Completely Futile

2012-01-25T19:25:00.000-08:00

MANGA MOVEABLE FEAST: THE CHILDREN'S CRUSADE BY USAMARU FURUYA, VOLS. 1 AND 2

The Furuya manga currently available in the U.S. don't do justice to his abilities as a writer. Genkaku Picasso is one of the worst works of Furuya I have read, while Lychee Light Club and No Longer Human are both adaptations of works written by others, unlike the majority of Furuya's works. Those who only know Furuya through these works may conclude that he's a poor writer when not adapting someone else, while even those familiar with masterpieces like The Music of Marie and "Book of the Moon" may think he's lost his touch. But in The Children's Crusade [Innosan Shounen Juujigun], one of Furuya's most recent works (the third and final volume has not even been published in Japan yet), which is an original story, his writing is as powerful as ever.

Genkaku Picasso was an attempt to create a shounen manga which avoided the cliches of shounen manga. The Children's Crusade, on the other hand, while not shounen, engages with shounen manga in a different way: it takes a familiar shounen scenario -- a group of teenage boys fights for justice armed with idealism, an indomitable spirit, and the power of friendship -- and shows it leading to disaster.

Based upon a real event, though one about which little is known, The Children's Crusade begins in a town in Northern France in 1212. Nicholas*, an impulsive and hotheaded twelve-year-old, longs more than anything to be a crusading knight like his father, but given his poverty and lack of social standing this seems impossible. To show his determination, he goes so far as to carve a large cross into his forehead with a knife. (He bears the scar prominently throughout the two volumes.) His friend Etienne is also twelve, but their personalities are complete opposites. Etienne is a gentle, devout, contemplative shepherd.

One day while tending his sheep, Etienne finds a letter and an unusual-looking trumpet. Then a vision of the crucified Jesus appears to him and tells him that he has been chosen and that the trumpet's sound will lead him to Jerusalem. When he returns to the town and publicly describes his experience, Nicholas acclaims him as a Savior, and declares that he will accompany Etienne to Jerusalem. Soon Etienne's pilgrimage has become a crusade to "liberate" Jerusalem from the Muslims, led by Nicholas, who declares that nobody over fourteen is allowed to participate, since previous crusades have failed because the faith of adults is too weak.

Spurred by a rumor that those who reach Jerusalem will have any wish granted, a diverse group of boys enrolls, including a puppeteer; an intellectually-minded, skeptical merchant's son; a leper; and one of the bandits who had attacked the village, whom the villagers had captured and are abusing as revenge. These latter two are allowed to come at the insistence of Etienne, who publicly embraces both of them. (To be sure, it's unrealistic that all these types would be found in the same small town, but it helps keep the secondary characters from blurring into each other, a common problem in stories with lots of characters of approximately the same age and sex.)

Soon after they set out, they meet Hugo, a member of the powerful Knights Templar. After he witnesses Etienne perform a miracle, he not only declares the Children's Crusade under the Templars' official protection, but accompanies it himself. From then on, in each town they pass through the Crusaders receive a rapturous reception, in good part due to Hugo's advance work. In each town Etienne miraculously heals the sick and injured. And in each town, they gain both generous donations and new recruits, some as young as eight, whose parents are eager to entrust them to the "miracle boy." Nicholas is living out his dream and practically worships Hugo, but Etienne grows concerned at the increasingly martial tone Nicholas's rhetoric has taken under Hugo's influence.

The crusaders have plenty of friendship and perseverance, the first two parts of Shounen Jump's famous formula. But this won't bring victory, the third part of the formula. Furuya raises the crusaders' and reader's hopes only to crush them. Legend has it that the historical Children's Crusaders were sold into slavery by the ship captains they trusted to carry them across the sea. I don't know how The Children's Crusade ends, but they, too, have their innocence and naivete betrayed. And the end of the second volume promises much worse to come.

One of The Children's Crusade's chief strong points is characterization. With Etienne, Furuya succeeds in one of the most difficult tasks for a writer: convincingly depicting a character who is good to the point of saintliness but not sanctimonious. Nicholas's characterization is also very well done. The other "apostles" receive less attention from Furuya, but he succeeds in giving almost all of them distinct personalities.

The characters' lively, expressive faces as drawn by Furuya contribute substantially to the characterizations. And the art in general is excellent, both in visual storytelling and page design, and is frequently cinematic in scope and detail. Furuya isn't particularly well known for his action scenes, but the ones here are dynamic.

In manga and anime, Christianity is generally treated very superficially (e.g. Evangelion and Hellsing). In contrast, Furuya gives a convincing depiction of a devout Christian in 13th-century France. And in general, even though Furuya takes substantial liberties with the few known facts about the historical Children's Crusade, his setting feels authentic. This makes it all the more disappointing when, in the last few chapters of volume two, Furuya introduces a frequent cliche in modern-day works set in the Middle Ages, the female heretic with modern attitudes. But so far, at least, this is a minor flaw.

I would rank the first two volumes of The Children's Crusade below The Music of Marie and "Book of the Moon," simply because it lacks the soaring imagination of those two works. But it's still an outstanding series.

Like The Music of Marie, the volumes of The Children's Crusade are not numbered, but labelled by the kanji for up, middle and down. Each of the first two volumes is 288 pages long and is published by Ohta Press. Their ISBNs are 978-4-7783-2086-3 and 978-4-7783-2105-5, and they cost 1200 yen each. Their amazon.co.jp pages are here and here.

The Furuya Manga Moveable Feast Archives, along with links to other reviews of Furuya, can be found here.

*The Japanese is "Nikora"; I'm guessing at the romanization.

2012-01-11T07:59:00.001-08:00

BOOK CORNER: A LOVESOME THING BY PATRICIA S. BOWNE

When Patricia S. Bowne offered me a review copy of A Lovesome Thing, the sequel to Advice from Pigeons, I accepted readily. I'd enjoyed the earlier book and expected to enjoy the second. Just as important, since I'd already reviewed the first book, I assumed that writing a review of A Lovesome Thing would be easy. That proved not to be the case. In part, that's because things usually turn out to be harder to write than I expect. But mainly, it's because A Lovesome Thing turned out to be quite different from Advice from Pigeons in several ways. Most importantly, it's much darker.

Although most of A Lovesome Thing's main characters are academics, it's not really an academic novel in the way that Advice from Pigeons was; the academics appear primarily in their public service role. And most of the main characters of Advice from Pigeons are absent from A Lovesome Thing, the only exception being postmodern feminist demonologist Teddy Whin, who is again a major character here. The other academic protagonists were secondary characters in the earlier book. One of them is Bill Navanax, the angry alchemist from Advice from Pigeons, who is actually happy at the start of the book, because Neil Torecki has become his lover and moved in with him. Neil, also a major character, is happy himself, except for a compulsion to paint pictures of Bill's ex-lover being burned at the stake, a compulsion he has kept hidden from Bill. Cham Ligalla the exorcist also returns, and is summoned to deal with a demon who possesses people and makes the nasty demon from Advice from Pigeons look like Mr. Rogers.

There's a new major character as well, Father Rameau, a priest of the Church of the Sacred Flame, who unlike the others has no connection with the Royal Academy. Through him we learn about religion and the gods in Bowne's world, something that didn't appear in Advice from Pigeons. There are many gods, all of whom are in some sense manifestations of a single divine power, although believers worship only one god at a time. And the gods are tangible, at least occasionally, so that when a murdered woman is found in Father Rameau's church, it's natural for a policeman to ask Rameau "'when was the last time you saw this god?'"

There is actually not much humor in A Lovesome Thing, especially compared to Advice from Pigeons. This may be partly because we're more familiar with Bowne's world, so there are fewer opportunities for the incongruity-based humor that enlivened Advice from Pigeons. But mainly, A Lovesome Thing is a much darker book, as mentioned above. The demon mentioned above likes to make its victims torture themselves, tortures that are graphically described. Much of the action takes place in a truly hellish garden. And while in the earlier book Rho's basic problem was his mix of arrogance and insecurity, A Lovesome Thing explores much darker regions of the human heart.

A Lovesome Thing is well-written, and the characters are complex -- more so than in Advice from Pigeons -- and well-drawn. Conversely, the plot in A Lovesome Thing is weaker than in Advice from Pigeons. Father Rameau's story in particular feels undeveloped and doesn't add much besides an opportunity to convey information about religion in the world of Osyth. The plot in A Lovesome Thing is also harder to follow, and the fact that there are multiple copies of several characters doesn't help things.

A Lovesome Thing's main problem, though, is that after the grimness of most of the book, its happy ending is unconvincing. After Cham has finished expelling a possessing demon from its victim, who was forced by the demon to mutilate himself horribly and is now dying, "She heard the enchanter's voice again, lying to [the victim]. Bad things happened, the voice said, but what mattered was how you faced them. Whether you had been brave and kind. And if you were brave and kind, it said, everything turned out for the best and everyone you loved would be safe." (135)

The book's ending appears to show that the enchanter's "silly lie" (135) is true after all. But looking at the book as a whole, Cham's original judgment seems more accurate.

Despite these reservations, I would recommend the book to those who want to know more about the world of Osyth, or the characters. But don't expect a fun read like Advice from Pigeons.

Advice from Pigeons is available as an ebook from Double Dragon Publishing and Amazon.

[Disclaimer: I received a free e-copy of the book from the author.]

2011-08-27T07:28:00.001-07:00

BOOK CORNER: ADVICE FROM PIGEONS BY PATRICIA S. BOWNE

Advice from Pigeons is the first novel in a nascent series which Bowne describes as "academic satire and fantasy for faculty" (though the satire is so gentle that it's usually unnoticeable, and you don't need to be a faculty member to enjoy the book). According to Bowne's website, a second novel has just been released, and more novels are forthcoming. There have also been several short stories, published in small-press magazines, which I haven't read; but most of the novel's potential readers won't have read them either. Much of the book's originality and pleasure comes from the world Bowne has created, so I'll discuss that first.

Advice from Pigeons takes place in a world which is not ours, but very much like our present-day world, except that magic is commonplace and is integrated into everyday life. Users of magic are divided into five classes, although only two of these classes appear in more than bit parts in the book. Wizards build things. Sorcerors heal. Alchemists can change the laws of nature for everything, everywhere, but they have to get approval from their Guild on pain of death, which can be a headache: as one alchemist complains, "People let nature get away with murder, but as soon as they realize a person is designing it, they start to think he ought to be able to please everyone." (p. 282) Practitioners of the Arcane Arts "explore the links between human creativity and the arcane." Magicians, who are the principal subject of Advice from Pigeons, study the spiritual world and the principles of magic, though that doesn't mean that they can't do magic themselves.

Magicians are themselves divided into various sub-classes, according to the type of spiritual beings they study, among other things. In Advice from Pigeons we see magicians who study imps, vampires and incubi (the study of incubi is known as "venery" and its practitioners are referred to as "lechers"). But the focus is on demonologists. Every weekday morning the collective faculty of the Demonology Department of the Royal Academy at Osyth gathers and attempts to summon a demon. Demons in Advice from Pigeons' world don't come from Hell, but they're still dangerous to deal with, not so much because of their capacity for violence (though there is that) as because of their ability to covertly influence one's mind.

We don't learn much about the actual mechanics of magic, but charms seem to work through persuasion, either logical or emotional. The Demonology Department uses "charms of discourse" -- philosophical arguments -- to persuade demons to take on bodily form, and these charms only work until demons learn how to refute them. And the Department's exorcist banishes demons by being dismissive, which she's very good at.

The book takes place almost entirely in its world's version of academia, which is almost exactly like our academia, except with magic. Anyone who's gone to an American university, or read a novel set in one, will find the Royal Academy at Osyth and its faculty instantly recognizeable. The wider academic world, too, will be familiar (although academic feuds between demonologists can be deadly). Unlike many academic novels, though, the faculty of the demonology department are all competent and, with one exception, content with their positions.

The exception, Hiram Rho, is the book's main protagonist. Rho had a troubled adolescence. He lived on the streets, scavenging and selling his body, until he met a magician who took him in and introduced him to the academic world. The academy where he did his graduate work was ancient and prestigious. Now, fresh out of grad school, he alternates between looking down on his new colleagues at Osyth as provincial, bourgeois mediocrities and feeling inadequate to his new position. This makes him easy prey for the blandishments of what turns out to be a particularly unpleasant demon. Rho is the best character in the book: his personality and his actions throughout most of the book would make him a villain in most books, but I found him sympathetic, even while I cringed at his mistakes and poor judgment.

The book's other major plot strand revolves around Warren Oldham, the head of the department, and Russell Cinea, the department's top magician. Both are suffering from midlife crises, and midway through the book their souls depart from their bodies, leaving their bodies walking and talking but without personality and technically dead (and therefore without health insurance). Warren' wife Lillian, one of the few non-academic characters, and Teddy Whin, Russell's colleague and friend (who enjoys pointing out the phallocentrism in Russell's charms of discourse), together struggle to return the magicians' errant souls. I didn't find this plot strand compelling, although the descriptions of the magicians' souls' experiences outside their bodies were interesting.

Of the other characters, the most interesting is an angry alchemist named Navanax (the one quoted earlier). His story is left unresolved, though, evidently being saved for another book.

Advice from Pigeons is fun, though lightweight. As mentioned above, much of the fun comes from the way its world smoothly blends magic into everyday life. It has flaws: because the mechanics of magic are only described vaguely, the significance of what seems intended to be a major plot development is unclear. But I recommend it, and look forward to reading future books in the series.

Advice from Pigeons is available as an ebook from Double Dragon Publishing and Amazon.

[Disclaimer: I received a free e-copy of the book from the author.]

EDITED TO ADD: I forgot to mention that you can read the first chapter for free on Bowne's website. You can also read the first chapter of the second book.

2011-07-29T18:26:00.000-07:00

FRUITS BASKET MANGA MOVEABLE FEAST: A PERFECT MOTHER?*

Among other things, Fruits Basket is a relentless catalogue of the ways parents can damage their children. From major characters like Kyo, Yuki and Akito, through secondary characters like Rin and Momiji, to minor characters like Machi, character after character suffers the scars of their parents' indifference or active dislike. But there's one shining counter-example: Tohru's mother Kyoko. Far from messing Tohru up, she made her into the good, loving person she is. In fact, Kyoko is a model parent. At least, she appears to be one during most of the series.

There's one discordant element from the start, though: Tohru's constant self-denigration. Even as she's unselfishly helping everyone, she feels guilty for not being unselfish enough. My favorite example is the time when, after visiting Rin (who doesn't even like her) in the hospital, she condemns herself for having forgotten for a moment about her goal of lifting the curse. If Kyoko was so wonderful, why was Tohru so bent on punishing herself?

The first hint that Kyoko was not as perfect as Tohru and Arisa's recollections made her out to be is Kyo's flashback of Kyoko completely freaking out when Tohru had gotten lost. But it's not until volume sixteen that we get a more complete picture of Kyoko and Tohru's relationship. In another flashback, Kyoko tells Kyo that after Tohru's father Katsuya had died, she (Kyoko) had been plunged into despair, and was on the verge of killing herself so that she could be with Katsuya again. At the last moment, she heard a kid yelling "Mom!" and was reminded of Tohru (then a very young child) and realized that she had been neglecting her. She rushed home, apologized in tears to Tohru and embraced her. After telling this to Kyo, Kyoko says: "Maybe the world doesn't need me. But there's still one person who's kind enough to need me. I only need that to live."

A heartwarming story with an affirmative moral, at least on the surface. But when you look more closely, there's a darker side. Whether she realizes it or not, Kyoko is in effect imposing upon Tohru the responsibility of keeping her alive, which is a terrible burden for a parent to place upon her young child.

Am I reading too much into this scene? Am I being overly cynical? I might have thought so if not for volume nineteen, where we see this dynamic from Tohru's side. At Kyoko's grave, Kyo meets Tohru's grandfather, who in the course of conversation asks him if he knows why Tohru speaks in such a polite manner. When Kyo says no, Tohru's grandfather tells him that she's imitating her father. At Katsuya's funeral, she heard some relatives saying that because she didn't look like Katsuya, she would be "no consolation" to Kyoko. When Kyoko fell into depression, Tohru asked her grandfather: "Daddy went somewhere far away, didn't he? Will Mommy go there too? Is Dad calling her? She's been sad for a long time. She won't talk to me. Is she sad because I don't look like Dad? What can I do to be like him? Will Mom get better if I'm just like him? Will she stay here?"** Since Kyoko's return, Tohru has been talking like her father.

Pondering this conversation, Kyo asks Tohru herself if her father looked like her. Nervously and with a forced smile, she tells him that they didn't look too much alike, but everybody said that they talked alike, even her mother. Then, in one of the most heartbreaking moments in a series full of heartbreaking moments, Tohru says "That's a lie.... I'm just mimicking the way he talked."*** She had been afraid that her father would take her mother away. and to try to hold on to her, she had imitated her father.

When I read this, everything about Tohru's character fell into place. Ever since her father died, she had been afraid that her mother would go away -- i.e., kill herself. And she had been continuously making an effort to keep her with her. She was always cheerful on the outside so that Kyoko would want to stay. She was unselfish to the point of abnegation because any demands of her own might drive Kyoko away. And she constantly felt guilty because the real Tohru wouldn't be able to keep Kyoko from going away, as she wasn't after Katsuya died. Even after Kyoko died (which she blamed herself for) the patterns of behavior she had learned continued. Without meaning to, Kyoko profoundly damaged her, even though she loved her.

Once I realized this, I saw some of the earlier scenes in a new light. For instance, it was now clear to me that for a schoolgirl to live alone in a tent when she has friends who would gladly put her up, so as not to bother them, isn't an endearing quirk but a sign of serious psychological problems (something I should have realized before).

Of course, Tohru is genuinely kind and good, and Kyoko is responsible for that too. Kyoko isn't a bad person, but in Fruits Basket even good people keep hurting each other without meaning to. Though Takaya gives her characters happy endings, her vision in Fruits Basket is hardly a cheerful one.

*This post may come off as a rebuttal to Kristin Bomba's contribution to the Manga Moveable Feast. I do have some disagreements with what Kistin writes about Tohru and Kyoko, but I've had these ideas for a long time, and I had decided to write them up for the MMF before I read Kristin's post.

**In the Tokyopop edition, there are quotation marks around each of these sentences, but not in the Japanese edition.

***I've used my own translation here. The Japanese, for those who want to check, is "Uso ... desu ... kuchimane o shite iru dake desu" (first ellipsis Takaya's).

2011-07-25T08:56:00.000-07:00

MANGA CORNER: BILLY BAT VOL. 6

I recently bought a copy of Billy Bat vol. 6, which came out a few weeks ago, and I just finished reading it. The first three-quarters of this volume continue the story of the previous volume. We learn more about how Chuck Culkin replaced Kevin on "Billy Bat," and we see Chuck in the present as well. And we continue following Kevin and the man whose identity I'm withholding because it would be a huge spoiler. The last quarter of the book takes place in New York in 1963 and introduces a whole new batch of characters. When I first skimmed through this portion I saw a figure who looked like Bob Dylan and saw the katakana for "Bob Dylan," and I thought "Urasawa wouldn't ... would he?" As it turns out, he didn't: it's just a character who looks like Dylan and is a big Dylan fan. And he's not the main character of this section, anyway: his Japanese-American ex-girlfriend is. This volume doesn't reach the storytelling heights of some of the earlier volumes, and it dissipates some of the urgency I felt coming out of the last volume. But it's still a good volume, without the lenghty weak section that mars volume five.

The blurb on the obi (the paper band that wraps around the bottom half of the jacket) says "Mysteries will be made clear!!" But they aren't, for the most part. We do learn the motive behind the Shinoyama case, which played a prominent role in the first volume-and-a-half but has pretty much gone unmentioned since then. And the Bat reveals something of his true nature (if we can believe what he says, that is), but his words raise at least as many questions as they answer.

Though there are no shocks in this volume to compare to those delivered in vols. 2 and 4, it nevertheless changed my expectations for the series. At the end of the last volume, everything seemed to be building towards a decisive confrontation at a certain place and time, and sooner rather than later. But now my guess would be that we're in this for the long haul. If that confrontation takes place, it will probably be indecisive, like several such confrontations in Monster and 20th Century Boys. And the introduction of what looks to be a major new character, and a major new arc involving her, makes it unlikely that Urasawa will be wrapping this up very soon.

I'm getting a bit worried about the licensing prospects for Billy Bat in the U.S., though. Again, I have to be vague for fear of spoilers. But I can say that an American historical figure is depicted in a way that, while patently fictional, might still anger and even outrage some people, and Kodansha, Billy Bat's publisher, might possibly be worried about offending the U.S. market.

A note for those who have read, or are reading, this volume in Japanese. You may have come across the word "Angorumoa" and been baffled, as I was. Upon searching, I eventually discovered that it's not the Sgt. Frog or Transformers character: it's the Japanization of "Angolmois." (To avoid creating false expectations among those who recognize the word or have Googled it, I'll add that nothing in this volume takes place later than 1963. If this makes no sense to you, don't bother trying to figure it out; it's not that important.)

Billy Bat is 196 pages long, and sells for 600 yen. It's published by Kodansha in their "Morning" line, and its ISBN is 9784063870015.

(Reviews of the previous volumes are here, here, here and here.)

2011-07-21T14:30:00.000-07:00

ANIME CORNER: EVANGELION 2.22: YOU CAN (NOT) ADVANCE

Neon Genesis Evangelion, the groundbreaking and popular anime series, is currently being remade as a series of four theatrical films, collectively entitled Rebuild of Evangelion. I watched the first of these films, annoyingly titled Evangelion 1.11: You Are (Not) Alone, when the DVD came out, but don't remember much about it, other than that it deviated little from the plot of the original. And yesterday I watched the second installment, Evangelion 2.22: You Can (Not) Advance. I didn't have high expectations going in, but even so, I was disappointed.

Evangelion 2.22 feels like, more than anything, like one of the many ripoffs of the original Evangelion. The main characters have lost their specificity and become cliches: Shinji is now a typical tortured teen protagonist, Asuka is a typical tsundere character, and Rei is, well, a typical Rei Ayanami-type character. The other characters are barely developed at all (including the new pilot featured on the cover, who plays very little role in this installment). What made the original Evangelion so fascinating and infuriating was that it was in large part an expression of Hideaki Anno's tortured psyche. Evangelion 2.22 seems to have been made solely to make money

Evangelion 2.22 does deviate from the plot of the original Evangelion in important ways. For those who remember the original, this produces one genuinely shocking moment. But it's not worth watching the whole thing just for that moment.

If you do watch Evangelion 2.22, don't turn it off or skip to the preview when the credits start rolling. The filmmakers have placed after the credits, not the sort of extra you sometimes get as a reward for sitting through the credits, but a brief but crucial scene. And this scene comes before the chapter break separating the credits from the preview.

2011-05-25T11:01:00.000-07:00

COMICS CORNER: NUTS

Nuts is the great lost kid strip. I'd place it with Peanuts and Calvin and Hobbes, although its mood is different from both of those. Its protagonist (who I believe was never named) is neither a tortured Everyman like Charlie Brown or an irrepressibly imaginative troublemaker like Calvin. He's just a regular kid experiencing the world around him, who's beginning to understand just how complicated that world is. Nuts was written and drawn by Gahan Wilson, but that's misleading: his writing here is far removed from the single-panel cartoons that Wilson is famous for, although the art is in the same style. Nuts is seldom morbid, though sometimes mordant; and Wilson has a keen sense of realism about childhood, as well as a good memory for what childhood actually feels like.

As far as I know, only one collection of Nuts ever appeared, and that's long out of print and treasured by those fortunate enough to own it. And I had no expectation of the strip ever returning to print. But in May's Previews Fantagraphics announced The Complete Nuts, which adds over two dozen strips not in the earlier volume. (It's also available for pre-order from Amazon.) This is the most excited I've been about any classic strip reprint in a long time.

(If you're wondering why you've never heard of Nuts, it's because it never appeared in newspapers. It appeared monthly in the National Lampoon, but that's even more misleading.)

(Incidentally, speaking of Amazon and Gahan Wilson, Amazon is currently selling Fantagraphics' three-volume set of Wilson's Playboy cartoons for nearly half off, though that's still over sixty bucks.)

2011-05-13T19:39:00.000-07:00

MANGA CORNER: FRACTION BY SHINTARO KAGO

A long time ago I reviewed one of Shintaro Kago's books. Since then I've read two others, and am currently in the midst of a third. Fraction isn't the best of these, but it's the one I finished reading most recently.

Over half of Fraction's 204 pages are taken up by a single 128-page story, also called "Fraction." It is unusual for Kago to write such a long story, although this isn't his first long story, nor his longest. It's also more tightly plotted than most of Kago's stories.

"Fraction" is divided into eight chapters, alternately labelled "Wagiri-ma" ("Slicing Devil") and "Manga-ka." The "Wagiri-ma" chapters deal with a serial killer who slices his victims in two horizontally, who becomes perturbed when he learns of another serial killer copying his M.O. The protagonist of the "Manga-ka" chapters is Kago himself. In the first of these chapters, Kago worries that because the number of magazines is shrinking, he will have to write more mainstream stories in order to continue to support himself as a mangaka. (Don't worry, he doesn't -- at least, not in this volume.) Meeting with a his editor, a woman, he tells her that he intends to write a mystery. Most of the rest of the "Manga-ka" chapters are devoted to the continuation of this coversation.

He plans to write a mystery that will deceive the reader; and then the coversation becomes meta, as he gives examples, first in novels and then in manga, of how a reader can be tricked into assuming something that is false. The manga-specific techniques he explains include taking advantage of the fact that panels are static (so the reader can be led to think that a character is moving when in fact she is standing still) and framing a scene so that crucial information is hidden outside the panel. After this, the reader will naturally be looking out for such tricks in "Fraction" itself, but is unlikely to spot them before they are revealed. After they are revealed, Kago (both the real one and the character) demonstrate at length how the tricks were worked.

Without giving the ending away, I can say that while for much of its length "Fraction" seems atypical of Kago's work, it ends up being very typical. On the band around the cover, the publisher proclaims "Fraction" to be Kago's first mystery. The term "mystery" is somewhat deceptive here, though, because no reader could possibly deduce the solution, given its extreme improbability and the virtual absence of clues.

Aside from two brief prose sections which I haven't read, the rest of the volume is made up of four sixteen-page stories, which are more typical of Kago's work and can be dealt with more quickly.* The first of these, "Kaette Kita Otoko" ["The Man Who Returned"] has a set-up much like Edogawa Rampo's short story "Caterpillar," which Suehiro Maruo adapted into a manga. A soldier returns home completely disabled, helpless and dependent upon his wife whom he formerly abused. In revenge, the wife torments him and uses him as a sex toy. But the set-ups differ in two ways. First, the main character is not a quadruple amputee, but is skeletally thin and has a very thin and sensitive skin which is constantly drying out. Second, his injury was not incurred in the regular course of battle, but by being swallowed and partially digested by a giant naked woman being used as a beast of burden by the army. (Yes, you read that right.) There's no explanation for the woman's presence, nor is there much of one for the story's gory ending.

Reading the next story, "Shindou" ["Tremor"], is a bit of shock so soon after Japan's recent disaster, as it takes place in the aftermath of an earthquake powerful enough to destroy buildings. The first few pages realistically depict the earthquake's aftermath. Then the story becomes a series of riffs on the theme of "tremors." There is no gore in this story, unlike the rest of the stories in the volume.

The fourth story, "Toukai," ["Collapse"] is set in a city where people are collapsing en masse in public places. Aside from that, it's too incoherent and bizarre for a summary to make much sense.

The final story, "Kakka-souyou" ["Irritation"] is the most straightforward in the book, and resembles a mainstream horror story. An insect lays eggs under a girl's skin, which hatch into larvae. These crawl around under her skin, making her itch. Eventually they leave her body, but she decides she likes the sensation and deliberately puts insects and worms under her skin. Ultimately she becomes addicted, with a predictable (in a horror story) result.

Comics theoreticians and semioticians may find "Fraction" of particular interest, since Kago essentially deconstructs the manga panel and page. And you can follow this deconstruction to some extent even without reading Japanese. Otherwise, the volume is entertaining if you have a strong tolerance for gore, although unlike the other Kago book I reviewed, there's not a lot of humor in it and what there is is of the blackest sort. But it doesn't show what Kago is capable of at his best. If you can read Japanese, and are looking to extend your knowledge of Kago beyond what's been scanlated, Banji Kaichou, the other Kago book I've read, would be a better starting point. Rokushitsu Tensou Ataraxia, which I'm currently reading, is also very good so far.

Fraction is 208 pages long and costs 1500 yen. It's published by Coa Magazine and its ISBN is 9784862527189. Here's its amazon.co.jp page.

*One is four pages of notes explaining the allusions in the story, and the other is a conversation of Kago with Ryuuichi Kasumi, who is identified as a writer of "baka mysteries."

2011-02-07T19:18:00.000-08:00

MUSIC CORNER: LES RALLIZES DENUDES, HEAVIER THAN A DEATH IN THE FAMILY

I was up in the Chicago area recently, and made a stop at Reckless Records on Damen. While browsing the psych-rock section, I came upon the above CD. The blurb supplied by the store revealed that the group was Japanese, notwithstanding its name. It also compared them to the Velvet Underground, the Stooges, the MC5 and other good stuff, as well as recommending it highly, so I decided to take a chance on it. Well, the Velvet influence is there: "People Can Choose" (the titles of all the tracks are in English, though as far as I can tell there is no singing in English on the album) sounds a lot like the instrumental part of "European Son to Delmore Schwarz," and parts of "The Night Collectors" sound like the chaotic part in the middle of the Guitar Amp Tape "Sister Ray." But taken as a whole, the album sounds incredibly like Fushitsusha. In fact, after hearing the first track I couldn't stop myself from checking to assure myself I hadn't gotten a Fushitsusha disc by mistake, although I already knew I hadn't. The CD had no information whatsoever about its contents except the song titles, but searching the Web I discovered that it was an anthology of live performances from 1977 (except for the above -mentioned "People Can Choose," which is from 1973). So the music on the CD actually predates Fushitsusha, which was founded in 1978, although its leader Keiji Haino had been active since before 1970. Be that as it may, it's pretty awesome.

2011-01-15T16:20:00.000-08:00

MANGA CORNER: BILLY BAT BY NAOKI URASAWA, VOL. 5

Reviews of the previous volumes are here, here and here.

