Through all the madness of falling in love

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.

Unlike some people seem to believe, Ash was never really cold nor ruthless and only changed his behaviour after meeting Eiji like a typical shoujo trope. Ash had always been caring and nice deep down, he just tried to hide it in order to not break and protect himself as Eiji mentioned and which you pointed out as well. But still, he couldn’t completely hide it like in the scenes you already referred to with Ash sparing the two who sided with Dino in the first episode or the scene with him having to go back into the facility to save Max and Ibe. It’s impossible for him not to care and even though he was so keen on leaving them behind but within seconds, he changed his mind to: “Nope. Can’t leave them.”

I won’t list all of the examples where his caring and loving side is shown since you already did a great job at listing petty much all of them ^^ I think they really show how Ash was already human right from the start and not Eiji being the one turning him into one throughout the story.

The reason for him having been able to stay human and still care for people and not go down the path of hatred like Yut Lung did is him having been surrounded by people who cared for him as well. During his childhood, he had Griffin with him and like any little brother, I can imagine Ash wanting to be like his big brother who seemed to be of a very kind nature after all. Later on, he had Shorter who wasn’t afraid to call him out on certain behaviour and became a close friend of him:

But even Shorter had a different perception of him at first and even seemed to be afraid of him in some sense:

Fearing or admiring Ash were the two extremes most people seem to have felt towards him, there was no in-between. Always seeing either a god or the devil. But never a human.

Eiji was the exception. Right from the start he seemed to sense something about Ash, unlike others. He was never afraid of him nor admired him. He just simply saw him as a human and this already got clear the moment he asked for his gun. Ash was used to people only ever taking something from him without considering his feelings or caring about him. And suddenly, there’s this boy asking politely for consent to hold his gun, not seeming to be afraid of him at all and not even starting to after asking if he had ever killed people which Ash confirmed. Ash had called him a “baby” then, but I think, more than anything, he was actually irritated by Eiji’s treatment of him because he simply wasn’t used to it.

I think the point where Eiji really caught the first real glimpse of how Ash was really deep down inside was the scene where Ash gave up his gun to Arthur because he threatened to kill him otherwise. Eiji looked so surprised when he did that, as if he hadn’t expected that at all. After all, he was just a stranger. They had no connection, yet. It made no sense for Ash to give up the gun he didn’t allow anyone to touch in first place just for him if he already wasn’t kind at heart from the start, so Eiji must have realized that there was more to him than what meets the eye. And the more the story progressed, the more he saw that this was indeed true or rather, Ash was feeling comfortable enough to let him see that side of him. The side of the boy he actually was deep down inside, the side of Aslan.

So if we consider “Ash” and “Aslan” not only being two different names but also  two different sides of him – “Ash” being the cold and ruthless appearing gang leader and “Aslan” being the caring and goodhearted boy – then it gets clear that most characters only ever saw “Ash” and maybe just a little glimpse of “Aslan”, if they were lucky. However, Eiji saw both sides of him and most importantly, he accepted and loved both of them. That’s also how I interpret his words in GoL about loving both, light and darkness:

Eiji saw and witnessed how undeniably human Ash was through and through. Saw how fragile he could be, how sometimes that thick wall he had built around himself was sometimes crumbling, how hurt and lonely he was.

So many people tried to tear Ash’s humanity away from him, tried to turn him into a monster, tried to make him think he had no other choice than being or becoming anything else than that.

And then there was Eiji feeling drawn to him precisely because of how human he was. Only ever treating him like a human and never expecting anything in return. Just loving him for himself and not in a twisted way like Dino did. And that was the reason Ash felt drawn to him as well.

Eiji’s role in the story is to show him that he’s deserving of love despite of what he’s done, despite of what he thought he was and also to remind him of his existing humanity. Because even though we and Eiji can see how human he was, it still doesn’t mean Ash also saw himself as that. For him, he was an unredeemable monster, a leopard that could never climb down the mountain ever again. After all he’s been through, it’s understandable that he sometimes began to lose sight of his own humanity. So Eiji stepped in and reminded him of it, just like did during the leopard scene:

Just like you said, Ash was already human, Eiji didn’t magically turn him into one but he kept reminding him of his humanity and also protected his soul. If Eiji hadn’t been there after Griffin’s and Shorter’s death, maybe Ash had pushed people away instead of letting them in because he would have been too afraid of people getting hurt again due to them having gotten too close to him. He would have been all alone with his grief and regret (imagine how episode 11 would have been without Eiji comforting Ash).

Thanks to Eiji, he had a sanctuary where he knew he was safe and could be himself, be human, could let himself fall and be vulnerable, being provided with normalcy, like you said. And importantly, with this normalcy, he took away Ash’s loneliness. The loneliness that was always surrounding him because everyone failed to see this human side of him and his pain. Because everyone saw him as “Ash”, the façade the world forced him to put up in order not to break, or because he couldn’t show this side of him to them since otherwise, they would have taken advantage of it.

The only one being able to see and notice that there was also another side to him was Eiji. The one Ash didn’t push away but instead allowed to see this side of him.

It bothers me somewhat that people mistake Ash’s harsh attitude at the beginning of the story, or towards certain characters, as being who he really is, and that only being around Eiji is what returned some of his humanity.  I’ve seen some comments lately that seem to express that.  Like I saw one the other day that was almost vitriolic in it’s hateful tone, talking about how badly Ash treated Sing, and how it was really his fault that Yut-Lung started his war with him, because of how Ash told him he was going to kill him after what happened with Shorter.  Like Ash is to blame for having such a visceral reaction after Yut-Lung blackmailed Shorter into the position he was in, and then Ash being forced into a position where he had to choose between Shorter’s life and Eiji’s.  Who wouldn’t have reacted the way Ash did when Yut-Lung showed up to give him the key to his handcuffs?  He’d just been forced to kill his best friend to save another friend.  He’s been forced to watch Shorter lose his mind and try to kill Eiji.  It would have been bizarre if Ash had had any other reaction to Yut-Lung at the point.  He was devastated and completely justified in his rage over Yut-Lung’s betrayal.  And then I’ve seen other comments like people saying Ash is a “pathological liar” who has no inner moral compass, and has to rely on cues for what’s right and wrong.  I’m just kind of bemused by how anyone could view Ash in that way.

Like, it seems painfully obvious to me that Ash’s at times harsh and dismissive attitude is nothing but a front.  A defense mechanism he’s built up in order to protect himself after a literal lifetime of suffering abuse and betrayal at the hands of almost everyone around him.  Referencing the scene from “Angel Eyes” that you posted, Shorter calls Ash out on his manipulative behavior, and Ash kind of scoffs and asks “Yeah, what’s of it?”,  But Ash does the exact same thing with Eiji in Banana Fish, when Eiji asks Ash if he’s the one that started the gang war going on in New York, and Ash gets this smirk on his face and asks “What if I did?”.  Ash doesn’t react that way to Shorter or Eiji because he doesn’t understand what’s wrong with what’s happening.  He doesn’t react that way because he can’t tell the difference between wrong and right.  He reacts the way he does because, in reality, he’s completely devastated inside at having to do these things, and he hates himself for it, and feels almost unbearable guilt for it.  He’s convinced himself that he feels nothing when he kills without realizing that’s not at all true.  He thinks he’s an unfeeling monster, but what it really is, is that he simply forcing his emotions down beneath his consciousness when he kills because otherwise he wouldn’t be able to do it, and he knows if he can’t kill, he himself is going to die.  People will see how much it hurts him to do the things he has to in order to survive, and use that against him, and if he hesitates in a moment of decision, where it’s his life or the other guys, he’ll die.  He HAS to be cold about it, because if he lets his emotion start to dictate his actions, he’ll doubt his actions, and that will be the end for him. So he crushes his emotion down and forces himself to operate like a machine.  And then of course afterward, after he gets through with it, he’s again wracked by guilt and pain.  He never lost sight of his morality.  He never started to lose his understanding of right and wrong.  He only learned to control it because, otherwise, he knew, he wouldn’t last in the world of crime and violence he was thrown into as a young kid. He acts apathetic about it precisely because he’s actually anything but.  Because he’s actually so torn up about it, and weighed down by doubt, and slowly but surely it’s degrading his mental health and self-esteem, until we meet him in the story, and his self-loathing is almost total.  It’s ironic, because underneath it all, he has a good heart, and he doesn’t want to hurt anybody and he just wants to be left alone, and it’s exactly for that reason that it torments him as much as it does. But then, nobody will leave him alone, will they?  People keep trying to hurt him, to use him and force him to do things he doesn’t want to do.  To take and take from him constantly, without ever stopping to consider that he’s a person with thoughts and feelings of his own.  They treat him instead like an object that exists solely for their pleasure and to do with as they see fit.  He doesn’t want to do the things he does, but he’s forced to in order to survive, and as the only means he knows of to protect himself from further abuse and to keep people who want to abuse him away from him, he adopts this dismissive, uncaring and cold-hearted attitude.  He does’t want anyone to see that he’s really tormented inside about it all because it would be exposing his vulnerability to them then, and would then give them an in to attacking and hurting him even more.  He pushes people away by acting like he doesn’t care because he doesn’t know any other way to protect himself.  Everyone in his life has either failed him, like his father, or outright abused and manipulated him, and taken everything from him without consent of any kind.  So when Ash, even in that scene with Shorter from “Angel Eyes”, acts apathetic, that isn’t how he really feels at all.  It’s just the only way he knows how to act to keep himself safe, because he’s never been shown any other way.  All of the adults in his life have only ever shown him that he should expect cruelty and pain from them, and so he reacts with that expectation in mind.  They don’t care about him, so he acts like he doesn’t care about them, or what they do to him, and turn around then becomes fair play.  If they’re going to use him, he’s going to use them right back.  But Ash never feels okay about that.  He’s never alright with it.  He struggles with it and torments himself with guilt over it.  He has no desire or wish to act this way, but he doesn’t have a choice if he wants to keep surviving.  And again, he can’t let those same people see that it bothers him, because they’ll only use that fact against him and try to use it to manipulate him and hurt him.  You know what they say about the best way to fight a bully is.  To show that their bullying doesn’t affect you.  To show it doesn’t hurt you.  If you don’t give them a reaction, then they’ll stop.  That’s what Ash is doing.  He’s not giving them a reaction in the hopes that they’ll stop.  And I just am confused that some people don’t seem to get this about him.

The same thing with his treatment of Sing at the beginning.  He’s so harsh towards Sing because he’s trying to PROTECT him and Sing’s gang.  He doesn’t want Sing to get involved, and he doesn’t want Sing to tell his gang about what really happened with Shorter, because then they’d be roped into the war Ash was waging with Dino, and become targets of Dino.  He isn’t mean to Sing because he’s a hateful asshole.  He’s mean to Sing because it’s the only way he knows how to protect him.  By pushing him away from himself and the danger of his world and life.  It’s actually an incredibly selfless act, heartbreaking in it’s selflessness, really.

I wonder when and how Ash was treating Sing in a harsh way, though? How could anyone seriously criticize that? Because of how he was pretty cold towards him when they first met? Seriously, that was understandable since Ash was really pissed in that moment. Think about it. Just not that long ago, he had to kill his best friend and he just had found said best friend’s corpse lying on a table with his brain having been removed and the only thing he could do was burn him, causing him to have a breakdown:

And then a kid shows up, thinking he could fight against him, challenging him. Ash even warns him beforehand that he’s currently in a bad mood:

And even a second time when Sing is still not leaving him alone:

Anyone would be annoyed with that when they had just went through hell and were just tired and still mourning their best friend. Ash didn’t want to be rude nor harsh, he was just really not in the mood for this.

Or was it about when Ash slapped Sing on the roof after his return from the facility? Okay, that may have been an overreaction of him, but still, Ash tried to get his point across that he’s not allowed to tell anyone the truth about Shorter’s death under any circumstances since otherwise, people would only want to take revenge and get themselves killed in the process. Again, it was a portrayal of Ash caring about other people and not wanting for anyone to die such a meaningless death. Besides, they were Shorter’s people so maybe Ash even did it for him because he knew he wouldn’t want his people to get hurt.

Anyway, regarding the complaint about Ash treating Sing in a harsh way, let’s all not forget who saved Sing’s life two times:

About Ash threatening Yut Lung…Considering that he had tricked them all, blackmailed Shorter with the life of his sister, helped in kidnapping him and Eiji which eventually led to Shorter’s death, it’s understandable that Ash said he’s gonna kill him. It may not have been Yut Lung’s idea, but he still helped and didn’t seem to care that much about the possible consequences. Besides, Yut Lung even seemed to welcome getting killed by Ash so maybe he even wished for it.

Ash being a “pathological liar”…When did Ash ever really lie for no reasonable reason? I can only recall the times where he hid things like when he didn’t tell Eiji he was going back to Golzine but come on, I don’t even need to explain why he did that. There were times where he lied when being manipulative towards his enemies, but who would hold that against him?

I also always had the feeling that Ash seeming to not care about having killed Arthur’s boys during the conversation with Eiji was just an act because it seemed so contradictory to what he thought about it just moments ago:

Just like you said, he puts on an act in order to protect himself, in order to appear collected and tough. The thing is, Eiji didn’t buy it. He kept calling him out on his behaviour and even told him outright that he’s not the Ash he knows:

That’s when Ash’s act was gone completely, that’s when he knew it doesn’t work, knew that Eiji sees through him and instead of continuing, he just snapped and stormed off.

