Mythical Beasts of Japan: From Evil Creatures to Sacred Beings is, oddly enough, exactly what the title says it is: a book of Japanese yokai (the very handy catch-all word for monsters, demons, spirits and basically any supernatural creature good or bad; I’m making it my mission to get this word into English dictionaries. It is just so useful, and lacking an English counterpart, unlike some other loan words. *cough* I’m looking at you, kamikaze. *cough*). I’ve been flipping through its pages for a little over a year now, ever since T. was thoughtful enough to get it for my birthday-before-last. There is a laht to take in here, over three hundred pages of full colour photographs of various depictions of yokai in various media, although the majority are paintings. 

The many gorgeous works of art are accompanied by a short introduction, a couple informative essays on Japanese art and yokai, and about thirty pages of notes, giving overviews of the most common yokai, and the details of the works of art in the book. Everything except the art details is bilingual, making for some interesting reading if you’re a language nerd. Unfortunately, either the translator is not a native speaker, or there was a strong non-native editorial hand involved in the process, as some of the translations are choppy and weird. The English blurbs for the yokai also tend to be noticeably lacking in detail compared with the Japanese. It’s bit frustrating for me as a translator to do some bilingual reading and realize entire sentences are missing in the translation, and some really interesting sentences on top of that.

Also, “imaginary” is spelled “imagenary”. This is in a title and is very annoying to see every time I go to read about these “imagenary” creatures.

Another point of frustration is the book itself. Going to all the trouble of curating such an interesting collection of art, spanning centuries, and then jamming it in this enormous paperback just seems like such a waste. To see the entire image, the reader has to basically crack the spine of the book. And the pages are just glued to the spine, so breaking that spine means you’re going to have pages falling out sooner rather than later. I would’ve loved to see a Phaidon kind of treatment of this collection, a nice hardback book that opens flat so you can really pore over the images. The publisher Pie Books seems to do a lot of art books, but it doesn’t really show in this volume.

There’s also not a lot of curation happening here. I’m sure all the pieces were carefully selected, and there is no doubt that they’re incredible with many different styles and periods represented. And given the number of paintings, shoji sliding doors, screens, sculptures and so many other objects covered in yokai littering the museums of Japan, I doubt this was an easy task. But the works are loosely grouped into two categories: “Animals as messengers of the gods” and “Demonic & auspicious creatures” (argh! Ampersand! In formal writing! Argh!). And that’s it. Each page contains the title of the piece, the approximate date of creation and where it is currently housed. But this information is only in Japanese, so the monolingual reader is basically stuck looking at a bunch of contextless pictures.

I would’ve liked to see the works arranged chronologically, so that the reader could get a sense of how perceptions of yokai changed over the centuries. They are arranged more or less thematically, so you can flip through a parade of Kirins and see the differences and similarities in how each artist depicted the famous beast (also on cans of my favourite beer!). But if each of these thematic sections had some small explanatory text to provide context for the images you’re about to view, the images themselves would be so much more affecting. As it stands, the only context you get is that some yokai work for the gods and some yokai are bad. The subtitle “From Evil Creatures to Sacred Beings” implies some kind of transition or shift in attitudes towards yokai, or at least a spectrum of yokai, but none of that is seen in the book itself.

But! Don’t let my grumbling turn you away. The book is flawed, but still fascinating. And the pages are delightfully heavy, worthy of the beauty they contain. Japan has millenia of monsters, there are yokai everywhere. There are monsters that lick up the stains in your bathtub even. The dirt-licking monsters are not in Mythical Beasts, though; they are too small fry for a book covering all the big yokai. But you can see Edo-era paintings of the earthquake-causing catfish, Meiji-era ink drawings of impish dragons, creepy smiling-faced boogeymen captured on shoji sliding doors, even a showdown between the lucky dragon and the elephant-fearing tiger. Which is why, despite all my complaints about this book, I have been poking through it for over a year now. There is just so much to see.

(I’m not going to post any NSFW images or anything, but I will be discussing various aspects of some pretty graphic stuff, violent and sexual, so if you have any triggers, just assume that I will be hitting all of them and go back and read about Akino Kondoh. You’ll like her! So pretty!) 

My stomach is made of that oft-referenced steel. Very little makes me queasy, and I am usually the person bringing up stories of parasitic wasps eating their way out of aphid bellies over supper. But I would be reluctant to recommend reading Maruo’s work while eating anything. Not all of the images are stomach-churning, but you stumble upon one panel of people licking human feces off a plate, and your lunch is basically ruined.

Even so, Maruo’s work draws you in. He makes me have a lot of difficult conversations in my head, ones I doubt he intended for me to have, but such is the nature of art. One very obvious chat I have with myself while reading these stories of various violations is whether or not I, as a woman who is pretty fed up with the whole “man good, woman sucky” narrative, can be okay with page after page of woman after girl after grandmother being raped, slashed, tied up, etc., etc. And this is a conversation that is so context-dependent. I think I would take a lot more issue with these kinds of stories if they were drawn by a Western artist. Which seems sort of hypocritical?

