animekritik and I talked about what’s in episode five of Kuchu Buranko/Trapeze, and we’re quite in high spirits that it will deliver something good, yet bad in a sinister kind of way, and it did. The episode’s theme is quite simple: It’s all about releasing the kid in us, the prankster in all of us, and getting away with it to tell the tale.
No picture available.
That’s the case of our patient-of-the-week, Tatsuro Ikeyama. He’s a psychiatrist aiming to be a professor in the university where he and Irabu Ichiro studied. Opening a bit of background on Irabu, it seems that both of them are alumni of the university, with Irabu going on his own and “Ike-chan” (as Irabu calls him) marrying the university headmaster’s daughter. The change in lifestyle transformed him from a university prankster to a reputable member of Headmaster Nomuro’s family, causing him to suffer obsessive-compulsive disorder. And to think that a psychiatrist would consult a fellow psychiatrist just because he can’t seem to cure his own mental illness, what a paradox it is!
Now, going on with the treatment, this case of OCD differs from the one before it (Toriyama’s case) in the way the disorder would manifest itself. The illness makes the patient conjure a hallucination of the patient’s inner prankster doing outrageous things. It is questionable whether the patient “permits” it mentally or not, given the fact that the patient thinks of the deed, does not do anything about it, and instead lets the inner prankster do it for him in his mind. As it worsens, the disorder would make the hallucinations realistic, to the point where the patient can’t control himself on the intention of doing the dirty deed in reality.
Contrary to what everyone believes, it’s not the wig that’s the source of problem, it’s Ikeyama’s sudden change of behavior. Why? To re-use animekritik’s way of explaining it, he commits “self-plagiarism” by recreating himself, altering his “contents”, and “re-releasing” himself like a freshly copied book done by some bogus author. He needs to be up for his reputation as a member of the headmaster’s family, and that means burying his past self as mischief-maker, and recreating himself as someone respectable, someone who easily blends with the society he’s in, someone like the chameleon. No more putting fundoshi on the university statue, no more LOL moments, just plain opera watching while smoking Cuban tobacco. Dandy, if it weren’t for Ike-chan’s distorted, imploding figure.
Classic pranks are the relics of the Crusade that is your university life.
In the end, he cured himself by simply being himself again. Seriously, why was there even a need to hide? Okay, we do have to consider the fact that he has reputation as a prankster before he got married, but anything other than that should be fine, right? He’s like a smoker trying to break the near-unbreakable habit via Cold Turkey. Heck, there wasn’t even any habit to break in the first place, just him keeping too much to himself that it damages himself internally. This point, I didn’t get, and I’m not trying to be Irabu Ichiro either.
Let’s just move on to the next episode. Wait, you can treat cellphone addiction? This isn’t like smoking, right? What? I don’t think this is going to be as juicy as the previous episodes were, yes?
Further Reading
Anonymity and the Chameleon:
Trapeze 05: Between a Scaly Crawler and Nothingness – Kritik Der Animationskraft
It does seem like most of these problems revolve around people’s rejection of who they are, who they will become, who they were, etcetera. The pressure from this “dissociation” or “splitting” is what causes the disorders. So how about Irabu???
Rejection and acceptance all rolled into one, perhaps? Unless he’s “partly insane” to the point of “being sane”, I think there’s no other explanation.