash for as long as he was.  Ash tried so many times to make Eiji leave, to send him back to Japan, but Eiji just kept finding ways to stay, refusing to abandon Ash.  Ash didn’t want Eiji tangled up in his life precisely because he didn’t want him getting hurt, either physically or emotionally.   It’s that very thing, this concern that Eiji was getting too attached to him, and would suffer if Ash died, that Ash feared deeply, I think, along of course with his fear that Eiji would get hurt or killed himself.  Ash would NEVER want either scenario.  How could he want Eiji to suffer like that on his behalf when Ash thought so little of himself in the first place that he didn’t even think he deserved a better life to begin with?  When he didn’t think redemption was possible for him?  When he thought he was a bad person who would one day corrupt Eiji’s goodness?  Of course, Ash never was a bad person.  The exact opposite, in fact.  He had such a pure heart.  But he could never see that about himself.

I think Ash always knew, deep down, that he was going to die young.  He lived in a world of brutal, unforgiving violence and uncertainty.  A world in which his life was constantly under threat, and in which he couldn’t afford to let his guard down for even a moment because of that.  A world where the lives of everyone he had ever cared about and loved were ended violently.  Skip, Griff, Shorter.  Very nearly Sing.  Even his own father and his girlfriend.  I think Ash knew he wouldn’t live long, and we see him make allusions to this feeling throughout the story.  When he tells Eiji the story about the snow leopard, and confesses that he isn’t afraid to die.  When he confesses that there had been many points in his life when he thought it would be better if he did.  When we see him after his fight with Arthur, and he’s contemplating death in this dreamlike state, and the peace he can find there.  We see Ash with an expression of such despair in those moments when Eiji tells him to be careful, to please come back safely to him, that he’ll always be waiting for him.  The moments before his fight with Arthur, for example, when he looks at Eiji sleeping beside him, and we see the stricken grief Ash feels, because he’s expecting to die that night, and his death is going to hurt his friend.  He wants to send him back to Japan then because he doesn’t want Eiji to be exposed to that cruel, violent uncertainty that Ash lives with every day, not knowing, not even really expecting, to make it to the next.  Ash looks so sad in these moments because he expects to die, he knows the threat of his dying is very real, and he knows, because of Eiji’s words, how much it’s going to hurt him if he does.  Ash looks sad because he doesn’t want that.  Again, it’s a direct contradiction of this notion that Ash could ever be selfish enough to consciously dismiss Eiji’s feelings for his own happiness or satisfaction.  He tries to keep Eiji away from him, even at points tries to make Eiji hate him, precisely so Eiji won’t be hurt when Ash dies.  He doesn’t want Eiji to hope for something which he himself doesn’t believe is possible, because false hope is the most painful thing of all when it’s shattered by reality.  I think Ash knew, with the continued deepening of Eiji’s care for him, that it would become harder and harder for him to deal and cope with the constant threat and ever present danger to Ash’s own life, harder and harder for him to accept that that was Ash’s reality and that it always would be, and that’s also one of the reasons why he’s so resolved to stay out of his life in the end.  Because he doesn’t want to cause Eiji that kind of pain, that kind of worry, that kind of anxiety.  Ash knows he lives in a violent world, and that his life will one day end in violence.  He knows and accepts that as his fate.  One, despite Eiji’s constant attempts to convince him otherwise, he doesn’t ever believe he can change.  With all that as something we know for certain with Ash, his dying in the end, his letting himself die, can’t have been something he ever intended as an act of selfishness, or an act of self-absorbtion.  He couldn’t have been thinking of how his death would affect Eiji’s life at that point.  If he’d truly known how it would hurt Eiji, he would have fought to live, even if it meant his own continued suffering.  I think that relates directly to how Ash could never understand why Eiji loved him at all, because he couldn’t love himself even.  I don’t think Ash ever really believed that his own life could matter that much to another person, or that they would truly miss him after he was gone, because he saw no real worth in himself.  Whenever Eiji tried to convey to Ash how much he cared about him, Ash always had this shocked, almost sad look on his face.  He couldn’t understand why this boy from Japan cared so much about him, a lowlife street hoodlum.  Nobody until Eiji had ever shown him he was irreplaceable, or that he would be missed when he died.  I think Ash’s happiness in the end at the realization that Eiji truly did love him was so overwhelming to him, like you said, that he just forgot everything in the face of it.  That he forgot everything but the feeling of that love, filling up his heart and soul.  It’s why Lao was able to get the drop on him at all, because he was blinded by Eiji’s love to everything around him.  The feeling of it so overwhelming to him, because he’d been starved of any kind of real love his entire life.

Your view here, that instead of Ash choosing to die, he simply chose to live in love, is so beautifully, perfectly put.  I don’t think it’s only a personal head canon for you, but is supported by actual canon.  Blanca even says this to Yut-Lung.  That Ash chose love, even at the cost of his own destruction.  That Ash doesn’t mind if he doesn’t survive, because the value of Eiji’s love means more to him than anything, including his own life.  It’s why he dies with a smile on his face.  He’s finally found peace in love.  

//

banannerfish

He’s basically saying “I don’t have to kill Eiji anymore so prepare for an escape, son”. CHECKMATE, BLANCA HATERS.

I agree that Blanca always had Ash’s best interests at heart, or rather, he THOUGHT he did.  But in reality, at least at first, Blanca’s actions, and even his words later on, are actually extremely destructive and damaging to Ash.  The thing is, Ash only ended up in Dino’s possession again as a direct result of Blanca accepting Dino’s “job” and going after Ash.  And all of the subsequent fallout, like the shootout in the sewer systems, and Eiji and Sing’s gang getting captured, happened, again, because of Blanca.  Ash then having to sequester himself in the Natural History Museum, and face off against all of Yut-Lungs henchmen, having to kill even more, dealing even more damage to his already overburdened and damaged self-esteem, etc…  

I believe that Blanca accepted Dino’s job to force Ash back into his clutches because he really believed that was the best thing for Ash.  But here’s the thing.  What right does Blanca have to tell Ash what he should and shouldn’t do?  That’s what every adult in Ash’s life has always done to him.  Basically tried to dictate to him and force him into being what they thought he should be, or what they wanted him to be.  And Blanca is doing exactly the same thing.  He isn’t allowing Ash to choose for himself what he wants.  Blanca doesn’t want to see Ash destroyed.  He wants him to keep living.  I get that.  But in his pursuit of trying to protect Ash, he’s dismissing what Ash wants for himself, which is to be free from Dino and his sickening abuses, and prioritizing his own wants for Ash.  He’s making his own desires for what he wants for Ash more important than Ash’s desires for himself.  That’s fucked up, I think.  Yes, he does all this because he thinks he knows what’s best for Ash, but he doesn’t stop, at least initially, to consider that Ash has his own wants and needs.  Blacna even calls Ash “selfish” for daring to want to keep Eiji as his friend, and at his side, when Ash’s whole life has been a living hell of pain, abuse, cruelty and manipulation at the hands of others, consumed by loneliness and despair.  He tells Ash he’s “selfish” for wanting something of his own, for wanting a friend, when he’s never had anything like that in his whole life.  Nothing of his own choosing.   Nobody who ever really understood him or who he really is until Eiji came into his life.  It’s like Ash says again and again, none of the people who abused and used him ever stopped to consider that he was a human being with his own thoughts and feelings.  They never treated him like he even deserved to have wants and needs of his own.  Like he was just a vessel to do with as they pleased, no matter the consequences to Ash’s own well being.  

Blanca is guilty of this too, without meaning to be I think, but he still is guilty of it.  He decides what’s best for Ash without ever even talking to Ash, or asking him what it is he wants or needs, or trying to understand why Ash wants so desperately to get away from Dino.  Without ever considering the reasons for why Ash feels the way he does.  I think that’s one of the root causes for why Ash is so mistrustful of people, and adults in particular, because that’s all he’s ever known from them.  This constant disregard for his own feelings and own agency.  This constant disregard for him as a human being with his own rights and choices.  And of course, Blanca later realizes this, and finally does the right thing by going to Ash and helping him directly.  He finally realizes that Ash would rather love and be loved at the risk of his own demise then live the “life” that Dino was offering him, which in reality wasn’t a life at all.  I think Blanca finally starts to understand this about Ash when he sees how Ash falls into despair while in Dino’s clutches and literally starts to waste away and die.  He thought Ash would simply assume this role, and become this idea that everyone had of him as this “devil” or this “Prince of Darkness”, and become a powerful crime lord or whatever.  He assumed that was what was best for Ash.  But he finally starts to see that he was wrong, and finally starts to understand why Ash broke away from Dino in the first place, and why he struggled so hard to free himself from that life, because he would rather have died then be trapped like that, a slave to another person, like he had been since he was a little boy.  And when he is trapped again, being in that position again is so soul crushing to Ash, that he just begins to fade away.  Blanca finally sees that being in Dino’s hold is the worst thing for Ash, because that isn’t who Ash is.  He isn’t this devil that everyone thinks he is.  Blanca finally starts to see Ash as an actual person, not an idea, or an object, and when he starts to see Ash as an actual person, he starts to see Ash for who he really is.  Not a demon or a devil, but just an 18 year old kid who’s been brutally abused and who just wants the abuse to stop, and to not be so alone anymore.

It’s like Blanca realizes for the first time that Ash is a human being, with his own mind, his own heart and soul, his own wants and needs and dreams.  Once he realizes this, that’s when Blanca really starts questioning his own role, his own agency, and his own choices, and is able to decide for himself to break away from Yut-Lung and go to Ash to help.  When Blanca says Ash is his own “salvation”, I think he really means that.  He means Ash has shown him by example of himself that Blanca doesn’t have to play the role he’s been assigned.  He shows Blanca how to be a human being himself.  And Ash shows him too that he was projecting his own perception of himself and the circumstances of his life onto Ash and deciding based on that, not on who Ash actually is, what was good for Ash.  That he was assuming Ash was like him and couldn’t love or be loved, and making decisions for him based on those assumptions.  And he learns, after seeing the consequences of his own actions against Ash, that he was wrong.  That Ash ISN’T like him.  That he does and is loved, that he cares too much about those around him to become the cold-hearted monster that everyone keeps trying to make him into and claim he is.  That his own survival doesn’t matter to him compared to the survival and well being of those Ash loves.  That his own survival doesn’t mean anything to him if it comes at the cost of his own humanity, if it means becoming a puppet and a pawn to the will and desire of others.  If it means giving up who he really is.  That he would rather die then live like that.  Blanca then learns to then step back from trying to control Ash and let him be who he wants to be, and who he actually is.  He learns to recognize the humanity in Ash and respect Ash’s choices.  He learns to let Ash go, and no longer try to control him.  He grows to respect and accept Ash’s decision to live like a human being, instead of a demon or a slave.  

So yeah, Blanca eventually comes to realize that he’s wronged Ash, and then he does the right thing by helping him.  I do think he always cared about Ash, and thought he was helping him at first.  But in reality, he was just trying to control him and take away Ash’s ability to choose for himself, take away Ash’s own agency.  The difference between Blanca and the other adults who did this to Ash, of course, is that Blanca never really MEANT to do it to Ash, and he eventually recognizes that he’s doing it and stops.  

//

thelastsummer

Banana Fish: Ending

I realize I’m two years late to this discussion but I’ve seen quite a few people become angry and hostile when someone says that Ash’s death was the better ending. First of all, it is a fictional story so different interpretations are ALLOWED. I don’t think anyone thinks that people should be given the message that people with trauma can’t recover, however Ash was made a symbol of this without even really being meant to. Lots and lots of anime main characters are given copious amounts of abuse as backstory yet the topic of healing from trauma is not nearly as frequently brought up.

Ash’s character is very realistic and it hits home for a lot of people. His character and eventual death weren’t supposed to represent a boy who suffered, experienced brief happiness, and found his only option left was suicide. He wasn’t supposed to represent this traumatized boy that could NEVER recover. If you want to read something that really touches on that, go read A Little Life. In the case of this story, Ash represents the tragedy of dying young. This topic has an effect on just about everyone, knowing someone who’s died young.

I believe Ash represented this youth of kids who “live their life in 17 years rather than 70” (quote from Yoshidas interviews). He was described by Eiji as this brilliant life force that lived at 100%. We see this in characters like Skip as well. Gone too young for no reason. My last reason why I believe Ash represents this topic and why it’s the reason he died in the end is Yoshidas connection between Ash and River Phoenix. He was a young actor that lived vibrantly and died too young. Yoshida herself expressed her feelings on how River was a vegan and activist yet still died from drugs. This is why Ash represents people who are taken from this world early for no true reason.

I think this part gets a lot of people mad, the “no reason” part. And it’s okay and actually good to be angry at that. You don’t always have to be complacent with death. But it’s also a thing that is very much realistic. Losing people for literally no reason. I myself had someone I loved who died in his sleep, no reason, not even a medical explanation, completely healthy. Maybe that’s why I interpret it this way, but it’s on the same level of saying that Ash choosing death is glorifying suicide as the only option for trauma survivors. If you don’t watch what you say then you could be saying that if I had done something, if Joaquin Phoenix had taken Rivers drugs away, if Eiji had gone to see Ash, then they would have lived. Things happen for a reason and sometimes they don’t, it’s a hard pill to swallow if you’ve never seen someone you love in a casket.

Exploring these topics in writing isn’t morbid or unnecessary. Sadness and grief are things we are taught to be ashamed of and avoid, but that’s why people choose to bring us these things through stories. Also, this reasoning isn’t “psychotic”, “glorifying suicide”, or a result of bad writing. It’s simply finding messages in a good story. Trust me I have a version of why he should’ve lived and maybe I would express it more if I wasn’t so dedicated to what’s canon.

If you can’t have a decent conversation about the meaning of stories that people choose to tell even when it comes to heavier topics such as death, then this story is too mature for you. Not every story has a happy ending, but they remind us to live 100% like Ash did and take advantage of the lives we have.

cosmicjoke

Amen to all of this.  If people are upset about the ending of Banana Fish and express that anger in accusations of bad writing, then yeah, it’s as you said, it’s simply too mature a story for those people.  Banana Fish is 100% dedicated to the realism of its situations and consequences.  Bad things happen to good people, for no reason at all.  They just do.  Ash was a good person, who suffered the most horrific abuses imaginable.  Child physical, sexual and emotional abuse from the age of 8 to 18.  He was forced into unimaginably terrible situations, having to see his friends killed, having to kill his best friend in order to save the one person who turned out to be his soul mate.  Constantly having to fight tooth and nail simply to survive.  Ash’s entire life was unfair and a tragedy.  And so was his death.  But what makes Banana Fish so powerful, and such a good story, is its refusal to compromise on that realism.  It doesn’t force a happy ending on an otherwise tragic story.  It stays loyal to it’s tragic narrative right through to the end.  Ash is a tragic hero, and as you said, he represents to us the unfair and unjust nature of reality that we, as human beings, are faced with every day.  Ash didn’t deserve any of the bad shit that happened to him.  That’s the point.  He was a good person, with a good heart, who did everything he could to help those around him and protect them, and sacrificed himself and his own well being constantly for their sake.  And being that good person didn’t exempt him from suffering.  He didn’t act good because he thought it would save him from suffering.  He was good, because that’s just who he was, regardless of his suffering.  That’s real.  I think Banana Fish is just too real for some people to handle.  But that doesn’t give them an excuse to crap all over people for feeling like the ending works and is right.

cosmicjoke

@thelastsummer​ Completely. But that’s not the message of the story at all. It’s not telling people that trauma can’t be overcome or dealt with. Of course it can. But just as much, of course, there are cases where it can’t be. That’s just realistic, and true.  And Banana Fish deals in realism, despite it’s extraordinary circumstances.  

People who insist that Ash could have been happy with Eiji in Japan are, I think, undermining the seriousness of what Ash actually went through and experienced.They assume that simply being with Eiji should have been enough for Ash to overcome all the pain of his life and be happy, but man, that’s not how these things work. The shit Ash went through was about as bad as it can get, and it wreaked havoc on him and his perception of himself.  He HATED himself, and throughout the story, there was always such a deep sense of melancholy and consuming sadness and loneliness to him.  He could never forgive himself for the things he’d done, no matter how justified they were. All of the people he killed, including his best friend.  All of Ash’s actions were in either self-defense, or in defense of those he loved and cared about.  But Ash always felt too deeply, and cared too much, had too much respect for life, to ever just “get over it”.  Even the scene where Lao is attacking Ash verbally and says he’s “not human, he’s a monster”, Ash does nothing to defend himself, because he agrees.  It’s completely wrong, but that’s how Ash sees himself, because of the abuse he’s suffered and the way he was brought up.  

It’s unrealistic at best, and dismissive of severe trauma at worst, to think Ash’s experiences could have been so easily wiped away by simply moving away to another country. Anyone paying attention to the story could have seen where it was going. The set up for Ash’s death was always there, woven into the narrative. It wasn’t sloppy writing, or done for “shock” value.  Anyone who claims that is instead guilty of sloppy reading and projecting their wish fulfillment onto the narrative, instead of paying attention to the actual themes and what’s happening in the story.  Death, and particularly Ash’s death, was a recurring theme throughout, constantly referred to and alluded to and foreshadowed.

The message I think the story wants to drive home is the seriousness of what it does to a person when they’re as severely abused as Ash was. It doesn’t want to trivialize that, and with integrity refuses to undermine or trivialize child abuse by making it all okay in the end, because for real life victims of child abuse, it never really is “okay”.  It’s never something they can just move on from.  It’s something that stays with them and continues to effect them for their entire lives.  Of course, they can learn to live with it, but it never leaves them entirely.  And in truth, I think, it’s more damaging to insist to people who have suffered from severe child abuse that they should be able to move on.  What if they can’t?  Does that make them a lesser person somehow?  No, of course not.  That’s just the reality.  Sometimes trauma can be too much.  Sometimes we aren’t able to overcome the things that have been done to us.  It doesn’t make us any lesser of a person.  It doesn’t make us weak.  

But of course, there’s such a powerful message of pure love woven in too, with the relationship between Ash and Eiji, between all of the horrific sexual abuse Ash has suffered. It shows a true, pure love, not romantic or physical in nature, but a love of the spirit and heart.  It shows that true love is possible, even for people who have been made to feel and think they aren’t deserving of or capable of being loved.  Ash knew in the end that he was deserving of love, that he was capable of BEING loved, because of Eiji’s love for him.  He died knowing that.  And that’s a beautiful, powerful, and moving ending to a life which was otherwise marred and defined by devastating tragedy.  It’s hopeful, in it’s own, strange way.  Ash died knowing he was loved.  That was more than he ever had in life.

cosmicjoke

@thelastsummer Totally.  Shorter’s death, and the impact it has on Ash, is something that is constantly glossed over when it comes to the way the story ends, and Ash’s inability to forgive himself.  Shorter was Ash’s best friend, and Ash had to KILL him in order to save Eiji’s life.  Think about what that would do to a young boy who’d already suffered so many horrific abuses?  Think about the mental and emotional impact that must have had on Ash?  Man, I don’t think that’s something he could have ever really gotten over, or been okay with.  The way Ash reacted when he saw Shorter’s mutilated body, the way he just collapsed to his knees and screamed, really says it all.  It completely devastated him, because he blamed himself for Shorter ending up that way.  He killed Shorter, because he had no other choice, but then he had to see his best friend’s mutilated, violated corpse, cut open and apart.  He didn’t want Shorter involved from the beginning, but Shorter insisted, and Ash finally gave in.  And then that happens to Shorter.  Really, people I think need to stop and think more about what Ash actually went through, and the weight of his own sense of guilt and the pain he was carrying with him.  If they did, they might better understand why he wanted to let himself go, in the end.

cosmicjoke

@thelastsummer And you know, that’s a really interesting view of Ash and Eiji’s relationship.  Of course, Eiji would be extremely desperate to rescue Ash, as we see from him throughout the story.  Eiji tries SO HARD to make Ash see himself in a better light, but Ash just isn’t ever able to do it.  He can’t see himself as what he really is, which is a victim.  He sees himself as a monster.  And Eiji’s attempts to help him grow increasingly more desperate and frantic.  It’s another element of tragedy in the story.  Like you said, if you really pay attention to the scene when Ash comes across Shorter’s body, and how he reacts, yeah, you can’t realistically watch or read that scene and think Ash is just going to be okay with himself someday.  Ash’s continued self-loathing, despite all of the love and care Eiji shows him throughout the story is a heavy indicator of that as well.  Eiji is able to help sooth and calm Ash down for these short bursts of time.  But as soon as Eiji goes from his side, we see Ash fall back into this melancholic, depressed state.  Eiji would have to dedicate himself to Ash all the time, at the expense of his own well being, it seems, to keep Ash’s thoughts from straying to those dark places, and really, when you think about it, that’s the last thing Ash would ever want.  He wouldn’t want Eiji to sacrifice his own well being for him.  

cosmicjoke

@thelastsummer I really agree with what you’re saying.  We see that within the story too, with the famous moment between Ash and Eiji, when Ash asks Eiji to stay, and he says “I won’t ask forever.  Just for a little while.”.  And Eiji replies with “forever”.  Ash always understood that he was so deeply entrenched in the world of violence and horror that he was in, that he could never, truly escape, and that tragically was driven home to him again and again, with how often Eiji was either kidnapped or hurt.  Really, with how everyone Ash was involved with was either kidnapped, hurt, or even eventually killed.  Like you pointed out with Skip and Griff and Shorter, and several members of his gang.  Whether it was true or not, Ash saw himself as “bad news”, and as someone who would only bring misery to others. And he obviously loved Eiji so much, that he couldn’t bear the thought of bringing that misery into his life too.  Which, yeah, is why I think Yoshida said what she did about Ash remaining separated from Eiji, even if he had lived.  As it was, Ash could remain with Eiji in his heart and soul for all eternity.  When you say how happy Ash was to get to have the time he did with Eiji, that’s really important to understanding Ash as a character, and the story as a whole.  Until Ash met Eiji, he had only ever known pain, loss and abandonment.  He’d never known actual, real love.  He’d never had someone see him for who he really is, and accept and love him for it.  So when he found that with Eiji, even knowing it was temporary and couldn’t last, it made Ash feel like the luckiest person in the world, that someone like him, who’d suffered so much, and who thought of himself as this monster, would get to taste that pure love and acceptance, even if only for a little while.

It’s incredibly poignant and moving, and so, so emotionally powerful.

