And normally, after an intensive Japanese experience like this weekend, I retreat into English books (and I have now, although you’ll hear about that later), but for some reason, Kami no Kodomo caught my eye, after lingering on the shelf of unread books for some months now. And once I started reading it, I realized that although I have expressed my love for the sister-brother Nishioka team on more than one occasion, I have never devoted any space to one of their books. Which is clearly a mistake because their long-form work is even more intriguing than their short stories. 

Kami is the tale of a young psychopath, told deftly in that way the Nishiokas have. No dialogue at all, just narration boxes to the side of each panel. The sister-brother team almost never include any dialogue or sound effects outside of these narration boxes, which creates an interesting distancing, and also an unexpected literariness. Reading their work, you get the feeling that the piece is a story written by some author somewhere that the pair decided to adapt to manga, even when it is their own creation as it is here. Maybe this comes from the fact that one of the siblings writes and the other draws, but I’ve read more than one such collaboration between comic writers and artists that did not skew to this strangely literary technique of narration boxes (Saga by Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples leaping to mind as an example because it is just such a good comic). (Seriously, though, Saga is pretty good. You should be reading it.)

So the nameless narrator of Kami guides us through his distanced and unfeeling life, from birth until his untimely death. In the first chapter, he guides us from his conception to his ultimate birth in a toilet “from my mother’s asshole”. This ugly beginning doesn’t quite fit with the middle class upbringing that follows, and after finishing the entire book, I imagine that it is more figurative, a way of suggesting early on his filthy nature and the depths he will stoop to. Because he stoops. Waaaay down. He is massacring millions in his imagination by the time he is a toddler, and he does not stop at imagining.

More than once, Kami reminded me of No Longer Human (manga or novel version, take your pick), mostly due to the narrator realizing that being around other people is a carefully crafted stage play of sorts and taking great pains to make his play a success. He notes that it won’t do to simply stay quiet and out of the limelight. To succeed in school, in society, you have to be “normal”, you have to play the part of “normal”; laugh at the right times, be weird at the right times, study the right amount, goof off the right amount. (There is even the same pencil-in-nose scene as in the No Longer Human manga by Furuya.) The concept of wearing a facade in society comes up in a million different works, but what struck me here was the similarity of phrasing, the similarity of the mindsets behind the facade-building. I’ve noted influences on the Nishiokas before, and given the grimness of their overall body of work, it doesn’t surprise me at all that they would have incorporated Osamu Dazai as an influence.

And not just in the grimness. Dazai had a lot to say about the hypocrisy of society in general and the Nishiokas do not shy away from social commentary. I like to imagine that the anecdote in the second chapter about tying a mochi rice cake to the back of any toddler who walks before the age of one to make her fall down and thus rely on her parents longer is a jab at ridiculous and at heart, meaningless social customs.

Art-wise, no one is seen at any angle in a Nishioka work. Everyone is flat, faces are in ninety-degree profile or else dead on. There is no depth, no perspective. Everything is in the plane with everything else, which might help to take some of the sting out of what would otherwise be horrifying images of disembowelled children. (Yeah, they’re in here.) I triple love this flatness, which only seems to add to that distanced feel created by the narration boxes. Which is basically perfect for a story about a psychopathic serial killer. Plus the tiny lips, the large almond eyes, the impossibly long and elastic bodies, they all add an extra element of the surreal.

And again I wish that someone would license this in English. Or any of their work. Maybe not Kami since there are some underage peeps involved in some sexual things and we have laws about that sort of thing here in the Great White North. But the Nishiokas always manage to present such an honest, unflinching look at the darker side of human nature that is worth serious study on this side of the ocean as well.

So it is kind of hilarious that I reached for Bara no Iro no Ho no Koro to give me that perspective, considering there are literally two women in its nearly two hundred pages. But you know, it’s Boys’ Love or walking that line at least, by a lady creator who has created some fine lady characters (one day, we’ll talk about Utsubora), and maybe, like any good fujoshi, what I was really looking for was some poignant boy-on-boy action. Something Bara Iro has in spades. Although no actual boy loving, which prompted one Japanese blogger (forgive me, I can’t find the link again) to categorize it as “Boys’ Love (?)”.

It meets a lot of the criteria, but fails to pass the big test: boys getting it on in some way with boys. A boy does kiss another boy, but never in any typical Boys’ Love way, and the one overt boy-boy relationship turns out to be a lie. But that’s okay, you don’t really have a chance to get invested in it.

We meet our heroes Andrew and Paul on their first day at an elite junior high school, a boarding school naturally, somewhere in the US in the fifties apparently. Andrew is brash and outgoing, the son of the town mayor, while Paul is quiet and prefers to wait things out. He chastises Andrew for fighting back against the bullies that have made him a target, insisting that they will lose interest if Andrew doesn’t give them the satisfaction, blah blah blah. Of course, Paul ends up targeted by the very same bullies, and tries to put his policy of non-engagement into practice, resulting in a broken arm and a whole bunch of bruises. Andrew then steps in for his own beating to protect Paul and now we’re getting into BL central.

Except it doesn’t go that way. We skip ahead a year to the new school year, Andrew and Paul end up roommates, and we see Andrew’s less-than-stellar home situation. Andrew is forced to confront his own sexuality and what he wants in the form of a hot 17-year-old married woman who is more than willing to introduce local school boys to the wicked ways of the world. She is contrasted with an exploration of homosexuality that gets Andrew thinking and experimenting on his own, and realizing that maybe he has feelings for this guy Paul he shares his room with. Lots of family stuff on both sides, but in the end, Paul and Andrew don’t get together despite the fact that every BL convention has taught me their getting together is inevitable.

I only realized that Bara Iro is part of the world of J no Subete when I got to the previously unpublished extra at the end, when Paul and Andrew meet up again as adults. The tension is still there, but now there is a curly-haired blond in the picture. So now I have another three books to read (there are three in the Subete series) to find out just what happens to this Paul character. Because I want to know. Because Nakamura is a compelling storyteller, revealing just enough at just the right time to draw you forward. And I have to know how things turn out for this weirdo Paul.

