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Pursuer-distancer roles & attachment style in Utsukushii Kare, Part 1: Hira

Note: As I write this, only the first episode of season 2 has been released. This is based on season 1, episode 1 of season 2, and (sparingly) on translated bits of the novel that I’ve read. There seem to be some issues with the current subtitles so impressions could change as better fansubs come out or if streaming ones are improved. I’m watching the show on Viki so any quoted dialogue is from their subs.

I wrote about pursuer-distancer dynamics in this previous post. Now I’m going to dig deeper into how they play out in Utsukushii Kare. I recommend checking out the more detailed explanation of pursuer and distancer roles in that post, but I’ll give a super concentrated summary now as well.

So, a pursuer-distancer dynamic in a relationship occurs when one person takes on the role of emotionally pursuing while the other takes on the role of emotionally distancing. These roles are deeply interrelated—they rely on each other in order to work. It’s difficult to sit with the fact that we both crave intimacy and fear it/need some degree of independence. But that difficulty can be avoided if one person expresses all the need for closeness in a relationship while the other expresses all the need for independence. Neither of these strategies really work, but they are meant to fail, at least partially. It’s a “careful what you wish for” situation. If pursuers got all of the intimacy they seek, they’d be overloaded, and if distancers got all the space they asked for, they’d be lonely. Hence the part where they rely on one another to work, to help them fail in the ways they need to.

(Screenshot via MDL by ruiLIKK)

In many ways, Hira is the epitome of a pursuer. I think it’s what makes him fit the role of a seme so well despite constantly putting himself in a subservient position and even refusing direct overtures from Kiyoi. Like most pursuers, Hira seems to want closeness with the person he loves but his covert fears of intimacy and need for independence cause him to sabotage his own efforts. What’s less typical are some of the strategies he uses both to seek intimacy and covertly avoid it, as I’ll talk about more below. 

Pursuers are often people with a preoccupied (or “anxious”) attachment style. In Attachment in Psychotherapy, David Wallin describes preoccupied patients as people whose formative experiences taught them that the best way to get their needs met was by “mak[ing] their own distress too conspicuous to ignore.” This would make sense for Hira. His parents (portrayed more in the novels than the show) seem to be disengaged most of the time, but they spring into action when they get worried (a prime example is when they take him to see a medical provider about his stutter and buy him an expensive camera). By the time of the main story, he mostly seems to mask his distress so they’ll leave him alone. But at that point, those early experiences have already had their effect.

Hira’s experiences with peers have been uniformly terrible, and they are also a type of formative experience. As I’ve said, it’s commonplace to have a fear of intimacy as well as a desire for it. But Hira’s history with people his own age would definitely worsen his fears of being close to others. At the same time, these same negative experiences and the fears they’ve created have isolated him, making his need for intimacy even more acute. Like I said in my previous post, Hira is intensely ambivalent about intimacy. (So is Kiyoi, but that’ll have to wait for part 2.)

In his discussion of preoccupied attachment, Wallin goes on to say that the making-distress-conspicuous approach to getting needs met renders the preoccupied person “hypervigilant for actual or imagined signs that a relationship partner might be disapproving, withdrawn, or rejecting.” Yep, this is classic Hira.

As much as possible, Hira interprets everything that Kiyoi says or does negatively—as meaning that Kiyoi doesn’t love him, won’t stay with him, won’t meet his needs, and could never approve of him. If necessary, he’ll create a reason for concern out of nothing. 

When you see Kiyoi making this face and his hair starts billowing in a mysterious breeze, you’re inside Hira’s mind witnessing a complete fabrication. (Screenshot via MDL by doramasaurusrex)

At the same time, Hira definitely pursues Kiyoi. His relentless staring communicates his interest. He takes every opportunity to be around Kiyoi. When he gets to communicate with Kiyoi privately, he’s all compliments and reverence. His willingness to do whatever it takes to be near Kiyoi, even behave like a servant, is also a form of pursuit. But, like all pursuers, he has built-in safeguards against accidentally getting (too much of) the intimacy he wants but also fears:

First, he chose a seemingly unattainable object. When Hira first fell for Kiyoi, he wasn’t aware of all the reasons Kiyoi might actually be capable of returning his feelings. Even setting aside his negative bias, he had every rational reason to believe that Kiyoi was unlikely to ever love him back.

By the time it turns out that Kiyoi may not be completely out of his reach, Hira has had a chance to observe his distancing tendencies. Just choosing a distancer as a potential partner is a way of decreasing the risk that you’ll get more than you bargained for by pursuing them. 

Next, when Kiyoi builds a kind of friendship with him and even kisses him on graduation day, he changes his phone number. Perhaps he really is unaware that he can replace his submerged phone without changing his number. But personally, I really wonder if a part of him did this intentionally. At the very least, he could still have asked about keeping his number or tried to contact Kiyoi to give him the new one. He had real reason to hope Kiyoi might like him back (if nothing else, the kiss!) and whether by neglect or (on some level) intentionally, he made further contact impossible.

The most pervasive and destructive way that Hira sabotages his own efforts at intimacy with Kiyoi is through his distorted thoughts, including the biased interpretations and pure fabrications I mentioned above. He creates a narrative that says that:

Kiyoi is permanently superior to him, rendering him permanently out of reach

To whatever extent he does attain intimacy with Kiyoi, or even seek it, this is a kind of crime against nature (“touching a god”) that will undoubtedly cause some kind of unstoppable cosmic misfortune as a punishment,

Relatedly, any intimacy with Kiyoi can only be temporary.

