Serdar | Genji Press

I spent last Saturday at WickedFaire Labyrinth, where I had a nice time selling my book and getting to know the folks in the adjoining booths.  I ought to be back next year (come February) if my budget can manage it — we'll see how that goes!

At the end of the month I'll be taking a quick jaunt into Jersey to be at Jeff Mach's Labyrinth (he and I are, like, tight from way back), and will be at the Author's Alcove with copies of Summerworld for all and sundry.  (If you don't have the book yet, quit stalling and go get a copy!)  I'll be signing copies of the book, talking about The New Golden Age, offering giveaways, and generally making a creative nuisance of myself.

What a joy it is to see the Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex mythology capped off so exuberantly and intelligently — at least, for now. Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex: Solid State Society (which has easily the longest title of any release this year) is a fitting culmination for what was created by the two seasons of the Stand Alone Complex TV shows. It has enough plot to fill a whole season of TV, skillfully and efficiently condensed into a single two-hour movie, but it never loses sight of the pole stars in the GITS cosmology of ideas: the tension between the individual and society; the way our lives and worlds are technologized with unforeseen consequences; the way this technologization gives rise to new orders of existence within and without us. And it’s also a great movie, period: fast-moving, gorgeous to watch, loaded with things that improve on repeat viewings. I also couldn’t ignore multiple parallels — thematic and visual — between SSS and the very first Ghost in the Shell film, right down to the images in the final shot and Kusanagi’s prescient closing lines.

Solid State Society opens some time after the end of the second season of Stand Alone Complex, and features many of the same characters. Togusa, the family man and former greenhorn, is now the mature and determined field commander of Section 9, leading Bateau, Ishikawa, Boma, Pazu, and all the other members of that elite outfit while himself taking orders from “the old goat”, Aramaki (himself a right-hand man to Prime Minister Kayabuki as per the 2nd GiG plotline). As for Motoko Kusanagi herself, she resigned four years ago and has “gone off the grid” for reasons unknown, much to the chagrin of the rest of the crew. “Her talents were as rare as ESP,” Aramaki laments, although apparently just as difficult to predict. We also find out that Bateau was offered Togusa’s post and explicitly declined it, and as much as Bateau admires his former teammate’s prowess it’s also clear he’s biting back a great deal of jealousy for what could have been.

Here’s where the going gets (slightly) grimmer. The second book in the Guin Saga series doesn’t quite have the same propulsive energy as the first, if only because it’s essentially a transitional story: it deals with what happens immediately after the leopard-headed hero Guin escapes from the chaos of Stafolos Keep with the royal twins Rinda and Remus in his care. The first book ended with a literal leap into the unknown, with the three of them plunging headfirst into the dangerous River Kes as hordes of the monkeylike Sem barbarians snap close at their heels.

That first book delivered the kind of rush I hadn’t gotten from a fantasy book in ages, partly because it was completely unabashed in its willingness to entertain. Here there were no attempts at socio-political analysis, no analogies or allegories to “current events”, just flat-out meat-and-potatoes adventure fantasy for the eleven-year-old soul, no matter what his biological age. Small wonder the second book felt like a step back and a retrenching, but now that I think about it, Warrior in the Wilderness really isn’t all that bad: it’s just that once you start with that kind of breathless burst of energy you sometimes need something else to leaven it.

Now this is a bit more like it, although I’m starting to see how even a series that runs to maybe fifty thousand words a book could withstand a bit of editing. The third book in the ongoing Guin Saga, over a hundred books strong in Japan and still going but only a pitiful four or five in English, kicks the series a little closer to the kind of action we saw and savored in the first book. To use a quote I’ve employed before, it may not be Bach but it is sure Offenbach — and it is exactly the kind of straightforward adventure fantasy that we have come not to know much of lately.

When we last left the leopard-headed Guin and his comrades — the royal twins Rinda and Remis, the mercenary Istavan and various allies from the ranks of the monkeylike Sem — they were trying to stay one step ahead of their pursuers, the armies of the Mongaul, pushing ever deeper into the wastes of the Nospherus that the Sem call home. They find themselves stuck in a valley populated by one of the weirder monsters found in the desert, the yidoh — giant amoebalike monsters that will probably make any Dungeons and Dragons player mutter “Gelatinous cube!” under their breaths. One of these walking stomachs is bad enough, but a whole gorge filled with them, and with no way around?