And I cannot get enough of her art-wise. Between her and Sunny, I am feeling pretty spoiled lately in terms of art. I love her languid, long bodies. I love her half-lidded, sensual glances. I triple love her starburst eyes. I especially love how Donna (the married temptress) here is given enormous black starburst pits for eyes, while all the guys get smaller starbursts. There is something so fitting about those black pits for a character like Donna who has no real identity of her own and has been forced by circumstances to live off of and make herself available to men. And the long necks, wide shoulders, and delightful expressions of shock that I have enjoyed in her other work are all present here.

I would suggest that the fujoshi out there use Bara Iro to proselytize. The story is mainstream enough not to scare skittish readers off, but BL enough to intrigue and perhaps bring reluctant readers into the BL fold. Also, it is just flat out beautiful and you can show it to people as proof that “manga” does not equal “big eyes + boobs”. I am so, so sick of that trope and so, so happy that creators like Nakamura exist to prove it wrong.

I don’t know if you know about this thing called TCAF? It is where loads of awesome people gather near the beginning of May? This year, the main exhibition days are May 11 and 12, but there is lots of stuff happening in the week before and after, and the whole month in fact. Like this art show at a beer factory. Art + beer = Sign me up. You should totally come and check it out. But if you need another reason to check it out, how about insanely talented Japanese artist Taiyo Matsumoto? You know, the guy who wrote Ping Pong? And Tekkon Kinkreet? And so, so much more? TCAF is putting on a big show of his work, the first of its kind in North America and not much to compare with it even in his native Japan. So it is kind of a big deal.

And in my capacity as “Japanese guest liaison” for the festival (I love this title, makes me feel like I am always wearing sleek black suits with my hair pulled back into tight buns), I will be escorting Mr. Matsumoto around town and making sure something in English happens at his speaking events. He is pretty good at handling the Japanese part; hopefully, I will be equally good at handling the English. Because I really want people to fall in love with him like I have. Not only because he is a super-nice, super-sweet guy (because he is), but also because his work just grows more and more compelling and interesting. 

I’ve read some of his work before this, but to prepare for working with him at the festival, I have been going back and reading and re-reading everything he’s written that I can get my hands on. And he has written a lot of stuff. Going through twenty years of work in a two-month period allows you to really appreciate how an artist has developed. (And being bilingual allows you to appreciate how his translators and the very notion of translation in manga has developed. Thoughts for another time, perhaps.) Moving from Hana Otoko, one of his earliest works, to Sunny, his most recent, is almost shocking, both art- and story-wise.

Sunny may be my favourite out of everything I’ve read, and it gives me hope for whatever he does next. An artist of Matsumoto’s caliber can basically do whatever he wants at this point (or so it seems to me, non-Japanese manga magazine editor), so the fact that he is still pushing and exploring and trying out new ways of telling stories and new stories to tell means that I will still get to read stories that challenge and interest me in new ways. (And it is all about me, after all.)

The thing that struck me the most about Sunny was girls! There are girls in this story! To be honest, as much as I enjoy his artwork and his storytelling style with all its intense motion, I was starting to get a little disheartened at the lack of anything not male in Matsumoto’s universe. I think the only woman in Tekkon Kinkreet is the lover of the gangster Kimura, which is what I would call a bit part at best. For the most part, Matsumoto’s worlds seem to be impossibly populated by guys, so much so that I have caught myself wondering more than once how all these people ever came to exist if there are no women in their universes.

So you can imagine my delight at seeing numerous characters of the female persuasion show up in this latest work in more than just bit part form. Sunny takes place in a kind of orphanage/children’s home in the seventies run by an elderly housemaster, who mostly just sits in his office and listens to the children’s voices, together with a couple of full-time, seemingly live-in staff members (one of whom has lady bits!). The children range in age from tiny (girl!) baby to nearly grown high schoolers (including a girl!), although the story generally focusses on the group of third graders in the house (including two girls!!).

As a friend said to me before I started reading, it’s heartbreaking. These are kids who have been left by their parents generally for reasons unknown. It is revealed later in the series (spoiler!) that Megumu (girl!) at least is an orphan, but the others seem to have been left by their parents in arrangements that are unclear. I appreciate this lack of clarity, though, since it seems to reflect the perspectives of the kids. They don’t know why their parents had to leave them, so neither do we the readers. We just get to follow them through their daily lives in the home and watch how they deal with being left there.

The art is so, so perfect for the story, I can’t even begin to express how in love with it I am. It’s all pencilly and watercolors, and has a feel of a seventh grader doodling in her textbook. You know how your friend in junior high would draw a dog and you would be all, oh my god, that looks totally like an actual dog? Matsumoto draws that dog. And not because he couldn’t draw a dog that is way better than this dog, but because this story about these lost kids really needs drawings with that skillfully crude edge to them. He also has a tendency here to pull in suddenly for a close up of a kid’s face in a way that is so moving and pushes the story forward in a very intangible way.

Only Volume 1 is out in English, compared to three books in Japanese, and having read all of these, I have to say I feel a little sorry for English speakers on this one. And not only because you have to wait longer to read these books. The translation is without a doubt a good one, faithfully conveying meaning from one language to the other. But Matsumoto writes Sunny in the Kansai dialect of Japanese, which is basically my favourite dialect and I never stop dreaming about moving to Osaka just so I can learn it. And it creates a particular atmosphere in the Japanese, especially given the contrast between the local dialect that the kids speak and the Tokyo dialect that new kid Sei speaks. That atmosphere is essentially lost in the English translation, which puts everything into standard American English with some “ya”s tossed in for variety. I understand the thinking behind the decision to lose the dialect (we don’t generally write in dialect in English, it sounds forced, etc.), but I wish there had been a way to keep the dialect because so much of the richness of this story is in the language it uses. Like all stories, I guess.

PS. Come see Taiyo Matsumoto at TCAF and say hi to me! I will be in an interpreting daze and so I will not remember meeting you, though! Just a heads up!

But Kurahashi deserves so much more than this in English. I have only read this one of her books, Otona no Tame no Zankoku Dowa (literally “Cruel Fairytales for Grown-ups”, but if I were translating it, I would totally call it “Grotesque Fairytales for Grown-ups” because I love the sound of the g’s playing off each other. And the fairytales are indeed grotesque at times. I am not just randomly choosing words here. I’m a professional) and I am already completely convinced of this. And as one follower on Twitter pointed out, she deserved so much better in her native Japan as well. Her third novel, Kurai Tabi (Dark Journey), published in 1961 got her accused of plagiarism, and set off a bit of a storm in the Japanese literary establishment and maybe led to a little behind-the-scenes blacklisting. In any case, she ended up being more well known for her translations of famous Western authors like Shel Silverstein (a personal favourite).  