Also what you pointed out about that scene between Ash and Jessica, where Jessica asks him how he can have it so together after being raped again by Foxx, and how her question really highlights just how immense and terrible Ash’s trauma actually is.  When he answers her with “If it took me a year to get over all the times I’ve been raped, I’d be dead from old age”, it drives home the horrifying reality of Ash’s day to day life.  The way he’s literally forced to repress and hold in the devastation and trauma of having been repeatedly raped and molested since he was a young boy in order to simply function and survive.  Ash never had the luxury of processing and dealing with his grief and trauma, because he never had a moment to even breathe.  If he’d stopped fighting for even a moment, he would have died.  And, eventually, that’s exactly what happened.  He stopped fighting for a single moment, and he paid for it with his life.  I think people fail to really consider that aspect to Ash’s character and his life too.  How absolutely exhausting and draining it would be to have to live like that.  To always have to be looking over your shoulder.  To always be so on edge that you can’t go through a single day without looking at everyone and everything with suspicion.  To never have a real moment of peace to just try and deal with all the consuming pain and tragedy Ash was dealt in his young life.  

I always think that Eiji’s love is what eventually made Ash feel like it was okay to finally just stop fighting.  To let himself go.  Because for those few years he had with Eiji, he knew real happiness, which is something he never dared to even hope for.  It was more than Ash ever thought he could have, and more than he thought he ever deserved (even though Ash completely deserved to be loved).  But because Eiji gave him that, because he showed Ash what it meant to be loved, truly and unconditionally, Ash could finally stop struggling and stop suffering, and just slip away.  

cosmicjoke

@thelastsummer That’s a great point about us as the audience being in the same position as Eiji.  The ones left behind after a loved one has died, and of course, it’s those people who continue to suffer from that loss.  And of course, anger is one of the stages of grief.  But death, as you’ve pointed out, is a reality of living, and even though some people don’t want to acknowledge it, and even become irrationally angry at even the suggestion or mention of it, real art of course never shy’s away from the harsher realities of life.  That’s something you really have to admire Banana Fish for, is it’s unwillingness to compromise on it’s realism.  Some people don’t want to be made to deal with genuine heartbreak or sadness, but avoiding those realities never helps anyone in the end.  Ash’s death is brutal and hard to accept, hard to take, but it’s also extremely sincere and real, and it’s why the story is so affecting.  It doesn’t ever betray its tragic nature.  Ash surviving would have been a direct betrayal of the entire tone of the story, and the arc of Ash’s own life, I think.  But like you said too, in sharing Eiji’s grief, the audience also shares in Eiji’s love for Ash, and as Ash will continue to live on with Eiji forever, he also lives on with us the audience.  Banana Fish refuses to let us forget Ash and what he went through.  It refuses to let us grow complacent towards him or what he went through by undercutting the tragedy of it.  It basically grabs us by the neck and forces us to confront the ugly reality of child abuse and violence, and the impact it can have on a person.  It’s just such a real and powerful story.  And believe me, I’m as happy to have found you to discuss the story with.  It’s not a hugely mainstream, popular manga/anime, I think because it’s just too real for a lot of people.  So being able to discuss it with you is a real joy.

cosmicjoke

@thelastsummer Definitely.  Banana Fish stands as a real piece of art because of how it reflects the actual human condition, and what it means to be alive.  It doesn’t shy away from those things.  Like you said, and it’s so true, people who have lost someone in real life can’t just magic it away because it makes them upset.  You have to eventually learn to face and accept it.  Banana Fish never compromises on its dedication to realism, or the brutal consequences of its subject matters, like child abuse.  If it had had a happy ending, it would have been easier to digest, sure, but ultimately, it would have been forced and contrite and left us feeling hollow.  The reason the actual ending is so impactful isn’t because it makes you feel empty at the end, it’s because it makes you feel almost too much.  It creates such raw, real emotion in the audience, because everything it depicts is so sincere and true and, ultimately, relatable to being alive.

ash-in-the-rye

All of this was really beautifully said and really enjoyable to read❤️ Thanks to @cosmicjoke and  @thelastsummer for these great interpretations.

Literature is all about interpretation which can come in various forms because everyone sees and perceives it differently. It’s interesting to talk to people about it and see them interpreting things in a way you haven’t considered until then yourself. That’s why it will never stop baffling me when people just only ever complain about how much they hate the ending, how “Yoshida doesn’t deserve rights”, how she dares to to tell them to die by letting Ash die in the end, how much of a “bad” and “lazy” writer she is because of that and how they basically tell people they’re not allowed to like the ending because it means they support the “message” of it.

First of all, not liking the ending is completely valid just like it’s just as valid to like it, and it’s also valid to express why you don’t like it.

However, badmouthing the author or other people is just a no-go. The author had workd hard on this manga she created for years. Yes, the ending may not be to everyone’s liking and she was aware of that, but it’s still the ending she chose for her story. If we had ended it dfferently, that’s okay, but we’re not the author, just like MAPPA isn’t the author and couldn’t change the ending. It may made no sense for some people, but for Yoshida-sensei, it did. It doesn’t mean it was “lazy” or “bad”, it just means we have a different perception of what would make sense or not.

And lastly, the “message”. A message is only ever what you take away from it for yourself and not necessarily what the author really wanted to say with it. So if people say the message is “people who experienced sexual abuse deserve to die” then it’s is what they took away from it and not what the author ultimately wanted to convey. So accusing people of supporting a message you personally took away from the story is really pointless because just because you feel like it’s the message of the story doesn’t mean others see it like that as well.

Anyway, if all people only ever want to do is complain and bashing the author, then they really should move on and read a more happier story if they so badly want to see a happy ending. They definitely won’t find it here and the author also doesn’t owe it to us because again, it’s her story.

I think nowadays, people are really too spoiled with stories always ending happily so when they have a story that’s having a sad and tragic ending for once, they’ll get angry quickly and dismiss it as being “bad” just because they’re not satisfied with it.

I personally really enjoy talking about the ending with other people and see how they interpret or perceived it. But I really think this only works with people who either like it or at least accept it (at least for me). People who only truly hate it and only ever point out the “bad message” behind it seem way more quicker in starting to only ever complain about it rather than actually talk about it and this can get really tiring.

When it comes to me regarding the ending, even though it greatly breaks my heart and makes me cry every time I see it, I think the ending is fitting.

The way I see it, it could only have ended in two ways anyway. Either with Ash and Eiji parting ways right then and there (just like the alternative ending Yoshida-sensei had in mind as stated in one of her interviews), leaving it open when or if they ever see each other again or with Ash dying. Sadly, it was the latter and I really wish it had ended the other way, but that’s just how it is.

Banana Fish was a tragedy from beginning to end (just like the stories it references like “A Perfect Day for Banana Fish” or “The Snows of Kilimanjaro”). So we had never seen the happy ending where they both go to Japan and live happily ever after in the first place. It would have been really unrealistic, especially if Ash had suddenly thought of himself of deserving a second chance and a normal life. Until the very end, that’s just not how Ash thought. It had never crossed his mind to start a new life in Japan because he thought of himself as an unredeemable monster which is only fit for the street life.

Of course, that’s not who he really was. We all saw how caring he was and how willing he was to sacrifice himself when it meant saving other people. He wasn’t a monster but a human. A human who deserved to live a happy life more than anyone else. But that’s not how he saw himself. Maybe he thought of himself as a human in the end, but that doesn’t mean he also thought he could be forgiven for all the people he had killed. Yes, mostly it was out of self-defense, but Ash still thought that this was no excuse. So in the end, he maybe even thought dying was the only way to redeem himself. Again, Ash’s perception and not necessarily the truth.

People seem to forget how damaged Ash’s view of himself was until the very end. There was no way this could have changed that quickly, him suddenly starting to love himself and finding self-worth, not even with Eiji’s help. After all, Eiji’s love was a comfort but not a magical healing tool that could fix everything. Over 10 years of abuse and people making him feel like he’s worthless won’t go away within 2 years which also weren’t that peaceful.

However, I do think, Ash would have been able to overcome his traumas eventually if he had granted more time and a quieter environment. It wouldn’t have been easy, but I think it would have been possible. But actually getting there would have been a a whole other story and I doubt Yoshida-sensei would have had the energy or wanted to actually write it.

cosmicjoke

@ash-in-the-rye Thank you for contributing!  And thank you for your measured, insightful, and thoughtful commentary.  I agree with everything you said, and I know we’ve discussed this before as well!  It’s always such a joy to talk to you about this.  Definitely, I think the message behind Banana Fish, which people lose sight of because they’re so angry or heartbroken over Ash’s death, is compassion for victims of child abuse.  Ultimately, Banana Fish refuses to white wash the damage caused by child abuse, and how it can destroy a person.  The abuse Ash received didn’t destroy him in terms of who he was as a person.  Ash remains a good person despite what was done to him, which just shows an overall incredible moral strength, I think.  But the abuse he suffered definitely destroyed his perception of himself, and his ability to think of himself as deserving of love or a better life.  Like you pointed out, Ash’s perception of himself is severely warped and wrong.  He calls himself a monster and a brute, when in reality, he’s got such a kind and compassionate heart, capable of so much love.  But like you said, the two years he spent with Eiji just wasn’t enough to free him of the pain of more than ten years of the worst kind of abuse, and to fix how lowly his opinion of himself was, and to expect that, to expect Ash to just get over what was done to him like that, isn’t only unrealistic but, I think, unintentional though it might be, disrespectful towards Ash and what he endured.  It shows I think an unwillingness to consider the depth of his suffering.  

It’s absolutely possible that he could have gotten better, or learned someday to love himself, but yes, the road would have been extremely hard, with no actual guarantee of success.  Ash died knowing he was loved, whether he felt he deserved that love or not, and that means something.  

By the way @ash-in-the-rye I sent you a PM!  I wanted to get your opinion on something!  

ash-in-the-rye

It’s always a joy talking to you about different aspect of Bf as well, @cosmicjoke ^^

Indeed, Ash’s trauma caused by having been sexually abused never got dismissed in the story. It was always present and we saw how it affected and shaped him over the years. The abuse he has suffered from was never downplayed and instead presented as what it is:

Something horrible and something no one should ever go through.

We sympathized with him, we rooted for him and wished he could have had the chance to get his happy ending because that’s what he honestly deserved. That’s also why the notion of his death sending the message of: “All abuse victims deserve to die” doesn’t make sense to me.

Everyone who watched/read the ending thought: “He didn’t deserve this.” So how can this be the message if we all agree that he should have lived and deserved a normal and happy life even if it had taken some time to get there? Even the narrative makes clear that he shouldn’t have died if we look at GoL. Eiji and Sing are still hurting so much after all those years and only learn to cope with their grief bit by bit. The fact that they’re so affected by Ash’s death signals me that his death was a tragedy and that he should have lived. Otherwise, we would have seen a much happier epilogue which would have portrayed Ash’s death in a positive way. But it didn’t and that makes all the difference.

Another thing would be people projectiing onto him. I’m not saying that it’s bad to identify yourself with a character who’s similiar to you or has gone through similiar things like you. On the contrary, it’s always good if you have such characters because it makes us feel not so alone with whatever we’re going through anymore.

However, we should always bear in mind that we’re not actually that character. We are our own person with our own decisions and our own personal way and eventual end. Just because Ash died doesn’t mean that everyone who went through the same as him have to die, too.

cosmicjoke

Again, perfectly said @ash-in-the-rye

That’s a brilliant point, that nobody had the reaction at the end of Banana Fish that Ash deserved to die.  I mean, if you had that reaction, there’s something seriously wrong with you, I think.  Everyone was so devastated because they knew that Ash was a good person and he deserved to have a good, happy life, and to see him suffer as much as he did and then die so pointlessly was nothing but a complete tragedy.  And as you also pointed out, from both Eiji’s and Sing’s reactions to Ash’s death, it’s absolutely framed as a tragedy.  There’s nothing good about him dying.  It’s just brutal and tragic.  So again, I think it’s people twisting the ending into something it’s not because they don’t want to face the reality that the story is conveying, which is that bad things happen to good people, and also refusing to downplay the damage caused by child abuse.

And also, yes, there is an element of projecting going on.  This idea that because Ash dies in the end, and because Ash never really learns to love himself, that must mean all victims of abuse are going and/or should end up the same way.  I don’t get that notion at all.  Ash’s circumstances, for one thing, were so extreme and so brutally bad, that it would be difficult to find any kind of parallel in real life to that anyway.  But even if you did, like you said, Ash is his own person, separate from anyone else, and how Ash reacted and felt about what happened to him and how his life went doesn’t reflect  100% how someone else who’d been through something similar would react and feel.

Also though, because Banana Fish refuses to just magic away Ash’s pain and trauma, I think it also sends the message that it’s okay if you can’t just get over the abuse you’ve suffered.  It doesn’t make you a weak person, or a lesser person.  Ash is anything but weak.  He isn’t pitiful or pathetic.  He’s so strong and courageous and kind.  Banana Fish shows us that even if you can’t recover from your abuse, even if it always haunts you, it doesn’t mean you aren’t a good person, or a person with value.  You can still be an extraordinary person, even carrying the weight of suffering.

//

Anonymous asked:

I feel like I can relate to Ash alot because he was so haunted by everything that happened to him. Survivor stories just kind of depress me since I'm stuck and I feel like I'm taking way too long to get better...Or I guess I feel like I haven't gained anything from what happened to me like they all say they have. They made Ash so realistic in his suffering so to me he's a really comforting character to love.

softasheijis answered:

ash never became a stronger or better person because of his trauma. you can argue that his strong aversion to sexual harassment, pedophilia, and rape culture is a result of this, but these are all things decent human beings are capable of feeling. you can argue that his intelligence is directly related to the suffering he endured in order to survive, but the truth is he was that smart to begin with, and being privately schooled by someone like blanca heightened his tactful abilities immensely.

like i said, ash never became a stronger or better person because of his trauma. it absolutely crippled him from beginning to end. it ruined his life and turned him into a person he never wanted to be. it’s okay to feel that way.

i’m not saying it’s wrong or impossible for people to grow in spirit and mind from these things, but a rape victim should never have to force on a brave face to show others that their pain meant something. trauma shouldn’t have to make you better to be seen as valid. horrific acts are often senseless and can happen for no reason at all, and you are absolutely not in the wrong for feeling the way that you are because of it. that is out of your control entirely, but recovery is in your control. it will take a very long time to get there and it is likely the hardest thing you’ll have to do, but you will absolutely get there no matter how long it takes. i think the most important thing to remember is that you are never alone in these things.

please remember to love yourself and take things one step at a time!

on a side note, it makes me really happy to know that you take comfort in a character like ash. i’m sure many others feel the same way as you.

cosmicjoke This is exactly why I don’t understand people who get angry at others for saying Ash’s trauma was too much to just easily overcome, or even overcome at all.  That’s just the reality for a lot of victims of abuse.  Sometimes it’s too much for them to ever move past, or get over.  And that reality doesn’t make victims of abuse weak people, it doesn’t make them somehow lesser.  They shouldn’t HAVE to get over it, just because everyone tells them they should.  Sometimes it’s too much, and that fact needs to be respected and treated with compassion.  If the abuse someone has suffered continues to affect and impact them for their entire lives, then that’s normal, and instead of expecting the victim to recover and “get better”, maybe it’s other people who need to work more on themselves in understanding and accepting the pain another person is in.  Banana Fish, and Ash as a character is completely realistic in the portrayal of what child sexual abuse does to a person.  It destroys their lives, and destroys who they could have been if it had never happened to them.  

People don’t like to face the bleak nature and reality of child abuse, and how it can irrevocably damage a person, and that’s why some people have such an issue with Banana Fish.  But in truth, the story is about the most fair and accurate depiction and representation there is for real life victims of abuse.  It doesn’t whitewash it, or make it more palatable for those who haven’t been victims like Ash was.  It forces us to look at the reality of it and accept it for how awful it truly is.  It doesn’t let you grow complacent towards the ramifications of child abuse.  If that makes some people uncomfortable, well, that’s just too bad for them I guess.  Ash never overcomes the abuse he was subjected to.  He never learns to love himself, he never moves past it or makes peace with it.  He never puts it behind him.  It continues to affect him and make him suffer right until the very end.  And by ending it that way, the story forces us to acknowledge the harsh reality of what child abuse does to its victims, and Banana Fish proves itself to be absolutely compassionate and understanding towards victims of child abuse for it, because it refuses to trivialize it by magicing away its consequences.  That’s the opposite of what people accuse the story of doing.  It’s a call for people to wake up and pay attention to the real consequences of what happens when we let children slip through the cracks, the way Ash was allowed to slip through.

//

jadeashes

I realized today that Dino Golzine has a code lock to get out of his bedroom to keep his victims from getting away. The code is Ash’s manga birthday (68/8/12). Since most 4-digit code locks don’t allow a repeated number the code becomes 6812.

I wonder how many times Ash tried random numbers to try to get out, never thinking to use his own birthday. Why would a man who hates him enough to abuse him that way care about his birthday, better try the other 10,000 combinations first. I wonder how Dino thinks of it now, how desperate he was to make Ash his “wife” and force him to be complicit in all of his crimes, going as far a using a number tied to Ash’s very existence as a means to keep other children from freedom.

cosmicjoke

Ugh, this is so twisted and adds yet another layer to Dino’s cruelty.  God, just imagining Ash being locked in Dino’s bedroom, literally trapped and unable to get out, is horrifying and heartbreaking.  I mean, think about it.  Ash was ten, eleven years old when Dino “bought” him, and started raping him.  I can’t even imagine what Ash must have been feeling at that point too, after running away from home, after everything that had happened with his baseball coach and his father failing him… only to find it all happening to him all over again.  God, it must have been so horrific.  And people wonder why Ash acted so harsh and closed off sometimes.  

#Banana Fish #Meta #Commentary #Ash Lynx #Eiji Okumura #Blanca #Dino Golzine

[bananafishmetas]

Ash Lynx and Blanca

I’m reading through Banana Fish right now, and I’m to the part in which Blanca enters the picture, early on to when Ash just figures out that it’s Blanca that’s been shadowing him, and is now targeting Eiji.

I know Blanca seems to be a character that has a lot of people split in terms of how they view him, but I have to say, while reading through the early appearances of him in the manga, I find what he’s doing to Ash to actually be some of the cruelest, most unkind actions taken against Ash in the entire series thus far.   It’s really hard to like Blanca at this point in the story, and I know that later on he ends up helping Ash.  But early on here, I feel like what he’s doing is tantamount to torture.  Blanca knows Ash’s history.  He knows what kind of tragedies and hardships he’s suffered in his life, and how from an incredibly young age, he’s been manipulated and abused by basically every adult in his life.  Blanca knows that Golzine not only repeatedly raped Ash, but allowed his associates and clientele to do the same to him, and yet we see him willingly associating with and working for Golzine during this period, as well as Yut-Lung, actively working to put Ash into a position which will lead him directly into the hands of people who want to hurt and torture him.  Beyond just that, he essentially stalks Ash for several days, purposefully working him into a frenzied and frantic state of fear and paranoia, all for nothing more apparent than that he finds it amusing, and wants to “test” Ash.  As if Ash’s entire life hasn’t been, and continues to be, a desperate and heartbreaking struggle to simply survive.  Ash has routinely been in a position since he was an eight year old child in which he’s had to essentially always be looking over his shoulder and approach every person and situation with an all-consuming wariness and fear.  Blanca KNOWS this, and yet he uses his experience and superior skills to essentially fuck with Ash and scare him into a state of awful anxiety.

I don’t know, but this whole section of the manga, and the way Blanca treats Ash in particular here, I think is incredibly upsetting, and in my view, some of the worst abuse of Ash yet, even with all the horrible experiences he’s had up to this point.  It’s again an adult basically manipulating and abusing him, not physically this time, but certainly psychologically.  I just can’t bring myself to like Blanca at all, for how cruelly he treats Ash here.  In the context of “Private Opinion” too, seeing the way Ash looked up to Blanca, and viewed him as maybe the first adult in his life he could look to for protection, it just makes Blanca’s actions towards him all the crueler still.  Anyway, that’s just my two cents.  Again, I know Blanca ends up helping Ash in the end, and that makes up for some of what he does here, but not all of it, in my opinion.  

Edit: Okay, so I reached the end of volume 12, and man, if I didn’t like Blanca before, I kind of just outright hate him at this point.  Even knowing he ends up helping Ash at this point isn’t enough to change my mind on this.  My god, first he leads Ash right into Golzine’s and Yut-Lungs hands, and then he beats the living shit out of him, and then he tells him that the best place for him is under the control of a man who repeatedly raped and molested him and trained him to become a killer.  I mean… yeah, there’s just no justification for that.  Telling Ash there was no other way for him to live.  He’s telling Ash that it’s better to survive even if he’s essentially a slave to a man who abused him in literally the worst possible ways then to seek freedom and die.  These are the kinds of people Ash grew up around, the kind of things he had beaten into him, literally and figuratively.  To view himself as an object to be used and controlled, as a weapon to be wielded.  Not as a human being.  Not as a person with any kind of rights or worth.  Is it any wonder Ash thinks so lowly of himself and can’t imagine himself as being able to escape his cruel existence?  I mean, fuck Blanca.  Fuck that guy.  He can look sad all he wants watching Ash suffer, but he directly contributes to that suffering in the worst kind of way.  God, I just can’t.  And then Ash begs him not to hurt Eiji and Blanca just flat out tells him he can’t do that, when he knows how much Eiji means to Ash, after Ash pours his fucking heart out to him about it, about how Eiji’s friendship means more to him than all the so called wealth and power in the world.  After he explains to Blanca that it’s better to die then to be under the control of a monster like Dino.  Fuck, Ash is just a kid.  He’s just a kid, and he never had any kind of chance, because these piece of shit adults around him never allowed him to have one.  

Okay, excuse me for a minute while I go hide in a corner and cry for a few hours.  Damn.

