“Reality counts for a lot.”

Despite the label on the cover (A Geek’s Diet Memoir), Sayonara, Mr. Fatty! is not a “diet book”. If anything, it’s an anti-diet book, much as Walker Percy’s Lost in the Cosmos was an anti-self-help book. The latter was designed to make you laugh at the absurdity of expecting someone else to be able to tell you who and what you are; the former lets you realize that dieting in the abstract is not going to help you lose and keep off weight. It’s an anti-gluttony book, a guide for waking yourself up and making you realize that you are best equipped to carry out your own self-destruction.

Maybe that sounds a bit over-the-top, but if the events of the last decade or so — financial, political, ecological — have taught us anything, it’s that our biggest problem as a species is that we think we want things we simply don’t need. We eat too much, we spend too much, we gobble up far more than our slice of the pie — and we condition ourselves to not even notice any of it. It’s this last part that’s the most damaging, because it allows us to go right back out and start all over again with no thought to the consequences. Toshio Okada’s book is about getting off this thoughtless Möbius strip treadmill of consumption, and the fact that it’s in the guise of a personable, friendly, you-can-do-it-too guide makes it all the better. It’s not a frothing condemnation of the Consumer Culture, but a DIY guide to picking the locks on your jail cell.

A while back I wrote a review of an animated feature from Japan — Tarō the Dragon Boy — where I said something along these lines: “You could watch this just for the nostalgia value, but that would be a mistake.” The same goes for Roger Leloup’s Yoko Tsuno series. Its design and storytelling harkens back to the days of Tintin and Johnny Quest, but it has far more than retro flair going for it. It’s one you get for your kids, and then you end up reading yourself out of sheer affection for it.

History lesson. Back when dinosaurs roamed the earth, the word manga was not in the dictionary (let alone on the bestseller lists) and what most people knew about Japan was mostly confined to the business or cooking pages of the newspaper, I was still working through my bandes dessinés phase and devouring everything in sight since there was so infuriatingly little of it to begin with. Mom had given my brother and I copies of Tintin to keep us busy during a transatlantic flight (circa 1978), and after that I was hooked. I borrowed copies of the rest of the series from the library, got hooked on Astérix in the process, graduated to the likes of Heavy Metal and Epic, and added tomes by Enki Bilal (Nikopol) and Juan Gimenez (A Matter of Time) to my permanent collection.

And along the way, I stumbled across something called The Adventures of Yoko, Vic and Paul from the same publishers as Bilal and Gimenez (the now-defunct Catalan Communications). Yoko was a Japanese teenager who lived in Belgium and “worked in television”, and along with her two friends — Vic the competent straight man, Paul the comic relief — she got into any number of adventures that ranged from Nancy Drew-style mystery to wild and wooly SF in the “let’s go to far-off worlds but we need to be back in time for dinner” vein. Of course I dug it, and not just because Yoko was cute. And now the good folks at Cinebook have picked up the rights to Yoko, letting me pick up where I left off all those years ago and not forcing me to go read the darn things in French after all.

In the few days before I sat down in earnest to read it, Mariko Koike’s The Cat in the Coffin sat cheek-by-jowl in my reading pile with Georges Simenon’s The Widow. A fitting pair-up. Simenon’s lean and surgically precise psychological thrillers are enjoying some well-deserved attention back in the public eye thanks to the New York Review of Books, and while Koike’s Coffin doesn’t quite have the same lancet-like directness — Simenon can make one word do the work of twenty — it has more than a little of his eye for how evil breeds in apparently ordinary places.

Coffin’s breeding ground of evil is a locale that hasn’t been tapped often for works in translation from Japan: a point in the post-WWII landscape of that country where the American occupation’s presence rubbed off on the more well-to-do local population. In this case, it’s the household of one Goro Kawakubo, a freewheeling art professor with broadly Western tastes. He’s infatuated with everything from American jazz to French cars, much to the bedazzlement of the naïve young Masayo, the barely-twenty-year-old art student Goro hires in as household help and a governess of sorts for his eight-year-old daughter.

Kikutani does not look forward to leaving prison. For sixteen years he has been half-asleep in the womb of the state, grateful for his lack of freedom, since it means that many less decisions he has to make. He is obliged to apply for parole even if he doesn’t want it. The prospect of rejoining the outside world, even just provisionally, fills him with terror. It is not because of what the world might do to him, but what he fears he might do all over again when confronted with the world in all of its capriciousness and turmoil.

A decade and a half ago, Kikutani found his wife cheating on him with a friend. His response was to stab her to death and leave the other man permanently injured — and in the years since, he has not so much dealt with the emotional reasons for the crime as he has simply buried them. If everyone else around him is willing to believe the past is a dead place, then he might as well act like it. Uneasy, fearful of what he might find, and surprised at both how much and how little has changed, he leave prison and joins the population of a halfway house. At every step he is certain he is doomed, certain that the past will erupt once again in some form, whether inside him or outside of him.

Well, that was short-lived. Such was my reaction at reading the second, and apparently final, volume of Batten. There’s little more depressing than reading something you have a furtive sidelong liking for despite all its flaws, and then seeing it get sliced off at the knees before it ever has a chance to come into full flower. Maybe it was inevitable: for all its quirks, the series never really seemed to achieve liftoff.

It wasn’t just that there was no lift. It was that there was also plenty of drag. By the middle of the second volume, we see a pattern — but it’s not a starting point from which bigger things grow. It’s closed-ended. Problem manifests, hero — Seijurō — comes in and straightens everything out, everyone goes back home to regroup. The only time Seijurō remotely approaches putting his own neck in danger is at the end of this book — fitting place for it, right when things have to be sewn up anyway — and all it really costs him is a couple of cuts on either side of his mouth. There’s never a sense of anything at risk on his part.

