Results tagged “Guin Saga”

Wild cries of joy were to be heart at Chez Genji after Sentai Filmworks announced it had clinched a licensing deal for the Guin Saga anime. A splendid time will be had by all (who can afford it).

There are two things I hope come from this.

The first is wholly optional: the possibility that Sentai offer a BD set for the series as well as conventional DVD. I've seen episodes in HD and they're stunning; this feels like a show that was authored from the inside out, from the backgrounds to the characters themselves, to be shown that way. Many anime that have HD editions still have that simplified, for-TV look to them, since they were created at a time when the average display was low-def.

If we only get a standard-def set, I won't cry into my beer: the mere fact we have the show in a licensed version at all is enough to be happy about. But it would be nice to have the option, now that there's a sizeable market for it. I just hope the touch-and-go situations involving reverse-importing don't make this unfeasible.

The second item on the wish list is the real doozy: bring us more volumes of the original novels, in English. That's something more in Vertical's hands than Sentai's, and from all that has come back my way it is tough to say they could ever fulfill such a wish with the sales of Guin Saga being what they were.

Here's an idea, which I freely admit may be impossible to enact, but I'll toss it out there anyway: a rolling licensing deal for the Guin books, one pre-paid by fans.

The process would go something like this:

1. Crunch the numbers and figure out how much it costs to put a decent number of copies of the next five books in the series out into the marketplace. The books are licensed in batches of five, since the plot arcs tend to span five books at a time as well. The costs should include everything — licensing of the translation, translator's fees, licensing for artwork, etc.
2. Set up an account somewhere — maybe with Kickstarter — to pre-fund the licensing and production of each set of books.
3. Do some grassroots campaigning in and among fans of both the books and the TV series to get them to contribute.
4. Once the funding limit is met, roll the books out into the marketplace.
5. Lather, rinse, repeat.

The production costs could be further alleviated by using print-on-demand, especially since we're dealing with a series that has over 120 books plus side stories and bonus material. I don't know that the Japanese licensors would be willing to set up a more flexible licensing deal, allowing for low-volume printing, but the idea is certainly worth floating.

I suggest this approach as a way to break the peculiar stalemate that has arisen with this series, where a great deal of it — over a hundred books — remains behind the wall of another language. I know I want to read it, and I'd bet there's enough people out there willing to pony up ahead of time to see more of it.

What say you good people?

Amazon.com in Japan has just revealed another way for me to go broke: the Guin Saga animation artbook.

127 pages, ¥1000? Not too shabby. I'll save my pennies and see if it shows up at Kinokuniya once it's out (which is, apparently, sometime this week).

[Update: Link works now. My bad.]

Guin Saga gamebook

Something I forgot to mention about my last trip into the city for Vertical Vendesday. While at Book-Off, scouring for rarities, I bumped into something that surprised even Ioannis: a Guin Saga tie-in game book that amounted to a kind of Choose-Your-Own-Adventure story. Rather than just pick between choices every couple of pages, you roll dice and track your character's progress with a sheet, so it's a bit more RPG-style game-oriented than CYOA was. There's some terrible irony in that the closest analogy in anything released today would be something like Queens Blade. Ick.

As with so many other deaths so early on, it still doesn't seem real yet. Doubly unreal since I never met her in person and now I never will. Death is unfair to everyone on both sides of the divide.

Her name was Kaoru Kurimoto and she wrote a 120-volume-plus fantasy epic named Guin Saga that became a cornerstone in Japanese (and now possibly world) popular culture. A record most anyone would envy; for me, it was absolute proof no goal need be unattainable. And in her case, maybe a goal unfinished, but not unfulfilled. All it took was discipline, devotion, work — love, under it all, love for something that didn’t exist yet and which you had to bring into existence. Surely no greater love exists than for something that is impossible to others only because they can’t see what you see.