#Banana Fish #Ash Lynx #Blanca #Meta

[bananafishmetas]

More on Ash and Blanca

Okay, so I reached the end of volume 12, and man, if I didn’t like Blanca before, I kind of just outright hate him at this point.  Even knowing he ends up helping Ash at this point isn’t enough to change my mind on this.  My god, first he leads Ash right into Golzine’s and Yut-Lungs hands, stands idly by while Ash nearly kills himself to save Eiji, then he beats the living shit out of him, and then he tells him that the best place for him is under the control of a man who repeatedly raped and molested him and taught and trained him to become a killer, Ash having no choice but to comply because it was the only way for him to survive.  I mean… yeah, there’s just no justification for that.  Telling Ash there was no other way for him to live.  He’s telling Ash that it’s better to survive even if he’s essentially a slave to a man who abused him in literally the worst possible ways then to seek freedom and die.  These are the kinds of people Ash grew up around, the kind of things he had beaten into him, literally and figuratively.  To view himself as an object to be used and controlled, as a weapon to be wielded.  Not as a human being.  Not as a person with any kind of rights or worth.  Is it any wonder Ash thinks so lowly of himself and can’t imagine himself as being able to escape his cruel existence?  I mean, fuck Blanca.  Fuck that guy.  He can look sad all he wants watching Ash suffer, but he directly contributes to that suffering in the worst kind of way.  God, I just can’t.  And then Ash begs him not to hurt Eiji and Blanca just flat out tells him he can’t do that, when he knows how much Eiji means to Ash, after Ash pours his fucking heart out to him about it, about how Eiji’s friendship means more to him than all the so called wealth and power in the world.  After he explains to Blanca that it’s better to die then to be under the control of a monster like Dino.  After Ash points out Blanca’s own hypocrisy in running away from his own supposed fate and role and living a life of leisure in the Caribean.  Something Blanca had the resources to do, and the freedom to do, when Ash never did.  Ash never had anything of his own like Blanca.  No choice in the jobs he did, no financial freedom, no real independence, because Dino gained control over him when he was a ten, eleven year old little boy, after he must have been living on the streets for two years prior to that, with no resources, no home, no protection of any kind, and that was it.  A little kid who’d run away from home because his own father had allowed him to be raped by his baseball coach and did nothing to protect him.  Everything Ash had after that was controlled and owned by Dino, was only given to him in exchange for Ash’s very freedom and innocence.  He couldn’t run away like Blanca because Dino had him on a fucking leash and at any point could and would have stripped him of any means to do so, and would have made him suffer for even trying, which is basically what the entire scenario of Banana Fish is.  Ash trying to break free of his abuser and suffering the worst cruelties for it.  And Blanca acts like Ash should be grateful to Dino for giving him an “education”, like he gave it to Ash out of the kindness of his heart.  When in reality he was trying to mold Ash into a tool for him to use and do with as he pleased.  Fuck, Ash is just a kid. He’s just a kid, and he never had any kind of chance, because these piece of shit adults around him never allowed him to have one.  

Okay, excuse me for a minute while I go hide in a corner and cry for a few hours. Damn.

#Banana Fish #Ash Lynx #Blanca #Meta

[bananafishmetas]

I’ve been thinking recently about the part in Banana Fish, while Ash is in prison, when he allows himself to be gang raped in order to get a message to Shorter to go and move Griffin.  I was thinking about what this scene, and this incident, tells us about Ash, and how he views and values himself.  When you really allow yourself to think about it, it’s devastating in its tragedy.  

Ash is sitting there, trying to think of how he can get a message to Shorter to keep Griff safe, and then this group of men come up to him, and Ash of course knows what they’re there for.  What they want.  

He sees an opportunity then, in that split second.  He knows if he lets these men rape him, he’ll get sent to the infirmary, where he can then get hold of a capsule pill so he can send a message to Shorter.  But like, really THINK about what that means.

Ash is a person who’s suffered through the most extreme child sexual abuse a person can.  It’s impossible to say how many times he was raped and molested up to that point, but considering that he was sold into prostitution at 10 years old, and then worked as a prostitute on the streets, it’s got to be countless.  And here Ash is, willingly allowing to happen to him one of the most traumatic and awful things that can happen to a person.  A horrific nightmare he’s lived through innumerable times already.  All so he can get Griff moved to safety.

It speaks volumes about how much Ash values himself.  Which is to say, he doesn’t really value himself at all.  He determines in that split second of decision that his own trauma and pain don’t really matter at all when compared to the life of his brother, even as Griff exists as only a shell of his former self.  Ash doesn’t hesitate for a moment to let something as awful as gang rape happen to him if it means he’ll be able to help Griff.  

I think this moment really underlines just how deeply damaged Ash has been made by the abuse he’s suffered in his life.  That he thinks it’s okay and acceptable for him to be raped in order to help someone else.  Of course, we see this same mindset with Ash throughout the series.  He’s constantly sacrificing himself and his own well being in order to help others.  Constantly putting himself in harms way to keep others out of it, without hesitation.  He constantly deems other people’s live and well being to be of more importance than his own.

I think Ash is just that kind of person anyway.  That he’s a true hero, in the sense that he just naturally will do whatever he can to help others in need.  But he also does these things with the full knowledge most of the time of what’s going to happen to him by doing so.  He knows he’s going to be raped in that scene.  Or he knows he’s going to be tortured, or killed.  And he does it anyway with the same, knee jerk quickness, and it’s because he sees himself as this worthless street thug with no real value.  Someone who contributes nothing to the world but misery and pain.  Here we see the true damage of the abuse Ash has suffered, in how it’s made him think of himself.  How it’s made him see himself as someone that is disposable and undeserving of a better life, or better treatment.  Someone who sees nothing wrong with him getting hurt, as long as it saves someone innocent from going through the same.  

He never stops to consider his own value.  He never can see how amazing he actually is, or that maybe he shouldn’t have to throw himself into these horrific situations.  He never tries to think of another way that doesn’t involve him having to sacrifice himself to help others, if that’s the most effective solution.  That’s how little value he places on his own life.  I think it’s one of the most tragic things about Ash.  It’s really just heartbreaking.  

#Banana Fish #Ash Lynx #Meta

[bananafishmetas]

That Last Moment between Ash and Dino

cosmicjoke

As I read tonight the last moment between Ash and Dino, the moment after Dino kills Colonel Foxx, and we see him facing off against Ash, as we see Ash push Sing behind him, his face a mask of resolve not to let Dino near him, not to let him hurt him, and then we see Dino falter, and stumble, and fall, when we see Ash’s face change into shock, and then what seems sadness… I found myself crying.

Not because Dino was dead.  No, fuck Dino, the guy was a total piece of shit.  But I cried because of what that moment was for Ash.

Ash’s expression of sadness as Dino falls into the flames below would seem contradictory to everything we know about his relationship to Dino, to all of the hellish abuse and cruelty we know Dino subjected Ash to as a child, and to how much Ash despised him for it.

But I think, in fact, this moment, this expression we see on Ash’s face, is such a deeply profound and moving moment, such a heavy and meaningful moment, as he watches the greatest tormentor of his life, the one man who singlehandedly made Ash’s life the worst living hell imaginable from the time he was a ten, eleven year old boy, to that very instant there, as an 18 year old young man,  finally die.  As he watches Dino fall to his end, and it’s over.  It’s just… over.  Finally.  The man he could never escape.  The monster who would forever have Ash in his clutches, and would never let him go.  The monster who Ash, I think deep down, never really believed he could actually be free of.  And suddenly he just… is.  Suddenly, Dino is gone, and Ash is free from him at last, after almost a decade of enslavement to him.

I think Ash’s expression of sadness, of grief even, is not because he’s sad to see Dino die.  I think seeing Dino die, I think seeing the tormentor whom he’s struggled SO HARD to escape from for SO LONG, finally perish, must have left Ash feeling hollow inside.  Empty.  Lost and confused.  To think his own struggle was finally over, to realize it in that moment, in seeing the architect of his torment and pain at last wiped from existence, after so much endured anguish and so much struggle, how would that feel?  How would that make anyone feel?  After all of that, after all that suffering and struggle and sadness and loneliness, and suddenly it’s just over.  Suddenly it’s at an end, after wishing and fighting so fervently for it.  

This moment, this scene, I thought, was just devastating in it’s sadness.  For Ash.  It’s hard for me to even put into words what I mean.  Dino’s death is so anticlimactic, in a way.  Ash doesn’t kill him.  He watches him die from wounds inflicted on him by another abuser of his.  That’s how Ash finally escapes from his greatest enemy.  That’s how Ash finally escapes from the hold of a monster.  The abruptness of it, and the bizarrely unintentional way of it, I think leaves Ash feeling sad.  Heartbroken, even.  Again, not because he’s sad for Dino, but because it’s like watching the one reason Ash even had to keep struggling himself finally fall away.  It’s like watching a dream he’s had for so long unfold before his very eyes, and it’s nothing like what he imagined, or hoped for.  It isn’t some great, defiant moment.  It isn’t some dramatic “Fuck You!” to Dino.  He’s just standing there, ready to take a bullet for Sing, ready to stand between Dino and another child, and then Dino just dies.  And that’s it.  Ash has nothing to do with it.  He has no part in Dino’s death.  It isn’t an act of revenge.  It’s just simply an end to his enslavement.  I think it must have left Ash feeling directionless, and purposeless.  After the entire struggle of the story, fighting against Dino, trying so desperately to break free of Dino.  The entire length, from beginning to end.  And that’s just it.  Dino is dead, and Ash is left standing there.

It’s such a momentous moment, Ash’s freedom from his worst abuser, and it happens so quietly, so softly even.  It happens without fanfare.  Without drama.  Without any anger even.  Ash’s expression in the seconds before it happens was only one of grim determination to protect Sing.  Like he didn’t even feel hatred towards Dino.  Only that he recognized the monster and wouldn’t let him hurt his friend.  Like Ash knew, for him, it was too late, for him, Dino had already destroyed his life, but for Sing, it wasn’t, it wasn’t too late, and Ash would do everything in his power to keep it that way.

And then Dino dies, and it’s still too late for Ash.  It fixes nothing.  It gives nothing of what was stolen from Ash back to him.  His childhood.  His innocence.  All those years of being trapped, all those long years of suffering, of anguish and pain, of feeling so utterly alone.  All of it is still with Ash, all that pain and sadness and damage, even as the man who robbed him of everything, and left him with scars that will last and burn inside him forever, for the rest of his life, is gone.

Something about this entire scene and the way it played out was just so poignant, I thought, and so sad.

I’d love to hear everyone else’ thoughts on this moment as well.  It just affected me so deeply.

#Banana Fish #Ash Lynx #Dino Golzine

[bananafishmetas]

Garden of Light and the Processing of Grief

cosmicjoke

Well, I’ve finally done it.  I’ve reached the final conclusion of the story of Banana Fish, and all it’s characters.  Man, I’m emotional.  

Just like with Angel Eyes, I feel like there’s so much to explore and unpack regarding Garden of Light.  But I want to focus on the main theme which runs through it, which is the weight of sorrow, and the processing of grief and guilt.

I want to actually talk about how the sorrow, grief and guilt we see both Eiji and Sing consumed by throughout this story relates back to Ash, and not simply in terms of the loss of Ash being the cause of those emotions for Eiji and Sing, but how, I think, it maybe led the two of them to eventually better understanding and accepting Ash’s death, and thus, processing and freeing themselves from their own pain.

Midway through the story, Sing seems really angry and overcome with guilt over the death of Ash, and in particular, how that death has affected and changed Eiji.  He’s angry AT Ash for dying, almost as if he thinks Ash died on purpose so he could forever possess Eiji’s soul.  He wants Ash to let Eiji go, so that Eiji can be happy again.  And this actually relates directly back to Sing’s own pain and grief and sense of guilt, his own inability to let go of what happened, to let go of his guilt for, he thinks, letting Lao attack Ash in the first place.  I think Sing is blaming himself, ultimately, for the pain Eiji is in, because he thinks it’s his fault that Lao attacked Ash, indirectly making Ash’s death Sing’s fault.  It’s a really interesting reaction on Sing’s part then, the anger he expresses towards Ash, because I don’t think he’s actually truly angry at Ash at all.  He’s angry at himself.  He’s angry that he let this happen, that he didn’t talk to Lao when he had the chance to prevent this awful tragedy.  He blames himself, then, for Eiji’s unhappiness.

Sing says “It’s been long enough Ash.  You hear me?  Let Eiji go now.  If you don’t let him go- he’ll never be happy again.  I need him to be happy.  Because until he is, I can’t…”

He trails off then, because I don’t think Sing can bring himself to say the words.  Until Eiji is happy, Sing can’t ever be happy either.  He can’t ever let go of his own grief and guilt.  He can’t ever forgive himself for what’s happened.

We later learn from Eiji that he always knew about the letter, and how it led to Ash’s death.  He confesses to Sing that he’s always known, and that he let Sing suffer the weight of that horrible secret because he himself couldn’t bear the weight of his own guilt, his own sense of responsibility for Ash’s death, instead choosing to focus on hating Lao, and letting Sing carry the burden of that guilt.

Both of these reactions, Sing’s anger at Ash for still meaning so much to Eiji, for still having such a strong hold on him, that hold seeming to prevent Eiji from finding happiness, and Eiji’s failure to help Sing by unburdening him from the weight of the knowledge of how it was Ash was left vulnerable enough to be killed, are born from an instinct of self-preservation.  Sing lashes out at Ash, because in reality, he’s drowning in his own sense of guilt over it being his own brother that killed him, and feeling responsible himself for Eiji’s grief.  Eiji doesn’t tell Sing that he knew about the letter because he couldn’t face the pain of knowing it was his love for Ash that ultimately left him vulnerable enough to be killed, feeling himself responsible for Ash’s death.  They both blame themselves for what happened.  

They’re both wrong, of course, in that the only person to really blame for Ash’s death is Lao.  Lao chose to attack Ash.  Lao’s the one who killed him.

But Eiji and Sing’s sense of guilt here, their sense of crushing sorrow and grief, and their inability to forgive themselves over what happened to Ash, can be related back to Ash’s own, overwhelming sense of pain and grief and guilt.  Over Ash’s own need to leave his feelings unacknowledged and unprocessed, for the sake of self-preservation.  Eiji and Sing’s trauma in Garden of Light is heavy like the trauma Ash carried around with him his whole life.  And, I think, ultimately, both Eiji and Sing come to realize that.  They come to better understand, through their own suffering here, maybe how Ash actually, truly felt.  How Ash suffered every moment of every day, carrying the burden of the abuse he suffered through as a child, carrying the burden of his loneliness, carrying the burden of his remorse over the lives he had taken.  I think they finally understood the true cost  that such heavy pain can exact on a person, for their same inability to face or process their own, instead both of them running away from it, pretending it doesn’t exist, focusing their anger and pain on things and people who in reality have nothing to do with it.  Ash never had anyone to share the weight of his trauma and pain with.  He carried it around inside him, shoved down into the darkest corners of his being, never speaking of it to anyone, never unburdening himself to anyone, never allowed the process to grieve, to cry or deal with everything that had happened to him in his young, tragic life.  We only see him truly grieve for what’s been done to him in the famous scene with Eiji, when he cries in Eiji’s lap, and Eiji promises to stay with him forever.  It’s a single moment that Ash allows himself, and even in that moment, it’s but a fraction of the true horror of what Ash’s life consisted of.  Ash never had the luxury of the grieving process, for how his life was constantly under threat, and to stop and process his trauma for even a moment, to allow himself even to acknowledge it, would have meant his end.  He was never allowed to properly process the trauma of all the sexual abuse he suffered.  He was never allowed to grieve for his friends Skip and Shorter.  Never allowed to grieve for his brother, Griffin.  Never allowed to process the rejection of his mother and father.  Never allowed to come to terms with all he’d had to do in order to simply survive, out there on the streets.  Eiji and Sing, I think, at last understand they themselves have something that they’ve been taking for granted, a privilege that Ash never had.  The time to process their pain.  The time to come to terms with their suffering.  Another person, in one another, to share the weight of their shared guilt and sadness.  Ash had no one he could ever really talk to, because he knew no one who had gone through the same things he had.  His suffering was unique in it’s severity and nature.  Eiji and Sing went through the loss of Ash together.  They both shared the same hurt.  And they found in one another a person who could understand what they felt, once they actually acknowledged what it was they were feeling.

Ash’s trauma, in the end, was a burden he couldn’t overcome.  He never came to a place where he could love himself.  He never came to a place where he could forgive himself.  All of that pain, all of that sorrow, all of that loneliness and heartbreak, crushed him under it’s weight, and defined the parameters of his life in a way he could see no way out of.  He could see no escape from.  He dies in the end.  He lets himself die.  He lets himself go, into the peaceful embrace of death at last, Eiji’s love giving him the permission he always sought to let down the unbearable weight of his own pain.

I think, by the end of Garden of Light, Eiji and Sing understand this about Ash.  Sing struggled so hard to understand what was going through Ash’s mind in those final hours of his life.  Why he let himself suffer so much before death finally came for him.  He struggled to understand why Ash would let go like that.  And I don’t think he really understood until he allowed himself to acknowledge the pain of his own grief and guilt.  Until he acknowledged his own inability to deal with his suffering.  Eiji too.  Until they both realized and admitted to themselves, and each other, that they’d been avoiding it and running away from it because they couldn’t bear it’s weight.  I think then, Sing and Eiji both understood why Ash let go.  They finally understood that Ash was carrying a burden that he just simply could no longer hold, because they too were carrying a burden that was crushing them.  They understood that Ash letting go was his final release.  His final freedom from the pain of his life.  His salvation.  Eiji says to Sing he could never forget Ash.  That he wouldn’t ever want to forget him.  He says “Ash lived all out, one hundred percent.  You and I know that better than anybody else.  I’m just grateful, and proud… that I got to spend at least a short while in the company of that brilliant, miraculous life force.”  I think this is Eiji acknowledging that Ash always knew he was going to die young.  That he burned too bright to burn for very long.  That a person so brilliant and filled with light, so present and so real, simply couldn’t last.  Like a shooting star, or a flash of lightening, so bright it lights up the all of the darkness around it for just a brief moment.  And then it’s gone forever.  

I think this is Eiji finally accepting that Ash was okay with dying, and that, ultimately, it was in death that Ash could finally find peace.  That he at last found his rest, after a lifetime of fighting.  I think it’s Eiji’s realization about how he was dealing with his own pain that helps him to understand this about Ash, to understand why Ash would WANT to let go.  How, in the end, Ash could even find his one, true happiness in letting go.  With the wings of Eiji’s love to carry him away from all of his suffering.  Eiji’s love gave him permission to be free.  To finally fly.

And I think in this understanding, in this realization, Eiji is at last able to let go of his own grief and guilt and pain.  He’s able to accept Ash’s death, because he finally understands that Ash wanted more than anything to be free, and so finally, in death, he was.  And in that release of Eiji’s pain, Sing too is able to let go of his burden.  He too is able to again find happiness, because Eiji finds his own.  They’ll never stop missing Ash, but that isn’t a bad thing.  It’s a simple acceptance, an acknowledgement of their love for him, what he meant to them, and a gratitude for ever having gotten to spend time with such an extraordinary person at all.  They’re freed from their guilt and sorrow by understanding that Ash’s death was his release from his own suffering.  By the understanding that, for Ash, he found his own, true happiness in the end, knowing he loved, and was loved in return.  That he felt his own, overwhelming gratitude for the brief time he got to spend with Eiji, as Eiji feels for having gotten to spend time with him.  The acceptance that, for Ash, Eiji’s love was worth the price of his life.  That, for Ash, that love was the ultimate happiness, and with that feeling of love in his heart, he could finally just… stop.  Finally end his suffering and slip away.  Eiji and Sing are able to set down their own unbearable burden, as Ash was able to set down his, because Eiji and Sing finally understand why Ash did.  Why, in the end, he had to.

#Banana Fish #Ash Lynx #Eiji Okumura #Sing Soo Ling #Garden of Light #Meta

[bananafishmetas]

Ash and others perception of him:

cosmicjoke

This is gonna get long, and I keep amending it, sorry.  It’s difficult for me to work out what I’m trying to say, but here it goes.

One of the things I find most interesting about Banana Fish is the recurring theme throughout of what the other characters think of and how they perceive Ash, and how, almost all of them to the letter are completely wrong.  All, of course, with the very notable exception of Eiji.

Almost everyone speaks about Ash as if he’s some sort of otherworldly being. They often use terms such as “devil” or “Satan”, or “demon”, or “angel” when talking about him.  This occurs with Dino, Yut-Lung, Blanca, Foxx, and any number of other characters.  Even Ash’s friends, like Shorter, Sing, Cain, and his gang, talk about him like he’s almost inhuman.  And, more important still, there seems to be an across the board notion between all of the former characters that Ash will eventually, one day, become like them.  That he’ll become a monster.  A “Prince of Darkness”.  There’s even a notion among readers/viewers of Banana Fish that seems to buy into this notion.  That without Eiji and his influence, Ash would eventually succumb to the dark side, as it were.

But I think it’s something a little different than that.  Because, deep down, that isn’t who Ash is.  It isn’t what he has inside him.  Ash never cared about money, or power, or control.  He never had the desire or wish to dominate people, the way all of his abusers wanted to dominate him, and control him.  Despite the perceptions and beliefs of all of these characters regarding him as this incredibly dangerous, wild beast, what Ash actually is, is just a young kid who’s been horrifically abused and who is struggling every moment of every day simply to survive.  And the only one who seems to ever really understand this about him, the only one who ever really sees this about him, is Eiji.  Eiji even has that moment of internal dialog where he’s talking about how Ash has had to put on this facade of an ice cold heart, but that he knows it’s only, in reality, a defense mechanism.  To keep himself from losing his mind.  To keep others away from him because he’s been repeatedly hurt and betrayed by everyone in his life, especially adults.  To simply keep himself alive.  Ash shuts down when he kills, not because he doesn’t feel anything, as he keeps accusing himself of, but because he feels too much.  The very act of killing is so horrific to him, he’s naturally so repulsed by it, that he’s had to learn to shut off his own emotions in order to simply survive.  We know that killing has always been a terrible thing in Ash’s mind from Dino’s own words, near the beginning of the story, when he’s talking to Ash, and he reminds him about how he used to always cry with every “job” Dino gave him.  One can easily infer from this that he’s talking about forcing Ash to take out hits on people, to kill people.  Ash cried about it then because he hadn’t yet learned to detach himself from the act for his own sanity.  Of course, as this continued, as Ash was made to do more and more terrible things to survive his own, horrific situation, it gradually and consistently eroded away at his own self-esteem, until we see how he regards himself throughout the course of the story.  His deep self-loathing and disgust at himself.  The tragic irony, of course, is that Ash’s own self-hatred is proof in itself of his good heart. He hates himself for killing because it’s always been something he understood to be bad, to be wrong.  He’s never had a problem understanding the nature of killing.  He’s never had difficulty understanding what it is, or what it means to to kill.  He’s never had a lack of empathy or sympathy.  He was never a sociopath, or a psychopath.  He doesn’t care what the reasons for it are, or that he’s justified in it.  It still tortures him, to know that he’s taken a life.  It haunts him and eats away at him in the worst ways.

