Released in the wake of Desire (1994), Xenon: Mugen no Shitai (1994) would see Hiroyuki Kanno refining his multi-pronged narrative approach that would shortly culminate in EVE Burst Error’s (1995) dual protagonist system before ultimately expanding into the auto diverting mapping system found in YU-NO (Elf Corporation, 1996). Given less than four months to develop each of these titles at C’s Ware,1 one gets the sense of Kanno rapidly and tirelessly working to outpace production deadlines. These circumstances, alongside Kanno’s working within the various “low-brow” genres of science-fiction, mystery, and pornography—a not too uncommon combination for Japanese PC games of the era—results in Kanno having less in common with his peers in the games industry than he does with the film directors who all worked under similar conditions in Japanese pink films and v-cinema—Shinya Tsukamoto, Rokurō Mochizuki, and most famously, Kiyoshi Kurosawa. This comparison to cinema is particularly apt as at its best, Xenon’s narrative recalls a subset of French New Wave sci-fi films—Chris Marker’s La Jetée (1962) and Alan Resnais’ Je t’aime, je t’aime (1968).2 Xenon can thus be considered an “arthouse eroge,” one that uses the genre of pornography as a vehicle to explore (postmodern) subjectivity. The game thereby represents a crucial stepping point in the trajectory of Kanno’s career as he approached his magnum opus, YU-NO, demonstrating the evolution of his writing style and design philosophy.
Opening in-media res, we’re introduced to our protagonist Kōji, a young man who appears to be in the midst of sleeping. As Ryoko, his doctor, awakens him, we learn that Kōji has been suffering from a recurring dream where he finds himself exploring a series of corridors and encountering strange women. Kōji has no sense of where he is or who these women are but Ryoko urges him to continue dreaming and to seek out the truth. It turns out that Kōji works a rather nebulous job as research-assistant-cum-guinea pig with the local biomedical laboratory, an opportunity facilitated through his girlfriend Megumi whose father serves on the board. Stuck in the lab, Kōji spends most of his time in counseling sessions with Ryoko, dreaming of another world, or, too exhausted from the experience, sleeping back in his bedroom where the dreams continue. In between, he flits about what few rooms are open to him, coming across two more young women who have their own involvement with the lab but to what extent remains unknown: Mai and Sayaka, each one seemingly invested in the progress of Kōji’s counseling sessions. While dreaming, Kōji meets four more women: Ranpha, Tracy, Fal, and later on, Bianca. If I am vague in my descriptions of these characters, it is only because their identities and the roles they play in the narrative are crucial to the experience of watching Xenon unfold. It’s enough to understand that when Kōji sleeps, he dreams he’s elsewhere, but as the story progresses, both Kōji and the reader slowly become unsure which is the waking world and which is the fabrication of Kōji’s sleep.
Xenon contains four routes with the third containing four different endings. The game’s first route is certainly its most serious, using Kōji’s confusion towards his own circumstances to establish a mysterious narrative hook. The game directly references the ancient Chinese text Zhuangzi and the struggle of Zhuang Zhou who dreamed he was a butterfly but upon waking could then not discern whether he was Zhuang Zhou dreaming that he was a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming he was Zhuang Zhou. Xenon thereby seems to ask: is 宏治 dreaming that he’s Kōji or is he 宏治 dreaming that he’s Kōji? In Kōji, those familiar with Type-Moon’s Tsukihime (2000) will recognize an antecedent to Shiki who spends restless nights dreaming of murdering people with glee. But whereas Kinoko Nasu uses Shiki to ponder questions on power and morality, Kanno’s own interest lies in the fragmenting of Kōji’s identity. If as Hiroki Azuma puts forth, the narratives of visual novels are dissociative,3 then Xenon reflects this not because of its branching paths—which are given a diegetic explanation much like YU-NO—but because as the narrative reaches its climax, Kōji fails to discern between the two worlds he’s embodying, a breakdown visualized in one of the game’s most memorable scenes when a match-cut brings together two separate sex scenes. It’s a moment that recalls the brief second of movement in the completely otherwise still La Jetee, when the hero finds himself flitting between the not-yet-destroyed past and ruinous future of Paris and encounters his sleeping lover awakening, her eyes opening to greet him. Like Marker working with photography in La Jetee, in Xenon, Kanno is working within the limitations of the genre and medium to push on the combination of science-fiction, mystery, and pornography.
