ACQUIESCENCE IS NOT obedience, as Iyer has written. We think of cute as something that exists only to please us, and of which we are the master. But it also is us. As the country’s economy has languished in the past few decades, the Japanese — along with people around the world who’ve lost faith in their governments and one another — have been ever more drawn to angst-ridden kawaii figures whose troubles reflect their own, like Retsuko of the anime series “Aggretsuko,” a 25-year-old red panda accountant who’s regularly belittled and hounded at the office. She’s not just cute, she’s furious. As a saleswoman repeats, “No pressure, take your time,” or when in the middle of a speed-dating session she realizes she can no longer take this “eternity of small talk and suffering,” she conjures visions of herself with inferno eyes and bear-trap teeth, screaming death metal at karaoke with enough rage to annihilate entire worlds. Gudetama, the yolk, a global sensation and one of Sanrio’s most popular characters alongside Hello Kitty, is an unrepentant nihilist. He clings to his eggshell, moaning, “All I see is darkness,” not out of fear of being eaten but in sheer lethargic defiance of existence as an active state of being: a latter-day Bartleby.
In Tokyo Character Street, a shopping arcade under the vast Tokyo Station, I find a shelf of tiny plushie Sumikkogurashi, including Penguin?, whose question mark betrays an identity crisis; Tokage, a dinosaur and the last of his kind, pretending to be a lizard to avoid capture; and Tonkatsu, a fatty scrap of battered and fried pork abandoned on the plate — an undesired leftover, like its friend Tapioca, the dregs left behind once a bubble tea is drunk. They are almost identical blobs with the subtlest of distinctions: a ruffle of spikes, an abbreviated beak. All have their backs turned to me, as they are shy. (Sumikkogurashi translates as “life in the corner.”) They shun me, their prospective buyer, which makes me want them all the more. Everything is cute, so cute is everything, the sour alongside the sweet.
Even the bitter: In another store I stumble on a plushie No-Face, the devouring ghoul from the Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki’s 2001 film “Spirited Away.” His nonface is moon white with only slits for eyes, like a blank Noh mask. In the movie he is loneliness personified, swallowing the world with a raw hunger that terrifies. Yet he is not a villain, nor is he redeemed; in the end, he is simply calmed by the shoujo heroine as part of overcoming her own fears. Cute is “a watered-down version of pretty; which is a watered-down version of beautiful; which is a watered-down version of terrifying,” the Oakland, Calif.-based writer Frances Richard suggests in the 2001 essay “Fifteen Theses on the Cute.” In the fluorescent light, this toy No-Face is no longer a rippling shroud but a pudgy black egg with odd skinny limbs. Still he has menace, crouched like a spider. This, too, is cuteness, the dark thing you can’t name, that you don’t push away even though it can hurt you; that you look in the eye, learn to live with, hold in your arms all through the night.
