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”.

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Cover image of the Jan 2010 issue of Comic Beam showing an illustration of "Choukoudou Shujin" by Yamakawa Naohito.

Choukoudou Shujin [澄江堂主人]

News reached me that the manga artist Yamakawa Naohito [山川直人] is launching a new series entitled Choukoudou Shujin [澄江堂主人] on the monthly manga magazine Comic Beam.

When I looked at the illustration on the left, my gut reaction was: “This is just what Chūzenji Akihiko would look like if Yamakawa-sensei were to draw a portrait of him.” Then my second thought was: “Well, since Chūzenji Akihiko was modeled in part after Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, maybe this manga is inspired by Akutagawa after all.” After researching on the internet a bit, it turns out that my gut feeling was right, “Choukoudou Shujin” was indeed one of several literary names by which Akutagawa Ryūnosuke was known.

Details on this manga seem to be scarce at the moment, but I am pleased to see Yamakawa-sensei continuing with his unique trademark medieval-engraving-like drawing style from his previous works such as -

Koohii mou ippai [コーヒーもう一杯]

This is a 5-volume manga series comprised of individual short stories that all have to do with coffee one way or other. Each of them is bittersweet with a philosophical bent. I have always thought this would be the sort of manga that the writer Murakami Haruki [村上春樹]* would have drawn if he were a manga artist. (Or least Murakami in his The Elephant Vanishes phase. I have fallen behind on his more recent works such as 1Q84 but have been told that his artistic/literary style had changed a lot.)

Anyway, my favorite story by far in Koohii mou ippai goes like this:

A man comes home one day and finds the cat he used the keep two years ago waiting for him. The cat has grown up and is apparently running his own successful business. The cat wears a suit and has a handful of employees by his side. They exchange news while drinking coffee, and the cat finally reveals that it has come to watch a movie called Coffee and Cigarette with him. The man is of modest means and has no DVD player, so the cat dispatches one of his underlings to fetch a DVD player at once, and the two of them sit down to watch the movie. During the movie, the man notices that the cat has fallen asleep. The cat apologizes and the man reckons that the cat must be tired from overwork. The man remembers that two years ago, the cat was still only a child, and he wonders what would be the human equivalent of two years in a cat’s life…

I think it is a unique story that illustrates basically the same concept as Shinkai Makoto’s Byousoku 5 Centimeter – that people live and grow at different speeds. On a personal level, it is a theme that I feel more profoundly than anything else. (I often feel like that cat when I meet with people from the past.)

In any case, I recommend Yamakawa-sensei’s works without reserve. Even if you cannot read Japanese, the unique, engraving-like artstyle is a still pleasure to look at. There is always a touch of the fantastical in the artwork, just like the stories themselves. Here are some random pages I scanned after the jump:

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Akio stands at the exit of the tunnel through which Utena and Anthy try to run away from the castle in the movie "The Adolescence of Utena".

I just want to do a quick post on a fanciful thought I suddenly had.

If Revolutionary Girl Utena were a novel of the Hyakkiyagyō series, I think the whole concept of “the prince” would probably be considered a youkai that is like a tsukimono (ie. a “spiritual thing that attaches itself to an individual”), which only someone like Chūzenji Akihiko can “let fall” [落とし] or exorcise.

Utena has always struck me as a story in which only one half is told (though I do not necessarily mean this in a negative way):

• It tells of adolescent development below the neck (ie. the emotional and the physical/sexual), but not so much above the neck (ie. the intellect). You see the teenage characters agonizing a lot over what goes on the below the neck, but you never see them reading a book and get hit over the head by a whole new world of ideas.
• Likewise, only the “female” side of the story is told – or at least feminist sentiments are echoed, although even then I am not sure I have enough information to draw any decisive conclusion, except that the scene in the movie where Utena and Anthy run away from the castle reminds me of a quote about atheists I once read. An atheist (I am just paraphrasing) is someone who walks away from church, but he walks away from church with his eyes fixed on the church and with his back facing towards where he is going. In other words, he cannot see where he is going. Atheism can only define itself against Christianity, whereas Christianity does not have to define itself against anything. I suppose feminism (at least as it appears in Utena) is also like that – you can walk away from “the prince,” but you walk away with your eyes fixed on the prince and with your back towards where you are going. If anything, I think it is the “male” side of the Utena story that is begging to be told – it is the male characters who are the active initiators in the story, whereas the female characters tend to be passively playing along or “acted upon.” As it is, I feel that I know about the key male characters (Akio, Touga etc) a lot less than I know about the key female characters.

