Tales of Old Edo – Kaiki: Uncanny Tales from Japan, Vol. 1

January 11, 2012 — Zack Davisson

5.0 out of 5 stars Ancient and Modern Japanese Weird Tales

Tales of Old Edo – Kaiki: Uncanny Tales from Japan, Vol. 1

As someone who is no stranger to Japanese weird tales—I have an MA in Japanese Folklore and run a website where I translate stories based on the hyakumonogatari kaidankai ghost-story game—I found “Kaiki: Uncanny Tales from Japan” to be a unique treat and a wonderful experience. I have a whole library of books in this genre, both in Japanese and in translated English; but this is the only one I have that combines ancient weird tales with modern writers’ takes on the classic storytelling style.

The important subtitle of this book is “Tales of Old Edo,” not “Tales from Old Edo.” Along with stories by the great authors of Edo period weird tales, like Lafcadio Hearn (Kwaidan: Ghost Stories and Strange Tales of Old Japan), Ueda Akinari (Ugetsu Monogatari), and Okamoto Kido (“Strange Tales of Blue Frog Temple”), there are modern masters like Miyabe Miyuki (Crossfire) and Kyogoku Natsuhiko (The Summer of the Ubume). Some of these tales I knew very well, particularly the old classics. Some of these I was reading for the first time. But whether I knew them or not, I found the mix of old and new to be fresh and appealing.

None of the entries here could be mistaken for horror. Although populated with ghosts and monsters, Japan’s storytelling tradition lends more towards strange experiences and odd phenomena than chills and thrills. Kurodahan Press was very careful in choosing the term “uncanny tales” for the title. There are nine stories collected in total, along with two essays on Japanese weird fiction, a short manga story, and an introduction by Robert Weinberg. Each of the stories has a different translator, some of whom do a better job than others, and which affects the quality of the stories.

I loved the 1959 story “Through the Wooden Gate,” by Yamamoto Shugoroi. There supernatural undertones are subtle, and much of the story must be read between the lines. I also enjoyed the 1938 “Visions of Beyond,” by Koda Rohan which takes you through page after page of various fishing techniques before finally getting to the story of the haunted fishing pole. Miyabe Miyuki’s 2000 “The Futon Room” was a touching story of sisterly love, and Kyogoku Natsuhiko’s “Three Old Tales of Terror” where a perfect recreation of the Edo style hyakumonogatari tales that were designed to be short and told around candlelight. I don’t know that I would have chosen Lafcadio Hearn’s “In a Cup of Tea” out of all of his available stories, but it is a good one that I hadn’t read for awhile. I liked the inclusion of Hearn’s essay “The Value of the Supernatural in Literature.”

The translations in “Kaiki: Uncanny Tales from Japan” where never bad, although there was variation in quality. Some of the translations seemed stiff and formal; more like an academic exercise than a book designed for pleasure reading. I spotted a few mistakes here and there, worked my way through a few clumsy turns of phrase that must have sounded better in Japanese than in re-worked English. But on the whole the various translators did a good job, and I found myself forgetting I was reading a work in translation and just disappeared into the story.

Kurodahan Press has a series of three books in this series, and I intend to pick them all up. The only disappointment is this is one of those books I would have loved to have participated in the making of not just in the reading of! Great stuff all around.

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The Buddha in the Attic

October 17, 2011 — Zack Davisson

4.0 out of 5 stars We, the Japanese

The Buddha in the Attic

Being married to a Japanese woman, and having lived for many years in Japan, I have always been interested in the stories of those who came before, those people who endured all the hardships and paid all the dues so that my wife I and could live happily in the US without anyone batting eye. I am fully aware that it wasn’t so long ago that the government could have ripped her from me and sent her to a concentration camp in the desert.

“Buddha in the Attic” is ostensibly the story of the Picture Brides, those women who made the long voyage across the ocean betrothed to a man who they had only ever seen in a picture. Most of the photographs were lies, taken twenty years earlier when the men were still young, and most of the fairy tales of riches and an easy life were nothing but lies. These women found themselves facing a hard life in a country prejudiced against them. But author Julie Otsuka expands the story with every chapter, moving beyond the Picture Brides to encompass all the Japanese women in the Pacific coast; the maids, the prostitutes, the wives, the mothers. And finally she expends her scope to include all of the Japanese, forced to abandon their homes and property, rounded up like cattle, and shipped to concentration camps in the desert.