Xenon too also presents its own “database” through which it creates new story routes. The second and third routes present a wholly new narrative from two different points of view. In the second route, a more powerful Kōji finds himself in the original and weaker Kōji’s body and quickly gets to work discerning the situation. Whereas during the first route, Kōji lacks agency, being pulled forward and manipulated by the various women he encounters, the Kōji of the second route is much more assertive which is no surprise given his background. This results in the story coming across as a parody. Knowledge that takes the first Kōji hours to stumble upon is instead quickly seized by this new Kōji who has no respect for the rules of facility. Kōji breaks into every room, solves every mystery, and of course, because this is an eroge, subdues every woman.
If a stereotypical passive attitude found in burgeoning otaku protagonists of the 1990s defines the first Kōji, then the second Kōji instead recalls the equally stereotypical pulp heroes of 1980s otaku culture such as Crusher Joe and Rance. As a result, whereas Xenon’s first route focuses on unraveling the mystery of Kōji’s shifting identity as he dreams, the second route instead takes up concerns of fantasy, power, and sexual desire from the perspective of otaku. Players who may have been frustrated by how weak the old Kōji comes across—a point repeatedly brought up by the new Kōji—can now delight in being powerful enough to bend the narrative to their whim. It’s no surprise then that the nature of the sex scenes in this route are indicative of this shift and subsequent new power dynamic, with Kōji being much more aggressive towards the game’s heroines and villains and dominating them—a term I do not use lightly here as erotic scenes take on a much more violent tone.
Alongside the third and fourth routes, the second route could thereby be considered a “nukige,” given the narrative’s overt focus on eroticism, but I would also hesitate to tell potential readers to only play the first route. Although it is certainly the game’s high-watermark, I suggest the first and second routes reveals a tension in the masculinity of protagonists in otaku media before and after the collapse of the Japanese economic bubble. After all, part of Kōji’s motivation in taking the job was to earn some extra crash. Examining the figure of the salaryman in Japanese cinema, film and media scholar Shuk-ting Kinnia Yau argues that the bursting of the economic bubble led to a crisis in masculinity.4 As a result, the appearance of traditional heroes in Japanese cinema became increasingly rare, giving way to a rising nostalgia towards post-war Japan.5 Yau goes on to suggest that, “In this age of declining masculinity, the sole salvation of man has apparently become the 100% devoted women. This explains why a thirst for maternal love and care is frequently found in Japanese movies nowadays.”6 Although Kōji is not a salaryman, his character and the overall narrative structure of Xenon still exemplifies the patterns that Yau outlines. It is not in Kōji’s girlfriend Megumi in which we’ll find the maternal woman, but rather, Mai who is the first potential love interest that players will meet in the game. In at least the first route, it is Mai who dotes on Kōji frets for his health and takes his concerns seriously. The second route’s wholly different Kōji has no need for compassion and seems to care for naught regarding his situation. This time around, he may still find himself a stranger in a strange land but his more aggressive attitude exemplifies a certain masculine ideal. Nothing stands in this Kōji’s way.
What of the third and fourth routes? One feels that as a work of pornography, these branches sees Kanno exploring the theme of power and sex through the alternating lens of dominating and of being dominated. It’s no surprise then that one heroine appears as a dominatrix, replete with a leather Greek fisherman’s hat, heels, and of course, a whip. The third route runs parallel to the second and as such takes place entirely in the “dream” world where the “weaker” Kōji now deals with Ranpha, Tracy, Fal, and Bianca. Whereas the first route combines these two settings, the subsequent two routes instead bisects them thus giving players the opportunity to engage with whatever specific heroine attracts them. The fourth route does away with any semblance of plot. Titled, “Sex Slave: The Melancholy of Tracy” (“肉奴隸: トレイシーの憂鬱”), the story follows Tracy rather than Kōji as she wanders around in something of a fugue state wanting nothing more than to have sex.