A lot of it has to do with the history of art and sexuality in Japan, which has in general, been a whole lot more anything-goes than any Western society. Like this whole danshoku idea, in which high-ranking samurai and other prestigious members of society took in a younger boy to “mentor”. And yeah, that’s a euphemism for sex right there. Prostitution was pretty much fine until the Meiji restoration, and the country has a creation myth that explicitly has two gods doing the deed to create the islands of Japan. There is a lot of sexuality in Japan, with really none of the shame or puritanical hand-wringing that we see to this day in North America. (Although that’s been changing, the human body is still a normal, non-shameful thing.) So something like the genre of ero-guro feels to me more acceptable, more like a continuation of an exploration that is part of the culture the genre is popping up from. (And not part of the culture in that “well, we’ve always treated women like shit. It’s tradition!” kind of way.)

The other thing that keeps my hackles comfortably resting against my neck is the fact that it is not just the ladies who get it. Maruo has no mercy. The director of a hospital is accosted by a gang of nurses in the garden at midnight, a young ne’er-do-well smashes in the skull of his former father-in-law. There’s plenty of pain for everyone. And plenty of uncomfortable sexuality!

One thing that comes up over and over in this collection of stories from the early eighties is eyes. And I kept thinking of Georges Bataille’s Story of the Eye. Although there are several subtle references to the work, like when the grandmother deliberately pushes the tip of her tongue up against her grandson’s eye, “Unko Soup no Tsukurikata” (How to Make Poop Soup) very explicitly points to that notorious work when the heroine pops an eyeball into her vagina and instructs one of her companions to suck it out. Which he does, while her other companion gets to work on on her head, sucking her own eyeball out of its socket.

The various protagonists of Yume get just as crazy as Simone in Story of the Eye. Simone would probably be delighted to join them. They share the same single-minded devotion to their pleasures and depravities. The boy with the eyeball-poking grandmother, yes, of course, he has sex with her. And then when she dies, he is consumed with thoughts of her and goes out in the middle of the night to masturbate on her grave. The young protagonist of “Hatsukoi” (First Love) is obsessed with the woman across the way, who, it turns out is dom to his father’s sub. She rapes him and then ties him down and forces his father to rape him.

All of this happens in Taisho or early Showa Japan (early twentieth century-ish), from the look of the school uniforms and kimono that everyone is wearing, which was a time of some serious upheavals in Japanese society, with the push for modernization, leading to the rise of facism and that whole war thing. (Historians, please don’t get mad at me for glossing over so many important aspects of this time. I am just trying to talk about a book here.) Which gets me wondering about the controlling nature of all these sexual and violent encounters, and whether or not Maruo is making a deeper comment on Japanese society. Deep!

And let’s not forget all the bandages and deformities. I think half of the characters in this volume have an eye patch, which yes, make me think of Story of the Eye again. But there are also missing legs, scars, open wounds, phantom hands, comatose patients and more!

But! All these conversations in my head forget one very important thing. And that is that Maruo is so skilled at depicting all these scenes of torture and debauchery. He is so focused on the details of every little thing, and his art is very reminiscent of early twentieth century style illustrations. I love the sly smiles, the languid kimono, the perfectly formed, slightly pursed lips. And all the beauty he infuses his drawing with offers up just that much more of a contrast with the subject matter he chooses to write about.

He also plays with panels and narrative structures in some really interesting ways. Like in “Fujin Eisei Jiten” (The Ladies’ Health Encyclopedia), which appears to be excerpts from some Taisho ladies’ health guide, complete with all the ridiculous advice you’d expect, including warnings about dangerous sexual tendencies. But it’s all illustrated with Maruo’s own dangerous sexual tendencies. And in “Yukiko-chan no Mita Yume” (The Dreams Yukiko’s Had), a list of the non-rapey dreams Yukiko has had are overlaid on images of rape and bondage.

So basically, not offended by many things/anything? Looking for beautiful art? Want to have a variety of conversations with your own self about your ethics? Check out Suehiro Maruo!

Remember how I said I try not to gush? That whole blah-blah-blah about how I only talk about books I enjoy, but that doesn’t mean I’m here to rave about them? Yeah, I lied. Or at least, I am breaking that self-imposed rule once again, because holy smokes! Akino Kondoh makes my heart beat faster and puts stars in my eyes. I triple, quadruple heart her! So put your cynical pants aside and join me in a round of unabashed adoration.

Hakoniwa Mushi is her first collection of manga stories, and I was literally thrilled when I came across it at the oddly amazing bookstore I found in Nakano on this last trip to Japan. Why I never went into this place before I will never know (actually, probably because that sprawling Mandarake is in Nakano and I always end up going there), but their manga section on the second floor had one of the best selections of alternative stuff I’ve ever seen. It is where I found the previous lovefest manga, Papa ga Mo Ichido Koi o Shita. And when I was poking around in their alt-manga section, after having grabbed the latest issue of Erotics f off the shelf, I saw Akino Kondoh’s name and for a moment, I actually couldn’t believe my eyes. Her stuff is never anywhere. (Her publisher needs to do something about that!)

Kondoh is also a fine artist, active in the art world with shows of paintings, drawings and animations, and that really shows up in her manga work. She seems to take the perspective of the whole, how the entire story will look rather than just focusing on a single image or the narrative thrust. She alternately takes advantage of and gets rid of the traditional manga structure such as dialogue and panels. And the panels are rarely a boundary for her. Flowers spill over the sides, characters dump buckets of water into the panel below, sound effects push past the confining black boxes.

What’s really striking about her work is her crisp outlines and great use of black and white. She almost never shades with grey, but instead uses black and white to create these really sharp images with striking depth. The clear beauty has me stroking each page tenderly as I drink it in. It always takes me longer to read her work because I can’t help spending an enormous amount of time on each page, singing “Pretty!” to myself.