I'll try to keep this free of major spoilers: in particular, I'm not giving away the big surprise in volume four. However, it's getting increasingly difficult to avoid spoilers and still say anything meaningful. And on the subject of spoilers, if you haven't read volume four and really don't want to be spoiled, I would suggest you try to avoid even looking at the front cover of volume five, let alone reading it. It probably won't mean much to most people (including me) , but to some it will be a giveaway.

The volume opens with a four-page story, not drawn by Kevin, featuring the "fake," Disneyfied Billy Bat.* As such, it's only partly successful: Urasawa's only concession to a Disney-like art style is the size of characters' eyes. (Also, you can give Billy Bat huge eyes and dress him like Mickey Mouse, but he's still a bat.) This segues into a flashback from 1950, showing how Kevin lost control of his "creation." Here I owe Urasawa an apology. In my review of the first volume, I expressed disbelief that Kevin's publisher would allow him to quit his strip for several months to go to Japan, because I was assuming that the strip would simply not be published during that time. In fact, it was taken over by Kevin's assistant, which led directly to Kevin's losing Billy.

After a quick return to the "present" (1962 or 1963), Urasawa jumps back to 1960, returning to the interracial lovers from the second volume. They are now married and expecting a child, and are driving across the Deep South to Tony, the husband's, new job. On the way, Tony witnesses a lynching, and the trip becomes a nightmare. Tony is terrified at first, but eventually does the right thing, inspired by a Billy Bat comic.

The section featuring these two characters was my least favorite part of the second volume, and the same is true for this volume, although there are a couple of chilling and suspenseful moments.First, the ending is stupid. And I'm not talking about Tony's being inspired by Billy Bat: that I can live with. I'm talking about the resolution of the whole affair, which is a blatant cop-out. Second, I once said that characterization isn't Urasawa's strong point, but the couple here are particularly uninteresting. Third is the lack of historical verisimilitude. It's inconceivable to me that an interracial couple would so blithely drive across the Deep South on country roads in 1960, particularly when the black woman is from the South herself. They even plan to stop for the night in a small town. There are other specific errors which I could cite, but more importantly, my impression is that Urasawa doesn't really understand race relations in the U.S. in 1960 (though I can't document this). This leads to my biggest problem with the whole section: it's a generic melodrama that could have taken place anywhere, with some local color painted on. The black characters the lovers meet in the South are Japanese in blackface.

This section goes on for too long (three chapters out of eight), but it does end, and the second half of the book is much better. It's set in 1963, and it follows the character whom I talked about in my review of the last volume, but didn't name (I'll call him Mr. X, for convenience), and Smith the investigator and Kevin, who are trying to track him down. All the live plot strands are converging on a single place and time, and signs are that this convergence will take place sooner rather than later. Or so I thought, until I read the last few pages of this volume, when Urasawa throws yet another curve ball, sending the story off into another unexpected direction. Now it's anyone's guess how long things will take.

As I said, in general characterization is not Urasawa's strong point, but "Mr. X" is an exception. He may be the most successful character in any of Urasawa's series that I've read. I can't say much about his characterization without spoilers, but even if only his actions in this volume are taken into consideration, it's amazing that Urasawa can make him sympathetic. There's a scene in which he has himself photographed holding a gun. Out of context, the photo is chilling. In context the scene is both ironic and moving.

I highly recommend this volume, despite the weakness of the "Deep South" chapters. Urasawa is a master storyteller, and here he's mostly at the top of his form. After I finished volume four, I considered buying the magazine in which Billy Bat is serialized, to keep up with it. Eventually I decided I couldn't justify the expense, but after finishing this volume I had the same impulse.

Billy Bat is published by Kodansha, and is in the Morning line, which is indicated by the word "Mooningu" in katakana at the top of the spine. Its price is 590 yen, and its ISBN is 978-4-06-372955-9. Here's its Amazon.co.jp page (but keep in mind what I said above about the front cover and spoilers).

*Technically, Billy Bat"s new owner isn't Disney, but he's clearly modelled upon Disney.

2010-12-21T18:28:00.000-08:00

MANGA CORNER: MONEY MOON BY KEI ISHIZAKA, VOLS. 1 AND 2

These two volumes were originally published in 1990 and 1991. The first volume is one of the first Japanese-language manga I ever bought. When I bought it, as I recall, I did not know any Japanese and had no plans to teach myself Japanese; I simply bought it out of curiosity. I bought it used and it only cost a dollar, so my curiousity was easy to indulge. There's at least one more volume after the second, but I've never seen it. At any rate, though this is one of the first series I owned, I only got around to reading it now. The female creator of the series, Kei Ishizaka, also wrote and drew the two-volume manga I'm Home, which I've read and reviewed.

The protagonist of Money Moon is a wholesome and innocent-looking college student named Tsukiko Kinjo. (The first kanji of her family and given names mean "money" and "moon," respectively.) The English-language blurb on the jacket announces that "'MONEY MOON' is the story about a girl, named KINJO, TSUKIKO making it a rule to enjoy sex and make money, as much as possible." What this blurb doesn't make clear is that Tsukiko pursues both these goals simultaneously: in other words, she's a part-time prostitute. Her attitude is strictly pragmatic: if men are willing to pay money to sleep with her, why do it for free? Hence, her friend Erika's lectures on the evils of selling one's body go in one ear and out the other.

At the start of the series, she's only hooking casually. This changes when her father, a banker, flips out, takes his boss hostage, and forces the bank to dump 300,000,000 yen (which at that time would have been equivalent to about $2,000,000) from a helicopter. Not only does he go to jail, Tsukiko's family is obligated to repay that part of the 300,000,000 yen that wasn't recovered (which is most of it), which with interest amounts to 2,020,522 yen (about $13,000) a month for twenty years.

Since Tsukiko's father was the family's sole breadwinner, her family has is in a fix. But Tsukiko, who is self-confident to the point of cockiness, wolunteers to pay off the whole sum and support her family. Fortunately, she's already been in contact with a scout for adult videos, which promise to be much more lucrative than simple prostitution. And at first everything seems to be working out: her debut film is a big hit and she becomes a media celebrity, quashing objections from her mother and brother by tossing them money. Unfortunately, she soon discovers that performing in front of the cameras day after day gets monotonous, and she develops an attitude problem. And then, to make matters worse, her fans desert her for newer adult stars, and to keep working she has to appear in a bondage film, which she doesn't enjoy at all.

The nadir comes when her manager arranges to have her raped -- for real -- on camera. Fortunately, the assault is interrupted before she is raped. And while shaken, she retains enough sang froid to present her manager with an itemized bill for damages (and a threat to go to the police if he won't pay). In fact, the episode indirectly inspires her to come up with a new money-making scheme: making porn for women. The second volume ends with her searching for a male lead for her first production.

The series also criticizes the Japanese society of that time, portraying it as money-crazed. (The first volume was published in 1990, when Japan's bubble economy of the 1980s had begun to collapse, but would probably have begun serialization when it was still booming.) Tsukiko sees everything in terms of money. Nor is she the only one in her family to be preoccupied with money. Her mother belongs to a new religion which preaches that money is all-important, and promises that those who donate to the religion will be richly rewarded. And her younger brother, who is drawn like a gnome, has calculated exactly how much, in terms of lifetime earnings, each point on his college entrance exams is worth. Ironically, it is her father, from whom Tsukiko learned to respect money, who during the hostage negotiations denounces how money has become an end in itself.

There's also a romantic subplot involving Tsukiko and Ryou, her co-star in her adult film debut. To one familiar with manga romance conventions, they're clearly destined to get together, although so far neither has acknowledged having feelings for the other. The twist is that they've already had sex with each other more than once. Ryou is even more businesslike about sex than Tsukiko is. After their first scene together, she offers to "finish him off," no charge (there was no "money shot"), but he declines: he doesn't do anything for free. When she later tries to seduce him in real life, he demands that she pay him.

The art style could be described as "simplified shoujo." On the one hand, it has the formal properties of shoujo, such as rejection of the grid -- rectangular panels are the exception, rather than the rule -- and the use of "decorative" flowers and abstract designs. On the other hand, except for Tsukiko and Erika, the characters aren't drawn in the big-eyed style associated with shoujo; and in general the art lacks the emotional intensity which is shoujo's chief characteristic.

Despite its subject matter, and its having been serialized in Big Comics Spirits, a seinen (young men's) magazine, Money Moon isn't primarily intended to titillate. Tsukiko is youthful in appearance, but at the same time is clearly drawn as a young woman, not an underaged girl. And while she is often nude and the sex scenes are fairly explicit, they aren't particularly sexy.

Money Moon isn't a great series, but it's enjoyable and fresh. Tsukiko is an unusual protagonist, with her cockiness, fixation on money and casual attitude towards sex. However, the series is out of print, so I can't order it through the Japanese bookstore where I shop. Somewhat to my surprise, amazon.co.jp offers a number of used copies of the third volume, as well as the first two, for one yen apiece (a little more than a penny). But while I'd like to read more of the series, I'm not sure that I'm motivated enough to pay the high cost of shipping from Japan. If anyone wants to investigate for themselves, the amazon.co.jp pages for the first two volumes are here and here.

Money Moon was published by Shogakukan. Its 10-digit ISBNs are:

vol. 1: 4-09-182321-1
vol. 2: 4-09-182322-X

2010-09-22T19:38:00.000-07:00

MANGA CORNER: BILLY BAT, VOLUMES 3 AND 4

Billy Bat volume 3 came out about half a year ago, and I bought it and read it soon after. I intended to review it, but as you may have noticed, I wasn't blogging at all for most of this year, and by the time I resumed blogging, I had bought volume 4. So here's a review of both volumes.

First, a very quick description of the series as a whole. Billy Bat starts out in 1949 as the story of Kevin Yamagata, a Japanese-American cartoonist who writes and draws a popular post-WWII comic about an anthropomorphic bat detective named Billy Bat,. Yamagata goes to Japan, and discovers that his creation of Billy was unconsciously inspired by a drawing of a bat which originated centuries ago. He also gets caught up in a murder case. But halfway through volume 2, the story splinters into a number of separate episodes ranging in time and place from the ancient Middle East to feudal Japan to Manhattan in 1959. These episodes have no apparent connection to each other except that they all feature appearances of the Bat, a spirit who can be evoked by the drawing Kevin saw, and who has been manipulating human history for millenia, for reasons that are still unclear.

In my review of volume 2, I surmised that the story set in feudal Japan which made up the last chapter might continue into the next volume. And so it does. In fact, almost the entirety of volume 3 is devoted to this story, with only two brief scenes set in modern times.

Kan, a shinobi (spy, though the back cover copy refers to him as a ninja), is on a mission to deliver a certain scroll. Along the way, he is forced to fight his childhood friends, who are trying to stop him. As the death toll mounts, his doubts about himself and his mission increase; and the scroll itself takes on a sinister aspect. What's more, it's a carrier for the Bat, and Kan's story is punctuated with conversations between Kan and the Bat in which the Bat tries to convince Kan that it's perfectly O.K. for him to kill his friends and betray those who have helped him. Interspersed with all this are scenes of Kan and his friends as children, trying to train themselves to become shinobi. All told, this shinobi arc is almost a self-contained story, but we also learn a lot about the Bat's modus operandi.

Considered as a self-contained story, the shinobi arc is successful. Kan is a more complex and interesting character than most of Urasawa's other protagonists; he is sympathetic but isn't, and doesn't aspire to be, a hero or morally perfect. Nor does the arc fall into sentimentality, as so many of Urasawa's story arcs do.

As far as I know, Urasawa is not particularly noted for his fight scenes or action scenes. But here he gives us a series of well-drawn, exciting scenes of ninja-style action. His artistic approach is unusual, though: rather than large, splashy panels, he uses small panels with lots of closeups.

In the last four pages of volume three, we see a two-page excerpt from one of Yamagata's Billy Bat comics, from which the point of view pulls back to show that the person reading it is standing under an arch reading "Billyland." This is the start of the arc which will occupy all of volume four, and presumably beyond. The time is the early sixties, which appears to be the series' new "present," which means we've skipped over more than a decade. The place is the U.S. Initially, we're in Billyland, a theme part based upon Billy Bat, which Urasawa has quite obviously modelled upon Disneyland. There's even a man inside a Billy Bat suit (which has been redesigned to closely resemble Mickey Mouse) who interacts and poses for photos with visitors.

"Billy" meets a kid who tells him he's a fake and as evidence draws the ur-Bat on the ground. Shortly afterwards comes what is perhaps the biggest shock in the series so far, bigger even than the first time-jump in volume 2. Unfortunately this makes it impossible to say much about the plot of this volume without giving away the surprise. (If you plan to read this in Japanese, and don't want to be spoiled, don't read the green band that wraps around the jacket. In fact, try not to even look at it.)

I can safely reveal a few pieces of information. It should be no surprise that a conspiracy is involved; in fact, more than one. Smith the investigator returns, and we now see that there's more to him than just the dogged, honest detective type familiar from Monster and Pluto.

The Billy Bat comic we saw at the end of volume three turns out to be an unauthorized comic put out by a small publisher. In fact, Kevin Yamagata no longer has any connection to the "official" Billy Bat, which has been redesigned to look cuter, and most people aren't even aware that he introduced Billy Bat to the U.S. (yet another similarity to Disney). But various people are interested in Kevin's comic, and their reasons appear to have nothing to do with copyright infringement.

In my review of the first volume, I complained that the portions set in the U.S. felt inauthentic. I didn't feel that way about volume 4. At any rate, Urasawa, or his collaborator Takashi Nagasaki, has clearly researched at least one aspect of early sixties American history. (Again, I can't be more specific without spoiling the surprise.)

As in the previous volume, volume four introduces a new protagonist -- the guy in the Billy Bat suit, though he doesn't stay in it long -- who is sympathetic without fitting in to the black-white into which most Urasawa's characters fall, including Kevin Yamagata. In fact, when Kevin reappears in volume 4, I found myself wishing he hadn't. Kevin is typical of Urasawa's tortured-good-guy characters, with little to distinguish him as an individual. What's more, after his initial decision to go to Japan he is almost entirely passive, reacting to the actions of others, and that is even more true in volume 4.

The real Bat appears in this volume as well, and we learn more about him. We also learn more about who the "bad guys" are. And the volume also explains how Kevin can stop the bad guys' schemes by drawing manga, something I had wondered about in my review of volume 2. There are still a lot of mysteries left, but I no longer feel, as I did at the end of volume 2, that I'm groping in the dark.

After only four volumes, Billy Bat is already more ambitious than Monster, Pluto, or what I've read of 20th Century Boys. Its plot is more complex, and it ranges more widely in both time and space. It is also more audacious in another sense. Both Pluto and 20th Century Boys were set in the future (even though Pluto contained a thinly veiled allegory of the Iraq War); and while Monster took the fall of Communism in Eastern Europe as background, the plot itself was entirely invented as far as I know. In contrast, the plot of Billy Bat is closely tied to the actual postwar histories of the U.S. and Japan. Real historical figures appear as characters in volume 4. And while the conspiracies Urasawa posits behind the scenes may be fictional (or not, depending on how paranoid you are), the effects he attributes to them really happened. But the greater ambition of the series doesn't mean a slackening of the suspense which Urasawa excels at.

I haven't been this excited about an ongoing series in a long time. If the later volumes are as good as these two volumes, Billy Bat may herald a new level of achievement for Urasawa.

Billy Bat volumes 3 and 4 are published by Kodansha, as were the first two volumes. Volume 3 has 224 pages and costs 590 yen, while volume 4 has 240 pages and costs 600 yen. Their ISBNs, respectively, are 978-4-06-372888-0 and 978-4-06-372922-1.

2010-09-07T07:14:00.000-07:00

MOVIE CORNER: METROPOLIS (1927)

Fritz Lang's 1927 film Metropolis is a landmark of silent cinema and of science fiction cinema; most of the science fiction films that have appeared since then are indebted to its imagery. But shortly after its initial release, about an hour was cut from it, and since then it has only circulated in more or less mutilated versions. A restoration in 2002, currently available on DVD, restored some of the lost footage. Now, following the 2008 discovery of a print in an Argentine archive, what is being billed as "The Complete Metropolis" is playing in theaters, and I saw it last Saturday. The new footage is of course of great historical importance, but nevertheless the new version has been oversold.

(In what follows, I assume readers have seen the 2002 restoration. If you've only seen an earlier version, of course a lot more footage will be new to you than it was to me.)

First, it isn't complete. While 25 minutes have been added, and presumably the film is now nearly complete, an important scene is still missing and summarized in intertitles. (Apparently this is due to damage to the print.) of course, "The Almost Complete Metropolis" would be a less compelling tag line, but technically this is still false advertising.

Secondly, contrary to what's implied in the New York Times article reprinted in the program at my showing, the new material doesn't transform the film. Pauline Kael once called Citizen Kane "a shallow masterpiece." If so, then Metropolis is a silly masterpiece, and the restored version remains so. If anything, it demonstrates that the incoherence and disjointedness of earlier versions cannot be blamed on missing footage.

Most glaringly, the new footage does nothing to fix the plot's biggest hole: that the actions of Joh Fredersen make no sense. In the first place, why does he want to destroy Maria's influence over his workers? She's actually doing him a favor by keeping the workers quiet. In the second place, why does he allow the rebelling workers free rein? Rotwang tells Maria that he does so so that he will have an excuse to use force against them, but if that's his motive then there's no need for him to go as far as letting them destroy their underground city, which he will now have to rebuild at great expense (since he needs workers, and the workers will need somewhere to live). In any case, Fredersen never gives any indication of wanting to use force against the workers.

The new version does restore a subplot which was missing completely from earlier versions, involving Josaphat, Georgy 11811 (the worker with whom Freder switches places), and the Thin Man. But this subplot adds little, if anything, and ultimately goes nowhere. It does expland on the film's religious themes, but these are still half-baked. But then, nobody watches Metropolis for its "ideas" anyway.

All this is not to say that the new footage adds nothing, or that there's no point in watching the new version. The new version is better than the 2002 version, particularly the film's final third, where much if not most of the new footage appears. The rescue of the children is lengthened substantially, and the added footage makes the sequence more more dramatic and suspenseful. In the scenes that follow there is not as much new footage, but what there is also adds drama. There is nothing "difficult" about any of this footage, so I'm baffled as to why these cuts were made. It's as if the producers of Safety Last, deciding the film was too long, cut fifteen minutes out of Lloyd's climb up the skyscraper.

To sum up, you should certainly see the new version if it's playing in your city, but it's not worth making a special trip. The DVD and Blu-Ray will be out in November, and the current theatrical showing is projected off a Blu-Ray disc anyway, so unless you're really impatient you'll lose nothing by waiting for it.

2010-01-07T16:26:00.001-08:00

MANGA CORNER: BILLY BAT VOL. 2

The second volume of Naoki Urasawa's Billy Bat has appeared in Japanese. I recently read it, and it turns out to be even more interesting than the average volume of Urasawa's manga. While its first half, like the first volume, continues in the template of Monster and 20th Century Boys, the second half is a radical departure.

The first half continues Kevin's story, though it provides mighty few answers. Kevin learns, not too surprisingly, that he is the only one who can stop the bad guys (whoever they are) from carrying out their nefarious schemes (whatever they are). More surprisingly, he has to stop them by drawing manga, although how this will work is not stated. There are connections with postwar Japanese politics, as Shimoyama's murder seems to be somehow related to a plan to fire hundreds of thousands of Japanese workers. We also see more of Lt. Feeney, who clearly plays the dogged investigator role in this series.

In the second half of the volume, Urasawa does something that is, as far as I know, new for him. First, he abruptly jumps back in time to the ancient world, and stays there for about two and a half chapters. To avoid spoilers, I won't say anything more, although the back-cover copy reveals the situation clearly. After this segment, the next two chapters abruptly jump forward to 1959 (ten years later than the main story has reached) in New York City. The bride on the cover of this volume is from this segment. (Incidentally, she's black, not Japanese.) For the final chapter, Urasawa jumps back again, to feudal Japan. And ninjas. At this point I began to get a mite exasperated; but Urasawa is actually pretty good at depicting ninja action. None of these segments have any apparent connection with each other, or with the main story, aside from the Bat's presence in all of them. And while my guess would be that they will develop into continuing storylines, they could be merely vignettes intended to illustrate the Bat's ubiquity through history.

Of these four segments, the best is the ancient-world one. The main story doesn't advance very much in this volume, and it also includes a grotesquely maudlin scene. The story set in 1959 is somewhat sentimental, although its highlighting of black-white relations suggests that the "white" and "black" bats may not correspond to good and evil, as I had assumed after the first volume. And the final segment, set in feudal Japan, seems undeveloped: I suspect that it will actually continue into the third volume.

As was true of the first volume, characterization is not Urasawa's strong point here. Kevin is still an uninteresting character, and the none of the new characters are distinctive, with the exception of two of the characters in the ancient world segment. (Again, I can't identify them without spoilers.) But despite my reservations on this volume, Urasawa's mysteries still have me eagerly awaiting volume three.

Billy Bat vol. 2 is published by Kodansha* under the Morning imprint (whose logo is mooningu in katakana). It's 216 pp. and sells for 590 yen. Here's its Amazon.co.jp page.

*And hence, as David Welsh points out, unlikely to be licensed in the U.S. by Viz (which is co-owned by Kodansha's two main rivals), contrary to what I said in my post about the first volume.

2010-01-03T18:28:00.001-08:00

TV ON DVD-R CORNER: FRIDAYS

Fridays was a late-night sketch comedy show which ran from 1980 to 1982. Like Saturday Night Live, which it was modeled upon, its cast was a group of young unknowns, among whom were a pre-Seinfeld Larry David and Michael Richards. While it was running, it was widely derided for being a rip-off of Saturday Night Live and for its heavy reliance upon drug humor. (Two of its recurring characters were a "Rasta" who hosted various TV shows while consuming enormous amounts of ganja, and a perpetually drug-addled pharmacist.) Today it's remembered mainly for Andy Kaufman's guest appearances, particularly the first.

Odd Obsession Movies, which I've mentioned before, has on its display shelves two not-entirely-legal DVDs containing the shows on which Kaufman appeared. Not on display, but available for rental upon request, are seven CD-Rs compiling around thirty shows, which if I remember correctly were burned from videotapes recorded by a friend of the owner off of his or her TV. I had watched Fridays when it originally aired, and remembered it as being pretty good. It was undeniably a ripoff of Saturday Night Live; but after its original cast left, which happened in the middle of Fridays' first season, Saturday Night Live basically became a ripoff of itself. So I rented the first of the discs (which aren't organized chronologically, although the first disc does happen to contain the premiere show, if I'm not mistaken).

As was perhaps foreseeable, the show didn't live up to my memory of it. There were some funny bits, mainly in the show that came first on the disc and in the one guest-starring Victoria Principal. But most of the sketches suffered from the usual flaws of unfunny sketch-comedy: sophomoric humor, weak acting, and sketches with little going for them besides their premises, which weren't that funny in the first place. Of course, your mileage may vary.

Before I rented one of the discs, the owner warned me that the set's video quality was "terrible," although "watchable." But on the disc I rented, only one of the shows was of really bad quality. (Unfortunately, it was the one guest-starring Victoria Principal I mentioned above.) The others, while far from professional quality, were perfectly fine for casual viewing.

2009-11-09T18:31:00.000-08:00

BOOK CORNER: NOCTURNES BY KAZUO ISHIGURO

On my first reading of Nocturnes, Ishiguro's recently published short story collection, its contents appeared to adhere to the template of what is sometimes called "the New Yorker short story": stories about unhappy people in unhappy relationships, in which nothing much happens, ending with a carefully calibrated "epiphany." Such stories are certainly not necessarily bad, and I enjoyed reading Nocturnes, but it seemed disappointingly conventional compared with Ishiguro's novels.

More than this, though, as I read I began to get the sense that something was off. I felt it most strongly in the first two stories, but to some extent in all of them except perhaps the third, "Malvern Hills": a growing feeling people don't actually act or speak like Ishiguro's characters do. In the first story, "Crooner," I put it down to Ishiguro being unable to convincingly portray Americans, but in the second story, "Come Rain or Come Shine," all of whose characters were British, I heard the same wrong notes (no pun intended). To put it another way, whereas the characters in Never Let Me Go were heartbreakingly real even though the society depicted in that book never existed, the characters in Nocturnes felt unreal despite supposedly living in real societies.

It seemed puzzling that the skill at characterization so visible in Ishiguro's novels should have deserted him when he turned to short stories. While trying to work out what was going on, it occurred to me that it was as if the stories were proceeding according to unfamiliar rules hidden from the reader. Of course, this description also fits The Unconsoled, which, like the stories in Nocturnes, is about a musician. Then a light bulb went on above my head: what if Ishiguro was following the same strategy here that he did in When We Were Orphans: under a superficially realist facade presenting stories that weren't realist at all?

Alas, I have no triumph of interpretation to announce. Whatever depths I missed on the first reading I also missed on the second. Nor can I say whether there are hidden rules or not. I did realize that several of the narrators were unreliable, or probably so; but this didn't help me much. Nor were the characterizations any more convincing on second reading. Sometimes they were less convincing. This was particularly true of Lindy Gardner in "Nocturne," who now seemed like a caricature, and not a very skillful one. In fact, that story was a chore to reread.

One thing Nocturnes did make me realize is how the theme of specialness or greatness, and the lengths people go to attain it or to assure themselves they have it, permeates Ishiguro's work. I've written about this theme in Never Let Me Go. In The Remains of the Day, of course, we have Stevens' ambition to be a "great" butler, and his belief that in Lord Darlington he has found a great employer. In The Unconsoled and When We Were Orphans, the protagonists struggle to live up to the expectations others have of them because of their "greatness." And in An Artist of the Floating World, Ishiguro's second novel, even after the protagonist recognizes that he was morally wrong to support the Japanese dictatorial regime of the 1930s, he still can't face the truth that his actions didn't matter all that much.

2009-10-25T19:28:00.000-07:00

BOOK CORNER: FRAGMENTS FROM SLOVENE LITERATURE

Fragments of Slovene Literature is, as its title suggests, an anthology of Slovene literature. Slovene is a language spoken by about two million people, mainly in Slovenia, a former Yugoslav republic which is now independent. A few translated works of Slovene literature have been published in the U.S., but none of them have entered into the consciousness of the American reading public. Hence, I had never read any Slovene literature before, and you probably haven't either.

I picked the book up out of curiosity, but somewhat to my surprise there was quite a bit of good writing inside. Some novelists, short story writers and/or playwrights whose contributions particularly struck me were Vladimir Bartol, Dominik Smole, Evald Flisar, Berta Bojetu Boeta, Milan Klec', Maja Novak, Andre Morovic' and Igor S'kamperle. (The apostrophes should be carons, like ^ but upside down, above the preceding letter.) There's also a lot of poetry, but I don't pretend to be any judge of poetry.

The anthology works on the principle of breadth rather than depth: there are 132 writers represented (most with a single work or excerpt) in 432 pages. While the earliest works included are from the 16th century, over two-thirds of the pages are devoted to post-World War II literature.

The editorial apparatus, if one can call it that, is stunningly unhelpful. The introduction is devoted mainly to listing writers who are not represented in the anthology. No information is given about the works included or excerpted from, not even whether they're short stories or novels. (Sometimes you can't even tell whether you're reading an excerpt or a completel work.) Nor is there any information about the authors other than their dates of birth and death. There isn't an index, so if you're looking for an author you have to hunt through the six-page table of contents. And the table of contents doesn't include titles, so if you're looking for a specific work you're really out of luck.

According to the link above, Amazon has one used copy for sale for thirty-two bucks. If the linked page disappears, or you want to try your luck searching elsewhere, the ISBN is 961-6547-01-1.

2009-10-17T19:33:00.000-07:00

THE VELVET UNDERGROUND: AN EMBARRASSING UPDATE

It's embarrassing to have to admit, but when I wrote that Coyote "would be a standout [track] on Loaded," it had slipped my mind that Sweet Jane and Rock and Roll were on Loaded.

I do have mitigating circumstances to plead, though. I first heard Sweet Jane and Rock and Roll on 1969, and listened to that album many times before hearing the studio versions on Loaded. In fact, I don't recall ever hearing Loaded until the Fully Loaded two-CD set was released, which would have been over a decade after I heard 1969. So to me, the versions on 1969 were the real versions, and I associated the songs with that album rather than with Loaded. (In fact, I still prefer Sweet Jane without the "heavenly wine and roses" bit.)

Coyote isn't as good as either of those two songs, so instead of being a "standout," I'd have to say merely that it could hold its own on Loaded.

2009-10-11T20:08:00.000-07:00

CD CORNER: VARIOUS VELVET UNDERGROUND REUNION CDS

I've been re-listening to my CDs of the Velvet Underground's 1993 reunion tour, both Live MCMXCIII -- the legitimate 2CD set -- and a bunch of bootlegs. I'm not done, but here are some generalizations:

The parts that reward repeated listening are the guitar or guitar/viola workouts. These occur in the places you'd expect; and also, surprisingly, in Some Kinda Love. The Velvets didn't play Sister Ray on the tour, alas. But Hey Mister Rain filled the "controlled chaos" spot more than adequately, though there was a lot less variation between different performances of Hey Mister Rain than there had been for Sister Ray back in the day.

On the other hand, the new versions of the songs whose main interest was the vocals are mainly dispensible. Reed's vocals are different from before -- and, frankly, bizarre -- but the difference is not to the newer stuff's advantage. An exception to this is Pale Blue Eyes: not that Reed's vocals are any better, but the addition of Cale's viola improves the song enormously.

Coyote is a good song, not a great song. It would be a standout on Loaded and would hold its own on VU or Another View (as you can probably tell, I'm not a fan of Loaded).

The synthesizer intro to I'm Waiting for the Man is just strange. Unless it's supposed to be a parody of stadium rock (something that just occurred to me), I don't see the point.

2009-08-02T19:32:00.000-07:00

MANGA CORNER: BILLY BAT VOL. 1, BY NAOKI URASAWA

Billy Bat is the latest manga by Naoki Urasawa, best known for Monster, 20th Century Boys and Pluto. (Takashi Nagasaki is collaborating on the story, as he did on 20th Century Boys and Pluto.) It's ongoing in Japan, and the first tankoubon (paperback collection) recently came out there. Billy Bat is almost certain to eventually be licensed in the U.S. (probably by Viz, who licensed the three other series listed above), but I was curious enough that I jumped the gun and bought the tankoubon.

Billy Bat takes place in 1949, and its protagonist is Kevin Yamagata, a Japanese-American cartoonist who writes and draws a popular comic called Billy Bat. In fact, the book begins as if it were Yamagata's comic, a funny-animal hard-boiled detective story starring an anthropomorphic bat named Billy Bat.