Which is probably why I only recently learned of her existence. I fell into one of those link  holes the last time I was in Japan. You know, the kind where you are reading one thing and then you click the link and then there is another link to click and then another and another and another until it is suddenly five in the morning and you haven’t eaten in ten hours? I know you do. So somewhere in this link hole, I came across a discussion of Japanese speculative fiction writers, and there she was, Yumiko Kurahashi. (This discussion also brought to my attention Yumeno Kyusaku and I suddenly understood the title of this book by Suehiro Maruo.)

Otona is a collection of twenty-six short stories, based on and styled after Japanese and Western fairytales. She helpfully includes a list of the original stories in her afterword, which I appreciated since I wasn’t familiar with some of the stories and thus couldn’t really enjoy the twists of her version as much (such as “How Some Children Played at Slaughtering”, which to be honest, was already pretty twisted). But many of the stories are familiar and I laughed out loud more than once at the unexpected turn a familiar story took, like in “Snow White”. The story starts out the usual way, evil stepmother, beautiful princess, huntsman, woods, attempted murder. But at the attempted murder part, when Snow White begs the huntsman for her life, pleading that she would do anything, he decides to strip her naked and have his way with her.

Or in “Princess Kaguya”, possibly my favourite in the whole collection, “The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter” unfolds in the usual way, the tiny baby found inside a bamboo stalk grows up into the most radiant and beautiful woman in all the land. And the princes vie for her hand, and all fail, although not for the same reasons as in the original story (Princess Kaguya is not as noble as she seems). And the people from the Moon Kingdom come for her. But she chooses not to return with them and decides to stay on Earth. In her true form. And as Kurahashi notes in the moral at the end of the story: “Princess Kaguya was an alien. And aliens are ugly.”

Kurahashi adds a moral to the end of every story and they are cutting, revealing a grim view of human nature and the world we live in. Like “True love means loving something ugly. Which is to say, it’s impossible.” or “Justice is created by public opinion.” Although some are just straight-up hilarious like “A tanuki will come for revenge.”

Kurahashi’s writing in each of the stories deftly mimics the style and tone of all those fairytales we all grew up reading and hearing. The simple, strong sentences, the lack of overly complicated structures, concise and precise word choices all ring true to the fairytale style, giving the grown-up twists and turns even more impact. You just do not expect to see the words “so she became the paramour of the seven dwarves and serviced them each night” in the rhythm the fairytale style creates.

To be honest, though, a lot of these stories were already pretty grizzly to begin with. I mean, “The Little Mermaid”? That story is grim. But Kurahashi’s approach seems to strip them down to their essential grimness, and zeroes in on the very structure of the world of fairytales. As she herself notes in the afterword:

Fairytales take place in a completely rational world, one that has its own set rules and logic. The system may involve magic, but that magic also has its own rules and logic, and the fairytale world is a rational one. … Consequences do not depend on sympathy or hurt feelings. And in that sense, the world of fairytales is a cruel one. One that is ruled by the principles of retributive justice, rewarding good and punishing evil, and reaping what you sow.

In Otona, Kurahashi adds her own rule to the rational world of fairytales: Nothing ends the way you want it to. And then she carefully and strictly applies it to her chosen fairytales in a way that reflects the cruelties of the real world only too well.

I say this in particular today because I should’ve judged the cover of Tamara Drewe more closely. I only bought it at the recommendation of P. over at The Beguiling, who generally has interesting taste and who has never steered me wrong before. But the cover looked dull as hell and a quick flip through the insides did not do anything to dispel this first impression. And so it has languished on the shelf of books to be read, always passed over for something with a better cover. But then one day, I was looking for something that would lay flat while I read it (a book to eat a sandwich with, basically), and it was either this or a French non-fiction book about military strategy. You see how much the cover put me off? 

But when I pulled it slowly, somewhat reluctantly off the shelf, my eyes still running over the other spines lined up there, still hoping for something else that would lay flat, I noticed that there were sheep having sex in the corner. And I thought, hmm, maybe this will be good after all. (Also, I don’t recommend staring at the main image on the cover for too long. You will notice that her pupils are weirdly placed/hidden and then you will see her as some kind of pupil-less monster. It cannot be unseen.)

Tamara Drewe is like a novel crashed into a comic book. It’s an interesting mash of actual comics, with blocks of text giving insight into the thinking of a particular character.  Each character’s text is in a different font, allowing for quick identification of whose head you’re in. We start out with a writer arriving at the writers’ retreat Stonefield, “Dr Glen Larson, translator (MFA, University of Arkansas, PhD, Columbia, currently Visiting Professor at London Medical University)”. This listing of titles only becomes seriously pompous and indicative of Glen’s character when the next page introduces the co-owner of the countryside estate simply as “Beth Hardiman”.

Beth is married to Nicholas, a best-selling mystery author and unrepentant philanderer. She runs the retreat, managing all the authors’ needs, in addition to being the business side of her husband’s writing, fielding invitations to festivals, emails, and letters from aspiring authors, signing the latter herself since of course, she can forge her husband’s signature. Beth likes to imagine herself as being the lull in the storm of the world and creating a place of peace for authors to focus on writing. But it soon becomes clear she harbours a kind of grudge at the writing world, believing her husband would never have succeeded without her. “I transform his grubby longhand into double-spaced typescripts. I edit, research, contribute to plots, make his females characters convincing, suggest names and titles.” She comes across as a woman who left her own dreams for this man and needs to find a sense of self and of worth in the work she does for the man she gave it all up for.