And yeah, again, with Sing on the rooftop, he was harsh, but it was because he was trying to protect Sing and his gang.  The thing people forget about Ash is that, he’s been treated so harshly and cruelly by everyone in his life up to that point, that he really doesn’t know any other way to be himself.  He cares deeply about people, but the only way he’s ever learned to protect them is by pushing them away from himself, and he already thinks so little of himself, that he thinks the best way to do that is to make people hate him.  So he plays up this image he has of being a cold, heartless jerk, and acts like an asshole sometimes, so that people will stop trying to get near him.  It’s both a defense mechanism for himself, and a means of trying to protect those he cares for.  He doesn’t want Sing to get involved with Dino, because he would be endangering his own life and the lives of his gang members.  Ash wasn’t mean to Sing because he’s just a mean jerk.  He’s mean to him because it’s the only way he knows how to protect people.  It’s the same as what we saw early on in the story, when Ash first tries to get Eiji to go back to Japan.  He tells Eiji bluntly that he’s going to get in the way and slow them down.  On the surface, it seems like a mean, unkind thing to say.  Even Max gets angry at Ash for saying it.  But Ash only says it because he doesn’t want Eiji to get hurt, and he knows he will if he sticks around.  He’s trying to protect him, again, in the only way he knows how, by pushing him away.  Even then, Ash isn’t able to be entirely dismissive of Eiji, telling him he isn’t useless, and reminding him that he saved his life.  I mean, Ash is the opposite of mean.  A truly mean-spirited person would be unkind and cruel just to hurt someone.  For the sole purpose of hurting someone, and getting to see them hurt.  Ash is only ever harsh with his words and actions with Sing or Eiji or anyone he truly cares about because he’s trying to protect them, not hurt them.

And yeah, Yut-Lung’s actions are what directly led to Ash threatening him.  Seeing it any other way seems bizarre and even deluded.  Even then, after Ash escapes with Eiji from the compound, we see his threat was actually idle, because he never actually goes directly after Yut-Lung again.  In fact, it’s the opposite.  Yut-Lung goes directly after Ash, and only then do we see Ash actually attack Yut-Lung, when he literally has no choice.  And it isn’t an attack born out of revenge, but because he needs to get Eiji and his own gang members released from Yut-Lung’s own men.  There’s even a point after Yut-Lung’s betrayed Ash and Shorter, when Ash says to Eiji that he can’t figure out if Yut-Lung is a friend or a foe.  You sense absolutely no actual malice from Ash towards Yut-Lung, despite everything Yut-Lung had done to him at that point.  Unlike Yut-Lung, who viciously goes after Ash, simply out of a jealous rage over the fact that Ash has a person in Eiji who cares about him.  

And great point about Ash and how he rarely tells lies at all throughout the story, and only in circumstances where, again, he’s either trying to protect someone, like Eiji, from the truth, because he doesn’t want him to get hurt, or because he has to in order to stay alive.  An actual pathological liar would be someone who can’t STOP lying, about ANYTHING.  They’re someone who lies without any sense of qualm and without any real reason.  Ash only lies because he has a good reason to.  Again, like almost all of Ash’s actions, either out of self-defense, or out of defending others.  Ash’s intent is never to just hurt someone out of malice.  

And that ties into the scene between him and Eiji, where Ash is trying to act callous and uncaring about what’s going on with Arthur’s gang.  We KNOW Ash is putting up an act here because of the preceding scene you mentioned, where he’s dwelling on and tortured by his actions.  He feels like a monster, and he hates himself.  At the same time, he knows he has to do what he’s doing in order to protect himself and his gang, because Arthur would just kill all of them if given the chance, as he’s proven he’s capable of time and time again.  Ash was forced to go on the offensive, because Arthur wouldn’t just let it go, and kept trying ruthlessly to kill Ash and his crew.  Ash is ridden with a feeling of guilt and remorse over his actions against Arthur’s gang, but if he allows himself to focus on those feelings, he knows he won’t be able to do what needs to be done in order to survive, and that’s why he snaps at Eiji and argues with him, because Eiji is basically shoving Ash’s sense of guilt in his face and chastising him for his actions, forcing him to think about his bad feelings over his actions.  Ash knows if he keeps dwelling on it and being forced to think about how it really makes him feel, he won’t be able to make himself go through with it.  The thing is, it isn’t just Ash’s life on the line in this situation.  The lives of his gang members are on the line too, and if Ash is weak, and gives into his sense of guilt, they’re lives will be forefit, along with his.  Ash tells Eiji that it isn’t about logic or reasoning out there on the streets, it’s about strength, and if he shows weakness by refusing to fight back, he’ll be killed, and so will the other kids who have chosen him to lead and protect them, and Ash is actually right, which is why I think Eiji feels bad later on about what he said.  Ash is actually crushed by his sense of guilt and remorse, but for the sake of his own life and the lives of his crew, he can’t let it dictate his actions.  Ash is basically stuck between a rock and a hard place, because he can’t win in this situation.  It’s either let his sense of morality guide him and not go after Arthur and his gang and basically wait for them to come and kill him and his own gang, or ignore his sense of morality in order to protect himself and his gang, but suffer the weight of his own remorse and despair at having to do these things.  Ash’s problem isn’t that he doesn’t care, or is cold-hearted, his problem is that he cares TOO MUCH, and he’s constantly in a position where caring at all will get him and other people either hurt or killed.  When Ash says to Eiji, and also to Shorter in that scene from Angel Eyes, “What would you know about it?”, he’s asking them if they’ve ever been in the kind of position he’s constantly in, where there’s only one of two choices to be made, either compromise your morals and survive, or don’t compromise them and get raped or killed for it.  Eiji of course doesn’t understand because he’s never been in a position where it was either his life or someone else’.  He’s lived a normal, even sheltered life where he never had to worry about making hard choices for his own survival.  And Shorter doesn’t really understand Ash’s dilemma either, because he’s never been sexually abused and had to use his own sexuality as a means of protecting himself, either against being raped again, or as a means of taking back some control in an otherwise powerless position and situation.  Still, Ash feels immense guilt and pain over it all, because he’s NOT okay with doing the things he’s doing, but he doesn’t have a choice if he wants to keep living and if he wants to protect himself from being further abused.  He can’t afford to let himself be guided by his conscience, and he can’t afford to let himself dwell on his sense of remorse.  Not if he wants to survive, and not if he wants those he cares about to survive.  It’s of course easy to sit there and judge someone for doing bad things when you yourself have never had to do bad things simply to keep yourself alive, or take back some control from the people who would otherwise thoughtlessly and without hesitation use up every part of you until there was nothing left.

Pushing people away, being harsh to them even though they could hate him afterwards is really the only way Ash sees in order to protect them. Another thing of which I think is really important regarding the scene with him telling Eiji to go home, that he’s only a burden to them etc. is what happens right after it:

He just had been mean to Eiji, had hurt his feelings by telling him really harsh things he didn’t even mean just to protect him, had told him out right to go away. And he obviously can’t handle how he had just treated him so he’s resorting to alcohol to drink away his bad conscience.

Even Max notices the reason behind it right away:

Contrast that with the other characters we see in Banana Fish who also kill to stay alive.  Like Sing, Cain, even Shorter.  None of them suffer from the same sense of self-loathing and self-deprecation that Ash does.  All of them have a much healthier and more balanced view of themselves and what they’ve done.  They excuse themselves for it because they know if they wanted to keep living, they had no choice.  They don’t blame themselves, or hate themselves for it.  They aren’t shown being tormented or suffering over the lives they’ve taken.  They move on quickly from it without ever really thinking about it again.  And we see that too, in post canon, where all of them eventually move on to lead normal, happy, healthy lives, where they aren’t crippled by their pasts.  But not Ash.  We constantly see Ash just ragging on himself and torturing himself over the lives he’s taken and the things he’s done, constantly referring to himself as a monster or a brute or a lowlife, constantly hating himself.  Cain even begs Ash to stop giving himself such a hard time, trying to convince him that he’s a good friend and a good boss, but it doesn’t break through to Ash.  He can’t see himself that way.  It actually speaks volumes about the strength of Ash’s moral character, that to him, taking a life is no trivial matter.  That taking a life is an extremely serious, and tragic thing.  Even the other characters who are obviously good and kind, again, like Sing, Cain and Shorter, don’t seem to recognize the true tragedy of taking another person’s life.  They don’t feel it in the same way Ash does.  I think that also has to do with Ash’s intelligence.  It’s a case of his own intelligence working against him.  He’s too smart, and because of that, he feels things more deeply than others. Is more sensitive than others.  Again, it’s ironic, since everyone except Eiji views Ash as this ice man, cold-hearted killer.  He’s anything but.  He’s the most sensitive and fragile hearted one of all.  

Your points about Ash always having love in his heart, and always loving, are excellent. Ash never did close himself off, or become uncaring towards people, despite everything that happened to him. Yut did, and let his hate for his brothers become his purpose for living. Ash always cared deeply for the people around him who were his friends. He never didn’t, even when he tried for his own sake.  Even when he tried to convince himself he shouldn’t care, he never could bring himself to.

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 “set 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 mean of sussing out who it is that’s gunning for him on the outside.  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, 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.  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 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 him, 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, it played into their sick fantasies, and they wouldn’t be angry then, 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.

Perhaps “pathological” doesn’t sound like the right term. It’s not like he has no reason at all. What I mean is that Ash has a bad relationship with Truth. You said that he didn’t say to the Chinese guys why Shorter died to protect them… They Got involved in Ash’s war anyway without knowing the truth and you knows? That is perfect to discredit Sing as a leader to them.

sayaka19fan

Don’t assume that I think Ash should have told about Shorter’s death on the first occasion. I never said that. Sing was the new leader, planning not to inform him at all at any time was insane.

sayaka19fan

Insane if not ill-intended

sayaka19fan

I don’t think Eiji would ever call Ash a slut. And Ash hadn’t to talk about his relationship with Dino. He could simply talk about the present as it was: a bad joke from a lunatic mafia boss.

sayaka19fan

No matter how hard his past was, Ash could have helped Charlie but he preferred revenge on justice. Being caring isn’t the only value to be good people: even criminals have family to protect while slaughtering others.

sayaka19fan

I know you would say things like “Ash protected Eiji when he was a stranger”. It is probably the best argument you could think of. Eiji was a guest that Charlie untrusted to him. As a boss he couldn’t dismiss it like not his business. But he abandoned his men when they obeyed Dino’s orders.

sayaka19fan

He even said to Eiji that Arthur’s mistake was that he wanted to rule though terror. You can’t gain worthy followers like that. You need to care even if you personally don’t care. We can’t read Ash’s mind: this is why I think that both Ash caring because he has a golden heart and Ash caring for a selfish reason are possible interpretations. I am not rejecting your view. I think the manga was carefully made for both those views to cohabit.

//

Ash lies when he has to.  That’s what every single human being on the planet does, by the way.  He lies either to protect people, himself, or to further a goal.  Again, everybody does that.  Lying is a survival mechanism.  And Ash always uses it as such.  

You can’t discount Ash’s past and the things he’s gone through when discussing the times Ash lies, because it then fails to understand the inherent reason for his doing so.  Ash doesn’t trust people, because he’s never been given any reason to trust people.  In fact, he’s been given every reason NOT to.  Viciously abused since a very young age in truly the most horrific ways imaginable.  So, in reaction to those experiences, Ash has closed himself off and purposefully pushes people away as a means of protecting himself.  He keeps people at a distance, because experience tells him to let people close is to let people see his vulnerabilities, which they’ve proven to him time and time again they will not hesitate to take advantage of.  Ash isn’t a pathological liar, or even a regular liar.  He lies because he has to.  If he didn’t, he would die, or get raped, again.  You can’t fault him for that.  You can’t hold that against him.  He’s living in a world where letting the wrong person close to you can end in your demise.  Where it isn’t at all guaranteed that you’ll live to see the next day, and one misstep could mean your life.  So yeah, I don’t buy that Ash has a problem with the truth, or that he somehow has a problem with lying.  He learned to lie, and to manipulate, as a means of survival, because he’s living in a seriously cut throat world where everyone around him is ready and willing to hurt him in any way they can.  But see, Ash never lies to hurt anyone, or with the intention of hurting anyone.  He lies to protect himself, and those he cares about, and always for a good reason.

Ash was loyal to Shorter, and at no point in the entire story does Ash display a desire to take over the Chinese’ turf, or anyone’s turf, for that matter.  He tries to maintain his own turf, and that’s about it.  He doesn’t try to muscle in on the Chinese, or the Blacks, or any other group we see in the story.  He just wants to be left alone.  And in Angel Eyes, it’s made clear that Ash never chose to become a boss, or ever even thought of becoming one.  He’s confused and uncomfortable when the other inmates start treating him like some kind of Capo, and doesn’t know what Shorter is talking about when he says Arthur was trying to nip Ash in the bud because he knew he would be a threat one day.  Other street kids just started following him because they saw how capable he was after how he handled Frankie, and by the time he got out, he had a gang who had essentially appointed him their leader.   But he never had any intention of becoming a boss, never any schemes or plans to that effect, and to think or interpret it otherwise is, I think, willfully ignoring the text and framing, and is strangely ungenerous and uncharitable to Ash’s character, and very cynical.  It’s projecting an intention onto the character that isn’t at all supported by the narrative, either in terms of writing, narrative structure, or artistic design.