Ash relaxes around Eiji, because Eiji is the only one who knows that Ash isn’t this wild, out of control, vicious animal that everyone else seems to think he is. He knows that the cold, frightening facade he puts up is just that.  A mask, used to protect himself and those he cares about.  And because he knows that about Ash, he treats him just like a regular boy, which is all Ash has ever wanted.

The thing about this notion that Ash would become like Dino, or Yut-Lung, or even Blanca if Eiji hadn’t come into his life is, I think, wrong.  Eiji doesn’t give Ash his humanity.  Eiji gives Ash a sense of normalcy and a sense of what it’s like to be treated like a normal kid.  He makes him feel human, because he treats him like he’s human.  But even before Ash really knows Eiji, we see how deeply he cares about and is willing to sacrifice for those he loves.  When he goes after Skip after he gets abducted, and willingly gives himself up to Arthur and Marvin.  We see he’s formed deep and loving connections to people, like Skip, and Shorter and of course his brother Griff.  We see him show genuine, anguished emotion over all of them when they’re killed.  He cared about them deeply, and it wrecked him when they died through their association with him. That isn’t the reaction of a monster.  That’s the reaction of a human being who’s lost someone they love.  It hurts him to his core.

We see him go out of his way to spare the members of his gang who moved against him by working for Dino, telling them to get lost instead of shooting them. He spared Arthur even, during their turf war, when he took over all of Arthur’s gangs.  All of those acts of mercy eventually came back to bite Ash, because all of those people then turned around and betrayed him and tried to kill him.  And that really informs the one moment in Banana Fish in which Ash’s morality seems to waver somewhat, when he’s taking out members of Arthur’s gang in systematic fashion.  Even during this point in the story, Ash gives those guys ever chance to save their own lives by telling his own gang to get the word out that if they skip town, no one will come after them.  Ash and his crew will leave them alone, as long as they don’t join forces with Arthur against him.  After that, those who fail to heed his warning or accept his leniency, yeah, Ash goes after them without mercy.  But that, again, ties back into what we see earlier, with how Ash’s previous acts of mercy towards Arthur and others resulted in the situation he then found himself in.  The fight he has with Eiji, when Ash screams at him that if he shows any of Arthur’s gang mercy, they’ll just kill him, is founded in Ash’s own, brutal experiences.  He knows that if he lets those guys go who beg for their lives, that they’ll just run back to Arthur, regroup, and attack Ash and his crew again, not only risking Ash’s life then, but those who have placed their trust in him as their leader.  Ash’s actions here, as harsh and merciless as they may seem, are actually based on his own past experiences and logic.  He isn’t killing Arthur’s gang because he wants to.  Or because he’s trying to gain power.  Or because he thinks it’s fun.  He’s doing it because past experience tells him if he doesn’t, him and those who follow him are going to pay the heavy price of their lives.  It’s not even really revenge for Shorter’s death.  It’s defense through offense, protecting the lives of himself and his gang because he’s been forced to take action by Arthur’s refusal to leave him alone.  Even then, Ash is willing and wants to simply fight Arthur one on one to end the war, so no one else has to die.  He’s willing and even expects to die himself in order to save the lives of not only his gang, but Arthur’s gang.  That shows a strong moral conscience.  That shows goodness of heart.  It’s only again when Arthur betrays him and has his entire crew try to gun Ash down in the subway that Ash kills the rest of them. That’s pure self-defense.

Beyond that point in the story, Ash, from beginning to end, constantly displays a deep and powerful moral conscience, constantly going out of his way to help others, and tries very, very hard never to hurt or kill anyone he doesn’t absolutely have to.  We see Ash consistently unable to turn away when someone he knows or cares about is in danger, like Max and Ibe when they get captured in the mental facility Ash had just fought tooth and nail to escape from, literally running back into the line of fire to rescue them, directly putting himself in danger in order to help them.  He’s constantly pushing other characters out of the way of gun fire, putting himself instead in the line of it.  That’s a knee jerk reaction.  It’s just what he does naturally.  The same as Eiji.  He’s constantly into firefights in order to lead others away to safety, sacrificing himself physically to rescue others, sacrificing his own privacy and mental well-being for the cause of others, when he tells Max to use the photo’s of him being molested as a child to spare the other kids who’ve been through the same thing.  Ash only kills either in self-defense, or in defense of those he loves and cares about.  Even in heat of the moment situations, like when members of Sing’s crew shoot Eiji and try to kill him and Ash, even when Ash seems to have lost it, repeatedly shooting their already dead bodies, when Lao comes at him with a gun, Ash doesn’t kill him. He has the presence of mind to simply shoot Lao in the hand.  He isn’t ever an out of control wild animal.  That’s just what people have made Ash believe about himself, which is one of the most tragic aspects about him.  That he’s been manipulated into seeing himself as a monster, when he never was.  When Lao screams “He’s not human, he’s a monster!”, Ash doesn’t even defend himself. He agrees with it, even though it’s so blatantly untrue.  That shows the ravages on Ash’s mental and emotional state from the abuse he’s suffered.  But even with all of that, he never became like those who abused him.  He never tried to hurt anyone who didn’t try to hurt him first.  By contrast, everyone who claims Ash is some sort of demon, everyone who claims him to be this inhuman monster, all themselves tried to hurt Ash and those he cared about when he himself had never done anything to them.  Ash never did anything to Dino, or Yut-Lung, or Foxx, or any of those people.  He never went after any of them until they went after him first, or those he cared for.  Even towards those who failed him so miserably and set him on the path he ended up on, like his father, Ash showed incredible compassion and care towards, despite the awful way James treated him.  When Ash had every right to hate him.  But he didn’t, and in fact was immensely distressed when James was shot.

As an example of how intrinsically Ash differs from the other characters who deem him a monster or a demon, I think comparing him to the character who most resembles him is a good case in point.  That of course is Yut-Lung.  Yut-Lung suffered his own horrific abuses and cruelties at the hands of the people who were meant to care for him, namely of course his brothers.  And understandably, he wanted and was justified in taking revenge on them for what they did to him and his mother.  But here’s where he and Ash diverge from each other.  Yut-Lung has in him a capacity for deep pettiness, jealousy, and resentment.  Failings which he acts on again and again throughout the course of the story, without hesitation, and failings which Ash himself never displays even the barest hint of, despite having suffered similar and even worse abuses in his life.  Yut-Lung tries with absolute commitment to kill Eiji, over and over, simply because he can’t bear the idea that somebody actually loves Ash.  He can’t bear to see Ash have even a little happiness, in a life of otherwise complete sadness and pain, because he himself doesn’t have it.  He can’t stand the idea that Ash might find “redemption” through love.  And so he tries with all of his considerable power to take it away from Ash.  It’s the definition of pettiness and cruelty, which is something Ash, even in his darkest moments, never showed a capacity for.  I don’t think Ash ever had it in him to be so ugly and unkind and vicious.  He can be manipulative, of course.  But he only ever used those manipulative abilities to defend himself and others.  He never used them to hurt anybody who hadn’t first hurt him or those he cared about, or at least tried.  He never tried to hurt someone simply because they had something he didn’t.  He never tried to take something away from someone simply because he didn’t have it too.  He never resented anyone for having a better life than him, or for having love when all he had was pain.  And therein lies the difference between someone like Ash and Yut-Lung, and it means everything.  

Ash sees himself as a monster because everyone’s always told him he is, those people projecting their own monstrosity and ugliness onto him.  Trying to twist him into what they are, trying to force him into a position where he has no choice but to do terrible things in order to survive.  They try to corrupt him because they themselves are corrupted and cruel.  But somehow, despite all the horror of Ash’s life, he never becomes like that.  He never loses that part of himself that recoils at violence and abuse, that agonizes over having to make the decisions he has to to survive.  He never becomes petty, or cruel, or hateful.  He never becomes unable to love.  Like Ibe says about him “He’s such a good kid.  He’s just such a good kid.”.  I think Ash is able to resist becoming like the monsters who abused him because he had in him an innate goodness.  I think Eiji could see that in him from the start, when everyone else could only see a savage animal, or a beautiful commodity.  It’s also why I think Eiji was so profoundly drawn to Ash, because he could see that goodness in him from the start, and why he had the opposite feeling and reaction toward Yut-Lung, because he saw the pettiness and cruelty in him.  It’s why there were so many people who deeply cared about Ash.  Eiji, and Max and Skip and Shorter, and Sing, and his entire gang, and Cain, and why someone like Yut-Lung didn’t really have anyone who cared about him, except I suppose Blanca and Sing to an extent, but not with nearly the level of real love and respect Ash garnered.  Not with nearly the same loyalty.  And that’s also why both Sing and Blanca sided with Ash eventually, against Yut-Lung. As deep a capacity for cruelty and petty envy as Yut-Lung had, Ash had an equal capacity for kindness and love.  He just doesn’t realize it about himself because he’s been manipulated into thinking the opposite, and because he was so savagely abused and put into such nightmarish circumstances, that he had to do awful things just to keep living.  And that’s a massive tragedy.  That Ash is the only one who won’t forgive himself for having to do the things he’s done, despite the very real and justified reasons for those actions, is further testament to the goodness in his heart.  Ash can’t and won’t give himself a break, can’t and won’t forgive himself for it, even as everyone around him tells him he should.  Because Ash always was and always would have been a good kid, with a good heart, who understood from the beginning the awful reality and seriousness of taking another life.  He understood that in a way Dino and Yut-Lung and even Blanca never did.  Those things were always going to weight him heavily down with awful, crushing guilt and remorse.  He hated himself for having done it, and saw himself as worthless because of it.  He was never what the others thought of him as.  He was never this “prince of darkness”, never this demon, or devil.  He was just a young boy trying desperately to survive.

It’s Eiji who sees that about Ash, where everyone else fails to.  Even Shorter doesn’t understand in the beginning of the story why Ash lets those guys go who tried to kill him.  Even Shorter, I don’t think, understands the toll that killing takes on Ash.  It’s Eiji, and only Eiji, who sees Ash for who he really is.  It’s why he’s the only one Ash can actually be himself around.  The only one who LETS Ash be himself.  Why it’s only around Eiji that we see Ash really able to genuinely smile, and relax, and let down his guard.  Because he knows Eiji isn’t going to try and make him into something he’s not, doesn’t see him as something he’s not, and isn’t going to try and get something from him.  Who isn’t going to try and control him, or mold him into what they want him to be, or what they think he should be.  He understands why Ash acts the way he does, why he does the things he does, and he doesn’t judge him or condemn him for it.  He accepts it, and tries to help Ash forgive himself and love himself.

Even without Eiji coming into his life, I don’t think Ash ever would have become like Dino, Yut-Lung, Foxx or Blanca.  I don’t think Ash ever had the capacity to become a monster like them.  His heart was always too big, and he always cared too much, felt too much, to become that.  What Eiji did give Ash, which Ash never had before, was the knowledge of what it is to be loved.  He gave Ash a sense of what it was to be treated like a human being, not an object to be admired, or a weapon to be used.  He acknowledged that Ash had feelings. That he had emotions and thoughts of his own.  He treated him like he MATTERED.  He didn’t make Ash human, because Ash was always human.  He didn’t give Ash morality, because Ash always had morality.  But he was the only one who saw those things about Ash, where everyone else failed to, even Ash himself. And because he could see that about Ash, he was the only one who ever made Ash feel like a normal boy.  The only one who ever made Ash feel like who he really was.  The only one who ever allowed Ash to BE who he really was.

#Banana Fish #Ash Lynx #Meta

[bananafishmetas]

Ash, Skip and Michael

One of the most telling things from Banana Fish is Ash’s relationship with children.  We only see him interact with two in the entire series, that being Skip and Michael.  But I think it speaks volumes that it’s around these two characters that we see Ash noticeably soften in his attitude.  He’s actually tender towards Michael, and acts as a true comfort to him after Michael has suffered the trauma of his mother’s rape, walking with him and holding his hand, and actually hugging him.  Michael is the only character, in fact, that we see Ash actively initiate an embrace with in the series.  It’s always Eiji who hugs Ash, after all.  And of course Ash’s care towards Skip is just as obvious.  It says a lot, that, outside of Eiji, it’s really only around Michael that Ash lets his defenses completely down and allows himself to be so open with his affection.  It shows that Ash has a trust in children that he just simply doesn’t, and can’t have, in adults, or even older kids around his age.  

The same, I think, is demonstrated in his entrusting the care of Griff to Skip, out of everyone in his gang.  He trusts Skip to take good care of his older brother over everyone else.  I think Ash trusts these two characters so much because he himself has an intimate understanding of the implicit trust and innocence of children their age, because he himself had that same trust and innocence robbed from him right around the time he was Michael’s age.  I think Ash’s tenderness towards Michael demonstrates with heartbreaking clarity his understanding of the loss of that innocence in himself.  It’s even more upsetting when you realize that, the kind of comfort he offers Michael was exactly what he himself was denied by his own father when he’d come home that day, after being raped by his baseball coach.

Years later, in Garden of Light, we see Michael when he’s older, and he still thinks of Ash as his hero, and it’s because of that one moment when Ash gave him comfort after a traumatic experience.  Ash understood on a visceral level the importance of offering a traumatized child comfort, and the fact that that offer of comfort still affects and stays with Michael years later, is proof of its importance and impact on him.  How much it meant to him.  He only meets Ash that one time, but there’s an indelible impression left on him by that meeting.  An unforgettable importance in his memory of this amazing boy who gave to him freely what was always denied to himself.  That Ash had that understanding, in spite of only ever receiving the exact opposite, in spite of the blatant cruelty and abuse he suffered at the hands of every adult in his life, in spite of having only selfish and sadistic men to serve as role models for him growing up, is testament to Ash’s own innate goodness.  Further proof, again, that he never was a monster, and never could be, despite being surrounded by them his entire life, and with every effort made to make him the same.  

Anyway, I’d love to hear other people’s thoughts on this as well!  What does everyone think of Ash’s relationship to Skip and Michael?

#Banana Fish #Ash Lynx #Michael Callenreese #Skip #Skipper #Meta

[bananafishmetas]

Banana Fish, Ash Lynx and the consequences wrought by the abuse of children:

cosmicjoke

One of the things that most fascinates me about Banana Fish is its dedication to realism.  

We see Ash at various points throughout the story slipping into the daydream of going to Japan with Eiji.  This whimsical fantasy of being able to change his fate.  As he speaks of it with Eiji, there is a faraway, hopeful look in his eyes and in his expression.  A moment of allowing himself to imagine what that might be like.

But there is always this pervasive sense that Ash never quite believes it.  In those moments of fancy, his expression also contains a deep and tragic melancholy.  An understanding, beneath the distant dream, that fairy tales aren’t real, and that his world, his life, has always been defined by cruel, unrelenting, uncompromising reality.

Eiji tries so hard to convince Ash that he’s wrong.  That he doesn’t have to exist in this world of pain and violence and hopelessness.  That he can run away from it all, to have his happily ever after.  But Ash’s life, the things he’s experienced in his life, tell him the truth of it all.  There is no hope there.  There is no redemption.  There is no salvation.  He never truly believes in the dream, because Ash, despite Eiji’s efforts, never truly believes in himself.  To the very end, he believes himself to be a monster, and herein do we see the true damage wrought by the abuse he’s suffered.  Ash’s inability to see himself as he really is.  A boy who loves and is loved.  He sees instead only the wretched animal he’s been beaten into believing he is.

The ending of Banana Fish is brutal in its honesty, and that’s why I think it’s so upsetting to people.  It isn’t a fair ending.  The exact opposite, in fact.  It’s unbearably UNFAIR.  And that’s intentional.  We aren’t meant to enjoy the ending, or like the ending, or feel satisfied with the ending, because Banana Fish is itself an examination of the unfairness of life, and, above that still, the consequences of child abuse.

Ash deserved happiness.  He deserved his life.  He deserved a reward for all he’d been through.  He was so young, and had in him so much limitless potential.  When you consider Ash’s character, and all the extraordinary gifts he possessed, unsurpassed physical beauty, an IQ so high he was among the five most intelligent people on the planet, reflexes almost superhuman in quality, and, above all else, a heart which, in spite of the endless and sickening abuses he’d suffered throughout his entire life, held in it a capacity for such deep and compassionate love, it makes his loss all the crueler still.  

In Garden of Light, and New York Sense, we’re given glimpses into the lives of all the other characters we met in Banana Fish.  Eiji has become a world renowned photographer.  Sing is going to Harvard Business school, and already runs and operates a successful shipping company.  Yut-Lung continues to rule the Chinese mafia.  Max and Jessica have rebuilt their lives together, and find continued success in their own careers.  Later, we see Sing finds love with Akira, and the two of them are married, and later have a son.  Reading these stories, I can’t help but be left with a sense of deep, unrelenting sadness, for how it forcefully reminds you that, for Ash, he’ll never have any of those things.  For all his extraordinary abilities, he never was given the chance to make something of himself beyond what his abusers decided for him.  

We see Sing in Garden of Light looking over and reading the essays Ash had written and left behind on his computer.  Essays written on subjects as far ranging as politics, history, the economy, etc…  Sing is left in a kind of jealous awe over Ash’s abilities, disbelieving that a child of 17, 18 years old, could be capable of such brilliant insight and understanding of the world.  Sing encounters here the remains of Ash’s genius mind.  It is a heartbreaking reminder of what could have been.  

For all the success we see these others characters achieve, the accomplishments they’ve built out of their lives after Ash’s death, we’re left knowing that Ash himself could have been so much more.  He had every quality required to be a truly great person.  A young man who literally could have accomplished anything he wanted.  We even see early on, I think it was Inspector Jenkins, say that someday, Ash was going to win a Nobel Prize.  We see Eiji talk to Ash about not understanding what it’s like for the “have nots”, because Ash himself is so exceptionally gifted.  Max tells Ash that he gave his paper on Banana Fish to a botanist, an actual doctor of science, and the man was so blown away by what he read, he wanted immediately to know who the author was.  Ash scores at something like 98.8 % correct on a battery of impossibly difficult tests meant to determine his IQ, and it’s revealed that scoring in that percentile means he has an IQ of 200+.  Again and again, we’re shown and reminded of just how truly extraordinary Ash is.  It’s a recurring theme throughout the story, never allowed to be forgotten by the audience.  

And then, at 18 years of age, he’s killed, his life taken away from him, and all of those gifts, all of those abilities, all of those incredible possibilities are just… gone.  Vanished like dust to the wind.

Life, too often, deals those who deserve better a cruel and merciless hand.

Ash could have been anything he wanted.  He could have accomplished anything he set his mind to.  And yet, he never is given the chance.

It’s the very definition of unfair.  Unfair to Ash, for how all those possibilities were taken from him.  Unfair to the rest of the world, robbed as it is of such an extraordinary person, and all he could have contributed to it.

But then, that’s the entire point of the story, isn’t it?  The brutal unfairness of what happens to children like Ash.  Children who slip through the cracks.  Children who are forgotten.  Children who are abused.  Nothing in Ash’s life was fair, and so then, neither is his death.

Banana Fish refuses to undermine the true depth of the damage caused by child abuse.  And for that, I think it needs to be applauded.

Ash never learns to believe in himself.  He never learns to love himself.  He can never see past the life of pain and violence which consumes him, past what he is to the rest of the world, what he believes himself to be.  A street punk.  A monster.  An animal.  A machine.  A wretched self-loathing which shatters in him all hope, all sense of a real future.

This is the true damage caused by those who abused him.  The way they twisted his perception of himself beyond all reality.  The way they destroyed his ability to see the true value of himself, of is life.  The way they destroyed his ability to see the goodness in his heart.  The way they made him hate himself.  For it is in that very inability to see himself as he really is that Ash denies himself his own future.  He doesn’t take Blanca up on his offer to go to the Caribbean.  He doesn’t go with Eiji to Japan.  He doesn’t even allow himself to say goodbye.  He stays behind, condemning himself to the only world he’s ever known.  A world of violence and despair and loneliness.  The world he believes he deserves.  And by staying in that world, Ash too condemns himself to his fate.  He’s killed at the age of 18, never to grow older, never to make something more of himself, never to accomplish all he could have with his extraordinary gifts.  

In truth, it is the people who abused Ash who condemn him to this fate.  The consequences wrought upon a boy deprived of all love and care.  The result of endless, relentless cruelty.  A child pure of heart, who when he looked at himself, could only ever see a monster.

#Banana Fish #Ash Lynx #Meta

[bananafishmetas]

Ash and the unwanted gain of power:

I wrote this post as a response to the awesome meta by @vashak, regarding her post on gang leader Ash, which you can read here: https://vashak.tumblr.com/post/189907130780/gang-leader-ash

But since it turned out so long, I thought I’d post it as a separate meta of my own as well.  

Particularly, I think it’s important to take note of the fact that Ash never wanted to be a boss.  Neither does Sing.  Both of them are chosen to take on that role by the other street punks, because it’s decided among those groups that people like Ash and Sing are most capable of offering them protection.

Focusing on Ash specifically, it speaks volumes about his character that he accepts this responsibility, even as it isn’t something he ever chose for himself, or at all desired.  

We see in Angel Eyes, after Ash’s fight with Frankie and his men in the library, that the other inmates start treating him like a Capo, basically attaching themselves to him and showing deference to him, because they’ve realized Ash is strong, and can protect them.  Again, this is really important to point out, because Ash didn’t want this, or have designs to this affect.  Shorter even points out that Ash is made uncomfortable by the sudden deference, by the other inmates treating him like the leader, and Ash also shows confusion later on, when Shorter is talking about how Arthur tried to take a hit out on Ash because he could see Ash would eventually inspire that same kind of deference and following on the outside, making him a direct threat to Arthur’s rule.  Ash doesn’t understand what Shorter means, and expresses his confusion over it.  We also hear Dino talking about Ash to Arthur, explaining that Ash never had any ambition, directly in contrast to Arthur, who’s ambition knows no bounds, and how regrettable Dino finds this, because he knows if Ash did have ambition to be a boss like Arthur, there would be no stopping him from taking over every single turf in New York.  Dino initially sends Ash out onto the streets with the hope this will happen, setting Ash up to run jobs for him, whether that’s selling drugs or taking out hits on whoever Dino decides needs to be eliminated.  He forcibly injects Ash into gang life and culture, doubtless under various and horrible threats from Dino himself.  We know from Dino’s own words to Ash, and the way he mocks him by reminding him about how he used to cry with every job Dino made him do, that he was likely either threatening Ash’s life if he didn’t do as he was told, or threatening to put him back to work at Club Cod as a child prostitute.  And we know how horrifying that was and continued to be for Ash.  Ash didn’t want to be in a gang, or engage in criminal activities, but he didn’t ever have a choice.  He was completely under Dino’s thumb.  