After twenty-four pages of Yamagata's Billy Bat, the camera "pulls back" to show Kevin drawing, and we are in the real world. Two policemen enter Kevin's studio, and one of them happens to remark that he's seen Kevin's "Billy Bat" character in Japan. In accordance with his father's dying request that he never steal, Kevin goes to Japan to discover if he has unconsciously plagiarized the character (he was stationed in Japan after the war), and, if so, to ask permission to continue to use it.

In Japan, Kevin realizes that he had indeed seen the character there, and also that there are mysteries surrounding it. He also gets embroiled in a murder case, and before you can say "Friend, meet Johann. Johann, meet Friend" we're in Monster/20th Century Boys territory. But this doesn't mean that the comics connection is abandoned. While we don't see any more of Kevin's strip, his real-life adventures become linked to manga in a surprising way.

Monster gets off to a notoriously slow start, and 20th Century Boys reportedly also picks up steam in later volumes. So it would be unwise to try to judge Billy Bat as a whole by its first volume. That said, its first volume moves faster, and does a better job of hooking the reader, than the first volumes of those series. At the end of the first volume, Billy Bat is also more obscure than were the other two series at that point: we don't know who or what Kevin's primary antagonist is, nor how it relates to the mysterious bat. In the last chapter Urasawa throws a curve ball which makes things even more enigmatic.

Judging by Monster and by those volumes of Urasawa's other series that have appeared in the U.S., characteriztion is not one of Urasawa's strong points. So far, Billy Bat is no exception. None of the characters yet encountered are memorable, including Kevin. Several are stock characters or cliches, a prostitute with a heart of gold being the most egregious example.

Urasawa's art is one of his strong points, and again Billy Bat is no exception. In fact, his art here may be his best yet. The facial expressions and the panel-to-panel flow in Billy Bat seem to be advances over his earlier works, although I haven't studied the matter closely.

The most obvious new element in the art, of course, is the twenty-four pages of Yamagata's full-color funny-animal strip. But though this is a funny-animal strip, it's in Urasawa's style. You've probably never wondered what the characters from Monster would look like as anthropomorphic bats and dogs, but if you have, now's your chance. In fact, they look very good: the use of anthropomorphized animals brings out Urasawa's gift for caricature. Urasawa (or his studio) also uses color well.

My biggest gripe about this volume is the lack of authenticity in the American section. Most obviously, most of the actual English text we see is wrong in some way, most blatantly the title of Kevin's first chapter, "Drealy Night Murders." The writing in Kevin's comic is aimed more at adults than any actual American comic from the 1940s, including Eisner's (which is not to say it's particularly good writing -- but then, it's clearly not supposed to be), and the visual storytelling is more like contemporary manga than any 1940s American comic I've seen. The color palette is also far richer than in American comics of the period. Urasawa appears to believe that the post-WWII American comics industry was structured the same way as the manga industry of that period, when in fact they were quite different. And, father's dying request or no, the idea that a 1940s comics creator would be so scrupulous that at the mere suggestion of accidental plagiarism he would go to Japan to investigate is only less farfetched than the idea that his publisher would let him.* To be sure, none of this matters much for the quality of the series as a whole. But one of the things that impressed me about Monster was that it seemed authentically rooted in its German setting, as opposed to many manga and anime which seem to take place in a generic "Europe." Now I'm wondering if I was had.

On the back cover are these words, in English: "The character of the bat was popular in United States after 1940's. It is the mystery bat which continues affecting the darkness of the human history." Make of this what you will.

Billy Bat vol. 1 is 200 pp. and costs 600 yen. It's published by Koudansha in their Morning line (the title is in English, so you can't miss it), and its ISBN is 978-4-06-372812-5.

*If Kevin is really so anxious not to infringe on anyone else's intellectual property, he should be worrying about the stylized bat-symbol in his series' logo: it's not identical to Batman's Bat-symbol, but it's close enough that DC's lawyers would be on him like a ton of bricks. The same symbol is a prominent feature of the real Billy Bat's actual logo, and it will be interesting to see how Viz (or whoever) deals with this when the series is published in the U.S.

2009-07-30T18:52:00.001-07:00

USAMARU FURUYA SERIES LICENSED

At the just-concluded SDCC, CMX announced (via MangaBlog) that they had licensed Usamaru Furuya's disaster manga 51 Ways to Protect Her, which I once discussed briefly (under the title 51 Ways to Protect Your Girlfriend). The protagonists of the first volume are Jin and Okano, a young man and woman respectively who are caught up in a magnitude 8 earthquake that strikes Tokyo, although they themselves are uninjured. (There's more on Jin and Okano in my earlier post,which was written when I had only read the manga's first chapter.) Most of the volume deals with Jin's efforts to protect Okano (not yet his girlfriend) and to help other victims. Furuya also progressively reveals more and more of the destruction caused by the earthquake, a process that presumably continues beyond the first volume.

In a comment to the ANN post linked to above, dormcat wrote that 51 Ways is more "accessible" than The Music of Marie. I never thought of Music as inaccessible, but there's no doubt that 51 Ways is more in line with the current U.S. market for shounen manga. And while, judging by this volume, 51 Ways isn't one of Furuya's major works, it's perfectly fine for what it is. The art is particularly striking. Don't get too excited yet, though: the first volume won't be released until September 2010.

2009-05-23T07:49:00.000-07:00

ON WALTON ON NEVER LET ME GO

I recently came across an interesting discussion of Never Let Me Go on Crooked Timber, sparked off by this post by Jo Walton, and specifically by this quote:

"Some critics have suggested it’s implausible that a whole class of people could be created to donate and die and yet been permitted to drive around from centre to centre and go into shops and service stations. I have no problem with it. The worst tortures are the ones you do to yourself. They are a class, they know their place."

Walton goes on to assert that the clones are modelled after the English working class, which likewise passively accepts its lot.

I disagree with Walton. I was surprised that nobody picked up on OO's clearly true observation, in the Crooked Timber thread, that "the clones did find possibilities other than having their organs harvested very attractive. ... the Cottages are pervaded with the clones’ desperation for an alternative other than dying." I would add that the students at Hailsham were not given an education which emphasizes submissiveness and knowing one's place. In fact the education Hailsham provided, with its emphasis on art and creativity, greatly resembled an upper middle-class education (allowing for the material poverty of Hailsham itself). If Kathy appears to never think of escape, it's not because she "cheerful[ly] accept[s]" her fate, as Walton claims. Rather, it's because she has already ruled the idea out as hopeless, and therefore thinking about it would be too painful.

Something else that occurred to me after reading the Crooked Timber discussion: As far as I remember, until the final scene with Miss Emily, the "donations" are always talked about as something that just happens, almost as if they were a natural process. This is even true of Miss Lucy's revelation and of the discussion of "possibles." Emily, in her final scene, is the first to acknowledge that the clones die because society has chosen to have them die, and society could have chosen differently.

My earlier posts on Never Let Me Go are here, here, here and here.

2009-01-14T06:51:00.000-08:00

BOOK CORNER: THE DISAPPEARANCE OF HARUHI SUZUMIYA

(Despite appearances, this hasn't turned into an all-Haruhi blog. That three posts of my last five posts, counting this, are on Haruhi is the result of chance as much as anything. Normal programming will return shortly.)

I had bought The Disappearance of Haruhi Suzumiya [Suzumiya Haruhi no Shoushitsu], the fourth in the series of Haruhi Suzumiya light novels by Nagaru Tanigawa, before the U.S. licensing of the novels was announced. A few weeks ago, I had finished reading a couple of serious manga and was looking for a change, and decided to read Disappearance. By this time, of course, the license had been announced, and I could have waited for the book to come out in English (assuming that the first three novels get published and that they sell well enough to justify publishing the fourth). But the description on the back cover intrigued me and I was curious, the more so since this is apparently the novel that's being adapted for the second season of the anime.

Disappearance is set shortly before Christmas, and opens with a prologue in which, among other things, Haruhi announces in typically imperious fashion that the SOS Brigade is having a Christmas party. A few days later, though, Kyon goes to school as usual and finds that Haruhi is gone and no one remembers her, and there is no evidence of the SOS Brigade ever having existed. Not only that, but Itsuki has also vanished without a trace, Mikuru and Yuki are ordinary high school students, and a character who shouldn't be there* is present as if nothing had happened.

In the anime, Kyon mainly plays the roles of observer and Haruhi's unwilling flunky; only rarely does he take action on his own. In Disappearance, Kyon has to act on his own initiative from the start. His first impulse is to search frantically for confirmation that his memories of Haruhi and the SOS Brigade are true, but this only succeeds in terrifying Mikuru and convincing the rest of the school that he's gone insane. But eventually, with a lot of help, he finds a way to return things to abnormal. And he encounters versions, at least, of the familiar characters along the way.

Disappearance isn't great literature, of course, but it's an enjoyable book and a worthy sequel to the anime. The plot is ingenious, if not as much so as the anime (but that's a very high bar). Kyon's character gets some development, and another character is also developed in a way that's unexpected yet logical in retrospect.

Regarding spoilers: the book thoroughly spoils the anime and first novel. There is also extensive, and presumably spoiler-filled, description of an episode which is in the third novel but not in the anime.

The Disappearance of Haruhi Suzumiya is 256 pages long and costs 514 yen. It's published by Kadokawa Shoten and its ISBN is 978-4044292041. Here's Google's machine translation of its Amazon.co.jp page. Interestingly, it has the highest customer rating of the entire series of novels, including the first novel. Note that there is a semi-intelligible spoiler in one of the customer reviews.

*I'm being vague to minimize spoilers for the anime.

2009-01-02T07:24:00.001-08:00

MANGA CORNER: THE MELANCHOLY OF SUZUMIYA HARUHI CHAN, VOL. 1

About a week ago Gia (via MangaBlog) reported that in Japan, the second volume of The Melancholy of Suzumiya Haruhi chan, the "official gag manga" for the Haruhi Suzumiya franchise, is expected to outsell the latest volume of the straight manga adaptation. As it happens, I bought the first volume of The Melancholy of Suzumiya Haruhi chan a few months ago, though I haven't read it yet. It's a mix of 4-panel strips and short stories. Gia stated that the second volume has an eroge*- playing Yuki. In fact, Yuki plays eroge in the first volume as well. What's more, she does so wearing headphones whose earpieces are shaped like bunnies. In another running gag, one of the characters from the anime returns, but shrunk down to only about a foot tall, and is treated like a toy by Yuki.

I can't really say much about the manga without having read it. But my impression, for what it's worth, is that its humor is:
1. very otakuish, and
2. dependent upon familiarity with the Haruhi Suzumiya anime and/or light novels.

I don't like the art, largely because I dislike the caricature-like style Puyo, the artist, uses here. However, the infrequent action sequences are well-done. Perhaps comedy is not Puyo's forte.

Volume 1 of Haruhi chan is published by Kadokawa Shoten. It's 164 pages and costs 540 yen, and its ISBN is 978-4-04-715062-1. Here's a machine translation of its Amazon.co.jp page.

*Erotic computer game.

2008-12-04T08:27:00.000-08:00

TENSHI NI NARUMON'! ONCE MORE

My mention of the Tenshi ni Narumon'! manga in my last-but-one post inspired me to take another peek at it. In my original review, I had written: "the art for the manga is pretty conventional. Which is not to say it's bad." I was wrong -- it's bad.

2008-11-25T06:23:00.000-08:00

A BRIEF REVIEW OF THE MONTY PYTHON'S SPAMALOT ORIGINAL BROADWAY CAST RECORDING

I liked "The Song That Goes Like This."

2008-11-11T16:43:00.000-08:00

MANGA CORNER: THE MELANCHOLY OF HARUHI SUZUMIYA, VOL. 1

A few days ago I read the recently-released first volume of the Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya manga. (If you're unfamiliar with the whole Haruhi phenomenon, here's an introduction.) My advice, as a big fan of the anime who never gets tired of watching "The Adventures of Mikuru-chan Ep. 00",* is to stick to the anime or wait for the light novels, which are scheduled to be published in English starting in 2009.** And if you have read the manga but haven't seen the anime, don't judge the latter by the former. Even though the manga is written (at least ostensibly) by the author of the original light novels, and is presumably adapted directly from the light novels, it reads like a typical anime-to-manga adaptation. And that's not a good thing (despite my liking for the Tenshi ni Narumon! manga).

According to the article I linked to above, the manga's "target age group is younger than the original novels in order to expand the series' fan base." That isn't necessarily synonymous with being dumbed down, but in this case it is. The manga's story is basically the same as that of the anime (which, based upon what I've read of the first novel, seems to be faithful to it), though there are a lot of minor variations. But the manga's characters are not nearly as idiosyncratic as the anime's. They're more like the characters in a typical "wacky" high school comedy. In particular, Kyon's distinctive, sarcastic commentary, which sets the tone of the anime, is almost eliminated.

The manga's visuals add nothing to the story, and the art itself is generic.

*Not, incidentally, in this volume of the manga, which proceeds in strict chronological order.

**Though given the present state of the economy and its prospects for the near future, any reference to something being published in 2009 should have a "hopefully" attached to it.

2008-11-05T12:08:00.001-08:00

MPD-PSYCHO: TV SERIES VS. MANGA

I recently rewatched the TV adaptation of MPD-Psycho, which Takashi Miike directed. Then for comparison I read volumes 1-6 of the manga, which are all that are out in the U.S. if I'm not mistaken. The conjunction of the two made me realize two things. (Slight spoilers ahead.)

The first is that, aside from the basic attributes of the main characters and the "signature" images of the human flowerpots and the limbless woman, the TV series and the manga so far are pretty much independent of each other. Most of the events in the manga are absent from the TV series and vice versa. In particular, the pregnant woman murders, which are key to the TV series' plot, are not found in the manga. And while the group that plays a key role in the manga (I'm being vague so as not to spoil too much) nominally plays the same role in the TV series, it's dealt with so summarily that it's irrelevant for practical purposes. Amamiya/Nishizono's personality switches, which are common in the manga and crucial to the plot, are very rare in the TV series; in a sense, the series isn't about a "multiple personality detective" at all. The other characters are generally quite different in the manga and TV series, if they appear in both. In particular, this is true of Sasayama, who in the manga is just a policeman who leeches off Amamiya's work but in the TV series is a much more complex and interesting -- and important -- character. The manga and TV series are also quite different in tone and thematically.

The TV series was based not just on the manga, but on three MPD-Psycho novels, and these, along with the rest of the manga may be the source for those events in the TV series that aren't in the manga volumes which Dark Horse has published so far. But that doesn't explain why so much that's important to the manga is missing from the TV series.

My second realization is that I don't like the manga. Neither the individual arcs, nor the overall storyline, nor the characters interest me. Nor does the art do much for me. In fact, I'd been feeling dissatisfied for a while, but it took reading the whole thing at one go to make me realize just how little I was getting out of it. Also, I'd bought the manga in the first place because of the TV series, and it was only upon rewatching the TV series that I realized how little the two actually had to do with each other. In short, I was stupid and wasted a lot of money, especially since a local library recently acquired vols. 1-6 of the manga. (Yeah, my mind boggled too.)

I'll have some comments on the TV series itself in another post. Maybe.

2008-10-26T17:15:00.000-07:00

MANGA CORNER: FLOWERS BY USAMARU FURUYA (following up on Thursday's post)

In my last post, I wrote that the copy of Flowers I had ordered from Sanseidoh was unlikely to arrive in time for me to report on it by the deadline for this month's Diamond ordering cycle, which is tomorrow (Monday), at least at my local comics store. Well, it did arrive, and yesterday I picked it up, and here I am. I was anticipating being able to tell everyone to go out and order it, from Diamond or elsewhere. Unfortunately, I can't. I don't regret buying it, exactly; but it's not what I expected. When reading what follows, bear in mind that I've only owned the book for a day, so any judgments I make are very preliminary.

As I've said before, there's some gorgeous fantasy art in The Music of Marie and Garden, and I was hoping to see more of that in Flowers. Instead, what we mainly get is girls. The longest section is "BUBKA Girls": thirty-eight full-page full-color illustrations of high school age (and occasionally younger) girls, which first appeared in a magazine called Ura BUBKA. The girls are usually fully clothed and not in conventionally seductive poses. Nevertheless there's an unsettling, and sometimes downright disturbing, current of eroticism running through all these illustrations. One image in particular renders the book as a whole unsuitable for sale to children. Some of the illustrations are reminiscent of the works of Trevor Brown and Romain Slocombe, with their subjects being bruised, bandaged, etc. All the works in this section, as throughout the book, are technically accomplished, but some of them strike me as rather soulless.

Apart from these illustrations, there are more full-page color illustrations, and a few black-and-white ones, from various sources. Again, these are mostly of girls, though very few of them are as sexually charged as the "BUBKA girls." All the illustrations in the book are annotated by Furuya.. There's also a twenty-page interview in Japanese covering Furuya's entire career, and two full-color manga totalling twenty-four pages, which won't mean much if you don't read Japanese. Let me stress that there is no English text in the book: everything is in untranslated Japanese.

Since I'm unsure about the book myself, I can't make a recommendation to buy or not to buy it. I can certainly understand if after reading the description above you want to pass. But please don't let my description of the book (or the book itself, if you buy it and don't like it) put you off Furuya in general. His best work -- The Music of Marie, Plastic Girl, some of the stories in Garden -- is better than anything here. (There are links to my reviews of these on the sidebar.) The Music of Marie in particular is free from the obsession with adolescent girls which is so evident in Flowers.

2008-10-23T19:25:00.000-07:00

USAMARU FURUYA ART BOOK IN PREVIEWS

One of the items in the latest Diamond Previews (under Books: Japanese Books) is a 136-page art book by Usamaru Furuya entitled Flowers, which Previews describes as follows: "Flowers collects some of Furuya's best artworks. In addition to never-before-seen oil paintings and illustrations of beautiful girls trapped in brutal, even terrifying worlds, Flowers contains short manga stories and a lengthy interview with the artist. Japanese text." There aren't many comics artists, Japanese or otherwise, whose art book I would spend nearly forty dollars on, sight unseen. In fact, the only one I can think of is Furuya.

I say "nearly forty dollars," although Diamond's price is $47.49, because the Japanese price is 2520 yen, which translates to $37.80 at the Sanseidoh bookstore in Arlington Heights. You may also be able to get it cheaper through a Japanese bookstore or mail-order service than through Diamond. You'll almost certainly get it quicker, too, since it's already out in Japan.

Here's Google's translation of the book's page on Amazon.co.jp. I don't know what Amazon.co.jp's shipping cost would be, but the page includes an image of the cover and the ISBN, which is handy if you want to order the book elsewhere.

I ordered the book a little over a week ago, and it's very unlikely that it will arrive in time for me to buy and report on it by the end of Diamond's order cycle. But when it does arrive, I'll get back to you.

UPDATE: I have the book, and have reported on it here.

2008-09-14T08:30:00.001-07:00

WAS MAX BROD A CO-AUTHOR OF THE TRIAL?

Sometimes, when an unfinished novel is published posthumously, it is alleged that the editor's role in selecting and arranging the materials left by the author is so great that the published work is as much the product of the editor as it is of the ostensible author. Some examples are Thomas Wolfe's last two novels, Hemingway's The Garden of Eden, and Ellison's Juneteenth. It appears that we may have to add Kafka's The Trial, and perhaps others of Kafka's works, to this list.

In a 2002 essay*, Clayton Koelb wrote: "An examination of the materials Kafka actually wrote [for The Trial] shows that the projected novel had never reached a form even remotely ready for publication; that Kafka had not yet formed a clearly discernible conception of the narrative as a whole; and that much of what he had been working on had been produced as disjointed fragments, each having only the sketchiest relation to the others. The only clear elements were the beginning and the end, which Kafka had evidently produced in the first hot enthusiasm of his inspiration." Later he says, referring to a published facsimile with transcription of the manuscripts for what became The Trial: "it is extremely difficult to read the Stroemfeld edition as a novel. One can only read it as a bundle of loosely related fragments that might, with a good deal of work, be made into a novel." He argues that The Trial as we know it should be seen as a collaboration between Kafka and Max Brod, who originally edited Kafka's posthumous works. (More recent editions, and translations, vary a bit from Brod's version, but preserve his overall structure.) Nevertheless, he argues that the novel we're familiar with should not be discarded, even if it isn't "what Kafka intended."

I've only seen the first volume of the edition Koelb refers to, not enough to judge the truth of Koelb's assertions. But in the introduction to the project as a whole, Roland Reuss, one of the editors, makes the arresting claim that "Kafka left no novels behind." ("Kafka hat keine Romane hinterlassen.")

*"Critical Editions II: Will the Real Franz Kafka Please Stand Up?" in A Companion to the Works of Franz Kafka, edited by James Rolleston.

2008-08-03T09:11:00.000-07:00

MANGA CORNER: MONTHLY COMIC BEAM, JULY 2008

Monthly Comic Beam, whose slogan (in English) is "A magazine for the comic freaks!" is the most "alternative" of the mainstream manga anthologies I've seen. But the July 2008 issue, which I recently picked up, is of particular interest to me: it contains the first chapter of a new Shiriagari Kotobuki serial, Soko wa Ikidomari da yo. (Translating the title is tricky: the key word, ikidomari, can mean various things such as "the end of a road" and "dead end," and it's not clear right now which meaning will end up fitting best.) This chapter is about a movie extra and his wife or girlfriend. It's good, but it doesn't give much indication of what the serial as a whole will be about, except that it appears to be neither a fantasy nor a comedy.

I haven't read the rest of the issue, but there are some other works in it that look very interesting:

1. An installment of Soil by Kaneko Atsushi, creator of Bambi and Her Pink Gun.

2. An installment of ZENi [sic] (Money) by Miso Suzuki, which appears to be a slice-of-life story about two OLs.

3. An installment of Koohii Mou Ippai (One More Cup of Coffee) by Naohito Yamakawa, who iirc had a story published in an English-language "underground manga" anthology about a woman who suddenly announces she's a whore, although Koohii Mou Ippai seems to be much gentler in subject matter.

4. An installment of Suteppu bai Suteppu (Step by Step) by Yasunaga Chisumi, about a young man who in this chapter discovers a community of tiny people in his bedroom.

5. A short story, complete in this issue, called "Cheen Shiti" (Chain City), set in a city full of chains and gears, like bicycle chains and gears but all different sizes and all over the place.

6. Another short story called "Hitsuji no Namida" (Sheep's Tears) by Raku Ichikawa, a fantasy or horror story about a shepherdess who encounters a sinister castle.

The two short stories have very distinctive artistic styles. But the quality of the magazine's art in general is high.

Monthly Comic Beam is published by Enterbrain, and costs 490 yen per issue.

2008-07-30T07:06:00.000-07:00

BOOK CORNER: HOPE BY DENNIS PHILLIPS

To tell the truth, I haven't come across much new literary fiction that I've enjoyed recently. And this applies to the more adventurous stuff as well as to "mainstream" works. (I'd enjoyed Nazi Literature in the Americas, but gave up on The Savage Detectives around page two hundred.) However, I did enjoy Hope. Initially, it alternates between two stories: that of a contemporary poet marooned on a desert island, and that of a thirteenth-century monk. But fortunately it's not one of those books where the present and past stories are mysteriously connected, and the hero in the present has to solve a bunch of puzzles to find out what the connection is. There is a connection between the two stories, but it's not mysterious, and we find out what it is soon enough. As the novel continues, we realize that its main subject is the poet's obsession with two events which took place before the novel began: his married lover left him with no explanation, and his friend deserted him. In the second half of the book, both stories swerve in unexpected directions.

But it wasn't the book's plot which attracted me to it: it was the prose. It's not that the prose is particularly ornate. In fact, it's more its clarity that attracted me. But rather than try to explain further, I'll provide a couple of samples and let you decide. Here's the first paragraph of Chapter 1:

"Father Benedictus walks the concrete floors of his domain. It is a sunny morning on a hilltop and the view is of the sea, but the sea is mountains and the mountains have valleys and the valleys are filled with sacramental fog. It is the first sunny morning after weeks of rain. Father Benedictus commands a vista that oversees the fog and the sheer peaks that emerge from it. It is 1293."

And the first paragraph of Chapter 2 (the start of the present-day story):

"Behind me the palms are buzzing in the breeze. It's the twenty-eighth day of a spring that never seems to end. I'm on an island. I don't remember the year. I can hear the birds but I don't remember their names. Sometimes I can almost make out what they're saying. A year ago or two or ten I was left here. They might have killed me. Instead they didn't. I am less than fifty years old."

2008-07-21T08:23:00.001-07:00

MANGA CORNER: SHINTARO KAGO'S LATEST

Shintaro Kago is a creator of ero-guro (erotic-grotesque) manga who stands out both for such brilliant experimental stories as "Abstraction," "Multiplication," and "The Memories of Others," and for his creativity, in other stories, in finding ways to gross his readers out. There are almost no published English translations of his work, but there's an ongoing series of scanlations hosted on Same Hat! Same Hat! and also a repository of scanlations, most of which have not appeared on Same Hat, here (via Journalista). The three stories mentioned above can be found on Same Hat! and the first two in the second location as well. Note that all of these scanlations are NSFW. In fact, Kago and NSFW go together like a horse and carriage.

I recently purchased Kago's latest book, a collection entitled Ana, Moji, Ketsueki Nado Ga Arawareru Manga [Manga in Which Holes, Characters, Blood and so on Appear]. (There are NSFW scans of the cover and an interior two-page spread here (via Same Hat! via MangaBlog iirc)). Since the Kago scanlations on Same Hat! have attracted a fair amount of interest, I thought people might be interested in descriptions of the stories in his new book, even though none of them are as experimental as the three stories named above (but they aren't as disgusting as the Kago's grossest stories, either, with one exception).

The stories are divided into four groups, each group followed by a two-page "photomanga" (more on these later). The first group consists of take-offs on Japanese celebrities, although they're funny even if you don't know anything about the celebrities. In "Batoru RoAiyaru" [Battle RoAiyale] (the "Ai" in the Japanese title is written in kanji, in contrast to the rest of the title which is written in katakana), a parody of you-know-what, a bunch of celebrities named "Ai" battle to the death for the title of "Number 1 Ai-chan." Each fights with a tool or symbol of her occupation or profession: for instance, the ping-pong champion kills her opponents with deadly serves, while the best-selling novelist buries her opponent under a pile of her novels. Those of the contestants whom I looked up in Google are all real.

"Horie-kun to Horiemon" [Horie-kun and Horiemon] stars the flamboyant businessman Takafumi Horie, who is depicted here as a buffoon, and revolves around his failed attempt to buy a Japanese baseball team. In real life "Horiemon" is Horie's nickname as well as the name of a racehorse he owns, but in this story Horiemon is a Doraemon-like cartoon horse who uses "merger glue" to merge two teams together, creating an empty slot for Horie to fill with a team of his own. This story is actually G-rated until the final page, the only one of Kago's stories I've seen about which that could be said.

"Joshi Ana no Ana" [Woman Announcers' Holes] depicts a group of manga artists discussing why female announcers marry athletes but not manga artists. Eventually one proposes a theory akin to Dan Clowes' notorious piece on sports, which segues into a bizarre fantasy in which "wild" (and naked) female announcers are captured and trained to use pens instead of baseball bats to masturbate with.

The next group of stories have nothing in common that I can see, except that they may be parodies. In "Shiro no Joukei" [this could mean either "white scene" or "innocent nature"] a young man stops a young woman from committing suicide. It turns out that she is wearing a chastity belt beneath which her excreta are festering, while he is wearing a similar device which turns into a rotating drill whenever he gets an erection. Neither of these can be removed. It would seem that they're made for each other, but there's a catch. The style here is a bit different from Kago's usual style, so this might be a parody of some other manga. If not, it's pretty pointless.

"Man'in Densha" [Crowded Train] can be summed up in one word: yuck. It begins innocuously enough, with a woman being caught trying to ride a train without a ticket. But it soon becomes a sort of literalized metaphor equating riding a train with raping that woman. That's not very clear, I know. But it's one of those things which are clear when you see them, but very difficult to describe. Also, the details are just too disgusting. That said, the story is ingenious.

"Soushiko no Yoru" [Soushiko's Night] has to be a parody, because otherwise it makes no sense. Soushiko, a schoolgirl, is drawn like a shoujo heroine, with huge, glistening eyes, but she sure doesn't behave like one. It's Christmas Eve, and while waiting for Santa to fall into the trap her father has built, Soushiko terrorizes her family. Her hyperactive antics include peeing on her father; forcing her mother to cut a cake which contains living organs inside (a la Eraserhead) and making her eat a spoonful of the bloody stuff; and proclaiming that her younger brother is really her child by Santa.

The stories in the next section are the most formally experimental in the book. Because most of them are built around abstract ideas, they're difficult to summarize. They all belong to Kago's long-running "eki mae" ("in front of the station") series, which apparently ran in a single magazine. They don't take place in front of a station, and in fact I have no idea what the series' title signifies. In "Eki Mae Ankoku" [Darkness in Front of the Station] people start painting everything black, even the pages of newspapers and books -- but the protagonist's husband explains that it's better that way, since you can imagine what the newspaper originally said. As the story progresses, more and more of the surroundings are blacked out, until ultimately all we see is white bodies against a black void. Along the way, Kago makes fun of Japan's censoring of images of genitals.

In "Eki Mae Hanbun" [Half in Front of the Station] two kidnappers whose victim's father can only pay half the ransom announce they will only return half the victim. They then argue whether she should be cut in half vertically or horizontally, which leads to a discussion of "halfness" in general. The theme of "halfness" carries over to Kago's visual storytelling: not only are most panels symmetrically designed, but most depictions of faces display only half the face, with the other half hidden behind a panel border or something else. Again, it's hard to describe, but it's more ingenious than this description makes it sound.

In "Eki Mae Gesa" [Aberration in Front of the Station], a man complains that everything is uneven or slipping out of place, from the dimensions of rooms and the legs of tables, to men's penises as they're about to enter their partners. As the story progresses, the graphic elements on the page begin slipping out of place: first the panels "slip away" from the regular grid, then the contents of the panels are displaced from the panel borders and the dialogue is displaced from the balloons.