This was not the easiest book to read, something due entirely to the writing conceit adopted by Otsuka. It is impossible to call “The Buddha in the Attic” a novel. It is much more like a long-form poem. In an attempt to show the group experience of the women, she starts every sentence with “we” or “Some of us.” The paragraphs read like lists, sounding something like:

“We worked all day in the field. We brought tea to the elegant ladies in their big houses. We washed laundry in hot water until our hands blistered. We went on shopping trips to the finest stores. We cooked three meals a day for a mining camp. Some of us wore the same kimono every day. Some of us wore pants for the field. Some of us had new underwear and white gloves. Some of us never washed the dirt from our hair.”

That’s not an exact quote, but it gives you an idea. When I read the first chapter, I was intrigued with the style. But with the second chapter, when I realized she intended to write the entire book that way, I was annoyed. Then finally I got into the rhythm of the writing. But I never really grew to like it.

Otsuka’s writing style creates too much of a sense of a faceless mass, of a wash of humanity that you can never connect with because they have no names and no faces, no individuality. The style does allow for scope; telling no individual story means that she can cover decades and thousands of lives in a scant 150 pages. But I wish that Otsuka had left her style in places, and broke up the repetition with something more personal. I have seen the same subject handled more personally, like in the film Picture Bride or from the Chinese point-of-view with The Poker Bride. I think “The Buddha in the Attic” would have benefited from a few of those kinds of individual stories.

One chapter I really enjoyed was the final one. I have read quite a bit about the Japanese concentration camps of WWII, but always from the Japanese point-of-view. “The Buddha in the Attic” is the first book I have read that deals with the white Americans who woke up one day to find the classrooms empty, the stores closed, and their towns and cities entirely stripped of the Japanese population that once lived there.

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A Zoo in Winter

August 22, 2011 — Zack Davisson

5.0 out of 5 stars Dreams of manga

A Zoo In Winter

Although I love his work, I don’t know much about the person that is Jiro Taniguchi. I don’t know how much of “A Zoo in Winter”, a story of a young manga artist finding his inspiration, is autobiographical, semi-autobiographical, or just plain fiction. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter. Because true or not, “A Zoo in Winter” (a direct translation of the Japanese title “Fuyu no Dobutsuen”), is an fantastic, touching comic book.

The story begins in 1966, with a young man named Hamaguchi working for a small fabric wholesaler. Hamaguchi has dreams of being a designer, but all he gets is grunt work. After the boss’s daughter uses him as a cover for her elopement, Hamaguchi leaves Kyoto for Tokyo, and a job as an assistant to a popular manga artist. An assistant’s life is also grunt work, coloring in whites and blacks, doing background detail and toner, but Hamaguchi finds himself drawn into the lifestyle. Like all of the assistants, Hamaguchi has aspirations of publishing his own comic, but with his uneventful life, he finds he has nothing to write about. He can drawn beautifully, but he has no experience. An artist named Kikuchi decides to show Hamaguchi the dark side of life, saying “You need to experience a whole load of stuff to write powerful manga,” but it isn’t until Hamaguchi meets Mariko that he finally gets his inspiration. Mariko is sick and physically weak, but her enthusiasm and love are exactly what Hamaguchi needed.

Taniguchi is one of the most versatile artists I know. He can create ultra-masculine, adrenaline surging works like “The Summit of the Gods” and “The Ice Wanderer”, and then with the same hand produce sensitive and romantic works like “A Distant Neighborhood”. If there is a common thread to his writing it is that his stories are all firmly about human beings. Whether scaling a mountain or overcoming their own emotional captivity, Taniguchi’s characters are fully-realized and emotionally connected.

“A Zoo in Winter” falls firmly in the “sensitive and romantic” camp. Whether Hamaguchi is a personal avatar or not, he represents the fear of reaching out for a dream with full knowledge that the end result is most likely failure. While at the fabric factory, he has no initiative of his own, and his life is directed by those around him. When circumstances land him in Tokyo working as a manga assistant, his first impulse is to just fall into a comfortable zone, without taking risks or following his own dreams. He watches others reach out and fail, before understanding that it is the trying, not the succeeding, that is important. And especially with Mariko, whose poor health almost guarantees a bitter ending to their romance, Hamaguchi refuses to give up, taking what time he has with her.

