It's about halfway through the first episode of Texhnolyze when we see the sky of the city of Lux. I've always found it hard to describe the color of that sky; it's grey but softer, beige but entirely nondescript. Maybe it's just a faded white. That sky is the first thing that comes to mind when I think of Texhnolyze, even before the desperate lifeless characters and technological ruin that lie in the foreground. There is nothing in the sky—no birds, no clouds, no sun—just that color. It may be the most lifeless color I've ever seen.
The irony of a city called Lux with such a lifeless sky is hard to miss. Even as the only real source of light in the city, the shadows it casts have dull borders, without sharp definition between brightness and darkness. Yet when the camera points skyward, there are times when a nonexistent sun washes all color from the frame and bathes everything in pure glare. At night the veins of the city become more transparent, the pulsing pounding machinery that underlies the vast urban decay. A dumpster fire and a lit window signal life, inequality, even the violent dreams of moving up in the world past the bodies of the weak, living and dead. But for all the people out in the daytime, that oppressive sky is anything but a guiding light.
This dichotomy helps us understand the city even in near silence. In a dark corridor we meet the prizefighter Ichise, wasting away. A shot of him bathed in the light of the arena from a fight minutes before frames him as an avatar of violence and anger, and of pure energy, but cut back to after the fight and his face is frozen and dead. In the same night a man descends an endless staircase and meets a masked girl, the seer Ran. A shootout ensues, and the night is alive even with the mild-mannered man emoting little more than Ran's mask. Cut to the daytime, where the rulers of the slums, the Organo, quickly deal with an assassination attempt on their leader Onishi. He is efficient, taking out his attempted assassins himself with little flourish. He is conscientious, claiming to know the voice of the city and its desire for peace. He stands atop Lux unquestioned, save for the oppressive daytime sky above.
What propels them all together? It barely touches the level of divine providence, and borders on coincidence. Ichise loses his arm and leg to Onishi's underling, and is taken in by a doctor of prosthetic limbs called Texhnolyze, where it is implied that she sexually assaults him in his sleep. She takes his most precious belonging, a collection of his dead mothers' cells, and turns them into the biological foundation of his new prosthetic limbs. Meanwhile tensions continue between the Organo and their eternal enemy, a religious group bent on eradicating Texhnolyzation, while the man on the staircase steeps himself in the world of Lux. Overall the death toll between them hardly changes; even with an all-out war mounting between them, it could hardly be called a world-changing event.
Yet somehow from all the stagnation and coincidence, the world of Texhnolyze is pushed forward. The longstanding ideological question of Texhnolyzation is brought forward by the doctor's work on Ichise, while the far-off gods of Lux come down from the hill far above to proclaim the gospel of prosthetic salvation. We learn that the cells of the dead, like Ichise's mother, are called Raffia, and are not only the basis for Texhnolyzation, but are the city's one export—to where, we don't know—and ultimately are the city's reason for existing. Now the Raffia has begun to disappear, and the city faces a silent but wholly existential crisis. Here is one of Texhnolyze's ironies: the death of Lux's citizens was the wellspring of Lux's life, and by extension the longer life offered by Texhnolyzation hastens the city's death.
I'm forced to focus on these ambient aspects of Texhnolyze, and perhaps the greater meaning it projects, because it is too quiet to speak to a larger plot. Most of the show takes place in inaction, in the hundreds upon hundreds of shots where nothing moves. The recurring dragonflies are often the sole reminder of life in the world, moving across vast shots of broken architecture and indistinguishable buildings stretching out for miles. A crane hangs high above the city like a noose, and off to the other side a lonely hill looms menacingly. Often we rush down a set of dark train tracks, the camera tilted slightly and barely up off the ground. These lonely shots are accompanied by the same subtle, atypical sountrack that heightened Boogiepop Phantom's atmosphere to that of a masterpiece; in the case of Texhnolyze, it borders on perfection, albeit the atonal perfection of someone like Ravel.
Many of the dozens of characters we see change very little. This is intentional; even with a name, a face, a personality, and a clear role in the city's future, most of the people of Lux are part of the city backdrop, the same as the worn-down buildings and the marketplace where we never see money exchanged. Onishi claims that the city has a voice, but to us viewers it seems more like “the city” encompasses the voices of everyone living within. Yet if Durarara's Ikebukuro was a living breathing entity unto itself, then Lux is more of a puppet show, where everyone acts according to the city's will for no purpose other than fate, and a predetermined collision course with the end times.
Watching through for my sixth time, I found that the few characters who resist the narrative are boundlessly changing, evolving, all while projecting their authentic selves through every little action. Ichise's new limbs force him to reintegrate into society, the world above those catacombs, from the ground up. For the first half of the show, he careens down the path of violence. For the second half, he learns that his new arm was built for kindness just as much as it was built for killing. He never vocalizes his relationship to Ran, and yet perhaps before we even realize it, he holds boundless affection for her, and it roots him in a matured sense of self even when she leaves him behind.
I'll give another example. Ichise makes a friend named Toyama, who we first see with a mixed expression as he is stroked on the shoulder by his boss, an older man. Later another man puts his hand on Toyama's shoulder and while we focus on their discussion, we also see Toyama's face contort in discomfort. When Toyama says that he owes his boss everything he is now, the mixed expression brings up a conflict for us of how to identify him: devoted with all his body and soul, or inadvertently held back in some trauma? As Toyama's boss falls into what can only be described as an ideological black hole, we see little if any resistance or reluctance from Toyama in watching the fall. Yet the final moments we see Toyama, it crystallizes everything into a single scene, from his friendship with Ichise to his devotion to his boss, his own struggles with boredom and power and trauma. And Ichise bears all of that with him, reflecting it back in the way he cares for Ran, the way he respects Onishi, and the way he defines his role in the future of Lux.
There are only three anime I've seen to date that I would consider perfect, and Texhnolyze is the hardest one to pin down. It isn't perfect in the sense of providing a cohesive narrative or a tight package. In truth, any number of other realities could have taken place in those 22 episodes and I may not have noticed the difference. It comes down then to the world, and to the crushing sense of inevitability that the world presents. There is endless fodder for analysis, from prosthesis to proselytization, from the Raffia to the world of Lux to shots of another world drawn from the quiet rural paintings of Edward Hopper.
There are narrative choices that no sane show would have made. Established characters will die in a matter of seconds, even offscreen, with little or no resolution to their lives. Some threads appear and then fade away, sometimes reappearing moments before the end of the show. The show is depressing, but beyond that much of the subject matter is dark and disturbing, as my comments on the doctor and Ichise may have made clear. The relationship between Texhnolyzation, penetration, and death runs thick, and while a better theorist than me could probably draw the connection out to a brilliant thesis, the faint of heart may not enjoy that sort of symbolism.
But when it comes down to it, even in almost complete silence and stillness, and with little or no narrative structure to be found, Texhnolyze's narrative of the death of the city of Lux is hands down the most emotionally provocative experience anime has for me. It is the crushing weight of Grave of the Fireflies, Bokurano, or Requiem for the Phantom, but without any logic imposed on it, anything to at least give us comfort in a driving reason and rationality. It is the flares of life in a world whose light has long since smoldered out. And if that isn't clear to them, it is abundantly clear to us, from the very first moments under the lifeless sky.