"Eki Mae Ichiji" [A Character in Front of the Station] is the best story in the book. It's also virtually untranslateable into English, because it's dependent upon the characteristics of the Japanese writing system. (It's from this story that the two-page spread mentioned in my second paragraph is taken.) It's built around the Oubapo-like constraint that every balloon and every sign contains only one character. This is possible because most Japanese characters are individually meaningful. Not only this, but in some panels or sequences of panels, every character has a common visual component (technically known as a radical). As a further gimmick, writing a character upon someone's skin controls their actions: for example, a man writes the letter "S" upon his unfaithful wife's chest, causing her to jump off a building; but she returns and writes "M" upon his chest, converting herself to a sadist and him to her masochist victim.

The book's final section is "Kago Shintaro Koten" [Shintaro Kago Classics]. This turns out to mean, not classic works by Kago, but classics (loosely defined) with a Kago twist. The first of these is "Dragon Buster." While the protagonist, and drawing style, do bear a resemblance to a certain very popular fighting strip, this is mainly a parody of sword and sorcery type comics: grateful villagers reward the protagonist for slaying a dragon by giving him three naked women, but it turns out that all three have medical conditions which prevent him from having sex with them. A pretty insubstantial story.

The next story, "Shin Nippon Mukashibanashi Zenshuu" [New Complete Japanese Folktales], begins as a parody of the Japanese folk legend "Momotaro," in which Momotaro has no wish to be a hero and eats the animals that in the original story form his retinue. But it goes on to parody a number of folktales and legends, including Cinderella and the Tower of Babel, which here is built inside a woman's womb (don't ask).

The next story is "Tetsuwan Uran no Shiawase Tokkyuubin" [Mighty Uranium's Happiness Express]. The title parodies Astro Boy, who is known as Tetsuwan Atom [Mighty Atom] in Japanese, and "Tetsuwan Uran" is a humanoid robot with rockets in her feet. But the story as a whole parodies the "magical guest" genre. Tetsuwan Uran, who looks like a Playboy Bunny (or "bunny girl," as the costume is known as in Japan), is determined to make her unwilling host happy. When she first appears, he's watching a porn video, so she brings him fifteen naked women resembling the actress in the video, all brainwashed into being his sex slaves. When this doesn't make him happy, she squashes them one by one with a ten-ton hammer. At the end of the story, she flies away for good, leaving him to try to explain the mound of corpses left in his apartment.

The next story, "Godzilla v.s. [sic] Gaigan" derives its title from the film Chikyuu Kogeki Meirei Gojira tai Gaigan, known in the U.S. as Godzilla vs. Gigan (note that Kago mixes American and Japanese spellings). A war has devastated the Earth, and the only humans left are a small group of naked young women (none of whom, judging by the events in the story, are very bright). A humanoid alien lands on Earth and with the help of her robot Gaigan kills them all, one by one. Gaigan has a "laser scalpel" which can cut through flesh and bone so cleanly that the victim feels no pain, and the story basically depicts Gaigan slicing and dicing (literally, in one case) its victims in various ingenious and grotesque ways. Godzilla never appears in the story, and the Gaigan here has no resemblance to the film's Gaigan, but the film does clarify some obscure points in the story (not that this really matters).

The final full-fledged story, "Taima Senki" (I think this translates as something like "Account of the War against the Demons") is a delirious parody of Japanese masked-superhero stories, in which the villains' plan is to castrate all of Earth's boys and they "convert" humans into their henchmen by repeatedly bashing them on the head with a hammer.

As I mentioned at the top, the book also contains four two-page "photomanga." Not only are these stories made up of photos, they're made up of photos of manga. To be specific, each panel is a photo of a panel or page from one of the manga in the collection, and the conceit is that the "real" 3-D reader can manipulate the 2-D printed drawings. This is hard to describe in words, so I'll give an example. In the first of the photomanga, the first frame is a photograph of a panel from "Battle RoAiyale" depicting the most prominent character, exactly as it appears in the book. In the second frame, a three-dimensional finger "pulls up" this character's shirt, and the original panel is altered so that the character's midriff is exposed. In the third frame, the character's stomach is being sliced open with a exacto knife; and in the fourth frame, she is evidently dead and her entrails are hanging out.

While none of the stories in Ana, Moji are the equal of the three stories mentioned in my first paragraph, they are for the most part funny and ingenious, and Kago's art is very good. If this were my only exposure to Kago, I would definitely be on the lookout for more work by him, though I wouldn't be inspired to rush out and order Kago's other works. Be warned, though: your ability to enjoy the book depends very much on how many scenes of rape and degradation of women you're willing to swallow (though not every story contains such scenes).

Ana, Moji, Ketsueki Nado Ga Arawareru Manga is 210 pp. long and costs 1300 yen. It's published by Kubo Shoten and its ISBN is 978-4-7659-3006-2. An English translation of the book's Amazon.co.jp page is here. (The book's spine has the title and author written in romaji (our alphabet) as well as in Japanese characters, so if a bookstore in the U.S. should have it on the shelves, it shouldn't be too hard to find.)

2008-07-12T12:05:00.000-07:00

A NOTE ON DRAWN & QUARTERLY'S EDITION OF RED COLORED ELEGY

Drawn & Quarterly's edition of Red Colored Elegy, a Japanese-language edition of which I reviewed here, is finally out. (Note that the D&Q book contains only the title story from the edition I reviewed, not the shorter stories that were also collected there.) Unfortunately, I can't greet this occaion with unalloyed joy, because Drawn & Quarterly did the same thing that they did with their Yoshihiro Tatsumi collections: rearranging the panels on each page so that the page (and the book) reads left-to-right, but not flipping the original panels.* Why do they do this? If they aren't going to publish it unflipped, which they should, I'd much prefer that they just flipped everything. That way the relationships between the panels, and the overall design of each double-page spread, would be preserved. I really don't understand. Drawn & Quarterly is clearly publishing this as a labor of love, so why do they deliberately mutilate it?

To be sure, it's not as disruptive here as in the Tatsumi collections, because most of the panels stretch horizontally across the entire page. And I certainly wouldn't make this a reason to not buy the book. But it is frustrating to have to remind myself, when I look at one of the double-page spreads, that this isn't quite what Hayashi drew.

*In fact, they don't do this every time. When a page contains a panel in which two people are speaking, all the panels on the page are flipped (otherwise the person speaking first would be on the right), and occasionally other panels are flipped.

UPDATE: Tom Devlin, Creative Director at Drawn & Quarterly, responds in the comments below; and Chris Butcher has an intelligent defense of D&Q here.

2008-06-24T08:38:00.000-07:00

MOVIE CORNER: FUNERAL PROCESSION OF ROSES

Funeral Procession of Roses [Bara no Souretsu]
(also known as Funeral Parade of Roses or Parade of Roses) (Toshio Matsumoto, 1969) is a film about Eddie, a female impersonator; his male lover, who is also the manager of the club where he works; and another female impersonator who is Eddie's rival both romantically and professionally. It’s also a retelling of the Oedipus myth, though this isn’t apparent at all on a first viewing. There are also indications that all of this a film-within-the-film, which is connected somehow to a mysterious figure known as Guevara.

Structurally, the film resembles Godard’s early films. It incorporates disparate elements, from slapstick to mock-documentary to political protest to tragedy; and most of the scenes are only loosely connected to each other. And to prevent viewers from losing themselves in the film, Matsumoto uses all the tricks of the French New Wave: intertitles, images briefly inserted into seemingly unrelated scenes, freeze-frames, jump-cuts, sped-up sequences invoking silent film comedy, and more. But far from being incoherent or derivative, Funeral Procession of Roses is a startlingly original work. If you’re seriously interested in film as an art, you need to watch this.

The extras on the DVD are in Japanese, but the trailer is worth watching, both because it contains at least one snippet of film that didn’t make it into the movie, and because it shows how the distributor tried to sell the film commercially.

There’s some groovy psychedelic guitar accompanying some of the scenes, though I didn’t catch who played it.

2008-06-10T06:43:00.000-07:00

MOVIE CORNER: YAJI AND KITA: THE MIDNIGHT PILGRIMS

I’ve been watching a number of interesting Japanese films recently, courtesy of Odd Obsession Movies. One of them was Yaji and Kita: The Midnight Pilgrims [Mayonaka no Yaji-san Kita-san].

This film was written and directed by Kankuro Kudo, who wrote the screenplays to Go, Ping Pong and Zebraman, among others, and is an anarchic comedy freely adapted from the manga of the same Japanese title written and drawn by Shiriagari Kotobuki (with bits from Shiriagari’s novel adaptation of his manga incorporated). It takes place in an ostensibly Edo-period (1603-1867) Japan filled with present-day anachronisms. The title characters are a pair of male lovers, one of whom (Kita) is a drug addict and unable to distinguish between reality and his hallucinations. They embark on a pilgrimage to the shrine at Ise in hopes that there Kita will be cured of his addiction and find “reality.”

In the course of the film, which moves fluently between dreams, hallucinations, and an increasingly surreal reality, they encounter, among other things, a town which only standup comedians are allowed to pass through, a group of modern-day high school girls who call themselves the “Pleasure Team” of a Mafia boss whom they have never seen, and a health club in the afterlife in which all the souls look exactly the same, regardless of their appearance and gender when alive. It’s very funny in an absurdist way, although it grows steadily more serious in tone as it progresses (though never completely abandoning comedy) and the ending is surprisingly sweet and touching.

A couple of notes: There are several good songs on the soundtrack, in a variety of styles. I particularly liked the ending theme, the punk screamer “I Wanna Be Your Fuck.” And you can see Shiriagari’s art on the walls of Kita’s house, as well as on the invitation to Ise that Yaji receives. Shiriagari himself has a bit part as the owner of “Tokyo Phonographs” (which sells the hit song Yaji and Kita record) and Kazuo Umezu also has a bit role as “Old man.”

The DVD is loaded with extras, but some of them are disappointing. The deleted footage consists of brief snippets only a few seconds long. And a short bonus film written by Shiragari himself (if I read the Japanese-language credits correctly) isn’t very good.

2008-05-09T11:07:00.001-07:00

MOVIE CORNER: NANA

Nana is a film about two young women named Nana, who meet by chance on a Tokyo-bound train. Aside from their names, they are very different: one is an ambitious punk rocker who is moving to Tokyo to advance her career, while the other is bubbly and not too bright, and is moving to Tokyo to be with her boyfriend. But they become roommates and friends, and help each other through emotional crises. Which is to say that it's a live-action adaptation of the manga Nana, which is a huge hit in Japan.

The film Nana only covers the first fourteen chapters of the manga (there's a sequel), so we don't see the more serious events that happen later in the manga. But there's still way too much material to fit into a 110-minute movie without drastic condensation. Many of the events in the manga are eliminated: for instance, we see nothing of the Nana who moves to be with her boyfriend's pre-Tokyo life, and Misato is eliminated completely. More seriously, the movie leaves out most of the interactions between characters that flesh out the characters, and made the early volumes of the manga enjoyable. As a result, the movie feels like a forced march through the plot of the manga, and you never really connect to the characters. Aside from the thrill of seeing one's favorite manga characters in live action, the movie has little to offer, although Aoi Miyazaki, who plays the Nana who moves to be with her boyfriend, gives a good performance which is wasted here. Frankly, I only watched it to the end out of curiosity, and I'm a fan of the manga.

2008-03-16T11:48:00.000-07:00

Last year I wrote about Usamaru Furuya's The Music of Marie (Marie no Kanaderu Ongaku*), but without having read it. Well, I finally got around to reading it; and while I can't say for sure that it's the best graphic novel I've ever read, it's definitely a contender. I don't have much to add to this excellent review by Carlos Santos, though (not without major spoilers, at any rate).

The first 200-odd pages of the first volume (out of a total of 274) are basically set-up: Furuya takes his time developing his world and main characters. But because the society and culture Furuya has created is fascinating, this isn't dull at all. The story itself, when it gets going, seems to be basically a familiar one -- up until Chap. 14, a little more than halfway through the second volume, which is where the fireworks begin. But when they do, they're spectacular. In fact, good as the first volume is, it's the second volume, and its retrospective effect on the first volume, that makes The Music of Marie a masterpiece.

There's publishing information in my earlier post. The volumes are in the Birz Comics Deluxe line. If you're fortunate enough to find these in a bookstore, note that instead of being labelled "1" and "2," the two volumes are labelled with the kanji for up and down, respectively. This is common for Japanese novels, which are frequently published in two volumes, but I don't recall having seen it in manga before.

I don't usually link to scanlations, but The Music of Marie is such an important work that I'm making an exception and linking to Kotonoha's scanlation. Unfortunately, only the first volume has been put up so far. If you can read French, the book has been published in French; but again, apparently only the first volume is available right now.

*As I remarked in my earlier post, a better translation of the Japanese title would be "The Music Marie Plays," and I don't know where "The Music of Marie" comes from; but the latter translation is probably too entrenched by now to dislodge.

2008-03-03T08:12:00.001-08:00

MOVIE CORNER: FROG SONG

I recently saw a curious little Japanese film called Frog Song (Kaeru no Uta; aka Enjo-kousai monogatari: shitagaru onna-tachi). Directed by Shinji Imaoka, it's about a woman named Akemi who catches her boyfriend in bed with another woman, walks out, and enters into a stormy friendship with Kyoko, a woman who is a prostitute and aspiring manga creator. This is a "pink eiga (movie)": these are basically soft-core porn films, but the directors can pretty much film what they want as long as they put in the requisite number of sex scenes. A number of legitimate directors got their start in pink cinema (something like Roger Corman's 60s exploitation films in the U.S.). Frog Song has its quota of sex scenes, but they don't account for much of the movie and most of them aren't erotic. Nor is the film a comedy, despite the packaging of the U.S. DVD.

Oddly enough, the film reminded me of Hou Hsiao-Hsien, incongruous as it may seem to compare one of the great masters of cinema with an exploitation film by a nearly unknown director. Like Hou, Imaoka rejects the conventions of commercial movies, and in similar ways. There is a feeling of austerity to Frog Song. Characters' motives are frequently unclear. And there are often unexplained narrative gaps between scenes. For example, in one scene the two women are in a manga cafe after having had a fight, and one of them ostentatiously turns away from the other. In the next scene, they are in Kyoko's room and she is having sex with a client while Akemi watches, with no explanation given. And there is always an emotional distance between characters: unlike the conventional "odd couple" movie, Akemi and Kyoko never really connect with each other.

Aside from the direction, Konatsu gives a very good performance as Akemi. Frog Song is definitely worth checking out. Here's a good review.

2008-02-26T07:47:00.001-08:00

MANGA CORNER: HOSHI WA UTAU BY NATSUKI TAKAYA

Hoshi wa Utau (The Stars Sing*) is the current series by Natsuki Takaya, the creator of Fruits Basket, which finished its run in Japan a bit over a year ago. About a month ago, I bought the first collected volume (in Japanese) of Hoshi wa Utau hot off the presses. Anyone who picks this up expecting a replay of Fruits Basket will be disappointed. There's no immediate hook like in Fruits Basket. In fact, there's no fantasy in it at all so far. There's also a lot less humor, and what there is so far isn't nearly as inspired as the best stuff from Fruits Basket.

Sakuya, the protagonist, is a high school senior. She's a lot like Tohru: cheerful, hard working, grateful for small favors, and not too bright. Unlike Tohru, her parents are alive; but for reasons not revealed in this volume she lives with Kanade, a young man whom her parents have hired to take care of her. Kanade acts gruff and indifferent, but actually cares about Sakuya.

The series opens on the morning of Sakuya's birthday. Kanade says that tonight's dinner will be a celebration of her birthday. To Sakuya, this is a big deal, since apparently Kanade never noticed her birthday before. When she gets home that evening, in addition to Kanade there's a boy her age waiting for her, named Chihiro. He's completely unfamiliar to her, but she assumes he's a friend of Kanade's. Chihiro gives her a present, and at the end of the evening he tells her that she's "great." But it turns out that Kanade had thought Chihiro was Sakuya's boyfriend, and had never met him before.

Despite knowing nothing about Chihiro (apart from his having visited under false pretenses), Sakuya feels strangely drawn to him, and searches for him. When she does find him again by chance, though, he's completely different: he says he hates everything, including her, and tells her not to speak to him again. Naturally, she's devastated by this -- even more so because she now realizes that she loves him -- although she hides it under a show of cheerfulness. All the above is interspersed with scenes of Sakuya with her schoolfriends Hijiri (who is a lot like Arisu) and Yuuri (who is a lot like Kakeru), who all share a love of stargazing, and have even formed a "club," of which they are the only members, to engage in it.

One volume is too little to go on to evaluate the series as a whole, even tentatively: recall how unrepresentative the first volume of Fruits Basket turned out to be of the whole series. But considered on its own as a reading experience, it must be admitted that this volume is rather unsatisfying. Not much happens; the plot summary above covers most of the events of significance. Nor do we learn much about the characters, not even Sakuya, from whose point of view the book is told. Frankly, the book feels padded. The scenes with Sakuya's schoolfriends, in particular, seem unneccessary. If you didn't like the student council scenes in Fruits Basket, you probably won't like these.

The art in Hoshi wa Utau is like the art in the later volumes of Fruits Basket. Like Tohru, Sakuya has giant eyes which can be disconcerting at first. Actually, Sakuya looks very much like Tohru, except for the hair. But then, the art isn't the main attraction with Takaya anyway.

Hoshi wa Utau vol. 1 is published by Hakusensha, and costs 390 yen. Its ISBN is 978-4-592-18601-4. If you're looking for it on the shelves of a Japanese bookstore, its line is "Hana to Yume Comics." The logo of the line is a stylized picture of a girl with wavy hair, but probably the easiest way to locate it is that it's in the same line as Fruits Basket.

*The official English title is "Twinkle Stars Like Singing a Song"; but what's so sacred about these "official" titles, anyway? If we gave our movies nonsensical "official" French titles, would the French pay any attention to them?

2008-01-17T09:46:00.000-08:00

ANIME ON YOUTUBE

For those seriously interested in anime or the history of anime, Youtube has more to offer than anime music videos, hentai, and fansubs of current series, if you're willing to search for it. Here are a few examples I found recently, in roughly chronological order. None of them resemble "anime style" at all.

Ugokie tori no tatehiki is an imaginative, well animated, Fleischeresque short from 1933. Except for the music, there's no stylistic difference between this and American cartoons of the same period.

When you think of Osamu Tezuka and anime, you probably think first of Astro Boy and Kimba the White Lion, though these are just two of the series he created. But in the 1960s and 1980s, he made some short animated cartoons which are totally unlike the anime of his that have been licensed. Of these, I had previously heard of Jumping (1984) and Broken Down Film (1985). I was actually a bit let down by the latter: it's certainly funny, but if you've seen Duck Amuck, it won't be any breakthrough. (Also, the deliberately poor quality of Tezuka's image combined with Youtube's low resolution makes it difficult to watch.) But Jumping is a miniature masterpiece. Youtube also has several UPA-like shorts by Tezuka, all very much worth watching: Osu (“Male”) (1962), Mermaid (1964), Memory (1964) and Drop (1965)

Belladonna (1973)(Kanashimi no Beradonna), directed by Eiichi Yamamoto, is a feature film intended for an art-house audience, combining animation with still illustrations and making generous use of symbolism. Set in medieval France, it's about a beautiful woman who is raped on her wedding night, persecuted by the villagers, becomes a witch and is eventually burned at the stake. (The copy on Youtube has no subtitles, but someone has translated the dialogue, of which there isn't much, in the comments.) It's full of sexual imagery which is occasionally very disturbing; it's NSFW and definitely not for kiddies. The first segment is here, and the "Related Videos" window will take you to the other segments.

This is a seriously amazing film, and I'm shocked that it's virtually unknown in the U.S. Here's a review on the AniPages Daily site, in which it's described as "one of the small handful of anime films that can stand up to comparison with the most innovative work in 20th century animation, beyond mere niche (ie anime) appeal."

If you need more persuasion, here are some noteworthy sequences:

A symbolic and horrifying rape scene in pt. 2.

A sudden burst of psychedelic and blatantly anachronistic animation, with music to match, in pt. 7.

The plague sequence in pt. 8.

The orgy scene in pt. 9 (overflowing slightly into pt. 10).

Originally this post would have also included the 2001 Crayon Shin-chan movie The Adult Empire Strikes Back, but by the time I got around to finishing this post, the copyright owner had had it pulled from YouTube (the perils of procrastination!). Given their age, the films above will probably remain up longer.

2008-01-12T09:04:00.001-08:00

MANGA CORNER: IRON WOK JAN VOL. 27

A long time ago, I wrote on this blog that I'd read the first two volumes of Iron Wok Jan and enjoyed them, but didn't feel inclined to pick up more. Actually, since then I have picked up more: not the entire series, but ten volumes here and there, ranging between vols. 3 and 18. Shinji Saijyo's storytelling may be overblown, but it's effective: he can actually build suspense over whether Jan can come up with a liver preparation that's better than foie gras. And it's also fun to read about the dishes and methods of preparation Jan and his rivals come up with, though I have no idea whether or not they would actually work. So when I saw in Previews (yes, I go through Previews, because my local comics store gives a 30% discount on preordered comics and graphic novels) that vol. 27 would be the last volume, I decided to get it. (The option of waiting to check it out when it arrived in stores wasn't open, since I don't know any place that carries the later volumes of the series.) Mild spoilers follow.

The first chapter of vol. 27 finishes up the Rising Chinese Chefs competition, which has lasted quite a long time. (I don't know when it starts, but when vol. 18 opens, it's already in the midst of its third round.) And the finale of the competition is both funny and unexpected -- or rather, it would be unexpected if the back cover blurb didn't give it away. On the other hand the ending of the series as a whole is disappointing: in fact, it's a washout. I was expecting a final showdown between Jan and his rival Kiriko, featuring the most bizarre and spectacular dish of all, or something like that. Well, not only is there no final showdown with Kiriko or anybody else, Jan doesn't even do any cooking in this volume. Just going by what you can deduce from this volume about vol. 26, it looks like that one may be better. I may pick it up.

On the plus side, Jan never reforms: he's as arrogant and obnoxious at the end as he was at the start, something I wouldn't have predicted after the first volume. Also on the plus side, there are several panels showing Kiriko folding her arms beneath her breasts. (That's a joke, I hasten to add. And it only makes sense if you're aware that all the female characters in Iron Wok Jan are F-cups.)

The ending of Iron Wok Jan only occupies 150 of vol. 27's pages. The rest is taken up by a "special alternate ending" which is basically a joke and not particularly funny, and by Saijyo's debut manga, a horror story which is pretty enjoyable, though nothing special.

2007-12-16T18:39:00.000-08:00

BOOK CORNER: AUNT BEARDIE

I recently finished rereading Aunt Beardie, a suspense novel written by Joseph Shearing, which I had earlier read as an adolescent many years ago.

Joseph Shearing is actually a pseudonym used by the woman born as Gabrielle Margaret Vere Campbell (she married twice, and is sometimes referred to by her second husband's surname as Gabrielle Margaret Long), who used several other pseudonyms, the most common and best known of which was Marjorie Bowen. Once popular but now almost forgotten, Bowen (as we'll call her) was a very prolific writer, who, according to one source, wrote at least 170 books, mainly historical novels, but also nonfiction works, collections of short stories, contemporary novels, and plays. Obviously, they couldn't all be good, but a surprising amount of them were, and she deserves to be better known. Insofar as she is remembered today it's primarily as an author of supernatural fiction, but this was actually only a small part of her output. There is a biographical essay on Bowen here.

She used the Joseph Shearing pseudonym for historical suspense novels which were based loosely on historical crimes or mysteries. These novels, unlike many of her others, tended to be heavy on mood and fairly light on plot. Aunt Beardie is no exception: the title character doesn't even make an appearance until the 65th page (out of 220). It's set in England and France in 1829, though political events enter only insofar as the chaos of the French Revolution and its associated wars has affected the characters' lives. (There was to be another revolution in France the following year, but there's no hint of it here.) The plot is about Jenny, an eighteen-year-old girl devoted to her aristocratic mother, who discovers that her mother is secretly meeting a strange man and becomes convinced that he is somehow a threat to her (the mother). The Aunt Beardie of the title is a childhood friend of her mother's, thought dead, who turns up unexpectedly around the time the strange man appears. When I first read it, as an adolescent (thanks to my mother, who had collected hundreds of paperback mysteries, including most of the Shearing books), I thought I knew the "solution" way before the end. And I was partly right; indeed, part of the solution is pretty obvious. But I had been partly led astray by Shearing's misdirection, and the whole truth came as a shock to me. But maybe, if you read the book, you'll be smarter than I was back then.

But the heart of the book is the intense relationship between Jenny and her mother. The mother feels closer to Jenny than to her husband or her other children, but urges her to marry quickly, so that she will escape the disaster she (the mother) obscurely feels looming over her (the mother). And Jenny is completely devoted to her mother. Though having led a sheltered life, she strikes out on her own to learn the nature of the threat to her mother, and when she does discover what it is she takes decisive action to dispel it. By the end, Jenny and her mother have almost become a single person.

The book has its faults. It takes a while to really get going. The prose is generally stolid and undistinguished, though the last line is remarkable. And the efforts to create a mood of foreboding can sometimes be a bit heavy-handed: there's a bit too much "the familiar scenery now seemed somehow ominous"-type prose for my liking. Nevertheless, it stands up well as a novel and repays rereading. It's worth tracking down.

2007-12-07T07:27:00.000-08:00

MANGA CORNER: PARTNER REVISITED

My reviews of Japanese-language manga may have conveyed the false impression that I can read Japanese easily. In fact, reading a manga thoroughly and looking up every word I don't know is still a laborious and time-consuming process for me. It's often more like work than fun, even when I enjoy the manga, although it's worth it in the end. And because it's time consuming, I'll often get distracted from one series by another that I just picked up, and neglect to go back to the first series. (I have a huge backlog of Japanese-language manga I've yet to read.) This is why, although I purchased the other two volumes of Partner (by Miho Obana) shortly after finishing the first one, I finished reading the last volume only a few days ago.

Now that I have finished the series, I'm sorry I waited so long. I highly recommend it: it's intelligent, suspenseful and moving, with visceral jolts scattered throughout. I can't say much about the plot of the last two volumes without spoiling the first, but I'll just say that things get a lot worse for the protagonists before they start to get better. The series probably fits the horror category best, but horror in the sense of "a series of creepy or menacing things happening" rather than "tons of gore" (of which there is very little). It's more mature than, and superior to, Kodocha, Obana's best-known series and the only one licensed in the U.S. so far.

Unlike the first volume, there are no bonus stories in volumes two and three: the main story runs the entire length of the volumes, except for a few pages at the end of volume three in which Obana's assistants greet her readers. My first post, linked to above, contains publishing info for all three volumes. And they're part of the "Ribon Mascot Comics" line, and are labelled as such, in English, on their spines.

2007-12-03T16:38:00.000-08:00

MANGA CORNER: MY DEAREST DEVIL PRINCESS

Today, a review of a translated manga that's notable only for the thoroughness of its mediocrity: My Dearest Devil Princess, story by Makoto Matsumoto, art by Maika Netsu. The premise of My Dearest Devil Princess has some promise: it's a "magical guest" manga but with the twist that the magical guest, Maki, is a demon who will take the soul of the protagonist Keita once she has granted him three wishes. Fortunately for Keita but unfortunately for the reader, Maki turns out to be sweet, gentle and naive, exactly like the heroine of every other magical guest manga. There's a bit of originality in the character of Sheeta, an angel given to throwing her weight around who aims to "save" Keita by killing him before Maki can take his soul. But everything else about this volume is drearily familiar. And anyway, the whole thing is little more than a thinly disguised vehicle for fanservice, as Keita takes a shower, fails to grasp the necessity of wearing clothes, etc. (Her naughty bits are always covered by strands of hair, wisps of steam, and the like, so don't get your hopes up.) The art itself is generic.

It's manga like this that give the anti-manga bunch some credibility. Moreover, they're beginning to make me question whether mainstream manga is really so much more diverse than mainstream American comics. Unquestionably, manga is far more diverse than mainstream American comics -- i.e. superhero comics -- in genre and subject matter. My impression, though, is that contemporary superhero comics are less likely to copy other series as blatantly as My Dearest Devil Princess -- and many other manga -- do. (This impression comes solely from reading reviews of contemporary superhero comics, rather than the comics themselves, so I could be mistaken. And of course it's far from being true historically.)

2007-11-27T20:07:00.000-08:00

BUYING FRENCH-LANGUAGE MANGA

Brigid Alverson points to a website selling manga translated into French (as well as other French-language books, CDs, DVDs, etc.). A much wider range of manga is available in French than in English, including a lot of alternative manga; so if you can read French but not Japanese, or would rather learn to read French than Japanese, this site is worth investigating. (Unfortunately, I couldn't find any indication on the site of what their shipping charges are like. I guess you have to wait until checking out to see.)

2007-11-26T19:10:00.000-08:00

MORE ON MOORE ON WODEHOUSE

Last week I saw a non-shrink-wrapped copy of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: The Black Dossier at my local Borders, and took the opportunity to flip through it. (As of this evening there's still a pile of shrink-wrapped copies there, but the unwrapped one is gone.) I didn't read enough to review it, though what I did read didn't make me hungry for more. I will say one thing, though: Moore does a lousy Wodehouse. (I may elaborate if and when I have the opportunity to read it again.)

2007-11-18T14:44:00.000-08:00

COMICS CORNER: HUGS: BLOODPOND

Hugs: Bloodpond is a 36 page long hardbound comic by Michael Ogilvie which I've had on my "to be reviewed" list for quite a long time. One reason it's taken me so long to review it is that while I knew I liked it, I couldn't figure out why I liked it.

A plot summary may help to explain my perplexity. The book begins with a chicken crossing a road. Via a circuitous chain of events, this eventually leads to the protagonist, a mute, fat-bellied, perpetually grinning bear named Hugs, being shot to death by a black dog out of revenge. Hugs goes to heaven, where everyone is perpetually high on heroin. Enraged at Hugs' bliss, the black dog uses his connections with the Pope to have Hugs sent first to hell and then to a pitch-black void, but Hugs manages to enjoy himself each time. Finally the Pope tells the dog that he shouldn't have killed Hugs because there is no suffering worse than being alive, and in exchange for a sacrificed virgin has Hugs resurrected by an obese, crucified Christ. The dog blows his own brains out, while Hugs, seemingly unaffected by his experience, goes home to his human wife and their children, who are miniature duplicates of Hugs or his wife. In an echo of its beginning, the book ends with a whole bunch of chickens crossing the road.

All this is told in thirty-five and a half pages, each (with one exception) divided into two horizontal panels of equal size. Interspersed throughout are various epigrammatic statements, some of which are quotations from literature, which by and large have no apparent connection to the action.