But more than the pretty is the great story. Hakoniwa is filled with metamorphoses, as is pretty much all of Kondoh’s work, and I am a sucker for transformations. In “Tentomushi no Otomurai” (The Ladybug’s Funeral; UPDATE: I just discovered that she calls this story “Ladybirds’ Requiem” in English. She also made an animation with the same title along the same lines), the protagonist sees buttons everywhere after accidentally killing a ladybug, whose squashed corpse looks like a button to her. But these buttons are real, and she collects them, pulling four-holed pieces of plastic out of flowers in the garden, the stars in the sky, a rabbit’s ear, anyplace that could possibly or impossibly have a button in it. She sews them all into the inside of her skirt, and when she opens the ladybug-murdering curtain, her skirt flies up and all the buttons turn into butterflies, ladybugs, flowers. (This is one of the pages that I stroked lovingly, and that I keep coming back to. So incredible!)

In the very short story, “Tsume o Kita Yoru no Koto” (The incident of the night I cut my nails), she is walking in the rain when she is suddenly surrounded by ten copies of herself, who then multiply into hundreds of copies and carry her off. This carrying off is a real thing for Kondoh, as are the bugs. Both ideas recur over and over in her work. Sometimes, the carrying off, like in “Tsume o Kita”, is involuntary and terrifying, but other times, it’s voluntary, a willingness to experience new worlds, as in the title story, when she opens her dresser drawer and finds a tiny world populated by herself at many different ages.

Kondoh’s stories are both surreal and personal, sometimes with the personal leading to the surreal. And sometimes, the personal just wants the surreal, but the surreal remains stubbornly at bay. The protagonist, always the same sullen-faced woman evocative somehow of traditional Japanese paintings, buys her first white blouse in “Ame no Hi Shatsu” (The Rainy Day Shirt), only to find that every time she wears it, it rains. But when she buys a new umbrella to go with the shirt after getting rained on numerous times, the first time she goes out wearing the blouse and carrying the umbrella, of course, it doesn’t rain.

Or in one part of the title story, she feels compelled to play the piano, even though she has an appointment that she’s late for, because what if the world collapsed if she didn’t? It’s probably this that makes me love her the most, this earnestly personal confessional style underlying so much of her work. She takes the neurotic moments of everyday life and turns them into something magical. If you lift the keyboard cover, the Nile River might just come pouring out at you. Stare at ants long enough on a hot day, and they will totally turn into butterflies. And I want to believe her. Which is maybe why I am gushing here. I want to believe that underlying my workaday world, there is something terrifying and magical and spectacular. Something warm and beautiful and painted in gorgeous contrasts. And although I am not the believing type, Kondoh always manages to pull me in.

A fair bit of her work’s been published in French, so if you read French, hunt her down. And she had a story in the English Ax collection (that’s her stuff on the cover), so you monolinguals can get a taste of her awesomosity there.

Her use of the third person doesn’t mean she doesn’t get inside her characters’ heads, though. She creates opportunities for omniscience, moments to sneak in and see what they are thinking. But it always feels like she is watching from the sidelines, which is what makes her so effective at creating that haunted atmosphere you see in so much of her work. I’ve only ever read her novels, though, where she has plenty of time to build and create that atmosphere, so when I came across Sabiru Kokoro (roughly “Rusted Heart”), a collection of six short stories, at Book Off for only two hundred and fifty yen, I snapped it up, eager to see what she would do within the confines of the short story.

Maybe it’s her reputation for mystery, or the fact that gruesome things do happen in her books, but in every single story in this book, I was half on edge, expecting something terrible at the turn of every page. And terrible things do happen, but they are not the obvious kind of terrible. They’re the dark, corners-of-your-heart kind of terrible. She stands off to the side and watches her characters’ shameful secrets, and narrates them to the reader dispassionately, but with a nuanced understanding and acceptance of why they do the things they do. I think this is why she is so excellent at depicting balanced and realistic characters, and especially women. Her ladies are always so compelling and real, and not just cardboard cutouts to prop teh menz up.

The first story, “Churan no hairetsu” (Insect Egg Array), starts off so innocuously, a woman running into a friend she hasn’t seen in a while, that murder seems just around the corner. But the two women go to a cafe, and Morizaki tells her friend about her failed relationship with an artist. Mizue tries to encourage Morizaki not to give up on the relationship, and recounts her own romantic difficulties, which involve the wife of the playwright she is seeing coming to her house and leaving a box of insect eggs. The insect egg thing is just such a strange and perfect detail, and makes Mizue’s story seem only too real. But when Morizaki joins Mizue at the theatre to see a performance of this playwright’s new play, she discovers that every single bit of it was in Mizue’s head.

This is the thing that comes up over and over in these stories, how we perceive our situations, ourselves, the people around us; how we are to the outside world; and the strife and disappointment that slams us in the face when the two collide somehow. In “Jason”, a man has a sort Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde thing going on when he gets really drunk that he has absolutely no idea about until he wakes up after a night of drinking and finds that his wife has left him. He goes from friend to friend, pushing and probing until they tell him stories about himself that he’d rather not hear. He is utterly horrified to learn that he has this opposite self inside that he’s been blind to all these years. Which yeah, that is a pretty horrific discovery to make.