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Oshii Mamoru’s film “Innocence” and the world of things

One of the most iconic features of Oshii Mamoru’s film Innocence is a sequence of festival parade lasting approximately 5 minutes. The parade was extravagantly animated with a myriad of ornate details, but at the same time the sequence did not really advance the story in any way, and even felt somewhat out of sync in the natural flow of the story. When I first watched it, I remember wondering to myself: why bother?

The festival parade scene in Oshii Mamoru's "Innocence"

Oshii-sensei has probably been asked this question and answered it accordingly somewhere. For my part, I could only say that my gut feeling on seeing it was that it is a powerful and nostalgic expression of the world of things – by which I mean the seen and touchable world:

• that one interacts with through one’s physical senses
• in which one lives in perpetual want of one thing or another

This is a point of contrast to the state of human existence you see in the film. Humans live in various states of modification from their natural biology – the Major long transcended to a form of existence not unlike “data” on a vast network, and various characters living in man-made bodies instead of their natural bodies. Yet the world of things is still the point of reference in human existence, even though ironically humanity seems to show tendencies of leaving that world of things behind. The parade seems to express nostalgic yearning for physical presence, the sensation of being there, of things with colours that you can perceive through your eyes, texture that you can perceive through your sense of touch, producing sounds that travel to your ears. The objects you see in the parade are all reminders of the natural world, recreated from man-made materials in the likeness of their natural counterparts. What you can no longer have, you create a likeness of.

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[This post is not a plot summary or general book review of Mouryou no Hako, a novel written by Kyōgoku Natsuhiko (京極夏彦), but spoiler discussion assuming prior knowledge of the book. This is also not a review of the anime adaptation by Madhouse either, though it may or may not be useful reference information. If you are looking for spoiler-free information about the Hyakkiyagyō series (of which Mouryou no Hako is the second book), please do not proceed any further and refer to this post instead.]

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[This post is not a plot summary or general book review of The Summer of Ubume, a novel written by Kyōgoku Natsuhiko (京極夏彦), but spoiler discussion assuming prior knowledge of the book. The version I read is the Japanese bunko edition published by Kodansha. There is also a translated English version published recently by Vertical but I have never read it. If you are looking for spoiler-free information about the Hyakkiyagyō series (of which The Summer of Ubume is the first book), please do not proceed any further and refer to this post instead.] (more…)

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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The entire second quarter at work was crazily busy, but recently I finally got more time to rest and recharge. Some part of my brain was yearning for period drama plus some sort of supernatural detective story (summer is traditionally the season for supernatural thrillers in Japan), so I went down to a bookstore and swept off the entire Kyōgokudō series (京極堂シリーズ) by Kyōgoku Natsuhiko (京極夏彦), of which Mouryou no Hako (魍魎の匣) was the second book. I have been curious to find out more about the onmyouji-detective character Chūzenji Akihiko (中禅寺秋彦) ever since I watched Madhouse’s excellent anime adaptation of Mouryou no Hako.

Mouryou no Hako

Anyway, I wish they had put some sort of health warnings on the novel covers – the stories are not only lengthy (they are thick as dictionaries) but also highly addictive (you just can’t bring yourself to put them down); they can cause considerable eye strain and destroy your sleep pattern. But I am glad that I read them – it has been ages since I got sucked into detective thrillers, not since Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum which I read back in university, I think. The Kyōgokudō novels are full of interesting ideas, which will take some time for my brain to properly sort them out. The stories themselves are like creepy kaidan tales from the Edo period, beefed up with logic in the style of Sherlock Holmes, and completed with psychological analysis of the Jungian school. The only thing I wish to say for now is that it became apparent to me that there is a distinct difference between horror (ホラー) and kaidan (怪談). Horror is creepy and the visual presentation often aims to turn your stomach – think the horror manga of Umezu Kazuo (楳図 かずお); but kaidan is always both creepy and beautiful in some dangerously attractive and eerie sense, or ayashii [妖しい]. I think an example of this would be Mononoke.

The Meaning of Ayashii

There are many words for “creepy” in Japanese and ayashii is one of them. If you look at the kanji 妖, it is comprised of 女 “woman” and 夭 “premature demise” – in other words, the premature demise of a woman makes for something creepy. I would like to stress that “creepy” is not really a good translation of the word ayashii. Ayashii refers to something creepy that is also at the same time enchantingly and bewitching attractive.

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