And the art? Hugs is drawn in a sort of Disney-ish bigfoot style, with a precision that suggests he was drawn with a computer: with a few exceptions, his facial expression is exactly the same throughout. Most of the other characters have a similar computer-drawn appearance, though the black dog is drawn by hand in a much rougher style. The backgrounds are either pure white (or occasionally black) or in muted colors or grays: these latter seem to be drawn from various sources, including photographs, stills from animated cartoons, and the "screaming pope" paintings of Francis Bacon. There are some samples from Hugs: Bloodpond on Michael Ogilvie's website, which also has samples from Hugs: Bloodpond's predecessor, Hugs: Thoughtlead, as well as other works. (Some of those latter images are NSFW.)

As I say, I like this book a lot. And yet, looking at its component parts, I found it difficult to understand why. Taken on its own, the story is rather sophomoric blasphemy, and is the sort of apparently pointless story that normally irritates me. The art is skillful and attractive: I particularly like the increasingly outlandish Tex Averyesque expressions of shock on the black dog's face as he observes Hugs' progress through the afterlife. But given the amount of repetition, and the extent of found material, the art by itself wouldn't carry the book. Then what?

In part, it's Ogilvie's mastery of the subtler aspects of comics: coloring, panel composition, and visual storytelling. But basically, this is one of those rare cases in which all elements come together to creat a perfect little gem which can't be changed in any part without destroying it. For instance, I noted that the story taken alone is nothing much. But "improving" it would wreck the balance between story and art. Likewise, if the art were less repetitive, it would be a completely different book.

In most comics, either the story is primary and the art is secondary, or the art is primary and the story is secondary. In Hugs: Bloodpond, both the story and art, as one usually thinks of them, are secondary. Instead, the book seems to be an experiment in getting the maximum mileage from the rearrangement and repetition of a limited set of elements, in both art and story. In the story, we have the circularity of Hugs' journey. And looked at more closely, the structure of the story as a whole is broadly palindromic: elements and motifs from the first half are repeated in reverse order in the second half. In an email to me, Michael Ogilvie wrote that he was "trying to create a new language," and that aspiration is visible here.

True, $11.95 is a lot to pay for 36 pages, even though the book is a nice-looking hardcover. But I don't regret buying it.

2007-11-16T19:22:00.001-08:00

"LIVEBLOGGING" NEVER LET ME GO, PART III

I'll wrap this series of posts up with some general reflections. The first two parts are here and here.

First, is Never Let Me Go a realist novel or not? Remains of the Day, Ishiguro's breakout novel, was a realist work. The Unconsoled, the novel following Remains, was emphatically not realist. When We Were Orphans, Ishiguro's next novel and Never Let Me Go's immediate predecessor, began as if it were a realist novel, but as the book continued the reader encountered things inexplicable in realist terms.

Of course, Never Let Me Go is not realist in the sense of imitating the real world. But it might be realist in the sense that most science fiction is realist: starting out with a world different from ours (or quickly introducing an entity or event not found in our world), but having events unfold as they supposedly would in real life, given that starting point. When I wrote my first post on Never Let Me Go, I believed it was realist in this sense. So did a number of reviewers, including some who criticized it as being bad SF because its extrapolation wasn't plausible: i.e. it was failed realism. I now think I was wrong. Instead, Never Let Me Go is a book which, like When We Were Orphans but more subtly, conceals a non-realist intent beneath a realist facade.

As one instance of Never Let Me Go's implausibility, several critics have cited the absence of resistance or escape attempts on the part of the adult clones. Originally, I saw no problem with this. Kathy M. is writing for her fellow clones, and just like a realistic narrator, doesn't tell them things they already know (unlike much SF, which contrives ways to have characters convey information which, in the book's world, everyone would already know). So it's perfectly reasonable to deduce that there's a security apparatus which Kathy doesn't discuss because her readers would know all about it.

I would still go along with this up to a point. But as I reread the parts of the book which take place in "regular society" -- the Norfolk expedition, and Kathy and Tommy's quest for Madame -- I realized that it just was too implausible for the security apparatus to be unobtrusive enough to not even be mentioned in these scenes, given that clones are visually identical to non-clones and that carers are allowed to drive, and apparently live, without supervision.

Another issue is the surface normality of Hailsham life. Is it really believable that everyone's reaction to learning that they will be murdered by having their organs removed would be so subdued? I do think it's plausible that many, perhaps most, would respond this way. But would there really be nobody who would freak out upon hearing Miss Lucy's speech? And when Lucy tells them: "you've been told and not told. You've been told, but none of you really understand" (81) -- something Kathy affirms -- well, I have a hard time seeing how you could tell a child that when she grows up her organs will be cut out and have her "not understand." (I'm pretty sure what my reaction would have been.) And Ishiguro is deliberately vague about how this "telling and not telling" would work.

Another thing Ishiguro is deliberately vague about is the sequence of donations. Kathy frequently reminds us that a "donor" will, if all goes well, make four "donations" in sequence, of which the last is invariably fatal. The first two would presumably be one kidney and one lung, but there is no obvious third "donation" which would not be fatal. There are possibilities, such as transplanting part of a liver; but Ishiguro's choosing a non-intuitive number of donations and never explaining it may be a clue that the book is not to be taken as realist.

Finally, there's the whole concept of a parallel society of "carers" and "donors" extending throughout England and existing in the same space as "normal" society, but only glancingly interacting with it, except for those few "normals" who deal with clones as part of their jobs. While this is not impossible, it's something one would expect to find in Kafka (think of the omnipresence of the "court" in The Trial), rather than Tolstoy.

Of course, one could also interpret all these points as indicating, not that Ishiguro did not intend the book as realism, but that he failed at realism. But given his clear interest in non-realist fiction, I'd give him the benefit of the doubt.

I understood the book better on this reading than on previous readings, but I don't understand everything, by any means. As I said, in an earlier installment, I don't understand the significance of the song "Never Let Me Go"; nor do I understand Miss Lucy's breakdown. When I reread the first post I wrote on the book, I think that at that time I only partially understood the book. I had grasped one important aspect -- the victimization of the clones -- but missed another, even more important one: the psychological imperatives that led them to collude in their own victimization. It may be that when I reread this series of posts after another reading of the book, they will seem equally partial.

(Speaking of donations, something occurred to me after I posted my previous post. The nightmarish rumor Kathy describes -- to which "even the doctors had no certain answers" -- that "maybe, after the fourth donation, even if you've technically completed, you're still conscious in some sort of way ... there are more donations, plenty of them, on the other side of that line ... there's nothing to do except watch your remaining donations until they switch you off" (279) is not completely clear, but seems to be the clones' idea of an afterlife. If so, how horrible that this is the afterlife they imagine.)

2007-11-16T17:47:00.000-08:00

MOORE AND WODEHOUSE

As long time readers of this blog may know, I haven't been impressed by most of the work Alan Moore's done since 1993 (when he started writing for Image), and that includes the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. But in this interview (via Journalista), Moore states that The Black Dossier contains "a Jeeves and Wooster novella by P.G. Wodehouse." Now that sounds like it would be worth reading. (Though not worth buying the book for.)

Since I wrote the paragraph above, I learned that Moore's Wodehouse pastiche mixes Jeeves and Wooster with the Cthulhu mythos. Now I'm less excited. This combination has been done before, and not that well: it's hard enough to get Wodehouse right even without throwing in the fundamentally incompatible Lovecraft. Besides, Moore's already done Lovecraft.

2007-11-01T11:51:00.000-07:00

"LIVEBLOGGING" NEVER LET ME GO, PART II

The first part is here. I should say that here, as in part one, page numbers refer to the Knopf paperback. Also, when a note begins with a page number, I'm not necessarily claiming that proof for that note will be found on that page. Sometimes the page number simply indicates when the thought in the note occurred to me.

p. 126: The Hailsham scenes are parodies of the boarding school scenes often found in English novels, except that the "pupils" are all going to have their organs harvested. Similarly, the scenes in the Cottages are parodies of college scenes, except that the "college" is a set of abandoned farm buildings, the "studies" are meaningless, and the "students" have no future.

p. 132: The veterans at the Cottages rarely talk about the students who leave to become carers, or about the courses to prepare for being carers: again, averting their eyes from the future.

p. 139: When the students argue about what age their "models" would be relative to themselves, and some argue that "they'd use for models people at the peak of their health ... around here, we'd all sense we were near territory we didn't want to enter": the fact that they were created to be harvested.

p. 140: Students argue whether "possibles" tell you "something of what your own life has in store" or whether "it was up to us to make of our lives what we could." Both positions are equally removed from reality.

The entire lives of the clones revolve around avoiding the truth as much as possible: at first by refusing to face it at all; then by ignoring it as much as possible; then, when they become carers and this becomes impossible, by using the language of "carer" and "donation" and "completion."

p. 142: Kathy's remarks about the "dream futures": "Maybe ... it was possible to forget for whole stretches of time who we really were"

pp. 142-43: "just for these few months, we somehow managed to live in this cosy state of suspension in which we could ponder our lives without the usual boundaries." College is supposed to be a time to "ponder [one's] life without the usual boundaries"; but in the clones' case, not only is the pondering pure fantasy, but their ideas of "life without the usual boundaries" are so restricted.

p. 152: Christine says "I know how lucky I am, getting to be at the Cottages," implying that most clones don't get any break between the "homes" they grow up in and becoming carers.

p. 192: Kathy is fascinated -- one might say magnetized -- by Ruth because Ruth constantly creates an aura of specialness around herself through make-believe and lies. This is the thematic reason why Ruth is so important in the novel: her specious "specialness" parallels the specious "specialness" of Hailsham itself. Does Ruth's sabotaging of Kathy and Tommy's relationship symbolize the life-distorting effects of Hailsham's myth of specialness?

Even now, Kathy doesn't fully recognize her own culpability in the churchyard incident.

(In my first post on Never Let Me Go, I'd written "In fact, when I reread the book, the part I most dreaded coming to was not the final confrontation with Miss Emily, or anything to do with the "donations," but the scene when Ruth betrays Tommy by telling him of Kathy's joining her in laughing at his animal pictures." Although I didn't reread my post before this reading, I reacted in just the same way this time, too. In fact, when I got to this point, I put the book down for a couple of days before reading the scene.)

p. 202: The reason why students volunteer to become carers, and why Kathy is proud of her work as a carer, is that they need to believe that their lives have some meaning other than being sources of spare parts.

Ruth doesn't quite come off as a monster, although she does awful things, because she is desperately trying to preserve her sense of specialness.

p. 257: Emily's speeches throughout this conversation have a very odd, unnatural tone.

Miss Emily is the original creator of the Hailsham myth, and still sees herself as a heroic figure. This conversation reveals that Emily, like Ruth, needs to be special and to be the center of attention; but, unlike Ruth, she deceives herself as well as others.

In previous readings I was never quite sure why Kathy and Tommy were so devastated by their conversation with Emily. When I wrote my first post on the book, I had concluded it was because of the revelation that even their guardians were afraid of them. But later I decided that was wrong. For one thing, neither Kathy nor Tommy seem to have been terribly attached to their guardians. For another, they were upset even before that revelation. Now, I think it was not one specific statement that upset them, but the conversation as a whole. They had believed in the myth of Hailsham, believed on some level that because they went to Hailsham they were different from other clones. Now they learn that Hailsham was not interested at all in them as individuals: they were essentially experimental subjects, even if the experiment was done with humane motives.

I had actually formulated this theory before I reached this section in my rereading. When I read Tommy's question to Miss Emily: "everything we did, all the lessons, everything. It was all about what you just told us [demonstrating that clones had souls]? There was nothing more to it than that?" (266) this made me more confident that I was right.

p. 266: Miss Emily's statement "There was a certain climate and now it's gone," referring to the campaign to demonstrate the humanity of clones, is remarkably unfeeling, so much so that even Kathy protests.

p. 268: Miss Emily admits that "sometimes ... we kept things from you, lied to you. Yes, in many ways we fooled you." [emphasis in original]

Miss Emily, the idealist, can only see Kathy and Tommy as the beneficiaries of her heroic efforts, and is indifferent to their fates as individuals. Madame, who had been visibly frightened of the pupils at Hailsham and who is now cynical about the whole enterprise, is the one who finally reaches out to them as humans. (272)

That's enough for now, I think. I have some more general thoughts, but I'll save them for the final installment.

2007-10-28T16:50:00.000-07:00

LIVEBLOGGING NEVER LET ME GO, PART I

I recently read Never Let Me Go for the third time. Not only does the book stand up to repeated readings, it's much more artful than I had realized when I first posted about it, after I had read it for the second time. This time, I did a sort of "liveblogging": I took notes as I read, with the intent of posting them pretty much as written. In the midst of writing the post I got derailed, as tends to happen with me, so I'm going to post what I've got so far, though I do intend to finish the job.

As I wrote in the post linked to above, Never Let Me Go can be spoiled and shouldn't be, so don't read this if you haven't read the book. In any case, if you haven't read the book what follows won't mean much to you.

Here goes:

The opening seems fairly innocuous on a first reading, but its horror is apparent on rereading, when we know the meaning of euphemisms like "donation" and "carer." Two subtler points arise in Kathy's conversation with the patient near "completion." When Kathy asks him where he grew up, he mentions a "place in Dorset." (5) On first, or even second, reading I assumed that this was a bad school. This time around, I realized that it wasn't a school at all, but one of the warehouses Miss Emily refers to. (265) And when he yearns to hear about details of life at Hailsham such as the guardians, the football, the school grounds, it isn't these things were of better quality at Hailsham than in Dorset: it's because these things existed at Hailsham, whereas he had never experienced them.

In both the opening and the first scene with Tommy, we see how cruelty perpetuates itself. In the opening, we see Kathy's pride in her work as a "carer," which, while it makes the donors more comfortable, also makes the process of donation -- actually slow murder -- run more smoothly. In the scene with Tommy, the girls watching Tommy deal with their incipient guilt and discomfort over his victimization by "swapping reasons why Tommy deserved everything he got." (10)

The question of "creativity" and the huge importance attributed to it at Hailsham. Commenting on her coversation with Ruth over Christy's poetry, Kathy remarks: "maybe she could sense where my talk was heading, and didn't want to go that way." (18) I'm not sure what Kathy means here, but was her talk "heading" towards questioning the value of "creativity"? And when Tommy tells Kathy that Miss Lucy told him it was okay not to be creative, Kathy thinks Tommy is lying to her.

p. 28 Lucy was shaking with rage when she told Tommy he didn't have to be creative. Because she was angry at how the pupils are basically being treated as experimental subjects?

p. 29 What do Kathy and Tommy know about "donations" at this point? Ishiguro deliberately keeps the question of what exactly the pupils know when fuzzy until Lucy's big outburst.

p. 52 "we each played our part in preserving the fantasy [of Miss Geraldine's 'secret guard'] and making it last for as long as possible." Hailsham itself is a fantasy -- that the clones can have normal childhoods, despite having been created to have their organs harvested -- which pupils and guardians alike collaborate in preserving. This is one example of how the incidents with Ruth at Hailsham that Kathy describes are linked thematically to the book's larger questions, even though they may be irrelevant to the plot per se.

p. 55 When Moira says that there is no plot against Miss Geraldine, Kathy, was been expelled from the "secret guard" a few days ago, responds by making up "evidence" that the plot is real. Trying to explain why she did this, she writes: "Moira was suggesting she and I cross some line together, and I wasn't prepared for that yet. I think I sensed how beyond that line, there was something harder and darker and I didn't want that. Not for me, not for any of us." Again, this parallels the way the pupils in general avoid knowing too much about their fate. (In fact, Ishiguro is even a little heavy-handed here.)

p. 69 The class doesn't follow up the question on smoking because they don't want to know the truth about "donations," implying that subconsciously they already do know it (though Kathy gives a different explanation).

p. 70 I still don't get the significance of the Bridgewater song.

p. 78 From Lucy's casual remark, we can infer that other "homes" for clones are surrounded by electric fences.

So many of the incidents at Hailsham Kathy recounts revolve around telling, not telling, and/or making believe.

2007-10-11T09:09:00.000-07:00

INLAND EMPIRE, PART II: MORE THINGS THAT HAPPENED

Deleted or additional scenes included on DVDs are rarely discussed in reviews or criticism, except to note their presence. This isn't surprising, since these scenes are generally equivalent to authors' rejected drafts. The additional scenes on the U.S. Inland Empire 2-DVD set, however, are a different case. For one thing, Lynch has labelled them "More Things That Happened," implying that they are "in continuity," so to speak. For another, they are not tangential, as such scenes often are. In fact, any full analysis of the film has to take them into account, even though doing so makes things more instead of less confusing.

In Chapter Four (using the chapter breaks on the DVD for identification) we see more of the mysterious "Phantom" than we do in the film itself. He is at a party, selling "licky watches," and apparently hypnotizes an unfortunate customer. Chapter Six is a lengthy and cryptic sequence (possibly beginning with Chapter Five) which includes the Bruised Woman, the Housewife, and Nikki, or possibly two Nikkis: nowhere in the film iirc are these three personas juxtaposed so closely. The first fifteen minutes of Chapter Fourteen are a monologue by the Bruised Woman providing information on her family history and current situation: she's living with her sister and sister's husband, something you would never guess from the film. We also learn a bit about the red lamp which is a visual motif in the film, associated particularly with the Housewife. And at the end of this monologue, the Bruised Woman makes the baffling statement that she was 41 in 1960, although what other chronological indications there are set the film firmly in the 00s.*

But the scenes in "More Things That Happened" are not just valuable for the data they provide; they are well worth watching in themselves. Two in particular stand out. The fifteen-minute monologue by the Bruised Woman referred to above is brilliantly written and acted -- one of the best portraits of dead-end working-class life I've encountered. And the light effects in Chapter Eleven are as beautiful as anything in Inland Empire.

Still, the scenes collected in "More Things That Happened" are anomalies. They're not part of the film, yet too closely connected to it to be treated as stand-alone entities. Neither wholes themselves nor integral parts of a larger whole, they're something that the mainstream of contemporary film criticism doesn't know how to deal with.

*The title page of the script for "On High in Blue Tomorrows" states "Received April 06, 2005"; and in the second part of Chapter Fourteen, a prostitute is paid by a client in Euros, which did not exist as physical currency before 2002.

2007-10-08T19:48:00.000-07:00

DVD CORNER: INLAND EMPIRE

I've been doing quite a bit of filmwatching in the past few days, partly in theaters but mainly on DVD. I recently finished watching David Lynch's Inland Empire for the second time on DVD, and I wanted to get down some thoughts on it while it was still fresh in my mind. Technically, there are spoilers, though I'm not sure that the concept applies to a film as opaque as this.

Several critics I've read have taken for granted that the scenes of the filming of "On High with Blue Tomorrows" that we see are "real," as opposed to later scenes, which may be dreams, fantasies or just surrealism. This isn't surprising, since this is the longest segment of the movie which could be taken for a realistic narrative. But there are several hints that these scenes are no more "real" than anything else in the movie. First, there is the film's title. Can you seriously picture a Hollywood filmmaker making a film entitled "On High with Blue Tomorrows"? Then when Nikki's "Visitor #1" asks her if the film is "about marriage," Nikki replies "Um, perhaps in some ways, but ... um ..." But the film we see being shot is unquestionably about marriage: it's about a married woman with a jealous husband having an affair with a married man. Finally, if the initial scenes of filming are real, then presumably the filming of the final scene is real as well. But would the writers of the banal dialogue we hear in the earlier scenes have nearly the last words in the film be a monologue by a homeless Asian about her prostitute friend who has a pet monkey and a hole in her vagina?

Once I suspected that the filming scenes aren't real, my first thought was that Visitor #1, who also talks about "magic," had in fact cast a spell upon Nikki, and everything between that scene and Visitor #1's appearance at the end of the picture is an illusion created by this spell. But this doesn't account for the Lost Girl and the rabbits, who make their first appearances before Visitor #1 meets Nikki. Moreover, Visitor #1 is first seen on the Lost Girl's television. These made me suspect that the conversation between Nikki and the visitor is itself not real. In which case, is Nikki even real? And if she isn't, who is dreaming, or imagining, her?

My first answer to this last question was the Lost Girl. After all, we periodically see her watching the events of the film on TV. And the scene in which Nikki kisses the Lost Girl, and then disappears, would fit well with this interpretation: now that the "film" is over, the Lost Girl's dream self has reintegrated with her real self. But the fact that the real film -- that is, Inland Empire -- ends with Laura Dern, not the Lost Girl, poses problems for this idea.

When I first saw the scene where the black homeless woman tells the dying Bruised Woman "no more blue tomorrows. You're on high now," I immediately surmised -- having seen Mulholland Drive -- that this scene was reality, and that rest of the movie were the Bruised Woman's fantasy, triggered by this remark. (You can find an elaborate reading of the film built on this foundation here (read the posts by onetailtest) and here.) But I quickly rejected this, for a couple of reasons. First, it would make the film too similar to Mulholland Drive. Second, on this hypothesis the film's last half hour would have to take place after the woman whose fantasy it is is dead. While this doesn't completely rule out the hypothesis, it does count against it, especially since there's no explicit evidence for the hypothesis. Furthermore, the scenes with the Bruised Woman, taken as a whole, aren't any more coherent or realistic than the rest of the film.

What does work, and what I would argue for, is that all or most of the film is the product of someone's unconscious (not necessarily a dream, but we can call it that for convenience). This explains why pieces of dialogue are repeated in completely different contexts by people who could not have known of the earlier use, and why Laura's husband joins a Polish circus (!): the Dreamer's unconscious is making things up as it goes along, cannibalizing earlier material in the process. Moreover, the film should be viewed not as the story of the "real" character played by Laura Dern whose personality is fracturing (whether we want to identify Nikki or Sue as this real character), but as the Dreamer's unconscious efforts, whoever she is, to construct a stable persona.

The first persona the Dreamer tries out is Nikki, but early in the movie's second hour, Nikki is replaced by the Housewife. (I refer to this persona as "the Housewife" and not Sue, because Dern plays the two personas differently, and because I think Sue's story is one of the things the Dreamer tries to repress by creating the Housewife.) Shortly before this happens, Nikki tells Devin to "look at me," insisting he recognize her as Mikki: she is demanding that Devin validate the Nikki persona, which he refuses to do.

The Housewife persona, as I hinted at above, is intended to suppress whatever it was that prompted the creation of "On High with Blue Tomorrows." But the repressed elements soon pop up again: first sex, with the group of seductive women who appear in the Housewife's house, and then violence, both dealt out and received, with the Bruised Woman. Shortly after the film's halfway mark, the Housewife confronts two women and asks them to "look at me and tell me if you've known me before." Like Nikki, the Housewife is demanding validation of her persona and does not get it.

This time, what follows is a chaotic section in which no persona dominates. This chaotic section ends with the "light show" that starts at about the 2 hour and 7 minute mark. After this, the Bruised Woman becomes the main persona from this point until her "death." But this persona is more fragile now than it had been before, as is evidenced by the danger that threatens her throughout this section. A couple of minutes after the start of this section, the Polish woman says to two prostitutes, "Hey, look at me and tell me if you've known me before," as the Housewife had earlier. Shortly afterwards, we have a reprise of the Bruised Woman's first encounter with the man at the top of the stairs; but this time her monologue expresses bewilderment and disorientation, rather than anger. The monologue is interrupted by a brief scene of the Housewife being beaten; there are also brief shots of two other women, one only seen in silhouette superimposed on the Bruised Woman's face.

From the Bruised Woman's death to the end of the film we get another period of chaos. This could be read either as all of the personas finally integrating, or as the final splintering of the personas. Obviously, this reading is far from complete, but I hope I've shown that it works as a starting point for further analysis.

Why is the Dreamer's unconscious so desperate to construct a stable persona, and why is it unable to do so until near the end of the film, if ever? In the conversation between Nikki and Visitor #1, the visitor tells Nikki she has an unpaid debt, and that actions have consequences, both phrases that will reappear later. It's reasonable, therefore, to assume that the Dreamer is guilty about something. What the Dreamer is guilty of is never stated; presumably it's the "thing" that the Bruised Woman sets out to tell the man at the top of the stairs about, but never actually gets to. Perhaps the Dreamer has killed her husband, or fantasized about doing so: this would account for a number of things. Note that the basic thrust of all the material between the start of filming and the Bruised Woman's death is either to portray Laura Dern's character as a victim, or to set up a self-defense justification for killing her husband.

2007-10-07T13:54:00.000-07:00

ANIME CORNER: PAPRIKA

A couple weeks ago I saw Satoshi Kon's most recent anime, Paprika, on the big screen, and I was so impressed by my first viewing that I went to see it again. Below are some thoughts on the film, not organized enough to qualify as a review. (This was mainly written a few days after seeing the film, but I didn't get around to posting it until now).

Paprika is definitely the weirdest anime Kon has made, and that includes Paranoia Agent. All of his anime, except Tokyo Godfathers (if my memory is correct) have involved some sort of blurring between reality and fantasies or dreams, but he takes this farther in Paprika than ever before. It's also creepy as hell, especially on a first viewing. A lot of the credit for this creepiness goes to the soundtrack, which is one of the most effective I've heard.

One of the creepiest things about it is the procession seen on the posters, which looks whimsical and festive on the posters but gives a completely different impression in the film. This procession plays a major role in the film. Two other recent, highly acclaimed anime feature films also contain processions: in Spirited Away, the procession of gods displays Japan's spiritual past, while the festive procession in Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence represents a cyberpunk future. Though these processions are very different from each other, each is harmonious in its own way. In contrast, the procession in Paprika is a chaotic jumble of everyday artifacts, pop culture and kitsch.

Paprika can be compared with Miyazaki in another way as well. Miyazaki presents the values of the past as an alternative to present-day commercialized mass society. All of Kon's previous anime, again with the exception of Tokyo Godfathers, depict the temptation to escape from a complicated present to a simpler, fondly remembered past, but this temptation is always something that needs to be resisted. While this theme appears more obliquely in Paprika, the film is emphatic that the solution to the misuse of technology is not to ban technology or to return to nature.

Although not ostensibly about movies, in fact movies are a major theme of Paprika. The entire plot of Paprika revolves around the dangers posed by shared dreams, and movies are shared dreams. This connection is made explicit several times. Paprika, the dream-travelling therapist who gives the movie its title, compares dreams to movies, and her client Konakawa's dream contains scenes modelled on various movies. Later, Paprika is shown watching Konakawa's dream projected on the screen in a movie theater. Does the irresponsible "kid trapped in the body of a genius" who, without thinking of the dangers, invents the machine that allows people to see and enter other's dreams represent Kon himself? And who does the evil "mastermind" who wants to control the world by controlling people's dreams represent?

Watching the movie a second time made its flaws more evident. Kon touches on a large number of themes, but in a scattershot fashion, as most of them are hardly developed: it's as if Kon was trying to cram the thematic breadth of the 13-episode Paranoia Agent into a ninety-minute movie. Konakawa's subplot is hardly deserving of all the time the movie spends on it. The characterizations are rudimentary: all the characters, even Paprika, are essentially types rather than individuals. And the ending, while impressive visually, makes no sense (although this is virtually an anime tradition). Paranoia Agent is still Kon's best work. But despite these flaws, I definitely recommend watching Paprika, on the big screen if possible.

2007-10-04T07:46:00.000-07:00

MANGA CORNER: BOKU TO KANOJO NO XXX [YOUR AND MY SECRET]

So far, American readers have seen only the first volume of the body-swapping comedy Boku to kanojo no XXX, published by ADV three years ago under the title Your and My Secret* as part of the throw-it-against-the-wall-and-see-if-it-sticks strategy they were following at the time. When they retrenched they abandoned the series, to the disappointment of a lot of readers, including me. More recently Tokyopop picked up the license, but they haven't released anything yet.

I recently read the second and third volumes of Boku to kanojo no XXX, which I'd bought before Tokyopop announced it was picking up the series. Those American readers who have been waiting eagerly for the continuation of the series may be taken aback when volume three comes out. The raunchy humor which was a feature of the first volume, and which distinguished it from other guy-in-girl's-body comedies, is absent from the third volume. By the end of that volume, the series has become virtually a shoujo romantic comedy revolving around the bizarre love quadrangle of Akira, Momoi, Senbongi, and Shiina, with Akira being less freaked out by his best friend hitting on him than by his own response. Which is not to say that volume three isn't enjoyable; it's just enjoyable in a different way from the first volume. I've ordered the fourth and most recent volume from Sanseidoh; we shall see how things develop.

I realized a few days ago that while my Japanese-language manga posts have provided the information needed to order the manga online or from a Japanese language bookstore, they've been less helpful to those trying to find them on the shelves of a Japanese bookstore. In most Japanese bookstores I've been to, the manga are sorted neither by title nor by author, but by the line under which they are published, which is determined by the magazine in which they originally appeared. This may seem strange, but for Japanese readers it makes sense: not only does each magazine have its own distinct flavor, but a Japanese reader would know in which magazine a given manga appeared. For Americans trying to navigate a Japanese bookstore's manga section, though, this system isn't so useful. Boku to kanojo no XXX is in the "Blade Comics" line. You can recognize this line by its logo, which appears on the top of the spine and consists of the words "Blade Comics" (in English) under a sort of irregular upside-down triangle shape.

For those who do have to order it, the publisher is Mag Garden, the cost is 552 yen for volumes two and three and a little more for the fourth, and the ISBNs are
vol. 2: 4-86127-046-4
vol. 3: 4-86127-193-2
vol. 4: 4-86127-357-9

*Although "boku to kanojo no XXX" would translate as "my and her XXX," the "official" English translation, as used by the Japanese publisher (though it appears only on the copyright page), is "Your & My Secret X X X," so ADV wasn't just being arbitrary when they chose the English title. Also, the official way of pronouncing the XXX part of the title is "peke mittsu," where "peke" means "no good" or "failure" and "mittsu" means "three."

2007-10-01T07:33:00.000-07:00

A BRIEF NOTE ON TEKKONKINKREET THE ANIME

A couple of days ago, I watched Tekkonkinkreet on DVD. Basically, it's eye candy, but when eye candy looks this great you won't see me complaining: Tekkonkinkreet may be the best-looking anime I've ever seen. There's an informative interview with Michael Arias, the director, here.

