Takehara Fusa’s love: Oh no, the bento!

It’s all about these memorable 500 ms.

Let me explain the title first: Takehara Fusa (Takehara is her last name) is the mother of the main character of a currently airing anime called “Xam’d: Last Memories”. In the most recent episode, her husband and the story’s main evil guy are confronting each other in a psychological dialogue on life and death. At some point, they start fighting each other with their swords and guns – it’s a scene with lots of drama, action and ‘meaningful’ dialogue. During this suddenly dramatic moment, the bento (= lunch box) that Fusa gave her husband before suddenly drops onto the ground and the majority of the food is spilled. And so, my very first reaction was: “Oh no, the bento!” Totally ignoring the suspenseful fight between the two men, in that very moment, I only cared about Fusa’s bento. To me, this showed quite clearly what the strongest appeal of this anime is for me: The great description of a love between two grown characters.

There are tons of love stories out there, and Fusa and Ryouzou aren’t even the main couple. The focus on them spans at most 2 episodes out of the 22 that have aired so far. However, given the short airing time, the characters have shown themselves to be quite fascinating. I totally think that these two deserve more attention.

The first thing that makes Fusa such an outstanding character is that she is perhaps the only realistically depicted mother in anime. In most other anime, the family of the main character is not an issue or it’s totally abnormal (Neon Genesis Evangelion, true tears) or they are just a comedic sidekick. Fusa, however, actually gets some screentime and interacts in a realistic way with her son, namely she has let him go. It was painful for her, but she managed to support him onto his own pursuit of – well, the answers to the world in the anime.

A bento, the most beautiful sign of a woman’s love.

However, what makes her much more interesting is the portrayal of hers as a middle-aged, loving woman. In fact, she incorporates the “modern japanese woman”.
What is modern about her mainly relies in her independent lifestyle. She works and has raised her son mostly by herself, in short: She doesn’t need to love a man. While a housewife who relies upon her husband’s financial income can never truly say that she loves her husband unconditionally, one can much easier say that Fusa does. Unlike the housewife, she cares for his well-being without selfish reasons to the point that she suffers under this love. The bento that she makes him every day and the way he curses him for not being able to clean his room shows to which degree she loves him.
Furthermore, the “japanese-ness” of her character explains her suffering. Even though she works, the gender roles in the anime are very traditionally portrayed. Fusa was the one who was taking care of the boy when they lived separately, and it is Fusa who keeps taking care of the household while her husband completely immerses himself into his work. I guess it would not feel real if it were the other way around – even today, the President of the U.S.A. must be male after all. And the one female candidate there was also one of those who, for the longest time, was standing behind her (arguably) less capable husband. Perhaps these gender roles are still very typical for the society we live in, and that makes Fusa even more sympathetic to me. The anime makes very clear that the complicated relationship of the two is mainly a decision taken by Fusa’s husband, and that she didn’t have much of a choice rather than keeping to love him and to care for him.

Here we have THE typical japanese bento. From top left to bottom right: Sausages in octopus shape, broccoli, tamagoyaki, curry, beans and triangular-shaped onigiri with an umeboshi in the middle.

Now, you might wonder why they are living separately if she cares for him so much to the point of making him bento every day? Wouldn’t it be more natural to stay with him? To say that it was Ryouzou’s wish to live separately would make the explanation too easy. I think there is more to it: Living together with a man, going to sleep earlier than him, waking up to see him working, coming home with nobody greeting you because both husband and son are at work or at school – of course one should not run away from reality, but sometimes reality is too difficult to bear. It must be suffocating for Fusa to confront herself daily with the fact that she cannot help her husband, and that he does not want her to help. I even think that she would have this typically japanese feeling of being a burden to him because she cannot ease his workload, while having the growing desire to be paid attention to. Ultimately, she had no choice than keeping a safe distance to Ryouzou.
I think this is the only point that shows how Fusa is also a normal human with weaknesses. It’s a very likeable weakness at that and perhaps the best reason why I feel so empathetic towards her and why I love her so much as a character: She is strong and weak at the same time, and she is a victim of her love while being extremely brave and never doing anything wrong.

In the end, he actually ate the bento from the ground, saying “It was delicious.”

I am not saying that her husband is all at fault either: He is just playing his gender role as well. When I was younger, my mother used to say something like “All men care about their job more than women” and it would not surprise me if that were the case. Nowadays, I even see many women who put their job over everything. Now, the research is not exactly a job, it’s more like a very special obsession which connects him to his son.
At some point in our discussion about Fusa, Pip said something like “He does everything for Fusa!” This is very often the case in seinen manga: A man who tries his best for his wife, but for that, he neglects her. The typical example for this is the guy who tries to succeed in his career so that the girl’s family accepts him (a socially inferior person by birth) as her husband. Ryouzou indeed says: “I just want to see you smile” when Fusa confronts him with her suffering. But I think that this statement needs to be interpreted differently. If he really ‘just’ wanted to see Fusa’s smile in the literal sense, he would just stop with all his research, be with her and take care of her while making some money as a doctor. This, however, is impossible to him. In my opinion, both his research and Fusa are part of something that is life for Ryouzou. In some ways, he ultimately searches for himself and his relationship with the world. This world encompasses all those large things like war and politics, but also his beloved people such as Fusa and especially Akiyuki, his son who is especially close to his life because of their blood relation. In that sense, his love for Fusa and Akiyuki are not the end of all things, they are parts and symbolic for something else (himself, that is); and most of all, they stand on the same level as his research. That he cannot forego his research is because it is something too important to stop with; it’s as if this research is Ryouzou’s “Es muss sein” (only that in the book, it was the other way around: love was the must-be, not work). But that he still truly loves Fusa is shown in the fact that he tried to be responsible for his own faults (by divorcing her), but ended up kissing her. If my theory about Ryouzou’s feelings are right, he must suffer under this situation, torn between these parts of his life he fails to bring together. It’s too bad this is not really shown in the anime.

See below. I wanted to cry when I saw this.

Before I end my endless rambling, here’s a little side note: Pip noticed that Fusa’s leg is parallel to this diagonal part of the bridge. I would even go further: The both of them and this bridge part form a triangle. I think I don’t need to delve further into the symbolism of the triangle and its use especially in art with biblical references, because I believe this could very well be a coincidence. But it’s quite a great-looking one.

All in all, even if “Xam’d: Last Memories” happens to turn out to be extremely bad in the end, I would finish watching it and recommend it solely for the portrayal of this interesting relationship. I’ve said before that I can see myself in these characters, and after putting my thoughts on this relationship into words, I feel even stronger that it might be the case.