I wanted to meet her, as I want to meet so many people who’ve touched lives through their vision. I only knew her through her work, and only her work in translation, at that. “To translate is to betray”, say the Italians, but what middling sense I had of written Japanese told me Alex O. Smith hadn’t betrayed her. And on hearing she’d died with Guin Saga still ongoing I am ashamed to admit the first thing that came to mind was: Dammit, I hope we’re not left in suspense.

Maybe it isn’t possible to talk about the death of another without thinking of yourself first. Certainly not so soon after. Someone else dies, you mourn those left behind, all those things they left unfinished. Only by degrees does your attention turn back to all that was complete. I talk about the woman’s work and not the woman herself, if only because that’s what I know.

It was strange to read the first few volumes of Guin Saga, knowing that the series was still ongoing in Japan and that native Japanese readers had an unfair advantage over the rest of us. I touched on that peculiar feeling back when I looked at a recent manga adaptation of the first few installments (designed to be released in conjunction with the animated TV series). It was a little like pressing your ear to a wall and listening to the heated discussion raging on the other side: you could hear everything going on, but there were hints, nuances, subtle drops of meaning that you knew revolved around the fact that manga artist Hajime Sawada (or the crew that produced the TV series) had seen so much more of it than the rest of us had. They were acting out of that knowledge. The rest of us, stuck behind a language barrier, had to wait and wonder.

But under and above and despite all of that, there are the books themselves. Or, rather, the stories. A book’s an artifact; a story is a living thing not bound to any one piece of paper. So goes the theory, anyway. I remember buying a remaindered hardback copy of the first volume and throwing it in the trash in frustration because a good third of the book was a repeat of another third of the book due to a printing error. Imagine you’ve snuck into Star Wars, and right after the Star Destroyer roars overhead the film catches fire inside the projector.

But once I had clean copies in hand, and once Vertical, Inc. did Kurimoto the justice of issuing the self-contained cycle of the first five books in paperback, the whole Vision Thing she had established with her Japanese readers started to become clear to the rest of us. Director Werner Herzog once said that mankind is hungry for images, for transcendent visions, and without them he will starve. Kurimoto threw cap-V Visions on the page like she was bailing water out of the canoe of our collective psyche. A desert swept by amoebalike monsters; an army on a plain sweeping out in all four directions like a flowering monster; a city of crystal towers gone to sack; a giant rock in the middle of a desert of bones; a man with the head of a leopard.

But behind (and under, and above, and slightly to the left of) the vision, there’s the story. All the best stories are about somebody you care about. Kurimoto didn’t waste any time giving us someone who tugged at our heart even if we didn’t realize it at first. “The body of a gladiator, the head of a leopard, the heart of a hero” — I came up with that tagline after reading the first book and wondering when the hell we were going to see it on a movie poster. Kurimoto just threw him at us and let him land on his feet: right on the first place he’s face-down in a marsh with no memory, no history, no allegiances, no allies. And out of nothing but the force of sheer will and an underdog’s compassion he earns the label of Hero with a cap H. He sticks his leopard-spotted neck out all the way, every time, all the time. This, I told myself, is a hero — not, say, the whiny, self-important likes of Rand al’Thor from The Wheel of Time (which accomplished less in its elephantine dozen volumes than Guin did in the first five).

If there is a key difference between Japanese genre authors and their Western counterparts, apart from language, it appears to be this: Japanese writers are passionately unafraid of allowing you to empathize with and even weep for the people they create. Heart and soul: what awful words, beaten into pulpy shapelessness and threadbare meaninglessness by so much misuse. What a thing it is to open a book and see heart and soul leap back to life, to see someone putting heft and flesh on those stupid words again, to give you a hero that actually lived up to the label from the inside out.

Maybe that wasn’t even how the whole mission started. Yanni at Vertical once put it this way (I’m paraphrasing): she wanted to take every fantasy trope she could think of, mash it up, and make it work. She was telling, as he put it, a history for a world that didn’t exist a place with its own geography and biology and religion and culture and warfare and commerce and, yes, heroes. Guin was the linchpin around which all of it revolved: pull him out and the whole thing just flies off in all different directions. You need a hero at the center of something that big to give it heft and depth. That didn’t stop her from shifting her attention away from Guin for whole volumes. But that was always done in the context of the lives he’d touched; even the books where he isn’t there, even the scenes where he’s not present, a Guin-like spirit can be felt. It’s always been his story.

