Pain, Suicide, and the Understanding of Suffering: a Philosophical-Psychological Reading of Takopi no Genzai (Takopi’s Original Sin)

Abstract

In recent decades, anime has become a privileged medium for exploring suffering, pain, and suicide within societies characterized by individualism, performance, and commodified emotions. In this context, Takopi no Genzai (Takopi's Original Sin) offers a radically raw depiction of physical and psychological violence, systematic abuse, and the search for familial validation, particularly as embodied in the experience of its protagonist, Shizuka. This article proposes a hermeneutic-philosophical reading with a critical-cultural and interdisciplinary perspective, primarily drawing on the thought of Schopenhauer, in dialogue with Nietzsche, Mainländer, and Cioran, to interpret the dynamics of suffering and the subjective construction of happiness and pain. Methodologically, a textual and conceptual analysis of the anime is developed, focusing on specific scenes and the formation of Shizuka's affective and familial bonds, to show how her subjectivity is constituted under logics of violence, guilt, and school abuse. From these philosophical frameworks, suffering is understood not as a mere biographical accident or an isolated clinical maladjustment, but as a constitutive dimension of existence that resists the imperatives of positivity and well-being prevalent in contemporary societies. Thus, it can be argued that Shizuka's life embodies a form of tragic subjective autonomy, where the affirmation or negation of existence is contested in tension with the emotional and symbolic frameworks through which consumer society regulates and guides positive affective experience.