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My most common lament about anime, manga and Japanese popular culture generally has been the language barrier. I’ve tried to learn Japanese but I was only able to make so much headway, and with my spare time at an even greater premium now it’s not likely I’ll ever develop the skill needed to read manga without a translator. A great many titles I know I want to delve into — Azumi, for instance, or Yoshiharu Tsuge’s works, or the endless one-shots I’ve collected along the way — are more or less off-limits for now. In this regard I have, and most likely always will, depend on the kindness of strangers.

The good news is the strangers are getting a little kinder with each passing year. Not just manga publishers like Dark Horse taking intelligent risks with titles like Hiroki Endo’s Tanpenshu, but Drawn & Quarterly bringing out Yoshihiro Tatsumi’s work, or Vertical, Inc. digging through most of Osamu Tezuka’s back catalog. Now joining their ranks are graphic-novel greats Fantagraphics, and their debut release in this category is a gorgeously-produced best-of collection from shojo manga creator Moto Hagio, A Drunken Dream and Other Stories. (Even apart from the content, the book is a keeper — a large-format hardback, in color, one of the best productions of its kind since something like the domestic printing of Seiichi Hayashi’s Red-Colored Elegy.)

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Let me start on as unambiguous a note as possible. Felipe Smith’s Peepo Choo is the manga title of the summer, possibly the manga title for the whole of 2010. It doesn’t just break new ground for manga, it paves it and puts parking stripes on it. It is raunchier than the last issue of Penthouse Variations you found behind someone else’s toilet, violent enough to knock the teeth from your face, and entirely too funny for its own good. It will raise one hell of a noise. It ought to.

After writing and throwing away a dozen other drafts of this review, I think I’ve managed to boil down to three basic points what makes this book such a blast of fresh air. One, as has been discussed at great length elsewhere, it’s one of the first manga titles — if not the first — created by a non-Japanese native, but published over in Japan before being licensed in English. Two, it uses its outlandish seinen plot (which reads like an overheated portion of, say, Black Lagoon) to make some fierce points about the very audience that might well be lining up for this thing. It has at least as much to say about otakudom as it does its cultural inverse, the fetishization of all things American (or at least Western) by some Japanese. Three, it does all this in exactly the style — not visual, but emotional — of the best manga: on one panel you’re getting your face slammed into the pavement, and then on the next you’re getting tickled until you can’t breathe. There’s a kind of genius in being able to do that and get away with it.

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Two things come to me on reading the second volume of Twin Spica. One, this is a gem of a series that deserves the broadest possible audience. Waste no time picking it up if a) you want to read a story that assumes the best and most ambitious in humanity, rather than its worst or most cowardly; or b) you have even the slightest interest in manga as something more than a way to show creative ways for people to get sliced in half.

Two, if Vertical Inc. editor Ed Chavez’s job description includes being on the lookout for titles like this, he has the best job in the world. He’s constantly scouring the planet (well, Japan) for manga that have that special Vertical something, and Spica has it in spades. It’s not so outlandish as to be alienating; it’s deeply felt without being sappy; and it plugs into something that people on both sides of the Pacific can tap into without needing a cross-cultural dictionary to decipher.

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I’m going to start this review with a position I fully expect others to find irritating at best and indefensible at worst. I hated Axis Powers Hetalia so much that for a long time I didn’t dare tell anyone how much I despised it.

The show has a strong fanbase, but I know better than to try and lecture people about taste. I only know that the show makes my stomach bubble and my temples pound in rage. Hetalia reminds me way too much of exactly the sort of nationalist, race-baiting propaganda produced by the very countries depicted in the show during WWII — including, I must add with no small amount of chagrin, the United States itself. That it tries to be cute and inoffensive only makes it all the uglier to me. And yes, I’m intimately familiar with the whole “Japan has very little political correctness as we understand it in the West” argument; it doesn’t make the damn thing any less uncomfortable for me to watch. There’s plenty of other stuff out there that I know I want to check out, and that I know isn’t going to give me a case of the sociological squicks.

(Pause for deluge of hate mail. Delete. Onward.)

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Most every society has mythologies that refuse to die even when there isn’t a shred of support for them. On the contrary: lack of evidence forces people to rely all the more on indestructible faith. Consider Japan’s long-standing fantasy that Yoshitsune never died, but instead escaped to Mongolia and became Chinggis Khan. Yasushi Inoue futilely sparred with the concept, and in his afterword to The Blue Wolf he mentioned how he’d attempted to read one “extremely tedious” defense of the idea before realizing the reality of the Khan’s life was far more interesting. The idea that the Genji general could have become the Mongolian warlord was only slightly less ridiculous than pigs achieving escape velocity unaided.

But aren’t crazy ideas, the exceptions to the rule, the very mainstay of fiction? Well, sure, up to a point, but after that they have to bring in things that don’t just rely on novelty and shock value. King of Wolves’s biggest problem is not that it recycles the Yoshitsune-is-Chinggis trope, but that the original story it tells is pedestrian. It also stirs in another trope Japanese pop culture resurrects too often for its own good: the Time Slip. You remember this from G.I. Samurai: people from the present day whisked away to the past; they realize they’re standing at the crossroads of history with the fate of the future in the balance; and so on. I don’t know about you, but if I was whisked off to 11th century Mongolia, I’d be more worried about dropping dead of typhoid than whether or not my actions were trashing the future. (And how is it that the characters in these stories come fully-equipped with an understanding of temporal mechanics, anyway?)