His art, of course, is phenomenal. Taniguchi has a distinct, realistic style that is still recognizable as “manga.” He forgoes any impressionism, and creates ridiculously detailed backgrounds for his characters to move in. There is a reason why Taniguchi is a multiple-Eisner award nominee.

At 231 pages, “A Zoo in Winter” is long enough to tell a complete story, but still leave us hanging on the final page wanting more. The ballad of Hamaguchi and Mariko doesn’t quite finish, and it is up to the reader to speculate on whether their ending is happy or melancholy. On the final page Hamaguchi musses that it would be nice if real life were as easy to plot out and conclude as a manga, but that real life is more complicated. I wonder if that is the message Taniguchi wanted to send as well.

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Caterpillar

July 29, 2011 — Zack Davisson

4.0 out of 5 starsThe God of Soldiers

Caterpillar DVD (Region 3) (NTSC) (English Subtitled) Japanese Movie

The first few minutes of “Caterpillar” do not promise a great movie. Shot on what looks like digital video, with bad special effects of a burning building that look like they were done on someone’s home computer, I figured this was yet another low-budget Japanese horror film.

I was wrong.

Nominated for Golden Bear (director) and winner of the Silver Bear (Best actress) at the Berlin International Film Festival, “Caterpillar” is an intense anti-war film, heavily political and nothing even approaching a horror film. Director Wakamatsu Koji made the film in response to the re-release of Mishima Yukio’s militaristic right-wing movie Patriotism, showing the harsh reality of Japan’s military cult of WWII.

Nominally based off of Edogawa Rampo’s banned short story of the same name (Found in Japanese Tales of Mystery & Imagination), “Caterpillar” shares only the briefest of association with Rampo’s tale. Wakamatsu changed the setting from the Russo-Sino war (where Japan was the victor) to WWII, and swapped the aggressive roles of the husband and wife.

The caterpillar of the title is Kurokawa Tadashi (Katsuya Keigo), who marched bravely off to war and returned a living torso, lacking arms, legs, hearing or speech. His neighborhood honors him as a living God of Soldiers, but his wife Shigeko (Terajima Shinobu) knows a different side of Kurokawa. Lacking anything else, Kurokawa has been reduced to a being of sensations. He eats. He sleeps. And he wants sex. All the time. Shigeko endures as a good wife should, but her hatred of her caterpillar husband overtakes her. To humiliate him, she dresses him in his uniform and hauls him through town in a horse cart, so that everyone can pay homage to the God of Soldiers.

Wakamatsu allows no glory to be shown in war. In Rampo’s story, the caterpillar sustains his injuries in combat, but in “Caterpillar” it is heavily implied that Kurokawa was injured while raping and killing Chinese farm girls in a burning building. Kurokawa is a decorated war hero, but his behavior mocks and degrades his commendations. His wife Shigeko shows the face of a good wife in public, but behind doors we see the suffering she endures. When Shigeko carts Kurokawa around town as a living idol (reminiscent of Johnny Got His Gun), he is the horror of war personified.

I have seen “Caterpillar” as described as having “explicit sex,” but surprisingly this isn’t true, Wakamatsu is an acclaimed Pink Film director, and although he made films like Go, Go Second Time Virgin, he also has to his credits “Violated Angels” and “Angelic Orgasm.” With “Caterpillar,” even though there a sexual element, there is no nudity or titillation. All of the sex scenes are shown from a distance, from a side-view, where you can see Kurokawa’s limbless body hunching on his wife.

“Caterpillar” is a surprisingly great film; very different from what I was expecting. Terajima Shinobu deserved all of the awards she won in the roll of Shigeko, and director Wakamatsu Koji showed once again that Japan’s Pink Film industry is one of the best proving grounds for talented directors.

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The Lake

May 12, 2011 — Zack Davisson

4.0 out of 5 stars Fragile People in Love

The Lake

“The Lake” has an interesting premise. Take one of those children you see in the  news, who suffered some unthinkable atrocity, and fast-forward to his life as an  adult, trying to live as normal a life as possible. How would he be affected?  What would he study in school? Could he ever trust anyone again? Could he fall  in love? Would he need someone equally damaged to love him in return?