The drama starts a couple pages in, just after we’ve gotten acquainted with Stonefield and some of its residents, and before the titular Tamara Drewe makes her appearance. Egos are fragile—these are writers, after all—and drama begets drama after drama in a natural snowballing. Nicholas is caught with his hand in the cookie jar, he and Beth have it out, all the writers and the farm staff hear the whole thing, Beth is mortified, and then ta-da! Beautiful neighbour moves in. Who is, of course, also a writer. And Tamara does end up being the centre of much of the ensuing drama, but the drama is not what makes this book so interesting. The characters are so deftly fleshed out, with all their weaknesses and neuroses on display, even though the characters themselves believe they are showing only their good sides. People do awkward things, try to fix them, and end up making things more awkward. Basically, real life made into a graphic novel.

The story and its conclusion are satisfying, and the style Simmonds employs suits the subject matter. The book just would not be as effective without the insight into characters’ minds afforded by the blocks of text surrounding the comics depicting the various scenes the characters are thinking about. And like any good artist, Simmonds makes clear just when what is happening, using full colour for the present and various shades of grey and brown for memories and recollections. And I do like her pencil, sketchy style, just loose enough to be expressive, but tight enough to sit next to the plain text.

And this is a book I thought I would not like because of the freaky, pupil-less monster lady on the cover. But if I had just taken a moment to look past that and see the sheep doing it in the corner, I would have realized that any book with sheep bonking on the cover is a book that I want to read. So to reiterate the lesson from the beginning of this post: Judge the cover. But make sure you judge it properly.

PS. ZOMG! They made it into a movie and it looks terrrrrrrrible! You probably don’t want to watch this. Just read the book.

PPS. It apparently also ran in the Guardian first, so check it out before you buy it.

Also, full disclosure: I am in this book. Twice. But I can still talk about it, right? Because there is a lot to talk about. I’ll just refrain from commenting on my own translations and we’re all good, yeah? But I will not refrain from commenting on the original stories (Silverpoint by Toh EnJoe, The Interview by Maki Kashimada) because they are pretty good and you should read them (if you can read Japanese). (Otherwise you are going to have to read my translations. That is not a plug for my work, just a fact of life.)

If you’re not a Japanese book nerd, you might not know that Waseda Bungaku is a lit magazine issued by Waseda University in Tokyo. They publish a lot of cool stuff (it’s where Brain favourite Mieko Kawakami got her start), so you should probably start reading it. (Unless you know, you can’t read Japanese. In which case, might I recommend Monkey Business, another Japanese lit magazine, but this one comes in English form?) And when the tsunami of terror and nuclear disaster struck Japan after the earthquake two years ago, they, like so many of us, scrambled to find some way to help the victims of the disaster. But they were authors and editors. What could words do for someone who had just seen their house washed out to sea and was now living in a school gymnasium?

I’m sure this is something all of us unable to be on the ground physically helping with relief efforts struggled with, the desire to do something, anything, but far from the site of the disaster and having no relevant skills. I did every volunteer disaster-related translation I possibly could, and felt like it could never be enough. Waseda, though, instead of volunteering their words, turned volunteered words into donations to the Red Cross with this charity relief project. Authors like the aforementioned Mieko Kawakami and Toh EnJoe (another Brain favourite) donated stories, which were then posted to the charity project website and available with a donation to the Red Cross for a year after the disaster. A book collecting all of them was then published, Ruptured Fiction(s) of the Earthquake, the proceeds of which are also being donated to the Red Cross.

What was interesting about this project, and one of the things that made it different from another earthquake relief anthology March was Made of Yarn (edited by David Karashima, who also had a hand in Ruptured Fiction(s)), was that they decided to translate every story into English. And a few stories were also translated into Korean and Chinese, making this the most multilingual book I own. So of course, I enjoyed a little bilingual reading, reading the Japanese story and then flipping the book to check out the English version and obsess over translation choices. Because, you know, I am a Japanese book nerd.

The translations are generally excellent, although I thought a couple of the stories were on the awkward side and dabbling in some translator-ese. But mostly, the translations made me jealous of my colleagues’ skills. Especially “Planting” by Aoko Matsuda and translated by Angus Turvill. The story in and of itself is wonderful, a woman who plants in her garden the items in the box that arrives at her house each day: “She planted balloons of pretty colors. She planted lip cream, its smell tingling in her nose. She planted thick ceramic mugs. She planted cashmere socks.” But Turvill’s translation captures so perfectly the phrasing and tone of the Japanese, without any extra flourishes or English massaging, that it really took my breath away. It’s the balance I always strive for in my work, but I always feel like I come up short. So reading this story and Turvill’s translation was a real pleasure and proof that my translation goals are not insanely out of reach.

Turvill also applied his translation magic to “To Next Spring – Obon”, a sad story about an Obon festival in a village in the exclusion zone, a rumination on what home means and what happens when you lose that home. Although all the stories in here were written after the earthquake, in reaction to it, this is the only one to directly take up that event. And yet all the others have an undercurrent of loss or fear or sadness or even hope that reflects the earthquake and its impact in unexpected ways. Or perhaps they read like that because you already know that this tragedy has happened.

“March Yarn” by Kawakami (and adeptly translated by Michael Emmerich) takes place at the time of the earthquake, but its protagonists, the male narrator and his heavily pregnant wife, are cut off from the world, and so have no idea what has happened. Still, there is an anxiety running through it that suggests the disaster. It reminds the reader that we already know how the world has changed and these people are ignorant for a few hours more, but still anxious.

In addition to some very fine fiction, Ruptured Fiction(s) also includes an interesting essay on the possibility of replacing nuclear power with renewable energy by Hisako Fujii, a dialogue between two authors, one from Fukushima, and a roundtable discussion on the relevance and place of fiction and writing after a disaster like the Tohoku earthquake. Unfortunately, only summaries of the discussions are given in the English half of the book, presumably because the discussions are very long (but worth reading!), but the summaries are enough to get you thinking.

Ruptured Fiction(s) is a whole lot of book. Jam-packed with a whole lot of things to think about. And every yen of the cover price (minus printing costs and all that, I guess) go toward helping the Red Cross get those people in Tohoku out of temporary shelters and into their own homes again. And sadly, there are still hundreds of thousands of people in this limbo nightmare even two years later. So buy the book. You can read at least half of it if you’re reading this, and you can have some fun on the train pretending you know how to read Korean.