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Reading Twin Spica made me realize that outer space, like the Wild West before it, persists so fiercely in our cultural imagination because we have found so many ways to mythologize it. We named one of the first space shuttles Enterprise as a way of paying homage to a cultural force that made it possible. The more broadly we dream about space, the easier it becomes for our dreams to become real, and a society that doesn’t dream of where to go next — and worry about what we will become in the process — is staring at its own navel.

Yukinobu Hoshino’s 2001 Nights makes its mythologizing clear right from the title. The mythology of old (the cycle of tales from Arabia) and the mythology of the new (Kubrick and Clarke’s vision) work side by side here. From 2001 we get the arena and the technology; from the Nights, we get the way every situation becomes an opportunity to learn about human nature in miniature. It’s a mixed bag, as all anthologies tend to be, but at its best it is downright transcendent, and my only worry is that I’ll have that much more trouble unearthing future volumes.

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Here is a novel about the life and times of Chinggis (Genghis) Khan, which is as interested in the weather of his spirit as it is in the geography of the lands he conquered. It is a fascinating hybrid of two kinds of story — the sweeping historical epic and the intimate psychobiography. It starts as the latter, adds more ingredients of the former as it moves along, and by the end has turned into a striking fusion of the two. It may be fiction as far as the details of Chinggis’s life are concerned, but that simply means the facts Inoue synthesized for his story have the ring of emotional truth.

Inoue has long been regarded as one of Japan’s greatest historical novelists, something like that country’s version of James Michener (although Inoue’s books tend to run a great deal shorter). My favorite book of his so far remains Tun-Huang, where Inoue took a historical curiosity — a cave in ancient China inexplicably filled with Buddhist treasures — and created an epic adventure that does more in two hundred pages than many books do in a thousand. Here, he pulls off something about as good, and it never becomes turgid or overblown but remains lean, spare and direct all the way through.

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Space is the place.
— Sun Ra

When I was a kid, I didn’t just want to be an astronaut. I wanted everyone else to be one, too. I imagined it’d get real lonely up there if I was the only one in orbit.

Twin Spica is not, strictly speaking, about becoming an astronaut. It is about the longing to become one — the way a dream deferred (as Langston Hughes put it) can lodge in the soul like a splinter. Or it can become rocket fuel to drive you on past the stars, and inspire others to follow in your wake.

Spica posits a kind of alternate present-and-near-future for Japan’s space program. In 2010, Japan launches its own manned craft, “The Lion”, the culmination of decades of effort. The launch is a disaster: the ship crashes into a populated area and kills an untold number of people. The weight of that disaster has hung heavy across all of Japan — especially thirteen-year-old Asumi Kamogawa. Her mother was one of those that died because of the crash, leaving her with her overworked and underpaid father as the only parent for most of her life. Now, in 2024, Asumi quietly fills out an application to enter Tokyo Space School — without telling her father.

It’s not as if she wants to get out from under his thumb. He’s a good man, just beaten down by life, and he clings to his daughter a little more tightly than he probably should. When he finds out she’s planning to go, he’s upset — but more because this is a dream he wished she had shared with him sooner, and because his daughter’s dreams matter more to him than his own.

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The tattoo on Shoko Tendo’s back reaches all the way down both her legs, right to her ankles. It wasn’t always like that: when she had been embroiled in the yakuza lifestyle, it had only covered her back. Only after she left that world did she extend the inkwork that most people would have gone to no small lengths to hide. Here it is, she seemed to be saying. Take me as I really am.

Yakuza Moon is the sort of autobiography that no woman should ever have to write. Not simply because the yakuza is a male world, where women are accessories at best and chattel at worst, but because Tendo was born too close to that world to say no to it from the beginning. The damage that was inflicted on her became damage she in turn inflicted on herself. If half of what’s in the book is true, she is seven kinds of lucky to have escaped all of that — and many more kinds of strong, too. The book is also evidence of how most people’s greatest strengths are invisible to them, because they embody them naturally and don’t seek them out. She may not have felt strong, but she was.

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The name Oniroku Dan has come up occasionally here, most memorably when I talked about a movie bearing a title that expressed Dan’s autobiography as one declarative sentence: I Am An S&M Writer.

Dan (real name, Yoshihiko Kuroiwa) didn’t just write S&M. He practically made it into a one-dirty-old-man cottage industry. He wrote over a hundred novels that were probably sold in several forest’s worth of plain brown wrappers, and penned dozens of scenarios for films whose posters you wouldn’t want hanging in your living room when your parents came over. Not unless your dad happened to be Oniroku Dan — and if he was, you had bigger problems.

Some of Dan’s movies, like the infamous Flower and Snake, have shown up in English, but until Vertical brought out Season of Infidelity earlier this month nothing he’s written has been given the same treatment. Infidelity culls four stories from Dan’s back catalog, and what’s most fascinating is not the gamut of fetishes and perversities that Dan catalogs for the reader — that part’s pretty predictable — but the tone of the whole thing. Dan mines his various autobiographical anecdotes as much for sentimental self-pity as he does for salaciousness.