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This began with a question I received that essentially asks, What is interesting about Endo and Chika, beyond their obsession with one another? In trying to articulate my fascination with them as individual characters and as a pair, I spiraled to trying to figure out What Love Is. This analysis (treatise, even) is an attempt to understand EndoChika’s story as the model romance — a story about desire and the pursuit of the desired.

Before engaging with outside literature, EndoChika’s relationship endlessly fascinates me because it is a love story between crazy people; people who have nothing else but each other — care about nothing but each other, interact meaningfully with no one but one another — and they have no language or refuse to give the other a language for what they have, except for a violent and rudimentary Boolean switch (acceptance for Yes, violence for No). It is a relationship where they both feel trapped in or found themselves wanting, at some level, yet never have the intention to break off. The thought probably never crossed their mind. I think of it like an old marriage – to us tumultuous, but to them the norm, including the dying embers. 

Lastly, the level of violence and exactly how they operate within the relationship is not just because theirs is a romance, but because they are both crazy. I think that is enough to be said. 

Table of Content:

Eros the Bittersweet: The Framework of Narrative Desire

Endo in Love: The Experience of Perfect Eros

What the Hell is Wrong with This Guy? The Psychology of Endo Yamato (Part 2)

My Poorest Least Understood Little Meowmeow :( The Inner Machination of Takiishi Chika (Part 2)

The Beloved, too, is a Lover

The Problem with EndoChika: Why Are They Dissatisfied? 

Symbolon: So, Do They Love Each Other Or Not?

In this part, I’ll begin by introducing the framework of desire in stories about the pursuit of it — the framework of narrative desire — which I will then use to justify why EndoChika can be understood as a romance and simultaneously trying to understand Endo’s experience of this chase. That will segue into Part 2, on why Endo and Takiishi “love” in this way. This will then give us ground to understand Takiishi's experience of love towards Umemiya and then Endo, where I will discuss the framework of triangulation— one most necessary in many narrative structures, not just ones about desire (Part 3). In the same section I will also emphasize why Umemiya and Sakura are vital to the EndoChika story. Lastly, we will come back to EndoChika and discuss all the ways that there are gaps between them— thus why they are dissatisfied, and how this is, at the end, still love.

Oh boy. This is going to be a long one.

Eros the Bittersweet: A Primer on the Framework of Narrative Desire

People fall in love. People chase love. People either get it — after numerous obstacles — or they don’t. Usually, the protagonist wins their beloved (both of them, or either, dead or alive). But is love or desire (Ἔρως – Eros) the final goal, the motivation, or something in between?

I turned to Anne Carson’s Eros the Bittersweet in an attempt to more formally understand this experience. One paragraph summarizes the goal and experience of eros best (p. 77):

… His delight is in reaching: to reach for something perfect would be perfect delight… We have looked at some of the tactics of incompleteness by which Sappho sustains desire and desirability… We have looked at similar tactics penetrating lovers’ logic and contracting upon a solitude unknown before. They are tactics of imagination, which sometimes turn upon enhancing the beloved, sometimes upon reconceiving the lover, but which are all aimed at defining one certain edge or difference: an edge between two images that cannot merge in a single focus because they do not derive from the same level of reality—one is actual, one is possible. To know both, keeping the difference visible, is the subterfuge called eros.

To (further) summarize the important details:

Love is not the Goal, but the Reaching: “to reach for something perfect would be perfect delight.”

Reaching necessitates a lack – as a taunt – a gap. “The Greek word eros denotes “want,” “lack,” “desire for that which is missing,” to quote Anne Carson (p. 11).

Love and Desire are born from the Imagination – Love being an entirely internal process in the mind of the lover – which enhances or re-imagines the beloved.

Crucially to the process of eros, various (narrative) tactics highlight the “edges” (limitations, boundaries) of a person: between lover and beloved, between the actual him of the present and the possible him who is in love/has obtained love. This flashes of possible realities superimposed onto (laying on top of) one another, is what eros is and why it is enticing. 

This is enough, for now, to get us started :3c. Later on, we will see that a crucial formulation of this lacking, taunting, and limitations is the triangle, or the act of triangulation— but let’s first focus on just a line between two vertices.