Oba is constantly playing a part, fearful of humanity and the ways of the people around him. This eventually leads him down a dark, dark path to some serious mental problems, alcoholism, and sure, why not, some drug addiction too. (In fact, this is one of the parts of the novel that remains most firm in my memory: the local chemist offering him heroin to help him kick his addiction to alcohol. Um… It was the forties. They still thought heroin could save the day, I guess.) Growing up moving about all the time like I did, as a survival mechanism, you learn pretty quickly to play the part you’re supposed to play, whether or not that part is anything like the person you actually are. And although I did not end up on Oba’s dark path, I’ve come very close and it’s something I wonder about. What if I weren’t as lucky as I am? What if I didn’t have the friends and family I have, what if I hadn’t been born in a country with such a strong social safety net; there were (and are) a lot of what-ifs knocking around in my head.

So Dazai’s Oba really spoke to me in a lot of ways, and I’ve read Ningen Shikkaku more than once since then, my growing understanding of the language bringing new facets of Dazai’s genius to light each time. (And it was weird when in a total coincidence, I actually moved to Atami, the place where Dazai wrote the novel, a fact I did not learn until I was already living there.) Which is why you can imagine my delight/dread when I learned that Furuya was adapting the novel into a manga. Delight because I love Furuya’s work (despite the way his mouths hypnotize me), dread because what if he wrecks it???

He does not wreck it. So you know, relax. Incredibly, he takes the heart of Dazai’s work and turns it into something that feels new and exciting, and yet is just as inevitable and unflinching. It is hard to take your eyes off young Oba’s tumble to the bottom, and just like in the original, with each new turn his life takes, you find yourself hoping against hope that he will take this chance, that this time he will get his life together. But of course, even as you have this hope flare up in your heart, you know it’s impossible. Furuya conveys so adeptly that sense of futility that permeates Oba and his life. He is on a course that cannot be changed, and all we can do is watch.

Unlike the novel, which has an unknown narrator begin the book, the narrator here is Furuya himself. And unlike other times he has inserted himself into his work, he is not a rabbit here. He is himself, a manga artist looking for something new to write about. So he settles down at his computer after his assistants have left and starts poking around online, where he finds the diary of one Yozo Oba. It starts with the same three photos as in the novel, one of an unpleasant child, the second a beautiful young man, and the third, a white-haired disheveled man. Of course, they are all the same man, and Furuya feels compelled to read the diary to see how all three could be the same person.

Furuya quotes liberally from the novel and tracks Oba through a parallel series of events as the novel’s Oba goes through. The main difference is that Furuya’s Ningen Shikkaku is set in the present, while Dazai’s original work was written in the forties. But he still meets Horiki, goes out drinking, gets into prostitutes, smokes too much, finds love, destroys that love, looks for somewhere he can belong and destroys that too when he finds it. I won’t lie to you: this is a powerfully depressing read.

I really love how Furuya captures the spirit of the original while making it his own in new and unexpected ways. And I especially love how the narrative format he chose allows him to open up art-wise. The main story is told in his familiar crisp lines (and yes, wide-open, oddly hypnotic mouths), but Oba’s inner turmoil and thoughts are depicted using some really wonderful pencils (and maybe charcoal?), adding roughness and uncertainty to his otherwise clean style that are really necessary to give his story the emotional weight of the original. And the depiction of Oba as the puppet he feels he has always been to his father is so perfect, I’m glad it pops up again and again throughout the three volumes.

This is one of the few books I’ve read in Japanese that has actually been translated into English, and if the English version (No Longer Human) is even half as good as the original, you need to put it at the top of your reading list. Ningen Shikkaku is one of those rare books that pulls you, compelling you to keep reading, even while you know it is all going to end very badly and you wish you could avert your eyes. Read it. Take some time to think about how close you have been to the edge yourself. Go on, go to that dark place. It’s so worth it.

So! Continuing with Naoto Yamakawa’s retelling of famed author Akutagawa’s life and last days! Biographies are such weird things to me. I mean, if you’re interested enough to pick it up, you probably already know the basic story: the subject’s big accomplishments, how/when they died. (Unless you are a person who just browses the biography section and picks out things about people you’ve never heard of? Which seems weird? But also kind of awesome?) You don’t read biographies for the big story, but rather for how it all hangs together, the details in between and around the big events.

And it’s weird too how this narrative gets imposed on a life. Of course, we all tell stories to make sense of our lives and the world around us, but those are our stories. We tell them about ourselves and we change them as we ourselves change. But the biography is someone outside your head, outside of your story usually, deciding on the story of your life, deciding what to tell, what to leave out, from what perspective to tell it. It’s someone else essentially deciding how you will be perceived by everyone who did not (does not) know you. Someone else is deciding what parts of your story were the most important, and what parts of you, what version of you gets to live on.

Thinking too hard about biographies sends me down a very squirrelly rabbit hole of identity, and how the version of you that you have in your head is different from the you that everybody else is carrying around. And then this whole angst thing kicks in, so let’s step back from this broad look at the biography and zoom in on this particular biography before I lose my mind.

Book Two picks up where we left off in Book One, with Akutagawa working too hard, taking too many pills, and getting skinnier and skinnier from lack of sleep and all those pills. He meets with his other writer friends (of course, they, like Akutagawa, are manga artists in this manga-ized biography), talks about manga, holds mini-lectures in his study for aspiring writers and is generally a central figure in the writing community. But this strong community and his loving family cannot stave off his growing fear of himself and his future. Mental illness runs in his family and it is a constant threat that looms larger and larger as time passes. And it doesn’t help that his good friend has a psychotic break, reminding him just how close to the edge he is. With others, he is jovial and charming, but alone, his own anxieties seem to swallow him up and the only way he can keep going is to write.

Yamakawa makes this explicit with the title panel of one of the chapters in the second book, showing Akutagawa literally drawing himself. It’s one of several panels throughout the series that hints at Akutagawa’s unravelling. And the chapters towards the end are devoted to a partial retelling of Akutagawa’s Saiho no Hito, which is itself a retelling of Jesus’s life (meta!). Yamakawa chooses, interestingly, to depict Akutagawa as Jesus in the story. Which I guess brings me back to my earlier point about interpretation.

Writing a biography is on some level a translation of a person’s life, not into another language but into another viewpoint. And like translation, the interpretation of the person writing the biography changes the life being documented. So the depiction of Akutagawa as Christ here is at best what Yamakawa (and admittedly other literary scholars) have read into that story. And here we go down the rabbit hole again.

