Iwa ni Hana

Quite in spite of its illustrious pedigree with Kenji “Ghost in the Shell” Kamiyama as director, the general impression the 11-episode anime series Eden of the East gave me is that it is like a game of bingo. The story and the marketing are all about hitting certain sets of keywords that you know you have heard somewhere else in various combinations before. Of these keywords, there are two I would like to focus on – one is 正しい道 [tadashii michi] which means “the correct path,” and the other is kuuki 空気 [kuuki] which means “air”.

In Eden of the East, the antagonist is billed as an old man who takes it upon himself to guide the country to “the correct path,” and goes about it by giving twelve randomly chosen individuals 10 billion yen each to spend as they believe would revive the country; meanwhile, the protagonist is billed as “a young man who fights against the air of this country” and is among the twelve individuals chosen. Now, “air” is a loaded word in Japanese politics. For more explanation I would suggest this article by Joichi Ito on The New York Times dated 2007. Joichi Ito is an insightful blogger whom I have been following for several years and the plot of Eden of the East happened to remind me of one of his most interesting blog entries back in 2004 about the cultural context of money in Japan:

One important Japanese businessman once told me. Power in Japan is not about having money yourself. It is about having the influence to move money.

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New artbook of the PRC illustrator Eno. (何何舞)

Cover image of Eno's artbook 'Marquee Moon'

News reached me that Eno’s new artbook entitled Anemone (银莲花) is to go on sale early next month. This is her second artbook since Marquee Moon (华盖之月).

Eno. is by far my favorite illustrator these days. I adore that androgynous, ethereal beauty and that delicate, graceful touch in her illustrations. I see that she is also trying her hand at manhua these days – namely a series entitled Ling Miao Qian (零秒前), which seems to be a sports series set in a Chinese high school.* (Personally, I wish it had been a manhua series set in premodern China, so that you get to see in spades the sort of beautiful, flowing black hair which she is so good drawing. But that’s just me.)

Earlier last year, she also did a series of illustrations on the theme of Lan Ling Wang (兰陵王), a prince of the kingdom of Qi (齊) who lived in 6th century China. According to legend, he was a skilled soldier, but his extraordinary and somewhat feminine good looks did not seem to strike much terror into the hearts of his enemies. So he devised these scary-looking masks to wear on the battlefield. His siblings were jealous of him; he was poisoned and died at the young age of 30 or thereabouts.

One of Eno's illustrations of Lan Ling Wang

Rumour has it that the novelist Tanaka Yoshiki (田中芳樹) also has a work in progress on the theme of Lan Ling Wang.** If the novel(s) – assuming they are not aborted efforts (as is so often the case with Tanaka Yoshiki) – were illustrated by Eno., that would be quite something to behold indeed.

* You can see the details from her blog here: ttp://blog.sina.com.cn/enoeno

** You can see the details from his editor’s blog here: ttp://a-hiro.cocolog-nifty.com/diary/2009/02/post-ae8d.html

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