BANANA BREAD NO PUDDING

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CHAPTERS

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  cloudyspider

  100/100
  Cannibalism loudly glittering: or, a manual for escaping the womb

  ~For girls, non-girls, the ungirled, and others floundering in the gossamer vapours of a rose-tinted youth (or otherwise writhing feminine malaise). Are you still evading the clown?~ Spoiler Warning!

  Ira’s most epitomizing characteristics are her fantastical neuroses surrounding the terrors lying in wait as her adult life encroaches, exemplified in the first few pages of the manga where she proclaims that her blood is going to freeze dry and turn to instant coffee once her sister gets married the next day. As a permanent fixture of her childhood, her sister’s presence symbolized a harmonious stasis of warmth and innocence, serving as the amniotic-fluid-barrier from the frightening outside world of adults. Her departure forcibly shakes Ira awake from her cozy dream of everlasting girlhood and reminds her of the fate that menacingly looms over her own horizon, from which she has no viable escape. Her only solution is to retreat into juvenile dreams and shimmering illusions that firmly rivet her to an artificially maintained childhood. Aside from instant coffee blood powder, she also readily believes in other delusions, like (this one originating as a bedtime story from her father) a clown of otherworldly beauty who devours children that misbehave by staying up past 10 pm. Her belief in the clown specifically is so fervent that it reappears over and over again throughout the manga by way of dreams, eagerly waiting to pounce when she’s weakened. Ira is implied to be a highschooler, and yet she plays pretend with dolls for fun; she plays hopscotch; sings lullabies to herself; braids long grass together as though it were hair; talks with the rose bushes that grow outside her house and believes they talk back to her; she speaks of herself in the third person; she dreams of a fairytale prince that gallantly rescues her from evildoers–Ira is indefinitely frozen in this naive, starry-eyed girlhood, her youth immortalized in all the childish traits that define her. Other characters take notice of this as well, even asserting that she needs Linus’s (peanuts comics) security blanket to calm her down when she gets herself too riled up in her infantile anxieties.

  

  Ira’s stubborn anchoring of herself in her girlhood is also the reason for her decision to marry a closeted gay man: she recognizes that marriage is compulsory and inescapable, but if she chooses a homosexual, she’ll manage to circumvent the obstacle of motherhood, which is the ultimate seal of womanhood. Additionally, gay men are not “real” men, so her marriage with one wouldn’t even constitute a real marriage, at once eluding the mark of womanhood without having to endure her peers’ scorn. If this seems convoluted and somewhat nonsensical, that’s because it is. The Girl’s situation during the transitory period from girlhood to womanhood generates innumerable contradictions and conflicts within her when it comes to negotiating her place in the world and navigating her way between desires and fears, which are often inextricably bound to each other. Virile force and masculine brutality draw her away from men, but her curiosity and burgeoning desire draw her closer to them. She is enraptured by the idea of love transforming her into a beautiful butterfly, but she senses that female metamorphosis is bloody and torturous, so she imperiously remains a caterpillar. The mythology of the Girl engulfs Ira in stories and dreams of fairytale romances with knights in shining armor, but harshly condemns any concrete expression of desire in real life as an unsightly blemish on her purity. She tries to find a balance between her girlish dreams of storybook romances and her fears of the tangible, corporeal Man, but they only deluge her brain with swirling irreconcilable forces that rip her to pieces. She’s meant to harbor nothing but positive associations with female adulthood, wifehood, motherhood, etc, but something within her is deeply afraid. Afraid of sexual initiation, of becoming alienated in her own body as it changes shape against her will, of being enclosed within an impermeable domestic sphere, and somewhere inside herself, Ira begins to realize that embracing her feminine vocation precludes her from emerging as a sovereign subject once puberty finishes. In childhood, neither girl nor boy are fully autonomous subjects, but their relative androgyny/sexlessness grants them a level of freedom that will be ruthlessly stripped from them as soon as they’re deemed old enough to bear the mark of gender. If Ira accepts womanhood, she must renounce her personhood and instead become a thing of flesh, becoming the female object in opposition to the male subject. The only part of this that’s spelled out on a near-verbatim level in the manga is Ira’s deep-seated and inexplicable fear of becoming an adult (there is literally a scene where Ira runs away in tears after seeing an abstract painting entitled “Departure”), which begins to become clearer and more explainable once you realize just how much it’s tangled up in the throes of her gender.