Endo in Love: The Experience of Perfect Eros

What is very important to me (and this analysis) is the emphasis that EndoChika’s story, as presented by Endo, is a story about desire. Endo fell in love, this much is irrefutable:

I want to stress that this is not a translational liberty[*]. Specifically, the original Japanese line is “惚れた” — I fell (in love). I became infatuated. 

By the criteria of narrative desire above, Endo is in love. He’s reaching for an unattainable, godly figure – perfect delight stemming from reaching for the perfect beloved. Is there a gap? The distance between godliness and humanity surely is one. Love is internal; it happens with or without the beloved’s approval. “Who can help love, after all?” is a common lament. Here, too, Endo’s love happens without it ever entering Takiishi's worldview. Endo appraises and re-imagines Takiishi to be his god, his beloved, the apple atop the highest branch:

(Visually, there are a few interesting details here. Endo is embracing an image of Takiishi. Even if Endo is the inventor of this image (certainly no one else in canon sees Takiishi in a similar manner), he puts the image of the godly Takiishi in a gilded frame, eternally preserving and separating the image from himself. Takiishi's eyes here are shadowed over— showing him as something other than human, intimidating and dangerous (but that is exactly to Endo’s liking). The lighting on the painting is on the right side (from the light on Takiishi's face), where Endo positioned himself. Endo shines a light – thus looks – at Takiishi in this godly manner. Note also the general Western setting of the image and how Endo wraps himself and Takiishi in what resembles the Roman toga, thus evoking the ancient worship of deities to legitimize his worship.)

Let’s demonstrate these principles from the very beginning, when Endo and Takiishi met. 

Prologue

Endo begins with an emptiness: even though he has the abilities to do anything, it separates him from the experience of being human— emotions, struggles, and most importantly, a sense of connection. Note the facelessness and transparency of the people around Endo. They are not there, in his internal world, at all:

which is reminiscent of what we will see later in Takiishi’s internal world. There is a lack, but not love, because he is not reaching. A lack without want is just “emptiness.”

Say, what caged bird would know that it is in a cage? That is, until Endo meets Takiishi and starts wanting, desiring, via a violent trigger that bursts upon his emotions, negative and positive. Sometimes, if you go hungry for long enough, you don’t realize how hungry you are until you start eating.

Bittersweet

From now on, let’s treat Endo’s experience in this chapter/sequence as a literalization of what are usually metaphors of the experience of eros. Endo’s fall to love starts with pain; he was “struck by Cupid’s (Eros’s) arrow.” Anne Carson writes about this sparking of infatuation: “We might cite metaphors of piercing, crushing, bridling, roasting, stinging, biting, grating, cropping, poisoning, singeing, and grinding to a powder, all of which are used of eros by the poets, giving a cumulative impression of intense concern for the integrity and control of one’s own body”[1] (p. 45) This “crisis of contact” fatally injures the lover then resurrects him anew– re-inventing him altogether. “Desire changes the lover” (AC, p. 41). 

But the lover doesn’t “die” immediately as Eros strikes him. Resurrection, or transformation, is a more complicated business. He feels change flooding him, his entire body in metamorphoses, and he becomes afraid. Anxiety, confusion, and fear are Endo’s initial reaction. Why?

Literally, well, because young little Yamato just got punched in the face. He just fell down a building scaffold, at least one or two stories tall, and escaped death by the skin of his teeth. It’s the first time he had been punched— the first time anyone treated him with anything less than awe and amazement. Of course this foreign transgression plunges him into shock. We established that this moment of shock is congruent to the first moment of falling in love. Figuratively, then, why does poetry say love inspires anxiety, confusion, and fear? 

Love confuses because it has just reinvented you. It transported you to a new state of mind. The moment of realizing you are in love comes after a period of confusion: Modern literary traditions (fanfiction[2]) extensively emphasize the “Oh,” moment of realizing you are in love. Confusion always precedes realization, where the protagonist puzzles for the reasons behind their modified behaviors. Literature says the same. Virginia Woolf relays this experience in The Waves, through a young man named Neville who watches as his beloved, Bernard, crosses the yard: 

Something now leaves me; something goes from me to meet that figure who is coming, and assures me that I know him before I see who it is. How curiously one is changed by the addition, even at a distance, of a friend.