The Mystery of Rampo is a rare creature: a truly original movie, blessed with a fearless imagination and a delirious visual style. It helps somewhat to know from where the film has mined its imagery and inspirations, but I don’t think it’s crucial: the spell Rampo casts all by itself is powerful enough to bewitch most any receptive audience.

I’m lucky enough, I guess, to have been a fan of the film’s core inspiration: the life and works of Edogawa Rampo, the man who was to 20th-century Japan what Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and (to a fair degree) Stephen King were and are to modern English-speaking audiences. One of his chief inspirations was Edgar Allan Poe, from whom he (rather cheekily) derived not only his pen name but also the other man’s nose for human frailty and foibles, and he wrote voluminously in Japan for decades without his work ever receiving much attention elsewhere. I devoured the only two editions of his work currently available in English (Japanese Tales of Mystery and Imagination and Black Lizard), along with other films that drew on his work for inspiration (Rampo Noir), and wanted more. And now I can add Mystery of Rampo to that list, which adds wonderfully to the man’s legacy without being redundant or insulting (as was the case, sadly, with the lamentable Blind Beast vs. Killer Dwarf).

Terms like genius and renaissance man get thrown around so casually these days, it’s a bit of a shock to run into the real thing. I’m hard-pressed to think of a better example offhand than Takeshi Kitano, the Japanese multi-hyphenate — writer, director, author, TV personality, social commentator and stand-up funnyman — introduced most broadly to the West through his quirky remake of the Zatôichi movie franchise. But he’s been around a lot longer than that, and for a long time I lamented the only things we were getting to see of his creative prowess were his films, and sometimes not even that. (Many of his movies are not even in print on DVD in the USA anymore, and many that are exist only in wholly uncomplimentary editions.)

Leave it to Vertical Inc., magnates of Japanese pop culture in translation, to bring one of Kitano’s books to English-speaking audiences. Which book to give us was, I imagine, the subject of at least some deliberation: he’s written dozens, both fiction and non-, some of which have also been filmed by other parties. I half-expected to see a translation of Many Happy Returns, the story of an unassuming man who becomes indoctrinated into one of Japan’s “new religions” (read: cults). What they chose instead was Boy, which seems to amount to a sort of Kitano taster — a slim book of three short stories. Despite their length, they radiate a lovely combination of affection and nostalgia, the sort of thing Kitano has mined for the best of his own movies time and again, and they both complement and extend on his other work. They show up his genius for what it is.

The second season of the Ah! My Goddess TV series is a little like having a reunion with an old friend who hasn’t changed at all over the years. You won’t get any real surprises, but you also won’t be let down — and in the case of A!MG, the whole cast of the show have taken on the flavor of old friends I’ve come to know and love.

Still, with the sheer number of iterations this material has been through, you’d think there would have been more variety. There’s the original manga; the first OAV adaptation; the feature-length movie; the first season of the new TV series; and now the second season of the TV show. Through it all, the basic math for the A!MG algebra has remained the same: Boy Meets Goddess(es), and Mayhem Ensues. Still, why tinker with a good thing when it already works?

The second volume of Mushi-shi continues the same magical atmosphere conjured up so wonderfully on the first disc, and that atmosphere was a big part of the reason for watching this show in the first place. And now that the show’s nailed down the basics — the mysterious organisms called mushi, and the wanderer named Ginko who knows their secrets and aids others in dealing with them — it’s now starting to expand on the original premise and use it as an arena for even deeper things. The stories are not really about the mushi, but the people who come into contact with them — good, bad, indifferent, ambitious flawed, what have you — and how they are changed by the experience. It wouldn’t be wide of the mark to talk about the show as a kind of environmentalist parable: We all bear some responsibility for our effects on our world; it’s madness for us to simply use it thoughtlessly and not learn to coexist wisely with it. And finally, the show continues to deliver one lushly beautiful image after another, like a living storybook. It’s the sort of show you could just watch with the sound off, like a piece of video art, but then you’d miss out on the poetic dialogue and Toshio Masuda’s spare, precise gamelan-and-piano score.

I'm back from AnimeFest, which was wonderful (here's the full rundown), and sold quite a few of the copies of Summerworld I got in stock before I left!

To that end, we've got about half left of what I originally ordered, so you can go ahead and order signed copies directly from me if you want them that way, or you can continue to order them directly from my printer (cheaper!).  Either way, you get to see me at my finest.

A big thank you to everyone who dropped by my booth in person or attended by storytelling / writing workshops w/Daniel Sanchez.  Your attention and company were all most welcome!