Hyde and Genkei’s Lie
In the novel The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1), one of the most famous examples of human duality in the Western canon appears: Dr. Jekyll, by ingesting a certain drug, transforms into all of his repressed desires and goes about town in the guise of Mr. Hyde, who is freed from all societal constraints and so can commit violence without repercussion (2). While Western conceptions of duality are most likely rooted in the Christian canon with the concept of original sin as well as other popular images such as the devil and angel on each shoulder, and while the Japanese ideas about repression and the public and private selves are most likely to be culturally different, the novel provides a basis off of which we can compare the Bishop Genkei in Mononoke by examining what is and is not considered monstrous in both instances (3).
While both the Bishop Genkei and Dr. Jekyll seek to repress a part of themselves, both the subject of repression and what is considered the “true” self are different. On the surface level, this is due to the difference in circumstances — the Bishop Genkei has a specific trauma and past that he is running from, while Mr. Hyde manifests from an evil within all human beings (4) — Dr. Jekyll just has the misfortune of managing to separate out that part of himself. Genkei’s repression, unlike Jekyll’s, is directly built on his lies. While Hyde represents freedom for Jekyll, a way for him to break out of societal constraints, Genkei’s pious persona, one who seems, on the outside, to be the perfect mentor for Sogen and who is looked up to by his acolytes, is his “Hyde.” Unlike Jekyll’s Hyde and repression however, Genkei’s “Hyde” shackles him to society’s perception of him as a religious man. Still, like the original Hyde, Genkei finds this persona liberating because it allows him to ignore and push down his fears about Oyo and himself. It allowed him to ignore the ugly parts of himself.
Sogen realizes that his master is a corrupted soul.
And there is the fundamental difference between Genkei and Jekyll. Jekyll finds himself inhabiting the body of Hyde through his own arrogance and curiosity — he was attempting to undo the duality of human nature to make a purely good man. Instead he ends up staying the same faulted human in Jekyll, but adding a purely evil component to his life and habits, the incorrigible Mr. Hyde. However, Genkei is constantly running from his own Truth. Jekyll confronts the possibility of the evil in mankind; Genkei concocts a false version of events where his only fault was cowardice and a defiance of societal standards through his illicit love.
Genkei, through his pious, religious persona, attempts to shift the blame off of himself and onto societal intolerance and prejudice. He externalizes the wrongdoing — it is the village that recalls him and expects him to sacrifice himself into the sea. He was willing to go and die because his love was not accepted by either Oyo or society. This hypocrisy is manifested in his insistence that his sister Oyo must be the one that carries resentment, that she must be the reason behind the Dragon’s Triangle, the Sea of Ayakashi.
Genkei sobs after reading a letter implying that he needed to become the sacrifice for the town.
If the monstrous in Jekyll and Hyde is the breaking of societal constraint through the medium of Hyde’s violence, then it is the opposite in Mononoke. Genkei almost glorifies the shattering of societal expectations and decorum — it is only within his lie, where is he is in love with his own sister, where their tragic relationship is doomed to fail, that the viewer and Kayo (who remains as a stand in for the viewer) feels pity and sympathizes with Genkei’s impossible situation.
If the moral allegory in Jekyll and Hyde is to abide by societal standards and by conventional right and wrong, to not be too curious, then the message that Genkei’s story contains is the opposite. Society’s standards become intolerable in this arc of Mononoke. It is society’s backwards view that allows the sacrifice of one of the villagers, Genkei, to appease the sea; incest is conceived of as less wrong than the breaking of that love by death.
The monstrous, in this case, is Genkei himself: his false self-righteousness, his despicable thoughts when Oyo offers to take his place and he loses the only love he had ever received. Unlike Hyde, who is an example of outstanding and incomprehensible evil and repugnance, symbolized through his unbearable appearance, Genkei’s monstrousness is all too human. While this monstrousness is also represented through Genkei’s own appearance, it seems natural, within the realms of the art style. Genkei is simply ugly, unattractive, rather than unbearable to look upon. While Hyde is ostensibly younger and smaller than Jekyll, this symbolizing Jekyll’s own desire to be younger, to be freer, Genkei’s persona, his lie, is older, venerated and respected. Genkei conforms to society — that is his freedom.
Ultimately it is selfishness that is at the core of both Mr. Hyde and Genkei’s lie.
It is selfishness that twists Oyo’s sacrifice and love for her brother (however “morally abhorrent”) into resentment. There is a logical incongruity in the idea that Oyo, who is for all intents and purposes extremely “pure” despite her incestuous tendencies, would carry resentment strong enough to curse a huge portion of sea. There is a logical incongruity in the idea that Oyo, who loves her brother enough to literally bury herself alive in the ocean, would carry resentment towards him strong enough to not have dissipated after fifty years. It is Genkei’s selfishness that twists his sister’s story and posits himself as the sympathetic character, the one who had to live with Oyo’s death. Just like Hyde is an indulgence of Jekyll’s, Genkei creates this elaborate alternate story in order assuage his guilt and fear — fear not of Oyo’s resentment, but of Oyo realizing, after death, that he had not had pure intentions, that at the time he was not grateful for her sacrifice, that at the time he only had thoughts about becoming a powerful and rich man, and thought her stupid for offering herself up.
In the words of Kayo then, “Poor Oyo!”
The Balance Scale and Revealing the Truth
However, lies do not stay hidden for long, especially in the Mononoke world.
In a twist of wording, the Sea Bishop — Umibozu — is not one of the ayakashi in those dangerous waters, but the literal Bishop on board the ship. We see this in the final episode of the arc in the Medicine Seller’s words: “The truth is you!”
The Medicine Seller at last discovers who the mononoke he needs to exorcise is.
We gain the first inkling that something may be wrong with the balance scale, and all throughout the arc, the scales show us the direction of the mononoke in ways that can only be fully realized after we, the viewer, know that Genkei was the mononoke. When the form of the mononoke is revealed the balance scale is in Genkei’s own hands, splitting his frightened face in two.
The balance scales that the Medicine Seller uses are, by his own admission, indicators of where the mononoke is. In the Zashikiwarashi arc, we can see how the balance scales indicate where and how many of the zashikiwarashi (or the daruma dolls that represent them) are going to appear. However, in this arc, the balance scales serve a slightly different purpose. The Medicine Seller says that not only will he measure the distance to the mononoke, he will try to reel out the truth through the balance scale.
In doing so he triggers the alternate, blue dimension where the characters are all arranged in a circle, listening to Bishop Genkei speak. In this formation, the balance scales are arranged in a circle surrounding them. They surround the story, and while Genkei is telling his lie they don’t react until the Medicine Seller tells Genkei the mononoke is not his sister.
Footnotes:
(1) Stevenson, Robert Louis. Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.
(2) Repercussion does come to him in its own way, but it is judgement by Jekyll and society’s hunt for him that leads to his downfall. There are no repercussions to Jekyll, who in a way is Mr. Hyde.
(3) Nakamura, Kenji, dir. “Mononoke: The Sea Bishop Part 1”, “Part 2”, and “Finale” In Mononoke. Fuji TV. July 26 – August 9, 2007.(4) “All human beings, as we meet them, are commingled out of good and evil: and Edward Hyde, alone, in the ranks of mankind, was pure evil.”
The Mononoke Project 
Leave a comment