Eventually, Ash does gain a loyal following.  It really becomes a substantial thing in reform school, and once he gets out, he doubtless has an entire crew that have attached themselves to him.  Again, because of his superior abilities, charisma and intellect, the other kids are just naturally drawn to him.  Ash doesn’t even have to try.  They just go to him because they can see he’s strong and capable of giving them protection.  But Ash never moves beyond this specific territory or specific group.  Eventually, he does come into conflict with Arthur, because that’s the territory Ash operates in, and of course he beats Arthur in one on one combat.  Further, the fact that Ash doesn’t kill Arthur, but spares his life, is more proof still not only of Ash’s ambivalent feelings towards killing, but of how he never particularly sought after the role of boss in the first place.  If he’d really wanted to solidify his position of power, he would have killed Arthur.  Again, this just all serves as proof of Ash’s reluctance to be in this role and position.

Ash never planned on becoming a boss.  The role was thrust onto him because of his superior abilities and intelligence.  The other street kids align themselves to him because they know he can protect them.  And even though Ash doesn’t want this role, he accepts it, because, and again, this speaks to Ash’s moral character, despite what he thinks of himself, and what others perceive him as, he feels a moral obligation and responsibility at this point to take care of these other kids who have selected him for exactly that.  He could easily refuse the obligation, and abandon them to be run by Arthur, who treats all of them as disposable.  Ash more than once proves his capability in handling himself.  He doesn’t need a crew to survive out there on the streets.  In fact, Ash is most effective and capable when he’s operating on his own, and doesn’t have to worry about anyone else.  His chances of survival are highest when it’s just him on his own.  And he’s not doing it because of any kind of loyalty to Dino, or because he thinks Dino will come after him if he doesn’t have a crew.  At the beginning of Banana Fish, Ash is already operating separately from Dino, and is only willing to work with Dino on equal terms, meaning they both benefit from whatever jobs they run.  He doesn’t operate out there anymore FOR Dino.  Which is also why he kicks those two members out of the gang at the beginning, for betraying him and going behind his back to run a job for Dino.  Again, Ash could have and probably should have killed them, but he showed them mercy instead, once more, because Ash doesn’t want to ever kill anyone if he doesn’t absolutely have to, and he has no actual desire for power.  He kicks them out because they’ve proven they can’t be trusted, which would endanger not only himself, but the other members of his gang and which, subsequently, they prove by immediately running to Dino and ratting Ash out, for which trouble they get themselves killed.

Ash accepts his role as boss because he cares about other people.  He understands that they’ve chosen him as their leader because he can protect them, and he takes that responsibility seriously and takes it onto himself willingly, even as he doesn’t want it and would in truth be better off on his own.  We see this proven also in the way Ash purposefully leaves his gang out of any truly dangerous business which is likely to get him or them killed.  He even is willing to sacrifice himself to spare the lives of Arthur’s gang, when he accepts Arthur’s invitation of a one on one battle, knowing it’s a trap and that Arthur is going to do something that will likely get Ash killed.  He’s willing to die to spare the lives of people who have already tried to kill him, not only his own gang members.  Those are the actions of someone distinctly NOT interested in gaining power, or assuring his hold on power.  He isn’t a good leader to his guys because he’s trying to assure his own safety or position.  If that was the case, he wouldn’t go into situations on his own where he believed he was going to die, or where there was a high probability that he would,  just to protect them.  He would be willing to risk their lives for his own if the only reason he cared about them was to protect his own position.  His willingness to sacrifice his life, and thus his position as leader, while at the same time protecting their own lives, actively keeping them OUT of danger, purposefully excluding them from being involved in risky situations so he can take the burden of them on to his own shoulders entirely, is proof that his motivation to be a good leader isn’t selfish.  He’s a good leader because he’s a good person. Because he takes his role as their protector seriously.  He’s willing to die to prevent more bloodshed between the two groups.  He deems his own life to be of less value than the lives of all these other people.  Of course, Arthur is a piece of trash, and he drags his own guys into it, sending them all after Ash at once, and Ash has no choice at that point but to fight back, not only for his life, but for the lives of his own crew.

He initially didn’t involve any of them in what was going on with Dino and Banana Fish, and didn’t want to involve Shorter either.  Circumstances led to all of them eventually getting roped into it, but Ash fought hard to keep everyone out, and was 100% ready and willing to take Dino on completely by himself.  He protects them constantly at risk to himself.  And it’s not only his gang that he tries to protect.  He tries to protect Sing’s gang, and Cain’s as well, by keeping them out of his war with Dino and Arthur.  Again, circumstances eventually lead to them getting involved, but Ash tried very hard to not involve them.  

It’s once more just an example of how Ash’s own choices and own wants and needs are never really something he’s allowed.  His entire life, he’s been under the control of one person or another, whether that be Dino, or Marvin, or any of the other men who have abused him, or even, unintentional though it may be, his own gang.  Ash’s life is more or less defined by his own free will and agency being robbed from him, and his endless, heartbreaking struggle to gain some small amount of it back.  

When Ash says to Eiji “I wish I could have been like you, Eiji.  I always wanted to live a better life than this.  A more normal life.”  He means that exactly.  He never wanted the life he has, he never asked for it, or tried for it.  It was thrust on him by other people, by other people’s decisions and other people’s needs and wants.  Ash was never asked what he wanted or needed.  Those things were never even considered.  It was just decided and chosen for him.  Like Ash says multiple times, he was treated by everyone around him like he wasn’t even a real person, like he didn’t have any real thoughts or feelings of his own.  Like he was just a doll, there for the benefit and pleasure of others, to do with as they pleased. One of the most tragic results of that, is that the life he has, has done nothing but bring him misery and despair and a crushing sense of guilt and self-hatred.  

It’s why Eiji treating Ash like a person means so much to him, and is so significant.  Because Eiji is the first and only person to ever actually do that.  To ever actually realize or care that Ash was a human being with his own thoughts, his own needs, his own feelings.  He was the first and only person to ever treat Ash’s pain like it mattered.

#Banana Fish #Ash Lynx #Meta

[bananafishmetas]

Ash and his eating disorder

cosmicjoke

One of the things in Banana Fish that I don’t see get discussed very often is the fact that Ash suffers from an eating disorder.  It’s just another, tragic consequence of the abuse Ash had been subjected to in his life, and I think it’s also something that can be explored in terms of how it came about that he developed this particular problem.

I was talking to the author of the Banana Fish/Avengers crossover fic, “Protective Custody”, which you can find on A03, and which I would definitely recommend!  But they were talking about how plausible they found the the theory that, since Dino so obviously micromanaged every aspect of Ash’s life, that that probably extended to Ash’s eating habits as well.  I’ve seen this addressed elsewhere in fan fiction as well, Dino basically terrorizing Ash into maintaining a certain weight to maintain his beautiful, fayelike appearance.  We know of course that Dino saw Ash as a commodity, as a piece of merchandise used to entice others in Club Cod and make money for Dino, and as Dino’s own, personal sex toy.  So of course he would want to maintain control over the way Ash looks too.  We even see Shorter make mention in Angel Eyes about how painfully thin Ash is, and how he’s supposed to be 15, but he doesn’t look anything near it.  Of course, we see Ash himself seemingly unnaturally concerned or preoccupied with his weight throughout the series.  He talks about getting taller without putting on any weight to Eiji like it’s a good thing.  He doesn’t order any real food at the restaurant with Max, and comments that Max needs to go on a diet when he has to wear his clothes after escaping from the mental health facility.  He tells Blanca that he doesn’t work out with weights because he doesn’t want to be a beef cake like Blanca.  And, of course, there’s the way Ash begins starving to death while in Dino’s possession again, being diagnosed with acute anorexia.  Ash later admits to Eiji that he wasn’t able to eat anything for about a month while being held captive by Dino.

No doubt this all started in Ash because of Dino’s abuse and wielding of power and control over Ash.  Later, after he’s on his own out on the streets, that control continues to exert itself over Ash in what’s probably developed as an insecurity regarding his weight, and a fear of becoming fat.  Who knows what Dino actually said to Ash, how cruel his words were in his attempts to control Ash’s eating.  Whatever they were, they obviously developed a complex within Ash.  Ash’s wanting to maintain a certain weight is probably, without him realizing it, a coping mechanism for him.  It goes from being something Dino made him do, to something Ash himself can control.  This one, small thing about himself that he can exert his own will over, while everything else in his life is out of his control, while his ability to decide for himself has been taken away.

Of course, when Ash falls into a deep depression while being held captive by Dino, that’s something else altogether.  It’s a well known consequence for people that suffer from severe depression, that they’ll often become so despondent and despairing that they can’t bring themselves to perform regular daily functions, like washing themselves, getting out of bed in the morning, or eating.  It isn’t a choice at that point, but a result of their mind and motivation shutting down, overcome as they are by hopelessness and despair.  We see the moment when this despair overwhelms Ash, while he’s working at the computer, forced into doing Dino’s dirty work.  His hands suddenly fall away from the keyboard, his head bows and he slumps down in his chair, falling into a state of near catatonia.  We see him before this, wracked by guilt and self disgust over what Dino’s just made him do with drawing up plans for how best to utilize Banana Fish.  When he realizes the truly twisted ways in which Dino is planning on using him, and that there’s no escape from it without running the risk of Eiji getting hurt, that’s when Ash succumbs to his despair.  Being in Dino’s control is so terrible for Ash, that he literally and figuratively begins to waste away under the crushing weight of it, and the hopelessness of knowing he’s trapped with no way out, forced even further into doing things he doesn’t want to do.  It’s only after seeing what’s happened to Ash while under Dino’s control that Blanca realizes what a massive mistake he’s made in delivering Ash to him, when he sees the way it’s literally crushing Ash’s will to live.  This entire situation is Ash’s usual difficulties with the concept of eating amplified tenfold by a soul crushing depression.

Anyway, what are everyone else’ thoughts on this particular aspect of Ash’s character?

#Banana Fish #Ash Lynx #Meta

[bananafishmetas]

Ash and how his intelligence relates to his pain

I talked about this in another post I just wrote about Ash’s overall sense of guilt and how that played a role in his ultimate demise, but thought it would be interesting to focus on this particular point I made, which is that, while Ash’s incredible intelligence served in helping him to survive for as long as he did, and to even cope, to some extent, with the severe sexual trauma he endured, able to understand and reason out that the abuse he suffered wasn’t, in fact, his fault, I think his intelligence is also what ultimately made Ash unable to get over the guilt and pain he felt over the lives he had to take in order to survive.

I made this point, that highly intelligent people like Ash are very often deeply sensitive too.  They feel things at a deeper level than less intelligent people because they see more deeply, they understand more clearly.  People with high intelligence are also more prone to depression.  More prone to despair, and we see Ash struggle with these things throughout the story.  There’s a deep sadness and a deep loneliness to Ash,

An important thing to note from early on in the story is when Dino mentions to Ash how he used to cry over every job Dino made him do, and we see Ash express anger and repulsion over how dismissively Dino regards human life and the act of killing.  Ash is keenly aware of the consequences of taking another human life, of what it actually means, and the pain he feels with each act of it stays with and continues to haunt him.  We never see the other characters in the story who have also killed, like Shorter, Cain, Sing, or the various members of any of their gangs, etc… struggle with anywhere near the crippling sense of guilt and self-loathing that Ash does over their own actions.  While there’s probably some sense of remorse on their part, having killed doesn’t bother them to nearly the same degree, doesn’t weigh them down with nearly the same level of consuming self-loathing, that it does Ash.  All of them, ultimately, are able to forgive themselves and move on, eventually going on to start relatively normal, happy, healthy lives.  None of these people are nearly as intelligent as Ash, of course.  

I pointed out before how ironic it is, then, that Ash has convinced himself that he doesn’t feel anything, that he’s this emotionless monster, because the truth is the exact opposite of this.  Ash feels TOO MUCH.  He feels more than all of them.  We see other characters, like Eiji, of course, and Cain, try to help Ash, telling him to not give himself such a hard time, to forgive himself, to explain to him that he was justified in the lives he took.  But Ash is never able to accept it.  He isn’t ever able to believe it.  He can’t unburden himself from his sense of guilt and grief and the trauma of his past because he cares too much, and I think that caring relates directly back to Ash’s intelligence.  Because he grasps at a deeper, more fundamental and innate level than a normal person would be capable of the true weight and meaning of a life lost.  He FEELS that loss in a keener, more pronounced way than other people, because his greater intelligence makes him more aware of the impact that loss has, the other lives it affects, the potential and possibilities it snuffs out, the reverberations of it’s reality upon the world around it.  It never remains for him an action only of the present, but an action which lives on and on forever in its implications and consequences.

This kind of overwhelming sensitivity links directly to Ash’s goodness of heart.  He can’t NOT care because he understands and sees too much not to.  Ironically, he values human life more than a normal person would, because he understands better what makes it valuable. One of the deep tragedies of Ash’s character is that this sensitive, caring nature, born of his intelligence, is innate to him, and he found himself, through no fault of his own, thrust into a world of cruel and merciless violence, one in which he had to take the very life he so profoundly understood the true value of in order to keep his own.

I also think Ash’s exceptional intelligence is directly linked to the deep sense of isolation and loneliness he feels.  Being as intelligent as Ash is automatically puts a divide between him and everyone else.  There’s maybe five or six other people on the entire planet who have an IQ as high as his, making Ash, in a very tangible and unavoidable way, unrelatable and fundamentally different from all of the people around him.  They sense Ash’s extreme intelligence, and it serves to intimidate and unnerve them.  They begin to treat him as separate and other, not like them.  We see this play out in the way his own gang members regard him.  They’re fond of and care about him, they respect him, and trust him, but they’re also afraid of him, and don’t ever just really hang out with him.  They never treat him like he’s just a kid, even though, actually, he is.  They never consider that Ash might want to be goofy, or silly, or have fun, like any boy his age would.  They only interact with Ash to take orders from him.  The impact this sense of remove has on Ash is undoubtedly profound.  It leaves him feeling friendless and alone, even as he’s surrounded by people who look up to and admire him.  It leaves him feeling like he can’t just shoot the breeze with or have fun with or relax with anyone.  Nobody is his “friend”, because they don’t treat him like a friend.  They treat him as their boss.  As the one most capable of protecting them.  They place on Ash the same weight of expectation that a child would place on a parent.  

Exacerbating all of this too is that none of them have experienced the same or even similar traumas to what he has.  He can’t talk to them about the kinds of things he’s been through, he can’t share that pain or unburden himself to them about it, because they would never understand in the first place, either what it meant or what it made him feel.  This inability on their part to understand how he feels applies also to what taking another life means to him, and how, again, his intelligence fundamentally alters how he absorbs the trauma of that compared to how they do.  They don’t feel the act of it in the same way he does, so they can’t understand why he reacts to it the way he does, and so he can’t talk to them about it, in the same way he can’t talk to them about the sexual abuse he’s been subjected to.   And because they don’t really perceive him as a normal person, or even really a person at all.  They see no weakness or vulnerability in Ash.  They see no reason for why he would ever need help.  Even as, in reality, he’s so deeply hurt and suffering, and needs help the most of all.  

It comes full circle, then, to his intelligence, and how it contributes to him feeling and caring so much, exacerbating his suffering and yet, again ironically, serving to cut him off from others, forcing him to bear the burden of that pain alone.

#Banana Fish #Ash Lynx #Meta

[bananafishmetas]

Further commentary on the ending of Banana Fish (Spoilers):

cosmicjoke

Look, I understand the controversy and upset surrounding the ending of Banana Fish.  My last post on this topic seems to have pissed some people off, which was never my intention.  But I think maybe I could have worded things a bit better, so I’m going to try again to explain why I feel like the ending of Banana Fish was so perfect.

It’s not a happy ending, and I don’t think anyone, anywhere, will try to tell you that the ending was meant to make anyone happy, or satisfied.  That’s the point.  It’s not MEANT to please the reader.  It’s meant to remain true to its narrative realism.  And in that realism, it’s meant to break the readers heart.  And boy does it do both.

I don’t think anyone would tell you, anyone with any ounce of feeling in their heart, anyway, that Ash didn’t deserve a happy ending, or that he deserved to die after all the awful shit he went through.  I think we can all agree that we would have wanted, if we had a choice, to see Ash have a happy, hopeful ending with Eiji in Japan.  We all agree that Ash DESERVED a happy ending, because he was a good person who was dealt about the shittiest hand in life a person can have.  And despite all that shit, he retained that innate goodness of heart that made him who he was.  He never became a monster, like the people who used him up and abused him over and over again.  That’s what makes him such an extraordinary character that’s deeply loved by so many people. He absolutely deserved to be happy.

But that’s the thing. Banana Fish is a story that deals in reality.  Everything that happens in the story, despite the often extraordinary, larger than life circumstances, is dealt with in a way that is, very often, brutally, painfully honest and realistic.  It doesn’t give us what should be, it gives us what IS.  And that makes perfect sense in accordance with its relation to writers like Hemingway and Salinger.  They wrote stories that dealt in brutal honesty and reality too, and both writers are referenced throughout Banana Fish.  And it’s Banana Fish’s commitment to that brutal honesty and reality that makes it an authentic piece of art.  People want a fairy tale ending, where Ash gets to ride off into the sunset with Eiji and live happily ever after, but at no point in Banana Fish are we given any indication that the story is, at any point, going to delve into the realm of unreality and fantasy, and give us such an ending.  To do so would have been a betrayal of the genuine nature of the narrative. It would have ultimately robbed it of its authenticity as a piece of art, and the story, as a result, would have been left hollow and lacking.  

Banana Fish, throughout its narrative, shows us that terrible things happen to good people, and that good people are often forced into doing terrible things.  It never shy’s away from that cruel, heartbreaking reality, and the ending is no exception.  

It affects us so deeply, and leaves us so upset, because it’s so REAL.  It feels genuine to us, it feels real, because it refuses to betray its honesty for the sake of a happy fantasy.  It remains loyal to the harsh truth of reality, and the harsh truth of Ash’s reality in particular.  Ash is a deeply damaged, broken person, who’s experiences in life are the very definition of cruelty.  Here is a boy who, since the age of seven, has experienced sexual, mental, emotional and physical abuse repeatedly and on a scale truly unfathomable to almost all of us. A boy who was forced into a life of prostitution in order to simply survive on the harsh streets of an unforgiving city.  A boy who, again out of a necessity for survival, has had to kill other human beings. A boy who, out of a desperate situation in which he was forced to choose either to save his soulmate or watch him be murdered by his best friend gone berserk in a mad, drug induced insanity, had to kill his best friend by shooting him straight through the heart.  A boy who, each time in his life that he’s tried to build real and meaningful relationships with other people, Griffin, the girl he liked when he was 14, Skip, Shorter, Eiji, he’s had to watch those people he allowed himself to grow close to either die or almost die, over and over again.  All of that combined creates a level of trauma that’s so far beyond the normal scope or understanding of a regular human being, so far beyond any discernable mechanism for coping with trauma, that to expect Ash to just get over it, for it all to magically be okay just because he moves to Japan with Eiji, is the height of unrealistic, and, again, would be a betrayal of the authenticity the story marries itself to from start to finish.  

Ash’s death is a tragedy, as his life was a tragedy, and the story is a reflection of that.  It stays true to that narrative, and never compromises on it.  That’s the point.  Life doesn’t always have a happy ending.  People that have suffered severe, irreversible trauma don’t always recover, and can’t always heal from it.  People who have suffered in the obscene and brutal ways that Ash has aren’t always going to be alright.  Sometimes it’s just too much.  For Ash, it was just too much.  Too much damage.  Too much heartache.  Too much pain.  Too much loss.  Sometimes we can’t overcome our damage, and that reality presented in this story scares people, I think, because it’s so nakedly honest and unapologetically expressed.

The ending is so god awful painful too because we see, in that moment after Ash reads Eiji’s letter, hope bloom inside him.  For an instant, this belief that maybe he can have a happy ending, when he thinks he’ll catch Eiji at the airport, and maybe go with him.  And in the next instant, he’s mercilessly reminded of that hope’s falsity. Hope springs eternal, but not always true.  Hope and happiness were never meant for Ash.  The chance for that was taken from him before he could even understand what those concepts were.  The thematic arc of the story was telling us from the start that it was going to end in tragedy.

People weren’t meant to LIKE this ending.  It wasn’t meant to make them feel good, or okay with what happened, or fulfilled.  In fact, I’d say, it’s meant to make you feel completely devastated.  As the story reflects reality, so often too does real life end in a way that leaves us feeling lost and confused and heartbroken.  Banana Fish is so good because it stays true to that sense of reality, right until the very end.

The ending doesn’t leave us feeling happy, but it sure does leave us FEELING.  Like any real piece of art would.  The emotions it conjures are immense and, for some I guess, too real. That sense of loss and hopelessness and pain it leaves us with is so effective because, again, it’s so honest. And I guess that because those emotions are so real, and felt so deeply, and with such intensity, it leaves some readers and viewers feeling angry.  Lashing out at a reality which they don’t want to accept.  The irony, of course, is that their hatred and rejection of the ending is testament to just how deeply the ending touched them.  It didn’t leave them feeling nothing, it left them feeling too much, and they then go into a state of denial, which is really just a stage of grief.  A refusal to accept.  You know Banana Fish is a true piece of art for that, in how it conjures sincere feelings of grief and mourning in us for its lead character in Ash.  We CARE about him, deeply.  We want him to be alright, because we love him.

But real art isn’t concerned with placation.  It’s concerned with truth.  So many great pieces of literature have unhappy endings, because that’s the truth of the human condition, and the condition of life in general.  Real art won’t shy away from those painful, awful truths, nor is it afraid to conjure the feelings which go hand in hand with those truths in its audience.  

With all that said, the tragedy of the ending doesn’t demand a feeling of meaninglessness or desolation at all.

