For a novel narrating a series of pivotal events in a teenage girl’s life, the absence of references to its protagonist’s social and family circle makes White Reminiscences seem like an anomaly. Among other things Ōnogi narrates in often overindulgent detail, we’re told that Misa attended Toyo Eiwa Elementary School and the first two years of Toyo Eiwa Junior High School. In these eight years (ten, if we also count the two years of kindergarten – if she attended one, which is very likely), she’s bound to have made friends from school and her neighborhood, with some being her best friends.

Yet, we don’t see that in White Reminiscences. Ōnogi names no friends – from school or neighborhood – for Misa. The only “peer” he gives her is Riber, but is he truly her peer? He’s five years her senior and much of the novel covers her largely epistolary, long-distance romance with him that is never consummated. It’s shocking that the novel implies that Riber, a boy she rarely sees in the flesh, is her sole human connection, besides her parents and a few of her father’s colleagues.

When Riber dies, Misa has no one, because even her friendships in the academy seem to be awkward, to say the least: in the letter she sent Riber to thank him for his gift for her fifteenth birthday, she described herself as “[t]he little Misa Hayase who’s always dragging everyone else down.” It’s implausible that she chose this description for herself; instead, it’s something that can only be attributed to the way her colleagues in the academy speak of her. Later on, after Sakiko’s death, Misa resorts to extreme methods of avoiding relying on anyone in the academy.

Likewise, Ōnogi names no extended family whatsoever – no cousins, uncles, aunts, or grandparents. Even Sakiko’s funeral, which the paterfamilias Takashi skips under the pretext of “finish[ing] all the loose ends from the end of the battle,” is attended only by a few people, all “closely connected” to her. These people leave Misa alone at the end – alone with her loneliness and a white box of ashes.

But who are these people? Obviously, some must be Sakiko’s next of kin. Japanese pragmatism and Misa’s adultification notwithstanding, some legal formalities could only be handled by an adult. Therefore, it makes sense to infer that Sakiko’s closest relatives – in all likelihood, parents and siblings – attended the funeral. Ōnogi, however, remains silent on this, and doesn’t show Misa being comforted, during or after the funeral, by a grandparent, a cousin, an aunt, an uncle, a friend. Instead, as I pointed out previously, she’s left alone immediately after the ceremony ends. As a matter of fact, none of these people are shown to visit Sakiko or take turns caring for her while Misa’s in training.

This raises serious questions about the relationship Takashi allowed his family to have with Sakiko’s family. The sparse narration of the funeral and the mental image of Misa alone and devastated after it all ended makes me wonder why she has no one on her mother’s side of the family by her side. Regardless of Ōnogi’s coercive writing, what I see makes it hard for me to not read Sakiko’s ties to her parents, siblings, cousins, and so on as anything more than vestigial; similarly, the novel leads me to infer she has few meaningful connections to the world around her, and that her entire existence is tied inextricably to her husband’s identity and his needs.

I’m not sure if this lack of evidence of a social and familial circle is a result of neglect or deliberate choice. Did Ōnogi neglect to write social and familial circles for Misa and Sakiko? Did he deliberately write them as being so isolated? It would be plausible to assume either – after all, he exhibits palpable neglect and haste in the novel’s last few pages, wasting precious narrative potential.

If this narrative is deliberate, why does he go to such extreme lengths to gaslight the reader on how to perceive what’s right in front of their eyes, instead of using the narration as an indictment of Takashi’s ways? If it’s due to neglect, it’s an authorial failure almost as bad as the novel’s ending, where Misa’s demobilization, its impact on her emotional and mental state, and her subsequent re-enlistment are told most telegraphically. From a narrative standpoint, the story has indeed ample room for social texture, and this room – through neglect or choice – was left unused.

However interesting the debate of choice versus neglect may be from the viewpoint of a literary critic, it doesn’t change the image conjured on the page – the image of a family with a father consistently absent physically and emotionally, a mother so subordinated to her husband’s identity that her own connections had withered to vestigial, and a child who, when crisis struck, had nothing and no one. A child’s network of relatives and friends doesn’t build itself; it’s built and maintained by the parents, and a healthy childhood requires more than one such relationship. Developmental literature has established that social support buffers the individual against the impact of stressful life events, and that its absence leaves an individual most exposed precisely when those events strike (Cohen and Wills 1985).

Teenage Misa is portrayed as having no such buffer, and this isn’t due to her temperament and character – if anything, the scenes prior to 2005 portray her as a cheerful, lively, playful, sociable, and spontaneous girl, while her later portrayal in SDFM is that of a deeply caring, responsible, and loyal young woman. A person like that would be expected to have a circle of good friends and a healthy relationship with close relatives, but Misa doesn’t have that.

Through a Watsonian perspective, the most likely cause for this lack of a social buffer is her family: she grew up in a household built entirely around her father’s career and “legacy”. Takashi, besides being consistently absent every time Misa needs him most, never bothered to construct a social world for his daughter besides an extremely small circle of people around him, and all of them from his professional circle. Her mother, existing in his shadow, is in no position to step up to the plate and do it instead of him.

As a result, when the two worst losses of her adolescence come, she has no one but herself and, as we’ll see later in this series, she learns to actively avoid relying on others. This lesson becomes part of her identity from that moment forward, and she carries it with her well into SDFM, on the bridge of the Macross. The circumstances of Misa’s backstory provide ample room for social texture. Ōnogi left this room empty – whether by authorial failure or authorial choice is ultimately neither here nor there. What matters is that Misa is portrayed as having no support network. Since the narrative positions Takashi as the undisputed leader of the Hayase household and its social driver, this is another failure of his that the novel reveals, and none of Ōnogi’s attempts to explain it away can absolve him.

Bibliography

1. Cohen, S. and Wills, T.A. (1985). Stress, social support, and the buffering hypothesis. Psychological Bulletin, 98(2), pp. 310–357.
2. Ōnogi, H. (1984). Hayase Misa: Shiroi Tsuioku [早瀬未沙 白い追憶; Misa Hayase: White Reminiscences]. Animage Bunko. Tokyo: Tokuma Shoten. (In Japanese.)