Shimeji Simulation

2024-12-17

TL;DR: it's good, go read it.

A manga, in five volumes. I'm gonna open this with a spoiler warning.

Honestly, this is a work of novel ideas. I'm not even sure where to start. I guess I'll cover the facts first: It's not too long of a read, you could get through it whole in about 10 or 8 hours. Definitely readable in a day if you're dedicated enough.

The artstyle is enjoyable and best described as 'comfortable' or 'cute'. The characters are drawn.. loosely. The proportions of them are all stylized, and I can say that not much attention is paid to photorealism or realistic proportions. The panels contained no real.. visual issues or shortcomings to my eyes.

But that's not the main shining point of this manga, in my opinion.

It is a story told in a novel setting. A post-human simulation. The reader isn't told this at the start, nor is there a story beat that grants the characters 'freedom' by somehow letting them escape a la matrix, the plot is entirely contained in a simulated environment, and the concept of interest, for me, when compared to other sci-fi works of a similar nature is that the simulated environment is not the work of an adversarial force. Humanity did this to themselves willingly.

And, by extension, humanity has say over what goes and doesn't go in the simulation. This is one of the main themes explored by this manga.

What does a world without physical strife look like? What does a world without material bounds look like? What does a world without bounds of conciousness look like?

These are the sorts of ideas that this manga tries to explore. And it does so while wrapping everything in a love story. And it makes for an interesting read. The fifth volume is all about exploring the idea of self-retention in a world with no bounds. How does one retain themselves when they are but an idea in an environment where ideas themselves are completely malleable? In other words, when you can be anything, anywhere, all at once, when you can even make infinite copies of yourself, how do you maintain a sense of self? One of the awnsers that this work provides is.. other people, and the relationships one makes over the course of their life, be they with loved ones, friends or muses.

Curiously enough, another source of self-retention that the manga points out, in the fifth volume, when the main character (shimeji, the girl with the mushroom on her head) meets the book-reading and storing senpai (slash library daemon? in the computing sense) for the last time, are stories. And her claim is, that an agent in a simulated world, simulates the world of any given story they read. In other words, one can equate a story of written text as a runnable simulation, where 'running' it is the conceptualization of said story within an agent's conciousness. It argues that there is no factual difference between a simulation of humanity and a story of humanity. I.e. the concept of a book reader imagining a book's story from the confines of a simulated environment is in it of itself redundant. At least that's what I took away from the encounter. I may be writing out of my ass here.

One other topic that piqued me was the exploration of the malleability of a simulated environment. This is best-covered in volumes two and three (but the notion doesnt go away in the following volumes). It is at this point where hints begin to be dropped about the world being simulated and the manga does a really good job of.. going nuts, honestly. Impossible architecture, global state anomalies and everything in-between happens to the world. There was even a part that placed characters in a toroidal space. The manga also explores how agents within that world have to be extremely tolerant of change itself. One of the chapters simply has the school that the two main characters go to be placed on one of it's side walls for a day. Another chapter of the manga has one of the characters build a perpetual motion machine as part of the plot. There was one chapter where.. water had no gravity.

The further I read, the looser the world became. Materials became arbitrary and abstract (vegetable-based transportation, sentient life out of wool and fabric, houses of tofu). Scale lost meaning. Some chapters portrayed the environment as entirely abstract. There was even a page that did away with drawing itself entirely, instead opting to be a page full of text. At some point the simulation becomes so chaotic that it turns untraversable for the main character, and it is this fact that the climax hinges on.

To compile my thoughts, i think that this manga is a well-executed exploraiton of the effects of a simulated environment on the concept of humanity itself, and what can be done to retain said humanity in the face of simulacrum. What's interesting is that this is a story with no real villain. At best, the closest thing to an adversary is.. entropy or change or freedom perhaps? And yet, it feels like a story that has villains, that has it's characters overcoming challenges and strife.

All in all, i'd say that this manga is definitely worth a read. I will be coming back to it someday.