Catching Neku In The Rye

This and this inspired me to finish reading The Catcher In The Rye, and what a book it was.

In deciding what to compare The Catcher In The Rye to, I realised most of the good comparative Anime works, and even light novels, were taken. I briefly considered contrasting it with Read or Die but that’s written with a bookish woman’s perspective, and not the perspective of an angry young man at all. So I decided to go with comparing Holden Caulfield’s angst and youth culture identity with that of Neku’s from The World Ends With You.

The Catcher In The Rye is about a young man called Holden Caulfield, who has just been kicked out of Pency, a prestigious school for boys, for flunking various subjects except English. On the way home he decides to hit New York for a few days before the letter stating his being kicked out gets to his parents. He is an angry young man, and I mean ANGRY. He calls everybody he doesn’t like “phoneys” and doesn’t get why people like the things they do that annoy him.

Like Holden, Neku from The World Ends With You is an isolated individual who doesn’t want to get involved with anybody, and he claims he doesn’t need friends. Square Enix probably stole a few characteristics from Holden to create Neku, so it’s no surprise they have a similar, yet historically different, outlook on life. Neku meets a girl called Shiki, who encourages him to value friendship, and so far as I’ve played the game, Shiki teaches Neku some life lessons he needs to learn. In the same way, Holden Caulfield recalls that he was emotionally affected by how Mr. Antolini put his coat over James Castle when James died, and took him to the infirmary.

Neku is similarly affected when Rhyme, a new friend he meets, is “erased” from the Reaper’s Game, and this also corresponds with how Holden responds to the death of his brother Allie.

Each part of The World Ends With You is a segmented sequence of events, and though it is a different medium, the string of occurences in Neku’s life are akin to the loosely connected events in Holden’s adventures. Occassionally he gets into trouble, like when he’s drunk and wandering the city and lost, or when he runs into an underage prostitute and gets injured, and Neku gets into a lot of jams too, just a lot more family friendly ones. Neku occasionally swears, using mild obscenities like “crap” and “hell”, whereas Holden uses “damn”, “hell”, yet is offended severely when the word “Fuck You” is written on a wall where schoolchildren can see it. TWEWY follows seven day blocks of missions, in which you buy clothes which are fashionable in order to gain combat bonuses and impress. Neku’s headphones are a motif in TWEWY, much like Holden’s red hunting hat that people think looks stupid, but he likes. Neku loves them headphones, and they’re part of how he constructs his youth culture identity.

Fashion is an important part of both Catcher in the Rye and TWEWY, because Holden frequently comments on how nice people’s clothes look, even if he thinks they’re phonies. He remembers lending James Castle a jacket he really liked as his own, and the lending of the jacket represents an intimacy between them he wouldn’t have had if he decided not to lend the jacket, in which case he would have never known James at all. TWEWY fashion would probably tick Holden right off on the phoney scale of things, but were he a more contemporary character he would find he has many things in common with Neku and maybe even his J-RPG character friends.

I don’t know if that was a good analysis but TWEWY was the only good example of Anime styled pop culture I could find that could possibly have strong links to Catcher in the Rye. Hope you all give me some comments about how I did with it, because reading Catcher took me a long time and a lot of effort for my attention disorder to grapple with.

[Edited: Here are the links to other Catcher circle posts: Here, here, and over here]