The Night Beyond the Tricornered Window

Episode 11

Although it has jumped through a lot of different themes and topics, the one that The Night Beyond the Tricornered Window keeps coming back to is belief. It was Sensei's belief that both he and his son could not remain with their mother that drove him to his present state, and it was his corrupted belief that choosing to give his son a safe life made his own spiral downward to the point where he uses hatred as fuel to keep living, if that's even the right word for what he's doing. Likewise it is Hiyakawa's firm belief in the fact that he cannot be saved that resulted in his present state, as the core of what Mukae terms Sensei's power plant; his despair rivals even Sensei's own.

There's a very sad, but interesting, statement on who is allowed to be rescued in Hiyakawa's belief. Most children start out certain that they will be saved from whatever terrible situation they find themselves in; it's even fed to them in the fairy tales we most frequently tell – Hansel and Gretel get themselves out of the clutches of the witch, Little Red Riding Hood is pulled from the belly of the wolf (in the Grimms' version at least), and Cinderella is lifted up out of her life of servitude. That only one of those characters is a little boy is interesting, and even in Japanese folklore, more typically the boys do the saving rather than being rescued themselves. There are exceptions, of course, though mostly in Northern European tales, like East of the Sun, West of the Moon or The Snow Queen. That means that little boys, like Hiyakawa still is on the inside, learn from fairy tales that no one is coming to save them, and if they're not doing the saving themselves, well, then that just makes them a Kai forever frozen, a prince forced to marry a troll, or a Hansel Gretel left locked in the witch's cell. There is no trail of breadcrumbs for Hiyakawa to follow.

That's what he believes, anyway, deep down in the soul that Mukae is talking to. Even though Hanzawa did come for him eventually, it was after the damage was already done, and that's paralleled in this episode when Mikado confronts his father. What Sensei wanted was to be saved himself, but he thought that once he became a parent, he had to give that up. Essentially he didn't trust that his wife was strong enough to keep both he and his child safe, and so he never tried and took the easy, albeit dark, way out. What he feels now is anger that he made that choice, changed by his warped mind into anger that he had a child in the first place. But Sensei has been alone and wallowing in his misery for much longer than Hiyakawa and the major difference is that Hiyakawa's savior, Mikado, knows what he needs to do. Sensei never gave his wife that chance. Mikado is aware and he's going to take it, even if Hiyakawa doesn't believe that such a chance at redemption exists.

It's also an interesting statement on the homoerotic fairy tale, that the prince can be saved by another prince. Picture book author Daniel Haack plays with that idea in his heartwarming book Prince & Knight, and to a degree that's what we're seeing play out here. But it's really less a question of gender and more about the idea of belief: Mikado believes that he can save Hiyakawa, and so he's going to try. Sakaki believed that he could use his power to reach through death to help, and so he did. (Incidentally, he also fully believed that Erika could use the dead to communicate with the rest of the group.) It's not a lack of belief, like Hanzawa displayed earlier, that's so damaging, it's the negating of it that causes problems – it's less that Sensei didn't believe his wife could only help one person, it's that he believed that she couldn't. It's a semantic difference that in this case makes all the difference in the world, like Mikado reminding Sensei of his name because he believes that he's strong enough to resist whatever hold that gives his father over him.

Now as Hiyakawa lets himself fall into an abyss because of his belief that Mikado won't love him or forgive him for who he was in the past, we're faced with one final question that will determine the outcome of the story: is Hiyakawa's negative belief stronger? Or will Mikado's positive faith prevail?

Can you save someone who doesn't believe that they deserve it? In this case, no one will know unless they try.

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The Night Beyond the Tricornered Window is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.