Analyzing a Scene in Otherside Picnic Volume 7
This post was originally hosted on Cohost.
The fourth Otherside Picnic omnibus just arrived today, and because this series has given me a deep and enduring brainrot, I figured I’d read through it again. Volumes 7 and 8 are my favorites, after all.
I don’t want to summarize or analyze the series in depth in this post. My good friend kinseijoshi has done that in exhaustive detail already. Please give those a read, they’re wonderful. Rather, I’d like to focus on one particular scene, encompassing the ending of File 21 and the opening of File 22.
You likely already know what I’m talking about if you’ve read this far. If you haven’t, then I’m going to spoil Otherside Picnic up to and including volume 7. Maybe 8, too, we’ll see. This’ll be long and rambly, lacking a central thesis statement. Don’t expect a concise argument.
Satsuki Uruma casts a shadow over the entirety of Otherside Picnic, at least this initial meta-arc of volumes 1-8. She has indelibly blemished Kozakura’s and Toriko’s lives, the former as a friend, the latter as a mentor and likely lover. The more we learn about her, the more we find she’s a rather despicable woman, using and abusing the people around her to further her research and exploration of the Otherside.
She’s already dead by the time the story begins.
Yet that’s not entirely true. Her fate is ultimately bizarre and perhaps unknowable: she’s shifted to the, well, other side of the Otherside. What this means is unknown as of volume 8; we don’t know what became of her or what she found there. Instead, her narrative role is one of a specter hanging over the characters, both literally and figuratively.
The scene I’d like to discuss is their second conversation, well after the first at the end of Volume 3. This scene has stayed with me ever since I read it; barring the entirety of File 26, it’s my favorite scene in the series.
Remorseful from hiding her feelings and dealing with her problems (primarily her situation with Toriko and Satsuki’s existence), Sorawo revisits the site where she first encountered the Otherside: an abandoned shop in Oomiya. Sorawo laments how different her life was then, only a year ago:
It all started here, yet my memories of it were vague, like they belonged to someone else. It had only been a year ago, so I was surprised by how I’d already forgotten nearly everything.
The me of then and the me of now were like totally different people. I could no longer remember what past me had been doing or what she had been thinking at the time.
In contrast to that, the memories of everything since I’d met Toriko were all so vivid. The difference was so stark when I compared them that it was like my monochrome world had suddenly changed to technicolor that day.
Sorawo experiments with the shop’s back door, dimly hoping the gate it formerly held had returned. No such luck. She decides to check the alleyway out, but is quickly rebuffed when she learns there’s essentially nothing out there.
Turning back, the door she’d left through shut behind her.
This already sets the scene’s innate suspense. A door mysteriously shutting behind protagonists is one of the most basic horror devices out there, yet establishing that it had formerly been a gate, and based on our existing knowledge of the interstitial space between the two worlds, we can expect some shenanigans to go down.
And, indeed, they do: she hears Toriko’s voice inside. Toriko, of course, did not come to the shop with her.
Upon hearing her own voice in return, Sorawo quickly places this as one of their first conversations, on the way back from the Otherside.
Miyazawa is a master of both slow, creeping dread and sudden, unsettling shifts in narration. Even though we’re primed to expect unsettling elements – exploring an abandoned ruin is prime horror material in general – we’re still caught off-guard here. The scene quickly but methodically builds tension: first the closed door, then the replay of an earlier conversation. We’re primed to expect an interstitial space, and the placement of the door as a barrier between the two is no accident.
In fact, it’s one of the more obvious entrances. The door has become a gateway to the Otherside again, but not in a way Sorawo expects. Interstitial spaces are often unannounced, they creep up on the characters and slowly shift them away from the world they know. Here, a door separates Sorawo, perhaps still in the real world, from the Otherside. Just as it did before, just as it marked the boundary between her past and present selves.
The conversation continues:
“Right, you mentioned a name earlier.”
What’s this?
As I listened to our past conversation in our own voices, I suddenly felt dizzy, like I was losing consciousness. If I kept on listening, I was going to go nuts.
My next words were hesitant, probing.
“Satsuki-san… was it?”
Instinctively, I pounded my hand on the door.
Interestingly, as I refer back to the conversation in volume 1, a loud bang interrupts them. Sorawo sneaks toward a door, ultimately peering through a peephole. She does the same thing in the present, yet sees only darkness.
