Purchases benefit
this site.

High schooler Takao Kasuga has two ways of coping with life in the backwater known as Hikari City. Both should be innocent, but they turn out to be anything but. The first is books — the more esoteric and offbeat, the better, and that includes Charles Baudelaire’s poetry (which the title of this series references unambiguously). The second is his classmate Nanako Saeki — “my muse, my femme fatale,” as he rhapsodizes over her. So smitten is he for her, and so intoxicated has he become with Baudelaire’s hymns to lordly indecency, that when Nanako forgets her gym clothes at school one day he hastily swipes them and takes them home with him.

No, even he doesn’t know what he’s doing. He’s a lethal admixture of two normally incompatible impulses: a guilty conscience and an impulsive heart. Stealing Nanako’s shorts and tank top will take him the rest of his life to pay back; this he is positive of. And yet he went and did it all the same … and, worse, he finds out has a witness to his crime: Nakamura. This is not one of the other boys in his class, who rib him about his love of weird books and his moon-eyed feelings for Nanako. Nakamura is another girl, and if the text for Takao’s spirit is a hesitantly-read Baudelaire, hers is an enthusiastically-devoured Marquis de Sade.

Purchases benefit
this site.

We are, I think, finally beginning to see the full flowering of a literature of true native Western Buddhism. By this I mean works written by Buddhists who are Westerners first and foremost, and whose understanding of both Western life and Buddhism complement each other. Brad Warner was one such writer: it was hard for an Akron, Ohio-born punk rocker turned ordained Soto Zen Buddhist not to have both his Buddhism and his Western-ism speak to each other. His books document all of that in a fun, accessible way for beginners, and perhaps also for experts who have gotten lost along the way.

Rebel Buddha is another well-written general introduction to Buddhism, by way of Tibetan Buddhist Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche, and for that reason alone is worth checking out for beginners. What makes it doubly interesting is how it attempts to approach Buddhism as something that is inherently transplanted from one culture to another. Buddhism has migrated from India to China, Korea, Japan, the rest of Asia, and into Europe and the United States, and along each step of the way has found ways to become a living part of the culture that accepted it.

Purchases benefit
this site.

Bit of a gamble, this. For the first time, Vertical, Inc. is resuming a manga series that was previously being issued by another publisher. In this case, the publisher was Tokyopop and the series was GTO (Great Teacher Onizuka): The Early Years. It's an interesting parallel tie-in with Vertical's other GTO-themed offering, which I covered previously.

Early Years is, as the title implies, the story of GTO back when he was just "O": Eikichi Onizuka, young punk with an idealistic streak that tends to put him on the wrong side of most fights. Years deals with his time in a high-school gang along with his buddy Ryuji Danma, and much of what goes on is a lot like what Onizuka-the-teacher would himself be dealing with years later: gang wars, trouble from the wrong side of the law, trouble from the right side of the law, and the endless ways Onizuka can get rejected by women.

Purchases benefit
this site.

Another instance of Miura (Berserk) lending his considerable talents as an illustrator to a nearly-worthless story. The last time he did that was with King of Wolves, also with a story by Buronson, but Japan is worse.

In some ways this is Wolves turned inside-out: a gallery of characters are flung into the future instead of the past, where Japan has turned into a wasteland and all the natives have been ground under the heel of a pan-European dictatorship. Their one hope is a meat-headed yakuza (at least he knows he's a meathead) who doles out Justice and Righteous Vengeance in equal measure.

The story's dumb enough, but there's also generous dollops of crass sexism and pinhead sociology to boot. At least when Kazuo Koike did this kind of thing (Crying Freeman), or when Ryoichi Ikegami drew it (ditto, plus Wounded Man, Sanctuary and Buronson's own Strain), it had the saving grace of being enjoyably smarmy pulp trash. The whole thing feels like a dry run for a series that was never commissioned, and thank goodness for that: Miura's far enough behind on Berserk as it is.

Purchases benefit
this site.

