Results tagged “Taishō / Showa”

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Back when Mangajin was still in print, they ran regular installments of a 4-koma comic named A Visual Glossary of Modern Terms (Zusetsu Gendai Yōgo Benran), which mercilessly dissected all those quirky little aspects of modern life, and with great visual flair. E.g., here’s a gallery of people you’d meet in a dark alley, ranked and rendered like monsters in a console RPG. (Hint: Button-mashing will not help you here.)

I suspect most people reading this have never read, let alone heard of, Visual Glossary, which is a big part of why I held off paralleling it to Sayonara, Zetsubo-sensei for so long. But here we are, five volumes in, and a better parallel has yet to suggest itself. Others have described Zetsubo as a harem story (sure, maybe a harem story on heroin), but the harem stuff is there mostly to provide Koji Kumeta for a container into which to pour his jaundiced observations about modern Japan being a den of duplicity, cowardice, back-stabbing, insincerity and buck-passing. Still others, me included, have simply described Zetsubo-sensei as really freakin’ funny. That also works.

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

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If there’s a difference between a cliché and a trope, it’s that a trope can be the start of something great, but a cliché is where things end up, often being not-so-great. Nightmare Inspector has its own internal set of tropes, but they never bottom out into cliché. We have Hiruko the baku, an intriguing narrator with motives of his own, with an instinct for things being askew. Said instinct leads him into the ugly spaces in people’s lives that are never what they seem like at first (or even second) glance. Think of Georges Simenon’s Inspector Maigret, turning over rocks in Paris’s darker corners and finding human monsters. Here, it’s 1920s Tokyo, and it’s every bit as decadent and seamy if not more so.

It’s either great or terrible that the first chapter of volume 7 is the best thing in the whole book — possibly even the series as a whole. Great, because right from the start you get a sense of just what sort of heights this series can rise to. Terrible, because while the rest of the adventures in the book are still inspired, they come in a distant second. Put this episode last and it would have had even more impact. Said episode gives us a manga-ka who’s come to the Silver Star to have one of his dreams investigated — a dream which is itself in the form of a four-panel manga. The whole way this is depicted is nothing short of brilliant; it’s as much a commentary on manga as an art form as it is a clever use of the medium for the sake of the story.

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

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A depressed young man came to see Hazel Dreis, the bookbinder. He said, “I’ve decided to commit suicide.” She said, “I think it’s a good idea. Why don’t you do it?” — John Cage, Indeterminacy

That Hazel, she sure didn’t stand still for anyone’s b.s. Had she met Nozomu Itoshiki, the titular character of Koji Kumeta’s Sayonara, Zetsubo-sensei, she would most likely have sent him schlepping with a smack to the back of the head: Look, kid, either do it or don’t do it, but for chrissakes don’t come here and advertise to me about it.

Some people have issues; Itoshiki has entire subscriptions. Itoshiki, you see, is in love with the idea of suicide. Not actually committing suicide, you see, but the idea of committing suicide. He’s so in love with the concept of killing himself out of sheer despondency, he’s never gotten around to doing it. Zetsubo-sensei, they call him. Professor Despair. The only sensible reaction to this corrupt world from such a sensitive, tormented soul as him is to find a branch, sling a noose over it, and hang himself by the neck until dead, dead, dead.

But wait. If he actually follows through on his death wish, then he can no longer collar strangers on the street and fulminate at them re: the wretchedness of life as we are condemned to live it. To that end, he elects to kill himself in ways that seem prime for interruption, like hanging himself in public or throwing himself under trains. If at first you don’t succeed, die, die again.

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

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After a certain point, most manga hit a kind of a plateau. They’ve set up the basic situation, and for the next however many volumes they’re going to run through variations on it like John Coltrane riffing for a solid hour on “My Favorite Things”. The good manga spiral out from their original inspiration and find new and wonderful places to go, like Coltrane did; the mediocre ones just repeat themselves, or run aground.

