Sometime in the 1960s, New York City adoption agency Louise Wise Services began separating twins and triplets at birth, not telling prospective parents that their new child was actually part of a set. This practice was carried out by child psychologists Peter Neubauer and Viola Bernard, who had decided it was time to scientifically answer a very real, very personal question. A question so commonplace and so often pondered that we invented the word ‘regret’ just for pondering it:

If I had done differently, would things be better?

Neubauer and Bernard’s approach to this question was not to answer it exactly. After all, knowing what could’ve happened is extraordinarily difficult to answer in the general case, if not impossible. Instead, being scientists, they tried to answer a very similar question:

How much of my life is a result of my upbringing, versus how much of my life is a result of my genetics?

Trying to answer this proxy question by studying twins raised in separate environments is the closest we can get to figuring out a general solution to these large-scale questions of lifetime regret. It’s crude and only works at the start of a person’s life – if you’re curious how things could be different if you had done differently sometime later in life, you’ll just have to wonder. But what if you could see what could’ve been? What if, at the crux of your life, you could choose differently? Choose a different major, have different friends, or even love someone else?

The question of regret and seeing what could’ve been is at the core of Masaaki Yuasa’s show ‘The Tatami Galaxy’, loosely based off of Tomihiko Morimi’s novel with the same name. Each of the first nine episodes features our protagonist Watashi (or is he an antagonist?) summarizing his college experience and his persuit of the “rose-colored campus life”. At the start of each of these episodes, a decision is made: What club should I join? Who should I pursue? Watashi is given the privilege of choosing a different path and knowing truly what would’ve been. He retains no memories or lessons from life to life, but he still gets to go down a different path. Isn’t that enough?

Somehow, despite seeing Watashi in a whole slew of new situations, there are similarities to each of his college experiences. Some things stay the same between each and every one of Watashi’s possible lives. Watashi is always, of course, oriented towards the same goal of a “rose-colored campus life”. Watashi also consistently approaches a fortuneteller, and they have a nearly identical conversation every time:

Your face is a face of extreme impatience… You are unsatisfied. I feel you are not in a situation that you believe suits you, and I can sense your fiercely earnest talent.

Every time, Watashi is immediately sold on the fortuneteller. Of course she’s telling the truth – I am talented! And I am mistreated! He asks the fortuneteller to continue.

I sense there is an opportunity you can’t let pass by. This opportunity is always dangling before your eyes. You must grab this opportunity and act on it. And if you do not? You will walk this life as now, ever unchanging.

Each time, Watashi takes this as a sign that he should dedicate himself even more strongly to the path he’s chosen. Surely, the opportunity that the fortuneteller is referencing is ‘the current thing’. Surely, happiness awaits him at the end of the road he’s on.

And yet…

Something always happens. Watashi is rejected or rebuffed each and every time. There must be something else in common that’s moving Watashi towards his failure. Fortunately, the fiend at fault wastes no time letting Watashi know exactly who he is and how he’s ruining Watashi’s life. He is Ozu, a man described and drawn as a demon. Just look at him:

Ozu

That’s the face of a trickster. He always finds and befriends Watashi, much to Watashi’s anger. When they meet, Watashi comments: “That was my first contact with Ozu, as well as my worst contact”. Ozu toys with Watashi, always collapsing his carefully laid plans for his “rose-colored campus life”. When Watashi blunders, Ozu is there to tell him how funny he looks. When Watashi does something stupid, Ozu is the first to give him the honest rundown about how exactly he messed up. If Watashi were to trip and faceplant into the ground, Ozu would be there, asking him how the ground tastes. Ozu’s isn’t oblivious to his relationship with Watashi. On the contrary, he completely embraces his role as Watashi’s coincidental tormentor. When Watashi even confronts Ozu, accusing him of always being present when Watashi fails, Ozu has a perfectly good explanation for him:

It’s the way I show my love! We’re connected by the black thread of fate, after all.

Watashi sees every life he lives as a failure. Ozu is always there when Watashi fails. If Watashi enters society, Ozu will be there. There must be another way for him to get the life he wants. So, with Watashi’s tenth life, he chooses differently. He chooses not to choose. Watashi will abandon the “rose-colored campus life”. If the pursuit for such a perfect life is destined to fail, Watashi will not pursue it. Instead, he chooses to live his entire life within his 4.5 tatami room. He will eat fried food and cake and instant ramen. Why stay healthy? There is no one who will judge him. He will talk to no one but himself. He will watch the same shows and read the same books, and he will not be rejected, he will not be tricked by Ozu, and all will be well. This is what Watashi needs.