This last factor leads me to one other thing I should mention. I was thinking about how I’d conceptualize Hira’s personality. I looked at my favorite book on the subject, Nancy McWilliams’s Psychoanalytic Diagnosis. I felt like I should check out the chapter on self-defeating/masochistic personality (note: not related to masochistic sexual practices!) but was reminded that people of that type are typically more resentful of what they see as undeserved suffering. Hira, on the other hand, perceives himself as completely deserving to suffer. So I looked at the chapter on depressive personality. The main defense depressive personalities use, McWilliams writes, is introjection: turning any hostile feelings inward toward the self. Much more like Hira. This is totally consistent with his pervasive sense of doom, hopelessness about improving his lot in life, and inability to take in positive comments about himself.

Of course, despite his self-sabotage, Hira does actually want to be close to Kiyoi. And he achieves that, in some ways. Pursuers do want intimacy, as their self-presentation suggests, they just tend to create conditions that decrease the chances they will get as much of it as they claim to want. So Hira sabotages his chances of getting his needs met. And every time he does get close to Kiyoi, he feels like he is adding to his list of crimes or the amount of suffering he’ll have to go through later to make up for any joy he feels. It’s like a form of emotional avoidance that dovetails with his behavioral avoidance.

Take, for example, his thoughts (delivered in voiceover) while on his outing with Kiyoi in S2E1. “They say the amount of happiness one feels is predetermined. In that case I may have only misfortune in my future. Kiyoi might dump me. Kiyoi might hate me. Kiyoi might die before me. What should I do then?” I don’t know who “they” are supposed to be here, but this is not an idea I’ve ever encountered in any culture or religion, except maybe Calvinism or something. It seems like Hira has just seized on a somewhat random idea, but this idea feels true because of his self-defeating narrative. It comes as no surprise, then, that when Hira starts ruminating about these possible future misfortunes, he stops himself from experiencing closeness with Kiyoi in that moment—which does not go unnoticed by Kiyoi. “Don’t live in your own world,” he tells Hira. “We’re hanging out in this one.” It barely seems to register with Hira that Kiyoi looks irritated and hurt. Clearly, Hira’s distractibility and negativity when he’s trying to enjoy his company is painful to him. And again, he has managed not only to detract from his enjoyent of the closeness he has with Kiyoi, but also to sabotage the potential for closeness in the interaction he’s having with Kiyoi in the present.

(Screenshot via MDL by ruiLIKK)

It’s worth noting that a related kind of distorted perception seems to affect Hira in other situations where people are showing an interest in him romantically and/or sexually. Take his interaction with that model at the party in S2E1 for example. He’s extremely gullible when he believes her claim that the other attendees are angry with him and think he’s rude. And though he registers that she’s getting close to him and touching him in a way that makes him uncomfortable, he doesn’t seem to understand that she’s putting the moves on him or that she’s interested in him. He’s beyond surprised when Kiyoi shows him the piece of paper with her phone number that she slipped into his pocket.

Watching that scene, I asked myself if I had just failed to notice before that Hira had a profound lack of social awareness. But then I thought about where this had come up and where it hadn’t. Hira shows social awareness in other situations, like when he observes what goes on between the students in Shirota’s circle in high school. It seems he’s only this clueless when it comes to admitting others might like him. The same happened with Koyama, when Hira seemed unaware that they were on a date. Hira does lack social skills in a lot of ways, but his awareness isn’t that bad except in this area. The main issue seems to be that anyone being attracted to or interested in him is classified as “impossible.” This is how, in S1E6, he not only turned down Kiyoi offering to date him but managed not to remember it ever happened.

That’s it for now on Hira’s side of the equation. I have part 2, on Kiyoi, almost ready to post as well, so that should be up pretty soon. Edited to add: I forgot to include another side of Hira’s pursuing role in his relationship with Kiyoi: pursuing sexual intimacy specifically. We get new information about this aspect of Hira and Kiyoi’s relationship in S2E1 in a couple of scenes. In the opening scene, once Kiyoi is awake, Hira asks if he’s angry with him for being “too persistent” the previous day. We don’t know for certain what this persistence was about, but their mutual shyness about it and Hira’s reference to it being caused by Kiyoi’s cuteness suggest that he was hitting on Kiyoi. We don’t know the outcome of it, though. The other moment happens when, after the incident with the model stirs up Kiyoi’s possessiveness, he (bashfully) announces that he and Hira are going to “do it” that day (resulting in a huge grin from a surprised Hira). It’s interesting—and simultaneously endearing and strange—that on the one hand, he can just decide this for the two of them (assumably because Hira always jumps at the chance), which gives him an air of imperiousness, but on the other, that he’s so uncharacteristically shy about it. Both of these scenes are very consistent with Hira’s role as a pursuer. He seems less ambivalent about this type of closeness than others, but he also seems to respect for Kiyoi’s boundaries (”persistence” notwithstanding). Basically, he seems to be on board with being the one petitioning for sexual contact while Kiyoi acts as more of a gatekeeper.

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