Anne Carson notes the confusing effects stemming from the re-invention of the self: 

 “How curiously”: he feels the change happen but has no ready categories to assess it. The change gives him a glimpse of a self he never knew before (p. 41).

Anxiety, then fear, are close companions to confusion. “Change of self is loss of self to these [archaic] poets,” said Anne Carson about the antiquity’s understanding of the Eros experience, “These metaphors [of war, disease, and bodily dissolutions] assume a dynamic of assault and resistance” (p.44). Transformation is confusing and fearsome; even so to feel yourself transforming, seeing some fundamental parts of yourself altering. Bodily dissolution is also an important motif, as Eros is traditionally called “melter of limbs” (Carson, 44). We will labor this melting later. Also notable is that, after this momentary distress, Endo plunges directly into joy and delight. That is a break from the archaic tradition of Eros. 

Footnotes:

[1] Technically this passage is about the violence of the changing of the self upon love– where the lover’s experience of transformation/metamorphoses is likened to these violent acts by the ancient poets, it being a loss of the self. For the scope of this analysis, I find it adequate to collapse this "danger of transformation" to the immediate feeling of falling in love.

[2] I legitimized fanfiction as literature in this context, insofar as literature (and fanfiction) serves to understand the current cultural attitude about certain ideas, in this case, ideas about the experience of falling in love. Even if the scope of "we" is a selected group of people reading the fanfictions, that is, ultimately, the main target audience of this analysis (i.e., the ones who will actually read this lol).

Wanting

Most crucially to the experience of love is wanting. Let’s remind ourselves of the definition of eros:  “The Greek word eros denotes “want,” “lack,” “desire for that which is missing.” “The lover wants what he does not have. It is by definition impossible for him to have what he wants if, as soon as it is had, it is no longer wanting” (AC, p.11). Well, that is confusing. The moment the lover “possesses” his beloved— the beloved is no longer “beloved.” It is like capturing a bird for the joy of capturing it. That seems cruel. But let’s not assume that the bird will ever be captured yet. What if we never see the end of it at all— we keep trying to reach the beloved, keep trying to catch the flying bird, and feel all the joys, sorrows, jubilation, desperation, fervor, and fatigue, of it all? Don’t we love slow-burn? Don’t we love thousand-of-pages danmei that takes the lovers years, decades, millenia, if not life-times to arrive at a happy ending? After the happy ending, the story is over and the characters go away. No more lover, no more beloved. Romance and love, in general, is this prolonged pursuit of something lacking. If you catch it— game over. 

Not everyone likes this idea, even poets and philosophers. Sartre sees this as a “dupery.” Simone de Beauvoir thinks it “torture.” Sappho certainly agrees— “Atthis, your care for me stirred hatred in you/ and you flew to Andromeda” (LP, fr. 131; trans. AC). Love and hate — torments inspired by this paradox of have and have-nots — commingled. The book we are consulting, after all, is Eros the Bittersweet. 

If there is one thing apparent through the Noroshi arc, it is that Endo never quite “gets” Takiishi. Takiishi, at least on a surface level, does not “love” Endo back, which inspires jealousy (ch. 152). Endo admits that he doesn’t entirely understand Takiishi, either (ch. 141, 142). For a genius like him, that probably is one of the first (as everything else about Takiishi is). At some level, Endo wants to “have” Takiishi, of course — that’s why he is reaching to understand Takiishi. But, on another level, Endo positions himself at the position of continuous reaching, for who can obtain a god? Isn’t it the whole point that Takiishi does not allow himself to be constrained in any way? Note that in the ending of ch. 142, Endo does not say that he wants to “keep” Takiishi– he wants to keep seeing Takiishi. Always at a distance. Always a gap. It is a paradox.

Reaching

The visual narrative also displays this gap. Note this visual motif of Endo’s attraction towards Takiishi in chapter 142: Endo’s hands are depicted reaching towards Takiishi, who is engulfed in light. In the first, Takiishi is symbolized by the moon, a celestial object reached up to by a child who had just fallen down the ground. Upon the moon the narrative has inscribed, A revelation. By the second “reaching” Endo has revised Takiishi to mean “God” — there is no inscription upon the image; there is no need for a symbol, because the thing itself is there. Recalling our summarized framework on narrative desire earlier, this transformation is akin from moving from the actual (the physical object) to the possible (God). 