…

…

…

No one can be alone forever. After weeks or months in his room, Watashi attempts to leave. He opens the door to his room, peeks his head around the corner… and finds a nearly identical copy of his room on the other side. His windows similarly lead to copies of his room. Watashi bashes the walls down, climbs through the roof, and even smashes the floor to bits. It’s all the same: Watashi is trapped in an endless cubic array of 4.5 tatami apartments, extending to infinity. This is what he wanted, isn’t it? Isolation? Safety?

Each of these rooms holds subtle differences between them. Different books line the shelves of each room’s bookcase, and each room posses and slightly different collection of Watashi’s belongings. He gradually figures out that he’s traveling through the lives he could’ve lived, each room belonging to a different version of him. This room has tennis rackets, so this Watashi must’ve joined the tennis club. This room has books on film analysis, so this Watashi must’ve gotten interested in films and cinema. In this endless array of tatami rooms which gives the series his name, Watashi finally gets the opportunity that we’ve always wanted – to see what we could’ve been. And with this, Watashi finally sees the common thread in his misery. It’s not Ozu, or the fortuneteller, or the clubs he chose or the people Watashi associated with. The only common thread Watashi can find common to his suffering is Watashi himself.

Watashi is not the kindest or most empathetic person. In his first life, unable to score himself, he decides to dedicate himself to ruining other people’s love affairs. He and Ozu team up, forging mean messages from couples to each other, spreading scandalous rumours, and even launching fireworks at couples as they attempt to and enjoy each other’s company. When Watashi himself falls in love, rather than point out his hypocrisy, Ozu encourages him to pursue what he wants. But as an angry mob approaches Ozu for ruining one-too-many dates, Watashi abandons Ozu, claiming he doesn’t know him.

That’s only a single life. Again and again, we see the recurring cast of characters in different lights, as Watashi’s different choices lead him to see people from different perspectives. If our protagonist were aptly named, perhaps each experience would be an opportunity for him to learn something new about the people around him, to experience the wonders of young adult life with a different perspective. He retains no memories or experience from his possible choices, and as such, only manages to see a single facet of the world around him. This is the most apparent with how the protagonist interacts with his fellow classmates. Take, for instance, his classmate Jogasaki. In one life, the protagonist and Jogasaki are bitter rivals, fighting over leadership of the college’s drama club. In the next life, Jogasaki is a mentor to our protagonist, helping him train and bulk in order to impress a girl. Later, our protagonist is tasked by a masked Jogasaki to take care of a dutch doll. Each time, our protagonist sees only a facet of the person close to him.

The characters around Watashi are dynamic, with their loves and vices and habits, and we’re able to recognize it because we see these characters from different perspectives. But Watashi, limited to the single life he lives, only sees a single dimension of a person, and his ego and pride make it so that he assumes that if he can only see one dimension of a person, then that must be all that person is. As our final Watashi goes through the tatami galaxy, viewing his other lives, he realizes this.

Ego isn’t the only problem Watashi realizes about himself. On countless past lives, Watashi sees how his strange (yet uncomfortably familiar) mixture of pride and fear have ruined his experiences. Watashi is too proud to directly pursue the thing he wants, because he’s fearful of rejection. And now he’s consigned himself to his apartment, where he cannot be rejected, because he attempts nothing. Watashi realizes that in his other lives, the thing he wants is perpetually right in front of him, yet his own bruised ego gets in the way every single time. The words of the fortuneteller, rings through Watashi’s mind:

I sense there is an opportunity you can’t let pass by. This opportunity is always dangling before your eyes. You must grab this opportunity and act on it. And if you do not? You will walk this life as now, ever unchanging.

Watashi has seen how his fear and pride result in his own misery, and with this realization, the tatami galaxy collapses, and Watashi is finally able to leave his apartment. As he wanders the streets with a newfound appreciation for the sky and a new purpose for his life, he spots Ozu being pursued by an mob, angry that Ozu has ruined their relationships. Watashi remembers how Ozu was always there when Watashi had failed. At Watashi’s worst moments, Ozu was there, perhaps making fun of Watashi but still supporting him, because that’s what a friend does. Watashi finally sees Ozu in a positive light, which reflects itself in Ozu’s appearance changing to resemble that of a normal person:

Ozu, for real this time

Watashi saves Ozu, and by this point he’s a completely different person. His time within the the tatami galaxy has changed him not just physically (as his hair has grown wild and unshaven) but mentally, as he sees life with a new perspective. Watashi has answered the question of regret: He knows what could’ve been and if he could’ve done better. Yuasa, through the protagonist, is able to loop back around to the question of regret:

If I had done differently, would things be better?

The answer isn’t in what you choose to pursue or what your hobbies were. The thing that has to change isn’t the path you chose, it’s in the person choosing that path. It’s pointless to wonder what could’ve been – you must focus on the here and now, making the most of what you have and not looking back.

Always dreaming of the unrealistic, I never realized what I had right in front of me.