  

  And Ira’s only coping mechanism is retreating into childish fantasy. She whines and cries and throws tantrums, spends her time with frivolous children’s games and hobbies she should have grown out of years ago, begs to be swaddled and cradled and sung to sleep, she believes in fairytales and foolish bedtime stories, and lives by them as though they were inscribed as natural laws of the universe. This is actually the throughline between a lot of Yumiko Ooshima’s work, centralizing female protagonists at this specific juncture in their adolescent lives, retreating into the make-believe and generally just being hysterically insane. Kusakanmuri no Hime/Grass Crown Princess is the quintessential example, where the protagonist fully convinces herself that she must be pregnant as a result of merely being kissed by a man, causing a mental breakdown. Her girlish naivete and lack of sexual knowledge isn’t just cute happenstance, it is a desperate attempt for her to cling to fantasy and childhood due to fear of real sexual initiation. Ooshima writes about girls who are fundamentally maladapted to reality, fanning their childish narcissism, cloistered and coddled in their mental frailty. I honestly think the popularity of this archetype was partially fueled by outdated medical beliefs; i.e. women’s bodies having no differentiation between psychic life and psychological realization, causing them to experience imaginary illnesses → women are biologically hysterical creatures. Stuff which would now be considered abhorrent pseudoscience but was unfortunately very commonly widely believed at the time Ooshima was working, although it would have been on its way out. Also in line with this is the quintessential year-24 allusions to psychoanalytics, especially when she’s being cheeky about it with one student saying “This is like something out of Freud!” Well, yes! There is also a panel where one of the main cast is holding a book entitled "psychoanalysis and psychotherapy,” and a whole section towards the end where they start using actual theoretical terms when talking about incest, womb regression, and homosexuality. I’m purposefully not doing this write-up through a psychoanalytical framework because I think the entire field is Evil but I do find it genuinely funny.

  

  In chapter 3, Ira has a hysterical breakdown when her presumably gay husband walks in on her and her best friend during their sleepover, after they’ve both beautified the other in a makeover (fully clothed). She cries and screams in a temper tantrum that no one quite understands, especially since she insists that being seen by him like this is “more indecent than nudity.” This is because she still believes herself to possess the androgynous, sexless body of a child. But applying makeup to that body–adding a warm flush to the cheeks, a bitten-red quality to the lips, a sultry darkness to the eyes–invariably evokes eroticism. Which isn’t remarkable when she’s alone in her innocence, but the second a man enters the picture (or more specifically his eyes, his gaze, his perception), she suddenly finds herself smothered by the indomitable filth of Sex. Her flesh is transformed upon reaching male eyes, instantly dirtier and more distinctly woman, she grasps herself as an object of flesh on which men have a hold. His gaze is the lethal revelation of her feminine destiny. Ira yearns to bask in the sunlight of her girlhood; she does not consent to becoming Woman because she does not consent to becoming Flesh; she does not consent to becoming carnal prey, surrendering to the strange and disturbing new shape that this body is taking through puberty. This body from which she is alienated. This body which only remains in her possession for a finite period of time. This body which will exist solely for purposes outside of herself. This body which becomes a passive vessel for proliferation. Made of flesh, through flesh, and for other flesh, it exists within itself but never beyond itself. Once Girl becomes Woman, she is barred from transcending her flesh in perpetuity, and her flesh thus becomes a prison wherein she wallows immanently, devolving into nothing but pure inertia. Ira rejects this premise but doesn’t understand how to effectively combat it, so she squirms helplessly and runs backwards into the past.

  

  The worse her situation gets, the more she regresses. When it’s revealed her husband is secretly heterosexual and was deceiving her the entire time, her grief-stricken frenzy propels her outside to ardently pray to the stars that she be reincarnated as her sister’s baby. If she can return to infancy, she obtains the ultimate innocence, as clearly her current youthful displays aren’t sufficing. She is soon devoured by the ethereal clown in one of her dreams, and when she awakens, Ira has fully convinced herself that she’s become the clown monster. She specifically likens it to bodily possession, referencing the Exorcist films. At this point Ooshima is kind of beating you on the head with the metaphor (saying this playfully and not as criticism pls don’t get me twisted) in the whole changing from girl to woman depersonalization aspect, as Ira peers into the mirror and covers her eyes in horror at the form standing before her: uncanny, disturbing, and not recognizable as herself. She never consummated the marriage (they never even so much as kissed), but the fact alone that a heterosexual man was able to gaze upon Ira in the context of her being a woman makes her feel so thoroughly defiled that all of her personhood is eviscerated–or in this case, swallowed whole and replaced by an unidentifiable skinwalker.

