Iwa ni Hana

So I got my copy of that novel a week ago and just finished reading all 753 pages of it. True to reviews in the Japanese blogosphere, the novel is “Kyōgoku Natsuhiko Lite,” which explains why I finished it much faster than I anticipated. Now I just want to write a spoiler-free post of some general impressions while the story is still fresh in my mind.

I believe it was the English novelist Graham Greene who once wrote (I am paraphrasing here): if you cannot stand someone in an uncivilized country (ex. Mexico), you would kill him; but if you cannot stand someone in a civilized country (ex. Europe), you would kill yourself. That was with reference to the world in the 1930s, and it is also a quote that floated to the foreground of my mind after reading Loups=Garous.

Loups=Garous is a SF story set in Japan in the near future. As every Kyōgoku fan knows, there is always a main theme to his novels – with Mouryou no Hako, it was “eternal life”; with Kyōkotsu no Yume, it was “resurrection of a god”; with Tesso no Ori, it was “halting the passage of time”. In the case of Loups=Garous, it was “wolfishness/cannibalism”.

The Story

The title Loups=Garous is taken from French and refers to a demon in the form of a wandering werewolf that does evil at night. The story is set in a future prosperous Japan of bloated regulations and overblown political correctness, where every manifestation of the instinctual side of human nature seems to have been rooted out. Among other things, Japan has become a world leader in producing sophisticated synthetic food that tastes just like real meat. Synthetic food solved world hunger. Popular opinion (as well as the law) has also decided that it is barbaric to kill animals for food. So mankind has reached such an evolutionary stage that they break away from nature’s food chain, and subsist only on vegetables and synthetic food. Meanwhile, technology also enables people to live in isolation and have as little physical contact as possible. Against this background, serial murders of teenager girls and boys occurred. A group of teenage girls and a team of adults began to (separately) take action to uncover the shocking truth behind these murders…

“Wolfishness” and soushoku [草食]

What I would like to talk about is “wolfishness” – the quality of being a predator animal, of fighting within your pack to decide the hierarchical order, of having the solidarity to make a kill together etc. Translated into human terms, “wolfishness” can be very broad: it is about manifesting that worldly killer instinct towards people and things, of fighting in the belief that there is nothing to stop you from becoming the next Rothschild/J.P Morgan/Bill Gates except your own weakness, and yet succeed in achieving a given goal by being part of a collective group. It is also the opposite of being a “sheep”: of not taking taking an insult lying down, of not being a burden to the “pack” by accepting the dole or charity from anyone, of not holding yourself back from biting your rightful share of the prey, of not being afraid of crying blood for revenge on your enemy…

It is also this “wolfishness” that seems to have been rooted out in the story, but as you can guess – it always comes back. One example Kyōgoku likes to recycle in his stories is the idea that ada-uchi [仇討ち] or “murder out of revenge” used to be legal and a highly respected moral obligation in Japan, and he likes to leave it as an open question whether it is really a sign of “progress” that ada-uchi is now outlawed. In Loups=Garous, he also leaves it as an open question whether it is really a sign of “progress” that Japan seems take the lead in substituting some man-made replica with the real thing. This applies not just to synthetic food in the story, but also to a subset of fanatic anime fans on a “cleansing” jihad as well.

Interestingly, the novel was published in 2001 – long before the term soushoku [草食] or “grass-eating” became a slang to describe those (mainly young men) with little sexual/material desire, and long before gal-game and h-game became “mainstream”.

In the story, the origin of synthetic food began with a psychological sin that is not obvious until you read to the end (as Kyōgoku’s novels always do). Perhaps it is just me being brainwashed by Kyōgoku – it makes me wonder what the “not obvious” origin behind gal-games and h-games may be.

The more you think about his novels, the creepier they get.

(I gathered on the internet that the English translation of this novel will appear in Feb 2010. I was very unhappy with Vertical Inc’s handling of Ubume no Natsu – but Loups=Garous should be a much easier book to translate. Please feel free to drop me a note if any of you do read it though.)