I could not tell you what, if any, plans have been assembled for Guin and his kingdom now that the queen has descended from the throne. I do know, though, that there are a hundred and fifteen more volumes of his story that aren’t in English yet, and the best tribute to her memory would be to continue to translate them however we can afford to do so. Publish-on-demand, digital download, whatever’s possible; knowing that the rest of her work is out there somewhere and yet unreadable is like only seeing one Kurosawa movie, reading one chapter of The Lord of the Rings, watching one episode of The Prisoner and knowing there was oh so much more just out of your reach. And I’m sick of living like that. And I hope a bunch more of you reading this get just as sickntired of it, if not more so, because that’s about the only way that stupid wall is ever gonna get knocked down.

I know now, I think, what I would have done if I had met her — that is, short of becoming a complete genuflecting nitwit fanboy, something I’ve had to sternly school myself out of time and again when other luminaries stepped into the room and took a seat. I would have thanked her, and I would have asked her this question: was Mr. Herzog right? Without some wild leap into the fantastic unknown, we starve and don’t even realize it — and she’s been keeping us fed all this time. Is that what she wanted? But in lieu of a definitive answer, I will believe she said Yes. Because, god knows, we’re not much of anything without a dream or three.

The last word I’ll leave to another man from another land in another language, but who seems to have been thinking the same thing.

My silken heart,
it’s filled with light;
with long-lost bells,
with lilies and bees.
I’ll go so very far,
past all those hills,
past all the seas,
near to the stars
and beg of Christ
the Lord give back
the soul I once had
when I was a child,
ripe with legends,
with a plumed cap
and a wooden sword.

— Federico Garcia Lorca

Guin Saga Author Kaoru Kurimoto Passes Away at 56 - Anime News Network

Kaoru Kurimoto, the mystery, fantasy, and historical novelist best known for her Guin Saga epic series, has passed away on Tuesday at 7:18 p.m. She was 56. She was in a Tokyo hospital due to pancreatic cancer which was diagnosed in 2007. She leaves behind her husband Kiyoshi Imaoka.

And a (126-volume) body of work.

I will have more to say when I'm not quite so shellshocked.

[EDIT: And I've gone and said it.]

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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.

I spent Saturday with my folks in Jersey, celebrating the birthday of a family friend, and then from there swung quickly through Manhattan to test out a theory I had about whether or not Google Street View was any good at helping me find curbside parking in a given neighborhood. The short answer: Yes, but bring change anyway, just in case. (Free parking on weekends is not totally dead in the city; it’s just one of those things that I’ve come to not count on at all.)

I swung through Book-Off — saw that one coming, didn’t you? — and nabbed a few goodies, among them the original novel of The Year of Living Dangerously.

Also snagged the first few untranslated Guin Saga books:

I’m planning on filing the originals next to the U.S. editions and using them as self-teaching tools, along with my copies of the Oldboy manga and a few other items that aren’t exactly classics (Sakura Taisen, cough cough) but are fine for the sake of readability and comprehension-building.

Another thing I stumbled across was — okay, nostalgia time — the soundtrack to the anime version of Peacock King. It's all hard-driving guitars, smoldering ballads and Emulator / CMI synth sounds, all guilty pleasures of mine. (They even made a live-action version of the story in Hong Kong, which I should cover one day if I can ever find a decent DVD of it.)

On the way back to the car ....

As the Beatles once said, "A fine time was had by all."

The Guin Saga anime has appeared. And from what I can tell, it is good. I don't think an American licensing deal has been set up yet, but I'd bet the phone lines between the U.S. and Japan are burning up right about now for the sake of one. For now, we have the novels to keep us busy (and the untranslated manga, too), but I'm already filling a jar with change for when the DVD / BD comes out domestically.

