but is it not a social commentary on toxic Japanese work culture as an extension of (and one of the final steps within) Japanese culture as a whole? the Japanese culture that would allow a single mother to raise two children, whereupon the eldest grows up in a way that he believes he has never experienced anger because of the negative impact it would have on people [S1Q10]? the Japanese culture wherein child neglect and relational stress (such as in cases of divorce [S1Q16], high social and achievement expectations [S2Q1], enmeshed families [S1Q16], etc.) are both considered especially common causes of DID? the Japanese culture that would reward a baseline of dissociative compartmentalisation (aforementioned lack of awareness/tolerance towards one's own social missteps and what are deemed unacceptable personality traits), as it helps a person keep up with and succeed under grueling social and occupational demands? the Japanese culture where in spite of everything, pushing yourself so far that you drink straight from a bottle of vodka on your way home, to cope with the abusive job that you may eventually die doing, is a relative, non-pathologised norm?
the Japanese culture where, if someone – that hit all these low-profile risk factors and therefore experienced DID on a subclinical level (on account of maintained functioning, doing what is expected of him, because drinking and working himself to death, is not considered 'disorder') – were to suffer 100+ days of sleep deprivation while abusing substances, and then go on a murder spree in his cognitively impaired haze, may retroactively compartmentalise and dissociate from that too, and only then – as a result of the scrutiny placed on criminals and antisocials – have his dissociative internal structure drawn attention to?
i think he makes for a really interesting fictional case study, about how much suffering and abuse we sweep under the rug, up until someone explodes, and how it is often only when the person has made disorder onto society (through violence, or not being able to work) that any sort of diagnosis (and thus acknowledgement of 'some issue') is made. and especially how, in response to 'some issue' that has been indicated, we always look at the person in question as an individual and isolated problem, who – on account of the diagnosis we then apply to them –must have been dysfunctional from the start, and done what he did, because of his innate 'disorder'.
and i think DID was an especially good choice for this thought experiment, because of how clearly it encourages a common debate, around to what extent someone's behaviour is 'theirs' and to what extent it is their 'mental illness'. and it also makes me very very happy, as a pwDID, to see mikoto overcoming his lifetime of dissociation, suppression, and self-hatred that brought him to the current moment, and acknowledge that yes, at the end of the day, he did not do what he did because he was irrational or possessed, and that the parts of him that identify with his awful acts still deserve sympathy and collaboration. because while he perpetrated horrible things, it was as a whole person, for reasons that were understandable, and never should have come to be.