You want to know what atrocity don’t you? Well, so does Chihiro. The  illegitimate daughter of a respectable businessman and a bar hostess who died  too young, Chihiro has her own emotional issues. She finds a certain comfort in  her budding romance with the shy guy from across the street. But for all his  kindness Nakajima is shadowed by something in his past, something he won’t talk  about but which could explain so much about his character. Why does he fall  asleep holding a kitchen grate tucked under his arm? Who are his mysterious
friends, the dwarfish Mino and his psychic sister Chii who never moves or speaks  and communicates only through dream images? In dealing with these mysteries and  burdens, she does the only thing logical. She paints a mural of monkeys.

I can’t claim to be a huge Yoshimoto Banana fan. I have read Kitchen  and Asleep  and some of her other work, and enjoyed them. But I rarely seek her out. I find  her a little too light. Too fluffy. However, I enjoyed “The Lake” for exactly  those qualities. Yoshimoto took a deadly serious subject and went the opposite  way with it. There is no heavy drama, no dramatic fights or flights. They don’t  follow the standard pattern of “Two misfits fall in love, break up over a  misunderstanding, then realize they are perfect for each other” that would be
required of a Hollywood romance. Chihiro and Nakajima are just two people  damaged by their pasts who find each other, and discover, to their surprise,  that they might just be good for each other. And able to heal and move on. “The  Lake” is a sweet love story, with just the right amount of bitter to give it  meaning.

Translator Michael Emmerich did a commendable job with “The  Lake.” Emmerich has translated several Yoshimoto novels, as well was works by my  favorite Japanese author, Kawabata Yasunari. He has a good grasp of the nuance  of language found here. I have read Yoshimoto in Japanese, and these clipped,  short sentences are trademark of her style. The way the language starts out  shallow and breezy, but becomes more complicated and dense, is a conscious  choice that shows how Chihiro and Nakajima’s relationship deepens and develops  over the course of the book.

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Manga Kamishibai: The Art of Japanese Paper Theater

December 21, 2010 — Zack Davisson

4.0 out of 5 stars Japan’s Golden Age of Manga

Manga Kamishibai: The Art of Japanese Paper Theater

I have been aware of kamishibai for a long time, but actually known very little about it. I mainly knew that my favorite manga artist, Mizuki Shigeru, got his start as a kamishibai artist before transitioning over to the new manga market. I knew that much of the visual language of kamishibai got its start in kamishibai. But not much more. Eric Nash’s “Manga Kamishibai: The Art of Paper Theater,” I found that the gaps in my knowledge were even greater than I could have imagined.

I had no idea that Japan had an active and popular superhero genre years before Superman burst from the pages of Action Comics in 1938. I had no idea that the concept of a cape-wearing, flying, super-strong and invulnerable hero was actually a Japanese creation, not an American one. I had no idea that kamishibai was so popular in Japan that when television first appeared it was known as “electric kamishibai” and that post-WWII MacArthur enlisted kamishibai men to teach Japan in simple terms about things like Democracy and Land Reform.

Nash has done a game job gathering and researching old kamishibai paintings, and telling their story. He starts with the history of emaki illustrated scrolls, and follows the kamishibai art form through transitional periods such as the Depression years, the War years when kamishibai was enlisted for political propaganda for a pro-militarized Japan, then the post-War era when it was used again for politics from the opposite side. He covers Mizuki Shigeru and his emergence in the artform, as well as a few other famous creators and creations.

Of course, “Manga Kamishibai” is first and foremost an art book, and Nash includes several complete adventures, all bright and beautiful. Included are he superhero story “Prince of Gamma and the Sea Monster,” the supernatural “Metamorphosis of the White Fox,” the ninja adventure “Ninja by Night,” the Samurai fable “Tange Sazen,” the political post-Hiroshima “Prayer for Peace,” the Twilight Zone-esque “Mystery Train,” and many more. All of the complete adventures are annotated to give the flow of the story.

The only real problem I had with “Manga Kamishibai” was Nash’s attempts to link kamishibai to modern and unrelated pop culture phenomenon. A ninja jumping off a roof is “evocative of the high-wire acrobatics in “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon“” even thought that is a Chinese film, not Japanese. The samurai Tange Sazen, with his missing eye, is “Popeye-like.” A scene from “The Prince of Gamma” has “the wistful crepuscular quality that characterized Steve Ditko’s end panels of Spider-Man.” There is almost nothing that Nash can’t draw a line back to some familiar modern character, no matter how fuzzy or illogical.