In volume 1, she sees only blue. Otherside ultrablue, specifically. The color, by the point of volume 7, is well-established as the strange boundary of the Otherside, its true makeup, separating the near-side Sorawo and Toriko explore and the far-side of the eldritch entities attempting to make contact.
We can immediately associate the color with Satsuki herself. File 4 makes this explicit.
Repeating this conversation in volume 7 sets us up for Satsuki’s appearance in the next scene, yet the absence of ultrablue here, in my opinion, indicates just how far Satsuki has pushed through to the real world. She’s well into interstitial space, much closer than she’s perhaps been at any point in the series so far. We don’t see only her ghost passively observing, the same way we have in the past. We get something far stranger, instead.
There were two figures seated across from one another at the table inside.
One was me. I could tell at a glance—it was my doppelganger. The dark imitation of myself that I had seen a number of times before.
The other was a woman with long black hair, wearing glasses and dressed in black.
“Satsuki…Uruma.”
The woman’s name came out of my mouth. Neither of them looked at me as I stood there in the door. My doppelganger had her hands on the table, and she was staring at the woman sitting across from her.
Oh lawdy.
Sorawo’s doppelganger is a fascinating narrative device. It recurs multiple times throughout the series, sinister and off-putting in each appearance. It’s no coincidence that it shows up now, in this scene with Satsuki. At this liminal space between the real world and the Otherside, the pre- and post-Toriko phases of Sorawo’s life.
The doppelganger is depicted in every appearance as a much more sullen Sorawo, usually with her hood drawn and her face downcast. It’s undeniably Sorawo, but like a shade, a shadow of the real woman. If we were to ascribe human feelings to it, we might call it depressed, morose, monochromatic.
We can easily read a doppelganger as the more negative, selfish parts of Sorawo’s personality. I’ve also seen it described as Toriko’s fears of losing Sorawo as she lost Satsuki. However, we can extend this further, based on this scene: it represents the Sorawo before she met Toriko, all her worst traits of her survival instinct gone haywire, never truly living, merely subsisting in and apart of the world. This is Sorawo at her most cynical and least trusting, a deeply traumatized girl unable to cope with her horrifying childhood.
And this is the Sorawo Satsuki sits with as the scene begins. They’re separated by a table, but are clearly framed together to an onlooking Sorawo. She appeals to the basest, most fearful aspects of Sorawo’s personality, the traumatized and hopeless girl.
Just as she did with Toriko.
So Toriko calls Sorawo right as she’s about to fire upon Satsuki, right?
“Right, so let me tell you why…” Toriko trailed off for a moment, then, finding her nerve again, she continued. “Everyone who’s ever been important to me before now, all of them, they’ve just suddenly vanished on me.”
Sorawo hears this as she’s staring at Satsuki. Narrative irony aside, we understand Sorawo’s peril: is Satsuki’s appearance here going to spirit her away? The stakes are in the stratosphere.
As I listened to her voice, I watched the two figures facing one another down in front of me.
Toriko. One of those people from your past, the ones you cared about, is here right now, trying to screw around with me.
Here I am, chatting on the phone with you right in front of her, and she doesn’t even notice.
She doesn’t give a damn about you.
When Sorawo mentions Toriko to Satsuki, repeating this phrase, Satsuki finally turns to her. Takes her eyes off the doppelganger, onto Sorawo. From the past, onto the present.
“It’s not fair to Toriko.”
It happened when I said that: those ultrablue eyes moved beneath her glasses. With a sideward glance, Satsuki Uruma looked at me.
“Do you really think so?”
Does Sorawo really think that? She obviously cares for Toriko, and her hatred of Satsuki for abusing Toriko is well-documented at this point.
Yet how much of that is for Toriko’s sake, and how much is her own bitterness? Sorawo is a blunt, bitter person, Kozakura constantly calls her out on it, and it seems this is the thread Satsuki pulls on. It’s no wonder she’s first shown with the doppelganger, it indicates the lens by which this conversation takes place at all. She knows Sorawo despises her and makes that the medium by which they communicate.
From fear, to hate. Both negative emotions, intertwined in this case, but the doppelganger embodies both.
Sorawo shoots, the pistol misfires. Sorawo realizes she’s now seated at the table, across from Satsuki. The older woman’s hand caresses her cheek. From here, they have a shockingly normal conversation. Before discussing it, I’d like to diverge a bit.
I opened my mouth and asked her straight out, “What are you?”
“I am Satsuki Uruma.”
“The real one?”
“Are you the real Sorawo Kamikoshi?”