Eiji’s love for Ash and Ash’s love for Eiji is still so pivotal and, ultimately, essential in how the story ends.  It’s what allows, maybe not a feeling of hope, but a feeling of peace.

You sense throughout the story that Ash knows he’s going to die.  Like he senses that his life is too fucked up, that he’s been through and had to do too many horrible things for it to last very long.  It’s like the saying of he who burns brightest burns twice as fast.  Ash is burning, and he knows it.  He’s already accepted it as an inevitable conclusion.  He doesn’t actively seek death, but he doesn’t fear, nor fight against it.  At points throughout the story, even, he asks for it, when the horror of what’s happening to him becomes too much.  He knows death is coming for him.  The only thing keeping him from giving in so easily I think is his lack of agency in how he will.  Everything has been taken from Ash, and he doesn’t want to give this last thing away. This choice in how he dies.

Eiji’s love is what finally gives him agency in that decision.

Ash died knowing Eiji loved him, and that knowledge, that certainty that he was loved, genuinely loved by another human being, without any strings or conditions attached, simply loved for himself alone, is what allowed Ash to finally find the peace in death which alluded him in life.  He no longer feels like he has to keep fighting, or struggling on through an endless malaise of misery and pain, because he’s finally found the calm and acceptance which comes with knowing he has this one, pure thing for himself, which nobody, none of his abusers, can ever touch or take away.  With everything else that’s been stolen from Ash, his innocence, his sense of agency, his own body, his own mind, Eiji’s love for him is the one thing nobody could ever steal away.  And that’s, I think, why Ash dies smiling, because it’s that knowledge, that he was worthy of another human being’s true love, that at last shows him that he was a human being himself.  Not an animal.  Not a monster.  He was a human being worthy of love.

Ash’s death is heartbreaking, and brutal, but there’s deep consolation to be had in knowing he spent his final moments with the feeling of Eiji’s love for him alive inside his heart, allowing him at last to feel like a person deserving, worthy of love.

It’s that which allows Ash to finally let go of his struggle, and let’s death’s embrace take hold of him.  It’s his own. Eiji’s love, and his choice to let go of life.

It doesn’t make the ending any less heart wrenching or brutal.  It doesn’t make us any less devastated by Ash’s death.  But it gives us a sense of peace, in knowing, even if we are left feeling lost and heartbroken, Ash himself left life with the fulfillment of knowing he was loved.

cosmicjoke

Thinking more on the reasons why Ash chose to let himself die, I haven’t seen anyone mention how really, it’s probably a combination of all the reasons stated, not just a single one.  Ash’s wish to protect Eiji, Ash’s own weariness at his constant struggle to survive, Ash’s overwhelming trauma, and Ash’s contentment at finally finding true unconditional love and acceptance from another person, immeasurably grateful for the chance to know how that felt, even if just for the briefest of time in a life otherwise burdened by suffocating pain and sadness.  All of these factors no doubt contributed to his ultimate decision in the end.

One thing I was thinking about too was that, given how we see Eiji’s letter prompt Ash to try and make it to the airport, whether to see Eiji one last time, or to actually go with him to Japan, I think once Lao’s attack happened, Ash was brutally reminded of the danger that followed him everywhere he went, how it would never end, that he would never be a safe person to be around, and that reminder, taken with the realization of what he had been about to do, how his vow never to see Eiji again had crumbled in the face of Eiji’s love, and his love for Eiji,  Ash probably felt fearful of his resolve cracking again.  With the reinforcement of his conviction of the danger he would put Eiji in were he to be in his life, he decided then and there, in that moment, to eliminate that possibility by letting himself die, rather than risking his resolve once more abandoning him.  I think, as well, Ash understood that Eiji himself wouldn’t be able to stay away from him, were he to come back to New York, that Eiji WOULD come back to New York, and it would be the same dilemma, with Ash putting him in danger simply by being near him.  So, then, Ash letting himself die was his final act of sacrifice for the one person who had given him true unconditional love and acceptance.  His final act of love for the one person who had made him feel human.  His final gift, for the one person who had let him be the boy he truly was.

There’s also the concept of, if you love someone enough, you let them go.  Ash had always understood that sometimes, in order to protect the ones you loved, you had to hurt them.  Sometimes, in order to protect the ones we love, we have to be willing to push them away.  We have to be willing to hurt their feelings.  “Tough love”, as it’s called.  Sometimes needing to be harsh, even unkind, in order to help, in order to protect.  Willing to sacrifice feelings and sentiment for the practical safety of another.  We see this with Ash trying to always send Eiji back to Japan.  Even knowing it would hurt Eiji, in the long run, he knew it would be better for him, and so he’s willing to incur Eiji’s anger and maybe even hate, to take that burden onto himself, in order to help Eiji.  I think the same applies to letting himself die.  Ash could only ever see himself as bringing Eiji pain and as endangering Eiji’s life, and he was willing to sacrifice Eiji’s love for him to keep Eiji safe.  He doubtless knew Eiji would be hurt by him dying.  That that hurt might even turn to hate.  Ash was willing to sacrifice the love Eiji had for him in order to ensure Eiji had a long, well lived life.  I think it also ties back into Ash’s inability to love himself, or to ever see himself as deserving of Eiji’s love, even as he knew he had it.  Because Ash was unable to see his own worth, it’s likely he felt Eiji would eventually come to the same realization, and be able to move on from him.  That Eiji would eventually realize Ash hadn’t been worth his love after all, and get over his death.  Again this comes back to Ash and the best way he knew how to express his love for others.  He was always willing to let someone hate him if it meant keeping them safe.  He was willing to let them think he was a jerk, or an asshole, as long as it meant they would be okay.  

To Ash, Eiji’s hate or anger would be worth keeping Eiji safe. When you’re willing to let someone hate you because you think their lives will be better if they do, pushing them away from you for their own good, taking on the burden of their anger and hate so they can be alive and free.  When you think you’ll only hurt someone by letting them love you, the way Ash felt letting Eiji love him would, then it makes all the more sense why he was willing to let himself die.   In some ways, that’s the ultimate sacrifice, the ultimate show of love, when you’re willing to sacrifice someone’s love for you because it’s the only way to keep them safe. I think this, too, probably played a part in Ash’s decision to let go.   He never wanted to hurt Eiji, and I don’t think he ever knew just how much his death would, ultimately, again tying into Ash’s inability to see his own worth.  He was only doing what he thought was right, expressing his love the only way he really knew how, by sacrificing himself.

Ash needed Eiji to live, and if that meant he had to die, then that was okay.

#Banana Fish #Ash Lynx #Eiji Okumura #Meta

[bananafishmetas]

Ash and his consistent lack of hate

It is an important point in understanding Ash’s character to acknowledge and examine his consistent lack of malice in everything he does, even when committing acts of violence.  He isn’t at all a hateful person, and this is an important and defining character trait which has a direct impact on his decisions and the events that eventually unfold within the story.  When you take into consideration all that Ash has been through, the extraordinary depth of suffering he has lived through in his young life, the absence of hate in his heart is all the more astonishing, and you understand then this lack of hatefulness can only be natural within him for it to endure through such overwhelming pain.

More striking still for how you realize all of Ash’s enemies are driven and consumed by their own hatred, in one form or another, motivated by their inherent cruelty, twisted desires, and self-serving ambition, while Ash himself never displays any sense of real venom or hatred, even towards those who have committed unspeakably horrific acts against him.

Certainly, Ash feels anger, even rage, towards those who have repeatedly and unforgivably wronged him, but never actual hate.

Let me explain.

Let’s start at the beginning.

Ash first kills at the age of eight.  It is the desperate act of a child forced to defend himself after the abject failure of the adults around him to protect him against the horrific sexual abuse he’s suffered at the hands of a monster meant to serve as a role model and guardian himself. First, in the police, the supposed representatives of “justice”, refusing to believe Ash, before outright blaming him for it happening, accusing an eight year old child of “seducing” his abuser.  And then in Ash’s own father, failing to keep his own son safe, allowing the abuse to go on, again and again, for who even knows how long.

Ash later tells Eiji that he cried afterward, because he didn’t feel anything while he did it, but Ash’s very admission at having cried contradicts this claim.  He felt deeply over the act he’d just been forced to commit, an act Ash was too young to fully comprehend the meaning of, too young to grasp it’s full implications, either for himself or anyone else, but upset enough by it to reduce him to tears afterward.  The fact that Ash cried at all over having killed a man who repeatedly and brutally raped and molested him and who would have eventually killed him, given the numerous other children he had already murdered, is remarkable.  There was no malice behind Ash’s act.  No hatred.  No pleasure.  No satisfaction.  Ash didn’t kill the baseball coach out of a sense of revenge, or because he wanted to. He killed him because he had no choice. He killed him, because nobody else was able to protect him.  Because he was an eight year old boy who simply wanted the pain to stop.  It was purely an act of self-defense.  

This connects to later on in the story, and to Ash’s relationship with his father.  

Ash has every reason and right to hate his father.  Firstly, for how James Callenreese was so neglectful and uncaring a parent when Ash was born and growing up, that he would have starved to death if Griffin hadn’t stepped up and taken responsibility for his care.  Secondly, for how it was essentially James’ fault that Ash ended up alone, at the age of eight, on the streets of New York, only to be found and captured by a twisted pedophile in Marvin, again repeatedly and brutally raped, passed along to Frog to have more of the same done by him, before being sold to another pedophile in Dino, and into an underground child sex trafficking ring, only for the abuse to continue on like that for years and years more, before he’s forced into a life of crime and violence, out on the streets again. And then, when at last Ash returns home to Cape Cod after ten years of this absolute nightmare of abuse and suffering, he is greeted by his father calling him a “whore”, accusing Ash’s friends of being “clients” of his, and proceeding to then tell Ash to “get out”. Real father of the year material here.

And yet, despite all of that, and it is a LOT, Ash doesn’t hate his father.  Why?  Because Ash, at his fundamental core, is a good person.

Ash never shows any hatred, not even any real anger towards his father, despite the utterly blatant verbal and emotional abuse James lays on him, refusing to take the bait of his father’s petty tactics of hurling insults and accusations, blaming Ash for everything that’s happened to him, because he’s too much of a coward himself to face his own guilt and accept his own role and responsibility in his son ending up like he has.  Ash only responds to James’ cruelty with a quiet resignation and acceptance of his father’s rejection and hostility, telling his friends to forget it when they express shocked horror at James’ treatment of his son, and promising to leave once he gets what he came for from the other house on the property.  Later, when James is shot, Ash shows genuine pain and concern for him, and breaks down into tears when he’s forced to flee and leave his injured father behind.  He forgives his father for his weakness and his cowardice, and doesn’t hold his rejection of Ash against him, despite, again, having every reason and right to hate the man.  Ash, in spite of it all, still loves his father, in defiance of all the pain the man has caused him.

This is a truly extraordinary display of kindheartedness on Ash’s part.  A testament to the astounding goodness innate to him.

And that innate goodness which so characterizes who Ash really is continues on in him, even as he’s thrust into a nightmarish hellscape of violence, cruelty and savagery.  

The next example to look at as proof of Ash’s inherent goodness, is the conflict between him and Arthur.

The first conflict between them arises when Arthur sets Ash up to be sent to Juvenile Detention, and then proceeds to bribe another inmate to try and kill Ash for him.  Arthur tires with very real intent to kill Ash, because of the assumption that Ash is, one day in the future, going to be a threat to him and his claim to power among the youth gangs of New York.  Because of Ash’s natural abilities and intelligence, he can see how others are just naturally drawn to this young fifteen year old boy, inclined to follow him, and he wants to eliminate Ash before his own crew members start ditching him for someone better.  He does this, even though Ash has never actually done anything to hurt Arthur up to this point. This fact is really important to note.  While in Juvie, Ash, due to those natural abilities Arthur so feared, begins to attract the other street kids to him, without even wanting it or having to try. Ash makes no attempt to win their loyalty or alliance, and is made uncomfortable when they start to give it to him, because it isn’t something he ever strove for or wanted.  Not something he ever intended to gain.  Ash shows no ambition towards that goal, and it’s even mentioned more than once by Dino in the story that Ash has never shown any real ambition or desire to be a gang boss.  The other streets kids, therefor, give him their loyalty of their own volition. They realize, after Ash’s fight with Frankie and his crew in the library, that Ash is superior, and capable of protecting them, and so they start to follow him around, aligning themselves with him, forming a gang around him.  

Eventually, more and more street punks choose Ash as their leader, and you have to assume, by the time he gets out of Juvie, he’s got a fairly sizable crew of street kids ready to follow him wherever he goes and in whatever he does.  Again, it’s vitally important to note that Ash didn’t choose this.  It instead chose him.  Ash accepts this responsibility placed on him by the other street kids, because the real reason they’ve chosen him is because they think he can protect them and keep them safe.  

This new reality for him, and the attempt to kill Ash, of course, leads to an eventual, unavoidable one on one confrontation between him and Arthur.  Ash wins.  At this point, Ash has every right to kill Arthur.  Not only would it be accepted, but it would be expected by the other street punks, and would also prove to be of great benefit to Ash, both in eliminating a legitimate threat against himself and in solidifying his newly acquired position as gang boss.

And yet, Ash doesn’t kill Arthur.  He lets him live, his only punishment to Arthur for trying to kill him and losing their fight to destroy Arthur’s ability to use a gun.  And given Arthur’s reputation for ruthless violence and brutality out there on the streets, and his obvious willingness to kill people who have never done anything against him, along with this being an act of mercy, this is also Ash’s first step in ensuring the safety of the kids now under his command.  Once again, him accepting the responsibility those same kids have placed on him.  He’s making sure, even as he lets Arthur live, that he doesn’t have the ability to easily kill anyone else.  He also allows Arthur to keep operating in the area, even when Arthur has done nothing to earn that right.

Ash’s act of mercy would later come back to haunt him, for reasons all of us already know of course.  

Arthur says to Ash, right before their final battle, “Ain’t you gonna ask?  Don’t you wanna know… why I hate you so much?  You know why, huh?”  Ash tells him “yeah”, he does know, and then he says “But that ain’t my fault”.  They’re talking about Ash’s natural abilities, his natural talent, the way people just chose him to be their leader.  Arthur admits this is true, that it’s not Ash’s fault that he has these things, or that people naturally want to follow him.  And then Arthur says “Y’know, you’re absolutely right… You prob’ly never wanted it that way.  But that just makes me hate you all the more.”.   Arthur is driven by his hatred of Ash specifically because he knows Ash doesn’t even want to be a boss, while Arthur himself wants it more than anything.  Ash is so naturally gifted and charismatic and capable, that he inadvertently draws people to him, without him even having to try, without him even meaning for it to happen.  Arthur hates Ash for this, is overwhelmingly jealous and envious of his talent, his hate compounded by Ash not even wanting the gifts that make it seemingly so easy for him.  Again, this is similar to Yut-Lung, in how we have a character who is consumed by their hatred towards Ash for having something they don’t.  The sickening irony here is that, all of these gifts and abilities which people like Arthur are so jealous of, have done nothing but bring Ash misery and pain.  His good looks, his intelligence, his physical reflexes.  They’ve all been used as excuses for others to destroy and take away his life and his choices.  It’s the very reason Ash gets into a fight with Eiji, when Eiji scolds Ash for not understanding how people who don’t have his exceptional abilities feel.  Ash gets so angry here, because Eiji is making the same mistake that everyone makes when they see Ash and everything he seemingly has, assuming it makes his life better, when in reality, all having these exceptional abilities has done is make his life exponentially worse.  Eiji eventually realizes this, realizes the mistake he’s made in judging Ash for the choices he’s had to make, and that’s when we see Eiji vow never to leave Ash’s side, and to simply accept him for who he is.

But back to the topic, Ash’s initial mercy towards Arthur, despite all of this, serves as a prime example of his lack of hate, once again, against a person who himself outwardly hates Ash, who did him and intended him very real harm.  Once again, Ash’s actions aren’t motivated by any feeling of malice, or vengeance, or to satisfy any sort of urge, but by self-defense, and defense of others.  

This is mirrored in Ash letting the two members of his own gang live after they had betrayed him by working for Dino, even as, once again, it would have served him better to simply kill them, once again his act of mercy coming back to haunt him when those two run back to Dino and rat Ash out about his knowledge of Banana Fish.  

Ash shows mercy again when letting his would be assassin in Chinatown live, telling Shorter’s guys to let him go.

Other, more minor examples, but still just as telling about who Ash is, is his initial dynamic with Max.  When Ash and Max first meet, their relationship is nearly antagonistic, the two of them even coming to blows a few times, Ash feeling deep anger towards Max for shooting Griff in Vietnam and leaving him abandoned in a state hospital afterward, Max consumed by guilt over the fact.  But even in this initial anger, Ash eventually admits that he doesn’t hate Max.  He says specifically to Max “I wish I could hate you.  I needed someone to hate.”.  Even when Ash wants to hate someone, he can’t bring himself to.  Again, further proof of how that kind of malice just isn’t natural within him.  He can’t bring himself to hate, even as he actively tries to.

The same applies to Blanca.  Blanca gives Ash plenty of reason to hate him when he initially shows up in the story. Blanca was really the only adult in Ash’s life before the main events of Banana Fish who didn’t actively abuse him, or really even use him in any way, and was thus able to gain his trust and even admiration.  It’s safe to say that Ash looked up to Blanca and saw him as a protector to at least some extent from the rest of the abusive men around him.  Blanca’s betrayal of Ash to Dino then must have been particularly painful to him.  At the start, not only does Blanca stalk Ash and work him needlessly up into a state of extreme anxiety and fear (remember, this is a kid who’s constantly having to look over his shoulder, constantly living under the stress and pressure of having his life threatened), but he then forces Ash into sacrificing everything he’s worked and risked his life for up to this point in the story, everything his friends and family have died for, his very freedom itself, by turning himself back over to Dino’s clutches, allowing himself to be held captive by his oldest and longest abuser, all because Blanca is threatening to kill Eiji if he doesn’t.

Even with all of this, and again, just like with his father, it’s a lot, Ash never shows any real malice or hatred towards Blanca, or expresses any desire for revenge against him. He only ever shows real anger and hurt, understandably, but even then, eventually, he forgives Blanca entirely, and puts his trust in him again by accepting his help.  In the end, he even wishes Blanca good luck with his life, and displays a genuine fondness for him in their final encounter.

The next, prime example of Ash’s lack of malice is in his rivalry with Yut-lung.

Yut-Lung does some truly horrific things to Ash.  Firstly, in his blackmailing Shorter into betraying Ash by threatening to kill his sister Nadia, essentially acting as the lynchpin that set the events in motion that would lead to Ash having to kill his own best friend in order to save Eiji, in turn causing Ash untold emotional and mental damage.  Secondly, by allowing his own, petty jealousy and hatred to force Ash into a position in which he has to give up everything he’s worked for in uncovering and exposing the truth behind Banana Fish, to break free from Dino, to avenge his brother, and Shorter and Skip, and to sacrifice his very freedom in order to protect Eiji, and after that, again allowing his jealousy and hatred to lead him in setting into motion numerous attempts to destroy the one good thing Ash has ever had in his life by trying to kill Eiji.  After all of this, once again, it would be more than understandable and justified if Ash hated and wanted to kill Yut-Lung.  And yet, once again, there’s never any real sense from him that he does.

We see him threaten to kill Yut-Lung immediately following Shorter’s death, when Ash’s own emotions are running sky high, dealing with unimaginable trauma and pain. Yut-Lung comes into the room Ash is being held captive in, mockingly leaving him the key to secure his escape, and Ash’s angered, threatening reaction to him at that point can only be expected.  Anyone in Ash’s position would do the same.  

After that, we see Ash confess to Eiji that he doesn’t really know if Yut-Lung is a friend or an enemy, which tells us that Ash never really meant what he said before, and that he had no real plans to go after Yut-Lung at that point, willing to simply let it go. Proven further by the fact that Ash never really makes a move against Yut-Lung until Yut-Lung himself goes directly after Ash and his allies.

Later still, after Yut-Lung has been involved in numerous situations which have caused Ash incredible suffering, we see him take Yut-Lung hostage and once more threaten to kill him.  But, once again, this isn’t an act or revenge, but a desperate gambit to get Eiji and the other hostages being held by Yut-Lung’s men released.  Ash doesn’t want to kill Yut-Lung.  He only wants to protect Eiji and the others.  He only threatens Yut-Lung here for that purpose and that purpose alone.  

After this, while talking to Cain, Ash says “I should have killed him when I had the chance.”, and his expression is, just like with his father, one of resigned sadness.  He knows Yut-Lung could very well one day be his undoing, but even in that moment, there’s no sense of hatred, or even anger towards him from Ash.  No sense, either in his words, or his expression, of wanting to make Yut-Lung pay for all he’s done, or to make him suffer.  No indication that he has any plans to go after Yut-Lung.  And this is further confirmed by Ash’s final conversation with Blanca, when he says as long as Yut-Lung leaves him alone, then Ash won’t go after him.  Even when Ash says to Blanca before that, that he would tear Yut-Lung apart if he ever got his hands on him, there’s an expression of joking amusement on Ash’s face, a clear indication that he doesn’t really mean what he’s saying in that moment.

Then of course, there’s Dino.  Dino is Ash’s greatest enemy, and the root source of a great deal of his pain and suffering.  Dino is the only person in the story who Ash shows an active desire to get revenge on, for obvious reasons that don’t bear repeating, and most certainly feels hatred towards.  But even in this, when Dino finally meets his demise, and Ash watches him fall to his death into the fire below, there’s no look of satisfaction, or happiness, or even relief on Ash’s face.  There’s no sense of triumph.  Ash once again only has that same resigned, even sad expression on his face as the person who tormented and abused him more than any other in his life finally dies. There isn’t any malice, no glee, not even any real anger, because, in the end, Ash’s desire to break free from Dino was never motivated by hate.  In the end, just like with all his other enemies, Ash’s only motivation was to be left alone.  To be free. Even for the person most deserving of his contempt, Ash couldn’t ever really bring himself to feel it fully. He couldn’t ever conjure enough hate in his heart to be driven forward by it, even against Dino.  It shows us with plain clarity the innate goodness of Ash’s heart then, that against all odds, that goodness won out against the abuse and cruelty every time, never destroyed, for how pure and powerful it lived within Ash.  For how much it was a part of his soul.