It comes off like Nash is an expert in American, and not Japanese, pop culture, so he tries to associate the unfamiliar images with something he can recognize that makes sense to him. This also means that less time is spent on some of the topics a more Japan-focused book would be interested in, like original panels of Mizuki Shigeru’s famous “Ge Ge Ge no Kitaro” instead of other Mizuki work. Or even a short section on kamishibai collectors. Do they exist? How many of these works of art have survived?

I am grateful for this book. It was a huge eye opener and I enjoyed it very much. Some of the text could have been better, and some of the focus could have been better, but having an imperfect book on the subject is much better than none at all.

Posted in Japanese History, Japanese Literature, Manga, WWII. Tags: , , . 6 Comments »

Moju: Blind Beast

August 19, 2010 — Zack Davisson

4.0 out of 5 stars A classic of Japanese horror literature

Moju: The Blind Beast (Shinbaku Books: Fictions)

Edogawa Rampo is an author as famous for movie adaptations of his work as he is for his own fiction. Like his namesake Edgar Allen Poe (Taro Hirai uses the penname Edogawa Rampo because of the phonetic similarity to Poe, read Edogaw Aram Po), Rampo’s works have spawned an entire genre of film in Japan, from works about the author such as The Mystery of Rampo, to films made from his short stories such as Rampo Noir to more direct adaptations such as Fukusawa Kinji’s adaptation of Black Lizard staring Mishima Yukio. But by far one of the most captivating, intriguing and over-all successful adaptations of Rampo’s work is Masumura Yasuzo’s Blind Beast.

Now, I have watched and loved Masumura’s “Blind Beast” for years, but had never read the original story it was based on. As popular as Rampo’s films are, English-language translations of his work are very rare, for the longest time being only Japanese Tales of Mystery & Imagination, an adaption overseen by Rampo himself. Finally, some more of Rampo’s works are making their way into English, and none is more appreciated or anticipated than Shinbaku’s translation of “Moju: Blind Beast.”

If you haven’t seen the film, “Blind Beast” is the story of an obsessive blind man who hungers after art based on touch alone. Deprived of sight, he lives through his fingertips and what he can caress. Nothing gives him more pleasure than the female form, and he has dedicated his life to finding its perfection. After discovering a statue of cabaret singer Mizuki Ranko, he kidnaps her and takes her to his specially crafted dungeon decorated in massive sculptures of the female form. Giant walls of arms, noses and eyes surround the phatasmagoric scene, with a huge sculpture of a woman’s legs and torso dominating the floor. There, the blind beast toys with and tortures Mizuki until she too comes to understand the beauty of living in world of darkness and touch.

Even if you have seen the film, the transition of Mizuki Ranko is only the opening chapters in this original story. I was surprised to find that Masumura clipped Rampo’s original for his film, and that the blind beast has a much longer career as an artist/murderer than I had imagined. After he is finished with Ranko, he goes off in search of more perfection, finds it and plays with it until he hungers for something fresh.

Edogawa Rampo’s genre is ero-guro, meaning “erotic grotesque,” and that truly describes the story of “Blind Beast.” The beast himself has a refined sense of humor and an artistry of soul, disposing of his victims in ways guaranteed to bring the most shock (such as tying an arm to a bunch of balloons in the park and then encouraging nearby children to chase the balloons and catch them when they come down). Even in the day of serial-killer heroes like Dexter on TV, I managed to be shocked by the degradation of Rampo’s protagonist.

Rampo’s fiction always leaves me filling a little stained, like reading a serial killers diary and getting a glimpse into the mind of insanity. His work is unique, and “Blind Beast” is unique amongst his works. I am used to reading Rampo’s short stories, but at a hundred and twenty five pages this is the longest time I have spent in his world. Creepy, to say the least.

Shinbaku has done a good job with the presentation of “Blind Beast.” The book included illustrations from a Japanese edition, although for some reason the captions of the illustrations have not been translated. The introduction by Jack Hunter (Eros in Hell) is good and gives some insight into both Masumura’s film and Rampo’s original story. If I had a complaint about this, it is that the writing in the translation is often stiff and “Blind Beast” would have benefited from a secondary adaptation of the translation to smooth out the English and create a better reading experience. But even with a some-what rough translation, having “Blind Beast” available at all is a treat not to be missed.