This question of what is Yamakawa and what is Akutagawa makes me want to read other biographies of the man to try and pin him down. Especially since Yamakawa takes certain liberties that cast doubt on the veracity of other events. Like plopping a computer on his desk when Akutagawa is having trouble colouring a manga story. In 1927. So when on his lecture tour with fellow author Ton Satomi, he whips out a guitar and starts rocking the house, you’re not sure if you should believe the Akutagawa was a punk rocker or not.

But Yamakawa’s checked his facts for the historical narratives that he weaves in, and it is fascinating to read about the effect that the 1923 earthquake had on the publishing industry, as well as the rise of socialism and anti-government activity after the Russian revolution. I also learned about the origins of the ubiquitous bunkobon book, so in terms of history, you are getting your money’s worth here.

And of course, both books are filled with Yamakawa’s intricate lines and busy, busy panels, his warped horizons curving up, and an incredible number of names (this many names is not typical Yamakawa. It just really annoyed me since he is not even considerate enough to give furigana most of the time, which are basically essential for reading Japanese names). He even manages to cram into one page what seems like every demon haunting Akutagawa for handy reference.

I surprised myself by tearing up at the end when you know, (historical spoiler), bringing me back to how weird biographies are. I knew what was going to happen, I knew from the first page, but when it actually happened, I felt so sad. Even if a biography can never be truth, can never show us the actual person how that person saw themselves, maybe its importance lies in being able to make that person real to us anyway, to make history meaningful and personal. Maybe a good biographer can make us cry over a person we never met.

Yeah, Ippo is everything you’d expect from est em. So if you don’t already like her, this book is probably not going to change your mind. But if you don’t already like her, that probably means that you’ve never read her because how could you not like her if you had? And Ippo is a pretty good place to start! Unless you’re looking for BL, in which case I’d turn you towards equus, mostly because wow, centaur sex. It exists on the printed page. If you’re not into equine-related BL, Tableau No. 20 is pretty good too. (Full disclosure: I translated that so of course I think it is pretty good.)

I am so glad editors are finally giving em a chance with longer form stories, first with Golondrina and now with Ippo. Obviously, I am a fan of her short stories, but with a whole book and more to tell a single story, she gets to stay with the same characters and really dig deep, revealing their personalities and their lives all onion-peeling style. And while Golondrina is very story-oriented, although still giving us interesting and nuanced characters, Ippo is pretty much entirely character driven (or at least at this stage it is. But this is only Book One, so she could be slowly turning us towards an overarching story) and really benefits from the easy pace an entire book allows.

The star of this leisurely ride through the world of custom-made shoes is Ayumu Ichijo, who has been pretty into shoes ever since he was a baby. It helps that his Italian-immigrant grandfather is a shoemaker from a very famous Italian shoemaking family. So little Ayumu grows up watching his grandfather make magic, turning leather into beautiful shoes. But then his grandmother dies and his grandfather closes up the shop to move back to Italy. The grandfather’s grief is so beautifully and simply expressed in four panels when he makes his dead wife shoes to be buried in. This incredibly minimal sequence is one of the most poignant things I have read in a very long time, and I still tear up thinking of it.

So after Ayumu’s grandfather is back in Italy, young Ayumu shows up on his doorstep. His parents are getting divorced and he wants to stay with his grandfather. He apprentices at his grandfather’s family shop and becomes a master shoemaker before returning to Japan as a young adult to start his own shoemaking business. And that’s where the rest of the book flows from. The remaining chapters are dedicated to Ayumu and his shoes. So many shoes. Seriously. If you are into comic-book feet, you should probably pick this one up.

At first, it has an episodic feel to it, like a shoe customer of the week kind of thing, but although em devotes more than a few panels to the customers who come to buy shoes from Ayumu and the circumstances that brought them to this place (hint: there is often sadness), she pushes Ayumu along steadily but surely through his own growth and his own story, so the episodic feel of the first couple of chapters is gone by the end of the book, which I was glad for. Although I like reading the interactions between Ayumu and his clients, there are only so many chapters of hey this person overcame sadness with a pair of 3000-dollar shoes. As a person who will never have thousands of dollars to spend on a pair of shoes, I do not relate to this as a method of overcoming sadness.

This focus on the way a piece of clothing can change your mindset and/or your life actually made me think of Order Meido by ancou running in Erotics F. Obviously, there is the connection of both stories having custom-made clothing at their centres, but the clothing is merely a device to allow the characters to reflect on their lives and find a new path forward. It’s a way to allow them to externalize acceptance of their own selves.

And it’s an interesting premise. As someone who likes clothing more than I probably should and has perhaps an addiction to handbags, I completely relate to that idea of changing your costume to change yourself. It’s kind of a twist on that whole fake it until you believe it idea of getting self-confidence. Clothes are costumes we use to signal to the world, but more importantly to ourselves, the person we are or the person we wish we were. And especially in Ippo, these people are getting new shoes to take the first step on a new path in life, to become a new person. Lots of symbolic step-taking in these pages.

The art is as always beautiful and understated and amazeballs. Like when Ayumu is meditating on what it means to make shoes, and there is this perfect panel of a baby’s foot as he remembers his own first steps. Even though there is basically nothing other than a baby’s foot in the panel, it’s so full of a late summer afternoon light to me. It just feels so nostalgic in that really good, washed out, seventies photo kind of way. The book is full of these kinds of perfect moments, a kind of moment that I haven’t really noticed in her other books, and one that I think can come about now because the full-length piece really pushes the reader deep into the characters.

I find it pretty impressive that she is working on something as contemplative as Ippo alongside the energetic and somewhat headstrong Golondrina. I love that these both exist in her mind and people are paying her to put them on paper for me to enjoy. So yes, yes, I will gush about Ippo too and continue to preach the gospel of est em until more/all of her work is published in English and everyone loves her the way that I do so that people will keep paying her to draw all these incredible worlds. So you know, consider yourself warned.