With volume 4, Nightmare Inspector feels like it’s hit a plateau — but not in the sense that it’s becoming redundant. It’s found a groove that works and is exploring it, and it’s also taking the occasional detour back into the roots of its premises — the former life of Hiruko, the baku, among other things, which provides plenty of meat for future twists. So maybe it hasn’t plateaued at all, and it certainly hasn’t peaked. Even if the plotting runs aground in this series, I’ll probably still snap it up for the artwork, the decadent 1920s Tokyo atmosphere that drips off every page — and the grim little twist ending that caps off every chapter, like a razor between the ribs.

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Horrors of Malformed Men isn’t really an adaptation of any one, or even two, or even three stories by Japanese mystery/horror icon Edogawa Rampo. It’s like a movie version of one of those jazz jam sessions where the band somehow manages to segue between “Melancholy Baby”, “My Favorite Things” and “Sweet Sue, Just You”. Or, in this case, “The Human Chair”, “The Stalker in The Attic”, the story that also inspired Shinya Tsukamoto’s Gemini, and probably three or four others I lost track of somewhere. It doesn’t make a lick of sense, but it’s not meant to: it’s an assault on sense, sensibilities and the senses, all at the same time.

Recanting the plot of a movie like this is pure chicanery. There is a plot, but if you wrote it down and submitted it in a writing class you’d get a long, sad talk from your professor about it. The story, such as it is, is not just lifted wholesale from various Rampo stories but used to evoke the same eerie, decadent, surreal atmosphere that came through in all of his writing. The recent anthology film Rampo Noir did a wonderful job of communicating that same erotic/grotesque or ero-guro sentiment. Men is even more feverish and unhinged, and has the added street cred of political incorrectness in its own country, relegating it to only the occasional midnight-movie screening and rampant bootlegging.

Because so much of what I'm doing with Tokyo Inferno requires research and documentation, I've been building a bookshelf of titles to keep close at hand while writing the book. Many of the things listed here I've mentioned before, or reviewed separately, but I thought it would be instructive to have them all listed here in some form. (Check back here for updates.)

• Eros Plus Massacre [Wiki], Yoshishige Yoshida's 3-plus hour postmodern epic on the life of anarchist Sakae Ōsugi, was cut to shreds on its initial release when the daughter of the real-life Ōsugi protested the movie as an invasion of privacy. It's since been restored to its original length, but there is no English-subtitled edition out there yet. Stunning filmmaking, and an almost casually brilliant evocation of its period as well.
  
• Seijun Suzuki's Taishō Trilogy of movies — Zigeunerweisen, Kagero-za, and Yumeji — evoke the atmosphere, morals, moods and also the terrors and pleasures of the era, too. The DVD transfers are subpar, sadly — these films absolutely deserve to be seen in theaters for the best possible impact — but grab them as rentals from NetFlix if you're not up to dropping $40-50 for the whole set.
  
• No discussion of the Taishō/Showa era's atmosphere and mood would be complete without at least some Edogawa Rampo, right? Black Lizard is probably your best place to start with that if you haven't already — in fact, I'd wager it's the single most accessible book I'll put on this list, so it deserves the top spot. Go grab it if you haven't already; those of you who are mystery / thriller fans will have a rollicking old-school good time with it.
  
• I still haven't written a review of Yasunari Kawabata's achingly beautiful novel The Scarlet Gang of Asakusa, unavailable in English until only a few scant years ago, but at this rate I won't be able to until after I finish writing this book — every time I sit down to talk about the book I fall into random babbling fanboy gushing instead of a proper discussion. But as far as Tokyo Inferno goes, Asakusa was instrumental in cementing a good deal of my fascination with that moment in time after the 1923 earthquake.
  
• Another aesthetic influence (and another one that I haven't discussed yet) is Izumi Kyōka's In Light of Shadows, an author from the Meiji/Taishō period who worked in the Japanese equivalent of the gothic tradition. I ought to pick up the other book of Kyōka's work available in English (simply titled Japanese Gothic Tales), but that will most likely happen after November is done with.
  