I also found an interesting parallel between Endo’s revision (revelation to God) and a fragment of Sappho that became the model for portraying the beloved (LP, fr. 105a, trans. AC):

As a sweet apple turns red on a high branch, high on  the highest branch and the applepickers forgot— well, no they didn’t forget—were not able to reach….

Anne Carson did a thorough close reading of this fragment in Eros the Bittersweet (ch. “The Reach”, p. 30-32); I briefly summarize/quote the analysis here. The poem is, first of all, 

incomplete, perfectly… The three lines of the poem follow the poet’s mind on a trajectory … in which both the perception (of the apple) and the judgement (of why it is where it is) suffer self-correction … One gets the sense, as the poem proceeds, of a gradually imposed constraint. The reaching action of desire is attempted again and again in different ways through the different lines; with each line it becomes clearer that the reach will not succeed.” 

The archetype of the beloved being a fruit (apple) on the highest branch, most unattainable and most untouched, found its origin in the same tradition that this poem arises; the poem itself is continuously referenced by later poets. Anne Carson references this also to summarize the action of reaching one’s desire: “beautiful (in its object), foiled (in its attempt), endless (in time).”

True to it, with each revision Takiishi grows further and further from Endo, from an observable celestial object to God, paradoxically as the physical distance between them shrinks. Throughout it, and beyond, Endo continuously reaches to understand and please Takiishi. Yet, when Endo appraises Takiishi to the status of God, he puts a pane of glass and a frame between them: constraining in this case not only himself but also Takiishi, thwarting this love. Maybe preventing it from ever ending. 

Internality and Imagination

Love is a scathingly internal process. 

Andreas Capellanus analyzes the pain of amorous longing in the same light in … De Amore, insisting that this passio is a thoroughly mental event: ‘The suffering of love does not arise out of any action … but only from the cogitation of the mind upon what it sees does that suffering issue’ (XIV) (p. 71).

Stendhal compares this process also to the “crystallization” of foreign objects in the mine, where, upon spending enough time in the cavern, they too become “a galaxy of scintillating diamond” with the crystal deposited on their surface. This effect is the same as in love, where the lover ruminates in their mind[4] the image of the beloved and incidentally bejeweled them – “enhances and re-imagines the beloved”. We saw Takiishi go from boy to light to God, all of which are unattainable. We saw a suggestion that Endo loves a particular image of Takiishi — that of an inferno scorching everything it grazes across — perhaps like in Italo Calvino’s novel The Nonexistent Knight, where the heroine only feels affection for a knight’s armor. We saw Takiishi in a gilded frame. It’s Endo and a perfect version of Takiishi, more than Takiishi himself.

There is this one last component of this process: the superposition of the actual and the possible that makes the eros experience so tantalizing. I arrived at a difficulty here. I could say here that these flashes of possibilities are present when Endo reaches towards the moon and noticing the overlap between him and Takiishi (the blood), thus seeing the two of them superimposing upon each other, or that, the possibility of him being with Takiishi superimposed upon him being alone, abandoned on a pile of trash. Those are tantalizing possibilities— enough of a tension to pull Eros through. But Endo swiftly resolves this gap between actual and possible at the very next page by transferring school and following Takiishi's every step. I could also say that there is this superimposition of images of Takiishi and of God, but Endo places himself nowhere in this picture. I could quote here Anne Carson’s answer to the question, WHAT DOES THE LOVER WANT FROM LOVE? saying, “To feel its current [flowing between actual reality of self and the new possible self] pass through her is what the lover wants” and perhaps we catch a glimpse of Endo between the letters. But not quite. There is something missing. We need to dig deeper— into the psychology of one Endo Yamato and Takiishi Chika.

Footnote [4]:  I glossed over the connection between this conception of love and literacy, in which anthropologists/writers say that Greek antiquity only started writing about love as they developed written, alphabetic language. If you want a quick summary, send me an ask! If you reaaally want to read it, Eros the Bittersweet briefly goes over it (p. 47) and cites many, many references!