That said, the show looks a little something about like .... this:

The trailer for the Guin Saga anime has hit YouTube.

We must have this in English as soon as humanly possible.

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Sometimes it’s hard to remain a skeptic when all the evidence is splayed out right in front of you. The fanboy in me screams to accept the Guin Saga manga as nothing short of The Real Deal — a name-taking and ass-kicking comic adaptation of what has quickly become my favorite fantasy series. The art’s detailed and powerful, the action hits fast and furious, and the whole thing is over way too soon (always a good sign for me). So how come I still feel a little, I dunno … hesitant?

Chalk it up, I guess, to something you could call Geek Nerves. Within every fanboy lies a germ of terror that the things they most look forward to will be mangled horribly. The second-stage version of this paranoia is even worse: they’ll be mangled horribly but only in a way they find egregious, so they won’t even get to share the pain with their fellow fans (or anyone else). Or the work in question gets within 98% of its goal, only to take the remaining 2% and augur headfirst into a wall with it.

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A major hallmark of pop-culture success in Japan is how many times your work’s been adapted or reincarnated. What starts as a manga might turn into a TV anime, an animated feature film (or a whole bunch of them), a light novel, a literary novel, a drama CD / radio play, a live-action film, a stage musical … and I probably haven’t covered half of the derivatives out there in this list. If you’re big in Japan, you don’t just “cross over”; you break on through to the other side.

That makes it something of a curiosity as to why, until very recently, there was no manga adaptation of the perennially-best-selling fantasy series Guin Saga, now one hundred forty volumes and climbing. Us Yanks were lucky enough to see the first five books — the self-contained “Marches Episode” — translated into English thanks to the good graces of Vertical, Inc., but the Irish bookie in me is not about to pay on any odds that we’ll even come close to seeing the rest — not in my lifetime, anyway.

A big part of why I was hot in the biscuit to see a Guin manga in the first place was as an end run around the language barrier: if I couldn’t read the books, then the very least I could do was see what was going on, and maybe cobble together some semblance of comprehension from my own limited command of Japanese. When a Guin manga did come into existence (The Seven Magi), it was not from the main story itself, but derived from one of a number of gaiden or “side stories” — novels written to fill the gaps between one phase of the saga and another. I enjoyed it, but it only made me all the more curious as to what a manga adaptation of the main line of Guin novels would be like.

Since when have I ever passed up an excuse to go into the city? Not in this lifetime, and probably not in the next one either. The excuse this time was a work meeting with some folks from Microsoft, but after that I made several stops along the way — some familiar haunts, and a one new one.

On the "new" side: Muji, the Japanese "no frills" store, something like a Nipponese version of Ikea. The store they'd opened near Times Square recently earned a story in the Times — especially since they're right around the corner from the offices of said paper — but this was the first time I stopped in. It won't be the last. The goodies on sale include everything from recycled paper products (with wonderful textures) to house 'n home implements of all kinds. I plan on coming back for some of those horribly comfortable polyurethane seat cushions.

Next stop: Kinokuniya, where I picked up the latest Monochrome Factor for a friend, and stumbled across a couple of other delights besides — among them, The Blue Wolf, a fictional history of Genghis Khan by none other than Yasushi Inoue. I'm planning to check that out in conjunction with Mongol and the Genghis Khan movie that FUNimation picked up recently, as a nice three-fer package of reviews. (No, I am not going to include The Conqueror. John Wayne as Genghis Khan? Get your heads out of your butts, people.)

From there, the other side of Bryant Park: Book-Off. I never leave there empty-handed, and this trip was no exception.

• What — another graphic-novel adaptation of The Guin Saga!? Yes, apparently so, although the low reviews on Amazon.jp seem to reflect a problem I had with the product myself: the art's excellent in some respects (Rinda and Remus look great, and so does Lady Amnelis) but dinky in others (Guin's face looks entirely too much like a mask — stiff and unemotional in all the wrong ways. The Seven Magi manga does a far better job of making Guin look like a character, not just a stage prop. But, still — any Guin is better than no Guin.
  
