One of my favorite anime series this season has been The Ancient Magus’ Bride. The art is gorgeous, the music is haunting, and we haven’t even talked about the story itself! I also watched the three prequel OVAs, and they were enough to wet my appetite; but the series itself is even better.
In Episode 9, “None so deaf as those who will not hear”, our heroine Chise encounters an old man tending his rose garden—and the vampire who haunts him unseen.
Ruth, Chise’s familiar, identifies the woman as a Leannán Sídhe, a kind of fairy who “grants a man a talent in exchange for his blood.” But this one, oddly, is doing neither granting nor blood-drinking. She’s just… hanging around. It turns out that
a) The man isn’t passionate about anything so strongly that the vampire can empower his talents, and
b) He doesn’t have enough blood, or at least sufficiently healthy blood, for her to drink without killing him.
So why is she spending all of her time with him?
It turns out that one day many years earlier, while Joel was working in his rose garden, for a moment he was able to see her.
Chise asks whether or not she loves Joel, and the vampire adamantly denies it: “We love by consuming and giving. So I don’t love him.”
The vampire has any number of reasons for insisting she’s not in love with him: He’s not my type. I can’t take his blood. He can’t receive my talent. He’s old, not handsome, a slob. He’s not passionate about anything in life.
And yet, here she is.
Then the vampire—
You know what? It’s too awkward to keep calling her “the vampire”. Since AMB doesn’t give her a name, let’s call her Vanessa. Vanessa the Vampire.
Then Vanessa makes a curious statement:
If she were confused merely about her feelings towards Joel, Vanessa would have said, “I don’t know what I’m feeling” or “what this experience is” or something like that. In context, “I don’t know what to do” only makes sense if Vanessa does love Joel and is unsure how to express it. This of course contradicts her express statement that she doesn’t love him. Why, then, would she insist she doesn’t?
I think it’s because of her understanding of love. Vanessa defines love as “consuming and giving”, an exchange of actions and things. Since there can be no such exchange between her and Joel, she concludes she does not love him.
Can you love someone to whom you can give nothing? Can you love someone from whom you can receive nothing?
(By the way, if you ever get to see Archibald MacLeish’s Pulitzer-winning drama, J.B., do so. I mention this because in the play, J.B.’s wife leaves him because she believes she has nothing left to give him. But she still professes to love him. It makes for a thought-provoking contrast with Vanessa, who won’t leave Joel even when she claims she doesn’t love him.)
AMB suggests that, yes, it is possible to love someone without this relationship of mutual exchange. It’s obvious in this episode that Joel loves Vanessa, even when he thinks she’s just a daydream from decades ago: He writes a love story based on their encounter.
For years, Joel has received nothing from Vanessa. A person might love an absent lover in the hopes that he or she will return, but Joel doesn’t even have the hope of ever seeing her again. He doesn’t even know if she’s real.
It gets better.
It’s been said of couples in some stories that they had nothing but each other, but here that is literal! They can’t talk to each other, can’t write to each other, can’t sleep with each other, can’t give gifts to each other, and one of them can’t even see the other! The only thing they have is each other’s presence. That is it.
I think that AMB suggests that love is a state of being present, not a state of doing. Or put another, perhaps better, way, love is about people and not actions or things. It’s not about what you can get from someone, or even what you can give to someone—it’s about the someone. It’s about you and they just… being.
Have you ever had a friend you were so close with that you could just sit in the same room with each other and… think? Just thinking and looking at each other? Just being in each other’s presence? I’ve had about two such friends in my entire life. Romantic or platonic, it’s an amazing experience. I think that’s akin to the kind of love between Vanessa and Joel.
I don’t want to generalize too much. Love gets boring when you philosophize about it, and I’m not enough of a poet to do love justice. Precisely because love is about people, there are as many different possible kinds of love as there are different possible relationships between people. Your story is your own.
But before we wrap up, take a look at this one incredible image from the moment when Joel sees Vanessa for the second time, dozens of years later, and Vanessa realizes it:
Can we take just a moment to appreciate the work of the art and animation team on this shot? As Vanessa’s eyes widen, her thoughts and doubtless extremely complicated feelings are vividly depicted in her eyes and on her face. (It’s even better animated.) Hats off to Wit Studio!
P.S. Glances and gazes are powerful. It only took one glance to determine the life’s course for Dante (no, not that Dante! The Italian poet.). If you only read one book in your life, read his Comedy (more commonly but inaccurately known as the Divine Comedy) alongside a good commentary like Robert Hollander’s. (Both poem and commentary are available for free at the Princeton Dante Project.) It was an overnight hit, and has been a bestseller for 700 years, eventually being partially adapted into a not-quite-so-bestselling video game. He wrote poems about the girl, then a story about how she changed his life before her early death (the Vita Nova), and then his magnum opus in which her gaze literally carries him to the heights of heaven.
Peace out!