Tag: Japanese gothic

Vampire Hunter D

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Vampire Hunter D is the first in a (still-ongoing) series of science fantasy novels written by Hideyuki Kikuchi and illustrated by the legendary Yoshitaka Amano. This first volume was published in 1983; and, in 1985, it was adapted into a film-length, direct-to-video animation that became a cult classic in the 1990s, when circles of genre fiction fans discovered ultraviolent sci-fi anime like Akira and Ghost in the Shell.   

I will admit that I was never able to get into the anime, whose art style doesn’t appeal to me personally, but I recently became interested in the novel series after rereading Gene Wolfe’s The Book of the New Sun. Wolfe’s tetralogy is perhaps the defining work of the “dying earth” genre of speculative fiction, in which human civilization has decayed to a medieval level after a global disaster in the far future.

Vampire Hunter D is set roughly ten thousand years in the future, when what remains of humankind lives in isolated settlements supported by barely-functional robots and occasionally policed by traveling bounty hunters sent from the Capital, which is filled with ruins but nevertheless seems to be the last city of any size. The story takes place on the Frontier, which has a pseudo-American “Weird West” sort of atmosphere that will perhaps be familiar to fans of Stephen King’s Dark Tower series.

Lurking above the ranches and saloons and cowboys are the remnants of a European-style aristocracy, who live in gigantic castles fortified by hypermodern surveillance technology. The Nobility, as they’re called, are immortal. Through various genetic alterations, they’ve come to resemble mythical vampires, and they’re proud to refer to themselves as such. Though the scattered Nobility are capable of artificially manufacturing their own nutrition, they have grown cruel and proud, and some terrorize humans for sport.

Doris Lang, a seventeen-year-old girl who manages her late father’s ranch outside of a small and dusty town on the Frontier, has fallen victim to the attention of the local vampire lord, Count Magnus Lee. Knowing that it’s only a matter of days before she’s either taken by the vampire or exiled by her fellow townspeople, Doris stands on the highway and waylays travelers in hopes of finding a professional hunter who specializes in handling monstrous mutants.

In a brilliant stroke of luck, the first hunter Doris encounters is one of the greatest, a vampire hunter who goes simply by the initial “D.” Though he appears to be a beautiful young man, D is a mixed-species dhampir who possesses the superhuman powers of vampires without most of their weaknesses. For his own mysterious reasons, D consents to be “hired” by Doris for no other payment than room and board.

The ancient Count Magnus, who is backed by his beautiful but deadly daughter Larmica, will not be easy to defeat. To make matters even more complicated, vampires are the least of the dangers threatening the humans who live on the Frontier, and D will also have to contend with werewolves, witches, outlaws, and lynch mobs if he hopes to keep Doris safe. There are eight chapters in Vampire Hunter D, and each presents its own unique set of villains. All of these threats eventually converge into a perfect storm of danger; but, in the end, it all comes down to a battle between D and the vampire lord.    

There’s a great deal of action in Vampire Hunter D, all of which is translated in a quick and punchy style by Kevin Leahy. There’s a somewhat shonen manga style to the action scenes, in which each of the characters performs a series of special attacks that have a rock-paper-scissors way of canceling one another out. I’m not generally a fan of action scenes in prose fiction, but Kikuchi’s sense of pacing is excellent, as is the creativity devoted to D’s opponents.

I’m also impressed by how lowkey horny this book is. Stories about vampires are infamously erotic, but Vampire Hunter D has a more universal Frank Frazetta style of sexualization. Gender, age, and even species don’t matter; everyone gets the same “Vaseline on the camera lens” treatment. As with the monster-of-the-week action scenes, I found this 1980s pulp fiction style of writing to be extremely charming.

It’s perhaps because of the nostalgic charm that I didn’t mind the story’s relative lack of psychological depth or complexity. Though she’s capable of defending herself against lesser monsters, Doris is a classic damsel in distress, and D remains mysterious from start to finish. D’s opponents seem to be evil simply because they’re evil, and even Count Magnus doesn’t have a personality that goes deeper than the usual vampire tropes. His daughter Larmica is granted a modicum of character development, but this is sadly limited. Still, the gothic expressions of the “dying world” setting are fantastic, and I appreciate that the world itself has far more character than the actors who drive the plot. 

