Fly Away Old Home: Memory and Salvation in Haibane-Renmei

When the shadows of this life have gone,I'll fly awayLike a bird from prison bars has flown,I'll fly away—"I'll Fly Away"

(traditional Southern gospel song)

A girl is falling from the sky. Distractedly she wonders where she is as a crow grabs onto her robe and vainly tries to stop her descent. "You can't," she calmly tells it, "but thank you." The crow leaves as the clouds part, showing the ground rushing up. In the next scene, five young women with halos and small nonfunctional wings are very excited about the appearance of a gray cocoon nearly filling one room in their rundown dormitory. Inside the cocoon floats the falling girl, now asleep. After the cocoon bursts open, the girl wakes up in a bed surrounded by the winged girls. One of the older ones, the apparent leader of the group, lights a cigarette, then leans forward to say, "Now, tell us about your dream."

Thus begins Abe Yoshitoshi's (known in the United States as yoshitoshi ABe) haunting thirteen-episode anime series Haibane-Renmei.¹ It is unique among anime in that it focuses on spiritual questions implicit in the use of dreams and memories that lead ultimately to the characters' quests for forgiveness and salvation. The spirituality of Haibane-Renmei, like the religious traditions of Japan itself, is a conglomeration of elements. It appropriates Buddhist and Christian ideas and imagery without ever explicitly alluding to either one. ABe combines these religious traditions with his own personal spiritual elements to create a curious mixture that produces an original and emotionally powerful anime. The most obvious appropriated Christian element is the appearance of the young women themselves. Despite their wings and halos, they are not angels but Haibane (Japanese for "gray or charcoal-colored feathers"), and ABe has said explicitly that they do not represent Christian angels.² As the falling girl tries to remember her name, she realizes she has lost all of her memories before her dream. She has entered a strange afterlife that can be viewed as either some form of purgatory (Christian) or as simply another reincarnation on the wheel of life (Buddhist). She is given a new halo, and her wings emerge later in a bloody sequence that is part fever dream and reminiscent of childbirth.

Figure 1.

The Old Home Haibane look on expectantly at the about-to-burst cocoon. Reki is in the center with the cigarette. Clockwise from the upper left are Hikari, Nemu, Ku, and Kana. Copyright yoshitoshi ABe * Aureole Secret Factory.

The salvation possible through the power of memory is the key element in Haibane-Renmei. As all Haibane emerge without any knowledge of their previous life, the recovery of some memory and understanding of their actions from before their cocoon dream becomes the key to self-discovery, identity, and finally the mode of their forgiveness and salvation. The first thing the group does is bestow a defining name on the Haibane hatchling in a shamanic-like tradition of taking a name from the cocoon dream, so the falling girl is named "Rakka" (Japanese for "falling"). The name of the leader, Reki, means "pebbles" because she dreamed of walking on a pebbled road.

Rakka begins exploring her strange new life as a Haibane in this dream world known as Glie (pronounced guri). Their residence is an old countryside boarding school called "Old Home" where they care for about ten young Haibane children under the age of six. A few miles away is the small town where normal humans live and beyond that are at least two more Haibane "nests" in the countryside. The town and countryside are completely surrounded by a thirty-meter-high wall, and neither Haibane nor humans are allowed outside. The world of Glie is a claustrophobic one, but few of the human residents seem to notice or care. Living their entire lives there, they seem to exist in a comfortable dreamlike eternal present with little regard for their own past or curiosity...