The shorter length is clearly no obstacle for Kirino in creating that haunted atmosphere you see in her novels. She perfectly evokes the nightlife of Kabuki-cho in Tokyo in “Neon”, one of the shorter pieces in the collection. This story also feels like a sort of testing of the waters for the fuller portrait of the criminal underworld that she brings to life in Grotesque (again, don’t bother with the English translation of this one).

Sakurai is a former bosozoku bike gang leader trying hard to establish himself as a real yakuza boss. He’s carved out a little turf and is followed by a group of loyal friends from his bosozoku days. But he is always thinking bigger, and when a young man comes running up to him one night begging to join his gang, he sees something in his eyes and decides to give the kid a trial run, even though the kid has clearly watched too many yakuza films. The thing I really love about this story (in addition to it being a story about yakuza that has no real violence, although Kirino makes you feel as if it could come at any moment) is the dialogue. Characters in the other stories have conversations and chat with each other, but the focus is largely internal, watching the world through the main character’s eyes.

“Neon” has that internality as well, but there is a lot of conversation and Kirino is such a genius with dialogue. The kid speaks in this great rural dialect, and it instantly gives him a whole backstory. As soon as he opens his mouth, you’re picturing rice fields and ramshackle farm houses. The other members of Sakurai’s gang speak in varying levels of politeness, but always with a sort of hooligan-y edge. And while Sakurai’s internal dialogue is in standard Japanese, his spoken dialogue is rough and abrupt, but often affectionately so when talking to the members of his gang. It’s such a treat to see an author pull off so many different voices. When a character is given such an identifiable way of talking, you don’t need much more to create a full portrait of them in your mind when you’re reading.

This collection is from 1997 near the beginning of her career, so it’s clearly not representative of the work Kirino is doing now. But all the hallmarks of her style are here, and it’s fascinating for me to see how sure she has been in her voice for so long. I’d like to pick up her most recent work now and see how that voice has changed. But that will have to wait for my next trip to Japan.

This time, it was me and my friend C. doing so together. Although it’s not usually something we talk about that much, we spent a lot of time discussing manga this go round. Maybe because she was being kind enough to let me pepper her with questions about the translation I was working on (Fallen Words, out this spring!), manga was on the table in a way that it usually wasn’t between us. So much so that nearly every outing together involved at least a brief stop at a bookseller so one of us could show the other that manga mentioned over dinner.

We have very different tastes though, with C. tending towards more ladies’ stuff, pages of women living their lives in ways that generally parallel reality, with a style of art she calls “non-distracting”—soft, rounded, nothing too distinctive in any way. And me, well, I love the stylized yon-koma of Ekoda-chan, and the over-the-top exaggeration of Papa Fell in Love Again. But I picked up one or two of the more interesting-looking things she pointed out just to try them, only to put them down halfway through. They weren’t bad, just too much on the ten-ways-to-get-that-man side of things for me. I don’t really care about women putting on makeup and having sexy problems.

But as a going-away gift, she slid a bookstore-paper-cover-wearing volume across the table at me, one of her favourite artists and she hoped I loved her too. Chameleon Army by Moyoco Anno. And flipping through it, I have to admit I was kind of put off by it. There are a *lot* of giant, exaggerated facial features, like hyper anime faces, in these pages, which I found kind of awkward and unpleasant at first. Plus so many close-ups of ladies’ eyes and their many, many eyelashes! And the first story, “Chameleon Army”, seemed to be just another tale of hot girl vs. dowdy girl at the office. But then dowdy girl sort of single white females hot girl and usurps her place, before moving onto greener pastures entirely. A new hot girl is hired, and the former hot girl sees her chance. The characters are surprisingly well fleshed out, and you actually care about Nitta (original hot girl) by the story’s end. As an added bonus, Anno manages to squeeze in a wicked critique of Japanese society and its treatment and expectations of women.

The more I read, the more her lanky ladies grew on me, with their oversized lips and enormous eyes. And the funnier the situations and stories seemed. Like “Prince of the Night”, a pair of stories that revolve around a mysterious man who, wishing “only to see every woman smile with happiness”, shows up at critical moments in the lives of women to make their dreams come true. With a lead-in like that, you’re expecting some kind of Prince Charming type stuff, but instead you get women struggling with their careers, what they want and what’s expected of them. And this Prince of the Night doesn’t carry them off into the sunset, but rather gives them the momentary support they need to become stronger so that they can keep fighting for what they really want.

And I started to notice more of the details in Anno’s work, the gestures she gives to her characters, the nighttime cityscapes they frequently inhabit. She moves from extremely detailed to the barebones of a sketch from panel to panel in a way that’s really effective at conveying not only the action but also the emotional intensity of any given moment.

Once I was really paying attention to this book, I realized that I knew this artist even though the name didn’t ring any bells when C. gave me the book. But Anno is also the author of Sakuran, a one-off book about an Edo-era prostitute that I really really liked, and that I wish I hadn’t sold when I moved back to Canada. Maybe this didn’t connect at first because the subject matter is so seemingly different, with Chameleon Army being populated by modern urbanites, and Sakuran being filled with pre-Meiji ladies of the night.