A plotless meditation on the concept of hell (or, strictly speaking, purgatory) as seen from a Japanese point of view. Several people who have recently died find themselves in a place that is much like the life they just left behind, but with some key differences. Everyone else's thoughts are readable; past and present intermix freely; and the things you worry about have a nasty tendency to come true. The only way out is to stop struggling — a conceit that students of Buddhism will recognize immediately, but Tsutsui uses it for satirical ends all the way through.

Maybe Tsutsui's brand of satire doesn't translate into English as effectively as it reads in Japanese, or maybe Hell is just not one of his better works. I'm leaning more towards the latter, especially after having gotten my hands on the English edition of Paprika, which shows him off in much better form. Here, he has a lot of ideas, but they remain little more than that. This is a rare case of a short book that cries out to be expanded into a longer one instead of vice versa.

Purchases benefit
this site.

A love-letter to Japanese kaiju, or the giant monsters we all know and love, from Godzilla all the way on down to Varan and everything in between. In a slightly-alternate present, Japan has a special government division, the MMD, to deal with giant-monster attacks of all varieties. Like any government agency their work is underfunded, thankless, and tiring; their sole reward for sparing Tokyo from destruction yet again is often nothing more than a hostile round of press coverage and their next paycheck.

Purchases benefit
this site.

[Volume 1 and Volume 2 of this series are also reviewed here.]

1.

Back before No Longer Human had even its first volume released in English, I went and copped all three volumes of the original untranslated Japanese edition. I read the first two of them back-to-back on one train ride back home, and I read the third a month or two later, while sitting in Bryant Park on a cool autumn afternoon (an incongruous setting for enjoying such a punishing piece of work). In short, I knew what I was getting myself into when Vertical, Inc.’s English translation arrived, but that didn’t make the experience any less emotionally shattering.

It says something that I can finish the story, find flaws with it that bothered me on a conceptual or dramatic level, and yet still see the whole as being unassailable. I’ve since found that’s the only sort of perfect you’re likely to get in this world: one where you can see something’s flaws all the more clearly because you love the whole, and in the end you forgive the whole those flaws because the entire package is worth the effort.

Purchases benefit
this site.

The end. And it’s a fitting end to a manga series that’s always stood poised on the knife-edge between sweet fairy-tale simplicity and the tougher sensibilities of stories for mature audiences. Black Jack might well have been Osamu Tezuka’s finest work by dint of how it combines the accessibility of works for younger readers (Astro Boy, Unico) and the sophistication and ambition of his experimental productions (Phoenix). Now’s the time to go back to the beginning, if you haven’t already, and experience the whole of this saga of a black-market medical man from start to finish.

Purchases benefit
this site.

If one were to travel into the universe of GTO: 14 Days in Shonan and look up Badass on Wikipedia, I would find the article deficient if a picture of Eikichi Onizuka didn’t appear as the illustration of choice on that page.

GTO stands for Great Teacher Onizuka, and the adventures of Onizuka and his stupefying excursions into rock-ribbed machismo have been chronicled in both a manga and its subsequent anime adaptation. Both were translated into English, but are now sadly out of print. Enter Vertical, Inc., who have been looking to broaden their manga offerings. Rather than reissue all of GTO, which would have been problematic at best, they elected instead to bring English-speaking audiences this previously-untranslated follow-up series. It’s a gamble, but not a reckless one, and the presence of previous GTO stories doesn’t create a major barrier for newcomers.

Purchases benefit
this site.

“This book argues,” writes Richard Gombrich in the preface to What the Buddha Thought, “that the Buddha was one of the most brilliant and original thinkers of all time.” His aim is to place the Buddha in the same canon as Aristotle or Descartes, rather than Jesus or Mohammed — a philosopher and thinker, not simply a religious figurehead.

This is an ambitious undertaking, and I am happy to report that What the Buddha Thought is not a case of hubris or mislaid ambition. It is one of a number of works that I am tempted to call “revisionist-Buddhist,” works that attempt to wipe away the encrustations of time or the dirt of history from Buddhism and make them not only relevant to the current age but allow us to see more of Buddhism than would be possibly by simply reiterating previous work. Brad Warner and Dzogchen Ponlop have both produced work in this vein for lay audiences, and now I am exploring works of a more scholarly nature that attempt to do the same things.