I’m given to understand that, as a series, Vampire Hunter D leaves behind its formulaic action-oriented structure after the first few volumes. I read the first volume around the time it was originally published in English translation in 2005 and didn’t think much of it, but I find it far more compelling now that I’m older and have a better understanding of the story’s genre tropes, as well as how Hideyuki Kikuchi fits into a timeline of Japanese dark fantasy that’s recently come to wider international attention with the 2022 video game Elden Ring.

Dark Horse Books has published the first thirty books in translation, which are currently being collected into ten omnibus volumes. The first novel stands alone, and it’s a relatively quick read. I’d definitely recommend Vampire Hunter D to dark fantasy genre fans, as well as to anyone curious about the roots of JRPG video game tropes and imagery.

At the Edge of the Woods

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In the woods, there is a castle. The castle was once the residence of the landowning family that ruled the area. During the war, it was the headquarters of a resistance movement. Now it sits empty and abandoned. The castle is so deep in the woods that most people couldn’t find it if they tried. No one tries, however, as the woods are filled with child-snatching imps. Strange noises come from the woods, and occasionally strange people as well.

Masatsugu Ono’s At the Edge of the Woods is a novel about dread and anxiety. There’s no plot, nor is there any sort of story. Instead, Ono presents four episodes in the life of a father left alone with his young son while his wife is away. There’s no chronological order to the four chapters, which all occur at roughly the same time, and there’s no meaningful change in the personalities of the characters. Rather, the story development involves the slow intensification of an atmosphere of foreboding.

The nameless father who serves as the narrator is Japanese, as is his wife, who is pregnant with their second child. The wife has flown back to Japan to visit her parents, leaving her husband and son in an unspecified European country that reads as Germany-coded. The family has taken up residence at the eponymous edge of a vast forest in a rural area dotted with small towns.

The country is now at peace, but its neighbors are not so lucky. Long lines of refugees stream across the borders, seemingly unhindered by local authorities. It’s entirely possible that some of these refugees have camped out in the woods next to the narrator’s house, but it’s difficult to say for sure. It’s equally difficult to specify the origin of the odd sounds constantly emerging in the forest.

Characters drift in and out of the narrative, leaving behind very little of themselves save for strong emotional impressions. The disabled daughter of a bakery owner has good intentions but struggles to make herself understood. The postal worker who delivers the mail relates grotesque stories to the father, who suspects the man might be reading and discarding his wife’s letters. A neighboring farmer has always been kind to the narrator’s family, but his son reports that he once saw the man tie a dog in a burlap sack and beat the poor creature to death.

Perhaps the most striking of these characters is an elderly woman that the narrator’s son invites into the house. She appears seemingly from nowhere, and she vanishes just as mysteriously. While she’s in the house, though, she becomes a living symbol of the narrator’s anxieties regarding his ill-fitting role as the solitary caretaker of a young child in a foreign land:

Overcome, the old woman buried her face in her hands. She trembled violently, and a sob escaped her. I looked up. The kitchen windows were all closed. And yet in the air there hovered the sour smell of decayed leaves from deep in the woods, leaves that would never dry out. Steam rose from the old woman. The steam was not from her tea. A puddle spread at her feet. (20)

In his “Introduction” to The Oxford Book of Gothic Tales, Chris Baldick neatly summarizes the genre as an expression of the fear that the horrors of prior eras will not remain comfortably in the past. At the Edge of the Woods presents the readers with a range of Gothic tropes to heighten the sense of uneasy suspicion that, even in the most progressive of European countries, there is no escape from misery and cruelty. While the back-cover copy of At the Edge of the Woods calls the novel “an allegory for climate catastrophe,” this feels like a bit of an interpretive reach. Instead, Ono seems to be suggesting more broadly that, even in our bright society sustained by futuristic technologies, we’re never that far away from the edge of a large and unknowable forest.

At the Edge of the Woods can be difficult to read, and it’s probably not for everyone. Speaking personally, though, I love this book, and I’ve read it on the winter solstice every year since it was published in 2022. Ono’s writing is gorgeously atmospheric, and the legendary Juliet Winters Carpenter has done a dazzling job with the translation. If you appreciate the sort of quiet, eerie, and darkly suggestive Japanese Gothic writing typified by Yoko Ogawa’s short story collections Revenge and The Diving Pool, I’d recommend At the Edge of the Woods as the next step on a shadowed path into the liminal spaces in the penumbra of modern civilization.