But like in Sakuran, Anno here displays a real playfulness and a kind of fearlessness, telling the stories of real women in often unreal situations. In possibly my favourite story in the collection, “X-GIRL-when her blood tingles”, Misa is a drab, boyish worker at a factory in the country. When an eighteen-year-old fashion princess from Tokyo becomes the new plant owner (yeah, right there, you’re thinking, what? Really?), she makes the factory the most fashionable in the country, going so far as to hold a fashion competition among the staff. Misa’s past as a Tokyo fashionista comes rushing back to her, and she pulls out all the stops, showing up at the final judging in a mask that covers half her face (stylishly!), a cape, a flowered sheer body stocking covered by a bra and some kind of bathing suit skirt thing. Extreme! When princess factory owner says that fashion is about making men want you, Misa delivers my own fashion philosophy dramatically and contemptuously: “It’s not for anyone. It’s for yourself!! Only me!! That is the path of those who give themselves up to fashion!!”

These are not the dull ladies of too many ladies’ manga, searching for love in the most stereotypical ways. These ladies own themselves and know what they want. And Anno’s evocative, exaggerated style is really the perfect fit, bringing to life grumpy heroines who don’t take shit. And you know I love grumpy heroines who don’t take shit; cf. previously referenced Ekoda-chan. If you don’t read Japanese, Chameleon Army is off-limits to you, but take heart in the fact that Vertical has licensed Sakuran, with a scheduled release of July of this year. So you’ll have some sassy ladies of the night to be your grumpy heroines!

The little box on the back pretty much sums it up:

File under

Science Fiction

• Digital Natives
• Corporate Wars
• Future Tech
• Teenage Riot

Check, check, check and check. They left “New Addictions” off that list, but that is pretty much what you get here. Toby is the most native of the digitals telling this story, wearing his BabyStrange everywhere, a tech fabric coat that he uses to video everything that happens around him and upload for his streamcast. He complains about his “motherbitch” and smokes a lot of sugar: “…with the amount of sugar I’m doing, she’s lucky I can remember the colour of my eyes without a mirror.” (Which is just such a great line. I could read it a million times and still swoon a little reading it again.)

Lerato gives us the corporate wars take in this world where citizens are divided into corporate and civilian, a kind of haves and have-nots grouping. A corporate ID will get you into the good clubs, the good restaurants, even the good transportation. In exchange, you work for a company that controls every aspect of your life.

Even if you’re not corporate, though, like photographer Kendra, you’re still connected and controlled. Your phone lets you onto the train and into your apartment, but also tell the authorities where you are and allows them to remotely taser you if you show even the faintest opposition to the regime.

Opposition which is here represented by Tendeka, the fourth point-of-view character. He’s earnest as hell and anti-corporate, working hard to create something positive for homeless, disconnected kids. But he has bigger dreams of taking down the whole system, and this is where all these people come together.

Like Zoo City, Moxyland plops you down and takes off running. Little is explained, and it’s all on a need-to-know basis. Beukes is a great writer, and puts together beautiful sentences that propel the story forward with wit and charm. Even though the world is not quite the one we live in, you can see how it could easily evolve out of ours. For instance, Beukes shows us over and over the natural progression of the kind of over-the-top policing we saw at the G20 here in Toronto (oh, burning cop car preventing me from seeing Thao!) with Moxyland cops that don’t take the slightest bit of shit, and who have even developed strategies to make sure they don’t ever have to:

‘This is an unlawful, unlicensed gathering. You are advised to disband immediately.’ It’s pre-recorded. Legislation bars the cops from opening their mouths unnecessarily. There’s too much room for human error, which means ammunition for the human rights groups.

And she points to the natural outcome of the world of rampant branding and capitalism that we live in: people themselves being branded. Kendra is actually physically addicted to a soft drink, thanks to a branding campaign she takes part in that fills her body with nanotech. It’s a hectic, busy world, and detailed in a way that feels real, so you can slip right in and join the ride.

But all the things I loved about Zoo City that I see here—the quick pace, the witty dialogue, the story yanking me along by the hair because everything is happening so fast!—work because Beukes gave us a great anchor in the main character. We ride along with Zinzi, see things unfold as they unfold for her, live in her mind and fall in love with her. She’s the calm in the centre of the storm. But Moxyland gives us four perspectives, flitting back and forth between them, never staying in one place too long. It’s hard to sympathize very strongly with any of these characters, and easy to get confused about just what is going on. And with no real ties to anyone in the book, I found it hard to actually care about finding out. The story is just as interesting as Zoo City, but the characterizations are far less compelling.

Given the nature of the plot, I can understand why Beukes felt she needed these four different voices. We need Tendeka to tell us about the protest, we need Lerato to tell us about the tech, we need Toby to record it all for us, and we need Kendra to set the tone. They each have a unique perspective that flesh out different aspects of the world, but I’m not sure that four different points of view was the best way to do that. I felt tugged back and forth. I enjoyed these people, but I didn’t care about them.

Happily, this was her first book, and her second book is all the things I like about this book, minus all the things I don’t like. So my hopes are high for her third outing. Which will no doubt sport another “very, very good” from William Gibson. Seriously, can we talk about this for a minute? His blurb for this one ends with “very, very good.” His blurb for Zoo City was “very, *very* good!” Will the next one be “very, **very** good!!”? I mean, I hope that the book is in fact “very, **very** good!!”, but I also hope that will not be the blurb for it.

I had never heard of Ebisu before, which shows just how much I don’t know about alt-manga and the history thereof (or about Japanese film and TV, Ebisu also being accomplished in both). A quick search shows that he gets a few pages in Fredrick Schodt’s Dreamland Japan (a book which has shamefully remained unread by me, despite having been on my reading list for years), and there are pages and pages of info on him in both English and Japanese. I’m glad to be pulling myself out of the ignorance quagmire with Nantonaku, though, and have no trouble seeing just why this artist has garnered so much critical attention. 

