Aggretsuko: In Praise of Mediocrity

After finishing the second season of Aggretsuko, I quickly rushed off to write this entry. For such a low-budget looking show, Aggretsuko has done it again with its philosophical musings on modern Japanese life. This entry contains spoilers.

Aggretsuko is a Japanese anime comedy that is currently being shown on Netflix. Its characters, part of Sanrio, are all animals (think Zootopia but less like a utopia with gleaming skyscrapers and more like worker-packed trains in Shinjuku). Its style is simplistic, leaning more towards a cartoonish side rather than being an artfully crafted “anime.” Nevertheless, the series compensates its visual simplicity by embarking on an ambitious journey to cover almost every trope of Japanese life from marriage philosophy to corporate politics. As the series carefully gleans on these modern anxieties, it does so with light humor and cheap recycled animated sequences.

Usually, I would be turned off by such low animation quality, but the themes covered in each episode, no matter how subtle, resonated with me a lot. The series’ last arc follows the main character, a red panda named Retsuko, as she decides to try out a relationship with a young CEO of an up-and-going AI company. Being in love, her world becomes colored in pink, showered with rainbows. As their relationship unfolds, the young CEO, a donkey named Tadano, tells Retsuko that he does not believe in marriage; to him, marriage is just another illusion created to bind them to social responsibilities, not that different from Retsuko’s office job as an accountant. At first, Retsuko becomes a little bit troubled by Tadano’s statement since she has always believed in family life to be the answer to life’s nihilistic void. But being deeply in love with him, she brushes off her own dreams. Perhaps living beyond what society expects of them will be fine too. Besides, the society they live in is becoming more progressive anyway.

Tadano continues to preach to Retsuko, telling her to quit her job to find her “passion.” His vision for the future is one where people no longer have to work the jobs they dislike. His newly engineered AI program, En-io, will replace all the boring and unnecessary bits of society. Tadano believes that once Retsuko is freed, she will feel that a whole new world, one blazed open by her passions, has opened up to her.

But in reality, Retsuko becomes troubled by this Sartrean freedom. She doesn’t have any ambition to climb up the ranks of her company. She also doesn’t have any “passions” she wants to pursue as a career. Her “hobbies” pertain to just cleaning and cooking. Her life is a wheel of mediocrity: wake up, go to work, browse the internet on her smartphone, sleep, repeat. Yet, she clings deeply to this conventional dream of marrying someone and starting a family. She reflects on her life. While sometimes Retsuko does complain about this dreadful wheel of life to her colleague, she also finds moments in it that she actually enjoys. She thinks that she doesn’t have an anchor: a metaphor she takes for married life. And so in the end, she tells Tadano that even though she respects his vision for society, she herself cannot live in it.

Despite the series’s sober ending, I think there is a glimpse of optimism that I really relate to. Like Retsuko, I also do not have any professional aspirations. This summer, I will be doing is a classic 9-5 salaryman job in a large Japanese company, so the series came at a very crucial time for me. It will be the first time I will experience the morning rush hour and office politics identical to that of Aggretsuko. Sometimes I do envy my classmates who will be doing things they are passionate about. But after watching the series, the anxiety and envy faded away a little bit. Like Retsuko, I think I am a great conformist, and people often look down on me for that. Many Tadanos have crossed my path and countless of them would tell me to search for something I am passionate about instead. But again, I have no life long mission. I don’t even have my own vision for this world. So a “passion” that I really want to pursue does not exist. To be honest, when I was a high school junior applying to colleges, I didn’t even know what I want to study. I picked urban studies because why not? It seems easier to get in than the college’s art and sciences school anyways. I started my school year knowing almost nothing about my own field. As I go through the year, I came to realize that I am not as “passionate” in my major as my classmates, and that has caused me a little bit of existential dread. As they talk about sidewalk lengths, Jane Jacobs and gondolas –enraptured in the movement of new urbanism – I would envy them. It must be nice to be so passionate about something.

So when I finished Aggretsuko, I felt somewhat reassured. The series ends inconclusively. Retsuko will not go off to live in a fairy tale-like life with a rich startup CEO. She will be returning to her abusive boss and a shitty work environment. And while she will have to go on with her worries and anxieties about marriage, the more important thing is that she lives on. Perhaps she will one day get the happiness she deserves. But through her laughing, her frequent visits to the karaoke, her road trips with her friends, I already think she found her happiness - not in the haughty ideals she hoped for, but in the mediocrity of her life. After all, her living passion-less isn’t so bad.

My Rating: 4/5