2007-09-30T08:15:00.000-07:00

ON TRANSLATIONS

As I hinted at in my last post, Alethea and Athena Nibley responded to my translation notes on FB vol. 1 by defending some of the translations I had criticized, both in the comments to my notes and on their own live journal, which led to brief exchanges at both places until time pressure forced me to bow out. I still think I'm right on most of the contested points, including the "itterasshai" vs. "come home safe" issue, although on that score I don't have anything to add to what I've already said. But thinking over their responses made me realize that I shouldn't have implied that they were simply mistaken. Many of our differences are due to different approaches to translation. Their translations are freer than I would like, and sometimes they make explicit what they believe is implicit in Takaya's writing, as in "come home safe." My belief is that that if the author leaves something implicit, the translation should do the same; but the Nibleys' approach to translation is a legitimate one. Even if you agree with their approach, though, I think it's useful to compare their translations with the original Japanese, so that people who wouldn't necessarily interpret the original text the same way the Nibleys do have an opportunity to decide for themselves.

2007-09-20T12:52:00.000-07:00

TWO BRIEF NOTES ON FREE IMPROVISATION AND TRANSLATIONS, RESPECTIVELY

About two weeks ago, I was handed a large chunk of work with a fairly tight deadline. As a result, I've had to pretty much withdraw from active participation on the Web, which is why I bowed out of the conversations between me and the translators of Fruits Basket below and on their live journal, and also why I haven't finished the second part of my translation notes on Fruits Basket vol. 1. I'm not completely out of the woods yet, but I do have a momentary breather, enough to allow me to post two brief items.

For free improvisation fans: two years ago I wrote in glowing terms of a live performance by Tatsuya Nakatani, Michel Doneda, and Jack Wright I had just seen. Tonight they will be playing again in C-U, at the Krannert Art Museum, 500 E. Peabody Dr., Champaign IL (same place as last time), starting at 7:30 PM. It's free, so if you're interested in free improvisation, or if you find my description intriguing, by all means come. If you don't live in C-U, they will be playing further dates in Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia and Brooklyn. You can find more information about the trio, now dubbing themselves the From Between Trio, here, including details about the tour and an audio sample.

And for manga readers, this brief discussion of translations of Jules Verne reminds us that when it comes to translations, we could have it a lot worse.

2007-09-04T07:14:00.000-07:00

FRUITS BASKET TRANSLATION NOTES, VOL. 1, PART 1

This time I've gone back to the beginning. There's a lot of material here: so much that I'm dividing it into two parts. Since I haven't done one of these in a while, I'll go over the basics (see the sidebar for my previous translation notes).

In each entry, TP refers to the Tokyopop edition, JP refers to the Japanese edition, and the line below the JP is my own translation. I haven't included every discrepancy between the TP and JP, only ones where there's a plot or character point involved, where the TP doesn't make sense, or where a joke is lost in the TP.

My translations should not be considered as polished translations; they're intended only to present the meaning of the JP as accurately as I can. They aren't always word-for-word literal translations, but when I had to choose between preserving the overall meaning of the passage and avoiding awkwardness in the English, I've chosen the former. In this regard I should again stress that these notes aren't intended to disparage the work of the translators and adaptor. Everyone makes mistakes, and I'm sure they did much better jobs than I could have.

In this volume, unlike the others I've done, the Japanese and English page numbers are the same.

p. 6:
TP: Life in the Sohma household, pre-Tohru
JP: Shigure mo douzai nan' desu keredo.
Shigure is also guilty, though.

p. 7, panel 1:
TP: Let's get this show on the road, shall we? This is where the fun begins ...
JP: Enkai o hajimemashou. Minna to tanoshiku itsumademo
Let's start the banquet, and enjoy ourselves with everyone as long as we like/forever

I'm not entirely sure of the second half of my translation. In isolation, the TP is fine as a free translation; but "enkai" is the word used to describe the banquet to which God invites the animals, which gives these lines an extra layer of significance. A further layer will be apparent later. "Itsumademo" can mean "as long as one likes" or "forever"; both meanings are significant here.

p.8 panels 3-4:
TP: No matter what happens in life I never let it get me down. That's me -- ever the optimist!
JP: Watashi no torie wa donna toki demo megunai koto desu
My good point is that whatever happens I never lose heart

p. 15, panel 1:
TP: Stop fantasizing and get a life.
JP: Kudannee innen tsukete n' ja nee zo kuraa ...
You're inventing an absurd pretext for a quarrel

p.18, panel 6:
TP: That sucks, you having to pay all your school expenses yourself.
JP: Taihen da naa. Gakuhi wa jibun de harau tte yakusoku shite n' da kke ka
Isn't it awful that you promised to pay your school expenses by yourself? [My emphasis]

Also, Hana's second balloon in this panel is a question.

p. 19, panel 1:
TP: After I graduate, I want to be able to pay my own way.
JP: Demo sotsugyou shitara hitorigurashi o hajimetai to omotte
But when I graduate I want to start living on my own

panel 2: There's no "so selfless" in the JP.

p. 24, panel 1:
TP: My head is spinning just from being around him.
JP: Amari no kireisa ni tamashii o suwareta kibun ...
I feel like my soul is being sucked in by too much beauty ...

panel 6: The word on the cover of the book Tohru is holding is "kakeiba," which means a household accounting book.

panel 7:
TP: Mom was always there for me.
JP: Watashi o mamotte kureta okaasan
Mom protected me

p. 25, panel 1:
TP: She was my cheerful protector.
JP: Itsu datte pawafuru de akarukute
Always powerful and bright

panel 4:
TP: Yes, yes! Good, good!
JP: Uki-uki uki-uki
Cheerfully cheerfully

p. 26, panel 2:
TP: Why don't I just start now?!
JP: Ima kara sono sabishisa ni taeru ii chansu da to omou koto ni shimashou!!
I'll think of this as an opportunity to endure that loneliness!!

p. 27, panel 1:
TP: My home is my castle. My home is my castle!
JP: Sumeba miyako. Sumeba miyako desu ... !!
There's no place like home. There's no place like home ... !! [Literally, "If you live there, it's the capital."]

p. 28, panel 1:
"Kiraku," the word translated as "progressive," actually means "easygoing, carefree, optimistic."

p. 35, panel 4:
There's no "castle" in the JP.

p. 36, panel 3:
TP: "Come home safe."
JP: ... Itterasshai

When a Japanese person leaves their house for a short time (e.g. to go to work or school) and someone else is in the house, they will automatically say "ittekimasu," which literally means "I'm going and coming [back]." The other person will just as automatically reply "itterasshai." I'm not sure of the literal meaning of this, but it might be something like "you'll be welcome when you return." If you watch anime with subtitles, you've probably heard this exchange many times. The important things here are that first, this is simply a standard phrase with no deep meaning; and second, there's no suggestion that Tohru thinks her not saying "itterasshai" had anything to do with her mother's death: she's just sorry she didn't say goodbye to her that morning.

p. 37, panel 1:
TP: I missed out on a lot of opportunities because of it.
JP: Demo yappa joshi kousei tte no mo yatte mitakatta na
But I wanted to try being a high schooler, after all

panel 3:
TP: But it's not too late! Even with my grades and my house being blown away I can still make it up to my mom.
JP: Baka desu. Akaten totte mo ie ga fukitonde mo taisetsu ni shinakya ikenai no wa okaasan datta no ni
I'm stupid. I get bad grades, and my house is blown away, and even though I should have taken good care of mom

panel 4:
TP: I can't bring her back ...
JP: Mou nido to ienai
Once again I couldn't say goodbye

panel 5:
TP: ... but I can live the life she wanted for me. She wanted me to finish high school so I'll graduate ... for her.
JP: Dakara semete gakkou wa okaasan ga nyuugaku suru koto o nozonda gakkou dake wa buji ni sotsugyou shitai desu ...
So at least I want to graduate safely from high school, which my mother wanted to enter ...

p. 41, panel 1:
TP: You don't have to push yourself so hard.
JP: Muri shite made kaji o tetsudau koto nai n' da yo
You don't have to help with the housework until you wear yourself out

panel 3:
TP: ... I'll die alone.
JP: notareji ni kettei desu ...
I'll definitely die of exposure ...

p. 44, panel 3:
TP: I'm pretty good at it, too, if I do say so.
JP: tto iu ka sore igai tokui na koto ga nai ...
That is, aside from that I have no strong points ...

p. 46, panel 1:
TP: I am at the mercy of your hospitality.
JP: Yoroshiku onegai shimasu!!

"Yoroshiku onegai shimasu," sometimes translated as "please treat me favorably," is commonly used in a variety of situations (often informally abbreviated to "yoroshiku"). Like "itterasshai," if you watch subtitled anime you've probably heard it a lot, particularly when a transfer student is being introduced. Also like "itterasshai," it shouldn't be translated as anything more than a routine polite formula.

p. 47, panel 3:
TP: It's all too good to be true. I hope my staying here doesn't cause them too much trouble.
JP: Aa demo hontou ni hontou ni ii no deshou ka. Kouun sugite fuan ni narimasu ...
Oh, but is it really, really okay? Too much good luck makes me uneasy ...

p. 51, panel 1:
TP: Is Kyo back?
JP: Moshikashite Kyou ga kita?
Did Kyou perhaps come?

The significance of this, and the final note to p. 84, panel 5, is that the TP has sometimes been taken to imply that before Kyou went off to the mountains, he had lived in Shigure's house. In the JP, there is no such implication.

p. 52, panel 1:
TP: I'm the same age as Kyo-kun ...
JP: Kyou-kun ni totte wa onaidoshi no onna no ko nan' desu ga ...
But for Kyou-kun the girls are the same age ... [And so Kyou won't be as excited at going to school with them as Shigure would be.]

p. 59, panel 4:
TP has switched the words in the two balloons.

p. 60, panel 2:
TP: I'm getting there.
JP: Daibu jijou wa nomikomete ... kimashita
There was ... quite a lot to take in

p. 61, panel 4:
There's nothing in the JP corresponding to "he's like a lovestruck fool."

p. 62, panel 2:
"Bugaisha," which TP translates as "outcast," means simply "outsider."

p. 63, panel 4:
TP: Just this once I'll overlook your stupidity
JP: Sono bakasa kagen ni menjite
Out of respect for the extent of that stupidity

p. 64, panel 4:
In the JP Tohru's thought is a question.

p. 71, panel 4:
There's no "I'm a liability, aren't I?!" in the JP.

p. 81, panel 2:
TP: Yuki does have good instincts, but still ... proceed with caution.
JP: Demo Yuki wa kan ga ii kara ki o tsukete ne
But Yuki is [mentally] sharp, so be careful

panel 5:
TP: I am at your mercy.
JP: Yoroshiku onegai shimasu
See the note to p. 46, panel 1.

p. 82, panel 1:
TP: Our mercy ...
JP: Yoroshiku ...
This is difficult to translate, but "yoroshiku" on its own can mean "well," "suitably," or "as one thinks fit," and Yuki is probably thinking ironically of one (or more) of these senses.

panel 2:
TP: I am in debt to you, too, Kyo-san."
JP: Yo- yoroshiku onegai shimasu eto ... Kyou-kun
See the note to p. 46, panel 1 ("eto" is just an interjection indicating hesitation, like "um" in English).

panel 3:
TP: Why should I be nice to anyone in this ...
JP: Dare ga yoroshiku suru ka konna ie ...
Who behaves well [or "suitably"] in a house like this ...

(I'm not really sure here, but that's my best guess.)

panel 5:
TP: Fix it again!
JP: Fuman ga aru nara dete ike
If you're dissatisfied, get out

panel 5:
TP: Maybe I will!
JP: Dete ... konna ... [ellipses mine]
The text is cut off by the panel border, and I can't tell what Kyou is supposed to be saying.

panel 5:
TP: We gave away your room.
JP: Omae no heya nanka nai zo
You have no room

See p. 51, panel 1.

p. 85, panel 1:
TP: It's a great setup -- I own them so much.
JP: Arigatasugite atama ga agarimasen
I'm so grateful [or "obliged"] that I can't hold my head up

p. 88, panel 2:
TP: You look like a talk show host.
JP: Hosuto mitai.
You look like a host.

"Host" here doesn't mean "talk show host." Those who have read or watched Ouran High School Host Club or watched Nerima Daikon Brothers will know what a "host" is. For those who don't, a host works at a "host club": a commercial establishment were women pay (quite a lot) for the company of young men. A host will flirt with his customer, and cater to her romantic or sexual fantasies, but ordinarily will not have sex with her. This may sound like something dreamt up by a shoujo mangaka, but host clubs are real: for more information see here. Shigure in this scene is, in fact, dressed similarly to a typical host as described in that article, or to Ichiro, the host character from Nerima Daikon Brothers.

Since "hosts" do not exist in the U.S. and the concept is unfamiliar, producing a translation that makes sense to American readers is problematic. If it were me, I might go with "You look like a gigolo," even though that only approximates the original meaning.

p. 93, panel 1:
TP: Hana-chan is very powerful to sense things no one else can, but I have to admit, I never understand her wave report!
JP: Yappari Hana-chan no denwa jouhou wa anadoremasen ... !!
You can't take the information Hana-chan gets from waves lightly, after all ... !!

p. 94, panel 4:
TP: Special? He's a freak!
JP: Sou iu mondai?
Is that the problem? [Emphasis mine]

p. 100, panel 2:
At the end of Tohru's thought balloon in the JP is the phrase "Watashi baka desu ..."
which means "I'm stupid" or "I'm an idiot." TP leaves this out.

p. 102, panel 3:
TP: People aren't born social. Sure it comes easier to some people[,] but most people, like you, need to work at it. Some more than others. You're just inexperienced.
JP: --... naka ni wa sou iu hito mo iru kedo ne. Kimi no baai wa tan ni keiken ga tarinai dake da yo.
There is a person [or people] like that on the inside. But in your case you're just inexperienced.

An alternate translation of the first half would be "there are people who are like that inside."

p. 103, panel 2:
TP: you'll never be able to care about anyone but yourself.
JP: honto no imi de tanin o omoiyareru you na ningen ni wa narenai yo
You won't be able to become a person who can enter into another's feelings [or "be considerate with others"] in the true sense of the words

p. 111, panel 1:
TP: Someone sincere who speaks from the heart.
JP: Gomen nasai no kimochi o shiteru ... hito [ellipsis mine]
A person who knows what it's like to feel sorry

p. 112, panel 4:
TP: And so Kyo and I became friends ...
JP: Koushite nakanaori mo dekimashita
That's how we were able to make up our quarrel

2007-09-02T07:24:00.000-07:00

INTERESTING COINCIDENCE DEPT.

The Sept. 3, 2007 issue of Newsweek describes an upcoming sitcom, "Samantha Who?" as being about "a woman who wakes up from a coma with amnesia and gradually discovers that she's actually a pretty rotten person." Hmm, where have I seen something like that before?

2007-08-21T20:49:00.000-07:00

FRUITS BASKET VOL. 17 LINKS

Some thoughtful -- and spoilery -- posts on Fruits Basket vol. 17 from umadoshi, flamika and merr0w. (Flamika's post also has spoilers to Pet Shop of Horrors vol. 10.) In the first comment to umadoshi's post, the translators explain why they made the choice I criticized in my previous post.

2007-08-19T08:23:00.000-07:00

A BRIEF TRANSLATION NOTE ON FRUITS BASKET VOL. 17

It's been too long since I've done one of these posts. This, though, as the title says, is just a brief note. I can't do a full set of notes for vol. 17 until I can borrow a copy from the library, but flipping through a copy at my local bookstore I noticed one important difference between the original and the translation. I can't discuss it without revealing a major spoiler involving Akito; so don't proceed unless you've read at least through Chapter 98 (the third chapter in vol. 17).

(read more)

2007-08-16T13:24:00.000-07:00

MANGA CORNER: AT THE MERCY OF THE WAVES BY SHUNGICU UCHIDA

I worry about doing too many posts about weird (from an American perspective, at least) manga. Aside from promoting the "freak show" view of Japan in general and manga in particular, they distract from the much better manga I've written about. But it's a lot harder, and requires a lot more thought, to do justice to a great manga than to a weird one. And lets face it: the reviews of weird manga probably provide more enjoyment to more readers. And since I recently read a manga that's both weird and good, here goes.

At the Mercy of the Waves (Nami no mani mani) is by Shungicu Uchida, whom I've written about before (see the sidebar). It's strange, not so much for the events depicted (though there is that), as because of the way it's told and its peculiar tone. In brief, it's about a young woman named Konoha who works at an inn and is regularly tortured by her older sister Tomiko.* Most of the chapters follow a rigid formula. Konoha falls in love with a guest and has sex with him. He offers to help her escape. Tomiko catches them, immobilizes the guest somehow and sadistically punishes Konoha. The guest disappears and is never seen again. Plot details, and even much of the dialogue, are also repeated over and over: for instance, when the guest offers to help Konoha escape, she regularly replies "I was waiting for a gentleman who would say that!" The formula is so rigid that when one chapter's panels are displayed in reverse order, I had no trouble following.

Most shockingly, Tomiko brands Konoha on both buttocks with a large brand reading "baita," or "whore." Tomiko also forces one of Konoha's lovers to tattoo "inbai," meaning "prostitution," prominently below her breasts. Reversing the usual sequence in S & M novels or manga, the worst tortures are dealt out in the first chapters, so in later chapters Tomiko has to resort to less permanent but still unpleasant punishments, such as suspending Konoha by her hair and dribbling mashed yams (which are apparently itchy) upon her nude body. Until the last chapter I could only think that the manga was intended as a parody of S & M porn. The last chapter, however, brings everything together in a way that makes sense.

At the Mercy of the Waves is an early work of Uchida's, originally published in 1985 (though my copy is a reprint published in 2001), but her art is already fully accomplished. Her compositions are good, and she creates interesting textures with the vertical stripes of the two sisters' kimonos and with occasional abstract patterns in the background. (Here's a computer-translated version of the book's page on Amazon.co.jp, so you can see the cover.**) Overall, while this isn't the best thing Uchida's done, I recommend it if the S & M theme doesn't put you off.

If you're wondering about the title, it has the connotation of drifting aimlessly, which certainly seems to apply to Konoha.

Publishing info: at 232 pages, At the Mercy of the Waves is somewhat longer than the usual single-volume manga. In my edition it's bound with a collection of unrelated short manga horror stories (which I haven't read), making 384 pages in total. It's published by Bunshun Bunko, it cost 705 yen, and its ISBN is 4-16-726712.

*Another possible reading for the older sister's name is Fuko, but going by their respective hits on Google, Tomiko is the more likely reading.

**You can order it from this page, but unless you live in Japan it's probably a lot cheaper to special order it from a Japanese-language bookstore, if you have access to one.

2007-08-08T18:50:00.000-07:00

TRIANGLE AND ROBERT IS (TEMPORARILY) BACK!

If you have followed Triangle and Robert based upon my recommendation, or have clicked on the link in the sidebar recently, you'll have noticed that the strip has been on hiatus for several months. The good news is that it's back. The bad news is that it'll end in four weeks. As I've said before, it's a very funny webcomic, so if you had been reading it, go read it, and if you haven't read it yet, read the archives. (The ending won't make much sense if you don't; the strip's first week isn't that hot, but starting with the second week it picks up.)

2007-08-04T10:49:00.000-07:00

MOVIE CORNER: A BRIEF REVIEW OF THE PRESTIGE

In my last post I said that I had hated the Christopher Nolan-directed movie The Prestige but that was a story for another day. Today is that day. Like a SF monster that takes on the form of what it devours, the film superficially resembles Christopher Priest's novel, but on the inside it's pure Hollywood: the sets, the acting, and above all the dialogue, which is full of confrontations staged to make a point and fake "emotional moments."

That alone would be enough to make me dislike the film, but I have other problems with it as well. They're spoilery, so I'll post them on my other blog.

2007-08-01T08:36:00.000-07:00

BOOK CORNER: THE PRESTIGE BY CHRISTOPHER PRIEST

I recently watched the film The Prestige on DVD, and while I hated it (but that's another story), it did prompt me to go back and reread the book. After finishing it, I suddenly realized for the first time what the point of the present-day ending is. Undoubtedly I'm not the first one to do so, but there are also people who haven't seen it. For example, Abigail Nussbaum, an intelligent critic, states that the present-day frame "ultimately serves no narrative purpose," and this very good review by Nic at Eve's Alexandria also misses the point of the present-day frame. (The first two links are full of spoilers for both the book and movie.) So, for anyone who hasn't yet grasped the point and doesn't want to work it out for themselves, I've provided the answer on my other blog, linked to by the fake cut below. Spoilers, obviously.

(read more)

2007-07-24T07:41:00.000-07:00

MANGA CORNER: ABSOLUTE BOYFRIEND VOL. 3

I've had some fun on this blog with a couple of examples of etchi shoujo sex comedies published in Japan. But I hadn't realized that at least one example of this genre has been published in the U.S.: namely, Absolute Boyfriend vol. 3, by Yuu Watase.

The premise of the series is that a high school girl named Riiko finds herself in possession of an advanced human-looking robot named Night who is programmed to be the perfect lover. At the end of vol. 2, another woman had kissed Night, resetting him to be that woman's lover. In the first chapter of this volume, Riiko gets Night back by kissing him herself. But Night is in danger of being reset again until he has sex with Riiko, permanently "imprinting" her on him.

Riiko is hesitant to take such a big step, but the salesman who "sold" NIght to Riiko is for some reason determined that they should have sex, going so far as kidnap Riiko and drag her, along with Night, to a private resort island. Adding complications is Soshi, Riiko's childhood friend turned boring-but-dependable rival for Riiko's love. Night, while determined to have sex with Riiko, insists on playing fair with Soshi, even taking him along to the resort island. For her part, Riiko can't decide which of the two she's in love with. She also can't decide whether or not to have sex with Night. (Since the series is, in the end, shoujo and not "ladies' comics," a threesome is unlikely.) And hijinx, as they say, ensue.

I haven't read any reviews of this volume, but I suspect that a lot of people would object to a "perfect lover" who is determined that his 16-year-old girlfriend have sex with him -- not to mention an adult who does everything possible to push a 16-year-old girl into having sex and is not portrayed as a villain. But when so much American popular culture approaches adolescent female sexuality with a combination of leering and Puritanism, it's refreshing to see something aimed at teenage girls that matter-of-factly acknowledges that many teenage girls not only have sex but want to have sex, at least sometimes.

Here's some dialogue I predict you won't see in DC's Minx line of graphic novels aimed at adolescent girls: Riiko's overprotective father, who has caught Night with Riiko, says angrily to his wife: "It seems like just yesterday Riiko was tugging innocently on my (BLEEP)!" To which his wife replies "Well, she's almost old enough to tug on other people's (BLEEP)." (p. 174)

2007-07-18T07:38:00.000-07:00

BOOK CORNER: PICTURES SHOWING WHAT HAPPENS ON EACH PAGE OF THOMAS PYNCHON'S NOVEL GRAVITY'S RAINBOW BY ZAK SMITH

This is a very peculiar book. It's not a book of illustrations in the conventional sense; it consists of approximately 760 drawings, one for each page of the 1973 Viking edition of Gravity's Rainbow. Despite the title, Smith doesn't portray everything that happens in Gravity's Rainbow. In fact, most of the drawings don't actually show anything happening. But each page does portray a scene, or sometimes simply an object, which appears on, or is inspired by, the corresponding page in Gravity's Rainbow.

Smith works in a variety of styles and techniques. Most of the drawings are black-and-white, but some have color added. Many of the drawings are caricature-like sketches. Some look like watercolors, or black-and-white reproductions thereof. Some look abstract at first glance. Some are darkened or cross-hatched to the point of virtual illegibility. Some pages are even broken up into comic-like panels, though there are never word balloons.

In appearance Pictures resembles one of those "wordless novels" that have appeared from time to time (e.g. Eric Drooker's Flood!). But unlike such books, it isn't a standalone narrative. Without referring back to Gravity's Rainbow itself, one can't tell the significance of Smith's drawings -- or, in many cases, even what is happening.

This leads to the main problem with the book. If one considers it simply as a collection of drawings, the variety of styles and the skill with which it's executed make it fascinating, though more suited to dipping into than reading straight through. But it demands to be read in conjunction with Gravity's Rainbow. And when you do this, well, Pynchon simply blows Smith out of the water. For all Smith's skill, he doesn't even come near to the richness of Pynchon's prose.

One thing that really pissed me off about the book is the misleading back-cover blurb (which Smith, of course, was not responsible for). This begins: "Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow (1973) has been called a modern Finnegans Wake for its challenging language, wild anachronisms, hallucinatory happenings, and fever-dream imagery. With Pictures Showing What Happens on Each Page of Thomas Pynchon's Novel Gravity's Rainbow, artist Zak Smith at once eases and expands readers' experience of the twentieth-century classic." First of all, Gravity's Rainbow is a difficult book, but Finnegans Wake it ain't: rarely if ever is there any difficulty figuring out what event is taking place on the page. Second, if this were a difficulty, Pictures wouldn't help: as I said above, you need Gravity's Rainbow to understand Pictures, not vice versa. (Incidentally, I'm not sure what the "wild anachronisms" the blurb mentions are supposed to be. Gravity's Rainbow ranges widely in time, from the mid-17th century colonization of Mauritius to an imaginary future, but as far as I recall the details of each scene are appropriate to the period in which it's set.)

Another side-note: at the start of Smith's foreword, he tells a story in which he allows a porn director who goes by the name Benny Profane to use some of Smith's Gravity's Rainbow drawings in his latest movie, in exchange for being allowed to act -- i.e. have sex -- in that movie. He comments: "I suspect Pynchon fans will find all that thoroughly gratifying..." I don't know how Pynchon fans would feel about it (myself, I have no feelings one way or the other), but I can't see Pynchon -- at least the Pynchon who wrote Gravity's Rainbow -- being anything but horrified.

If you're interested in the book, it's published by Tin House Books and costs $39.95; its ISBN-13 is 978-0-9773127-9-5.

2007-07-16T19:09:00.000-07:00

ONLINE MANGA CORNER: "ABSTRACTION" BY SHINTARO KAGO

About three weeks ago, the blog Same Hat! Same Hat! which focuses on ero-guro (erotic-grotesque) manga, posted links to a scanlation of the sixteen-page experimental manga "Abstraction" by Shintaro Kago. (Link via MangaBlog.) I can truthfully say that I have never seen a comic like this. You may have seen comics which partially treat the "virtual space" of the comics page as an actual physical space by showing characters in different panels interacting directly with each other. "Abstraction" takes this idea to the limit, pushes it into three dimensions, and twists it into a Moebius strip. And that's about as far as I can go toward describing it. Trust me, you have to look at this.

(Note that Same Hat's post is probably safe for work (unless you work in a day care center or something like that) though with some grotesque imagery; but the scanlation linked to is NSFW, mainly due to some grotesque imagery of genitals.)

2007-07-08T20:20:00.000-07:00

MANGA CORNER: 51 WAYS TO PROTECT YOUR GIRLFRIEND VOL. 1 BY USAMARU FURUYA

I realize that recently I've done very few reviews of Japanese-language manga. This is partly because I haven't finished any Japanese-language manga for a while, for various reasons. So, I'm going to discuss some manga I own but haven't read, starting with 51 Ways to Protect Your Girlfriend (Kanojo o mamoru 51 no houhou) vol. 1.*

The protagonist, 21-year old Jin Mishima, is waiting for an appointment in a Tokyo square when he encounters by chance an old schoolmate of his, Nanako Okano, who has become a Gothic Lolita.** She's not a very good Gothic Lolita, though, and is looked down upon by the other Lolitas there. In full hearing of these other Lolitas, Jin reminds Nanako that they were both on the basketball club in middle school. She's understandably not pleased about this, and they part on bad terms.

That evening Jin sees the other Lolitas pushing Nanako off a bridge (or perhaps only pretending to) in response to an alleged infraction of some sort. Jin chases the other girls away, and then, being a rather strait-laced young man, upbraids Nanako for her choice of lifestyle. Again they part angrily. But, while mulling over the encounter, Jin suddenly recalls that Nanako had been the target of Japanese-style bullying in high school. Now feeling awful about himself, he runs to catch up with her and apologizes for not having helped her in high school. She tearfully tells him that it's too late for that. Then an earthquake destroys Tokyo.

Okay, that's an exaggeration (but I couldn't resist): Tokyo doesn't appear to have been destroyed, at least not totally. But it is a major earthquake of magnitude 8 which devastates the areas surrounding Jin and Nanako, though they themselves are unhurt. The rest of this volume seems to be primarily devoted to Jin and Nanako's efforts to help the survivors. After the earthquake (which takes up sixteen pages, although it's over quickly in "real time"), the art becomes a bit more angular than is usual with Furuya, which works well with the gritty subject matter.**

51 Ways to Protect Your Girlfriend is published by Shinchosha. Four volumes have been published so farm, each 505 yen each (I think). The 13-digit ISBNs are:

Vol. 1: 978-4-10-771289-9
Vol. 2: 978-4-10-771305-6
Vol. 3: 978-4-10-771321-6
Vol. 4: 978-4-10-771338-4

*Translating the title is a bit tricky: the basic meaning of "kanojo" is "she," but it's frequently used to mean "girlfriend." The afterword is titled, in English, "The Way to Protect Kanojo," which is no help.

**Strictly speaking, Gothic Lolita is just one of several varieties of Lolita fashion: others include Classical Lolita, Punk Lolita, and Sweet Lolita. (I'm particularly taken with the concept of Pirate Lolita.) But I can't tell the difference between the varieties, and saying "Lolita" without qualification might lead to misunderstanding; so at the risk of inaccuracy I've opted to say "Gothic Lolita," which is the most familiar term in the West.

***Incidentally, on p. 25 Furuya does something I don't recall seeing anywhere else in either manga or Western comics: in order to put a lot of dialogue into a single panel, he shrinks the type size, rather than have the word balloons take up half the panel.

2007-07-05T07:21:00.000-07:00

BOOK CORNER: HOMUNCULUS

If one were to make a list of the least promising settings for a comic novel, Sierra Leone during its 1991-2002 civil war would undoubtedly belong near the top of the list. And yet Hugh Paxton's Homunculus is a comic novel set during Sierra Leone's civil war, with none of its horrors omitted. And it's funny, in a very black (no pun intended) way; though if this is your first exposure to the particulars of the war, you'll probably be too horrified to laugh.

The homunculi (plural of homunculus) of the title are totally obedient, self-reproducing miniature killing machines made from corpses by a mad alchemist. This alchemist's attempt, in partnership with a mercenary, to auction them off is the core of the novel's plot. But, as with many satires, the plot is mainly a device to expose the stupidity, evil and/or indifference of nearly all the characters.

