What You Got Under Your Skirt Will Make Them Pay For The Things That They Did
Heisei Pistol Show takes the tone of a confession, an embarrassing disclosure. Heart, the game's sex worker assassin faggot, is terminally sincere, caught between abiding love and fierce anger, the kind of parallel resentment and affection that reflects a history with abuse. People use him, but he treats the transaction as love, the fairytale sort: passionate, expansive, freely given. It is only in the morning, when the lover has left, when the money is in hand, does Heart realize that it was only an exchange. This may seem to come out of a delusional denial of reality or a fierce naïveity, and perhaps it is both those things, but a boundary-defying love drives Heart. He believes that anyone in the world *could* love him. His belief makes the fact that no one loves him all the more heartbreaking. It is that tender gap, between what is known and what is, between what is felt and what is real, that Heisei explores so vividly.
At the game's beginning, when Heart resolves to murder the three top assassins and then the prince, he states his only friends are his pistol and his lolita dress. In those two objects is the game's entire span. The pistol is obviously phallic, power and violence, but still personal. It’s the kind of weapon you use to kill other people, not animals or soldiers. Heart's arsenal of pistols wound particular targets, aim for weak spots. Not spread fire, but single shots, holding at the right place so death is assured. The sound of the gunshot accompanies text and dance as much as gunfire. The pistols become personal, expressive, and individual...even when they are used to kill. One of Heart's attacks, which deals a set amount of damage regardless of enemy defense, is called "talk." Heisei's formal structure draws a clear equivocation between speech, gunfire, and sex. The pistol is all three, all at once, all the time.
In a kind of contrast, the dress is frilly, feminine, ornate, and floral. It's a symbolic object in a similar way to the pistol, but also not so easily reduced. Color is its trademark: hues, spectrums, textures. Through the references Heisei makes to oiran (female courtesans/sex workers dating back to the Edo period) and Kabuki, the lolita dress becomes the outward expression of an inward role, the elaborate uniform of the feminized sex worker (and actor) [and assassin]. However, unlike the oiran's kimono, the lolita dress is associated with modern fashion subcultures. Lolita was, at least at inception, counter-cultural and expressive, emphasizing an individual sense of style. In other words, it was opposed on principle to the rigid forms of dress most traditional courtesans wore. But Heart describes the dress as "an armor-like friend that protects my body and soul." There is a sense of rigidity and protection that the dress offers. It gestures at a definitive, though expressive, feminine role: an outward expression of inward longing.
So, both pistol and dress take on forms of constriction as well as freedom. Heart may don them in a declaration of independence, but in practice they represent a connection with his own flaws and struggles, as well as the many other people who have been through similar experiences. Granny Pistol (more on her later) obtained the pistols at bargain store Daiso, i.e. they are commonplace, even cheap. Simultaneously Heart’s dreamscape is suffused with a collective history. Each of the game’s many sections are populated with geishas and kabuki performers, whose stories mirror his own.
Most directly, Heart's own history with sex work is equivocated with tales of oiran. These courtesans (frequently but not always sex workers) catered to the upper classes and bore names taken from literature (most often The Tale of Genji). Some of these names even had a gender bent quality; one of the most famous courtesan names was Yūgiri, after Genji's son. Ludzu's contribution emphasized how a sense of inheritance is woven into Heisei's form, but it's a key thematic element as well. Each of Heisei's characters wear multiple names. Heart's "real" name is Mizusaki Yuuichirou, though only his corpse and his childhood self are depicted directly. All other appearances are in Heart's lolita dress. Yumeno Kyūsaku, the writer quoted in one of Heisei's puzzle sequences, is the pen name of Sugiyama Naoki. All three of the top assassins mirror Mizusaki's friends and bear different names in the "real world." This playful changing of superficial form goes beyond names alone. Heisei flips between evocations of classical art forms like Kabuki, big band, idol shows, science-fiction, and post-apocalypse. Its landscapes leap between the past, the present, and the far future. The effect is that everything happens all at once. All selves, all mirrors, all times exist on the same fractured wavelength.
But all those multitudes of times, places, and feelings are all filtered through Heart, who is also the most direct and dramatic manifestation of these layers. The name Heart may not be from The Tale Of Genji, but it is a loaded word, full of its own history and context. A heart is, in colloquial parlance, the organ we use to love. The expression "nothing but heart" fits into the protagonist's sense of self. Heart is earnest and straightforward. He yearns for affection, wants eternity with a loved one, and is quick to fierce, righteous anger. But of course, Heart's ideal self is just one layer. Rather than an assassin, he is a sex worker. Though earnest and true to himself, his ideals often don't consider the needs of other people. When Heart speaks for himself, it is in dramatic bright tones, the brass of a jazz tune or the kaleidoscopic colors of a stage show. But when others speak for Heart, it is in the hushed tones of a gossip, or the stark black-and-white of an obituary. Mizusaki Yuuichirou did not have a final heroic battle against his friends, he was shot after stealing a police officer's pistol. Heisei's final image is of his smiling face, as he bleeds out and dies. The flip-flop of time and space, as well as the span between pistol and lolita dress, is the space between life and death itself.
