Existential Insights on Hallucination from the Womb: Man Can Reach God, But He Cannot Become God If He Falls From Grace

Man has always been trying to reach out to God in an attempt to understand why the former was created from the latter’s image. Often, the endeavor strays from its intended path, becoming bold, devious, and wrong. “Reaching out to God” suddenly becomes “Reaching God”, and “Reaching God” can even become “Overthrowing God and Taking His Place”. I can only imagine much, but I think I’ve seen some of the best examples of Man’s attempts from this excellent piece of paperback.

Hallucination from the Womb is the second tankoubon volume of compiled works by Kitoh Mohiro, an artist known for drawing disturbing scenarios concerning human behavior in a futuristic background. Now, before I do share the general sentiment of the book, I’ll do have to warn you guys that the manga itself is NOT SAFE FOR WORK. It’s pretty touchy stuff, and Mohiro-san seems to have taken a liking to drawing deformed and underdeveloped girls for the story’s characters. Other than that humble reminder, we’re good.

The story is set in the grounds of Shell City, brimming with technology, society, and even the occult and the unknown. The story surrounds the people, events, technological achievements, as well as strange phenomena surrounding the city. Most of the stories are events experienced by two of the city’s unnamed “Administrators”, one male and one female, though a fingerful of them are stories that do not concern the two in any way. I don’t know if anybody else felt something existential on the way Shell City was built, but I was one who took it at heart, pondered a bit on it, and suffered from it, mindrape or whatnot. Reading the chapters repeatedly registered different reactions each time I read them, from the subtle, to the extreme. I think I’ll elaborate on some of the chapters instead of trying to give understanding to the somewhat anonymous characters or trying to keep you away from downloading it since it’s mostly pedostuff. I’m not spoiling that much, though, so just get the stuff on the DL link I provided at the end of the post.

This is so NOT mai waifu material.

Sins for Divinity

One of the interesting plots in the story is about how Man tries to achieve godly status by performing feats that only God can perform. Man even uses love as an excuse to emulate what God did, doing it in a very similar way to what God did in the past: To create someone from their own image, and instill their love for them. In the first chapter, Birthday Coffin, a woman seeks help to keep her scientist husband from repeatedly “murdering” her by creating clones of her, using them, and finally killing them by preserving them like lab specimens. But in order to complete his “love” for his wife, he must then kill and preserve his wife, and his “daughter”. The scientist overstepped the bounds by thinking that since he can achieve such godly feats, he is in no position to be wrong. What he just did was an act of love, right? How can it be wrong? Ethically? Existentially? Morally?

The concept designs of the City’s machines are sometimes fascinating. The Puppet Device is a manned machine hanging by two cables that can be deployed from the city’s upper levels.

Pertaining to love, another good and simple example is the third chapter, An Undead’s Voice, where a cadaver suddenly springs to life because it has “something to tell” to its wife. The corpse even convinces the Administrators to help. Finally, the man who passed away meets his wife, and utters the three words of love. The positive feel of the chapter and its bittersweet ending portrayed one of the best stories of Man’s everlasting sickness. You have a corpse, and it moves by itself, unknown if it still has its will intact, hell-bent to tell its wife the words it failed to tell her before he died. Such audacity and stubbornness shows that Man’s way of loving can beat the odds, defy fate, and overthrow God’s design itself. But then again, God may have opened the option in the first place. It’s already for the taking.

“In this city, it’s easy to see invisible things.“

Not only Man was given importance to the stories. It also told of the ways the world would sometimes make contact to Man. The fifth chapter, A Zashiki-Warashi’s Mark, tells the story of how a City repairman met a strange girl on Shell City’s abandoned sublevels. The girl is actually a Zashiki-Warashi, a spirit who dwells in people’s homes and blesses them with good luck. But in the ever-growing city, there is no permanent home, and so such spirits linger on the abandoned homes, looking for a soul they can spend time with. Why? Why would a dwelling have a spirit of its own, even when it knows there is nothing left for it? Why do the spirits stay on the structures, if they know nobody is there to live on them? Nobody dwells in them. Nobody cares. Why? Why is it that the world has picked such a miserable way to get Man’s attention?

This is not about a certain magical Index, nor is this about a certain magical library owner with a demon familiar. Those are two totally different stories, so let’s not get into that.

Shell City is a living being. The people living in it would testify for its sentience. The city is an entity that would build itself up, build itself up, build itself up, constantly changing and rising to the heavens “for an unknown purpose and an unclear reason”.  The technology depicted is not that advanced, since most of the principle elements that you can find on common things are still present, like the barrel and handle of a gun, or the concept of the unicycle and the segway combined, and even the authoritarian type of government. The key elements of the city aren’t that advanced either, though the story does show a bit of a deviant side on human cloning and usage, reanimation, infrastructure, as well as military and police power. Other than some of the factors needed for the story, it leaves the rest of the scenery to the reader’s imagination. As for the reason or purpose on why it was regarded to something close to a living being, that would be told from the the various events depicted in the book. The last chapter, A Bibliovore’s Love, tells of the very person who kept the stories in memoriam to the city and its citizens. The Administration found an unnamed girl called a Bibliovore: A person designed to memorize and recite the contents of a collection of books for their owners’ pleasure. The Bibliovore may be Mohiro-san’s way of injecting himself in the story as its narrator, sealing all the chapters and their relations to each other in a very long story for the public audience and the readers of the manga.

Obligatory image: Gotta love that one-wheeled segway.

Overall, I can say that Hallucination from the Womb is something either hard to digest, or just plain hard, like thinking that you’re eating alphabet soup when you see numbers on your stew. I suggest throwing religion, ideals and beliefs out of the window, however that would greatly affect how you will perceive the story. But for a hardcore read, it’s good, and I recommend it. You gotta love that one-wheeled segway, too.

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Hallucination from the Womb (Scanlated, English) – Kotonoha