The first story in this collection of fourteen starts with a man in a suit running on a desolate road, reciting a list of complaints about modern society, passing Mount Fuji and a UFO on his way to a stand of skyscrapers. He encounters a naked woman in heels, the skyscrapers erupt like a volcano, and we head in to a close-up of the woman being shot into the air by the farts coming out of her ass. Which sounds totally crazeballs and it is. But in an intriguing way. I liked the social commentary I saw in the litany of modern ills, combined with a complete departure from reality. I’m not afraid to embrace the nonsensical.

But it did make me wary going forward, mostly because of the use of the female character as a tool for the male protagonist. And the second story, which focuses on a man who comes to rape a woman who is “good at getting raped”, only intensified that wariness. So much so that I really wondered if I wanted to keep reading. Because although I do enjoy the style of the book, and the nonsensical aspects combined with critiques of social mores, I have a real problem with manfiction these days. I’m just tired of reading things where ladies are nothing more than props, especially when they are props in their own destruction.

The lady in the story in question was not necessarily a prop, though, as worrisome as the title was, and the appearance of yet another UFO and the ridiculous details of the story (like the fact that the woman in question paints her vagina with butter, keeps a handiwipe behind her ear and gives her rapist two thousand yen without fail), plus the fact that the book was published in 1983, when I’m sure Japan was even more sexist than it is now, made me give the third story a try. A sort of tiebreaker.

Then I laughed out loud and the book was won. The third story, “The Worst Sex Ever”, is a hilarious encounter between a man and a woman (married to different people) who decide to have the most awkward affair. So awkward! And the more I read, the more I saw Ebisu’s focus on themes like the rigidness of Japanese society and his disdain for the world of salarymen and the modern focus on money and consumerism.

So I kept reading, delighting in Ebisu’s heta-uma style (and the previously mentioned search turned up the claim that he was inspired by King Terry, so I guess he is a direct descendant of the original heta-uma). At times, the art reminded me of something a junior high school boy would draw in a textbook (mostly in the older stories), but I was often struck by how his salarymen with their cheekbones nothing but slashes on their faces were so similar to the costuming and make-up on sketch comedy shows like Warau Inu (Oh, Handsome Samurai! I miss you!) and its bold black lines drawn all over the actors’ faces. It’s almost as if the lines are enough to prompt the reader to fill in the details for themselves.

Which is not to say that Ebisu is not detailed. He fills in the panels when the story needs it, towns, desk, houses, knick knacks. But he lets his characters stay in a kind of every-man land to great effect, in stories like “Jigoku no Salaryman Part 2” (Hell’s Salarymen) in particular. (There is no Part 1.) As the sales people (sweaty, sweaty, sweaty people like so many of Ebisu’s characters are) while away the day gambling, the salarymen are locked in a cage for eight hours each day. Not some kind of metaphoric soul prison, but an actual cage. Upon hearing that they will have to “work” overtime that day, the salarymen riot and break down the wall of their prison. But only because the overtime is only until eight instead of nine, which means that they won’t get supper. After busting out, they flood the streets, waving their hands and stepping forward delicately in a way that is reminiscent of Bon Odori, the dance done at the summer festival of the dead. But the song they sing as they dance insists that the status quo is fine as is and there is no need for anything to change.

The thing that completely won me over, though, was “Kinjirareta Asobi” (The Forbidden Game). A couple are walking along with their son when they come across a toy store. The kid begs to stop and look, and the parents agree. And then they hide from the kid. When the kid turns around and finds his parents gone, he starts calling out for them and running around crying. The parents hide behind buildings and pillars as they follow their son, giggling the whole time. And yes, this is something that I would do if I had kids. Which is why I guess it is a good thing I don’t have kids.

I heard an interview with the author on some science podcast I listen to ages ago, and was intrigued enough by what she said to bring the interview and the book up in later conversations, but not intrigued enough to actually remember to buy the book. Thankfully, I have T. in my life who gave me Dirt for my birthday this year. I assume this is because he stores up my random noodlings and acts on them when a present-giving occasion comes around, and not because he wants me to re-consider my take on hygiene and is encouraging me to do so in the most passive-aggressive way possible. 

But there is a lot to make you re-consider these things in Dirt. Ashenburg does the nice linear history here, making for an easy, quick read. She starts us off way back in the days of the ancient Greeks, taking Odysseus as a particularly well-washed example of his kind and looking at the things he did that made him so. And she sets us up in the first few pages for a running theme in the book, the perceived connection between physical and moral dirt. The Greeks had to wash before praying or offering sacrifices, the Romans see a dirty body as being equivalent to a lazy and unworthy. And modern Christians of all stripes, like Jewish people, tend to hold firm to the idea of “Cleanliness is next to godliness”. Surprisingly, however, this is a relatively modern way of thinking.

Turns out early Christians were filthy. And proud of it, the idea being to punish “the body so that the better part, the soul, could flourish.” Ashenburg gives us several unbelievably disgusting saints, complete with first-hand witnesses to the horror, such as the biographer of St. Olympias noting approvingly that her clothing was “contemptible.” Oddly enough, though, these dirty holy people spent a great deal of time washing those less fortunate such as lepers; “Humility and charity demanded that the most scrupulously filthy saints help others to be clean.” And as the great Roman baths faded from existence after the Goths disabled the Roman aqueducts in 537, some really weird ideas about hygiene started springing up, the most notable being that water was scary and dirt was protective.