The Master Key

Kathryn5 Comments

The Master Key

Title: The Master Key
Japanese Title: 大いなる幻影 (Ōinaru gen’ei)
Author: Togawa Masako (戸川 昌子)
Translator: Simon Grove
Publication Year: 1985 (United States); 1962 (Japan)
Publisher: Dodd, Mead & Company
Pages: 198

The Master Key, first published in 1962 and set in the late 1950s, is an interesting window into a period of postwar Japan that we don’t often see represented in Japanese fiction in translation. The story takes place entirely within the closed world of the K Apartments for Ladies, a large, multi-story building located in southeast Ikebukuro and registered as a charitable trust with “rents pegged at wartime levels.”

On its surface, the story is about a 1951 kidnapping of a young boy who is the son of a Japanese woman and an American military officer. Seven years later, when the K Apartments building is lifted and moved to a different location in a grand public works experiment, the body of a child is discovered buried underneath a shared bathing area in the basement. Right around the time the child disappeared, a man dressed as a woman was struck by a van in an intersection near the apartment building, and it’s revealed to the reader early in the novel that this man disguised himself as a woman to help one of the tenants dispose of the body that would later be found in the building’s basement. Who in the apartment buried the body, and what relation does this have to the kidnapping incident?

About twenty pages into The Master Key, however, it becomes clear that the mystery portion of the story is going to take a backseat to an extended exploration of the inner worlds contained within the K Apartments for Ladies and the psychological dysfunctions of its aging tenants.

Ishiyama Noriko, who has been diagnosed with “nervous pains,” has removed herself from the rest of the world and lives in a dark apartment stuffed with other people’s trash, which she occasionally boils and eats to sustain herself. Yatabe Suwa, a former concert violinist who now gives music lessons to children, is haunted by the loss of potential represented by the theft of a violin from her own teacher, even though it’s possible that she herself may have more to do with this incident than she likes to admit. Kimura Yoneko retired from her position as a schoolteacher years ago and spends her days writing letters to her former students, and she is not above checking into the affairs of the other tenants as well. Santo Haru is obsessed with a religious cult, and she is in the palm of its leader, who frequents her apartment to hold prayer meetings centered around the trances of its vestal priestess.

The plot is complicated and circuitous but is centered around the use and whereabouts of the master key of the title, which various tenants use to sneak into one another’s rooms in order to discover the secrets of others while concealing their own. At the end of the novel, it’s revealed that there is a mastermind orchestrating all of their movements, someone who has been spying on everyone for years and has manipulated the women around her for her own amusement. As someone who had essentially done the same thing to these characters through the process of reading this novel, I felt somewhat guilty, but not enough to lessen my enjoyment of how neatly all of the different plot threads are eventually tied together.

I will openly admit that I love stories about women being unpleasant and irrational and absolutely human. All of the female characters in this story are a little pathetic and a little demonic in that they have no power outside the K Apartments but all manner of strange little powers within their closed world. I’m sure this can be read as a metaphor for something, but it need not be, as the haunted and uncanny environment the characters shape through their bizarre actions is absolutely fascinating in and of itself.

For people with more background on Japanese history and urban space, the story’s setting in Ikebukuro is of special interest. In the immediate postwar period, Ikebukuro famously functioned as a heterotopia in which diverse groups of people came together and the norms of mainstream society didn’t necessarily apply. There is all manner of hidden “national polity” history in Ikebukuro, where the family-state of Japan has buried countless failed narratives under highways and skyscrapers. The Master Key thus serves as an excellent example of postwar Tokyo gothic (as similarly exemplified by Kyōgoku Natsuhiko’s The Summer of the Ubume). A reader doesn’t need historical knowledge to appreciate the story, but a bit of research into the setting has the potential to deepen the experience of reading this novel, which has sub-basements under sub-basements under sub-basements.

The Master Key is long out of print but still cheaply available through a number of online used book services. If you have access to your local or university library’s Interlibrary Loan program, it’s well worth requesting this book. It’s a quick read, and it packs a huge impact. To my fellow horror and mystery lovers especially, I highly recommend tracking down a copy of this short, satisfying, and creepy little novel.