What we have here is a transitional volume of the Guin Saga manga, designed to get us out of one plot arc and into another. It spirits our heroes away from Stafolos Keep, out from the clutches of Count Vanon (if that is Count Vanon, but that’s another story), and ends the raid of the Sem on the fortress — leaving behind plenty of tools for survival that our heroes will need as they cross the River Kes and head for … well, more adventure. As Indiana Jones rather testily said the first time around when someone asked him for details on his plan to wrest the Ark of the Covenant away from its Nazi thieves: “I don’t know; I’m making this up as I go.”

It does sometimes feel like they’re making it up as they go. Even though I know for a fact this whole arc of the story was completed more than thirty years back, and over a hundred other books have been written for the original series since. One odd little advantage of coming back to the very first books and revisiting them as manga is how both the audience and the creators themselves know what’s going to happen. To that end I’m noticing a great many changes, albeit minor ones, that seem to be along those lines — although I’m at a disadvantage since I haven’t read that far ahead. I think the total number of people who speak English and read Japanese who have read that far ahead (that I know, anyway) could be counted on one hand with plenty of fingers left over … and I have better taste than to bug Yanni about what happens. God knows he’s busy enough with his publishing company.

There are two authors named Murakami. Don’t get them confused; this’ll be on the test. Haruki Murakami is the master of daily whimsy, the author of Hardboiled Wonderland and the End of the World and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. He looks outwards from his homeland and sees endless terrain for his imagination to play freely. Ryū Murakami, on the other hand, writes about violence and nausea and sweat and blood and sperm, and turns his vision back inwards to see a Japan that is rotting from all sides at once.

Like many other people, I mistook one for the other the first time. At Tower’s Bargain Annex on 4th Street (now long gone), I found Murakami #2’s Almost Transparent Blue for $3 — about the most I’d want to pay for a book that was barely 128 pages, anyway. I read it in one sitting and was unimpressed; it felt like a poor man’s reduction of the same cheerless decadence found in books like Last Exit to Brooklyn. A Newsweek blurb on the back cover described it as “a Japanese mix of A Clockwork Orange and L’étranger”, but that’s unfair to Camus, Burgess and Murakami in about equal measure — especially since all three are better represented by other works of theirs.

We never know his name. He is referred to as “that mysterious boy” (不思議な童子 / fushigi na douji) by one character, but the title of the comic (たまゆら童子 / Tamayura Douji, “The Phantom Boy”) hints broadly at the fact that he’s a spirit and not a human child anyway. Give him a name, and it’s a tossup as to whether he’d take it to heart or just chuckle and look for someone else to give him another. Like the angels in Win Wenders’s Wings of Desire, sometimes he soars above all of human nature and sometimes he drops to earth to experience human nature firsthand.

The best offhand term I have to describe Tamayura Douji is historical fantasia — it’s not intended to be any kind of serious exploration of Japanese history, even if the logo on the spine of the book reads “Jidaigeki Comic Series” (jidaigeki meaning a historical tale). It leaps and floats between characters and events from Japan’s past, linking them through the adventures of the title character. The end result is somewhere between the Classics Illustrated approach seen in other manga (e.g., Mitsuteru Yokoyama’s Sangokushi) and the dreamier, more whimsical — shilling for sentimental — approach used by shōjo manga.

Most of us, I suspect, have a deep-seated distrust of anything “nuclear”. The infamy of the atom has many monuments to its name: Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Bikini Atoll, Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, Mayak, Windscale. Nobody wants a reactor in their backyard — even if nuclear power is one of the few large-scale ways to wean ourselves from burning coal. (Irony of ironies: we spew more radiation into the environment by burning coal than we do with a well-regulated and well-designed nuclear plant.)

The key words, of course, are “well-regulated” and “well-designed”, and while there are probably plenty of the latter it’s becoming all too clear there isn’t nearly enough of the former. For bad design and poor regulation, Chernobyl stands as the grossest example of both in conjunction. In its shadow there have been other accidents, albeit not as well-known or with such widespread effects, but which illustrate all too clearly that the most pressing danger of nuclear power is not radiation but human ignorance.

A Slow Death: 83 Days of Radiation Sickness documents how negligence and corruption at a nuclear-fuel processing plant in Tokaimura, Japan caused that country’s worst nuclear accident to date. One of the workers there, a pleasant family man named Hisachi Ouchi, received a dose of radiation nearly ten thousand times the normal background level, and over the course of the next two months and some-odd days literally disintegrated under the eyes of his doctors. Most of us know of radiation sickness only from the exaggerations of bad science fiction movies, but Mr. Ouchi’s case is even more ghastly than anything dreamed up by any screenwriter.

Get past the lurid title, and Shocking Crimes of Postwar Japan offers a fair amount beyond the cheap frisson promised there. Part true-crime anthology and part social history, it uses the crimes in question as jumping-off points for insights into Japanese society, both conventional and criminal. The author, Mark Schreiber, has approached the subject as an insider. As a resident of Japan with a long journalism pedigree for many English-language publications there, Mark writes with the confidence and authority needed to make this more than just a rehash of what’s in the newspaper archives.

The opening and closing chapters are devoted to what is arguably Japan’s most infamous crime of late: the 1995 Aum Shinrikyo subway gassings, the details of which were still unfolding as the book was being written. For this reason the book doesn’t focus in much detail on that incident — a book like The Cult at the End of the World may serve the curious reader better — but it works as a useful way of bookending all the other material covered here. Japan’s just as capable as any other country of having its equilibrium punctured, no matter what the internal or external perceptions.