The tragedy of it all then, you realize, is how, if these monsters had only ever left Ash alone, none of any of it ever would have happened.  But of course they couldn’t, their hatred, greed, perversion and lust for power too strong within them to let a 17 year old boy who just wanted to be left  alone, be, underlining in stark and startling relief the total contrast of who these people were against who Ash was.  Monsters consumed by hate, against a boy who loved too much.

#Banana Fish #Ash Lynx #Meta

[bananafishmetas]

Ash and Shorter in Angel Eyes

cosmicjoke

So, I just finished my read through of Banana Fish.  Yes, I cried my eyes out.  I then finally got around to reading Angel Eyes all the way through for the first time, and man, what an awesome side story.  There’s so much to talk about from it, and so much to explore, but there’s something really specific I noticed, which I think ties into my other post about other people’s perceptions of Ash, and which also relates to the last conversation we see between Ash and Blanca.  

In the first three quarters of Angel Eyes, Ash comes across as very cold, as very unfeeling, and even frightening.  Even Shorter at one point is so scared of Ash that he doesn’t want anything to do with him.  Of course, by the end of the story, we realize his cold demeanor was, again, a total front.  A wall put up to keep people away from him, including Shorter, because he seriously doesn’t know who he can trust.  He’s wary of Shorter precisely because Shorter’s being nice to him, and nobody’s ever been nice to Ash for no reason.  Ash is only going by his experiences in life to inform his decisions.  His experiences tell him that anybody being nice to him is doing it because they want something from him.  This, coupled with Frankie essentially submitting to Shorter’s demand that he stop harassing Ash at the beginning, and Ash’s having already pegged Frankie as an assassin, naturally makes Ash even more suspicious of Shorter.  Eventually of course he realizes, after talking to Shorter and asking him if Frankie is part of his crew, that that’s not the case.  But he still doesn’t trust Shorter.  He still keeps him at a long distance and doesn’t tell him anything about himself.  Well, why would he?  He’s just met him a week ago and Ash’s life experiences tell him he can’t trust anybody.

Well, the thing I wanted to really talk about here, and I think this is a prime example of how it is that Ash was never this ruthless, cold-hearted killer, is the moment directly following the fight between Ash and Frankie, where Ash very nearly kills him.  He only doesn’t because Shorter shouts at him as he’s charging Frankie with the pool cue and distracts him enough with that that Ash messes up his aim.  Shorter runs after Ash afterward to thank him for “going easy” on Frankie, and we see Ash start to laugh, seeming almost demonic in his reaction as he explains to Shorter that he didn’t “go easy” on Frankie.  He meant to kill him.  Of course, when we later realize that Ash knew Frankie meant to kill him, his own intent to kill makes more sense.  But there’s a very important bit of dialog between Ash and Shorter afterward, which speaks volumes about who Ash really is inside.

He thanks Shorter, and then starts saying “So that’s it.  Deflect it slightly at the last second.  I didn’t DECIDE to go easy on him.  But now I finally know how.”  He says I “finally” know how.  

Now lets take this back for a moment to Ash’s last conversation with Blanca in the park, when they start talking about how Blanca never taught Ash how to go easy on an enemy.  He says to Blanca “”Never let your enemy escape alive.”  You’re the one who taught me that.  I never learned how to go easy on someone I’m fighting.”  And then Blanca replies, while smiling fondly, “That’s because I was told there was no need to teach you that.”.  

These two pieces of conversation taken together tell us everything about Ash, and his attitude towards the idea of having to kill, even for reasons as justifiable as self-defense.  

Blanca taught Ash how to kill with the efficiency of a professional hit man.  He taught him how to react and kill in the quickest, easiest and most efficient way possible.  He never taught him how to hold back once he was in the midst of a fight.  Once he got going, he would become a killing machine, so to speak.  And we see this from Ash throughout the series.  Once he starts fighting someone with the intention to kill them, he goes through with it with frightening precision and effectiveness.  Blanca never taught Ash how to simply incapacitate an opponent using a deadly weapon, he never taught Ash how to only maim, instead of kill.  All of his lessons were geared towards showing Ash how to take the life of an enemy, nothing more, nothing less.  Dino didn’t want Ash to carry out threats or warnings.  He wanted him as a hit man.  But Blanca’s words to Ash, that he was told he never needed to teach Ash how to go easy on an enemy, tells us that someone, Dino most likely, told Blanca that Ash was already too soft-hearted and too merciful, and that he shouldn’t bother with teaching Ash anything but how to kill.  Dino wanted to use Ash as a weapon, to carry out hits for him.  He didn’t have any use for Ash’s own ambivalent feelings about killing.  He didn’t care how Ash felt.  He needed to mold him into the most effective weapon he could.  We see Dino remind Ash, early on in the series, and in a mocking way, about how Ash always used to cry over every job Dino made him do.  Ash never wanted to kill anyone, and it was an upsetting enough experience for him that it used to reduce him to tears.  He didn’t want to do it, but Dino forced him into it, like he forced him into prostitution.  

But let’s go back to what Ash says to Shorter.  He says “But now I FINALLY know how.”  What this tells us about Ash is that he WANTED to know how to pull back while fighting someone so that he didn’t kill them.  He wanted to know how he could stop himself from always taking someone’s life if he happened to get into a physical altercation with them.  He’s happy that he’s learned how to pull back in just this one way.  He’s been trained only to know how to kill, but Ash hates killing.  He only does it because he has to.  And we know Ash never would have even tried to kill Frankie if Frankie hadn’t first tried to kill him.  Even later on, Ash let’s Frankie go, when he could have killed him.  Even here, we see Ash show mercy, despite this asshole and his crew just trying to murder him.  It’s the same as Ash only seducing Ricardo as a means of getting Frankie to make a move and show his hand.  Because Ricardo made clear his own intention to try and rape Ash.  So Ash uses Ricardo’s intention to his own benefit in forcing Frankie’s hand and to find out who sent him to kill him.  I don’t think Ash ever intended to “sick Ricardo on Frankie and let him do his dirty work for him”, like Shorter accuses Ash of.  Ash saw Frankie beat Ricardo’s ass earlier, when they got into a fight over him, so he knows Ricardo can’t take out Frankie.  Ash wouldn’t ever send someone to do a job for him like that anyway, as we see in the main story line of Banana Fish.  He takes care of his own business when someone’s after him specifically.  He never sends his own boys to do it for him.  He acts dismissive of Shorter’s accusation because, again, he’s putting up a front of cold-hearted detachment because that’s the only way he knows how to protect himself.  By showing no emotion.  Even Shorter basically tells him to utilize a form of this earlier in the story, when he advises Ash to let himself be raped if he gets caught, and to be as quiet and passive as possible.  Ash already knows those sorts of tactics, obviously.  By this point in his life though, he’s been raped so many times, he’s got more sophisticated means of getting through it. So he uses Ricardo as a means of sussing out who it is that’s gunning for him on the outside.  Because he knows if Frankie thinks he’s got a Sugar Daddy in Ricardo to protect him, it’s going to make it more difficult to kill him, which is why Frankie acts like he wants to make Ash his “bitch” in the first place.  So he forces Frankie into making his move by making him think him and Ricardo are a “thing”.  Ash was expecting Frankie and his crew to make a move on him.  When they attacked him in the library, he was ready.  Because he knew the act he’d put on with Ricardo was going to make Frankie act, thinking he needed to get Ash before Ash could find protection.  And Ash then used that opportunity to find out who had sent Frankie to kill him in the first place.  The whole thing was just so he could find out who it was that wanted him dead.

He’s using sex as a weapon, because it’s one of the few ways he has of defending himself.  I think Ash starts crying and is so upset when Shorter says if he keeps manipulating people like that, he’ll be just like the assholes who try to hurt him, because that was never Ash’s intention.  He was just trying to protect himself.  He never wanted to control anybody, or hurt them, or dominate them.  He only uses tactics like manipulation to try and keep himself from getting more hurt.  He’s not trying to hurt anybody, or control them because he wants power over them.  He’s trying to control what’s HAPPENING to him, and because what’s happening to him is being perpetrated by these bastards who want to rape him, or kill him, the best way to control the situation is to control THEM.  It isn’t some power play on his part, or born from some sick desire to dominate the other person.  It’s the only way he has of protecting himself.  He starts shaking and crying and gets so upset, because the last thing he wants is to be like the people who hurt him, and because he never did the things he did for the same reasons as them.  It hurts him badly that Shorter thinks he could be like them at all.  That he could be like that, or have that kind of twisted mindset.  He doesn’t, and he never did.  It’s why he tries to explain to Shorter later why it is that he did what he did with Ricardo.  He wants Shorter to know and understand the reasons for it.  That it isn’t because Ash likes it.  It isn’t because he gets his kicks out of controlling somebody, or manipulating their feelings.  It isn’t because he wants to have power over them, or because he gets a thrill from the idea of having power over them.  It’s because he hopes it will make his own suffering at their hands less awful.  

It’s just he was brought up in such an unforgiving and cruel world, that those sorts of things were the only means available to him of staying alive. He couldn’t say no, or fight them off, because that would just lead to his getting more hurt, either by the person doing it, or by Dino, or Marvin, or whoever had him on a leash.  Like Ash later explains to Shorter, because he’s so good looking, guys are always trying to force him to have sex with them, and he only figured that it would make it easier on himself, if he took the lead when guys made passes at him like that.  If he takes the lead and makes these bastards happy, he can control what’s happening to him, at least to some extent.  Shorter wonders then where Ash learned to do that.  Well, the answer is obviously Club Cod.  Ash HAD to learn to do that to keep himself from getting killed eventually.  To keep himself from getting hooked on drugs and used up and destroyed, like most of the kids that ended up in that club.  You can easily imagine that many of the “patrons” of that place were violent on top of their twisted sexual perversion, because those two things often go hand in hand.  A lot of them probably physically hurt the kids there, were probably extremely violent with them.  And we even see that happen to Ash in Private Opinion, when Blanca finds Ash in that motel room after he’s been raped by Marvin.  His hands had been tied to the bed frame, and he had bruises all over him.   He’s been beaten up on top of being raped.  Ash obviously had to learn to “play nice” and be seductive just to keep the physical harm he suffered to a minimum.  If he could make the men molesting and raping him think he was liking it, they were probably less likely to hurt him.  If he “submitted” and pretended to like it, if he played into their sick fantasies of being this submissive little boy that they could control and do with as they pleased, that they could have total power over, then they wouldn’t be angry, and they wouldn’t make it worse.  Like Ash even says to Shorter, the guys who rape you aren’t doing it because they want to get laid.  They’re doing it because they want to hurt you and dominate you and control you.  The more you struggle, the angrier they get that you aren’t submitting to their will, the more violent they then become, the more brutal the rape.  If they think they’ve tamed you and that they’ve broken you to their will, if you act receptive to their advances, then they’re satisfied, and they won’t hurt you more than what they think is “necessary”.  It’s truly horrific.

But anyway, back to the scene between Shorter and Ash after the fight with Frankie.  Shorter takes Ash’s laughing and words as a sign that the kid is crazy and dangerous.  He thinks Ash is laughing because Ash is a lunatic who gets his kicks killing people.  It’s a misinterpretation from Shorter.  It’s after this interaction with Ash that he starts worrying that Ash is Arthur’s assassin, come to kill him.  Ash is confused by Shorter’s sudden anxiety around him, as we see in the scene of them at night in their cell, when Ash gets up in the middle of the night to get a drink of water.  Shorter tenses up in fear, thinking Ash is going to kill him.  Ash smiles at Shorter and asks why he’s so tensed up, and then jokes, asking “You think I’m gonna rape you or something?”  Ash then smiles at him again and says, in the friendliest tone we’ve seen Ash use on Shorter so far “G’night Shorter.”  

Shorter looks completely confused, because it just doesn’t jibe with this picture he’s formed of Ash as this cold hearted killer that’s just waiting to pounce.  

We see Shorter again later in the library, still worried that Ash might be the assassin, but then he realizes that he just doesn’t get that vibe off of Ash, and doesn’t sense that he’s got anything to do with Arthur.  Which of course is true, and Shorter gets his first real glimpse of who Ash actually is, when he finds him in the stacks, sitting up on a ladder and just reading.  It’s the first moment Shorter realizes that Ash looks just like the angel on his Christmas card, and we start to see Shorter’s fear of Ash dissipate in that moment.  

The thing is, Shorter’s perception of Ash gets skewed for a while by the fear mongering of the other inmates.  Nico, who we eventually realize is working with Frankie, is the first to stir it up, to start disseminating the idea that Ash is some kind of devil or demon, and that people should be wary of him.  He spreads this ridiculous story that he claims his grandmother told him about this evil woman who came to her village and drove all the men insane and eventually drove them all to kill each other.  Everyone laughs at first, because it’s an absurd story and Ash is just a kid.  But after what happens with Frankie the first time, Nico doubles down on his fear mongering and won’t shut up about how Ash is the devil, and how he’s evil.  He’s trying to turn the other inmates against Ash, because he’s with Frankie, and Frankie is working for Arthur.  And eventually, even Shorter starts to get effected by all this talk, and starts to be afraid of Ash to a paranoid degree.  Eventually Shorter realizes it’s just bullshit, and Ash really IS just a kid who’s just struggling to survive, and they become friends after that, and Ash no longer seems like this cold, emotionless and frightening devil, but just a cool kid he can shoot the breeze with and really talk to.  By the end, they’re real friends, sharing jokes and laughing together.  It’s only at the end of Angel Eyes that both we the reader and Shorter himself finally see the real Ash.  Again, just this sweet kid who’s surviving in an uncaring and brutal world.

It also tells us everything about how it is Ash became the boss of his gang on the outside.  Shorter remarks how, after the fight between Ash and Frankie’s crew in the library, everyone in the prison started treating him like a “Capo”, and that it made Ash really uncomfortable.  We see again here how Ash never had any desire to become a boss, or to have any power over other people.  He never had any designs to that effect.  Never any schemes to take over any gangs or territory on the outside.  He’s even confused when Shorter starts talking about how clever Arthur was, in trying to nip the threat of Ash in the bud, because Arthur could see that Ash was the kind of kid that would naturally draw others to him and gain followers just by being there.  So he gets Ash sent to reform school and then tries to have him killed there.  Ash doesn’t even know what Shorter is talking about because he never had any intention himself of becoming a gang boss.  He fell into it because of his natural abilities, and when he got out of reform school, he had a whole group of street kids who’d decided he was their leader while on the inside and wanted to follow him once they were out, and it obviously just snowballed from there, with Ash taking over Arthur’s territory, etc…  But again, it stands as testament to how Ash never wanted this life at all.  He never cared about money, or power, or control over the street gangs.  Like he eventually tells Eiji, him being exceptional wasn’t something he ever wanted, because his gifts are what led him to eventually being thrust into a life of violence and crime which he detested and never wanted.  

cosmicjoke

There’s another thing I wanted to add on to this, which I also think is vitally important to take note of, relating back to the scene in which Ash is explaining to Shorter why it is he did what he did with Ricardo.

We see Ash say “… The way I look… I’ve had guys make passes at me tons of times.  And all of them- it’s like, they can’t believe it when I fight ‘em off.  And then they always get really mad.  It’s like, how dare I mess up their fantasy, you know, like I’m not even a real person to them.  And that’s why, I figured it’s a lot easier on me if I take the lead.  Get them wrapped around my finger and do whatever I want them to do…”

We then hear Shorter think to himself “Yeah, but where’d he learn it, what I saw him do to Ricardo?”

One of the important things to note about this scene, is what Ash doesn’t tell Shorter.  Ash doesn’t tell Shorter about the actual kind of abuse he’s been through.  He says “I’ve had guys make passes at me tons of times.”  But we know, of course, that it’s way, WAY worse than that.  That Ash was first and repeatedly raped by his baseball coach starting at the age of seven, and then right around the age of ten, he got picked up by Marvin and sold to into a child sex trafficking ring in Club Cod.  We know Ash was repeatedly and brutally raped by Marvin, Froggy, Dino, and countless patrons of Club Cod, and from what some of the police at the beginning of the story say, we know that Ash also worked as a prostitute on the streets of New York, which very likely involved instances of rape itself.  Ash, in trying to explain to Shorter that what he did to Ricardo was just him trying to defend himself, doesn’t go into actual detail about the true depth of the horrors he’s been through.  Of course, if Ash had, Shorter would have understood far better than he did why Ash acted the way he did.  We see Shorter still confused, wondering where it was Ash learned how to seduce someone like he did Ricardo, because he doesn’t have a full grasp of the actual severity of the abuse Ash has suffered.  Ash doesn’t tell him about being sold into child prostitution, no doubt because he’s horribly ashamed and humiliated by the fact, as victims of child sexual abuse usually are.  

So When Ash tries desperately to defend his actions to Shorter in the library, when he says Shorter has no clue of even half the crap he’s been through, well, he’s actually right.  Shorter says he gets it, but he doesn’t really.  How could he?  Even if he knew the details of what Ash had experienced, he couldn’t possibly understand how Ash feels, because he’s never been through even remotely the same thing.  Shorter can guess, after seeing Ash’s reaction to his advice about just staying quiet and submissive if he gets caught by a pervert, that Ash has likely been raped before, and more than once.  But he doesn’t have even remotely a full understanding of just how bad it’s been for Ash, and I don’t think Shorter ever really fully understood it either.  In Cape Cod, he learns for the first time about what happened to Ash with his baseball coach, and he looks horrified and shocked.  But it’s obvious that Ash never breathed a word of his actual experiences of sexual abuse to anyone, not until he told Eiji about what happened with the coach anyway.  We see the police mock Ash at the beginning of the story, asking him what his gang would think, if they saw the films of him when he’s a ten, eleven year old boy, getting raped by Marvin and others, and Ash during this scene is basically paralyzed by his trauma, unable to do anything but stare blindly ahead with a stricken, terrified expression on his face.  We can infer that Ash has never told anybody in his gang about those experiences.  

He talks in a dismissive, unconcerned manner to Max about having sex with Senator Kippard at Club Cod, and we can infer from this that, by the time that particular event happened, Ash had begun to learn to at least use his sexuality somewhat to his advantage, to try and control, to some extent, the situation that was happening to him.  To not just be a submissive, helpless victim, but to fight back using his own attributes, using the very thing these disgusting men were lusting after, and wanting to use to hurt Ash, to his own advantage.  Shorter wonders where Ash learned to do this, and the answer is obvious to anyone who knows Ash’s actual background.  He learned to do it in Club Cod as a means of survival.  As a way to keep himself from going completely insane from the endless, horrific abuse he was constantly subjected to.  Ash’s ability to cope with the horrors he’s lived through is tied directly to this defense mechanism he’s developed.  This small amount of control he’s able to gain from an out of control situation.  If Ash can steer these instances of sexual harassment and abuse in the direction he wants them to go, then it isn’t as bad for him.  It isn’t as overwhelmingly out of his control, isn’t as much something someone is doing TO him without his consent.  Of course, this is a coping mechanism, and the truth is, it’s still only happening because these perverts can’t leave Ash alone to begin with, try to force themselves on him, and to force him to do things he doesn’t want to do at all.  It’s still a situation that’s happening against Ash’s will and against Ash’s wants.  It’s still, in that sense, something completely out of his control.  The event itself is out of his control.  How that event plays out is the only thing he can somewhat dictate, by, as he says, taking the lead.

You compare Ash’s cool, controlled responses to these sorts of things happening, like the situation with Ricardo, or the gang rape he suffers through in prison in order to help Griff, to his responses when he wasn’t able to control at all what was happening, when he had no say in the direction it turned, like when he’s a very young child being raped by Marvin or Froggy or Dino, or later, when Foxx rapes him, and it tells you everything about why Ash uses what weapons are available to him when he can.  Ash is nakedly terrified when Foxx starts to touch him in ways he doesn’t want to be touched.  He cries out for Foxx to stop, to get off of him, actually stumbling over his words, his eyes wide with panic and fear.  He doesn’t want this to happen.  Not again.  But there’s nothing he can do about it.  He’s helpless, bound with his hands behind his back, and this wasn’t a situation that arose through any preemptive measure on his part.  He’s captured by Foxx through threat to Ash’s friends, and Ash clearly isn’t expecting Foxx to do what he does.  And when Ash realizes Foxx isn’t going to stop, that this is going to happen, he’s going to be raped, again, Ash resorts to a defiant attitude, telling Foxx he can do whatever he wants, that it doesn’t matter, because Ash’s mind and spirit will always be his own.  This is Ash’s last line of defense.  In a situation that’s completely out of his control, in which he’s, once more, having the most horrific and traumatizing thing happen to him, forced on him by a man in a position of total power over him, and in which there’s nothing else left to defend himself with, no other options, Ash’s only recourse is to pretend he doesn’t care.  It’s utterly heartbreaking.  And we see later that, in fact, Ash is severely traumatized by the event.  He breaks down and begins shaking uncontrollably, looking like he’s going to be physically sick, falling mute.  It’s the same exact response we saw from Ash in that police station, when he was forced to watch videos of himself as a little boy being raped.  It’s the same response we see from Ash when he’s remembering what Froggy did to him, and all the others.  This is what happens to Ash when he can’t take back any amount of control of what’s happening to him, when he can’t to any extent control the outcome of the sexual abuse and harassment that’s constantly and continuously thrust upon him by sick, depraved men.  He loses it, for how deeply scarring and traumatizing it is.  He physically and mentally shuts down, rendered helpless and overwhelmed by the pain of his suffering.  

With that in mind, we understand better not just why Ash uses seduction to head off these sorts of things and try to control the direction it takes, but why he HAD to.  If he hadn’t, Ash would have lost his mind years before, for the severity of the abuse he actually experienced.  He would have gone insane with despair and pain.  

I think this is important in understanding why Ash reacts so angrily to Shorter’s words, that if Ash keeps playing with people’s feelings, he’ll be just like them.  Why he starts shaking and crying, why he screams at Shorter and then runs away.  And why, later on, he tries to explain himself to Shorter, to make him understand.  He doesn’t want Shorter to think that about him, because it’s not true.  Ash isn’t anything like the people who abuse him, and the idea of becoming like them, or of anyone even seeing him in the same light as them, is unacceptable and unbearable to Ash.  Ash tries to make Shorter understand why he did what he did to Ricardo, because he doesn’t want Shorter to think of him as being like Ricardo, or any of the other bastards that have abused or targeted him.  Ash wants Shorter to understand the reasons he does what he does, and goes out of his way to explain them, hoping Shorter will get it and not compare him to those people anymore.  But because Ash feels so much shame and is so damaged by the actual extent of the abuse he’s suffered, he doesn’t and can’t go into greater detail about it, simply making vague reference to guys “making passes” at him, the grim and far worse reality still being kept locked away for Ash to cope with on his own.  It leaves Shorter only more confused, because he still doesn’t have a full grasp of the kind of trauma Ash has suffered, and so he never fully understands or grasps Ash’s pain.  To him, Ash is still this mysterious, amazing person who looks like an angel, and who’s a total badass.  