• Shocking Crimes of Postwar Japan has as lurid a title as they come, but get past that and it's quite an informative little volume. A full review to come, but one complaint I have right off the bat: why no coverage of the stupefying Junko Furuta case, easily as infamous as anything out there? (I'll probably grab Tokyo Confidential as a follow-up.)
• Most of us know Paprika from the anime, but the original novel — by Yasutaka Tsutsui — has never been translated into English. I bumped into a manga adaptation that appears to be much closer to the novel than the movie was. I may take a stab at translating it just to get an idea, but the novel desperately needs to be brought over here ... especially since a couple of Tsutsui's other (and probably lesser) works have already crossed the pond.
• In the CD section I bumped into one of those lovely little rarities that seem to come my way: a collection of compositions by Osaka-based musician Hiroki (sometimes Hiroshi) Okano. A more detailed review to come, for sure, but what I've heard is impressive.
  

And to think those were all $3-$5 each.

I haven't read the Twilight books. I probably never will, at this rate. After all the negative press from people whose tastes I trust, the well has been poisoned so thoroughly that not even a Superfund cleanup would help.

What I have heard about the books set off alarm bells all up and down my critical faculties, so you can imagine my surprise when I read a critique of the books from a story-construction POV and found that other people were already roasting Twilight for things I suspected it was guilty of. One of the biggest was the relationship between the two principal characters, which sounded creepy / stalkerish in a way that didn't serve the story in the slightest.

Then I read this gem, on a board dedicated to giving the Twilight books a thorough dressing-down:

... just because something is fantasy does not mean it is unrealistic. The object of writers is to make you believe the story they are telling ... A good fantasy can utilize the idea of soulmates (like Richard and Kahlan in Terry Goodkind's Sword of Truth series) while still taking time to develop the relationship and the characters in a believable fashion. Attraction =/= everlasting love. Everlasting love happens when you get two people who understand, respect, and enjoy the other in terms of personality and character. Edward's hotness and Bella's delicious blood do not a soulmate make. And justifying the pitiful relationship development with "it's fantasy" is only a crude cop-out reserved for those with no understanding of good storytelling. [*]

That sums it so succinctly there's very little I can add on my own, but here goes.

The other day a friend of mine who'd read both Summerworld and The Four-Day Weekend mentioned that she liked Summerworld, but adored 4DW. The former was fantasy, albeit well-tooled; the latter was her life writ small, and there was so much in it that she recognized and was able to plug right into. I admitted that had been exactly what I was aiming for, but with both books: in Summerworld there's a lot that goes on which is outlandish and fantastic, but it's all rooted in real human need and behavior. It doesn't come out of (or go into) a vacuum. I don't mind a story that features people who suck each other's blood and turn into monsters. I do mind a story that would pretend the logical emotional consequences of such things can be simply hand-waved aside or turned into emotional pornography — which, from the sound of it, is what Twilight's really, really good at.

People are not heroes because the author tells us so, but because the heroes go out and demonstrate their heroism. Guin is a hero: he sticks his neck out first when there's trouble; he takes responsibility for his actions when they fail and credits those who helped him when they succeed; he keeps his sense of humor about him; he never says die. He makes Edward look like the flabby, sullen wimp he is. Now: which one of these two book franchises is currently selling like mad?

The transcript of the podcast I participated in along with the folks from Ninja Consultant is now live. And if by some ridiculous twist of fate you haven't yet read the Guin books — well, go get them right now before I have to beat someone up.

Friday night I sojourned into Manhattan for a visit to the small but gloriously productive offices of Vertical, Inc. for a roundtable discussion about the Guin Saga books, hosted by none other than Vertical's Editorial Director, Ioannis Mentzas.