To than assume that Ash didn’t want Sing’s gang to know why he had to kill Shorter was because he was looking to discredit Sing and take over his gang, is completely without evidence or merit.  Ash never showed any ambition towards that kind of thing, and in fact, his respect and friendship towards Shorter was strong enough that you know he wouldn’t betray his memory by making a grab for power in the vaccum left by his absence.  Secondly, there was no time at all for that kind of thing.  Ash had his hands more than full with Dino and everything going on with Arthur, and trying to protect Eiji, etc…  He’d gotten through with his war with Arthur, in which he very nearly died, and immediately following that ordeal, he ends up a prisoner in a mental hospital, where they’re planning on destroying his mind and turning him into a zombie.  He barely escapes from there with his life, before then having to go back in to rescue Max and Ibe, again, something he didn’t have to do, something nobody would have even known about if he’d decided against risking his life again to do it, and which would have benefited him not to.  Once more, this is irrefutable proof of Ash’s willingness to put others before himself.  The opposite of selfish.  But I digress.  The point is, he goes through this entire, insane ordeal just to escape with his life from this horrible place, before going out in search of Eiji.  Where, in that time, would Ash have had a moment to even think about making a move on Chinatown?  And why would he?  How would Ash even have the time or inclination to concern himself with taking over Chinatown when he was simply fighting for his life against Dino, and Arthur, and trying to figure out how to stop his plans with Banana Fish?  When there was hardly even a moment to breathe in the midst of all the chaos going on around him?  There’s no evidence to support that idea at all, or to show Ash as having that kind of mind set or intention when he tells Sing to keep the truth about Shorter’s death a secret.  Again, to make that assumption, you would have to willfully ignore everything in the text, in the designs and expressions of the characters, in the narrative framing of events, in what we can infer from the subtext.  It’s just not there.

And Sing’s gang only ended up getting involved because, again, Sing injected himself and his gang into the action when he showed up unannounced to Ash and Arthur’s fight.  Ash didn’t expect him to be there, and he didn’t expect things to unravel the way they did, with Arthur’s men jumping him from the subway car and trying to blow him away.  Sing basically forced his way into what was going on without Ash’s consent or desire for him to do so.  He wanted to keep them out of it, because he knew if they got involved, there was a good chance they would get killed, and many of them did end up getting killed.  Not only that, but once they were involved, there’s was more than one situation which arises in which Ash had to put himself in harms way and endanger his own life to help rescue members of Sing’s gang.  A problem he wouldn’t have had to concern himself with if Sing had just done as he wished and stayed out of it.  Ash was ultimately correct to be concerned.

Yes, Sing was the new leader of Shorter’s gang, but Ash didn’t know him at all.  He didn’t even know who he was when he first met him, had never seen him before, didn’t recognize him.  He had no loyalty or obligation to Sing.  He wasn’t his friend, the way he had been Shorter’s, and had no reason to even trust him, considering he barely knew him.  Again, past experience told Ash that he couldn’t really trust anyone.  Why would he feel the need to explain to him what was going on, and why should he have even felt safe in the assumption that Sing was on his side?  Especially after what happened to Shorter because he insisted on being involved too, Shorter being forced into a position where he had to betray Ash, why WOULDN’T Ash feel ambivalent about roping other people into his war with Dino at that point?  When he knew, if he DID explain what was happening, just exposing Sing to that knowledge would make him a target of Dino’s?  When it would then make Sing a potential weak point for Ash, the way Shorter and Eiji had been?  Ash wouldn’t be able to just leave Sing or his gang in the lurch then, because he would have been directly responsible for exposing them to the threat in the first place, and Ash proves throughout the story that if he feels something is his fault, if he gets someone involved in trouble, he’ll do everything he can to help them out of it.  Once more, as evidence by Sing and his gang’s eventual involvement, and Ash’s immediate willingness to lend his aid to them when they, like he feared, were targeted by Dino and his allies.  Once again, Ash’s experiences told him that the best way to handle his business was to keep it self contained, and not involve others, because when he involved others, they got hurt, and they could be used as leverage against him.  Dino held infinitely greater resources and power than any of the street gangs, and Ash knew that better than any of them.  If Sing didn’t know about Banana Fish, then he couldn’t blab about it to anyone else, and he would never land on Dino’s radar.  The narrative makes it more than clear what Ash’s intentions here are.  Again, you can’t ignore things like narrative framing and subtext, when those things support how the actions happening in a story are being portrayed.  If you do that, you could essentially call every hero in every story where we don’t have access to their inner thoughts all the time possibly suspect in their intentions, and twist every action of theirs to mean whatever you want it to mean, even if the framing of their actions is plainly meant to portray them in a positive light.  Ash wants to protect Sing and his gang, and anyone else from getting involved.  That’s apparent by Ash’s own expressions, his own actions, and his own past actions.  He didn’t even want Shorter involved at first, but Shorter, just like Sing, refused to stay out of it.

And how was Ash supposed to know how Eiji was going to react to finding out what his relationship with Dino was?  Of course Eiji would never call Ash a slut, but we see consistently throughout the story Ash’s fear that Eiji is going to start to think he’s a monster, that he’s going to think he’s pathetic, or disgusting.  He wants Eiji to go back to Japan, not only because he’s trying to protect him, but also because he doesn’t want Eiji to see him do bad things.  He doesn’t want to ruin Eiji’s perception of him.  He even cries out to Eiji after his fight with Arthur “Go back to Japan!  I don’t want you seeing me like this!”.  Telling Eiji that Dino gave him the earring could imply any number of things to Eiji about Ash’s relationship with him, and none of them really good.  Earrings are usually given as a romantic gesture.  Boyfriends give their girlfriends jewelry, husbands give their wives jewelry.  It implies in the object itself some sort of romantic connection, or sexual connection.  Further, that earring basically represents to Ash everything he was trying to escape.  Dino’s control, Dino’s perversion, Dino’s dominance of him.  Dino was constantly lavishing expensive items on Ash as a power play, as a symbol of his ownership of him, and that earring is just another example of the same, twisted power games he’d always played with him.  Why would Ash want to bring that up at all around Eiji?  Why WOULDN’T he be reluctant to talk about something that left a bad taste in his mouth, and reminded him of how horrible his life was?  

Charlie was a cop, Ash was a criminal.  Ash had a bad relationship with the law, for obvious reasons.  Ash had absolutely ZERO reason to trust the police on top of it all.  His first experience with the police was back in Cape Cod, when he was seven years old, when the police blamed Ash for getting raped by his baseball coach, and refused to help him.  Great start for helping Ash form a lifelong loyalty to official police “justice”.  Then we see numerous examples of how the NYPD is in Dino’s back pocket, with plenty of corrupt officials and offiers on his pay role.  We first see it in Angel Eyes, at the very beginning, when Gregory tells Dino that Ash was picked up by the cops, and asks if he wants him to get Ash out.  That tells you that Dino holds enough sway with the police to get prisoners released from their custody when he wants them to be.  Then he proceeds to get the police’s help in setting Ash up for Marvin’s murder.  The lead detetive who collars Ash then proceeds to essentially torture him by making him sit there and watch video’s of him being raped by Marvin.  Great trust building exercise there.  From there, Dino has control over the DA, getting Ash sent to state prison, instead of Juvie, where he should have gone if due process was actually being followed.  He has control over the warden of the state prison, who is working with Dino’s own incarcerated men to go after Ash and make him give up what he knows about Banana Fish.  He instructs those men to kill Ash if Ash doesn’t give up his information.  Yeah, Ash has a lot of reasons to believe that by complying with the law, justice will be served.  That’s a joke.  The police have given Ash every reason NOT to trust them.  Jenkins even admits it at one point, commenting that it’s no wonder Ash doesn’t trust them at all.  Beyond all of that, even if Ash had suddenly lost all of his vaunted intelligence and decided that, hey, I can trust the cops after all, he never would have gotten his revenge on Dino, either for Griffin’s death, or for any of the horrible things Dino had done to him, if he’d gone along with his parole.  He never would have found out what Banana Fish was, or been able to stop Dino’s plans with it.  Don’t forget, Ash knew Banana Fish had something to do with Griffin’s vegetable state, since it was the only thing Griffin was ever able to say after he came back from the war.  Ash couldn’t just forget that, and drop it.  He couldn’t just let go something which he knew had destroyed his brother’s life.  If he’d helped Charlie out, as you say, all of that would have been impossible, and he would have just ended up going on trial, and likely convicted, again, corrupt cops in Dino’s pocket, for a crime he didn’t even commit.  He would have ended up back in jail for the rest of his life, while Dino ran roughshod over the city and country.

As for Ash “abandoning” his men after they betrayed him to Dino, Ash kicked those men out of the gang, because again, experience told Ash that once a traitor, always a traitor.  People capable of betraying you once only prove their capacity for it in the first place, auotmatically making them untrustworthy.  If he’d allowed them to stay, they more than likely would have betrayed him again and kept feeding information to Dino, which would have not only endangered Ash, but the rest of his gang.  His suspicions are of course proven when, after kicking them out, they do exactly that, running to Dino and ratting Ash out to him, for which trouble they end up dead in a ditch.  Ash could have killed them.  His own gang expected him to kill them, and thought he was going soft when he didn’t.  He probably SHOULD have killed them, because if he had, Dino never would have found out what Ash knew.  Ash showed mercy to them instead. He basically told them to leave town, because he knew Dino would be after them. That isn’t a good example of Ash acting cold.  It’s the exact opposite.  Ash never wanted to kill if he didn’t absolutely have to.  Just like he showed mercy to that hitman who tried to take him out after he and Eiji meet up with Shorter after ditching Charlie and the lawyer, letting him go when Shorter was ready to kill him.   Again, I think you’re projecting an impression you want to see onto a narrative framing which doesn’t support it.  Ash’s actions are very deliberately portrayed as heroic, and entirely selfless.  Narrative framing matters.   It’s everything, really.  He protects Eiji when he doesn’t have to, when he doesn’t even know him.  He goes into what he knows is a trap to save Skip, and gives himself up willingly to torture in order to protect him and Eiji both, even when Shorter himself tries to discourage him from going.  Ash would have been forgiven for not throwing himself into a winless situation, even at the expense of one of his crew in Skip, and certainly at the expense of a total stranger in Eiji that walked into the situation himself.  His gang isn’t going to care at that point if the cops entrusted Eiji to Ash, because Eiji, at that point, isn’t one of them, and there’s no reason to be loyal, either to the cops or Eiji.  Heck, Ash could have simply pretended to not even notice Skip escaping outside the bar, which would have freed him from any sense of obligation at all in the eyes of his gang.  But he does notice, and he immediately goes after Skip, even as he figures out immediately that it’s a trap.  He doesn’t hesitate for a moment.

This idea that Ash only cares because he’s trying to maintain power, or because he wants to gain power, again, contradicts everything we know about Ash and how he even came into power in the first place.  He didn’t seek it out, he was chosen by the other street kids and gangs because of his natural abilities and superior fighting skills.  They just started regarding him as their leader, and following him around while he was in reform school.  This is important.  THEY chose him, not the other way around.  They started following him because he was stronger, more capable, and they knew, because he had those qualities, that he could protect them.  Their own motives for choosing Ash were rooted in self-preservation.  Ash never wanted to be a boss, but once these kids started looking to him as their leader and protector, he couldn’t abandon them or tell them to screw off, because in their eyes, he was their best shot at survival themselves.  The fact he doesn’t abandon them, despite obviously not wanting to be a boss, shows in itself that he cares enough to look out for people who look to him as someone who can keep them safe.  Ash could have just as easily said screw you and kept on on his own, since he’d more than proven he was capable of taking care of himself.

And we see things from Ash’s view point several times throughout the story.  Moments when he’s alone and clearly tortured by the things he’s having to do, expressions on his face when he’s turned away from any other characters, private moments.  Remember, this is a visual medium, and what we’re seeing matters just as much as the words on the page.  Character expressions tell us just as much about what a character is thinking and feeling as their dialog, either external or internal.  Even then, we see several internal monologues and dreams where Ash’s self-loathing and fear of himself is on full display.  When he looks at his own hands in horror, because he can only see the hands of a monster that can’t stop killing.  Where he’s clearly, deeply conflicted and suffering over his actions, because deep down, he has a good heart.

Ash’s conversation with Shorter and his confusion over Shorter’s words about Arthur being clever tell you that Ash wasn’t a boss, and that he had no designs on becoming one.  Ash stood out among the street kids because he’s beautiful and because he’s smarter than everyone.  

Charlie was a cop, that’s all you need to know to understand why Ash wouldn’t entirely trust him, again for all the reasons I laid out in my previous post.  And it wasn’t just Charlie that Ash would be dealing with if he’d gone along with his parole.  Again, I laid all this out already.

If you think all of Ash’s actions are suspicious, then I don’t know what to tell you.  He’s framed in a heroic light throughout the series, and engages in several heroic acts.  If you can’t see that, then it’s because you’re being deliberately cynical and uncharitable towards Ash’s character, because you want to be.  Not because there’s anything within the actual narrative to support your suspicions.  There’s a reason Ash is such a beloved character, and it’s because the narrative structure purposefully frames him in a positive light.  

Ash and Shorter were having a conversation, they were asking questions of each other and responding to each other.  We come upon the scene in what is clearly the middle of this conversation, and Ash is explaining to Shorter how Arthur got him sent up.  We have to assume that Ash is listening to Shorter’s responses within this context.  Again, framing MATTERS.  The impression a scene leaves you with, based on how it’s framed, is intentional.  It’s how an author tells the reader what they should be thinking.  Ash’s response to Shorter, and Shorter’s words, within the context of what we just learned about Ash’s discomfort at the other inmates treating him like a boss, denotes confusion.  This, coupled with the fact that Ash didn’t make any attempts to form a gang for the first several weeks he was in Juvie, instead wanting to be left alone and content to fend for himself, tells us Ash had no designs on forming a gang.  If he had, he would have immediately set about establishing himself as someone to be followed.  He would have been aware of those types of dynamics within gang culture, and worked to set himself up in that regard.  But he didn’t.  Why not, if he was a boss on the outside?  He would have known it would afford him protection too, and power within the system. But he doesn’t get a crew until everyone just starts inadvertently attaching themselves to him.  The fact too that Arthur tries to take Ash out after getting him sent up, because he could see that Ash’s natural abilities and charisma would eventually lead to the street kids following him, which in turn would lead to a direct confrontation between them, is more proof that Ash wasn’t yet a boss.  It’s why Shorter says Arthur was trying to “nip Ash in the bud”.  He was trying to get rid of Ash before that could happen.  All of this information taken together lets us know that Ash hadn’t yet become a boss, and that he never even planned on it, .  

