Iwa ni Hana

A rare cover image of the magazine "Manga Erotics F" dated 2004 by Fujiwara Kaoru (藤原薫), a very talented josei manga artist who unfortunately seems to have stopped production of new works these days. Her fine sense of aesthetics, stylish drawings and thought-provoking stories will be missed.

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In my mind, there is a spectrum of Japanese authors. On one extreme end there are those I understand and admire tremendously and they are the likes of Natsume Soseki (夏目漱石) and Kyougoku Natsuhiko (京極夏彦). And then there are others whose works I unfortunately can never quite understand and cannot bring myself to like, and there sits the likes of Oe Kenzaburo (大江健三郎) and Dazai Osamu (太宰治). So that when news reached me that Madhouse is to launch Aoi Bungaku (青い文学) – an anime series based on works of modern Japanese literature – it was with mixed feelings that I received the lineup of titles to be animated. You can find a list of the titles here.

Screenshots of "In the Forest, Under Cherries in Full Bloom" downloaded from Aozora Bunko to the iPhone app Aozora Hondana (青空本棚). Yes, I recently yielded to get an iPhone.

In the Forest, Under Cherries in Full Bloom (桜の森の満開の下) by Sakaguchi Ango (坂口安吾) would be the highlight of this series for me. I have mentioned it briefly before on this blog and I personally reckon it to be the most thought-provoking short story written in the post-war era. The text itself is available on Aozora Bunko. (Actually, the copyright of a lot of Sakaguchi’s works would seem to have expired in the recent months, as I noticed that Aozora Bunko has been active with many uploads of his works.) I don’t want to spoil that story by summarizing the plot because it is much more powerful if you do not know what comes next from the very beginning. For now, I will only say that it is a complex story juxtaposing man and woman, savagery and refinement, beauty and madness, urbanity and wilderness, lawlessness and order, and a host of other things. A story like this begs to be handed by an anime director like Nakamura “Mononoke” Kenji, but I see that they have chosen Araki Tetsuro (荒木哲郎) for the task. I have seen Araki’s recent work Kurozuka (黒塚) and I think he does have the skills to depict that darkly beautiful air that permeates Sakaguchi’s story.

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If you can read Japanese (preferably some archaic Japanese and a lot of difficult kanji at that), and if you are ever in the mood for something like Umberto Eco’s erudite thrillers with shocking endings like The Name of the Rose and Foucault’s Pendulum, broad literary canvas of interlocking individual lives captured in a certain historic period like Honoré de Balzac’s magnum opus The Human Comedy, and pure masterpieces of interwoven arcane lores and mystery like Robertson Davies’ The Deptford Trilogy, combined with touches of the eerily beautiful that is typical of Japanese kaidan tales, I would recommend to you without reserve a series of supernatural detective novels written by Kyōgoku Natsuhiko (京極夏彦) known as the Hyakkiyagyō series (百鬼夜行シリーズ), which is also popularly referred to as the Kyōgokudō series (京極堂シリーズ).

A screenshot from the DVD of "Ubume no Natsu" (姑獲鳥の夏), a movie adaptation of the first novel of the series.

The Background

This novel series is set in Japan in the 1950′s when society was just returning to some resemblance of order after WWII. I personally think there couldn’t be a better time to set a series like this in. The war put a pause of seven or eight years in people’s lives – men were conscripted to fight abroad and those who remained behind were dislocated etc. But past action, no matter how long ago and how much the face of society has changed, always has an effect in the present. The past just never goes away.

The timescale of some of novels in the series spans across centuries and millennium. Actions from distant history, actions before and during the war, and actions in the near present combine to form these stories. The 1950′s was a time for unearthing past shattering secrets and settling scores.

It was also an interesting time from the reader’s point of view. The 1950′s was a time of transition when old beliefs gave way to the unknown. The country was directionless and exhausted from the high tension and mass hysteria during the war. A number of new spiritual cults were springing up from nowhere. The characters in the books can only ask open questions as to what the new social order and various trends in technology may bring in the future. Now that some sixty years had passed since the 1950′s, the reader is free to draw his or her own answers to those open questions in the series.

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