Inscrutable Desires, or, The Heart Wants What It Wants

Hey, player. Sometimes, I struggle to understand which world is real.What is a lie? What is the now? Where are the boundaries? Is this a dream? Is this real? Is this my world? What would be best? Maybe it doesn’t matter, right, player?

While playing Heisei Pistol Show, I was briefly reminded of another, more popular RPG Maker game: Omori. On the surface, both games feature protagonists who retreat into childlike fantasy worlds that shield them from their traumatic realities. In Omori’s “good ending,” the story concludes with its protagonist confronting the truth of what happened in his life, and shedding his fantasy world like a safety blanket. By facing the phantom of his own guilt, he once again enters back into a shared “reality” with everyone else. 

Here, Heisei Pistol Show takes a markedly more nuanced approach: its text does not demarcate between “fantasy” and “reality,” nor does it offer such a simplistic idea of “healing” from trauma.

It’s a way of fighting and laughing off one’s life, not a simple method of escapism. It’s not a {desired} world, but {reality itself}.

In the end, all humans live in a subjective world, so other people's happiness cannot be measured using relative criteria.

Heart’s understanding of himself and his world is often shown to be in direct contrast with those of his friends and neighbors. One of the main points of dissonance is Heart’s attitude toward his father: While Heart’s friends see his father as abusive, he insists that his father was nothing but loving. Rather than framing Heart as a delusional person who must grow up and face the objective truth, the narration affirms that each person has their own subjective idea of the truth. Heart’s reality, which may seem skewed or distorted by others’ standards, is still “reality itself,” and should be treated as such. 

While this feels like a more nuanced perspective on mental health, it has its own uncomfortable implications. Late in the game, Heart finds a diary entry written by Mizusaki Tsutomu, in which Tsutomu writes about physically abusing his son, Yuuichirou. Heart remarks, “what a horrible parent. nothing like my dad”—the irony being that Heart is Yuuichirou. While Heart can recognize the reprehensibility of the diary writer’s actions, he is unable to recognize that writer as his own father. He is not merely choosing to gloss over the negative aspects of his father, but wholly denies or represses them. 

Like the protagonist of Tideland, one of Heisei’’s named influences, Heart is a child thrust into scary and painful circumstances beyond his control or understanding, and has to conjure a sense of contentment and safety out of a bleak situation. Thus, he cultivates an “endlessly positive attitude” toward life, repressing its painful aspects. This narrative helps Heart survive his difficult childhood, but also leaves him unable or unwilling to recognize abuse as abuse and makes it difficult to find the safe, loving relationships he yearns for. If the game believed in a straightforward notion of “healing,” then such healing might involve Heart’s version of reality being somehow challenged or upturned. 

However, the game doesn’t hold out much hope for such a thing to occur. In the final lines of the game, Heart admits that he is (and perhaps already was) aware of the fact that he was abused, but rather than this revelation leading anywhere, Heart insists that he simply doesn’t “care”:

I don’t care that I was abused, I don’t care I sold my body and was betrayed, I don’t care I lived a “life of immorality!” That was {my happiness} at that time! I will never, NEVER, NEVER give up on living happily!!

The bleakness of Heisei Pistol Show is that it can’t or doesn’t want to imagine a way out. While there are characters that one can imagine could have altered the course of Heart’s life—his relatives, his neighbors and his friends—the game seems mostly uninterested in exploring this as a real possibility. For reasons not explicitly stated, but inferred from his desire for companionship and his inability to hold down a “regular” job, Heart becomes a rentboy. On the job, he contracts herpes encephalitis, a brain disease which, according to the police narrative, agitated him to the point of killing his ex-lover. Heart is then shot in an ensuing faceoff with police. The game makes it quite easy to draw a straight line from Heart’s experiences of abuse and grief to his precarious situation as a sex worker to his violent death. 

There’s no real opportunity for Heart to find “healing” in all of this, and I’m tempted to say that the game doesn’t believe in such a thing. What it does believe in is Heart choosing not to roll over and die, but rather, to chase his desires, no matter how pathetic or misguided they may appear to others. The happiness that Heart eventually chases is revenge. The father he trusted to take care of him abused him; his sanctimonious relatives abandoned him; and his clients disposed of him. Heart takes up the gun as an act of rebellion against a patriarchal system that he relied upon for safety, acceptance and love, and which denied him all. 