I was planning to write a meta on how Shorter also saved Ash’s humanity and was indeed the first to do so (and no, I’m totally NOT under the influence of @sevenflats​’ gorgeous shorash fanart) but then I realised that the main idea I had for that meta actually overlaps with what @ash-in-the-rye​ inspired me to write about power relations in Banana Fish.

Content/trigger warning: This meta discusses child sexual abuse.

All his life Ash fought against people who sought to dominate him for his beauty, intelligence and skills. While the odds were always in favour of his opponents who had resources he didn’t have, Ash made use of the very same qualities they were after to fight back. He tipped off the power balance to his favour by pretending to play the part they expected him to and caught them unawares. 

How did Ash learn to do that? Well, in the worst possible way. When he was repeatedly raped by his baseball coach in Cape Cod, he killed him to put an end to what his abuser was doing to him because the adults around him couldn’t. According to James, the guy thought he didn’t have to kill Ash like the other kids because he was paying him money. So here’s the thing. And this is really difficult to think about, let alone to put into words. Ash was only 8 years old and he knew this. He knew the money was keeping him alive. That’s why James, the genius that he is, suggested that Ash ask the guy for money in the first place. Ash also knew that as long as money was involved, the abuse would continue and there would be no way out. By then, he must have observed the guy many times and learned his routine. So one day, he took his father’s gun. 

It’s shocking to think that an 8-year-old would commit premeditated murder. The fact of the matter is that when the adults around him who should have protected him failed to do so, Ash took matters into his own hands. And he learned something from this experience: how to turn his vulnerability into an advantage.

Eiji really had been an important person to Ash in the main story and without him, he probably really would have turned into a devil. But Shorter was very important, too. He was the first one to call him out on the way he acts and probably was his first friend. If it hadn’t been for him, we wouldn’t have gotten the Ash we saw at the beginning of Bf and maybe, he wouldn’t even have been able to bond with Eiji like that (putting it like that, it sounds as if Shorter was like a spiritual wingman 😂)

What I always found and still find hard to imagine is Ash killing the coach on purpose when he was 8 years old, though.

Like, I never thought that he knew where to find that gun but rather found it by accident. What I also could never imagine is him holding the gun in his hands, thinking: “I’m gonna kill him.” and plans everything out. I thought it may have been something along the lines of: “I won’t let him hurt me anymore” and that he just wanted to scare him with pointing the gun at him the next time he tried to do something to him. And then things just escalated and Ash just pulled the trigger out of fear, killing him.

I rather always thought that he found it by accident, maybe as he was playing all on his own in his father’s house, the gun being left unguarded. And Ash knew. He knew what this weapon is for. Knew that it can kill, knew that it’s even supposed to, but he also knew that it can be used for self defense. All the horror he experienced as he had been raped by the coach started to replay in his mind and without giving much thought to it, he just took it with him.

His father didn’t notice that his gun was gone, that it was now in the posession of his eight year old son, that out of desperation and fear, Ash decided to take matters in his own hands if neither his father nor even the police were showing signs of wanting to protect him.

And then once again, the coach took him to his home. Ash couldn’t make a scene, couldn’t refuse because he already learned when having been taken to the police that no one would believe him anyway, that the coach will always be seen as the nice guy and a hero.

Of course, we would think of it differently and outright potest, searching for help from others but this is a eight year old we talk about here. A eight year old who was already labelled unreliable and was told by his own father, a parental figure he trusted, that he just should keep quiet without fighting back. That was exactly what he was doing, may it have been because he just followed his father’s “advise” like any kid would probably do or because the coach had told him what happens if he ever started to protest.

That’s why this last time was no different than the other times. He took him home, not even bothering to lock the door because Ash wouldn’t try to run away anyway. He guided Ash to his bed and began to take off his clothes, but before he could do anything else, just when he was close enough, Ash pulled out the gun and threatened him. He didn’t pull the trigger immediately, he didn’t intend to kill, he just wanted him to fear for his life, to show him that he’s now in control and is able to defend himself on his own. He just wanted for it to stop.

But the coach just laughed. He was laughing at him and his attempt to frighten him. In his life, he had see much worse than a eight year old holding a gun and pointing it at him. He wasn’t afraid in the slightest. Ash’s plan had failed and what was even worse, he had fought back. There was no way he would ever leave that house alive again. Of course, the coach tried to take that gun away from him as he jumped on him, wanted it out of the way befeore he’d do much more terrible things to him than he already did before.

Maybe Ash pulled the trigger out of fear in that moment, maybe it was pulled accidently as both tried to get their hands on it. Either way, the gun went off and the man suddenly went stiff and half slided off the bed, dead.

And Ash could just stare. Stare at what he had just done, stare at the dead body in front of him. The horrors he had been living through had finally come to an end, but at the same time, even crueler horrors were awaiting him.

I wanted to comment a little bit on the ending of Banana Fish, and the generally accepted or believed assumption that Ash let himself die.  That he essentially committed a suicide passive in nature by returning to the library and letting himself bleed out.  But… upon reading the ending, I have more the sense that this isn’t really the case.  

There’s a few reasons for this.  

The most obvious reason, which I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone mention before, is that Ash gets stabbed by Lao in the exact same place where, just a few days before, he’d been shot through.  This, on top of the severe physical trauma of the knife wound he’d received from Arthur earlier on on the opposite side of his abdomen.  Ash’s body is, at this point in the story, particularly to this area of his body, extremely beaten up and has suffered through a lot of physical trauma.

The other reason I think it’s important to take note of the above fact, is that more than a few times, in the previous panels, Ash’s physical condition and specifically his wounds are made mention of by Blanca.  He keeps asking Ash how he’s feeling, how his pain is.  The very day before Ash is killed, Blanca asks him how his wounds are, and Ash tells him they hurt like hell.  What this tells us is that the damage to Ash’s abdomen from the gunshot hasn’t fully healed.  That area of his stomach is still damaged and still weakened by the physical trauma of being torn apart by a bullet.

So, then Lao comes and stabs Ash in exactly the same spot.  Blanca mentions earlier on that the bullet from the Chinese kids that shot him didn’t hit any of Ash’s vital organs, that it passed cleanly through, but he was still bleeding profusely and would die if he didn’t get help.  After Lao stabs Ash, Ash says “You missed all my vital organs, you idiot.”.  But Lao hit him in the exact spot where there was still severe physical trauma from Ash’s previous bullet wound.  

After Ash shoots Lao, we see him start to really labor, as he bends down to gather up the pages of Eiji’s letter.  He’s gasping and making labored, pained noises, almost like he’s wheezing.  He dies not long after that.

I think, when you consider all of this information, it makes it seem like the knife wound killed Ash, not because he let it happen, but because it basically reaggrevated a previous, very serious wound, and Ash’s body just couldn’t take it anymore.  He just started bleeding so much, and so quickly, that there wasn’t any time for him to seek help, or save himself.  I think Ash probably knew this, and just accepted it, returning to the library to finish reading the rest of Eiji’s letter, and dying in peace, knowing he was loved by Eiji, and that Eiji’s soul would always be with him.

However, there are still two reasons which bug me about this.

1. The library

Despite of his wounds, Ash still makes it to the main reading room of the library which is on the third floor. There’s a lot of stairs he had to climb in order to get there and quite some time must have passed since he couldn’t move that fast due to the wound he just had received. It’s hard to imagine that there really was not even the slightest chance Ash could have been saved if he still had time and energy to walk all the way up there

2. Sing’s comment in GoL

Sing describes Ash’s death as a process that lasted “long, long hours”:

I read through various interpretations regarding the ending and also regarding this little moment and stumbled upon an interpretation from the Japanese fandom. According to them, it’s actually supposed to be seen as being told from Ash’s point of view, that due to his injury and pain, it just seemed that long even though it wasn’t. This doesn’t get clear because English isn’t that nuanced like Japanese is.

Unfortunately, I can’t speak Japanese and can’t really confirm if that’s true or not. However, I also once saw a comment of someone on that scene who explained why they can’t get quite behind that interpretation.

I would link it here, especially since it’s a whole page of interpretation for the ending as a whole, but it’s in German and I don’t know how many people would even understand it or if the site can be opened at all in other countries…

Basically, what the comment was pointing out is that Sing desperately tried to understand Ash’s train of thought and to see things from his point of view:

And indeed, that whole scene seems to be about Sing trying to piece everything together, to understand why things had come to this, why Ash died, why he was smiling when he died and how Lao could even get so close to him to attack him.

For the last question, he found answer:

But, as it gets also pointed out in the mentioned comment, Sing is speculating in that moment, he doesn’t know anything for sure and can only keep running in circles as to why the things happened the way they did. That’s why it seems weird that in one panel Sing is supposed to suddenly talk from Ash’s perspective and describe how things felt like for him before his death from his point of view even though he kept on struggling so much to get behind it in the first place and continues to do so right after the panel with the “long, long hours”.

Of course, that’s all just speculation and interpretation just like with the ending in general and no one can say for sure what is now “right” or “wrong” because when it comes to interpretation, there simply is no “right” nor “wrong”.

To quote one of my professors: “We’re 45 people in this room and if we all read the same book, we would get 45 different versions of it because everyone interprets it differently.”

And I think that also can be applied to Banana Fish because there is definitively room for all kind of interpretations.

Did Ash choose to die? If yes, then why? Did he think he could keep Eiji safe with his death? Was he fearing that people would come after him (like Lao did) and endanger Eiji again if they met again? Had he assumed that his enemies would even follow him if he ever decided to give Japan a try? Was this assumption justified or was it just his habit of always imagining the worst case scenario? Did he believe Eiji’s heartfelt letter? Was that the reason Ash felt like he could let go in the end with no major regrets? Or was he so imprisoned in his twisted mindset that had been implanted into him by others over all those years that Eiji’s words, as sad and heartbreaking it would be, simply didn’t reach him?

And if Ash didn’t choose to die? Did he simply knew there was no way to save himself despite of his vital organs having been missed? Did the wound he had received from the gun shot reopen? Did he just have enough time to make it to the library and read Eiji’s letter before he died? How much time did he have left exactly? Was he already dead when the librarian found him or was he just unconscious in that moment? Was his death really a process of “long, long hours” or did it really just seem like that for Ash and it was actually a quicker death?

Was it maybe a mixture of both? Was his wound not severe enough to actually kill him for sure but still severe enough so a simply “patching up” wouldn’t have sufficed unless he had went to a hospital? Would he have been arrested if he had gone to a doctor due to his criminal record? (After all, this was the reason Ash couldn’t go with Eiji to the hospital after the latter had been shot) Was this something Ash feared? Was this fear justified or again just all in his head?

Was this quote by Hemingway maybe ringing true:

Was Ash so filled with Eiji’s love that he simply forgot to take proper care of himself in that moment? Did he simply not notice that his life was slipping away while Eiji’s words were filling him up with love? Did he maybe notice that eventually, but at that point it was already too late?

No one can tell for sure and maybe that’s where it goes full circle with “The Snows of Kilimanjaro”:

I didn’t know that about what the Japanese readers say regarding that panel from “Garden of Light”.  I have yet to read “Garden of Light” all the way through, so I guess I need to do that before I can form a good perspective on this.  It would be interesting if it really took hours for Ash to bleed to death, and also awful.  But I think it also makes sense that that panel is meant to be from Ash’s perspective.  To think about things like blood pressure and body temperature slowly dropping seems like it would be from Ash’s perspective in a way.  Ash was dying, and so his perception of time would be skewed, no doubt, just like his perception of everything would be.

But then, yeah, Ash shows a real tendency towards suicidal thoughts throughout Banana Fish, and I was just talking about this on another post.  I’ll just quote myself here on this point.   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.  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, how it’s like a release from the suffering of life.  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.  He doesn’t want to expose Eiji to that, and ruin his own happiness with it.  He doesn’t want Eiji to hope for something which he himself doesn’t believe is possible, this idea that Ash could somehow walk away from his life of violence and uncertainty and paranoia, because false hope is the most painful thing of all when it’s shattered by reality.  And all of Ash’s experiences in his life tell him that this idea of being able to walk away is nothing but a very nice dream.  Because that world of violence and pain and suffering was the only world Ash had ever known, and every time he tried to have a part of it that was separate from that violence and pain, it only ended up getting destroyed.  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. I mean, we’ve talked about this extensively, that people assume Ash was running to the airport to go to Japan with Eiji, but how both of us think he was only going to say goodbye.  I think Eiji’s words absolutely reached Ash, and he believed in them completely, and he was spurred on to see Eiji one last time, to say a proper goodbye. 

When thinking about this idea that Ash let himself die, I think if he did, it was both because he took Lao’s attack on him as a sign from fate, that his time with Eiji was done, that Eiji’s love, and the knowledge of that love, would have to be enough for him, and I think Ash accepted that, without qualms, without wanting or needing more, because it was already more than he thought he ever deserved or would ever have, and also, because I think Ash was just finished with fighting at that point.  His life had been such a nightmare of struggle and pain and suffering, and with the knowledge of Eiji’s love in his heart and mind, Ash was okay with finally stopping, and letting go.  This idea that Eiji’s love finally allowed Ash to lay down his burden and just rest. In that regard, I feel like Ash’s end mirrors more his second idea regarding the snow leopard, that it was searching for something else, climbing higher and higher, using up all it’s strength, and finally collapsing.  It’s like Ash had used up all his strength struggling just to survive his whole life, and finally, at the end of it all, he just didn’t want to struggle any more.  He was just so tired.  And Eiji’s love made it alright to let go, because it gave Ash the first and only real happiness he’d ever known, and that was the greatest gift he ever could have received.