Those looking to play Xenon simply for the erotic scenes will then find themselves having to engage with the narrative to reach that point, a sort of ludic foreplay. Even then, much like Desire the majority of pornography here ranges from uncomfortable to boring and while Xenon never received an all-ages re-release like its other sound novel peers, Kanno’s strength as a writer lies in the much wider circumstances surrounding sex rather than the actual act itself. Take one scene where Kōji awakens in Tracy’s room. Tracy, wearing a deep plunge dress and garters, sits in front of Kōji with her legs crossed. The position of her body alongside the perspective from Kōji’s angle accentuates both the erotic elements of the situation and of Tracy, leading the player to believe that this is naturally the set-up for a pornographic scene. Instead, both Kōji and the player are treated to an extended lecture on parapsychology as Tracy attempts to comfort Kōji in his own confusion. A few moments throughout the game, such as this one, demonstrate what one might call “pornographic brilliance.” Elsewhere, the graphics team also show that they understand why players are drawn to specific elements of a character, such as one particular erotic scene where Tracy retains her glasses, or the still image format of the novel medium being used to present a striptease show as a means to mimic actual movement.
There’s no doubt that even while working within the more restrictive atmosphere at C’s Ware, Kanno and the members of his development team would grow in their ambition, leading to the more cohesive but still experimental EVE, and so for those interested in the trajectory of Kanno’s career, Xenon offers a glimpse into how he continuously drew influence and reiterated upon Koichi Nakamura’s earlier Otogirisō (Chunsoft, 1992). While there certainly remains a juvenile element in Xenon—and this might be perhaps true for Kanno’s oeuvre at large—the game’s particular combination and approach to science-fiction, mystery, and pornography are novel enough especially as Kanno explored the distinction between players and characters and even characters to themselves.
END NOTES
- Hiroki Azuma and Hiroyuki Kanno, “SUPER TALK SESSION: Hiroyuki Kanno with Hiroki Azuma + Editorial Department,” Faust, Vol.2 (Tokyo: Kodansha, 2004), 486. ↩︎
- This is not to imply that Xenon and by extension Hiroyuki Kanno can only be considered “artistic” or worthy of critical examination because they are comparable to film, but rather that Xenon can at least be placed in dialogue with the medium of film, a comparison which provides insight into understanding the game and Kanno’s career. ↩︎
- Hiroki Azuma, Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals, trans. Jonathan E. Abel and Shion Kono (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 84. ↩︎
- Shuk-ting Kinnia Yau, “Bad Father and Good Mother: The Changing Image of Masculinity in Post-Bubble-Economy Japan,” in International Perspectives on Translation, Education and Innovation in Japanese and Korean Societies, ed. David G. Hebert (Springer International Publishing, 2018), 243. ↩︎
- Yau, “Bad Father and Good Mother,” 250. ↩︎
- Yau, “Bad Father and Good Mother,” 251. ↩︎
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Azuma, Hiroki. Otaku : Japan’s Database Animals. [English ed.]. Translated by Jonathan E. Abel and Shion Kono. University of Minnesota Press, 2009.
Azuma, Hiroki, and Hiroyuki Kanno. “SUPER TALK SESSION: Hiroyuki Kanno with Hiroki Azuma + Editorial Department.” Faust. Vol. 2 (2004): 483–502. Kodansha.
Yau, Shuk-ting Kinnia. “Bad Father and Good Mother: The Changing Image of Masculinity in Post-Bubble-Economy Japan.” In International Perspectives on Translation, Education and Innovation in Japanese and Korean Societies, edited by David G. Hebert. Springer International Publishing, 2018. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-68434-5_16.