So in the spirit of a new look at my love for this series, I decided to live blog my reading of Book Eight. Come, see these classic pages in a new way: through my eyes! And in the spirit of classic TV sitcoms, this live blog was prerecorded in front of a live audience (mostly my sister) because I don’t actually have several hours in the middle of a work day to sit and read manga and hang out online to ramble about it. But in the spirit of actually live live blogs, I’ll be posting bits and pieces every few minutes and hanging out on Twitter, so really, it’ll be just like a non-prerecorded live blog.

And warning: As with my other posts on this series, there are spoilers in these bits and pieces. Click through if you dare! 

So Book Eight begins with the boys returning to boarding school after the summer of love (and also terror because you know, it is still Kaze to Ki no Uta). Let’s see what happens to them this year!

p10 O noes! Serge and Gilbert are no longer roomies! And Serge gets into a fight over it! We’re off to a bad start. The world is trying to tear these lovers apart.

p25 Gilbert jumping on the horse into Auguste’s vortex of evil is amazeballs.

p31 Seriously. What is wrong with everyone at this school?

p45 Pascal tells Serge not to be gay and uses magnet poles as a demo. I’m not sure I buy his thinking that human sexuality is a matter of opposite poles attracting.

p50 Pascal’s sis Patricia is giving Gilbert a run for his money.

p52 Gilbert alone in a crowd! Always alone! Betrayed by Serge for a girl!

p57 But Serge is thinking about Gilbert on his date with the girl.

p66 Naturally Pat takes this chance to confide in Gilbert about her feelings for Serge.

p68 Gilbert puts on a big show of laughing off the idea that he is Serge’s bestie. He’s not fooling anyone.

p69 And now Serge alone in a crowd, another reminder of the many ways he and Gilbert are meant for each other.

p74 Sebastian is still totes in love with Serge for some reason.

p76 Serge tenderly apologizes to Gilbert  and yet again I draw parallels with abusive relationship patterns.

p77-81 Gilbert in tormented inner dialogue. Angoisse! Serge has made him aware of Auguste’s true nature and now he’s run off with that girl when all Gilbert wants is to sex someone up.

p82 Shocking revelation! Auguste is engaged!!! Dum dum duuuuuuummmmm! And to a little girl! The man never fails to get grosser.

p84 Serge races off to read the letter he just happened to get that very day. The little girl marrying Auguste is his childhood sweetheart Angeline. Damn.

p86 I love how she always uses the weather to reflect character emotions. The storm around Serge and his inner turmoil are hilariously contrasted by the kid in the window yelling, “Hey Serge! Your soup’s getting cold!”

p89 Serge imagines angelic Gilbert returning to the arms of evil Auguste.  Love this panel.

p92 Why are Pascal and the gang all rough lines in the last panel? They look like ghosts.

p96 Serge makes his dramatic escape to chase after Gilbert and keep him out of evil Auguste’s clutches!

p97 But before he can go after Gilbert, he must talk with Carl or their friendship will be OVER!

p98 Carl is surprisingly understanding, given his puritanical nature.

p100 Great movement in these panels. I love the shot of the horse’s legs.

p101 Serge falls asleep in the carriage and fears he has missed Gilbert, but of course like every other bit of perfect timing in this series, he just happens to come upon Gilbert at the very moment he wakes up.

p105 Big kiss! Serge takes the lead. Silence as Gilbert releases the newspaper with the news of Auguste’s engagement, the symbolic release of the hold of Auguste in his heart. Now he only has eyes for Serge!

p107 Aaw, so sweet sleeping together in the sunbeam. It all worked out for the best. Oh wait, I still have 200 pages and two more books to read.

p117 Wow. Kids are mean. One boy says to Gilbert: “Just being in the same group as you makes me want to throw up.”

p118 Gilbert interrupts Serge’s study group by throwing chocolate vine at their feet. I didn’t know there even was such a thing. Kaze, you are always teaching me!

p122 She has taken the gloves off with Auguste! And I didn’t think she was wearing any before. But the representations of him in this book are all actually demonic, and Gilbert is always an angel with him. Maybe because these images are through Serge’s eyes and he views Auguste as pure evil after the events of the last book. And you know, rightly so.

p125 Ha ha! Gilbert is actually clutching his head he is in such turmoil.

p127 This lunatic carved the mother of Jebus into a tree. To pray to.

p130 The lunatic is kicking up shit between Serge and Gilbert. He tells Gilbert the truth about Auguste’s marriage and Gilbert’s world crumbles as he realizes Serge lied to him.

p135 It’s on! Gilbert throws a book at Serge, hits him in the head!

p137 But Serge doesn’t think he was lying. He really believes the marriage won’t happen. He’s so deluded. Of course it will. It is guaranteed to make Serge and Gilbert unhappy, so therefore it has to happen. I think Takemiya used that as her motto writing this series.

p139 Disembodied evil Auguste!

p144 Dang. They are really having it out. Serge snaps when Gilbert sneers that Breau is better, and Serge realizes that Gilbert wants him to sex him. Even though Gilbert *knows* what happened to Serge (evil Auguste).

p152 Aaw. Cuddle monkeys.

p156 Jesus. Gilbert fucked Serge up pretty bad.

p159 The classic calendar pages flying away to show the days passing.

p162 And Gilbert is back to his old slutty ways.

p168 Uh oh! Serge stumbles upon a drunk-looking Breau in the greenhouse.

p169 And Gilbert is hiding and watching the whole thing!

p170 Gilbert casually tosses his hair and invites Serge to hang out. So onto a horse they get! That is how they did back then.

p172 And in the secluded abandoned building, Serge makes his move!

p174 That passionate kiss is not bringing them back together, though. They both have troubled faces as the chapter ends.