Also, I finally read through Garden of Light, and posted my thoughts and analysis of it here, if you want to check it out too! 

I think the reason why Lao and Ash passed out at so different times has to do with the weapon they had received their wounds from.

Ash’s was “just” a stab wound, caused by a knife that didn’t even reach his vital organs. It seems minor at first, but considering the fact that he walked back to the library and up to the third floor, it’s understandable that it put a lot of additional strain to his body and caused him to lose more blood than he would had if he had remained where he was. And him losing more blood eventually caused him to pass out.

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.

“Garden of Light” is a really important and crucial part of Banana Fish and without it, the story just doesn’t feel complete. There’s just something missing if the main story just stops at the panel of Ash having passed out on the table in the library. There must be some kind of closure, even if the closure isn’t necessarily what we expect or want. But sometimes, it’s not about what we want but about what we need. In that moment, what we needed was closure for us and the characters. That’s also why, no matter what others say, I still do want GoL getting animated. Not as an OVA because I think to really get the emotions across, it takes more than just 20 minutes. What I want is a 90 minutes movie and I know MAPPA would really do this chapter more than justice.

I actually already talked about GoL quite some time ago, so I’ll just leave two links here:

This one is (yet) again about the ending but then ties it together with GoL and this one is about my favourite page in the epilogue.

What I don’t really agree with is the notion of death having been freedom for Ash, but I also explained the reason for that here.

I wanted to comment a little bit on the ending of Banana Fish, and the generally accepted or believed assumption that Ash let himself die.  That he essentially committed a suicide passive in nature by returning to the library and letting himself bleed out.  But… upon reading the ending, I have more the sense that this isn’t really the case.  

There’s a few reasons for this.  

The most obvious reason, which I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone mention before, is that Ash gets stabbed by Lao in the exact same place where, just a few days before, he’d been shot through.  This, on top of the severe physical trauma of the knife wound he’d received from Arthur earlier on on the opposite side of his abdomen.  Ash’s body is, at this point in the story, particularly to this area of his body, extremely beaten up and has suffered through a lot of physical trauma.

The other reason I think it’s important to take note of the above fact, is that more than a few times, in the previous panels, Ash’s physical condition and specifically his wounds are made mention of by Blanca.  He keeps asking Ash how he’s feeling, how his pain is.  The very day before Ash is killed, Blanca asks him how his wounds are, and Ash tells him they hurt like hell.  What this tells us is that the damage to Ash’s abdomen from the gunshot hasn’t fully healed.  That area of his stomach is still damaged and still weakened by the physical trauma of being torn apart by a bullet.

So, then Lao comes and stabs Ash in exactly the same spot.  Blanca mentions earlier on that the bullet from the Chinese kids that shot him didn’t hit any of Ash’s vital organs, that it passed cleanly through, but he was still bleeding profusely and would die if he didn’t get help.  After Lao stabs Ash, Ash says “You missed all my vital organs, you idiot.”.  But Lao hit him in the exact spot where there was still severe physical trauma from Ash’s previous bullet wound.  

After Ash shoots Lao, we see him start to really labor, as he bends down to gather up the pages of Eiji’s letter.  He’s gasping and making labored, pained noises, almost like he’s wheezing.  He dies not long after that.

I think, when you consider all of this information, it makes it seem like the knife wound killed Ash, not because he let it happen, but because it basically reaggrevated a previous, very serious wound, and Ash’s body just couldn’t take it anymore.  He just started bleeding so much, and so quickly, that there wasn’t any time for him to seek help, or save himself.  I think Ash probably knew this, and just accepted it, returning to the library to finish reading the rest of Eiji’s letter, and dying in peace, knowing he was loved by Eiji, and that Eiji’s soul would always be with him.

However, there are still two reasons which bug me about this.

1. The library

Despite of his wounds, Ash still makes it to the main reading room of the library which is on the third floor. There’s a lot of stairs he had to climb in order to get there and quite some time must have passed since he couldn’t move that fast due to the wound he just had received. It’s hard to imagine that there really was not even the slightest chance Ash could have been saved if he still had time and energy to walk all the way up there

 2. Sing’s comment in GoL

Sing describes Ash’s death as a process that lasted “long, long hours”:

I read through various interpretations regarding the ending and also regarding this little moment and stumbled upon an interpretation from the Japanese fandom. According to them, it’s actually supposed to be seen as being told from Ash’s point of view, that due to his injury and pain, it just seemed that long even though it wasn’t. This doesn’t get clear because English isn’t that nuanced like Japanese is.

Unfortunately, I can’t speak Japanese and can’t really confirm if that’s true or not. However, I also once saw a comment of someone on that scene who explained why they can’t get quite behind that interpretation.

I would link it here, especially since it’s a whole page of interpretation for the ending as a whole, but it’s in German and I don’t know how many people would even understand it or if the site can be opened at all in other countries…

Basically, what the comment was pointing out is that Sing desperately tried to understand Ash’s train of thought and to see things from his point of view:

And indeed, that whole scene seems to be about Sing trying to piece everything together, to understand why things had come to this, why Ash died, why he was smiling when he died and how Lao could even get so close to him to attack him.

For the last question, he found answer:

But, as it gets also pointed out in the mentioned comment, Sing is speculating in that moment, he doesn’t know anything for sure and can only keep running in circles as to why the things happened the way they did. That’s why it seems weird that in one panel Sing is supposed to suddenly talk from Ash’s perspective and describe how things felt like for him before his death from his point of view even though he kept on struggling so much to get behind it in the first place and continues to do so right after the panel with the “long, long hours”.

Of course, that’s all just speculation and interpretation just like with the ending in general and no one can say for sure what is now “right” or “wrong” because when it comes to interpretation, there simply is no “right” nor “wrong”.

To quote one of my professors: “We’re 45 people in this room and if we all read the same book, we would get 45 different versions of it because everyone interprets it differently.”

And I think that also can be applied to Banana Fish because there is definitively room for all kind of interpretations.

Did Ash choose to die? If yes, then why? Did he think he could keep Eiji safe with his death? Was he fearing that people would come after him (like Lao did) and endanger Eiji again if they met again? Had he assumed that his enemies would even follow him if he ever decided to give Japan a try? Was this assumption justified or was it just his habit of always imagining the worst case scenario? Did he believe Eiji’s heartfelt letter? Was that the reason Ash felt like he could let go in the end with no major regrets? Or was he so imprisoned in his twisted mindset that had been implanted into him by others over all those years that Eiji’s words, as sad and heartbreaking it would be, simply didn’t reach him?

And if Ash didn’t choose to die? Did he simply knew there was no way to save himself despite of his vital organs having been missed? Did the wound he had received from the gun shot reopen? Did he just have enough time to make it to the library and read Eiji’s letter before he died? How much time did he have left exactly? Was he already dead when the librarian found him or was he just unconscious in that moment? Was his death really a process of “long, long hours” or did it really just seem like that for Ash and it was actually a quicker death?

Was it maybe a mixture of both? Was his wound not severe enough to actually kill him for sure but still severe enough so a simply “patching up” wouldn’t have sufficed unless he had went to a hospital? Would he have been arrested if he had gone to a doctor due to his criminal record? (After all, this was the reason Ash couldn’t go with Eiji to the hospital after the latter had been shot) Was this something Ash feared? Was this fear justified or again just all in his head?

Was this quote by Hemingway maybe ringing true:

Was Ash so filled with Eiji’s love that he simply forgot to take proper care of himself in that moment? Did he simply not notice that his life was slipping away while Eiji’s words were filling him up with love? Did he maybe notice that eventually, but at that point it was already too late?

No one can tell for sure and maybe that’s where it goes full circle with “The Snows of Kilimanjaro”:

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 “set 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 mean of sussing out who it is that’s gunning for him on the outside.  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 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.  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 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.  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 him, 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.  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.  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. 

When I first read it, my first impression was: “Wow. Ash was a totally different person in comparison to the main story. His eyes are a lot more empty and cold and he seems to be totally ruthless…” But after reading through it, I realized that this wasn’t really the case and that it may have been just another act of him.

Of course he tried to appear cold and like a demon back then. He had a reputation and if this was enough to keep some people away from him, why not? Besides, just like you said, he couldn’t trust anyone in there. He was used to people only ever getting in touch with him if they want something in return. Even Shorter was no exception to that mindset since he was promised to get released sooner if he watched out for Ash:

So even Shorter had ulterior motifs at the beginning with him.

The scene where Ash fights against Frankie is also what stood out to me the most in that chapter. Like you already pointed out, Ash didn’t intend to go easy on him but was grateful that he was able to, thanks to Shorter interfering. It’s just like you said, as soon as Ash got into “killer mode”, there was no other outcome than death for his enemies and Ash just couldn’t control it. But at that moment, he finally found a way to change that. He finally knew how to go easy, how to control it.

Your post also made me reconsider that tiny remark of Blanca:

When first reading it, I thought he meant it more along the lines of: “I was told not to teach you how to go easy on someone because you’re not supposed to learn that.” But reading it as like: “I was told not to teach you how to go easy on someone because you already know that” really puts it into a different light.

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.  

We’ve all seen his (delayed) reaction after having been raped by Foxx, how much he trembled and how much he was traumatized.

The difference between this and the time in prison with Garvey and his boys is that Ash was more or less in control regarding the latter. It wasn’t planned right from the start but rather, just like you said, something he came up at the split of a second. Even though it was only short, he still had enough time to mentally prepare himself for it (which hadn’t been the case later with Foxx). He knew what was going to happen, what he would let happen and so he pushed any kind of feeling and thought he had about it into the deepest corner of his mind to be able to stay sane, to protect himself from breaking down.

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. 

Going after Dino, taking revenge on him for all he had done and freeing himself from him was Ash’s major goal. Throughout the whole story, this was what he wanted to achieve, what he fought for and suddenly, without warning, just like that, everything was over in a blink of an eye.

For so many years he had wished for this moment to happen and now when it happened, instead of joy or happiness, only emptiness remained. It’s like making reaching the top of a mountain your goal and you climb higher and higher, desperately wanting to reach the top but as soon as you do, you don’t know what else to do. Your goal is fulfilled, so what now?

It was the same with Ash. It’s just that he didn’t have that much of a choice what to do next or rather, he couldn’t see it. For him, there was only going back to the streets, living his life as he did before, just with Dino now gone.

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.

Unlike some people seem to believe, Ash was never really cold nor ruthless and only changed his behaviour after meeting Eiji like a typical shoujo trope. Ash had always been caring and nice deep down, he just tried to hide it in order to not break and protect himself as Eiji mentioned and which you pointed out as well. But still, he couldn’t completely hide it like in the scenes you already referred to with Ash sparing the two who sided with Dino in the first episode or the scene with him having to go back into the facility to save Max and Ibe. It’s impossible for him not to care and even though he was so keen on leaving them behind but within seconds, he changed his mind to: “Nope. Can’t leave them.”

I won’t list all of the examples where his caring and loving side is shown since you already did a great job at listing petty much all of them ^^ I think they really show how Ash was already human right from the start and not Eiji being the one turning him into one throughout the story.

The reason for him having been able to stay human and still care for people and not go down the path of hatred like Yut Lung did is him having been surrounded by people who cared for him as well. During his childhood, he had Griffin with him and like any little brother, I can imagine Ash wanting to be like his big brother who seemed to be of a very kind nature after all. Later on, he had Shorter who wasn’t afraid to call him out on certain behaviour and became a close friend of him:

But even Shorter had a different perception of him at first and even seemed to be afraid of him in some sense:

Fearing or admiring Ash were the two extremes most people seem to have felt towards him, there was no in-between. Always seeing either a god or the devil. But never a human.

Eiji was the exception. Right from the start he seemed to sense something about Ash, unlike others. He was never afraid of him nor admired him. He just simply saw him as a human and this already got clear the moment he asked for his gun. Ash was used to people only ever taking something from him without considering his feelings or caring about him. And suddenly, there’s this boy asking politely for consent to hold his gun, not seeming to be afraid of him at all and not even starting to after asking if he had ever killed people which Ash confirmed. Ash had called him a “baby” then, but I think, more than anything, he was actually irritated by Eiji’s treatment of him because he simply wasn’t used to it.

I think the point where Eiji really caught the first real glimpse of how Ash was really deep down inside was the scene where Ash gave up his gun to Arthur because he threatened to kill him otherwise. Eiji looked so surprised when he did that, as if he hadn’t expected that at all. After all, he was just a stranger. They had no connection, yet. It made no sense for Ash to give up the gun he didn’t allow anyone to touch in first place just for him if he already wasn’t kind at heart from the start, so Eiji must have realized that there was more to him than what meets the eye. And the more the story progressed, the more he saw that this was indeed true or rather, Ash was feeling comfortable enough to let him see that side of him. The side of the boy he actually was deep down inside, the side of Aslan.

So if we consider “Ash” and “Aslan” not only being two different names but also  two different sides of him – “Ash” being the cold and ruthless appearing gang leader and “Aslan” being the caring and goodhearted boy – then it gets clear that most characters only ever saw “Ash” and maybe just a little glimpse of “Aslan”, if they were lucky. However, Eiji saw both sides of him and most importantly, he accepted and loved both of them. That’s also how I interpret his words in GoL about loving both, light and darkness:

Eiji saw and witnessed how undeniably human Ash was through and through. Saw how fragile he could be, how sometimes that thick wall he had built around himself was sometimes crumbling, how hurt and lonely he was.

So many people tried to tear Ash’s humanity away from him, tried to turn him into a monster, tried to make him think he had no other choice than being or becoming anything else than that.