It isn’t until Ash meets Eiji that he finally finds someone who fully grasps and understands his pain.  It’s why Eiji later apologizes for scolding Ash over his going after Arthur’s gang the way he did, because Eiji realizes this part of Ash’s life, this part of his actions, doesn’t make him like the people who have hurt him.  He realizes that Ash is only doing it because it’s the only way he can survive, the only course he can take, and he accepts that, and is okay with it.  He goes to Ash in the library to tell him this, and I think that’s probably the first time in Ash’s life that anyone had ever told him they understood why he had to do the things he did, and didn’t condemn him for it, or tell him he was a monster, or an animal, or a demon for it.  The first time anyone had expressed to him that his actions didn’t make him the same kind of monster as the people who had abused him.  That he was still a human being, that he was still a good person, and that he was still worthy of friendship and love.  It’s why we see Eiji later remind Ash, when he’s trying to convince him to come to Japan with him and start a new life, that the only reason he killed was because it was the only way he could survive.  Eiji accepts Ash as he is.  As he says, both the light and the dark.  And he UNDERSTANDS why Ash is the way he is, and he never judges him for it.  Never believes that Ash will become a monster.  Never fears that as a possibility.  And he never fears it, the way say Shorter did, because Eiji sees who Ash really is, in his heart and soul and mind.  This deeply hurt, suffering young boy who’s never had any say in the life he’s living, never had any say in the things he had to do in order to survive.  Never had a choice but to do whatever he could to fight back against the real monsters, the real devils who never cared how badly they hurt him, never cared how completely they destroyed his life.  Eiji ended up seeing this about Ash, seeing who Ash really was, without needing to be told in detail about the horrors he’d faced and lived through.  Ash felt that, and responded to it, knowing that Eiji was the first person he’d ever met who really, truly loved him without condition, or judgement, or demands that he change.  That just loved him as he was, and believed fully in him, and believed him worthy of that love completely.  To put it simply, Eiji was the first and only person to ever be RIGHT about Ash.  Not even Shorter did that for Ash. Not even Shorter saw the desperate and alone little boy simply struggling to hold on.

cosmicjoke

Ahh, okay, just a few more things to add to this.  I’m sure no one’s even reading at this point, given how absurdly long it’s become.  But I was talking to @vashak on PM’s and having a great discussion with them, and just wanted to consolidate my thoughts from that conversation and expand on them a little here, because this is how I work things out in my mind, haha.  So here’s another long ass post delving deeper into all my points about Angel Eyes, and specifically, into Ash’s innate goodness of heart, which I think he always had.

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I do think Ash was thanking Shorter sincerely, and that he was being sincere in that scene after the first fight with Frankie, after he almost kills him. The reasons for this are a few. One, we know from Ash’s final conversation with Blanca that Blanca never taught Ash how to go easy on an opponent, and instructed him to always kill his enemies. Blanca replies to Ash that the reason he never taught him is because he was told there wasn’t any need to. The implication here is that he was told there wasn’t any need, because Dino thought Ash was already too soft hearted and he wanted Blanca to make him into a killing machine that wasn’t weighed down by anything as “inconvenient” as guilt.  This is also supported by how, at the beginning of the story, we see Dino mockingly remind Ash about how he used to cry with every job Dino gave him, and also by how repulsed Ash is by how dismissive Dino is about the act of taking a life.  He can’t believe the way Dino acts like it’s no big deal, killing someone.  What this tells us about Ash is that it’s a VERY big deal to him, to have to kill someone.  And that too is supported by the absolutely crushing grief and guilt Ash feels throughout the story over the lives he’s taken.  He’s haunted by it.  He can never forgive himself for it.  He can never accept any excuses for it, even as there are so many justifiable reasons for why he had to.

Killing for Ash was always a horrible, difficult decision he had to make.  A very serious act which carried with it devastating consequences and implications.  Something he never wanted to do it from the beginning, but was forced to do it because he was thrust into a world of violence, into situations where it was kill or be killed.  It tells us that from the very beginning that Ash was reluctant and deeply uncomfortable taking life, but he simply didn’t have a choice if he wanted to survive himself.

The other reason I think Ash is being sincere in that scene between him and Shorter, that he’s genuinely thanking him, is that it’s being told from Shorter’s perspective. We have to remember that Shorter at that point in the story is scared of Ash, that fear reaching a peak during this scene, due to what just happened with Frankie and the pool cue. He’s been listening to Nico work everybody up into a frenzy, talking about Ash like he’s some sort of devil or demon, and now he’s just seen Ash almost kill somebody. Shorter’s perspective here of Ash is warped. Instead of seeing the little kid that Ash actually is, he’s seeing that devil that Nico has been scaring everyone into thinking he is. So Ash’s laughter and attitude comes across as sinister to him. It’s the same as Shorter thinking Ash is going to kill him in the middle of the night when he gets up for a drink of water. Ash seems scary and spooky in that scene too, even though he literally just got up to get some water, and Shorter is confused when Ash tells him “Goodnight” in a friendly manner. It doesn’t jibe with the malicious perception Shorter had started to form of him. Because he’s so scared of Ash, every action of his, all of his behavior, is being colored in this sinister and malicious tint. It’s twisting Shorter’s ability to see Ash clearly.

Later on, when Shorter starts to realize Ash isn’t this horrible monster that everyone kept saying he was, he started to see Ash in a more accurate light, Ash’s whole appearance to him beginning to soften, Ash beginning to look more like what he actually was, which is a little boy. Ash definitely comes across as sinister in that scene where he thanks Shorter, but it’s because we’re seeing it from Shorter’s perspective, and he’s scared to death of Ash at that point.

I think the reason Ash was laughing during that scene wasn’t because of sarcasm, or because he was mocking Shorter, but because this stupid guy that had been harassing him since he’d arrived in Juvie inadvertently showed him how to do something that none of his expensive, world renowned tutors that Dino had been paying god only knows how much to teach him, had been able to. Ash wanted to know how to pull back and control himself, but no one ever showed him how. Ash was basically talking to himself when he says, “So that’s it. Deflect it slightly at the last second.” Him saying “So that’s it…” shows that Ash had been thinking about and wondering about how to not kill in a situation like that. He’d been trying to figure it out before this scene, but couldn’t, because nobody ever showed him, or told him, or thought that it mattered if he knew how, because Ash’s own feelings never mattered. Nobody ever asked him what he wanted, or how he felt.

Ash thinks it’s funny then that he would learn something like that from someone who, at that point, he saw as a ridiculous, annoying person. So it wasn’t sarcastic laughter, it was genuine amusement and, like you said, relief, because he finally knew how to do something he’d always longed to know, and he learned from the most unexpected and unlikeliest source.

I think you have to read the whole story of Angel Eyes from beginning to end to understand that, a lot of Ash’s cold, frightening appearance at the beginning is being exaggerated by the fact that it’s being seen through the specific perspective of Shorter. We see this throughout Banana Fish itself, when other characters are talking about Ash, and Yoshida draws these panels where Ash is rendered in this otherworldly way, where he looks like a demon or a devil or a god. In those panels, where the other characters are thinking of him, he never looks quite human. This is how other people often see Ash, even as, in reality, those perceptions of him are completely warped and not at all reflective of the truth. Who Ash really is, of course, is just a young boy who’s fighting tooth and nail for his freedom and to simply survive. Ash is standoffish and a loner at the beginning of Angel Eyes because he can’t trust anybody, and so he keeps people at a distance. As the story progresses, this standoffishness, and Shorter seeing how dangerous Ash actually is, coupled with the fear mongering Nico’s been doing, causes him, for a time, to have the same problem everyone else has when it comes to Ash, which is he starts to see him not as a human being, but as a demon. This is also reflected in how Shorter thinks he sees actual lightening go through Ash’s body and explode out of him right before he moves into action before fighting Frankie.  Of course there isn’t ACTAULLY lightening sparking off of Ash.  Shorter just imagines there is because Ash moves with such intensity and focus.  Shorter’s perception of him is being altered by how efficiently Ash moves, because nobody else he knows or has ever met moves like that.  And when he realizes that Frankie is no match for Ash, and that Ash fully intended to deal a lethal blow in their fight, he freaks the hell out, his already compromised perception of Ash going out of control.    Shorter is definitely being influenced by Nico’s fearmongering too, with the way he’s trying to rationalize seeing red in Ash’s eyes as just the lightening outside creating an optical illusion.  But you can tell when Shorter says this, it’s like he’s trying to convince himself, because he’s actually afraid that Nico is right, and that Ash is actually the devil.

Eventually, by the end of the story,  after he’s spent more time around Ash and they’ve really started talking, Shorter comes to realize that this initial perception he had was wrong, and Ash isn’t this cold, emotionless killing machine, but just a scared and hurt kid who’s doing what he can simply to make it to another day.  

Another thing to point out is how Shorter is one of the only people who allows himself to get close enough to Ash to see him as a person, and this relates back to how Ash initially acts around him.  Particularly, the scene between Ash and Shorter in the library, when Shorter accuses Ash of seducing Ricardo to get Ricardo to take Frankie out for him.  Ash never intended to use Ricardo in that way. I already explained why in another post of mine, basically explaining that Ash seduced Ricardo because he knew it would force Frankie into making a move against him, and Ash knew once that happened, he would be able to find out from him who was trying to have him killed. That was the only reason he seduced Ricardo.  But the point is, Shorter makes an accusation here which is wrong and false, but Ash doesn’t defend himself against it.   He instead says “Yeah, so what?”,  acting like he doesn’t care and that he sees nothing wrong with using Ricardo to take care of a problem of his.  It’s important to remember here that Shorter’s accusation is wrong, and that Ash WASN’T using Ricardo in this way.  He acts like he doesn’t see anything wrong with what Shorter is suggesting, because he’s to push Shorter away.  The question is, why is he trying to push Shorter away at that point?

Basically, Ash is trying to control the direction of how things go between the two of them, so that Ash doesn’t later end up getting hurt.

It’s exactly what he explains to Shorter later on, when he talks about how he tries to make the first move against people who want to sexually assault him, figuring if he makes the first move, he can control the outcome, if only even a little.  Again, when we stop to really think about the kind of life Ash has had, how horrifically alone he’s been since, well, since Griff left for the war, so since he was seven, and the kind of abuses he suffered in that period until he’s fifteen in Angel Eyes, and then we see the way he acts, pushing people away, keeping them at a distance, acting like he doesn’t care, you come to the realization that he’s pushing people away so they don’t get close, because if he lets them close, they’ll hurt him.  That’s all he’s ever known in his life.  People using him for something, people taking something away from him, people treating him like a disposable commodity instead of a person.  You realize also that Ash has never actually had any friends his own age.  He’s never interacted with other children in a normal, healthy way.  Nobody has ever shown any interest in JUST being his friend. He’s never had a relationship like that with another person.  

I think with Shorter, when Ash realized he really was just a nice guy and he didn’t have any ulterior reason for being nice, Ash was probably even more scared of letting Shorter close, because he probably felt like if Shorter really got to know him, he’d end up deciding he didn’t like him and reject him. Ash had never had any real friends, and if he suddenly had one, that would mean he suddenly had something else to lose, whether because the person he thought was his friend turned out being like everyone else, using and abusing Ash, or ended up not liking Ash and rejecting him.  In other words, if Ash let his hopes get up about Shorter really being his friend, and it turned out not to be true, or turned out badly somehow, the pain of that loss would be exponentially worse than never experiencing friendship at all.  At least, that’s how Ash probably felt.

We also see Ash talk about himself in truly disparaging ways throughout the series, like when he tells Ibe and Max that everything will be okay with sending Eiji back to Japan, because by the time he goes, he’ll be sick of Ash anyway. Ash really believes that once people get close to him, they’ll think he’s a worthless piece of trash, because that’s how he sees himself. So initially, when Shorter accuses Ash of wanting to use Ricardo to take care of Frankie, Ash acts like that accusation doesn’t bother him, that he doesn’t care what Shorter thinks he was trying to do, because he doesn’t want Shorter to think Ash cares what he thinks of him at all.  It’s like a preemptive strike, pushing someone away before they can hurt you. The problem for Ash is that he DOES care. He probably felt really good, knowing someone actually wanted to be his friend, that someone liked him enough to talk to him just because they wanted to talk to him, that someone was being nice to him just because, but feared that once Shorter got close to him, he would turn out like everyone else and either start using Ash or just outright reject him as a “bad apple”.

So he tried to push Shorter away before that could happen.  Before he could really hurt Ash’s feelings.

Acting like he didn’t care what Shorter thought of him. But he does, of course, because Shorter’s the first person who ever acted like he really wanted to be Ash’s friend. Imagine what that must have been like for Ash, to have a kid close to his own age actually want to be friends with him, when all he’d ever known before was what it felt like to be used and treated like an object.

It really ties back into what Ash says to Shorter later, that the people who abuse him always get angry when he dares to protest, because it never even occurs to them that he’s a person. He’s just a thing for them to use as they please. I think the reason Ash gets so upset at Shorter for telling him if he keeps playing with people like he did Ricardo, he’ll end up just like them, is because it’s really not true. Ash’s motivations for playing with people in the first place are pure defensive. He doesn’t play with people because he can. Or because he wants to hurt them. He does it because it’s the only way he’s ever known how to defend himself against them. I think Ash takes the time later to try and explain this to Shorter because he doesn’t want Shorter to think badly of him, he doesn’t want Shorter to think he’s like or ever could be like the people that abuse him. He likes Shorter at that point, and wants his respect, and so he takes the time to explain himself.  So I think it’s important to Ash later that Shorter understand the difference between him and his abusers. Those people get a kick, they get a thrill, out of hurting others, and dominating them, but Ash doesn’t get any kind of enjoyment out of what he does. He does it because it’s necessary for his survival, and only because of that.

My point in talking about all of this is that Ash was ALWAYS a good person, it was just that his life was so hard and difficult from so early on, that he had to develop this hard, cold exterior as a way to protect himself.   But it wasn’t something created in him through the kindness of others.  I think the reason Eiji connected as deeply as he did with Ash is because Eiji was able to see past that armor and see Ash for who he really was.  He saw how much pain Ash was in, how much it cost him to have to do the things he did, that he wasn’t some emotionless monster, and that he never was in danger of even becoming one.  The one time the two of them really fought was when Eiji started to make the same mistake everyone else had made, thinking Ash was doing the things he was doing, and it was because he was losing sight of his own humanity.   The same way Shorter accuses Ash of becoming like the people who abuse him.  Ash is horrified and upset that Eiji would think that, and again gets extremely angry, because again, it’s not true.  Ash isn’t killing Arthur’s men because he enjoys it, or because he wants to.  He’s killing them because if he doesn’t, they’ll kill him and all of his own boys.  He’s doing it because Arthur and the rest of them forced the issue by refusing to back down.  Ash gets no pleasure out of what he’s doing.  Just like he got no pleasure out of seducing Ricardo.  It’s an act necessary to survival, and that’s all.  Eiji eventually comes to understand that, and that’s the real turning point in their relationship.  That Ash didn’t kill because he was a devil or a demon or a ruthless killer. That Ash didn’t kill because he was a bad guy.  But because he had no other choice if he wanted to keep living and if he wanted to protect his own crew.  

There’s so many things that point to Ash having an inherently kind and caring heart. The fact that he cares as much as he does about everyone around him, even before he really gets to know Eiji, like Griff, Skip and Shorter, and everyone in his gang.   A good example of this is the fact that Ash is only working with Dino at the beginning of the story still because he needs the money in order to pay for Griff’s medical bills.  Dino is Ash’s worst abuser, his longest abuser, and the last person Ash wants anything to do with.  But he keeps working with him just so he can care for his big brother.  He subjects himself to being around a man who raped him repeatedly as a child so he can have a way of keeping Griff safe and alive. This is the definition of self-sacrifice.  This is before he ever meets Eiji.  Definitely Ash was influenced by Shorter and Eiji, in terms of how he was able to open up and be outwardly softer and less harsh, but I feel like the fact Ash is as good as he is from the start of the story really proves he always had a strong, moral inclination. Really it’s in SPITE of all the horrific pain Ash has been through that he’s as good as he is, because anybody with a shaky or nonexistent moral foundation, if they had gone through even a fraction of what Ash did, would have turned out viciously cruel.  Yut-Lung is a good example, actually.  Yut-Lung has been through similar experiences, though not entirely the same, as Ash, and he acts in ways that are entirely selfish and petty.  Yut-Lung didn’t really have anyone in his life to help guide him, but even despite this, we see moments of regret and remorse in him, because he isn’t ENTIRELY without goodness.  Still, he’s noticeably selfish, self-centered, petty and vengeful in a way Ash never was. Even at his lowest and most desperate moments, even when he was most alone, with no friends and no one to support him, Ash never hurt anyone who didn’t first hurt or try to hurt him, and he never hurt anyone out of spite, or jealousy, never tried to take anything away from someone just because they had it and he didn’t.  Ash, from the very beginning, only ever acted out of self-defense. Even with positive influences like Shorter and Griff and Eiji, if Ash hadn’t started out with having a strong, natural sense of right and wrong, given the truly massive scale of his suffering, he would have been a lot more morally corrupt from the start. The greatest tragedy of Ash, I think, is that he’s really such a good person, who’s been forced into such an awful, brutal existence through no fault of his own, and it’s driven him to hate himself. I think the whole point of Banana Fish is to show the true damage that child abuse can cause. That it can take a good person like Ash and make him believe he’s a bad person.

I think people can influence you, definitely, and can influence the way you turn out, but I also think there’s an equal balance between nature versus nurture. I don’t think you can create a strong moral nature in someone if it doesn’t exist from the start.  It’s why you can find genuinely bad people who have never experienced anything traumatic in their lives, and they still go out of their way to cause harm to others. Like basically everyone in the story who abused Ash.  It’s also why you can find people who have experienced truly traumatic things, and they’re still good people deep inside, wanting to do the right thing, even if they’re also damaged.  Like Blanca, and of course even more so Ash himself.  If that goodness DOES exist from the start, other people can nurture it and grow it and give it a safe place to express itself, and that’s what Eiji and Shorter did for Ash (and of course, the most important thing that Eiji gave to Ash was the experience, for the first and only time in his life, of what it felt like to be truly, unconditionally loved and accepted).  But you can’t give a moral conscience to someone who doesn’t already have it. Kind of like you can’t create talent or intelligence in someone. They have to be born with it, and then you can develop it. I just think, with everything we know about Ash, about the way he was from the start, the way he reacted to things, the things he tried to achieve, like keeping his friends and family safe, even trying to spare enemies of his, trying to break free from Dino, etc… and the things he didn’t ever care about,  like money and power, the way he cared about people, the value he placed on human life, despite all the hell he’d been through, etc… it shows that he always had a good heart, he just lived in a world where if he let that show, it would get him killed. Which, the most tragic thing of all, it eventually did.

One more point to make about all of this is a parallel we see is in Private Opinion and Angel Eyes.  There are scenes in both stories in which both Blanca and Shorter see Ash smile and laugh genuinely, in the carefree, childlike way children do, and they’re both struck by how sweet and cute Ash is. Because they’re seeing Ash as he really is in those moments. This sweet, adorable little boy.   They’re amazed and stunned, because it’s the first time they’re actually getting to see the real Ash.  and it’s so at odds with the detached, uncaring facade Ash usually wears. Ash shows that part of him to them in moments of lighthearted, carefree abandon. He smiles and laughs like that around them after he’s come to realize he can trust them, and that they won’t hurt him.

I think what’s important to remember is that, as horrific as the abuse Ash suffered is, and honestly, it’s about as bad as it can possibly get, it never defined WHO Ash was.

The abuse he suffered destroyed his life. Absolutely.  It ruined his life.  It changed, irrevocably, the course and direction of where he ended up. It changed and affected the way Ash interacted with people and situations.  It altered and affected the way he behaved.  It forced him to harden himself, to become harsh and blunt, to cut himself off in order to survive, to push people away because he couldn’t trust them, and because he was thrust, through no fault of his own, into a desperate, cruel world of violence which made him dangerous to be around.  It damaged him in permanent, irreparable ways, emotionally and mentally.  Caused him to develop dangerously low self-esteem and other, deeply unhealthy habits and ways of thinking.  It made him hate himself, made him think of himself as worthless and not deserving of love. It caused him painful and overwhelming stress, and anxiety, and forced him to live in a constant state of fear and uncertainty, leaving him unable to ever just relax, to just be himself, to just LIVE.  Always having to think, constantly, just to be able to survive another day.  He could never just stop, not even for a moment. The abuse Ash suffered affected him and changed his life in ways that could never be fixed.  

But the one thing it never changed, the one thing it never altered, was who Ash was fundamentally inside himself.  The abuse destroyed his life, but it never destroyed HIM.

Despite it all, Ash never stopped being a good person.

This is so vitally important to the story, I think. To realize this about the story. Ash’s abuse didn’t turn him into an abuser. It didn’t make him a bad person.  It never changed what was in his heart from the very beginning.

Ash says to Foxx, right before Foxx rapes him, that he can do whatever he wants to him, because it doesn’t matter, because Ash’s mind and spirit are his own. He’s telling Foxx that no matter how badly you treat me, no matter how hard you try to make me like you, I never will be. I’ll never be as ugly as you are. Ash never lost himself, despite the sickening hell he suffered, and I think that’s exactly in line with the message of Banana Fish. That even if you’ve suffered trauma that’s destroyed your life, it doesn’t mean that trauma defines who you are. It doesn’t mean that trauma has destroyed you, or made you a worthless person. That your trauma isn’t WHO you are. It’s something you’ve been through, maybe even something you can never move past, but it doesn’t mean that’s all you are as a person. It doesn’t mean that’s what you are as a person.  That bad things happening to you don’t make you a bad person.  They may affect the way you act, the way you behave, the decisions you make, but it doesn’t change what’s in your heart.  And Ash’s heart was always golden.

#Banana Fish #Ash Lynx #Shorter Wong #Meta