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The Times of Botchan Volume 2

August 17, 2010 — Zack Davisson

5.0 out of 5 stars Botchan, continued

THE TIMES OF BOTCHAN volume 2 (of 10)

The second volume of Jiro Taniguchi and Natsuo Sekikawa’s tremendous “The Times of Botchan” completes a single story arc, telling of Natsume Soseki’s transition from struggling teacher to full-time author as well as the transition of feudal Japan into the modernization of the Meiji era.

“The Times of Botchan” is a literate, intelligent comic series that shows that manga is so much more than cute girls with big eyes and small mouths. The art is highly detailed and yet retains a specific style, and the story is a journey through history while still being an engaging narrative.

This first volume concluded with Soseki’s unwilling ousting of Lafcadio Hearn from his teaching position at the First Higher School and his gathering of ideas for the characters who would eventually populate Botchan. In this second volume, Soseki is still seeking inspiration in those around him, from the stodgy old man who would become the principal of Botchan’s school, before finally setting down to write his novel.

Writing a book about someone writing a book can drag, and Taniguchi and Sekikawa add action to Soseki’s writing scenes by means of a judo tournament where Natsumi’s friend Ota is attempting to win two hundred yen so that he can build a better life. The Judo competition becomes a metaphor for Soseki’s inner struggle between desire to be a writer and the real-life financial demands placed on him as head of the household. All of those around Soseki are facing their own personal challenges and transitions, and these are woven into the main narrative.

I really cannot recommend “The Times of Botchan” enough. If you enjoy and are familiar with Japanese literature, then this series brings to life those famous names and shows how they interacted with each other during the dawning of a new era in Japan.

Posted in Japanese History, Japanese Literature, Manga, Uncategorized. Tags: , . 2 Comments »

The times of Botchan volume 1

June 23, 2010 — Zack Davisson

5.0 out of 5 stars An absolutely brilliant historical/biographical comic

The Times of Botchan volume 1 (of 10)

Botchan is my favorite work of Japanese literature. Funny, insightful, at times both light-hearted and mournful, it is a perfect novel. Still completely relevant today, “Botchan” is the one book that I recommend everyone read before moving to Japan in order to learn the culture. The author, Natsume Soseki, is considered one of the greatest authors of Japan, and in was featured on the thousand-yen note for years.

When I saw Jiro Taniguchi and Natsuo Sekikawa’s “The times of Botchan,” I originally thought that it was going to be a manga adaptation of the famous novel. But it is so much more.

While I love “Botchan,” I have never thought too much about the writing of “Botchan,” of the story behind the story. I have never thought about the process behind Soseki’s writing of the novel, so different from his works like I Am a Cat and Kokoro. That is the story that Taniguchi and Sekikawa explore in their comic “The times of Botchan.”

Volume one opens with Soseki sitting on his front porch, staying at his famous stray cat, and contemplating a new novel. Soseki was feeling caught in the Meiji era, and time when Japan was transforming from one kind of nation to another, achieving technological advances in weeks what had taken other countries centuries. The nation was emerging from the two hundred and fifty year period of isolation known as the Edo period, and was in a full-fledged identity crisis. The clash of the old and new, of tradition and innovation, of country and city, of Eastern and Western, all of this Soseki sought somehow to embody in his short comic novel.

To help process his ideas, and just to be social, Soseki meets with a group of young writers who wish to study at his footsteps. In “The times of Botchan,” Soseki wanders the streets of Tokyo with these young writers, taking a little something from each of their personalities that will eventually end up as a character in his book.

Do you need to have read “Botchan” to appreciate “The times of Botchan?” I don’t think so. Aside from Soseki’s musings the story doesn’t delve too deeply into the events of the novel. It would help to have at least a familiarity with Meiji period Japanese literature, as many of the characters are famous names from that time. Ogai Mori (Vita Sexualis) is a character, as is a personal favorite of mine Lafcadio Hearn (Kwaidan) and there is a great scene where Soseki reacts to the news that his return from London has pushed Hearn out of his professorship with Tokyo University as the pressure to expel foreign influences grows.