And then there was Eiji feeling drawn to him precisely because of how human he was. Only ever treating him like a human and never expecting anything in return. Just loving him for himself and not in a twisted way like Dino did. And that was the reason Ash felt drawn to him as well.

Eiji’s role in the story is to show him that he’s deserving of love despite of what he’s done, despite of what he thought he was and also to remind him of his existing humanity. Because even though we and Eiji can see how human he was, it still doesn’t mean Ash also saw himself as that. For him, he was an unredeemable monster, a leopard that could never climb down the mountain ever again. After all he’s been through, it’s understandable that he sometimes began to lose sight of his own humanity. So Eiji stepped in and reminded him of it, just like did during the leopard scene:

Just like you said, Ash was already human, Eiji didn’t magically turn him into one but he kept reminding him of his humanity and also protected his soul. If Eiji hadn’t been there after Griffin’s and Shorter’s death, maybe Ash had pushed people away instead of letting them in because he would have been too afraid of people getting hurt again due to them having gotten too close to him. He would have been all alone with his grief and regret (imagine how episode 11 would have been without Eiji comforting Ash).

Thanks to Eiji, he had a sanctuary where he knew he was safe and could be himself, be human, could let himself fall and be vulnerable, being provided with normalcy, like you said. And importantly, with this normalcy, he took away Ash’s loneliness. The loneliness that was always surrounding him because everyone failed to see this human side of him and his pain. Because everyone saw him as “Ash”, the façade the world forced him to put up in order not to break, or because he couldn’t show this side of him to them since otherwise, they would have taken advantage of it.

The only one being able to see and notice that there was also another side to him was Eiji. The one Ash didn’t push away but instead allowed to see this side of him.

It bothers me somewhat that people mistake Ash’s harsh attitude at the beginning of the story, or towards certain characters, as being who he really is, and that only being around Eiji is what returned some of his humanity.  I’ve seen some comments lately that seem to express that.  Like I saw one the other day that was almost vitriolic in it’s hateful tone, talking about how badly Ash treated Sing, and how it was really his fault that Yut-Lung started his war with him, because of how Ash told him he was going to kill him after what happened with Shorter.  Like Ash is to blame for having such a visceral reaction after Yut-Lung blackmailed Shorter into the position he was in, and then Ash being forced into a position where he had to choose between Shorter’s life and Eiji’s.  Who wouldn’t have reacted the way Ash did when Yut-Lung showed up to give him the key to his handcuffs?  He’d just been forced to kill his best friend to save another friend.  He’s been forced to watch Shorter lose his mind and try to kill Eiji.  It would have been bizarre if Ash had had any other reaction to Yut-Lung at the point.  He was devastated and completely justified in his rage over Yut-Lung’s betrayal.  And then I’ve seen other comments like people saying Ash is a “pathological liar” who has no inner moral compass, and has to rely on cues for what’s right and wrong.  I’m just kind of bemused by how anyone could view Ash in that way.

Like, it seems painfully obvious to me that Ash’s at times harsh and dismissive attitude is nothing but a front.  A defense mechanism he’s built up in order to protect himself after a literal lifetime of suffering abuse and betrayal at the hands of almost everyone around him.  Referencing the scene from “Angel Eyes” that you posted, Shorter calls Ash out on his manipulative behavior, and Ash kind of scoffs and asks “Yeah, what’s of it?”,  But Ash does the exact same thing with Eiji in Banana Fish, when Eiji asks Ash if he’s the one that started the gang war going on in New York, and Ash gets this smirk on his face and asks “What if I did?”.  Ash doesn’t react that way to Shorter or Eiji because he doesn’t understand what’s wrong with what’s happening.  He doesn’t react that way because he can’t tell the difference between wrong and right.  He reacts the way he does because, in reality, he’s completely devastated inside at having to do these things, and he hates himself for it, and feels almost unbearable guilt for it.  He’s convinced himself that he feels nothing when he kills without realizing that’s not at all true.  He thinks he’s an unfeeling monster, but what it really is, is that he simply forcing his emotions down beneath his consciousness when he kills because otherwise he wouldn’t be able to do it, and he knows if he can’t kill, he himself is going to die.  People will see how much it hurts him to do the things he has to in order to survive, and use that against him, and if he hesitates in a moment of decision, where it’s his life or the other guys, he’ll die.  He HAS to be cold about it, because if he lets his emotion start to dictate his actions, he’ll doubt his actions, and that will be the end for him. So he crushes his emotion down and forces himself to operate like a machine.  And then of course afterward, after he gets through with it, he’s again wracked by guilt and pain.  He never lost sight of his morality.  He never started to lose his understanding of right and wrong.  He only learned to control it because, otherwise, he knew, he wouldn’t last in the world of crime and violence he was thrown into as a young kid. He acts apathetic about it precisely because he’s actually anything but.  Because he’s actually so torn up about it, and weighed down by doubt, and slowly but surely it’s degrading his mental health and self-esteem, until we meet him in the story, and his self-loathing is almost total.  It’s ironic, because underneath it all, he has a good heart, and he doesn’t want to hurt anybody and he just wants to be left alone, and it’s exactly for that reason that it torments him as much as it does. But then, nobody will leave him alone, will they?  People keep trying to hurt him, to use him and force him to do things he doesn’t want to do.  To take and take from him constantly, without ever stopping to consider that he’s a person with thoughts and feelings of his own.  They treat him instead like an object that exists solely for their pleasure and to do with as they see fit.  He doesn’t want to do the things he does, but he’s forced to in order to survive, and as the only means he knows of to protect himself from further abuse and to keep people who want to abuse him away from him, he adopts this dismissive, uncaring and cold-hearted attitude.  He does’t want anyone to see that he’s really tormented inside about it all because it would be exposing his vulnerability to them then, and would then give them an in to attacking and hurting him even more.  He pushes people away by acting like he doesn’t care because he doesn’t know any other way to protect himself.  Everyone in his life has either failed him, like his father, or outright abused and manipulated him, and taken everything from him without consent of any kind.  So when Ash, even in that scene with Shorter from “Angel Eyes”, acts apathetic, that isn’t how he really feels at all.  It’s just the only way he knows how to act to keep himself safe, because he’s never been shown any other way.  All of the adults in his life have only ever shown him that he should expect cruelty and pain from them, and so he reacts with that expectation in mind.  They don’t care about him, so he acts like he doesn’t care about them, or what they do to him, and turn around then becomes fair play.  If they’re going to use him, he’s going to use them right back.  But Ash never feels okay about that.  He’s never alright with it.  He struggles with it and torments himself with guilt over it.  He has no desire or wish to act this way, but he doesn’t have a choice if he wants to keep surviving.  And again, he can’t let those same people see that it bothers him, because they’ll only use that fact against him and try to use it to manipulate him and hurt him.  You know what they say about the best way to fight a bully is.  To show that their bullying doesn’t affect you.  To show it doesn’t hurt you.  If you don’t give them a reaction, then they’ll stop.  That’s what Ash is doing.  He’s not giving them a reaction in the hopes that they’ll stop.  And I just am confused that some people don’t seem to get this about him.

The same thing with his treatment of Sing at the beginning.  He’s so harsh towards Sing because he’s trying to PROTECT him and Sing’s gang.  He doesn’t want Sing to get involved, and he doesn’t want Sing to tell his gang about what really happened with Shorter, because then they’d be roped into the war Ash was waging with Dino, and become targets of Dino.  He isn’t mean to Sing because he’s a hateful asshole.  He’s mean to Sing because it’s the only way he knows how to protect him.  By pushing him away from himself and the danger of his world and life.  It’s actually an incredibly selfless act, heartbreaking in it’s selflessness, really.

I wonder when and how Ash was treating Sing in a harsh way, though? How could anyone seriously criticize that? Because of how he was pretty cold towards him when they first met? Seriously, that was understandable since Ash was really pissed in that moment. Think about it. Just not that long ago, he had to kill his best friend and he just had found said best friend’s corpse lying on a table with his brain having been removed and the only thing he could do was burn him, causing him to have a breakdown:

And then a kid shows up, thinking he could fight against him, challenging him. Ash even warns him beforehand that he’s currently in a bad mood:

And even a second time when Sing is still not leaving him alone:

Anyone would be annoyed with that when they had just went through hell and were just tired and still mourning their best friend. Ash didn’t want to be rude nor harsh, he was just really not in the mood for this.

Or was it about when Ash slapped Sing on the roof after his return from the facility? Okay, that may have been an overreaction of him, but still, Ash tried to get his point across that he’s not allowed to tell anyone the truth about Shorter’s death under any circumstances since otherwise, people would only want to take revenge and get themselves killed in the process. Again, it was a portrayal of Ash caring about other people and not wanting for anyone to die such a meaningless death. Besides, they were Shorter’s people so maybe Ash even did it for him because he knew he wouldn’t want his people to get hurt.

Anyway, regarding the complaint about Ash treating Sing in a harsh way, let’s all not forget who saved Sing’s life two times:

About Ash threatening Yut Lung…Considering that he had tricked them all, blackmailed Shorter with the life of his sister, helped in kidnapping him and Eiji which eventually led to Shorter’s death, it’s understandable that Ash said he’s gonna kill him. It may not have been Yut Lung’s idea, but he still helped and didn’t seem to care that much about the possible consequences. Besides, Yut Lung even seemed to welcome getting killed by Ash so maybe he even wished for it.

Ash being a “pathological liar”…When did Ash ever really lie for no reasonable reason? I can only recall the times where he hid things like when he didn’t tell Eiji he was going back to Golzine but come on, I don’t even need to explain why he did that. There were times where he lied when being manipulative towards his enemies, but who would hold that against him?

I also always had the feeling that Ash seeming to not care about having killed Arthur’s boys during the conversation with Eiji was just an act because it seemed so contradictory to what he thought about it just moments ago:

Just like you said, he puts on an act in order to protect himself, in order to appear collected and tough. The thing is, Eiji didn’t buy it. He kept calling him out on his behaviour and even told him outright that he’s not the Ash he knows:

That’s when Ash’s act was gone completely, that’s when he knew it doesn’t work, knew that Eiji sees through him and instead of continuing, he just snapped and stormed off.

And yeah, again, with Sing on the rooftop, he was harsh, but it was because he was trying to protect Sing and his gang.  The thing people forget about Ash is that, he’s been treated so harshly and cruelly by everyone in his life up to that point, that he really doesn’t know any other way to be himself.  He cares deeply about people, but the only way he’s ever learned to protect them is by pushing them away from himself, and he already thinks so little of himself, that he thinks the best way to do that is to make people hate him.  So he plays up this image he has of being a cold, heartless jerk, and acts like an asshole sometimes, so that people will stop trying to get near him.  It’s both a defense mechanism for himself, and a means of trying to protect those he cares for.  He doesn’t want Sing to get involved with Dino, because he would be endangering his own life and the lives of his gang members.  Ash wasn’t mean to Sing because he’s just a mean jerk.  He’s mean to him because it’s the only way he knows how to protect people.  It’s the same as what we saw early on in the story, when Ash first tries to get Eiji to go back to Japan.  He tells Eiji bluntly that he’s going to get in the way and slow them down.  On the surface, it seems like a mean, unkind thing to say.  Even Max gets angry at Ash for saying it.  But Ash only says it because he doesn’t want Eiji to get hurt, and he knows he will if he sticks around.  He’s trying to protect him, again, in the only way he knows how, by pushing him away.  Even then, Ash isn’t able to be entirely dismissive of Eiji, telling him he isn’t useless, and reminding him that he saved his life.  I mean, Ash is the opposite of mean.  A truly mean-spirited person would be unkind and cruel just to hurt someone.  For the sole purpose of hurting someone, and getting to see them hurt.  Ash is only ever harsh with his words and actions with Sing or Eiji or anyone he truly cares about because he’s trying to protect them, not hurt them.

And yeah, Yut-Lung’s actions are what directly led to Ash threatening him.  Seeing it any other way seems bizarre and even deluded.  Even then, after Ash escapes with Eiji from the compound, we see his threat was actually idle, because he never actually goes directly after Yut-Lung again.  In fact, it’s the opposite.  Yut-Lung goes directly after Ash, and only then do we see Ash actually attack Yut-Lung, when he literally has no choice.  And it isn’t an attack born out of revenge, but because he needs to get Eiji and his own gang members released from Yut-Lung’s own men.  There’s even a point after Yut-Lung’s betrayed Ash and Shorter, when Ash says to Eiji that he can’t figure out if Yut-Lung is a friend or a foe.  You sense absolutely no actual malice from Ash towards Yut-Lung, despite everything Yut-Lung had done to him at that point.  Unlike Yut-Lung, who viciously goes after Ash, simply out of a jealous rage over the fact that Ash has a person in Eiji who cares about him.  

And great point about Ash and how he rarely tells lies at all throughout the story, and only in circumstances where, again, he’s either trying to protect someone, like Eiji, from the truth, because he doesn’t want him to get hurt, or because he has to in order to stay alive.  An actual pathological liar would be someone who can’t STOP lying, about ANYTHING.  They’re someone who lies without any sense of qualm and without any real reason.  Ash only lies because he has a good reason to.  Again, like almost all of Ash’s actions, either out of self-defense, or out of defending others.  Ash’s intent is never to just hurt someone out of malice.  