Most of the characters are white: mercenaries, diplomats, intelligence officers, and other self-interested parties. The only major Sierra Leonese characters are members of the RUF (the anti-government force in the war, notorious for their use of child soldiers and atrocities against civilians). One could criticize the book politically on these grounds, as well as for contributing to the West's image of sub-Saharan Africa as solely a land of misery. But it's still a powerful portrayal of evil and stupidity. And it's still funny.

Homunculus has apparently not yet been published in the U.S., but it's available from Powell's or Amazon.

2007-06-24T20:09:00.000-07:00

MANGA CORNER: TENSHI NI NARUMON! REVISITED

The first manga review I ever wrote (though not the first to appear on this blog) was a review of Tenshi ni narumon! a two volume manga based upon the anime of the same name (the first half of the anime was released in the U.S. under the title I'm Gonna Be an Angel!). At the time I wrote the review, I had only seen the first nine of the anime's twenty-six episodes. I saw the rest of the first half when it was released in the U.S.; and a few weeks ago I watched the rest of the series on YouTube. Now that I've seen the whole anime, I thought I'd take another look at the manga, in particular at how the manga differs from the anime. As far as possible, I'll try to avoid spoilers for both the anime and the manga.

Obviously, when transforming a 26-episode anime into a two-volume manga, a lot has to be left out or condensed. But given this constraint, the first half of the anime is adapted pretty faithfully, except for the first-half climax, some aspects of which are changed. On the other hand, the anime's second half (which makes up the second volume of the manga, except for its first few pages) undergoes drastic changes in the manga.

To start with, Raphael is eliminated completely from the manga. Of course, this substantially alters Mikael's character. Miruru is virtually eliminated from the second volume, in contrast to her prominent role in the second half of the anime (she only appears at the edge of a single panel, as far as I know). Noelle's family, who were less important in the first volume of the manga than they were in the anime, are even less important in the second volume. In fact, they're virtually absent from the second half of this volume. And Natsumi's role in the second volume is diminished, and different, from her role in the second half of the anime.

While Eros and Muse remain important characters in the manga, their characterizations, and their relationships with each other and their employer, are completely different (up until their final scene with their employer). Eros does not remain in his employer's realm directing Muse, but works hand-in-hand with Muse, who does not transform herself. Eros is not constantly and fruitlessly trying to please his employer, nor is Muse constantly trying to please Eros. Nor do Eros and Muse function primarily as comic relief, as they do in the anime. Furthermore, the strategy they employ is different.

In fact, the only scenes from the anime's second half which appear in the manga are the aforementioned final scene between Eros, Muse and their employer; the finale, which is itself heavily altered; and parts of the aftermath. Apart from these, the events in the manga's second volume (except for its opening scene, which is a spillover from the anime's first half) are almost wholly new.

I'm sure a lot of people will be outraged upon hearing of these changes, particularly the elimination of Raphael. I myself regret the diminuition of Natsumi's role (she gets somewhat of a raw deal in the manga, IMO). But the manga tells a satisfying and enjoyable story in its own right. In fact, I actually prefer some aspects of the manga, such as its more serious Eros and Muse. I also like the manga's finale better: not only does it do a better job of avoiding cliches, but it gives Noelle herself a more active role in the finale. As for the loss of Raphael, I'd be more unhappy about it if his role, and his relationship with Mikael, hadn't been so sketchy in the anime in any case. All of this, of course, is not to say that I didn't thoroughly enjoy the anime.

If you've watched the anime, and want to know more about how the manga differs (or if you've read tha manga and want to know more about how the anime differs, for that matter) write me, and I'll answer your questions as best I can.

UPDATE: In the original version of this post, I let slip a fairly large spoiler for both the manga and the anime. I've fixed that.

2007-06-13T20:14:00.000-07:00

MOVIE CORNER: TWO OBSCURE QUICKIES

Recently I was up in the Chicago area, and watched some DVDs I rented from Odd Obsession Movies. Here are brief reviews of two of them; more perhaps to follow.

"Turkish Young Frankenstein": This film is one of a number of Turkish rip-offs of famous American movies which have become notorious among connoisseurs of cult and/or bad movies. The "Turkish Young Frankenstein" (whose real title is Sevimli Frankestayn) is virtually a scene-by-scene remake of the Mel Brooks classic. As I was watching it, I got the feeling that Nejat Saydam, who wrote and directed it, didn't realize that the original film was a comedy. Adding weight to this suspicion, the film reproduces several of Brooks's routines, but with the comic payoffs omitted. If Saydam did intend the film to be a comedy, then the Gene Wilder and Marty Feldman parts were woefully miscast, while the "monster" looks like a heavyset man with a few facial scars. Unfortunately, for the most part the film is funnier to read about than to watch: I stopped watching after about fifty minutes, which was about a half-hour after the joke, such as it was, had worn thin. Odd Obsession's copy is in Turkish without subtitles.

Sexy Line (Sekushii Chitai): Not a pink or etchi film despite its title, this is a Japanese black-and-white crime drama directed by Teruo Ishii (who also directed Blind Beast vs. Killer Dwarf, which I reviewed here, along with many other films). It's about a young salaryman who, framed for the murder of his girlfriend, investigates the murder himself and discovers that she was involved in a shady prostitution ring. The film has most of the accoutrements of film noir, but the noir atmosphere is spoiled by Yoko Mihara, who steals the show as an irrepressively vivacious female pickpocket who joins forces with the salaryman for the thrill of it. Actually, Mihara's performance is the main reason to watch what is otherwise a fairly routine film.

2007-06-11T11:16:00.000-07:00

NEWS BRIEF: D & Q TO PUBLISH RED COLORED ELEGY

I know I've been gone a long time, and I should have a more substantive post up soon (knock wood!). But right now I want to quickly pass along the news, reported on Same Hat! Same Hat!, that Drawn and Quarterly have licensed Seiichi Hayashi's Red Colored Elegy, which I reviewed here. It will appear after the third volume in their Tatsumi series, which itself will appear "probably in the first half of 2008."

2007-05-14T20:15:00.000-07:00

OUT 1 ALERT

As part of its Jacques Rivette retrospective, the Siskel Film Center in downtown Chicago will be showing his twelve-and-a-half hour long magnum opus Out 1 on May 26 and 27. (This is a single showing spread over two days.) Out 1 has been acclaimed a masterpiece by those few who have seen it. But to say it's rarely shown is an understatement: since it was made in 1971, it has been screened fewer than a dozen times anywhere in the world. So if you're living in the Midwest, this may literally be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see it on the big screen. Nor is it available on video or DVD, even bootlegged (as far as I know), though a VHS version was released in 1995 and is owned by a few university libraries. If you're a serious cinephile and live within, say, two hundred miles of Chicago, you don't want to miss this.

The Siskel Film Center will also be showing Out 1: Spectre, Rivette's four-hour reworking of Out 1's footage, on June 9. (Note that Out 1 is sometimes referred to as Out 1: Noli me tangere.)

2007-05-06T11:24:00.000-07:00

MUSIC MEETS COMICS CORNER: THE CARBON COPY BUILDING

The Carbon Copy Building is described in its accompanying booklet as "a comic-strip opera," and the phrase is apt. Not only did Ben Katchor, known for such comic strips as Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer, write the libretto (or "text," as the booklet calls it), but this text is based, if I remember correctly, on a single installment of one of his strips, though not one that's been collected as far as I know. And it is indeed an opera, with music composed by Michael Gordon, David Lang and Julia Wolfe, the founders of the contemporary music organization Bang on a Can. But if your knowledge of opera comes from Mozart, Verdi, Wagner and company, you may not recognize it as one.

The "text," one of Katchor's typical meditations on "the pleasures of urban decay," tells the story of two buildings. The first, the Paladin Building, was built in 1929 in a prestigious neighborhood in a city that is unnamed, but obviously New York City. The second, the Palaver Building, was built six months later, using the same plans (the "carbon copy building" of the title). Sixty-nine years later, when the opera takes place, the Paladin retains its prestige, while the Palaver, now located in the unfashionable "bent spoon district," has gone to seed and is home to dozens of small businesses.

The story per se is slight. There's no real plot, just uneventful snippets from the lives of a few people working in one or the other of the buildings. But we do hear of a number of the strange businesses which are a specialty of Katchor's, including a firm of out-of-date calendar specialists, a broken cookie consolidator, and a dessert embalming service. The most interesting "narrative" thread revolves around a delivery boy for the last of these businesses, who from working in the Palaver Building has absorbed carbon-paper chemicals into his system, so that whatever he touches is smeared with their residue (although much of his story is told only in Katchor's stage directions).

The music is minimalist in style, with both vocal and instrumental parts made up of short repeating phrases. I'm not familiar with the recent evolution of this style; in fact, the most recent minimalist work I'd listened to before this is Einstein on the Beach. But The Carbon Copy Building's music is less schematic, and much more varied in texture, than was Einstein's music. The first scene, for example, is a melancholy recitative over a lute-like obbligato, while the second has a full-blown rock accompaniment. And the opera itself has a quasi-rock instrumentation: everything is played by four musicians on electric guitar, percussion, keyboards and woodwinds. As with the libretto, the music isn't much like that of traditional operas, even setting aside the unconventional instrumentation. There are "recitatives," but nothing that could be called an aria. As said above, I have little experience with minimalism, or indeed of the whole "downtown" (as in downtown Manhattan) music scene. But I found the music always interesting, and at times even catchy: the best thing about the opera.

On the other hand, the opera's main problem is that there is little connection between the music and Katchor's text. Apart from the opening and closing recitatives, the musical textures seem to have been chosen with little regard for the text. The composers frequently expand Katchor's brief conversations to fill a whole scene by having the singers repeat Katchor's words over and over again. His peculiar brand of poetry gains nothing by this treatment. Perhaps the composers were emphasizing the emptiness of much social conversation, but that is surely far from Katchor's intent. Overall, I can't help thinking that the opera could have been based on almost any strip by any cartoonist and had virtually the same score.

The libretto is profusely illustrated with color illustrations by Katchor. These create atmosphere and add more strange names, but they aren't among his best work: his art is best seen in black, grey, and white, and in comics, not individual illustrations.

To sum up, the opera's chief attraction is its music, and I would recommend it to those interested in, or curious about, contemporary composition. (If you're just curious, you can download individual tracks at the link above for 98 cents apiece. You can also download the whole album for $9.90, a savings of six bucks over a physical copy, though presumably you wouldn't get the libretto or illustrations.) For those whose main interest is Katchor, whether you should buy it depends on how much you're willing to spend for minor work of his. And if you have no particular interest in either Katchor or contemporary "classical" music, I would skip it.

I should say a few words about the unusual packaging. The libretto "booklet" is actually the package itself: it has hard covers and a cloth binding, and the CD fits into a paper sleeve attached to the inside back cover. This package is compact and elegant, but unfortunately it's very hard to remove the CD from its sleeve (at least in the review copy I was sent). I wound up storing the CD in a separate case, which sort of defeats the point of the packaging.

2007-05-06T10:49:00.000-07:00

MANGA CORNER: DO YOU LIKE BOOBS A LOT? YES, I LIKE BOOBS A LOT

From the sublime -- Marie no kanaderu ongaku -- we turn to the ridiculous, namely Vampire (Banpaia) by Masaya Tokuhiro, a five-volume seinen (young man's) manga series. I own, but haven't read, the second and third volumes.

The vampire of the title is Maria, a beautiful, young-looking woman. It's not clear to me why she's called a "vampire," as she doesn't appear to drink blood or have fangs; but she does have super-strength, immortality, and quasi-invulnerability. Oh, and enormous boobs. They're nearly as big as her head, and may even be bigger than Power Girl's boobs. Unlike Power Girl, Maria doesn't wear a revealing costume, though she does wear boob socks. But she more than makes up for this by frequently wearing nothing at all (she even works as a stripper), and appearing in several explicit sex scenes. One character thinks she's a god, and has constructed a giant statue of her in the nude flanked by cherubs, her porn-star bust proudly displayed in all its glory. Remember the scene in (the original) The In-Laws where the dictator proudly displays the flag he designed?

To be fair, unlike many of the women in contemporary superhero comics, Maria's anatomy isn't impossible, if you assume she has huge implants. And it could be, of course, that the writing is brilliant, though somehow I doubt it.

If my description has left you dying to try Vampire out, it's 524 yen per volume (which is about as cheap as seinen manga get), it's published by Shuueisha, and the ISBNs are:

v. 1: 4-08-859513-0
v. 2: 4-08-859532-7
v. 3: 4-08-859562-9
v. 4: 4-08-859581-5
v. 5: 4-08-859606-4

2007-05-04T19:52:00.000-07:00

MANGA CORNER: MARIE NO KANADERU ONGAKU [THE MUSIC OF MARIE]

Usamaru Furuya is one of my favorite manga creators (see the sidebar), and I have more than once seen Marie no kanaderu ongaku (usually translated as The Music of Marie, but more accurately The Music Marie Plays) acclaimed as his best work. Unfortunately, it had been out of print, so I couldn't read it. A few weeks ago I saw both volumes of the series offered on www.amazon.co.jp, so naturally I ordered them; and yesterday they arrived, a couple of weeks ahead of schedule. My joy at receiving them was somewhat tempered when I discovered that they'd been reprinted recently, so I could have special-ordered them at the Japanese bookstore in Arlington Heights and saved myself about twenty bucks. (I had thought I was buying used copies.) But the books look so good that even that doesn't bring me down.

Marie no kanaderu ongaku is a fantasy, though not the elves-and-dragons kind. Think more of Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind (even though that's actually science fiction), which Marie's art in fact resembles. And while I haven't begun reading it yet, it looks great, as I said above. In addition to Miyazaki-like characters and landscapes, there are intricate clockwork animals. (The Marie of the title is a gigantic clockwork woman floating across the sky.) In fact, I could almost recommend it for its art alone. I'll say more once I've actually read it.

Marie is published by Gentosha Comics and costs 1200 yen per volume, but the volumes are thicker than the usual tankoubon (paperback manga volume): the first is 276 pages, and the second is 248 pages. The ISBNs are 4-344-80012-5 for the first volume and 4-344-80005-2 for the second.

2007-04-30T08:28:00.000-07:00

SHIRIAGARI KOTOBUKI IN COLUMBUS, OH.

While Googling Shiriagari Kotobuki, I discovered that Ohio State University's manga collection contains about forty of Shiriagari's manga. So if you have access to the OSU library, you can look at these -- or nearly ten thousand other Japanese-language manga. They're non-circulating, but they do have some circulating Japanese-language manga: for instance, a number of volumes from Tezuka's 400-volume (!) collected works.

I may have to make a trip to Columbus one of these days.

2007-04-07T07:29:00.000-07:00

TWO MANGA REVIEWS

The French-language comics website du9 has put up an English translation of its review of Shiriagari's Hako-Bune (via Journalista).

Also via Journalista, Bart Beaty's savage and funny review of Shigeru Mizuki's NonNonBa, which won the Best Album prize at this year's Angouleme. Sample quote: "Mizuki's work literally sucked the life right out of me." Beaty has said highly positive things about other manga (the fifth paragraph in "Report #1"), so it's not like he's prejudiced against manga in general. (For what it's worth, what I've seen of NonNonBa's art didn't appeal to me either.)

2007-04-01T21:03:00.000-07:00

GOOD NEWS

I was up in the Chicago area a few days ago, and I learned that the Sanseidoh bookstore, in the Mitsuwa shopping center in Arlington Heights, will be relocating to another part of the shopping center and expanding massively. When this process is finished (scheduled for mid-May), it will occupy the Asahiya bookstore's former space, plus the small space immediately to the left of the supermarket entrance which it occupied when it first moved in. Needless to say, I'm excited.

2007-03-29T09:09:00.000-07:00

FRUITS BASKET VOL. 15 TRANSLATION NOTES

It's been a long time since I've done one of these, for various reasons. But anyway, on to vol. 15. As usual, TP stands for Tokyopop, JP stands for Japanese, and passages without a prefix are my efforts at literal translation. Page numbers refer to the Tokyopop edition; subtract six to get the Japanese page number. (Tokyopop made a mistake in the page numbers: the page that should be page 90 is numbered 92. So a few of the entries below have two page numbers. The first is the correct number, and the second is the number you would get counting from the incorrectly numbered page.)

p. 5: While Tohru also provides the "story so far" synopsis in the JP, the text in Tohru's balloon here is an invention of TP. In particular, in the JP Tohru says nothing like "With the right help, I think I can end this curse once and for all!"

p. 15, panel 5: There's no "karmic" in the JP.

p. 16, panel 1: TP: "Hello... my vengeful little Yuki."
JP: "Boku no mononoke."
The final word in the JP is written with "mononoke" in kanji, but "Yuki" in furigana. "Mononoke" is the word consistently used in the JP to describe the spirits possessing the Zodiac members, and is only used for that purpose in FB as far as I know. "Vengeful" may have been an attempt to convey something of the connotations of "mononoke," but it really doesn't make sense here.

p. 16, panel 3: TP: "My earliest memories are all with Akito."
JP: "Monogokoro tsuita ni wa mou Akito no soba no ita."
"When I began to understand what was going on around me, I was already at Akito's side." It's a subtle difference, but compared to the JP, the TP shifts the focus more to the present: what Yuki remembers now.

p. 19, panel 4: TP: "No, we can't be the same. That would make me unnecessary."
JP: "Chigau. Issho nanka ja nai... Boku wa iranai sonzai nanka ja nai ..."
"No. We're not a pair... My existence isn't unneeded ..."

p. 23, panel 2: TP: "He makes these terribly angry faces."
JP: "Urameshisou ni tateru wa yo. Iya nee..."
"He stands there with a reproachful look. It's unpleasant, right?..."

p. 35, panel 1: TP: "The incident was a scandal."
JP: "Ousawagi ni natte"
"It became an uproar"

p. 39, panels 2-6: TP: "Loving parents ... A home that no one would ever want to leave. A happy home. A warm place with everyone smiling at me."
JP: "Dakishimete kureru ryoushin. Karetai to negau ie. Minna ga waratte iru basho. Minna ga hanarete ikanai you na jibun."
"Parents who would embrace me. A home I would want to come back to. A place where everybody was smiling. A 'me' that everyone wouldn't separate from." (The second sentence in the JP has no explicit subject, but I think "I' is the most likely subject.)

p. 40, panels 1-2: TP: "That was all I wanted. That, and nothing else."
JP: "Hoshikatta. Hoshikatta."
"I wanted it. I wanted it."

p. 45, panel 1: TP: "All the talk is that she died in an accident but it was suicide, trust me. Apparently she left a will -- if you can call it that."
JP: "Omotemuki wa jikoshi ni natteru kedo jisatsu da yo. Isho magai no mono mo nokotteta rashii shi."
"Officially she died in an accident but it was suicide, you know. It seems she even left an imitation of a suicide note." I don't know what Akito(?) means by "an imitation of a suicide note" (or "a fake suicide note") either, but that's what the JP says.

p. 49, panel 5: TP: "If my dark, useless world is such a hated place"
JP: "Sekai wa kuraku, kirawarete, hitsuyou to sarenai nara"
"If the world is dark, and I'm hated and not needed by anyone"

p. 51, panels 5-7: TP: "I couldn't think straight. I just wanted to move, to run. Maybe I wanted to hurt myself. Or maybe I wanted to feel better."
JP: "Kangae nante nakatta. Tada, gamushara ni ugokitakatta. Kakedashitakatta. Jibun o itametsuketakatta dake na no ka furuitatasetakatta no ka."
"I didn't think at all. I just wanted to move recklessly. To run off. To rebuke myself or to stir myself up."

p. 52, panel 4: TP: "Before I knew it, I'd lost my way."
JP: "Itsushika shiranai basho ni kiteta kedo"
"Before I knew it, I had come to a place I didn't know, but"

p. 52, panel 6: TP: "And then ... I found something."
JP: "Sou shite tadoritsuite no wa"
"And the place I eventually made my way to"

p. 54, panel 4: In the JP there are quote marks around the word for "mother."

p. 56, panel 1: There's no "about something" in the JP.

p. 66, panel 4: TP: "Well, as a child I failed in that respect."
JP: "... kedo dame datta"
"...but it was no good"

p. 74, panels 6-7: TP: "But at the same time she didn't deny that other people are as weak as I am."
JP: " Yowai ningen mo iru n' da tte koto o hitei shinaide kureta koto..."
"She didn't deny that even weak people exist ..." (Or "that weak people also exist," but the first reading seems to fit the context better.")

p. 75, panel 4: TP: "Rin can understand that."
JP: "Rin mo sou datta n' daro?"
"Was it like that for Rin too?"

p. 85, panel 3: TP: "I don't appreciate the sudden threat of a nosebleed!"
JP: "Hana ni atatte hanaji fuitara dou sunda!!"
"What would you do if you hit my nose and I had a nosebleed!!"

p. 85, panel 4: TP: "You stink!" "You stink!"
JP: "Baaka baaka" "Baaka baaka"
"You idiot!" "You idiot!"

p. 89, panel 4: TP: "Knowing my feelings may be too much for her to handle."
JP: "Ki ni yamisugite shimau kamoshirenai"
"She might worry too much" or "She might take it too much to heart"

p. 89, panels 5-6: TP: "Man, Yuki. You really are a good guy."
JP: "Yuki tte honto majime da nee"
"You really are serious, aren't you?"

p. 99 [101], panel 7: TP: "There is no need to request the costumes I already visualize!"
JP: "Ishou no koto nara kono boku ni omakase sa"
"If it's a matter of costumes, leave it to me!" (Literally "leave it to this me.")

p. 100 [102], panel 2: There's no "nii-san" in the JP.

p. 127, panel 5: TP: "And she acts up in class!"
JP: "Kurasu de mo urimakuri de"
"Even in class she just floats" I'm not completely certain what the verb here means, but I don't think it's "act up."

p. 129, panel 4: In the JP, Tohru's word balloon begins with "Yokatta desu ..." ("I'm glad"), which is absent from TP.

p. 131, panels 2-3: TP: "What is it now?" "Is that what you want?"
JP: "Nani o suneteru n' da?" "Honda-san o shinpai sasete tanoshii ka?"
"What are you sulking about?" "Do you enjoy making Honda-san worry?"

p. 134, panel 2: TP: "Sob ..."
JP: "Goshi ..."
"Rub hard ...

p. 137, panel 5: TP: "Hooray for the play!"
JP: "Hayaku mitai na ..."
"I want to see it right away ..." (Literally "quickly")

p. 140, panel 2: TP: "Sorta Cinderella"
JP: "Shindererappoi mono"
"A Cinderella-ish thing" The TP isn't wrong, but I like the literal translation of the JP better.

p. 142, panel 4: TP: "No more frivolities for you!"
JP: "Nande anta sonna yuuga na kurashi shiten no yo..."
"Why are you leading such a refined life?"

p. 143, panel 2: TP: "The stepmother was eager to marry her daughter into the royal family, in the hopes of attaining a life of ease and comfort."
JP: "Jibun no musume o tama no koshi ni nose, hidariuchiwa de kurashitai mamahaha wa yakka ni natte arimashita"
"The stepmother, who wanted to enable her own daughter to ride in a jeweled palanquin, and wanted to live in ease and comfort, was frantic"
I've included this mainly because I don't get why they would leave out "jeweled palanquin." Do they think that readers wouldn't know what "palanquin" means? But you can get enough of the meaning from the context, and it's a vivid detail.

p. 155, panel 1-3: TP: "Think of all the star-crossed lovers who would kill for things this easy! All those star-crossed lovers ... who just wanna see each other ..."
JP: "Sonna nja aitakute mo aenai yatsu wa dou surya ii!! Aitai no ni ... aitai no ni ..."
"What is someone who wants to see someone but can't supposed to do!! Wants to see but ... Wants to see but ..."
This is a very difficult passage to translate, and I'm not claiming my translation is sufficient. I don't really know what that "sonna" ("like that," "such as") is doing there; and the ability of Japanese to leave out subjects and objects makes Arisa's transition from the play's dialogue to talking about herself go much more smoothly in Japanese. But Arisa definitely says nothing like "star-crossed lovers"; nor does she imply that she thinks Kureno is yearning to see her.

p. 156, panel 1: TP: "I never once wanted to see her!"
JP: "Ore mou ichido aitai nante hitokoto mo itte nee jan yo..."
"I never said a word about wanting to see her again ..."

p. 157, panel 1: TP: "Just a minute, Prince Charming! That information was very necessary!"
JP: "A, chotto ooji, ima no wa tadashii serifu na n' desu kedo"
"Uh, wait, Prince, that was the correct line"

p. 159, panel 2: TP: "Do you plan to live a lie for the rest of your life? ...deceiving yourself daily..." [First ellipsis mine.]
JP: "Sou yatte jibun o gomakashinagara ... ikite iku tsumori ...?"
"Do you intend to go on living cheating yourself like that ...?" "Gomakasu" (the base form of "gomakashinagara") can be translated as "deceive," but I think "cheat" fits the context better.

p. 159, panel 4: TP: "and stopping only at the moment you die?"
JP: "shinu made ..."
"until you die ..."
"Shinu made" are also the words Akito uses to tell Kyou that he will be permanently confined if he loses the bet, and which Kyou recalls in vol. 8, though this is lost in TP's translation of that volume (see here for details).

p. 163, panel 5: TP: "What wonderful judgment!"
JP: "Nante migoto na osabaki ...!!"
"What a splendid decision!!" "Sabaki" can be translated "judgment," but only in the sense of "a judgment": that is, a verdict.

p. 168: The notes on the bottom of the page can be translated "idiot child" and "idiot father."

p. 181, panel 1: TP: "...you've got the hots for Rin."
JP: "Rin ni horeten no?"
"You're in love with Rin?"

p. 185, panel 3: TP: "Clamming up in a corner makes the thing half your fault."
JP: "Iikaesenai hou mo warui yo"
"It's even worse if you can't talk back"

p. 187, panel 5: TP omits "uchira ga sekkaku katazuketa," i.e. "that we cleaned up specially" (referring to the student council room).

p. 188, panel 2: TP: "... He's a natural. Mm."
JP: "... Tennen no hito"
"... A natural person"
I can only guess that someone misread "man" as "mm."

p. 191, panel 2: TP: "... Machi said I'm a natural."
JP: "... Machi ore wa tennen da tte"
"... Machi said I'm natural"

This volume has somebody new, Lianne Sentar, doing the English adaptation (as distinct from the translation). And this does seem to be an improvement, at least insofar as there are no instances of the TP just making stuff up, as there were in previous volumes (except for the stuff on p. 5, which may not have been written by Sentar). On the other hand, there are several places in this volume where the TP sounds unnatural or stilted although the corresponding passage in the JP is perfectly ordinary: p. 66, panel 4; p. 85, panel 3; p. 99, panel 7; p. 137, panel 5; and p. 159, panel 4.

2007-03-25T09:26:00.000-07:00

SHIRIAGARI KOTOBUKI LINKS*

I recently finished twelve volumes of manga by Shiriagari Kotobuki, which I intend to review at some point. In the meantime, here are a few links:

Shiriagari's website. It's Japanese only, but if you can't read Japanese, this page, and the links leading from it, feature illustrations of Shiriagari's characters.

Two pages from a comic of Shiriagari's translated into German, appearing in the magazine Strapazin. The series it comes from is "Futago no oyaji," which translates into English as "The Twin Oyaji." (An oyaji is a sort of stereotypical middle-aged man; for more info see the first volume of Usamaru Furuya's Short Cuts, if you can get ahold of it.

An article in German about Shiriagari, also from Strapazin; and its semi-intelligible Google translation.

An interview with Shiriagari (via Journalista).

Among the loads and loads of French-language reviews of European, American and Japanese comics available on du9 are reviews of three works by Shiriagari. (The fourth link is to the French version of the review linked to above.)

A review of a new Japanese manga anthology with a story by Shiriagari in it and a small sample of art. Possibly NSFW, owing to an image of a farting space potato (not from Shiriagari's story). (Via Journalista, who got it from Postmodern Barney.)

*My usual policy is to write Japanese names with the surname last, in conformity with the usual Japanese practice when writing names in romaji (the Latin alphabet). But I've decided to make an exception for Shiriagari, because the surname-first form is more familiar in the West, and because it seems to be Shiragari's preference. So Shiriagari Kotobuki is how the name would be written in Japanese as well.

2007-03-15T09:38:00.000-07:00

TWO QUICK ONES: MANGA AND CAPTAIN MARVEL

It's been too long since I've posted, for various reasons. I do have some substantive posts planned, including more Fruits Basket translation notes, but for now I'll just post a couple of quick things.

I was up in the Chicago area a couple days ago, and went to pay a visit to Sanseidoh, the Japanese bookstore in Mitsuwa. I had a scare when I saw that the spot it had occupied was now empty, but it had only moved to another spot in the building: it's now opposite JBC, close to where the old Asahiya had been. I didn't buy much, though. Aside from a sudoku magazine, I just picked up three manga I had special ordered: the second and third volumes of Partner, and the first volume of Kiichi, which, like Jacaranda, was nominated at this year's Angouleme Festival. (The French version is entitled "Ki-Itchi," but in Japanese it's simply "Kiichi.") I plan to write about all these books eventually.

And at the other JBC, the one that's not in Mitsuwa and sells used books and manga, I picked up another volume of the anthology title Grimm's Fairy Tales, the Cruellest and Most Beautiful in the World. They also had still another volume, which featured modernized versions (as were a couple of stories in this volume), but I didn't buy it. Also, those copies of Kotobuki Shiriagari's A*su and Dying Essayist which were there in December 2005 are still there, though on a different shelf. So if you live in the Chicago area and can read Japanese, go buy them already.

Changing the subject, am I the only one who doesn't love Jeff Smith's Captain Marvel? Granted, I haven't read the two volumes that are out, just flipped through them in the store, and if I read them I might change my mind. But I don't like Billy Batson being turned into a pathetic abused waif, and I don't like Mary Marvel being six years old.

2007-02-11T12:31:00.000-08:00

MANGA CORNER: JACARANDA

Kotobuki Shiriagari's destruction-of-Tokyo manga Jacaranda (there should be an accent over the final "a," but I don't know how to write it. deserves a full review, and I hope to write one eventually. But since it has recently attracted a bit of interest due to its having been nominated at Angouleme, I wanted to do a brief report on it now.

1. Jacaranda is indeed about a tree which rapidly grows to gigantic size, destroying much of Tokyo in the process. The destruction is caused by its spreading roots which split the ground, like an earthquake. These both destroy buildings directly and cause fires by breaking gas pipes, releasing inflammable fumes.