• I was actually trying not to list manga here, if only because it's a bad idea to do any kind of historical research with them — you might as well try to pass the bar exam after watching a few seasons of L.A. Law. Still, I'm including Nightmare Inspector not because of any historical accuracy, but because it's got the mood and tone of its period down pat, and it looks nifty. [More reviews]
  
• Herbert Bix's biography of Hirohito serves as a good way to establish historical background for the period, although I think I'll need to dig up some more specific information on the Russo-Japanese War (which is partial prelude to the goings-on in the story). Most of the book focuses on the emperor himself rather than the country at the time, but it is still valuable.
  

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If you love a series because it plays to a whole array of personal fascinations, is that a bad thing? Nightmare Inspector is an anthology of things I adore without apology — 1920s Japan, gorgeously dreamy art, and of course manga itself — but at the same time, I know I’d be doing a disservice to anyone reading this if I didn’t review it instead of simply gushing about it.

And so with the third volume, the series has settled into a comfortable formula, although one where they ring enough twists on the basics to make it perennially interesting instead of leaden and repetitive. Each night a new customer comes to the Silver Star Tea House, seeking the aid of Hiruko the baku or dream-eater. He’ll devour their nightmares for them, and often play amateur psychoanalyst while doing so … but what his clients find is not always what they have been seeking. The way each search is visualized and played off is a big part of the fun, and the conclusions to each story often involve a clever O. Henry-style twist. There’s very little meta-plot in this particular volume, and so the individual stories tend to be highly self-contained, but the few times such connections come up they hint at a larger and more all-encompassing storyline that’s only just now being hinted at.

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

I spent most of the last two days highballing NyQuil and wishing I didn't feel like red-hot pokers were being shoved into my eyesockets. That's right — Con Crud (or Con Staph, ha ha), which is rather surprising since I felt more than fine after I left, followed pretty scrupulous self-sanitization measures, and haven't gotten a case of serious consickness since about 2003 or so.

So I dosed myself, and slept — or tried to — and was plunged into a fever nightmare the likes of which I hadn't experienced in a long time. The good news is that fever dreams are, for me, usually a source of inspiration.

The dream was set in Japan's Taishō Era — sort of the Roaring Twenties of Japan, but also suffused with a heavy dose of dread and deathly decadence. Kawabata's novel The Scarlet Gang of Asakusa and Edogawa Rampo's detective thriller The Black Lizard both do a great job of encapsulating the aroma and flavor of the era — the former in a more literary way, and the latter in the guise of pulp fiction.

My dream, though, revolved around a young man who was caught in the Kantō Earthquake and finds himself curiously "unstuck in time". He journeys to the past before the devastation of the quake, and finds comfort there in things he remembers, but that comfort soon turns out to be short-lived — everything that was familiar and happy there quickly turns strange and terrible. He returns to the present, but there finds himself pursued by hellish apparitions bent on consuming his soul. He finds some shelter with a spirit medium, but even she isn't able to help him. The only answer lies in the future ...

... and if I start talking about how all that works out, I'll ruin one of the best reasons to read it when I finish writing it. Which, by my best estimates, will probably start sometime in, oh, November. Hint, hint.

One key thing is the look and feel of the whole work, which is hard to put into words. My closest point of comparison would be the art of Suehiro Maruo — he of the phantasmagorically evil Mr. Arashi's Amazing Freak Show, the brilliant if also vile Ultra-Gash Inferno, and many others that will probably never see print in the U.S. at this rate. His nostalgia for the Taishō-era look and feel comes through in all of his works — even the ones that are allegedly set in the present day — and so does an all-pervading sense of unease, something else I want to capture in this thing when i write it.