And that ties into the scene between him and Eiji, where Ash is trying to act callous and uncaring about what’s going on with Arthur’s gang.  We KNOW Ash is putting up an act here because of the preceding scene you mentioned, where he’s dwelling on and tortured by his actions.  He feels like a monster, and he hates himself.  At the same time, he knows he has to do what he’s doing in order to protect himself and his gang, because Arthur would just kill all of them if given the chance, as he’s proven he’s capable of time and time again.  Ash was forced to go on the offensive, because Arthur wouldn’t just let it go, and kept trying ruthlessly to kill Ash and his crew.  Ash is ridden with a feeling of guilt and remorse over his actions against Arthur’s gang, but if he allows himself to focus on those feelings, he knows he won’t be able to do what needs to be done in order to survive, and that’s why he snaps at Eiji and argues with him, because Eiji is basically shoving Ash’s sense of guilt in his face and chastising him for his actions, forcing him to think about his bad feelings over his actions.  Ash knows if he keeps dwelling on it and being forced to think about how it really makes him feel, he won’t be able to make himself go through with it.  The thing is, it isn’t just Ash’s life on the line in this situation.  The lives of his gang members are on the line too, and if Ash is weak, and gives into his sense of guilt, they’re lives will be forefit, along with his.  Ash tells Eiji that it isn’t about logic or reasoning out there on the streets, it’s about strength, and if he shows weakness by refusing to fight back, he’ll be killed, and so will the other kids who have chosen him to lead and protect them, and Ash is actually right, which is why I think Eiji feels bad later on about what he said.  Ash is actually crushed by his sense of guilt and remorse, but for the sake of his own life and the lives of his crew, he can’t let it dictate his actions.  Ash is basically stuck between a rock and a hard place, because he can’t win in this situation.  It’s either let his sense of morality guide him and not go after Arthur and his gang and basically wait for them to come and kill him and his own gang, or ignore his sense of morality in order to protect himself and his gang, but suffer the weight of his own remorse and despair at having to do these things.  Ash’s problem isn’t that he doesn’t care, or is cold-hearted, his problem is that he cares TOO MUCH, and he’s constantly in a position where caring at all will get him and other people either hurt or killed.  When Ash says to Eiji, and also to Shorter in that scene from Angel Eyes, “What would you know about it?”, he’s asking them if they’ve ever been in the kind of position he’s constantly in, where there’s only one of two choices to be made, either compromise your morals and survive, or don’t compromise them and get raped or killed for it.  Eiji of course doesn’t understand because he’s never been in a position where it was either his life or someone else’.  He’s lived a normal, even sheltered life where he never had to worry about making hard choices for his own survival.  And Shorter doesn’t really understand Ash’s dilemma either, because he’s never been sexually abused and had to use his own sexuality as a means of protecting himself, either against being raped again, or as a means of taking back some control in an otherwise powerless position and situation.  Still, Ash feels immense guilt and pain over it all, because he’s NOT okay with doing the things he’s doing, but he doesn’t have a choice if he wants to keep living and if he wants to protect himself from being further abused.  He can’t afford to let himself be guided by his conscience, and he can’t afford to let himself dwell on his sense of remorse.  Not if he wants to survive, and not if he wants those he cares about to survive.  It’s of course easy to sit there and judge someone for doing bad things when you yourself have never had to do bad things simply to keep yourself alive, or take back some control from the people who would otherwise thoughtlessly and without hesitation use up every part of you until there was nothing left.

Pushing people away, being harsh to them even though they could hate him afterwards is really the only way Ash sees in order to protect them. Another thing of which I think is really important regarding the scene with him telling Eiji to go home, that he’s only a burden to them etc. is what happens right after it:

He just had been mean to Eiji, had hurt his feelings by telling him really harsh things he didn’t even mean just to protect him, had told him out right to go away. And he obviously can’t handle how he had just treated him so he’s resorting to alcohol to drink away his bad conscience.

Even Max notices the reason behind it right away:

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.

Unlike some people seem to believe, Ash was never really cold nor ruthless and only changed his behaviour after meeting Eiji like a typical shoujo trope. Ash had always been caring and nice deep down, he just tried to hide it in order to not break and protect himself as Eiji mentioned and which you pointed out as well. But still, he couldn’t completely hide it like in the scenes you already referred to with Ash sparing the two who sided with Dino in the first episode or the scene with him having to go back into the facility to save Max and Ibe. It’s impossible for him not to care and even though he was so keen on leaving them behind but within seconds, he changed his mind to: “Nope. Can’t leave them.”

I won’t list all of the examples where his caring and loving side is shown since you already did a great job at listing petty much all of them ^^ I think they really show how Ash was already human right from the start and not Eiji being the one turning him into one throughout the story.

The reason for him having been able to stay human and still care for people and not go down the path of hatred like Yut Lung did is him having been surrounded by people who cared for him as well. During his childhood, he had Griffin with him and like any little brother, I can imagine Ash wanting to be like his big brother who seemed to be of a very kind nature after all. Later on, he had Shorter who wasn’t afraid to call him out on certain behaviour and became a close friend of him:

But even Shorter had a different perception of him at first and even seemed to be afraid of him in some sense:

Fearing or admiring Ash were the two extremes most people seem to have felt towards him, there was no in-between. Always seeing either a god or the devil. But never a human.

Eiji was the exception. Right from the start he seemed to sense something about Ash, unlike others. He was never afraid of him nor admired him. He just simply saw him as a human and this already got clear the moment he asked for his gun. Ash was used to people only ever taking something from him without considering his feelings or caring about him. And suddenly, there’s this boy asking politely for consent to hold his gun, not seeming to be afraid of him at all and not even starting to after asking if he had ever killed people which Ash confirmed. Ash had called him a “baby” then, but I think, more than anything, he was actually irritated by Eiji’s treatment of him because he simply wasn’t used to it.

I think the point where Eiji really caught the first real glimpse of how Ash was really deep down inside was the scene where Ash gave up his gun to Arthur because he threatened to kill him otherwise. Eiji looked so surprised when he did that, as if he hadn’t expected that at all. After all, he was just a stranger. They had no connection, yet. It made no sense for Ash to give up the gun he didn’t allow anyone to touch in first place just for him if he already wasn’t kind at heart from the start, so Eiji must have realized that there was more to him than what meets the eye. And the more the story progressed, the more he saw that this was indeed true or rather, Ash was feeling comfortable enough to let him see that side of him. The side of the boy he actually was deep down inside, the side of Aslan.

So if we consider “Ash” and “Aslan” not only being two different names but also  two different sides of him – “Ash” being the cold and ruthless appearing gang leader and “Aslan” being the caring and goodhearted boy – then it gets clear that most characters only ever saw “Ash” and maybe just a little glimpse of “Aslan”, if they were lucky. However, Eiji saw both sides of him and most importantly, he accepted and loved both of them. That’s also how I interpret his words in GoL about loving both, light and darkness:

Eiji saw and witnessed how undeniably human Ash was through and through. Saw how fragile he could be, how sometimes that thick wall he had built around himself was sometimes crumbling, how hurt and lonely he was.

So many people tried to tear Ash’s humanity away from him, tried to turn him into a monster, tried to make him think he had no other choice than being or becoming anything else than that.

And then there was Eiji feeling drawn to him precisely because of how human he was. Only ever treating him like a human and never expecting anything in return. Just loving him for himself and not in a twisted way like Dino did. And that was the reason Ash felt drawn to him as well.

Eiji’s role in the story is to show him that he’s deserving of love despite of what he’s done, despite of what he thought he was and also to remind him of his existing humanity. Because even though we and Eiji can see how human he was, it still doesn’t mean Ash also saw himself as that. For him, he was an unredeemable monster, a leopard that could never climb down the mountain ever again. After all he’s been through, it’s understandable that he sometimes began to lose sight of his own humanity. So Eiji stepped in and reminded him of it, just like did during the leopard scene:

Just like you said, Ash was already human, Eiji didn’t magically turn him into one but he kept reminding him of his humanity and also protected his soul. If Eiji hadn’t been there after Griffin’s and Shorter’s death, maybe Ash had pushed people away instead of letting them in because he would have been too afraid of people getting hurt again due to them having gotten too close to him. He would have been all alone with his grief and regret (imagine how episode 11 would have been without Eiji comforting Ash).

Thanks to Eiji, he had a sanctuary where he knew he was safe and could be himself, be human, could let himself fall and be vulnerable, being provided with normalcy, like you said. And importantly, with this normalcy, he took away Ash’s loneliness. The loneliness that was always surrounding him because everyone failed to see this human side of him and his pain. Because everyone saw him as “Ash”, the façade the world forced him to put up in order not to break, or because he couldn’t show this side of him to them since otherwise, they would have taken advantage of it.

The only one being able to see and notice that there was also another side to him was Eiji. The one Ash didn’t push away but instead allowed to see this side of him.

It bothers me somewhat that people mistake Ash’s harsh attitude at the beginning of the story, or towards certain characters, as being who he really is, and that only being around Eiji is what returned some of his humanity.  I’ve seen some comments lately that seem to express that.  Like I saw one the other day that was almost vitriolic in it’s hateful tone, talking about how badly Ash treated Sing, and how it was really his fault that Yut-Lung started his war with him, because of how Ash told him he was going to kill him after what happened with Shorter.  Like Ash is to blame for having such a visceral reaction after Yut-Lung blackmailed Shorter into the position he was in, and then Ash being forced into a position where he had to choose between Shorter’s life and Eiji’s.  Who wouldn’t have reacted the way Ash did when Yut-Lung showed up to give him the key to his handcuffs?  He’d just been forced to kill his best friend to save another friend.  He’s been forced to watch Shorter lose his mind and try to kill Eiji.  It would have been bizarre if Ash had had any other reaction to Yut-Lung at the point.  He was devastated and completely justified in his rage over Yut-Lung’s betrayal.  And then I’ve seen other comments like people saying Ash is a “pathological liar” who has no inner moral compass, and has to rely on cues for what’s right and wrong.  I’m just kind of bemused by how anyone could view Ash in that way.

Like, it seems painfully obvious to me that Ash’s at times harsh and dismissive attitude is nothing but a front.  A defense mechanism he’s built up in order to protect himself after a literal lifetime of suffering abuse and betrayal at the hands of almost everyone around him.  Referencing the scene from “Angel Eyes” that you posted, Shorter calls Ash out on his manipulative behavior, and Ash kind of scoffs and asks “Yeah, what’s of it?”,  But Ash does the exact same thing with Eiji in Banana Fish, when Eiji asks Ash if he’s the one that started the gang war going on in New York, and Ash gets this smirk on his face and asks “What if I did?”.  Ash doesn’t react that way to Shorter or Eiji because he doesn’t understand what’s wrong with what’s happening.  He doesn’t react that way because he can’t tell the difference between wrong and right.  He reacts the way he does because, in reality, he’s completely devastated inside at having to do these things, and he hates himself for it, and feels almost unbearable guilt for it.  He’s convinced himself that he feels nothing when he kills without realizing that’s not at all true.  He thinks he’s an unfeeling monster, but what it really is, is that he simply forcing his emotions down beneath his consciousness when he kills because otherwise he wouldn’t be able to do it, and he knows if he can’t kill, he himself is going to die.  People will see how much it hurts him to do the things he has to in order to survive, and use that against him, and if he hesitates in a moment of decision, where it’s his life or the other guys, he’ll die.  He HAS to be cold about it, because if he lets his emotion start to dictate his actions, he’ll doubt his actions, and that will be the end for him. So he crushes his emotion down and forces himself to operate like a machine.  And then of course afterward, after he gets through with it, he’s again wracked by guilt and pain.  He never lost sight of his morality.  He never started to lose his understanding of right and wrong.  He only learned to control it because, otherwise, he knew, he wouldn’t last in the world of crime and violence he was thrown into as a young kid. He acts apathetic about it precisely because he’s actually anything but.  Because he’s actually so torn up about it, and weighed down by doubt, and slowly but surely it’s degrading his mental health and self-esteem, until we meet him in the story, and his self-loathing is almost total.  It’s ironic, because underneath it all, he has a good heart, and he doesn’t want to hurt anybody and he just wants to be left alone, and it’s exactly for that reason that it torments him as much as it does. But then, nobody will leave him alone, will they?  People keep trying to hurt him, to use him and force him to do things he doesn’t want to do.  To take and take from him constantly, without ever stopping to consider that he’s a person with thoughts and feelings of his own.  They treat him instead like an object that exists solely for their pleasure and to do with as they see fit.  He doesn’t want to do the things he does, but he’s forced to in order to survive, and as the only means he knows of to protect himself from further abuse and to keep people who want to abuse him away from him, he adopts this dismissive, uncaring and cold-hearted attitude.  He does’t want anyone to see that he’s really tormented inside about it all because it would be exposing his vulnerability to them then, and would then give them an in to attacking and hurting him even more.  He pushes people away by acting like he doesn’t care because he doesn’t know any other way to protect himself.  Everyone in his life has either failed him, like his father, or outright abused and manipulated him, and taken everything from him without consent of any kind.  So when Ash, even in that scene with Shorter from “Angel Eyes”, acts apathetic, that isn’t how he really feels at all.  It’s just the only way he knows how to act to keep himself safe, because he’s never been shown any other way.  All of the adults in his life have only ever shown him that he should expect cruelty and pain from them, and so he reacts with that expectation in mind.  They don’t care about him, so he acts like he doesn’t care about them, or what they do to him, and turn around then becomes fair play.  If they’re going to use him, he’s going to use them right back.  But Ash never feels okay about that.  He’s never alright with it.  He struggles with it and torments himself with guilt over it.  He has no desire or wish to act this way, but he doesn’t have a choice if he wants to keep surviving.  And again, he can’t let those same people see that it bothers him, because they’ll only use that fact against him and try to use it to manipulate him and hurt him.  You know what they say about the best way to fight a bully is.  To show that their bullying doesn’t affect you.  To show it doesn’t hurt you.  If you don’t give them a reaction, then they’ll stop.  That’s what Ash is doing.  He’s not giving them a reaction in the hopes that they’ll stop.  And I just am confused that some people don’t seem to get this about him.