Heisei's sense of meaning is networked, a product of the internet if there ever was one. But Heisei is also free of the boring things that usually conjures. There is instead the fog of loneliness, the sheer wall of distance, the fact that so many people have felt the way you have, but also that none of that actually prevents your individual aches and wounds. Heart wanders through images that reflect or make ironic his own history: a virgin Mary and child, dancing women, samurai killing each other—bloody and open to a further wound, dripping with love. Heart is motherless, without a real connection to women, yet so much like them.
The game's spirits personify that sense of interconnection. Through the game's environments, you'll find ghostly characters. As Heart attempts to find and speak with every spirit in the game's world, he often remarks that there is "no response." The player, however, sees the words spoken. It is at the game's end, when Heart confronts the prince he wishes to kill, that the spirits' dialogue echo through his mind. Heart takes each spirit's place and restates what they said. Every spirit's words spoken aloud, a network of pain shared across gender, time, and space.
But Heart's pain also has more direct analogs. Pistol Granny tells the story of a prostitute who kills herself after her lover refuses to raise her child and abandons their suicide pact. The lover marries a geisha and has a daughter, who then takes to wearing the prostitute's signature: a poppy-colored hair pin. When her father forbids her from donning such clothes, she throws a fit, speaking the words of the prostitute: "If only I wasn't born a woman. If only I never bore a man's child." She grows ever more delirious and dies in an echo of her mother.
The game never says this outright, but the story is clearly a parallel to Heart. His father beats him because of how he reminds him of his wife. He is a child bearing the burden of an absent mother. The equivocation of Heart with oiran and ghosts alike connect him to a network of marginalized women. But this story makes him into a woman. Heart expresses a disdain for his identity as a gay man—"yes, I happen to love 'men,' while also being a 'man.' This contradiction, this absurdity, can you even understand?"—perhaps indicative of a latent trans identification. However, Heart's desire to be a princess, his subject position as a sex worker, and his past as a victim of abuse make him feminine in a material way. Whether or not he is trans, he is a woman because people treat him like one.
So, like any woman, Heart is a danger to herself and others. Much of Heisei's violence is sublimated, past tense outside of the game's major battles and its final moments. Heart's childhood abuse is rendered comical with stock sound effects and background jazz. Even the purgatory made of Heart's prior victims shows bodies already dismembered, wounded, and dead, no further violence to them is done on screen. Images of violence against women, and particular sex workers, recur but usually in text. The massive exception to this comes towards the end of the game, when a montage of Hearts are shot and killed. It's a comedic mirror of the earlier montage of spirits. Instead of shared expressions of pain, there is just pain.
Heart treats his own death with a kind of cold inevitability. When Heart finds his own corpse in some corner of the world, he only remarks, "a body. I've seen this face before." When he discovers the corpses of his past victims, he opines, "It's straight to hell for me when I die. By experiencing torture, they get to be cleansed. This is a happy room. They must be happy." Even his desire to kill the prince is a wish, in part, to go to hell with him. Death is a portal to somewhere else; it is a place where you are not alone.
Which brings us to what exactly Heisei Pistol Show depicts. The game's final shot and its dream logic environment indicate a kind of "life flashing before your eyes." Perhaps this is a long vision of Heart's as he dies. Perhaps it is a kind of memory palace, built from Heart's feelings and those of his friends. In the model, the game's cuts to his friends' posthumous conversations represent a kind of redemption. In memory, his friends are kinder to Heart. But perhaps that is all Heart's wishful thinking, as he dies on the ground.
The result of all this, Heisei's dedication to gender-swapping and nameplay, its cavalcade of violences, its impossible spaces, is an emphasis on the fact of distance. We cannot know who Heart was. For that matter, creator Parun's life ended before it got full expression. We cannot know who he was. But the fact of that difference can bridge as much as it can sever. One spirit says, "Those without someone to pledge their hearts to, this unliving, undying hell awaits. I wonder if a man like you could ever understand." At first they come off as a rebuke, but then, Heart speaks the same words in the montage. What was spoken once in hatred, can be spoken in love.
Heart cannot understand this truth, though he is the subject of it. He seeks death, both for himself and others, and so cannot quite grasp what the unbridgeable gaps of life might grant. What you got under your skirt will make them pay. Who pays? And for what? In Heisei, all of Heart's petty vengeances turn back on him. Perhaps this is only because it is all in Heart's mind, but Heisei Pistol Show offers little comfort of "others" who can be safely dehumanized and disregarded, though it is in one moment racist and callous. Heart is one person, one body, and in him is the struggle of human life itself. His childish fantasy of being a princess is a longing for a life of simple dignity and power, one only granted him in death. But Heart's longing for that life, his fight for it, was enough to make him good, despite everything. We have little room to judge him and thus little room to judge anyone else. A good life will be in a different world. For now, we live how we can and we reach for each other across that span.