I even have a tentative title: 関東地獄 Kantō Jigoku, or Tokyo Inferno. Kantō is the Eastern part of Japan that contains Tokyo, and there is a certain cachet associated with using that word, although in English "Tokyo" carries more of a meaning than "Kantō", sadly. Hence the substitution.

I'll be tagging posts about this and setting up a separate category for it before long.

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The more I see of Nightmare Inspector, the more I hope it doesn’t just slip through the cracks and go unnoticed. This has to be one of Viz’s better mainstream acquisitions, a title that satisfies both me the critic and me the fan — and while I can often make one or the other happy, you know how hard it is to get both of them to smile?

The first volume introduced us to Hiruko, a baku or dream-eater in human form who holds court in the Silver Star Tea House. Those with nightmares come seeking to dispel them with Hiruko’s aid, and discover things about themselves, not always good, in the process. The unconscious, as Hiruko knows well, is more than just a feeding ground for a baku — it’s a place where the strangest demons can come to life without warning. What’s more, just when you think you’ve plumbed the meaning of what you’ve experienced, it turns out there’s yet another layer to it all.

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

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Japan’s Taishō era, so named for its emperor then, lasted from 1910 to 1925 — a time obsessed with death and downfall. Suicide pacts, madness, and perversity filled the popular culture of the era, as documented in places like Edogawa Rampo’s mystery novels, and real-life disasters like the Great Kantō Earthquake of 1923 only further hammered home the darkness of the age. The era also sported a distinct and lush visual aesthetic all its own, and modern-day cultural cultivations like Lolita-Goth and visual kei arguably have their roots in the Taishō-era look (and its decadence) as well. It’s one of the most criminally underused periods in manga and anime, if only because it bursts with endless visual tropes and thematic undercurrents that fairly cry out to be put to use.

You now know one of the biggest reasons I was immediately enthralled by Nightmare Inspector: the atmosphere. It’s set in a gorgeously manga-fied Taishō-era Tokyo, where streetcars rattle dismally up and down the steamy avenues, mercury-vapor lamps barely cut through the haze and street signs and movie posters are all written in the same elegantly spidery script. In a rundown, out-of-the-way teahouse, an improbably handsome young man named Hiruko holds court, with only the maidservant as his occasional company. Hiruko is a baku, a “dream-eater” in human form, and those who come to him for aid are plagued by nightmares that only he can dispel. He can do away with the nightmares, but at a cost … and typically that cost is the torment of having to relive the nightmare and discover its true, often soul-jarring meaning.

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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).

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Shuji Terayama is one of many Japanese filmmakers who remains almost wholly unrepresented in the West, much to our detriment. He created both experimental and “mainstream” cinema, the former best known through movies like Throw Away Your Books, Let’s Go Out into the Streets and the scandalous Emperor Tomato Ketchup. Most of his work was done under the auspices of the avant-garde Art Theatre Guild, and in doing so he collaborated with many staple countercultural figures from Japan’s Sixties and Seventies. But he’s never had much of his work issued domestically. When his movies are seen at all, they’re usually in the form of blurry bootlegs or tattered prints screened at private showings. To that end, whenever any of his movies show up in English-language editions at all, it’s something to celebrate.

Grass Labyrinth might qualify as one of his most widely-seen films, since it was released both on its own and as part of the anthology production Private Collections. That film also contained shorts by Just Jaeckin (he of Gwendoline and Emmanuelle infamy) and Walerian (The Beast) Borowczyk, which is why it is linked to this review in lieu of a standalone edition.  And since the U.S. DVD of that film is the only decent way to see Labyrinth I was initially inclined to review all three at once — but Terayama’s movie so far overshadowed the others, I decided a review of Labyrinth alone would be more than worth it.

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When Kōji Suzuki’s novel Ring, the basis for whole franchises of movies on both side of the Pacific, was published in English not long ago, I commented to a friend that English-speaking audiences are now finally seeing the literary side of Japan that the Japanese themselves experience and not simply the literature they offer up to the rest of the world. There’s more to this than simply “trying to understand the Japanese psyche”, or some equally stilted pseudo-psychological explanation. The reason people want to read such things and see them translated into English — myself included — is because there’s a lot of really good work to be read there. Dozens of authors, whole genres of work, are as-yet-untapped. Translating all of that into English increases the size of its potential audience by at least an order of magnitude.