—

Is Heart trans? It's not really a question with a yes-or-no answer. A moment that sticks out to me is when Heart is referred to by a neighbor with different pronouns, within the same sentence:

He became a different person after leaving the hospital. From then on, he kept his distance from others. And, for a while, he sold her body too. Didn’t even seem to mind it all that much.

While this could be chalked up to a typo or quirk of translation, the question of Heart’s gender identity is one that the game constantly plays with. Another of the listed influences on Heisei Pistol Show is a poem by Hagiwara Sakutaro, whose English translation by Hiroaki Sato is titled “The One Who’s in Love with Love.” The narrator of this poem is a man who laments that he is a man—that his chest bears no “breasts like rubber balls” and his skin lacks the “fragrance of fine-textured powder.” In the latter half of the poem, the narrator transforms himself, rouging his lips, slipping on gloves and “something like a corset.”

The narrator of this poem makes clear that his desire is not simply to be attractive or desired, but to embody a femininity he feels himself lacking. There are obvious parallels between this narrator and Heart, who from a young age fantasizes about becoming a princess and finding a prince to love. It’s true that the princess is a cipher for other things Heart craves: beauty, security, being adored and protected. But these things are inseparable from a certain expression of femininity. 

The image that Heart latches on to is not just that of a princess but an idol. He is drawn to the idol, her performance of yearning, her song that brings cheer to its audience. Heart quickly takes on this role of a singer as a way of making his father happy. Singing is a way for Heart to step in as a kind of surrogate for his mother, who also loved to sing. At the same time, he becomes a surrogate for his mother in another way: as a scapegoat for his father’s anger. When his father beats him, he’s also lashing out in response to his wife’s betrayal. 

But, yes, I happen to love “men,” while also being a “man.” This contradiction, this absurdity, can you even understand. 

Heart “enjoys” the attention and adoration of men, but unlike the fairytale princess, he is also at the mercy of men’s violence and capacity for betrayal. If Heart doesn’t go so far as to identify as a woman (and the use of quotation marks in the above is worth noting), Heart sees himself in relation to feminine archetypes—the princess, the sex worker, the woman scorned. These figures provide models for how Heart sees himself, “woman-like” in his suffering as well as his longing. 

In the first half of the Sakutaro poem, the narrator expresses feeling pathetic and unattractive. After putting on rouge, gloves, “something like nape-powder” and “something like a corset,” the transformed narrator kisses the trunk of a birch tree. We’re left with this ambiguous final image, a performance of desire’s consummation that is at once ridiculous and poignant. Whether this act brings him joy or plunges him further into despair, the poem doesn’t say. But there’s beauty in the narrator choosing to act out his desire, no matter if the performance seems incomplete or merely resemblance. 

The final image of Heisei Pistol Show, Heart’s smiling face, is much less ambiguous. We have not only a right but an imperative to follow our desires. Even if it might be impossible for others to understand—even if it flies in the face of their reality—we have to keep chasing our happiness. 

Postscript

When someone says of a game from ten, twenty or even thirty years ago that it still feels “fresh,” “contemporary,” it sounds more like an indictment of a culture that overwhelmingly sticks to the same conventions and recirculates the same images and values. Rather than see Heisei Pistol Show as a wholly original work by a once-in-a-generation genius, we should pay attention to how much its aesthetic sensibilities draw openly from theater, poetry, and films like Memories of Matsuko and Pistol Opera. This is not to downplay the creativity of Heisei or the labor that went into creating it, but to recognize how powerful aesthetic experiences are generated through copious borrowing, remixing, and reinterpreting of existing work from across different mediums, especially works that have been overlooked in favor of the most canonical. 

Another part of the Heisei’s “freshness” is simply its rawness. It’s honest, it’s personal, it’s strange, and it takes risks with its content and presentation. Not all of these risks pay off: there are also elements I find frustrating or unsatisfying. There’s a particular moment that strains the limits of “racial insensitivity” that’s as shocking as it is bizarre and difficult to know what, if anything, to do with. Nonetheless, one cannot say of this game that it’s either generic or forgettable. Its vivid, in-your-face visuals; its eclectic mix of influences; and its frank portrayal of queerness, trauma and mental illness culminate in a game not quite like anything that came before it—nor anything that’s come since. 

I’ll never forget your song, man.