Joining us was Erin Finnegan from PopCultureShock:

The whole conversation was quite complex and meandering, but in the best way for each. I'll link to a copy of the whole thing when it goes up.

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The best thing about the fifth book in the Guin Saga is, in a way, also the worst thing. At last, the five-volume “Marches Episode” — the first five of the hundred-plus Guin novels — has come to the smashing conclusion it deserves. But while it ends with a bang (and a roar, and a whoosh), it also leaves behind so many tantalizing hints and so many as-yet-unanswered questions that it’s not so much an ending as a pause for breath. We know there’s more … just not here, and not in English. I could lament that fact until they carted me off, but I’d rather celebrate the fact that we got this far at all.

Over the course of the previous volumes we’ve followed Guin, he of the body of a gladiator and the head of a leopard, out of the forbidding Roodwood and into the wastes of the Nospherus. He’s become self-appointed guardians of the royal twins Rinda and Remus, been chased by the armies of the Mongaul empire, made tentative allies out of the simian Sem to protect their lands against invasion, and headed ever deeper into the wasteland to find and enlist the fabled (many would say fictional) Lagon in their ongoing fight.

Article originally written for AMN. Click here to read full text.

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I’m going to use an adjective to describe the fourth Guin Saga book, Prisoner of the Lagon, which might seem completely out of place for this most fast-moving and hard-hitting of adventures: introspective. After the full-bore action extravaganzas of the first three volumes, book four slows things down just a bit — but a slowdown here is akin to downgrading to “only” a Lexus from a Lamborghini. There’s still a lot happening between the covers, just in new realms.

Lagon gives us two parallel plots: Guin traversing the far reaches of the Nospherus wastes to enlist the aid of the barbaric Lagon in his fight against the Gohran armies; and intrigue within the ranks of the Gohran forces themselves. Each one ends up a fair distance from where it starts. The former storyline begins with Guin struggling against the elements and enemies of nature, but transforms into a vision quest within Guin’s memory and spirit. The latter presents us with what sounds like a sure-fire formula for gleeful mayhem: the cutthroat and cutpurse Istavan sneaks into the Mongaul army and masquerades as one of their number. But that story, too, evolves from one of subterfuge into something more unexpected and even touching.

Article originally written for AMN. Click here to read full text.

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Article originally written for AMN. Click here to read full text.

Purchases benefit
this site.

The story, as set up in the first two volumes, overlays the two-fisted pulp adventure of Edgar Rice Burroughs with the color and immediacy of a seinen action manga. At front and center is our hero, Guin, sporting the body of an Adonis and the head of a leopard, unable to remember his past before being discovered face-down in a no-man’s-land swamp. Flanking him, the Royal Twins of Parros, Rinda and Remus, the ones who stumble across a half-dead Guin, revive him, and earn him as their protector and companion. Alongside them is the mercenary Istavan, as quick with his snide tongue as he is with his sword, although he tries to get far more mileage out of the former than the latter. And finally, behind them and gaining fast in hot pursuit, the female general Lady Amnelis, commanding the armies of the Mongaul nation.

Article originally written for AMN. Click here to read full text.

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This may sound paradoxical, but I have more fun writing about the hard sell than the easy sell. The easy sell, I almost fall asleep at the keyboard: Great series, but you know that, you’re probably buying it as I type this, zzz. The hard sell, I have to actually talk about the thing, instead of just remind people of what they probably already know.

So it goes with the Guin Saga Manga — the comic adaptation of one of the later books in the Guin Saga series, currently being released in paperback to what I hope will be a receptive and enthusiastic audience on this side of the Pacific. The manga, a three-volume cycle that covers a side story set much later in the Guin timeline than the novels we’re currently seeing, doesn’t require that you read any of Guin to understand what’s going on, but it does enhance the experience all the more. I still encouraged people to go out and snap up the first book sight unseen if they wanted a taste of something off the beaten path, and the second graphic novel keeps up the same level of exotic fascination.

Article originally written for AMN. Click here to read full text.