I thought Taniguchi and Sekikawa’s “The times of Botchan” was just brilliant. Everything about the book, from the art style to the pacing to the subject matter are far removed from what is typically thought of as “manga.” Jiro Taniguchi’s art is highly detailed, sometimes being drawn from famous photographs that I recognize, yet with an obvious influence of Katsuhiro Otomo (Akira) in the facial expressions of his characters.

What was originally supposed to be a short two-volume collaboration between Taniguchi and Sekikawa, “The times of Botchan” blossomed into a ten-volume series that goes beyond the titular novel and into an exploration of literature in the ever-changing Meiji period. Frankly, I can’t wait to read the rest of the series, and it is no wonder that publisher FanFare / Ponent Mon received an impressive seven Eisner Award nominations in 2010. This is high-quality literate comics.

Posted in Japanese History, Japanese Literature, Manga. Tags: , . 4 Comments »

Maoh: Juvenile Remix, Vol. 1

June 10, 2010 — Zack Davisson

5.0 out of 5 stars Battle not with Monsters

Maoh: Juvenile Remix, Vol. 1

“Maoh: Juvenile Remix” is an interesting comic in that it comes from popular novelist Kotaro Isaka (Golden Slumbers). Kotaro is known in Japan as “Haruki’s child” after novelist Murakami Haruki (Hardboiled Wonderland and the End of the World). Like Murakami, Kotaro has that ability to bridge the gap between serious and popular literature, between complex social ideas and outlandish genre imagery.

Megumi Osuga has brilliantly adapted Kotaro’s style and story for the manga “Maoh: Juvenile Remix,” bringing together heady concepts of social justice, of corporations and politicians vs the rights of citizens, of the sins of progress, and the nobility of action vs inaction. All of these ideas have been presented in a comic that is also beautifully drawn and highly entertaining.

The story presents 11th grade student Ando, a perpetual bystander in life who harbors a secret. From a young age, he has had the psychic ability to put words in other people’s mouths, to be a ventriloquist as he calls it. The power is innately passive; he cannot influence their thoughts or actions, only their words. Ando himself does not necessarily believe in his own power, and thinks that these instances might be more coincidence than anything else.

Ando lives in the fictional city of Nekota, a small town on the cusp of modernization, where the City Councilor Miyuki Yamamoto is attempting to bring in corporate money with the creation of a new Urban Center. Many residents oppose this, feeling that the corporate money will only drive out local businesses leaving the current residents of Nekota jobless and hopeless. Presenting a shining light to the populace is a charismatic young leader named Inukai who leads a vigilante groups known as the Grasshoppers. Inukai and his Grasshoppers have dedicated themselves to ending crime and corruption at all costs and by any means necessary in Nekota, and while most hail them as local heroes Ando discovers that the group might be hiding a dark secret. Slowly, he is forced to re-evaluate his position of merely “staying out of everyone’s way” and taking a more active role in his life and the lives of others, and possibly taking control of his own mysterious power.

I was impressed with “Maoh: Juvenile Remix.” There is a lot more going on here than I originally suspected from the cover, and this is a heavier series with more depth and character than a typical manga. I am used to unconfident, passive heroes in Japanese comics, but Ando’s particular psychic ability gives him an excuse to be passive, and to stay behind the front line. He is a manipulator, as opposed to Inukai who is a leader and a doer. The two make for a nice opposition.

Stylistically, the book could be compared to Death Note or Deadman Wonderland, with a somewhat dystopian environment that is an alternate Earth more than a future. The masked image of the Grasshoppers also brings to mind Pink Floyd – The Wall, and the frightening nature of Gestapo “liberators.” How much freedom are you willing to sacrifice in order to live in peace?

Megumi Osuga’s art is splendid, realistic at times and cartoony at others. Dirty at times and clean at others. Horrific at times and inspiring at others. Ando has the typical “any man” look about him, while Inukai plays with the “beautiful boy” look that exemplifies a hero. Megumi drops some light fan service here and there, but in interesting ways such as Ando’s brother’s girlfriend Shiori who is so tomboyish she doesn’t even bother to button up her shirt correctly, or the girl Machiko who is almost comically large-breasted and works to shake Ando out of his lethargy.

Clearly, there is a lot going on in “Maoh: Juvenile Remix,” more than this first volume can contain. We are only given glimpses behind the curtain here, but what we are shown is more than enough to hook us for the next. I am very much looking forward to the next volume.

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