Before Dawn and the End of the World & Hope
Sin has marked the world as absurd and hopeless. With sin as master, the world has no hope. [Leviticus 26:14-39; Jeremiah 2:14-29; Romans 1:18-32] No hope apart from Christ, sovereign over all creation and who will renew all of His children and disciples, alongside the world we all reside in. [Lamentations 3, Titus 3:1-8] Finding hope is not just difficult but impossible without Christ, because without Christ, absurdity wins. The oneshots in Before Dawn and the End of the World show many people looking for hope in a dark and absurd world, and though there are rare moments of mercy and reprieve for some, quite a lot of them never find the hope that they need, and even the ones who do find hope are still left without because they are apart from Christ.
A lot of people do not find hope because they simply do not look for it. They want it, certainly, for who wants to be without hope? Who wants to bother looking for that hope, though? The main character of the one-shot "17," a seventeen year old boy, certainly despairs about his life, but does very little to tend to his problems. The boy, Tamura, says "The most pressing concern I have right now is how I can download porn without getting my computer infected."[1] Right after this comment, our protagonist robs a convenience store – the cashier left the cash register completely unattended, and Tamura takes a few high bills from it. For this, he is granted one panel, one moment of relief, of excitement, before things return to the way they were just beforehand. He thinks about buying a sampling machine, but the money he stole isn't quite enough to pay for the one he wants. He tries to offer the money to a girl for sex, but she turns him down. He ends up donating the money at the convenience store he stole it from and borrows money from his parents to buy the sampler for people he hangs out with at school. You can see that the boy aimlessly walks around in circles. Sure, he does things and looks for change, but never anything meaningful nor impactful and always when it is made extremely easy and convenient to do so. He does not pursue the paths that are given to him in the proper way – he has friends he could connect with through music, but he won't let it take an interest for him. He is able to talk to girls, but instead of seeking friendship, he only wants sex. He keeps his life in the stagnant state it has been in. He has no hope for the future. In "Alfalfa," school children live their lives in the wake of a freeway to Tokyo that has come straight through their small town. The freeway has directly impacted these characters – the main character's, Sugisaki's, family had to sell their land to the government because of it, yet the new money, change in living space, seems to make no difference at all. The protagonist dreams of taking the freeway to a better life, but their lives continue still as though nothing has changed – the main character still hangs out with his friend, Honda; Honda still wants to hook up with a girl, a classmate, Ozawa; Ozawa sexually harasses our Sugisaki; Sugisaki and Honda play video games to see who asks the girl out. Honda wins; Ozawa turns him down. Life continues without clear direction. Sugisaki says "I think happiness is having something to believe in,"[2] but even knowing this, our protagonist has nothing he believes in and lets life slip by him. When the girl leaves, he says she "followed the freeway to freedom," and Honda says they should go to Shibuya (a district in Tokyo) to "hit on girls."[3] As uncertain of an avenue of hope that it is, our protagonist refuses to acknowledge it even though it is right in front of him. Ozawa believed in betterment, in progress, and took the "freeway to freedom," despite her own issues, but Sugisaki stays in his own loop.
In some small moments, some of the characters are spared and find grace. In the second story in the collection, "Before Dawn," we’re given an eclectic view of Tokyo before one day's dawn. A man is trying but failing to reconcile his friend and his friend's girlfriend, some people are trying to summon an alien spaceship, an alien spaceship abducts two people having sex in public, a birthing mother and the doctors helping her disappear without a trace. A man hallucinates and jumps off of a bridge chasing the hallucination, and thinks to himself, "Hey, God, Why. . . Why did you create this world? 'Just because.'"[4] Hopelessness abounds; to no surprise, among it all, a girl plans to livestream her suicide. A publishing editor sends the video to an author he edits for, and by the end of the night the author has managed to talk the girl down from killing herself. Once dawn finally breaks, the girl happens across the man having trouble mediating his friend's relationship, and for the moment they share the solace of having made it to daybreak, though uncertain of the future that lies ahead. For the moment, the pair has been spared, a brief light in the darkness of everything, everyone, else around them. Similarly, in "Sunday, 6:30 PM," a father of two whose wife died some years before walks out on his remaining family. The economic bubble in Japan has finally burst, and as an overseas employee, he lost his job after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center. He needs some kind of reprieve, so he walks out of his house one morning and heads for a place he has fond memories of, a hotel in the mountains. On his way, he finds a high school girl who was abandoned by some guys in those mountains after deciding against filming pornography with them, a thread from earlier in this particular story. They both end up going to the hotel. It fell through after the bubble burst and is now in ruins. The father thinks to himself, "Betrayed by my family. . . betrayed by my company. . . betrayed by society. . .betrayed by the world. . . what else is there to believe in?"[5]Stressed from all sides, the father gives in to his inner temptations to lust after the girl, but in a rare moment of mercy, the two merely hold each other's hands and lay on the floor of the ruins, and the father is reminded of his wife from his own youth, of his family. He finds the strength to call his family and return to his home. "The ideal family I'd dreamed of back then no longer exists. But. . . can I still believe in them? . . . I can. That's what family is all about."[6]He found some reprieve in his break from home, and was able to find something of the human connection he had been missing.
Even these moments of hope can turn out to be mostly worthless, however. This appears most obviously in "A Day in the Melancholy Life of A-ko the Daydreamer." The title is self-explanatory: Eiko works running a stand at a train station and she daydreams often and heavily. Her days tend to be repeats of themselves. She daydreams about a lover, picking him out from the crowd (and creeping him out in the process;) a better house, but her family is in a rough spot and needs money; a better life, a life away from everything in her current life. "From her shop in the station, Eiko wishes for happiness for everyone on Earth. . . and for herself. . . just a little more happiness than everyone else."[7] Her daydreaming grants her nothing. She may seem happy picturing a loving husband and a cool nuclear bunker, but it deflects nothing, improves nothing. It does not give her any true reprieve to her misery. In another story, "Tokyo," a comic artist goes to a school reunion and reflects on his path in life from childhood to the present. Life has moved on – not because of any specific wrong that the protagonist, Haru, has committed, or any good thing he has withheld, but simply because of the fallen nature of the world and the way that the passage of time erodes everything the way rivers carve out canyons. He remembers his school crush, all the moments they shared, the fights, his birth of his love of comics – his love of comics stemming from a want to express his fear of the future. At the end of the oneshot, Haru says "Sometimes I think. . . if I open my eyes, I'll be a kid again and none of this will have happened. But it has happened. . . and this is the only me there is."[8] In his resolution, in his peace, he fades away into nothing, disappearing into the sprawl of Tokyo, becoming nothing. He is nothing – of course, Eastern philosophies often see this kind of thing as an end goal, as the thing to strive after, and one can assume (but can only assume) our protagonist has been searching for this all along, but it is not a viable solution. Haru's nothingness has not granted him anything.
That so many would willingly walk through such bleak lives knowing the ramifications of sin eternally through the immediate consequences it has on them now seems itself absurd, but what else would humans who will not accept Christ do? There is no other place for them to go. They have made their decision. We must strive to persevere through the race, so that at the least the brothers and sisters of Christ will not go with them. One could argue, of course, that many of the characters in these stories would have never had the chance to know Christ, living in Japan. This is not true, but rather than argue about what evangelism has happened up to the point of these comics being written, one should take this inspiration and let it motivate them to be the one who spreads the gospel and show to those among us who have no hope the place where hope and new life can be found.