The same thing with his treatment of Sing at the beginning.  He’s so harsh towards Sing because he’s trying to PROTECT him and Sing’s gang.  He doesn’t want Sing to get involved, and he doesn’t want Sing to tell his gang about what really happened with Shorter, because then they’d be roped into the war Ash was waging with Dino, and become targets of Dino.  He isn’t mean to Sing because he’s a hateful asshole.  He’s mean to Sing because it’s the only way he knows how to protect him.  By pushing him away from himself and the danger of his world and life.  It’s actually an incredibly selfless act, heartbreaking in it’s selflessness, really.

I wonder when and how Ash was treating Sing in a harsh way, though? How could anyone seriously criticize that? Because of how he was pretty cold towards him when they first met? Seriously, that was understandable since Ash was really pissed in that moment. Think about it. Just not that long ago, he had to kill his best friend and he just had found said best friend’s corpse lying on a table with his brain having been removed and the only thing he could do was burn him, causing him to have a breakdown:

And then a kid shows up, thinking he could fight against him, challenging him. Ash even warns him beforehand that he’s currently in a bad mood:

And even a second time when Sing is still not leaving him alone:

Anyone would be annoyed with that when they had just went through hell and were just tired and still mourning their best friend. Ash didn’t want to be rude nor harsh, he was just really not in the mood for this.

Or was it about when Ash slapped Sing on the roof after his return from the facility? Okay, that may have been an overreaction of him, but still, Ash tried to get his point across that he’s not allowed to tell anyone the truth about Shorter’s death under any circumstances since otherwise, people would only want to take revenge and get themselves killed in the process. Again, it was a portrayal of Ash caring about other people and not wanting for anyone to die such a meaningless death. Besides, they were Shorter’s people so maybe Ash even did it for him because he knew he wouldn’t want his people to get hurt.

Anyway, regarding the complaint about Ash treating Sing in a harsh way, let’s all not forget who saved Sing’s life two times:

About Ash threatening Yut Lung...Considering that he had tricked them all, blackmailed Shorter with the life of his sister, helped in kidnapping him and Eiji which eventually led to Shorter’s death, it’s understandable that Ash said he’s gonna kill him. It may not have been Yut Lung’s idea, but he still helped and didn’t seem to care that much about the possible consequences. Besides, Yut Lung even seemed to welcome getting killed by Ash so maybe he even wished for it.

Ash being a “pathological liar”...When did Ash ever really lie for no reasonable reason? I can only recall the times where he hid things like when he didn’t tell Eiji he was going back to Golzine but come on, I don’t even need to explain why he did that. There were times where he lied when being manipulative towards his enemies, but who would hold that against him?

I also always had the feeling that Ash seeming to not care about having killed Arthur’s boys during the conversation with Eiji was just an act because it seemed so contradictory to what he thought about it just moments ago:

Just like you said, he puts on an act in order to protect himself, in order to appear collected and tough. The thing is, Eiji didn’t buy it. He kept calling him out on his behaviour and even told him outright that he’s not the Ash he knows:

That’s when Ash’s act was gone completely, that’s when he knew it doesn’t work, knew that Eiji sees through him and instead of continuing, he just snapped and stormed off.

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.

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.  

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.  

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.

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.

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.  

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.  

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.

Since I knew about the ending and the interpretation of Ash choosing death beforehand, I quickly began to wonder about the “why” as I continued watching (aside from thinking he could assure Eiji’s safety with that).

Like some people already pointed out several times, Ash always fought so hard to stay alive and never gave up but kept holding on, pulling himself out of every dangerous situation he was thrown in. So why did Ash seem to have been okay if he had died during the fight against Arthur? 

Why allowing Lao to be the one to end his life like that in the end? What’s the difference between these two and the ones who try to kill Ash but aren’t able to since Ash resists so much?

And that’s when it occurred to me that Arthur as well as Lao belonged to the street, just like Ash. Dino and Foxx belonged to another category of enemy. They had abused him, tried to dominate him by raping him. Ash didn’t want to grant them the gratification of being the ones to kill him, of successfully crushing him beneath their feet and allow them to decide when his life ends. He simply didn’t want to give them such power over him anymore.

Arthur and Lao were different. They weren’t his abusers. They didn’t want to dominate him. And above all, they both had their personal reasons for fighting and wanting to kill Ash, not out of the desire to gain power over him.

Arthur was clearly jealous of Ash, of his charisma, of the fact that so many people followed him, of him being their leader at such a young age (I always had the impression Arthur was older than him) and of course, Arthur was angry at Ash for cutting his fingers and rendering him unable to use a gun.

It’s actually kinda sad we never got any further glimpse into what else was going on between them since I’m sure there was more than just that.

Someone even came up with the theory of the girl Ash had been in love with at 14 having been Arthur’s sister and Arthur blaming Ash for her death and thus, holding a grudge against him. It’s an interesting theory and actually would have been a nice twist if it was canon.

There’s one scene between Arthur and Ash that always caught my interest. After Ash catches up to him in the subway and telling him to fight against him fair and square, Arthur asks Ash if he doesn’t want to know why he hates him so much but also states shortly after that he already knows which Ash affirms and adds “But…that’s not my fault”:

I’ve always wondered what they were talking about and I even saw some people who came up with the sister theory interpreting it as them talking about the girl who died, but I rather see it as Arthur being jealous of Ash’s abilities and charisma.

The conversation being about the girl doesn’t really seem plausible to me since Ash clearly states it’s not his fault but during the conversation with Eiji about that girl, it did seem like he blames himself for her death and for not being able to protect her:

I doubt he would have changed his mind like that all of a sudden so quickly. The way I see it, they both were referring to Ash’s leadership and skills. Ash saying it’s not his fault could be the equivalent of this:

So it’s basically him telling Arthur it’s not his fault he possesses these skills and “talent”, like Eiji called it, of which he’s so jealous of because he never wanted it in the first place. (I swear, it’s a double-edged sword. On the one hand, his intelligence, beauty and his skills are what allows him to stay alive. On the other hand, I think Ash gladly would have exchanged all of it if it meant having been able to have a normal life instead + it makes people either fear him or causes them to want to possess him).

Lao was a different case. He didn’t develop a hatred towards Ash out of jealousy but because of Shorter’s death for which he blamed him. And that hatred got even worse when Ash agreed to fight against Sing after Eiji had been shot, being the main reason he attacked Ash in the first place in the end.

I often see people saying the end could have been prevented if Sing just had told him the story behind Shorter’s death right from the start and later on had informed him that the fight between him and Ash had been cancelled. However, I don’t think it would have been that easy. I personally think Lao wouldn’t have believed it, even if Sing had told him. For him, Ash was nothing more than a monster, perfectly capable of killing anyone, even friends, without feeling any kind of remorse and only ever caring about Eiji:

Lao had a pretty fixed opinion of Ash and until the end, that also never changed.

What’s pretty interesting (and also sad) is the fact that Ash actually acknowledges Lao’s opinion of him, saying he can see him for what he really is:

And I also always had the feeling like Ash thought he deserved to be hated by Lao and in the end, that Lao had every right to kill him.

Ash makes clear when he tells Sing not to tell anyone about what really happened to Shorter that he doesn’t want anyone to try to avenge him and put themselves in danger because of that. However, I always thought that this wasn’t the only reason but also because Ash still blamed himself for Shorter’s death and thought he deserved to be blamed for it by others, too, as some sort of punishment.

That’s why I’ve always seen Ash embracing his death in the end not only as him thinking he could protect Eiji from any further harm through his death but also as him thinking it’s what he deserves, especially since it’s Lao who ends his life.

Lao, who still holds a grudge against him because he had killed Shorter and whose hatred Ash thinks of as justified. Lao, who sees him as a cold ruthless monster, just like Ash sees himself as and proclaims as his true self.

Him shooting Lao after he attacked him always seemed to me like some sort of reflex and maybe Ash saw this reaction as confirmation of what he previously told Blanca:

That’s where I’ve always seen his mind spiralling backwards.

He just had killed. Again. It was out of self-defence, but we all know Ash never saw this as an excuse for killing. For him, that was the ultimate proof that he really is what he sees himself as: A monster which doesn’t deserve redemption or to leave his previous life behind.

I saw many people complaining about Lao, a mere side character, to be the one who kills Ash, wishing it had been Dino or Foxx. But personally I think Lao was the only one left who could have killed him.

Dino and Foxx were already dead and besides, Ash would have never allowed them to kill him. Yut Lung also wouldn’t have worked since I don’t think he actually wanted to kill Ash. All he ever seemed to want was turning Ash into the monster he wanted him to become, unloved and unloving, mostly by trying to hurt Eiji rather than Ash himself. And a complete stranger who we’ve never had seen before was also out of question.

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.

Unlike some people seem to believe, Ash was never really cold nor ruthless and only changed his behaviour after meeting Eiji like a typical shoujo trope. Ash had always been caring and nice deep down, he just tried to hide it in order to not break and protect himself as Eiji mentioned and which you pointed out as well. But still, he couldn’t completely hide it like in the scenes you already referred to with Ash sparing the two who sided with Dino in the first episode or the scene with him having to go back into the facility to save Max and Ibe. It’s impossible for him not to care and even though he was so keen on leaving them behind but within seconds, he changed his mind to: “Nope. Can’t leave them.”

I won’t list all of the examples where his caring and loving side is shown since you already did a great job at listing petty much all of them ^^ I think they really show how Ash was already human right from the start and not Eiji being the one turning him into one throughout the story.

The reason for him having been able to stay human and still care for people and not go down the path of hatred like Yut Lung did is him having been surrounded by people who cared for him as well. During his childhood, he had Griffin with him and like any little brother, I can imagine Ash wanting to be like his big brother who seemed to be of a very kind nature after all. Later on, he had Shorter who wasn’t afraid to call him out on certain behaviour and became a close friend of him:

But even Shorter had a different perception of him at first and even seemed to be afraid of him in some sense:

Fearing or admiring Ash were the two extremes most people seem to have felt towards him, there was no in-between. Always seeing either a god or the devil. But never a human.

Eiji was the exception. Right from the start he seemed to sense something about Ash, unlike others. He was never afraid of him nor admired him. He just simply saw him as a human and this already got clear the moment he asked for his gun. Ash was used to people only ever taking something from him without considering his feelings or caring about him. And suddenly, there’s this boy asking politely for consent to hold his gun, not seeming to be afraid of him at all and not even starting to after asking if he had ever killed people which Ash confirmed. Ash had called him a “baby” then, but I think, more than anything, he was actually irritated by Eiji’s treatment of him because he simply wasn’t used to it.

I think the point where Eiji really caught the first real glimpse of how Ash was really deep down inside was the scene where Ash gave up his gun to Arthur because he threatened to kill him otherwise. Eiji looked so surprised when he did that, as if he hadn’t expected that at all. After all, he was just a stranger. They had no connection, yet. It made no sense for Ash to give up the gun he didn’t allow anyone to touch in first place just for him if he already wasn’t kind at heart from the start, so Eiji must have realized that there was more to him than what meets the eye. And the more the story progressed, the more he saw that this was indeed true or rather, Ash was feeling comfortable enough to let him see that side of him. The side of the boy he actually was deep down inside, the side of Aslan.

So if we consider “Ash” and “Aslan” not only being two different names but also  two different sides of him – “Ash” being the cold and ruthless appearing gang leader and “Aslan” being the caring and goodhearted boy – then it gets clear that most characters only ever saw “Ash” and maybe just a little glimpse of “Aslan”, if they were lucky. However, Eiji saw both sides of him and most importantly, he accepted and loved both of them. That’s also how I interpret his words in GoL about loving both, light and darkness:

Eiji saw and witnessed how undeniably human Ash was through and through. Saw how fragile he could be, how sometimes that thick wall he had built around himself was sometimes crumbling, how hurt and lonely he was.

So many people tried to tear Ash’s humanity away from him, tried to turn him into a monster, tried to make him think he had no other choice than being or becoming anything else than that.

And then there was Eiji feeling drawn to him precisely because of how human he was. Only ever treating him like a human and never expecting anything in return. Just loving him for himself and not in a twisted way like Dino did. And that was the reason Ash felt drawn to him as well.

Eiji’s role in the story is to show him that he’s deserving of love despite of what he’s done, despite of what he thought he was and also to remind him of his existing humanity. Because even though we and Eiji can see how human he was, it still doesn’t mean Ash also saw himself as that. For him, he was an unredeemable monster, a leopard that could never climb down the mountain ever again. After all he’s been through, it’s understandable that he sometimes began to lose sight of his own humanity. So Eiji stepped in and reminded him of it, just like did during the leopard scene:

Just like you said, Ash was already human, Eiji didn’t magically turn him into one but he kept reminding him of his humanity and also protected his soul. If Eiji hadn’t been there after Griffin’s and Shorter’s death, maybe Ash had pushed people away instead of letting them in because he would have been too afraid of people getting hurt again due to them having gotten too close to him. He would have been all alone with his grief and regret (imagine how episode 11 would have been without Eiji comforting Ash).

Thanks to Eiji, he had a sanctuary where he knew he was safe and could be himself, be human, could let himself fall and be vulnerable, being provided with normalcy, like you said. And importantly, with this normalcy, he took away Ash’s loneliness. The loneliness that was always surrounding him because everyone failed to see this human side of him and his pain. Because everyone saw him as “Ash”, the façade the world forced him to put up in order not to break, or because he couldn’t show this side of him to them since otherwise, they would have taken advantage of it.

The only one being able to see and notice that there was also another side to him was Eiji. The one Ash didn’t push away but instead allowed to see this side of him.

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.

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.  

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.  

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.

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.  

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.

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.

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.  

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.  

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.