New chapter starts with a bang! After telling Gilbert how beautiful he is and how he can’t stand seeing Gilbert with all those boys, Serge confesses his own love for Gilbert!

p179 If Takemiya was ever subtle, she has thrown all that out the window now. Gilbert responds to Serge’s confession with “……it’s a sin.” Oh these star-crossed lovers!

p180 And then it’s five pages of them getting it on!

p190 And then Serge gets back to being Serge, and fusses about them missing dinner. Sure, life-changing sexual/emotional experience, but what about supper!!

p197 Gilbert is a changed man! As proven by the fact that he actually smiled at Long Hair. (The lunatic from before. What is this guy’s name again? Rosemarine’s friend.)

p198 And then a great montage of Gilbert having his shit together at school. All he needed was for Serge to do him. Aaw.

p203 New boyfriend syndrome steals Serge from his friends and they are not happy about it. And in panel four, Carl appears to be wrestling an alligator.

p207 Hm, I don’t think the word “scat” was around back in the days of the frilly shirts.

p208 Ooh, Gilbert becomes Serge’s muse!

p210 What the hell is this fire horse thing?

p211 But you knew their idyllic times had to end. Shadowy (literally!) doings afoot! Looks like Auguste is not done in the battle for Gilbert and is going through Rosemarine to have another student take over where Breau left off.

p216 And while Serge is being fêted by his teacher for writing his first song, Gilbert is getting stoned (in the Biblical sense. So far no drugs in this story. Just lots of sex and drinking) in the woods by Breau’s would-be successor. This guy’s way meaner than Breau.

p218 Wow. This is really sinister and dark. The new evil threatens to take out Serge’s eyes with his slingshot if Gilbert doesn’t sex him whenever he wants. I have to say again the drama just never stops with Takemiya.

p223 Gilbert tries to make out like getting raped by evil dudes is just him back to his old ways. Serge: “You betrayed me!” The shadows on his face here are perfect.

p225 Noodly philosophical interjection from the ghost of Serge’s dad.

p236 Serge reconnects with his friends by hammering some stuff together. And throwing nails at them. These kids have weird hobbies.

p237 Meanwhile, Gilbert is in a dark place both literally and figuratively. Driving off Serge is not enough for evil dude (whose name is Adam we finally learn). Turns out Adam’s orders are to do whatever he wants to Gilbert so that Gilbert wants to go home, i.e. back to Auguste, that sick bastard. And what Adam wants is to be really, really mean.

p239 Seriously. There are some dark scenes in this book.

p244 Sebastian finally has the chance to win Serge’s love after so long in the shadows.

p247 But Gilbert blows it off: “Serge still loves me.” Pascal is gobsmacked. Seriously. Great face.

p248 And now I know Long Hair’s names is Jules. I’m sure we learned it before, but it’s been such a long time since we saw him that I forgot.

p249 Rosemarine pretends outrage at the things Auguste is ordering him to do. But he’s always hated Gilbert, hasn’t he?

p250 Every time anyone is sleepy or worn out, it’s “anemia”. Was this really the go-to problem or is it her own personal catchall?

p253 Serge confesses to Carl that he slept with Gilbert. Carl is so shocked he emits lightning.

p254 And is driven to drink violently. He is practically knocking himself out with that bottle.

p258 Carl overhears the baddies casually chatting about how they threatened Serge so they could ruin Gilbert. What will he do with this info?! He thinks Serge and Gilbert doing it is a sin, but Serge is his friend.

p266 Serge and Gilbert have it out about Gilbert sleeping with those guys, but Gilbert can’t tell Serge the truth.

p268 So I guess Gilbert meanly laughing coldly and telling Serge that it’s ridiculous to think he ever loved him is part of the plan to protect him from Adam? Too cruel though.

p269 O noes! Here comes evil Adam!

p272 But Serge rides safely off after telling Gilbert to never talk to him again. And tears drip down Gilbert face. Poor Gilbert. Poor Serge. They are trapped by their pasts.

p276 But time to get back to the fact that Carl knows Gilbert is with Adam to protect Serge. What to do, what to do. If he says nothing, Serge will stay  all smiles like he is now.

p278 Shocking reminder: it was Carl who put Serge in Gilbert’s room in the first place! Their forbidden love is all his fault!

p280 Gilbert has turned into a total creeper, sniffing Serge’s clothes when Serge is not in their room.

p284 Long Hair (why can’t I remember his name?) rescues Gilbert naked in the forest traumatized after another afternoon with Adam.

p289 Gilbert begs Long Hair for help saying he’ll do anything, so of course Long Hair takes that as an invite to get it on.

p292 Of course, Piano Teacher sees that it is love that has caused Serge to grow like this. How does everyone understand everyone’s feelings like this when no one ever talks about feelings (except for dramatic confessions of love)? This comes right after Long Hair has taken a couple pages to ponder how Gilbert loves Serge from the bottom of his soul.

p295 Carl meets Serge on his way to get out of sharing a room with Gilbert. He has to tell him the truth! (There’s also the question of why no one seems to think they could tell a teacher or someone that Adam is a monster and a rapist. I mean, I know that principal guy or whoever was sleeping with Gilbert or something, but Watts and the piano teacher seem like good guys and the kids trust them with other stuff.)

p296 Shattered glass as Serge learns that Gilbert never betrayed him.

p298 And now Serge is outraged that he was laughing and having fun when Gilbert was suffering all this time.

p299 “If I had only believed in him!”

p300 Naturally, Serge finds Gilbert half-naked, picking flowers in a meadow.

p303 But Gilbert runs away from apologetic Serge and now the baddies have him. O noes!

p305 What really cracks me up in all this Adam drama is that he’s threatening everyone with a slingshot. I know they can be dangerous, but it’s so not menacing. This is Dennis the Menace level of menacing.

Also, it’s been awhile since anyone made a racial slur about Serge. Way to bring it, super villain Adam!

p306 Ooh, Serge gets a slinged shot right in the gut. Ow. And then they proceed to beat the crap out of him. Again, the beating by four big guys seems much more threatening than the slingshot.

p308–9 The spread here of Serge getting clobbered is laid out so well.

p312 So Gilbert being Gilbert, rather than run in and get someone to come help, he throws a rock through Watts’s window to get them to come out.

p315 Finally, someone’s talking some sense! Carl urges completely battered Serge to tell Watts the deal. And Pascal points out that if he does the relationship between Serge and Gilbert will come out, and they’ll be in super trouble. I guess that is a good reason not to say anything. It’s for love.

p317 Anemia rears its head again. Watts tries to get Serge to tell him who beat him like this, but of course, Serge keeps his mouth shut because he thinks he deserved it for not believing in Gilbert. Dang.

p320 And we end on a note that guarantees the drama will continue unabated and unashamed in the next two books. I’m betting the Adam thing gets cleared up middle of the next book to set up for the super showdown with Auguste, and the inevitable running away together of Serge and Gilbert that have to happen in Book Ten.