[Reading Column] Why can't I love my daughter! Getting hooked on a pioneer of 'toxic parent' dramas, and being moved by what lies beyond the toxic parent depicted in the original work - 'Iguana Girl' by Moto Hagio
When I'm preparing materials or doing other tasks, it feels lonely without sound, so I play random anime or dramas on Amazon Prime. Since it's just for background noise, I often choose works I didn't intend to watch rather than ones I specifically wanted to see.
So, I just let it play automatically based on recommendations, and the other day, 'Iguana Girl,' which aired in 1996 starring Miho Kanno, started playing.
I knew the title and the synopsis. It's a story about a mother who sees her daughter as an iguana. It has often been introduced in psychology books and the like as a work that depicts the difficulties of parent-child communication.
However, born in 1993, I didn't watch it in real-time, and I had never encountered a rerun. While I was curious, I thought it was a work I had no connection to.
To think I would be able to see it in this lifetime. As I watched the screen with genuine joy, it turned out to be incredibly interesting! I've become completely hooked.
I'm up to episode 8 now. From a modern perspective, the developments are absurd, so I often want to shout, 'That's ridiculous!'
Even so, the iguana girl played by Miho Kanno is honest, kind, and a hard worker, so I find myself wanting to cheer for her so much. No matter what unreasonable things she faces, she never blames others. I can't stop watching until I see this girl find happiness.
However, while enjoying the drama like that, I couldn't help but think that Moto Hagio's original work must be completely different in content.
In particular, I felt uncomfortable with the iguana girl's line, 'I want to change!', which is repeated throughout the drama. She says that because she was bullied by her mother, lost her confidence, and became a timid person, she hates who she is and wants to be reborn as a cheerful woman. If she does that, the person she admires will like her, she believes.
Somehow, I felt it didn't fit Moto Hagio's worldview. Although I have only read major works like 'The Poe Clan' and 'They Were Eleven!', I felt that Hagio would depict the process of coming to accept oneself as an iguana.
So, to confirm that, I bought the original work.
As I expected, haha.
The psychological depiction of a mother wanting to reject a daughter who resembles her in order to hide her own flaws was the same. However, how the daughter accepts such unreasonableness was quite different. You could even say it was the exact opposite.
That said, the original is a short story of only 50 pages, so it's quite difficult to turn it into an 11-episode series. I understand the circumstances of having to change the story, increase the cast, and add a lot of original elements. In that process, the setting of a protagonist who overcomes difficulties and grows as a human being likely became necessary.
When that happens, the inability of the mother and daughter to understand each other becomes an obstacle to be overcome. This is where the discrepancy with the original work arises. After all, Moto Hagio is trying to convey that even between parents and children (or family), there are things that cannot be understood, and that doesn't mean one is unhappy.
The phenomenon of the daughter appearing as an iguana is not a curable illness. She truly looks like one. Thinking about it that way, the daughter can also understand the reason why her mother treats her harshly. It couldn't be helped, she thinks.
Moto Hagio drew 'Iguana Girl' in 1992, when she was 43 years old. It was an ambitious work in which she re-examined her own experience of not getting along with her mother and seriously challenged herself to find a way to affirm her mother.
In a special lecture held at Joshibi University of Art and Design in 2017, Moto Hagio spoke about her relationship with her parents.
If you ask what was difficult about becoming a manga artist, it wasn't the battles with editors, nor was it the lack of ideas; it was that the relationship with my parents was extremely difficult. My parents were both born in the Taisho era and grew up without reading manga at all. Therefore, when I grew up reading manga and said I wanted to become a manga artist, they were dead set against it. Why would you do such a trivial thing? They might have accepted it if I were an illustrator for fairy tales, but they thought manga was something you graduate from once you can read hiragana. That's how big the gap in awareness was. But I wanted to do it no matter what, so I submitted my work, debuted, and became a manga artist. Once I started getting paid for my manuscripts, my mother acknowledged me a little, but her awareness that I was doing something pointless anyway didn't change. For 10 years, she kept asking me endlessly, 'When are you going to quit? Why are you still drawing? Why don't you listen to your parents?'
Even so, as is well known, Moto Hagio continued to draw manga energetically. In 1970, she moved to Tokyo. Works like "The Poe Clan" and "The Heart of Thomas" became hits, and she achieved financial success.
Around that time, her father, who had retired, suggested they start a company.
My father, who had just retired, said he would manage my bankbook, so he suggested we turn it into a company. I found calculating money to be a hassle, so I thought if my father would do it, I would rely on him. So, we created a company called Moto Production, and my father became the president. My father, along with my mother, had been against me drawing manga, so I was grateful that he would cooperate in this way. But that was when the trouble started.
Her father would show up at the workplace constantly. When she kicked him out for being a nuisance, her mother would call in a rage. He would complain that the salaries paid to assistants were too high. He insisted that since they were like apprentices, they should be paying her instead. He would take on jobs to draw promotional illustrations on his own. When she refused, saying she was too busy, he would say, "Well, I'll draw it for you under your name."
Things like that piled up, and one day we had a huge fight. My parents finally got angry and said, "The reason you ignore your parents and don't listen to us is because you're working. Quit your job." I was furious. I had thought they would support me a little, and I had even tried to be kind by making my father the president, but in the end, they just told me to quit, and we had a complete falling out. That was around 1979.