  

  After Ira stabs her second husband (this-time-legitimately-homosexual closeted professor at her school, several decades her senior and extremely abusive) through the heart with a knife, she’s sent down a manic spiral. The only two pathways forward she imagines are either suicide or being locked away in a sealed chamber for the rest of her life. The only wrinkle is that he’s barely even injured whatsoever, as the great stabbing was entirely a delusion on Ira’s part, having barely wounded him with a small scratch. In all of her misery and desperation, the singular most drastic act of defiance Ira musters is one she can’t even follow through with. It is wholly symbolic in nature. Instead of just pushing that knife a couple inches deeper, she submits to the constraints that bind her. In the ultimate resignation, she opts for an audacious spectacle rather than something that actually changes the course of her life. She wriggles around in her shackles and the action only tightens them. Meek, fragile, and powerless, she is bereft of agency she once possessed, and can no longer effectuate change on her own–she is forced to rely on the agency of men to make her cage more comfortable. She accomplishes this by flailing around femininely to garner attention and paternal concern. This resignation propels her into womanhood, and she ultimately ends up dating the man who was her first husband (the fake-gay heterosexual), shouldering the burden of her new life without protest.

  

  The last few pages of the manga punctuate the ending with a baffling dream wherein Ira’s future baby is speaking to her, and she instructs it to not be afraid to escape from the womb to enter the outside world, as a wonderful future lies ahead. When she wakes up, she wonders why she felt so assured in her words when she has yet to encounter that magnificent future of her own, and would have no concrete reason to believe it even exists. What Ooshima wants her readers to take from this is, in my opinion, entirely inscrutable, especially since it stations Ira at an awkward three-quarters-complete of a prescribed character arc and just ends it there. Her transition to womanhood finally feels like an ascension rather than a plummet into the abyss, and whatever prison she’s eternally entrapped in is one that she graciously accepts. She is no longer fleeing from an ineluctable capture, she’s instead decorating the walls of her jail cell in sparkling adornments to assuage herself in her subjugation. I swear I’m not making the ending sound more cynical than it is–the last page is Ira questioning herself, questioning the validity of a positive statement she made, questioning whether she has the credibility to tell her future child that life is worth living–and the question remains unanswered! Ira would like more than anything to assure herself and the world around her that she’s finally happy with growing into her womanhood, but she can’t say the words without doubting herself. Ira is no longer permitted any greater search for meaning in any continuous movement, because her meaning is predefined, she already has an ascribed fixed value as woman. In commencing with womanhood, she finds herself firmly riveted in place, encased within the four walls of her home, doomed to repetition and perpetuating the present. What’s left to wonder is whether there are any other foreseeable pathways, any other futures that would enable Ira to age into adulthood without becoming Woman in its current form. In all the vast stretches of Ira’s vivid imagination, where she conjures up fantasies of talking rose bushes, child-eating clowns, and blood that turns to instant coffee, she never once envisions a life unbound to her carnal flesh and untethered to her animal function. In all the glitter, rose petals, and sweet cherubic angel-baby dreams, the ending of Banana Bread Pudding finds Ira fumbling around in despairing obscurity for answers that won’t ever come to her.

  

  The manga’s form, and Ira’s place within that construction (and I have to talk about this because I’m insufferable) renders the space of the story itself into a sort of paradisal gynaeceum for the young girl reader to take temporary refuge in, protected from the tyranny of the masculine universe. Ira fears being surrendered to masculine brutality, appearing to man as a physical being and fleshly entity, so she races backwards against time to prevent it. Ooshima’s audience attains this same illusory-eternal-girlhood themselves within the pages of the manga, caressed by scattered cherry blossoms and sunflower bundles, peering deeply into the glassy doll-eyes of the protagonist, sighing sweetly to drawings of pastel silks, vanilla creams, and rose-perfumed bathwater. The vast majority of vintage shoujo manga posits their female subjects within this realm, the ephemeral dream of youth reigning supreme (this is not entirely relevant, but it’s not coincidental that an inordinately large portion of western women’s literature also does this, many of them actually being subsumed into the animanga world as well through adaptation; e.g. Akage no Anne, Alps no Shoujo Heidi, Perrine Monogatari, Shojoko Sera, like half of World Masterpiece Theater’s catalogue). The average vintage shoujo heroine is unable to envisage herself or her life in any domain outside of the fanciful abstractions of girlish immaturity. Sex does not yet exist in this domain. Every pulse of the heart, quiver of the flesh, and swelling of the breast is pure as shining snow, since the sinful taint of sex has not yet crystallized itself in the heart of the young girl. But when it does enter the picture, it will send the skies of their insular worlds crashing down. This is also why tragedy is such a hallmark of vintage shoujo, where someone always has to die, be abused, or otherwise suffer. The childish fantasy of ageless girlhood is so sacred because of the extreme contingency and precariousness of its position. This is also why vintage yuri also usually characterizes lesbianism as childish; for girls, no matter what type of girl, all roads point to the same destination. I’m trying really hard to not type 379,977 words about this because this topic makes me insane, but all throughout vintage shoujo, even in series with self-assured rebellious otenba protagonists, from Candy Candy to Haikara-san ga Tooru, they cannot escape the inexorable force of womanization, which usually takes shape as marriage. These stories often end when the girl is married, or she finds a man who she’s implied to end up marrying. After being quickly integrated into the heterosexual regime, there is no use continuing the story. There is girlhood and there is wifehood, but there is seldom a period of autonomous, independent female adulthood (you’d have to wait until the 80’s and the rise of josei for that).