2. There is nothing remotely comic about Jacaranda, apart from some satire of TV news in the beginning. In fact, it is one of the most intense depictions of destruction I have ever read. Of the 300 pages of story, 140f are devoted to portraying mass death and destruction in grim detail. Most of these pages are wordless.

3. There is no protagonist except for the giant jacaranda itself. Nor are there any major characters. Shiriagari makes no attempt to "humanize" the disaster (for example, by including a character who witnesses the whole thing, and whose viewpoint we see things through).

4. Nevertheless, the book is not at all clinical or lacking in humanity. This is mainly because of Shiriagari's brilliant art, which is impressionistic, occasionally almost abstract (as in the sequence on pp. 218-25, where the art is at its most intense); fluid and kinetic, yet also effective in portraying the horror of individual victims' fates, which it does often.

5. Strange as it seems to say about a manga about a city-destroying tree, one of Jacaranda's notable qualities is its verisimilitude. Normally, in comics and movies, catastrophe is represented in a stereotyped manner, by depictions of fleeing panicky hordes. Here, as you see the disaster gradually build and people gradually shift from unconcern to terror, you think "Yes, this is how something like this would go down."

6. Of all the manga I've read in Japanese, this is the first one which you can basically understand without knowing Japanese. You'll miss the satire mentioned above, and Shiriagari's social criticism, but these are secondary matters. You won't miss an explanation of the jacaranda, because there is none. Nor will you miss anything else essential. And after p. 130, which is less than halfway through, there is virtually no significant dialogue.

7. Physically, the book is very handsome, even classy-looking: a hardcover with a dark-green dustjacket in subdued lettering. To be sure, this means greater expense, but not as much so as you might think: its price is 1800 yen, about $15 at current exchange rates. At the Japanese bookstore I go to, it would cost $27.

(And yes, that is a pretty big markup, now that you mention it. It didn't seem so steep when the exchange rate was about 110 yen to the dollar, but that was nine months ago.)

8. Info: it's published by Seirinkogeisha and its ISBN is 4-88379-183-1. (Seirinkogeisha's website is interesting to check out, incidentally, even if you're not interested in this particular book.)

2007-02-01T18:04:00.000-08:00

MANGA CORNER: PARTNER

Partner is a three-volume series, of which I have read the first volume, by Miho Obana. Obana's best-known work in the U.S. is Kodomo no Omocha ["Child's Toy"] (aka "Kodocha" and "Kodocha: Sana's Stage"), but Partner is a very different series, and one which breaks the stereotype that shoujo manga are all about romance. This isn't evident at the start, though: Partner begins like a typical shoujo romantic comedy-drama. The main characters are two sets of twins, all in high school: two female twins, Nae and Moe, and two male twins, Takeshi and Ken. The relationships among these four are typically tangled. Ken and Moe are in love with each other. Takeshi loves Nae, but Nae regards Takeshi as both a friend and a pest, and secretly carries a torch for Ken. But the expectations raised by this comforting beginning are shockingly upended in the middle of the first chapter, when Moe is killed in a traffic accident. To add insult to injury, Moe's body disappears mysteriously from the hospital where it was being held.

At the end of the first chapter, things start to get weird. Ken sees a girl who looks exactly like Moe, but she shows no signs of recognizing him. When he grabs her arm to keep her from walking away, the arm comes off, and it doesn't seem to be an artificial one; but the girl calmly picks it up and gets in a car waiting for her, which drives off. From there the story becomes a grim and downbeat (at least so far) thriller, though Obana also keeps following the relationships between the three survivors. I've also seen the series described as a horror story, which fits too.

Though similar in appearance to Sana, the heroine of Kodomo no Omocha, Nae is quite different in personality. She's serious, and she can take care of herself (unlike Sana, who only thinks she can take care of herself): she uses her kendo skills to disarm and overpower a gun-wielding attempted rapist. Both these characteristics are evident on the cover, which is also atypical of shoujo manga.

The art in Partner, while very similar in appearance to the art in Kodomo no Omocha, is more self-assured and dynamic, and flows better.

In addition to the main story, the volume includes two bonus short stories. The first, "Seto no guran ma" [Grandma of Seto], is an 20-page long autobiographical story about an old woman running a coffeeshop whom Obana met while traveling alone in her early twenties, and again several years later. To me it seemed rather slight, but my impression is that this sort of quiet, undramatic sketch is common in Japanese literature in general. (Of course, such stories aren't unknown in Western art comics either.) The second, "Paatonyaa," is a brief jeu d'esprit in which the four protagonists of Partner, Moe included, are turned into cats and comment on the story.

I highly recommend Partner if you can read Japanese. Obana's story is original and a page-turner, and the characters are well-drawn, particularly Nae and Ken. And this series would seem a natural to be licensed (though since it's published by Shueisha, Viz is the only company that can license it).

The ISBNs for the three volumes are:

vol. 1: 4-08-856200-3
vol. 2: 4-08-856222-3
vol. 3: 4-08-856244-5

The first volume costs 390 yen (though amazon.co.jp sells it for 20 yen more), and my guess is that the other two do also.

(Wow, posts on two consecutive days! I'm on a roll!)

2007-01-31T19:41:00.000-08:00

BELATED THANKS

A very belated Thank You to Brigid Alverson and Huff, for responding to my plea for readers to let me know they're out there. I was hoping to say something meaningful or funny about this, but I don't seem to have it in me right now.

I do have a review of an unlicensed manga nearly completed. And I have three by Kotobuki Shiriagari awaiting review, including Jacaranda, which received some attention recently when it was nominated for best album at the Angouleme Festival. (It didn't win but another manga did.

2007-01-22T09:17:00.000-08:00

A LONG RAMBLING POST INSPIRED BY THE NEW TIPTREE BIOGRAPHY

Recently I finished reading James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon by Julie Phillips, and it deserves all the plaudits it's received. I was enthralled by the story Phillips tells, which is doubly surprising, since I was never a big Tiptree fan and most literary biographies I've read have bored me. But I found Alice Sheldon's life more interesting than I've ever found Tiptree's stories. More than that, I found Alice Sheldon's voice, as seen in the letters, diary entries, and occasional writings Phillips quotes, more interesting than Tiptree's voice as seen in "his" stories and letters: partly, I suppose, because Tiptree presented "himself" as a "man's man," and that type has never appealed to me.

I do have a couple of bones to pick with Phillips, though. The first is that her portrayal of women's situation in the 1950s is too one-sided. However benighted that era seems to us today, and whatever the amount of misogynistic sentiment floating around, there were many women of Sheldon's generation who were able to make productive and fulfilling use of their talents outside the home, and such women could find support as well as disapproval in the media of the time. And from what Phillips says, it wasn't Sheldon's gender that stopped her from pursuing an academic career once she'd gotten her Ph. D.

The second is Phillips's seeming lack of interest in the fact that Sheldon killed her husband. Old, ill, and depressed, on May 19, 1987 she shot her husband in the head while he was sleeping and then killed herself. Sheldon, who loved her husband very much, had tried to persuade him to agree to a suicide pact, but it's not clear that he ever agreed to it; and Phillips thinks that her husband, who was blind but healthy, did not wish to die. In any case, Sheldon didn't give him a chance to choose. When you think about it, it's pretty extraordinary. Her depression can excuse the murder to a certain extent (and my intent here is not to condemn her), but it doesn't explain it: most people who commit suicide out of depression don't kill someone else first. But Phillips is a lot more interested in Sheldon's depression than in the causes of her decision to kill her husband. Granted that sources may be lacking, Phillips is willing to theorize in other places. And while one might argue that the killing came long after her best stories had been written, and so is irrelevant to a literary biography, the fact that she could make this decision surely says something about her earlier life.

Thinking about this, I was reminded of a novelette by Tiptree, "Backward, Turn Backward," one of the last stories Sheldon wrote (a year before her suicide). The stories from this period are in general considered far from Tiptree's best: Phillips doesn't even mention this one in her text. When I read it many years ago, I thought it was sentimental, melodramatic crap. Rereading it now, it's still a bad story, but it has are some curious and disturbing similarities to Alice Sheldon's life.

The protagonist, Diane Fortnum, is a high school senior at a ritzy boarding school in the fairly near future (though the year isn't specified). She's beautiful, rich, and intends to marry super-rich; she's also, in the words of the story's main Good Guy, a "self-centered, materialistic, greedy, rude little shit." A technology has been developed, essentially allowing you to switch places temporarily with your future self, though when you return to the present you forget everything you saw or experienced in the future. Nor can you bring back any physical objects. ("In that case, what's the point?" you may be wondering. Apparently, it's to give you older, future self one last experience of being young.) Diane's school offers this technology to its senior class as one of its perks.

Each student can pick how far ahead (s)he wants to jump, and Diane chooses fifty-five years. When she gets there, she's horrified to find that she's married to the class nerd (who, coincidentally, also chose to jump ahead fifty-five years). Worse yet, they're middle-class. Eventually, hidden in a drawer, she discovers a letter to her from her future self explaining how she ended up here, along with a handgun.

Shortly after she (the first Diane) returned to the present, a catastrophic depression hit, and her family was completely wiped out. With no money and no skills, she soon found herself unemployed. On her first evening of unemployment, she met a handsome older man named Nikko, who made love to her and "in a short time he had [her] hypnotized, totally sexualized." Nikko turned out to be a pimp, who made her into a prostitute and sold her to another pimp, who beat her. She spent three years working the streets, diseased and looking for a way to kill herself. Finally Don, the aforementioned class nerd and Good Guy, ran into her, took her home and cleaned her up. And after a while they fell in love and eventually got married.

Though Diane (the first one) hates the idea of being married to Don, they sleep in the same bed for some reason. One night they make love, and Don proves, improbably, to be an expert lover who makes her first time pleasurable. (She's been saving herself for her anticipated super-rich husband.) She falls in love with him; but despite this, and despite knowing that in the future they will be happily married, she still can't endure the prospect of a "second-rate life," as she thinks a middle-class existence is. She decides to kill herself with the handgun her future self left for her (which will cause her to be dead in her own time, too), but to do it while they are traveling back to their own time, so as not to hurt Don. But as they are traveling back, before she is able to kill herself, her former "cold shallow schoolgirl" personality comes back, and she loses her memory of loving Don, except to associate him with her future second-rateness. Instead of shooting herself, she shoots the sleeping Don. So Don is dead in the present as well, and everything happens as in the future Diane's letter, except Don is not there to save her from the streets. Instead, shortly after Don would have saved her, she is burned to death (and perhaps raped) by three kids.

Unfortunately, this doesn't improve in the execution. For example, Don is described as having eyes that are "almost too long-lashed, compassionate, sparkling for a man"; and the description of his and Diane's lovemaking wouldn't be out of place in a steamy romance novel. My interest in the story is exclusively in what it says about Sheldon. And though in its particulars Diane's life doesn't resemble Sheldon's, the shapes of the two lives (so to speak) have some disturbing similarities. Like Diane, Sheldon came from a wealthy family that lost much of its wealth in the Depression, although thanks to her mother the Sheldons retained a comfortable standard of living. Sheldon's first husband, like Diane's fiance (who drops her when her family is wiped out) was came from a much richer family than the Sheldons had ever been: his stepfather was a heir to the International Harvester fortune. Sheldon was never a prostitute, but her first marriage was an "open" one, and she once visited a brothel and "play[ed] whore." (One difference between Sheldon and Diane's lives was that, unlike Nikko and Don, both of Sheldon's husbands were lousy lovers.) And of course, there's the husband-killing thing. Note that Diane first decides to kill herself, but then kills her (future) husband, whereas Sheldon did both.

Of course, it could be that Sheldon simply drew on bits of her life to give her protagonist a background. It's even possible that she didn't notice the resemblance between herself and Diane. But for what it's worth, my impression was that something about the story was so personal for her that she couldn't get the distance needed to turn it into art. The most peculiar thing about the story is that Diane knows that she will spend most of her life by the side of the man she loves, and will be happy, but still wants to prevent this life from happening by killing herself. Sheldon doesn't make this convincing in Diane (the story makes clear that it is not the few years of hell before Don which Diane can't stand the thought of, but the many years with Don); but is it possible that she herself had come to feel that her life was "second-rate" and would have been better not lived? Obviously, this is pure speculation on my part. But passages like

"What stabs her in the gut is ... the absolute knowledge that she is excluded. That there are people she can never meet, let alone have as friends; places into which she can never enter. Excluded. Condemned to copies, to second-best. Not regarded as fully human. Not wanted, by people no better, in absolute terms, than herself. To be on the outside, absolutely, irrevocably, forever. That's what's intolerable."

and

"she begins to notice how the word 'pleasant' is coming to infest her thoughts.The home is pleasant, the life is pleasant. --Damn pleasantness! 'Pleasantness' is another word for mediocrity, she thinks savagely, and an old saying comes to her: The good is the enemy of the best."

seem too heartfelt to be pure invention.

Rereading these passages again, particularly the first, a thought strikes me: could it be the masculine world that Sheldon felt excluded from, an exclusion that caused her to see her life as a woman as mediocre? Certainly there's evidence to support this in Phillips' book.

Well, that's probably enough speculation for now. There are interesting comparisons to be made between this story and an earlier and much better story of Tiptree's, "Forever to a Hudson Bay Blanket," but I haven't quite got a handle on them yet, so they'll have to wait for another post (if I ever get around to it).

2007-01-16T19:59:00.000-08:00

Brigid Alverson's response to my previous post reminded me to finally add two blogs to my sidebar that I've been meaning to for a long time. Brigid's blog MangaBlog collects links about manga from hither and yon (and there are a lot), interspersed with occasional reviews and interviews. It's the place to go to keep up with manga news in the U.S. (primarily) and with the manga blogosphere.

The Comics Curmudgeon makes fun of bad comic strips on a daily basis, with particular attention paid to the few remaining continuity strips. Sure, it's shooting fish in a barrel, but it's also very funny.

2007-01-14T20:04:00.000-08:00

A QUESTION FOR MY READERS

This is National De-Lurking Week (via Acephalous), which provides me with a pretext to ask you a question I've been considering asking for a while: Who are you? I know the names of a few regular readers, mainly because they've linked to posts of mine, but there must be more (mustn't there?). And while sitemeter tells me the number of people who view my blog at my site, most of whom have been brought here by various searches, I have no idea how many people subscribe to feeds of my blog.

So, if you are a regular reader, or even if you're just visiting and feel like it, please let me know, either in comments to this post or by email. And of course, if you want to tell me what you think of my blog, that'd be even better.

2007-01-07T21:06:00.000-08:00

MANGA UPDATE: THE WALLFLOWER VOL. 10

When I reviewed the first three volumes of The Wallflower for The Comics Journal, I liked them, but wondered how long Hayakawa could keep up the joke. Judging by this volume, the answer seems to be "for fewer than ten volumes." Of the four stories in here, only the first one is funny. The second and fourth are pretty pointless; and I have zero interest in Ranmaru's love life, which the third story is about. Volumes 8 and 9 were pretty blah too: in fact, none of the the stories in them were as good as the first story in vol. 10. Unless a future volume looks really good, this will be the last volume I buy. (Incidentally, the cover of vol. 10 is the most boring cover I've ever seen on a manga, as far as I can recall.)

2007-01-05T08:28:00.000-08:00

WEIRD BOOK CORNER: AN INCOMPLETE HISTORY OF THE ART OF FUNERARY VIOLIN BY ROHAN KRIWACZEK

While browsing in a bookstore, I noticed An Incomplete History of the Art of Funerary Violin on the classical music shelves. The title intrigued me for two reasons. First, you rarely see books entitled "an incomplete history" of anything. Second, while I had never heard of "the art of funerary violin," the idea of a history of it seemed like it might be eccentric enough to be interesting. The back cover (actually, a paper band wrapped around this cover) explained that "funerary violin" was solo violin music played in Protestant funerals, and went on: "Despite its enormous influence on classical music generally and on the Romantic Movement in particular, this music has almost entirely vanished. In a series of 'funerary purges', the violinists were driven into silence or clandestine activity. This is a music that ... has haunted Europe's collective unconscious for more than a century." Well, that was certainly intriguing; and the back cover also had a highly favorable quote from The Liberal (which I never heard of, but presumed was one of those respectable English magazines like the New Statesman). Paging through the book, it appeared to be an old-fashioned scholarly monograph. And while the book itself seemed rather dry, consisting mainly of a series of biographies of notable figures in the H. o. t. A. of F. V., the story was intriguing enough that I added the book to my long list of books to take out of the library someday.

And then I had second thoughts. Wasn't the story, perhaps, a little too good to be true? And something didn't fit: the funerary violin was played mainly in Protestant countries, but while paging through the book I'd noticed that Kriwaczek attributed its suppression to the Vatican. Moreover, I'd majored in music as an undergraduate and taken courses in music history, yet had never heard of any of the "major" composers for funerary violin discussed in the book. This didn't mean much: there are thousands of composers I've never heard of, some of whom are undoubtedly "major" in their specialized fields. Still, it wasn't reassuring. On the other hand, if it was a hoax, it was a very elaborate and painstaking one (for instance, there are 68 authentic-looking illustrations and 43 pages of scores), and I didn't see any obvious giveaways.

Conveniently, there was a copy of the Oxford Dictionary of Music on the shelf above. I looked up some of the major figures in the Incomplete History, but found none of them. Having failed to settle the issue in that way, I turned back to the book. I found the answer to how the Vatican suppressed the art of funerary violin: by sending their agents to destroy all records and artifacts pertaining to it, as well as to attack the violinists themselves. Now I was really suspicious: this sounded more like The Da Vinci Code than real life. I then noticed the book's epilogue, entitled "A Response from the Vatican." This proved to contain two rather preposterous letters supposedly written by the Vatican to Kriwaczek in response to his "research," followed by Kriwaczek's suggestion that his own life was in danger. Now my money was on a hoax.

When I got home, I immediately got on the internet, where a Google search quickly revealed that sure enough, the whole thing was a hoax, as Kriwaczek has admitted. (The latter link also reproduces the book's foreword.) The "art of funerary violin" as described by Kriwaczek never existed. Nor did the Guild of Funerary Violinists, which Kriwaczek is supposedly the Acting President of and whose archives were supposedly his main source for the book. Nor did any of the composers for funerary violin Kriwaczek discusses. And when I actually read the book, there were various absurdities scattered throughout, such as "funerary duels," in which two violinists would play alternately at the same funeral, with the winner being the one who made the mourners cry more (though I don't know if I would have noticed these absurdities as such if I hadn't known, or at least suspected, that the book was a hoax).

My Google search didn't turn up anyone (except perhaps for the book's publisher) who was taken in, perhaps because the hoax was exposed before the book was published. (A few people wrote as if they believed in it, but were clearly just playing along.) But in the bookstores where I've seen it stocked, as well as in my local public library, the book is placed with genuine works of music history, so some people may come away thinking that the "art of funerary violin" is real. And I have a horrible vision of some poor graduate student believing the book is authentic (perhaps not having read it as a whole, but just having cherry-picked passages relevant to her work, as graduate students do) and using it as a source for her dissertation.

Kriwaczek has set up a website for the "Guild of
Funerary Violinists." Here you can both read about the Guild and buy CDs of "historic" and "modern" recordings of "surviving" compositions for funerary violin, and even hear brief excerpts online. There's also a page of parodic "links," all created by Kriwaczek. In particular, check out the program of the GFVA (Guild of Funerary Violinists America) 2007 Convention and Exposition, which is both funny and deadly accurate.

Tracing a link from the Guild's website, I discovered another bogus institution invented by Kriwaczek, the Rohan Theatre. This one's fictionality is more obvious, as it is said, among other things, to have staged the famous riot at the premiere of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring. There are also CDs available, along with online excerpts from them (which sound a bit Tom Waits-ish), by the "Rohan Theatre Band," whose supposed history is similarly improbable.

There's a brief but interesting discussion of the affair here.

2007-01-02T06:55:00.000-08:00

BOOK CORNER: HOGFATHER

I've never been a big fan of Terry Pratchett's Discworld books. I read the second and third books in the series when they first came out and thought they were funny. But it's the later books in the series that everyone raves about, and the few of those that I've read didn't appeal to me much. People keep raving about Pratchett, though, so when I saw a couple of people single out Hogfather as particularly good, I decided to check it out of the library and read it.

If you've been reading this blog for a long time, you can probably guess where this is going. To be sure, Hogfather starts out with a bang, as the head of the Assassin's Guild accepts a commission to kill Santa Claus (named "Hogfather," but basically Santa). And there are a lot of funny bits, mainly arising from Death's decision to take Santa's place on Christmas Eve -- er, Hogfather's place on Hogswatchnight. But in the end, it all collapses into didacticism, and shopworn didacticism at that. We need myths in order to be fully human: heavy, man, heavy. For children, the world is actually a scary place: who'd'a thunk it?

And another thing: I keep hearing about what a rich world Pratchett has created. Well, it's easy to "create" a rich world if you fill it up with details from the real world. For instance, Discworld has not only its own Santa Claus, but department stores and department-store Santas. And Hogswatch in Ankh-Morpork is apparently celebrated in just the same way the Christmas is celebrated in present-day England. When you just look at what Pratchett has himself created, Discworld in Hogfather isn't particularly rich: no more so than you'd expect from a fantasy series that has been going on for as long as Discworld has. (And I realize that Hogfather is just one book, but if Discworld as a whole is so rich, then some of that richness ought to be evident even in a single book.)

2006-12-19T13:25:00.000-08:00

SPEAKING OF MUSICALS

Did you know that they made a musical out of James Tiptree, Jr.'s short story "The Girl Who Was Plugged In"? Yeah, my mind boggled too.

And when I say "they," I don't mean a bunch of clueless amateurs. The music was written by Alan Menken, who wrote the music for a number of Disney's hits, including Aladdin, Beauty and the Beast and The Little Mermaid, among other things. And David Spencer, the lyricist and co-author of the book, and Alan Brennert, the other co-author, are also professionals.

I haven't seen or heard it, but I've read the script. (It's actually a one-act musical, and its script is packaged with another one-act SF musical under the title Weird Romance.) Its plot actually sticks fairly close to Tiptree's story, except for the ending, but the tone is completely different. The musical is a story of two idealistic young lovers crushed by a cruel world, with a hint of "love conquers all": exactly the sort of thing Tiptree's story satirizes. Frankly, I thought the script was pretty bad. (To be fair, though, I might feel differently if I saw it on the stage with the music.) But evidently somebody liked it: Weird Romance premiered off-Broadway and still pops up here and there occasionally, and Columbia even released an original cast album.

2006-12-03T07:34:00.000-08:00

TWO MANGA TIDBITS

First, here's an amusing take on Futari Etchi (via John Jakala).

Second, the latest debate raging in the manga blogosphere is over Seven Seas' announcement that they've licensed Kodomo no Jikan, a manga which, while it apparently has no actual sex, has heavy lolicon overtones. Specifically, the question is whether the appearance of such a title is likely to provoke a backlash. ("Lolicon" is a Japanese word that American manga circles have taken up, denoting a sexual interest in pre-pubescent girls, or manga, anime, etc. which appeal to such interests.) If you want to follow the debate, the easiest way is to start with these posts by Dirk Deppey and follow the links. (Note that the second of these posts contains an NSFW* image.) For whatever it's worth, my two cents are in a comment to the first of these posts.

All I want to do here, though, is quickly look at the other comics the mangaka Kaworu Watashiya has done; or rather, look at their covers, which can be found on this page of her website (via Simon Jones; there's also an NSFW image at the Jones link). As you can see, it's a fairly eclectic assortment. Her longest-running series, Chibi to Boku, ("Chibi and Me") is about cats, while her next-longest running, Seishun Binta! ("Youth Binta!") is a young men's (seinen) manga, apparently about a busty young woman and her female friends. The one I'm curious about is a little less than halfway down, Ikkai Yarashite ("Just Let Me Have Sex with You"), whose cover image is a cartoony drawing of woman with her panties pulled down, holding aloft an object that might be a vibrator, a very large insect, or a cactus.

*Not Safe For Work

2006-11-28T15:48:00.000-08:00

ROZ CHAST ON MANGA

The most recent issue of The New Yorker, the "cartoon issue," has a two-page strip by Roz Chast on her encounter with Japanese-language manga, which is reproduced here (via Dirk Deppey. It's not particularly insightful, but it's an amusing portrayal of the disorientation people who are only familiar with Western visual and storytelling conventions may feel when encountering manga for the first time. Though Chast presents herself as completely mystified, she evidently did some research. The kana displayed are accurate, as are the kanji for "book store"; and Tohru, and Yuki's mouse form, are clearly recognizable in the first manga she looks at (though she's taken the artistic license of drawing the interior art in color).

Chast devotes the most attention to one manga, which she indentifies as "Step Up Love Story" and describes as "like a children's comic book, a sex manual from the fifties, and a raunchy movie all mashed up together." This manga actually exists, though its title isn't "Step Up Love Story." While those words are displayed prominently on the cover (in English), the actual title is Futari Etchi (sometimes romanized Futari Ecchi), which might be translated as "Two-person Sex" or "Sex for Two". And as with Fruits Basket, the characters are recognizable from Chast's drawings. In fact, you can even tell from her drawing of the cover which volume she's looking at: it's volume 32, the most recent one out so far. And the Engrish blurb on Chast's cover is also on the real cover, though again Chast has taken artistic license in making it a lot larger than it actually is. I own volume 5, which has a different English blurb: "Are you as sexually able as you'd like to be? This comic is high quality 'love' fiction. The effects of this comic are both amazing and permanent. Thank you, everyone".

Futari Etchi is an erotic comedy by Katsu Aki about a couple who are virgins when they marry, and strive to improve their sex life with the help of advice -- not always accurate -- from friends and relatives. (For more details, see the Wikipedia entry and this review.) In the volume I own, there are plenty of sex scenes and nudity, but no genitals (except in a few cross-sectional diagrams): in scenes where genitals ought to be visible they're simply not drawn, leading to a couple of panels showing a character apparently performing fellatio on nothing.

The manga seems to be very popular in Japan: not only are there thirty-two volumes out so far, plus two volumes of Futari Etchi for Ladies, but the volume I own went through thirty printings in less than three years.

2006-11-19T20:23:00.000-08:00

FILM CORNER: DEATH POWDER

I recently was up in Chicago for a few days, and rented a couple of DVDs from Odd Obsession Movies, one of which was Death Powder, a 1986 film directed by Shigeru Izumiya.

Apparently the film was intended to have a plot, but I have no idea what it is. It didn't help that a good deal of the dialogue is only subtitled in Japanese, which I could only partially read without a dictionary. Nor did it help that when I was able to check the English subtitles, when they existed, against the Japanese dialogue or subtitles, the two had virtually nothing to do with each other. It's as if whoever did the subtitles was trying to invent their own (still incoherent) story. (From what I was able to gather, the real plot involves "scar people," an android named Guernica, and of course "death powder," whatever that is.) Basically what I got from the film was a series of bizarre, often incomprehensible images, some of which were striking. So if you're a fan of that, it's worth picking up.

Here's a longer, more detailed review, with screencaps. The reviewer is sharp, and noticed some things that I missed, although he accepted the English subtitles as accurate (as is natural, of course, for someone unable to check them against the Japanese).

2006-11-12T09:29:00.000-08:00

THEATER CORNER: URINETOWN

If you've been reading this blog long enough to remember my infrequent posts on music, you probably won't expect me to be a fan of musicals. And for the most part, you'd be right. But there are a few exceptions, one of which is Urinetown, which I saw on Friday.

Urinetown, perhaps the most unlikely Broadway hit ever, was conceived as a parody of Brecht-Weill type political musicals, with a deliberately ludicrous premise: a city where you're not allowed to pee except in public pay toilets, which are controlled by a corporate monopoly. It also parodies musicals in general. The hero and heroine are impossibly idealistic and naive. And the narrator, who is also involved in the action, is well aware that he's in a musical: at one point he explains to another character that nothing can kill a musical quicker than too much exposition, only to have that character retort that a bad concept, or a bad title, can also kill a musical pretty quick. The music, too, is a pastiche of other musicals. The biggest influence, naturally, is Weill, but there are also imitations of other genres of musical numbers, such as the jazzy, Fosse-type number; the faux-gospel number, the love duet, the Les Miz-type anthem, and more.

All this provides a lot of laughs. But the secret of Urinetown is that under all this parody and postmodern tomfoolery, it's actually a good musical. The book, for all its absurd elements, is artfully constructed and well-crafted. And though it started out as a parody of political musicals, beneath the laughs it turns out to examine serious political issues in an intelligent and unpreachy way.

And in addition to being clever pastiches, the songs can stand on their own as good songs. Mark Hollmann, who wrote the music, not just a skillful pasticheur, but a very good composer in his own right, with a gift for catchy, insinuating melodies. Particular highlights include the very Weill-ish opening (and title) number, the Brechtian "Don't Be the Bunny," the love duet "Follow Your Heart," and the show-stopping "Snuff that Girl" (the Fosse-ish number mentioned above). The clever lyrics (co-written by Hollmann and Greg Kotis, who wrote the book) make an equal contribution.

Friday was actually the third time I'd seen Urinetown: my first two times were during the New York Fringe Festival run which was its very first outing, and the first off-Broadway run. What I saw Friday was a community theater production put on by the local community college, and I wasn't sure what to expect; but I needn't have worried. The performances were generally professional level (despite a couple of muffled lines and some difficulties with projection). I thought two actors were particularly noteworthy. Brad Baillio plays the hero, Bobby Strong. Though Strong is impossibly pure-hearted, Baillio managed to find the humanity under the parody. And Michael Steen plays Officer Lockstock, the corrupt cop who is also the narrator, and in a sense the linchpin of the show. Steen fulfills this role admirably, and strikes the right balance between charm and viciousness. It's not just me: most of the audience appeared to be having a great time. If you live in Champaign, IL, you still have an opportunity to see it, next Thursday through Sunday (Nov. 16-19), and if I were you I'd jump at that chance. (I should point out that, despite the title and subject matter, aside from a few silly pee jokes there's nothing offensive in the show, not even any swearing.)

If you don't live in Champaign, you can still buy the original off-Broadway cast album. Though the lyrics are clever and often witty, as I mentioned above, the songs by themselves generally aren't laugh-out-loud funny, but they are very good: Hollmann's music alone makes the cast album a worthwhile purchase. You can also read the playscript (there are inexpensive copies available from Abebooks, if your library doesn't have it). This also includes a very interesting introduction by Kotis and Hollmann describing the show's history and development.