This mindset put down some deep roots, and until the beginning of the 19th century, Western Europeans were stinky, filthy people who avoided water like the plague (which was killing them and which they blamed on the practice of bathing), with the possible exception of Jewish people thanks to the ritualized washing Judaism requires. At this point, you’re probably seeing a pattern here. All these washing habits belong to white people. And you’d be right to notice that.

Ashenburg admits right from the outset that she will be focusing on the history of Western ideas of cleanliness, and merely touching on other customs. Given the wide range of ideas involved in something so basic as perceptions of cleanliness, this is a smart move, but I was frustrated by the fact that, as we move into the modern era, this focus ends up being on England, France and the United States, with occasional mentions of Spain, Finland and Italy, and Germany referenced a little more often. In the discussion of cleanliness in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the focus is almost entirely on England/France versus the US. I suppose this is because of the innovations that each of these countries made in the world of personal hygiene, but it felt really narrow. I would’ve liked to have seen more discussion of other Western countries, particularly Spain with its historical ties to Islam. (To be fair, Ashenburg does touch upon this last point, but just.)

Another frustration/irritation was how the main text is littered with quotes and bits of trivia about bathing and cleanliness. It’s distracting as hell. (Although some of this litter is really quite interesting, like Louis XIV’s ordinance that the feces left in the corridors of Versailles were to be removed once a week. Think about that the next time you watch some romanticized historical drama about the Sun King.) The whole book has the feel of a magazine article, thanks to all these bits and pieces intruding on the main text. And when I want to read a magazine article, I open a magazine, not a book.

Towards the end of the book, Ashenburg’s biases really start to show; clearly, she is in favour of less cleanliness in our modern times. Which is not a bad perspective and actually one that I’ve been coming around to myself. (I am shampoo-free! Because shampoo makes my scalp really itchy and it turns out that when I don’t use it, I don’t suddenly turn into a disgusting pig monster. Who knew?) But there is a little preachiness and editorializing in her tone that I am not so in love with. I also think that I do not need “freshening cloths” (yes, you can guess what those might be for), but there’s a sort of “the kids these days” to the way she comments on recent hygiene developments in the last chapter.

All that said, The Dirt on Clean is a fascinating read. How we ended up so over-the-top in our cleaning habits in North America is just nuts. And in the context of a history where people believed that clean linen had magical powers and that plugging the pores with dirt was the best way to stay healthy, it seems crazy to think that most North Americans bathe once a day, if not more, and that the mere whiff of body odour on the bus is enough to cause eyeball-rolling and outraged recountings to friends.

Given that I am one of the shower-a-day tribe, I doubt that I could ever go au naturel and be all comfortable with an unsanitized me. Or unsanitized anyone else. But I do think that smelling like mangoes or whatever weird perfumes and lotions we are anointing ourselves with is probably not sustainable. As Ashenburg herself notes, “We are concerned about the environment, but we avoid thinking very much about the gallons of clean hot water we use every day and the toxins in our cleansers that we pour down the drain.”

The book itself is also lovely with a cinematic cover, all fade out to black. The lonely figure depicted in the centre of that fade-out pretty much sets the tone for the stories inside (beautifully laid out on pages edged in black, a nice touch that makes each page reminiscent of a movie frame). All of the stories are from around the seventies (or as I like to call it the bleakest time in Tatsumi’s career), and I’ve read them all before in other collections. I think they’ve also been published in English, although I don’t have all the English story collections so I can’t be sure. In any case, it’s interesting to see them put together here in the context of telling the story of Tatsumi’s life and career. From what I understand, the majority of the film is based on his memoir A Drifting Life, but this is interspersed with some of his work itself. I’d love to hear why Khoo chose these particular pieces as representative of Tatsumi’s life and work.

They are definitely some of his most well-known and powerful pieces, including “Hell”, the story of a military man sent to Hiroshima immediately after the bomb was dropped. Photographing the wreckage of the city for the army, he comes across a shadow scorched into concrete by the power of the blast, what appears to be a young man massaging the shoulders of his tired mother. His photograph of this moment obliterated by the atomic bomb becomes a rallying point of sorts for the burgeoning “No More Hiroshimas” movement, and he is sent around the country and the globe to speak of the horror and the aftermath of Hiroshima. I’ll keep the spoilers to myself and just say that in trying to do something right, the photographer does something terribly wrong and to no avail whatsoever.

This is something that comes up again and again in these stories: people trying to do right or make do however they can, and coming up short or crashing into walls of one type or another. In “Abandon the Old in Tokyo”, the young man nurses his dying mother while trying to forget about the pain she caused him as a boy, and makes decisions he ends up regretting. In “Otoko Ippatsu”, a salaryman on the verge of retiring pisses on a cannon at Yasukuni Shrine, where Japan has traditionally interred its war dead, as a kind of revenge on his dead war buddies for being able to live their lives with dignity and without compromise. The protagonist of “Beloved Monkey” loses his arm to a machine when his dreams of a better life cause him to look the wrong way at the wrong moment.