Edogawa Rampo is a case in point. For decades he was probably the most famous and influential mystery author in Japan, a country which had devoured mystery novels in translation from English but had few creators of its own. Rampo (a pen name coined from a Nipponification of Edgar Allan Poe) changed all that. He wrote grotesque psychological mysteries that were something of a genre unto themselves, and which are not only appreciated today but have been revisited endlessly as movies — Rampo Noir and Gemini, just to name two recent examples. After the Second World War and the difficulties he encountered with censorship, he actually broadened his approach instead of narrowing it; he wrote works for younger audiences, became an influential critic and exponent of mystery and detective fiction, and even managed to personally oversee a translation of a meager selection of his works into English through the venerable Charles S. Tuttle publishing house. That one volume, Japanese Tales of Mystery and Imagination, has been about all anyone has ever read of Rampo’s work in English until now.

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A man who builds himself a chair inside which he hides, the better to seduce a woman without her ever knowing it; a man who commits the “perfect” crime and discovers all too late he’s been a little too perfect about it; a man who builds a mirrored prison for himself and in it discovers madness or ecstasy — you decide; a wife who discovers her own fetish for cruelty when her husband returns home from the war with his body a ruined lump of flesh. Among the most remarkable things about these stories is not that they are from a Japanese author, nor even how striking and powerful they are, but that they were written many decades ago by a man now recognized as that country’s grand master of mystery and horrific fantasy: Edogawa Rampo, he who chose for his pen name a Nipponification of Edgar Allan Poe and remains one of the most criminally underpublished writers in any major genre.

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Some movies are about plots and characters and stories, and some movies are about images and sounds and feelings. Rampo Noir starts in the second category — it’s a deliriously beautiful movie — but gradually backs into the first. It does not, however, make the mistake of explaining so much about itself that it ends up in the same category as Silent Hill, where we got so much explanation that everything else became moot. And it also stars Tadanobu Asano, easily my favorite Japanese actor of the moment, making himself as inscrutable and fascinating to watch as only he can.

The name “Edogawa Rampo” means nothing to most Westerners, but in Japan it’s the name Edgar Allan Poe, Nipponified (try saying it out loud) and adopted by author Hirai Taro as his pseudonym. Rampo claimed Poe as a major literary influence, along with Maurice Leblanc and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and wrote dozens of stories and novels in that vein. Like almost every successful author, his works have been adapted to film — Shinya Tsukamoto’s Gemini (which this movie resembles in many ways), The Watcher in the Attic, The Boy Detectives, Blind Beast (and Teruo Ishii’s Blind Beast vs. Killer Dwarf) were all adapted from his work.

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The doctor always wondered, idly, what was obscured by his wife’s faulty memory. Being an ex-army surgeon, and having seen the worst of the Russo-Japanese war, a trauma of the mind was hard for him to fathom. A scarred face, a scarred body — but not a scarred soul. She’s clearly disturbed, but can’t remember why. And in the rather smothering atmosphere of his house, where he practices medicine with his ailing mother and his sullen adoptive father, there’s little chance of her feeling normal.

This is the premise for Shinya Tsukamoto’s Gemini, which loosely adapts an Edogawa Ranpo short story and turns it into a movie of remarkable power. Tsukamoto is of course the “punk” director of such techno-modern nightmares as Tetsuo the Iron Man, Tokyo Fist and Bullet Ballet. His early productions were done under the collective name of the “Man-Sized Monster Theater,” and his focus has long been on monsters in human form in the modern era. With Gemini, he plunges into the early part of Japan’s 20th century — the dawn of Japan’s modern times — and finds monsters there as well.