  

  To be fully clear, I do not believe that vintage shoujo mangaka are terrible misogynists operating solely to induct vulnerable young girls into the patriarchal economy (except Yumiko Igarashi sorry girl but you are kind of #evil). These mangaka, for the most part, were fully aware that that girlhood isn’t actually this mystically flawless period in a woman’s life, but that it only reached that status through patriarchal propagandization. Elevated on a pedestal in her symbolism of virginity and purity, woven into myth and legend and embroidered into the seams of countless societies as the ultimate Ideal, she is youthful, beautiful, uneducated, inexperienced, not tarnished by the sexual world, she is the blazing emblem of virtuousness. And once she grows up, she loses absolutely everything. She will be forced into sexual initiation and subsequently defiled, and by becoming the sexual creature she was always destined to be, she forfeits the gleaming virgin halo she once possessed, and becomes dirt. ((((((This quote is overused but))))) Denis Diderot said in his letters to Sophie Vollant of young girls “You will all die at fifteen!” and understandably, Ira doesn't want to die. And yet she has to; she is expected to. This is the eternal dilemma of the young girl, this tragic double bind where she’s doomed no matter what. This is, I think, what vintage shoujo mangaka are trying to capture over and over again (to varying degrees of success). Yumiko Ooshima, along with the other year 24 mangaka, tend to do it better than most. For Banana Bread Pudding to have a less shaky ending, sex would first have to not turn women to Dirt. For women to stop being Dirt, every single facet of this world would have to change so radically that even Ooshima herself can’t imagine what it would look like, and therefore can’t write a conclusive ending.

  

  On a more positive note, I do genuinely believe that women have been more staunchly refusing Dirthood for a while now, and there are more people outside of The Young Girl who enjoy Yumiko Ooshima’s work. Haggard unsocialized gay people LOVE Yumiko Ooshima (I am one of them). And the young girl likely isn’t reading her anymore–she might be reading Kyoko Okazaki instead! Some of her kind have even been spotted reading Jujutsu Kaisen! (We have not determined whether this is good or bad yet). Much of Banana Bread Pudding is still indecipherable to me; there are entire layers of the story I left out of this write-up just to help me focus. Above all else, it might actually be a melodrama about a messy love-pentagon. It’s deranged, nonsensical, whimsical, traumatizing, magical, sparkly, depressing, silly, fantastical, and painful. It’s about girlhood and it’s about fear. The first time I read it, it sort of just washed over me like a tsunami in its jam-packed everythingness, and if you’d asked me why it provoked such an intense emotional reaction, I wouldn’t have been able to tell you. I imagine that’s something along the lines of what the average 1970’s Japanese fourteen year-old girl may have felt reading it. And after this lifesucking ordeal of arranging my incoherent thoughts into letters and words and sentences, this entire write-up feels profoundly futile and superfluous, because what I’m really trying to do is indicate which part of my soul this manga pokes and prods at. Banana Bread Pudding offers a transitional sanctuary to the girl who trembles beneath the branding iron that stands to mark her as Woman; as time passes, she’ll one day manage to sift through her delusions and emerge from her turbidity in a triumphant luminosity - but if this happens somewhere in the future, or is even beginning to happen now, Yumiko Ooshima certainly hasn’t witnessed it for herself.
  ~
  “When she was a girl, her hands were empty: in hope, in dreams, she possessed everything. Now she has acquired a share of the world and she thinks in anguish: there is nothing more than this, forever. Forever this husband, forever this home.”
  -- Simone de Beauvoir

  
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