From then on, intending to cut ties, she decided to stop communicating with her parents, even while still sending mid-year and New Year's greetings.
However, in 1982, while traveling in Russia, Moto Hagio was involved in a traffic accident, and through a mysterious experience, she began to think about her parents.
Regarding this accident, something mysterious happened. I was in the accident around 11:30 AM on December 30th. At around 11:30 AM on that same December 30th—since it was Japan time, there was actually a time lag—my mother fell off her bicycle and bruised her head. She said her head hurt and she spent the end of the year and New Year's in bed. I heard a little later that I had been in an accident and hit my head, and when I returned to Japan, my parents came to pick me up at Haneda or Narita, saying, "We're glad you're safe." At that time, my mother told me about falling off her bicycle. She said, "You know, you were saved thanks to your mother. Because I hit my head, your injuries were minor." When she said that, I couldn't help but think that might be true. Perhaps there is something like synchronicity. After this, in my relationship with my parents, it felt like, "Let's just put the manga issue aside for now." They knew I would get angry if we talked about manga, so my parents tried their best not to bring it up, and they stopped telling me to quit. We put that topic in a box, put a lid on it, and started communicating in areas that wouldn't cause friction.
Around the same time, Moto Hagio was writing a work called "Mesh," which had the theme of patricide. She had been studying psychology due to her discord with her parents and was re-examining her relationship with them based on the story of Oedipus Rex.
Perhaps at that time, she viewed her parents as objects to be overcome. Through the mysterious experience of the traffic accident, she became able to reconstruct her relationship with her parents from a perspective different from a Freudian interpretation, realizing that it is possible to feel affection even if you cannot understand each other.
I had been reading psychology books the whole time, thinking I wanted my parents to somehow acknowledge my drawing manga, but I didn't know how to explain it so they would understand. In the end, I read a fortune-telling book, and it said, "You are incompatible." I thought if we were incompatible, there was nothing I could do. And I thought that the reason we couldn't communicate no matter how much we talked was perhaps because we were speaking different languages. Maybe I am not human. I thought that because I am not human, no matter how much I talk, it won't get through. If I am not human, then what on earth am I? I suddenly thought, "Maybe I'm an iguana," and the story "Iguana Girl" was born. This is a story about a girl who thinks she is an iguana.
This shows the biggest element missing from the drama version. Moto Hagio drew "Iguana Girl" as "a story about a girl who thinks she is an iguana."
Of course, the drama also revolves around the daughter, but because it is set during her high school years, the mother's presence is always there. As a result, it falls into a structure where the mother's madness—seeing her daughter as an iguana—is transmitted.
While that creates thrills and leads to the interest of the work as a visual piece, which is a point to be praised, unfortunately, the reality of the parent-child relationship presented by "Iguana Girl" is lost.
This is because the fact that the daughter looks like an iguana is not madness at all, but something that cannot be helped. Therefore, the conclusion should not be that the daughter forgives her, but that she comes to understand her.
Nowadays, the term "toxic parent" has become established, and it is widely known that parents can dominate their children's lives and have a negative impact. The drama version of "Iguana Girl" was likely innovative in that it depicted the reality of toxic parents as early as the 90s.
However, when you criticize a parent in the form of a 'toxic parent,' the child is forced to choose between forgiving or not forgiving the parent who tries to control them. Because of this, the endings of many toxic parent-themed works tend to leave a bad taste in the mouth.
Yet, Moto Hagio's 'Iguana Girl' manages to reach beyond the toxic parent, achieving a refreshing, happy ending. I think this is something truly extraordinary.
In 2017, a book titled 'Regretting Motherhood' was published in Germany and became a global sensation. When it was translated into Japanese, it caused quite a stir.
What this book revealed was that, separate from the love for one's child, the regret of being a mother can exist independently. To put it simply, it means that the position of being a mother is painful.
Human beings are not that simple. You don't transform into a 'mother' creature the moment you give birth, and the natural desire to live your own life doesn't just disappear.
Conventionally, it was considered natural for parents to take a backseat once a child is born. It was thought normal to wish for the child's growth and to rejoice in their success as if it were one's own.
But if you consider it a relationship between two human beings, it's no wonder that a parent might feel jealous of their child. After all, if the child ends up living a more wonderful life than your own, you might feel empty, thinking, 'What am I doing with my life, when I am so similar to this child?'
We don't feel jealous of amazing people who are too far removed from us. If you looked at Shohei Ohtani and thought, 'I'm better than that guy!', your perception would be significantly distorted.
We only feel jealousy when there is a possibility that we could be in that position ourselves. We feel uneasy about the success of a former classmate from middle or high school, or frustrated by the happiness of an ex-lover; it's precisely because they are close to us that it becomes frustrating.
In that sense, there is no existence as close as a parent and child, so it is only natural to see another version of your own life in them.
The brilliance of Moto Hagio's original work, 'Iguana Girl,' lies in the fact that it faces this helplessness head-on and affirms it as something that cannot be helped.
I don't know of any other work that shows us what lies beyond the toxic parent in this way. It was a masterpiece that still shines with freshness today.
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