Kasumi’s introduction marks the beginning of a conversation between Sorawo, Toriko, and the other characters of ‘interfaces,’ or attempts by the Otherside Entities to communicate with humanity. Initially, these take the form of fear, as these are the only means by which the entities are able to influence us. It’s a deeply compelling idea on its own, but as the series goes on, the interfaces expand to pseudo-humans, shapes taking the form of humans and trying to blend in with normal society, to varying degrees of success. Kasumi, then, is a human interface, twisted in unknown ways by the Otherside, but still (probably) human.
We can also argue Satsuki herself is an interface, a willing connection between the two worlds. Extremely similar to Kasumi, in fact. What makes her different is that she, herself, sought and made contact, rather than the other way around. Given that this contact most likely happened before the story starts, can we assume that everything following after, T-san, Michiko Abarato, Kasumi, are influenced by this contact?
Put another way, did Satsuki teach the Otherside Entities how to communicate? Or did they learn through her contact itself, much like an autopsy can educate us about causes of death? It’s clear this knowledge is incomplete, yet it’s steadily growing as the series goes on.
The scene with Satsuki and Sorawo is another marked shift. Now, an entity of the Otherside is directly communicating with a human, contact is being made, even if so much of it is shrouded in mystery. While Kasumi can only communicate with borrowed words out of context, Satsuki (or the entity assuming her form) can talk regularly. The interface has evolved yet again.
It was like seeing life suddenly blown into what had been a mannequin just seconds ago. The palm of her hand, positioned a hair’s breadth from my skin, touched my cheek with every shallow breath I took. It sent tingles through my skin and down my spine. I smelled human skin and felt her warmth.
“I came to see you,” she said, her expression unchanged, in an amused tone of voice.
“Why?”
“You interest me.”
“You don’t interest me. Get lost. Now.”
“Get lost? That’s an interesting turn of phrase.”
Oh fuck off, Satsuki.
“There’s a ghost story about going to the mountains, you know?”
“What…?”
“You go to the mountains, and the mountains call to you. Called, you enter the mountains, and you never return.”
I won’t quote the entire conversation (this post is long enough), but this mountain analogy is perhaps the most fascinating part. Apart from the tension of the scene, it’s perhaps the most comprehensive description of the Otherside we’ve yet seen.
Knowing Sorawo’s obsession with ghost stories, Satsuki makes the analogy of going into the mountains, then becoming part of them. Losing one’s individuality, becoming part of a greater yet alien whole. Satsuki uses the thing Sorawo best knows to describe her existence, yet even that is layered in allegory and mystery.
We can clearly read an intelligence here. An alien one, certainly, yet almost recognizable. Satsuki directly calls herself a part of the Otherside, inextricable from it, lost to a normal frame of reference. She implies Sorawo is the same. The right eye is the obvious connection, but does the Otherside’s influence run deeper?
The scene ends. They stare at each other for ten seconds, before Sorawo realizes Satsuki’s disappeared. She’s staring at a soot-blackened cloth draped over a chair, instead. It hadn’t been there when she first entered the shop. Another horror device: the monster was actually a mundane object all along. A subtle indication that Sorawo’s returned to the real world, the interstitial space had collapsed once Satsuki disappeared.
The interface had served its purpose, and Satsuki now recedes back into the Otherside. Sorawo has denied her, breaking Satsuki’s trend of seducing other women. While anger and hate were the means Satsuki used to bridge the connection, fear severs it.
There’s so much more I haven’t talked about. I’ve been writing this post for two hours and I’ve barely scratched the surface.
The primary purpose of this scene is to spur Sorawo into exorcising Satsuki once and for all. Toriko’s direct confrontation at the beginning of Volume 8 serves a similar purpose: Sorawo can’t hide from Toriko’s confession of love anymore. Yet, while that scene is rather mundane, this one is anything but.
We learn so much about Satsuki Uruma here, and suddenly the shadow she casts comes into light. Unlike many horror stories, where the monster’s reveal cheapens the suspense, it only intensifies here. We learn concrete details about what she is now, what she represents, but it only shows how much more we have to learn. How much deeper and stranger the Otherside is than we ever thought.
If this is Satsuki now, what does that mean about the entities as a whole? Are they alien, eldritch beings, or are they more human than we know, severed from a shared context and reality? This thought has occurred to me multiple times in my first reading of Otherside Picnic, yet this scene perhaps hints at the question most directly.