'Under Execution Under Failbreak (死刑執行中脱獄進行中)' by Araki Hirohiko (荒木飛呂彦): A collection of bizarre, outlandish and strangely philosophical short stories

Araki Hirohiko is best known for his manga series Jojo's Bizarre Adventure (ジョジョの奇妙な冒険), but to me his crowning achievement is in a collection of bizarre, outlandish and strangely philosophical short stories called Under Execution Under Failbreak (死刑執行中脱獄進行中). Let me summarize the first story in the collection so that you get an idea:

Prisoner 27 has just received his death sentence. He is brought to his cell to await his demise. He switches on the light only to be stung by a colony of bees beside it. He discovers devilishly clever traps hidden in his food and his chair. He spots a hole on the wall and attempts to dig his way to liberty, only to have his fingers peeled off by a meat grinder installed on the other side of the wall. It finally dawns on him that he isn’t incarcerated in a prison cell at all, but the execution room itself, where he is to suffer a prolonged and agonizing death. From that point on things progress from bad to worse. Rats spring out of nowhere to devour his fingers that have fallen onto the ground. In the end, he digs a hole large enough for him to escape alright. But having been consistently fooled by objects in the room that are wholly innocent in appearance but are in effect torture devices, he wonders if there is a scaffold ready to cut him into two halves the moment his jumps across that hole he dug. He sits, meditatively gazing at the clear blue sky, the distant mountains, the bounteous field, the light, the beauty of the outside world. Fifty years have passed him by, he still hasn’t mustered the courage to step over to the other side. The end.            

It is a story that makes one ask questions: What if the scafford Prisoner 27 imagines is not really there and he sits longing for freedom in vain for fifty years? What if the scafford he imagines is actually there and the moment he reaches out to escape to the free world, his life is finished?

Besides the story of Prisoner 27 above, my other favourites in this volume are Dead Man’s Q and its sequel, which are undeniably the most heavy-handed story with all the expected existentialist metaphors and Kafkaesque symbolisms. One has no right to be a manga fan without having read this. It is a stunning feat of story-telling. Take my word for it.

Comments

[minus-one]

yeah, very Kafka-like story ("in der Strafkolonie"(?))

i wonder is there any English translation?

[Wabisabi]

I don't follow news of English translation of manga so don't quote me on this - my gut feeling is that there is probably no English translation on this...