There are a couple stories like “Good-Bye” with a greater narrative focus on the female characters, but even then, the focus is split between the trials of the female and male protagonists, and the majority of the works focus on an everyman sort of character whose features are almost unchanged from story to story. But it’s exactly because of the generic nature of his protagonists that these stories are able to succeed in the way they do. This guy is just regular, just a working-class schlub trying to get by in a difficult world. Some of the things he comes up against are kind of out there (like in “Who Are You?” when he keeps a scorpion in a can), but the fact is, he is just a guy, nothing special, working hard to take care of what needs taking care of. So that when he lashes out or makes some effort to change his situation, you can relate somehow.

What I love about Tatsumi, and what’s reflected so perfectly in these stories, is how well he is able to depict the conflicts people have within themselves about their relationships with other people. The son feels an obligation towards his mother, but also a hostility and a desire to be rid of her; the salaryman wishes he had never married his spiteful wife; the young machinist feels a bit of hope mixed in with his hated of the crowded city of Tokyo when a young woman is kind to him; I love how obliquely Tatsumi approaches these relationships, never making anything obvious, but just letting the emotions slip out from between the lines.

So yes, I will see the movie when I get the chance (it was supposed to come out on DVD this month, but I don’t see it for sale anywhere, so.), but regardless of how good or bad it is, I’m glad it happened if only so I could have the chance to re-read some great stories in a new collection, and to see a delightful author photo of Tatsumi on the red carpet at Cannes, looking sharp as hell in a tuxedo.

And it seems that this is the last book my brain will tackle this year. So high fives to it for defeating a book every single week, and high fives to you for reading all about the battle! Join my brain again next year for more sizzling literary adventures. The mountain of books-to-be-read is climbable at this point, so there will be no shortage of things to read and discuss, but feel free to make suggestions. Learning about new books is nearly as great a treat as reading new books. Fingers crossed that 2012 is full of books for all of us!

He may not have built a golden statue of himself that revolves to always face the sun, but he did have his own flower (something that my dictatorial self is extremely jealous of), he started a giant rabbit breeding program to end famine in North Korea, and he even made a socialist Godzilla film. Given the alarming rate at which dictators are being killed or are just dying, the world may not see again such flagrant disregard for the constraints of reality. And so, my brain turns this page over to its totalitarian half and a book it read about North Korea to remember the legacy of the man who brought double-bread meat to the hungry people of North Korea. 

Oh dear peasants, I often think gladly about the amorphous nature of the borders of the Independent Republic of Josi. After all, if you are to escape My cruel iron fist, you must first know the way out. And I’m sure that you who have attempted this escape and still live so that I might make examples of you, you are well aware of the vague nature of the borders of this mighty republic and the god-like omnipotence of My secret squad of doom who steal you from your homes in the middle of the night.

Imagine if you were able to find a border and slip away in the dark to a neighbouring country hostile to the IRJ. (Yes, Canada, My steely gaze is firmly fixed on you.) The shame you would bring on yourself and the UN inspectors you would entice into My seat of power! Just the thought of dealing with those pusillanimous bureaucrats is nearly enough to put me off of these delightful and expensive truffles. And to think that My dear friend and loyal ally Kim Jong-il has gone through exactly this. And that the contemptible peon who slipped out of the great Democratic People’s Republic of Korea would spill state secrets in a book! That was written in French with Pierre Rigoulot and translated into English by Yair Reiner! My only hope is that in his too-brief life, sweet Jong-il never had to see this terrible betrayal by a seemingly loyal citizen.

In The Aquariums of Pyongyang, the lost sheep of a citizen Kang Chol-Hwan tells of being sent with his family to a reeducation camp at the age of nine. I personally have a strict policy of keeping children of political dissidents to work in the presidential diamond mine (their little hands are perfect for plucking diamonds out of the earth!), but I can understand why dear Jong-il would have rounded up an entire family for reeducation. Apple and tree and all that. And knowing the great leader of the DPRK, I am convinced that this book is made entirely of lies. Camps like these are to turn those wayward sheep into proper citizens again, not torture them by locking them into tiny boxes for months on end.

And no one in a reeducation camp lacks proper nutrition, forcing them to catch and eat rats and insects. That sort of thing would never take place. The late Jong-il, like Myself, loved his citizens and only wanted the best for them. When we catch our peons doing things like listening to foreign radio, we have no choice but to chase those foreign lies out of their heads. Those outsiders will say anything to destroy our perfect and sacred regimes.

What we have here is a man desperate to smear the good name of a good man. There are no famines in the DPRK. They are completely self-sufficient. Would you deny the words of one of the greatest communists I have ever had the pleasure of dining on heart-stoppingly delicious caviar with? No, this Kang fellow is clearly out to sabotage the decades of hard work put in first by Kim Il-sung and then by his son, My own friend, Jong-il. And now Jong-il is gone, unable to even defend himself against this vicious campaign of hate. These lies must be stopped. Take a moment, citizens, if you value your lives, to send your sympathies to the Republic at this time of great mourning. Keep Jong-il in your hearts, remember all the great and wonderful miracles he has wrought for this world and for his people, and let the DPRK know that they still have allies outside their borders. And then pull the string to extinguish your lone light source. You have wasted enough of My power today.

Dictator and President-For-Life, josibear

]]> http://brainvsbook.wordpress.com/2011/12/23/the-aquariums-of-pyongyang-kang-chol-hwan-and-pierre-rigoulot/feed/ 0 norocketscientist The Aquariums of Pyongyang