Tag: Tokyo

Parade

Kathryn6 Comments

Parade Novel

Title: Parade
Japanese Title: パレード (Parēdo)
Author: Yoshida Shūichi (吉田 修一)
Translator: Philip Gabriel
Year Published: 2014 (America); 2002 (Japan)
Publisher: Vintage Books
Pages: 230

Do you remember how, maybe around ten years ago, writers like Nick Hornby and Chuck Palahniuk were really cool? You’d read something like Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho or Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis and go, Wow, that’s brilliant! And do you know how now, when you try to pick up one of those writers again, you’re too jaded by movie adaptations trying to make hard-line masculinity and sexual violence seem edgy to really appreciate what the writers were trying to say about urban culture and the weird bonds that form between people and what happens when you’re no longer young and suddenly running out of opportunities to make a fresh start? Have you ever thought it would be kind of awesome to re-experience the excitement of those stories without the nagging annoyance of an ever-present undercurrent of misogyny?

If so, then you need to read Parade. It’s by far the most enjoyable novel I’ve encountered this year. When I first sat down with it, I thought I would read twenty pages and then call it a day; but then, the next thing I knew, I was ninety pages in and terrified that I wouldn’t be able to stop. The novel’s five chapters are recounted by five different characters, each of whom is crazier than the last. I loved all of them, and I had to pace my progress through the book so that I could spend more time in their presence. Like its narrators, Parade is young, and it’s fun, and it’s clever, and it’s psychologically unbalanced (in a good way).

The story is about four people in their twenties who have no idea what they’re doing with their lives. Almost by accident, they’ve found themselves living together in a two-bedroom apartment, where they’ve established an easy and comfortable social space that one of them likens to an internet chat room. In short, each of them is free to be as dysfunctional as he or she wishes without incurring the judgment of the others, and they get along well.

Sugimoto Ryōsuke is a sophomore in college who adores a protective upperclassman and has found himself in a Sedgwickian love triangle with his friend’s girlfriend. When he’s not stalking this girl (with her tacit approval), he’s aimlessly driving around Tokyo in a derelict Nissan March that he’s named Momoko. Ōkochi Kotomi is twenty-three, unemployed, and may or may not be dating an up-and-coming young actor. She spends all day inside the apartment watching tv and waiting for her maybe-boyfriend to call. Sōma Mirai is only a year older than Kotomi but manages a branch of a boutique that sells clothes and accessories imported from places like India and Bali. She’s also an unrepentant alcoholic who frequents gay bars and stays up all night working on digital illustrations based on close-up photographs of male bodies. Ihara Naoki, the apartment’s last remaining original tenant, is pushing thirty and seems the most normal of the group. He works at a small but successful film licensing company and goes on jogs late in the evening while listening to classical music. Every so often Naoki’s nutty ex-girlfriend Misaki appears without warning, has a few drinks, and spends the night on the apartment couch.

One night, Mirai picks up an eighteen-year-old high school dropout named Kokubo Satoru on one of her pub crawls through Shinjuku. Satoru, who does speed in public restrooms and trolls for clients in parks, has no fixed residence and somehow ends up squatting in the shared apartment. His entry into the lives of the four tenants coincides with a string of assaults in the neighborhood that become increasingly violent over the course of the novel. Meanwhile, the unit next door – Apartment 402 – is fairly obviously serving as the headquarters for some sort of shady operation orbited by creepy old men and weeping teenage girls. Despite all this, Ryōsuke, Kotomi, Mirai, Naoki, and even Satoru continue to drift through life largely untroubled by anything that happens outside the confines of their apartment.

For the reader, there is a certain Gothic appeal in unearthing the secrets hidden under the placid comradery characterizing this pseudo-family, but the lack of concern on the part of the people in question drains most of the shock from each revelation. So Ryōsuke is stalking his older male buddy’s girlfriend because he has a weird father complex? It happens. Kotomi is obsessed with an actor not because of lust or emotional emptiness but because of a half-hearted sense of guilt over something that happened when she was a high school student? Whatever, it’s no big deal. By the time the reader uncovers the more sordid secrets of Parade‘s narrators, they’re become more amusing than upsetting; and, if nothing else, knowledge of these secrets only serves to render the continued companionship of the apartment’s tenants all the more touching.

I understand how some people might interpret Parade as a horror story, but it’s really more like an American sitcom about comically mismatched roommates. “Comically mismatched” happens to mean “weaving in and out of the borderlands of sanity” in this case, but the novel still has the potential to generate a lot of warm fuzzy feelings, at least in readers with a healthy tolerance for black humor and antisocial behavior.

Philip Gabriel’s translation is eminently readable, capturing the grit and immediacy of the narrators’ different styles without resorting to easily dated slang or stereotypes regarding urban speech patterns. Yoshida is a popular writer with a distinctive literary voice, which I feel comes across much more clearly in Parade than in Gabriel’s earlier translation of the author’s 2007 novel Villain. That being said, both books are a lot of fun, and I’m looking forward to more of Yoshida’s work appearing in English.

Isao Yukisada, who won a Japanese Academy Prize for his 2005 adaptation of Katayama Kyōichi’s bestselling romance Socrates in Love, directed a movie version of Parade. The film was well-received at the 2010 Berlin International Film Festival, winning a FIPRESCI Award and going on to screenings at festivals all over Europe and North America. I had a chance to catch the movie at a showing during that year’s Philadelphia Film Festival, and it was really good. I highly recommend Yoshida’s original novel, of course; but, if you get an opportunity to see Isao’s cinematic adaptation, go for it!

A review copy of Parade was kindly provided by Vintage Books.

Parade Movie Poster

In the Miso Soup

Kathryn4 Comments

In The Miso Soup

Title: In the Miso Soup
Japanese Title: イン ザ・ミソスープ (In za miso sūpu)
Author: Murakami Ryū (村上 龍)
Translator: Ralph McCarthy
Publication Year: 2003 (America); 1997 (Japan)
Publisher: Penguin
Pages: 217

In the Miso Soup was serialized during 1997 in the Yomiuri Shimbun, the newspaper with the highest circulation in Japan (and perhaps in the world), and it won the 1998 Yomiuri Prize for Literature, an extremely prestigious award given to superlative works of writers who have already established themselves as leaders in their fields. The novel’s North American and Japanese publishers have marketed it as a “psycho thriller,” and its extreme and violent content will more than likely shock anyone who isn’t familiar with Murakami’s oeuvre, especially his other suspense novels from the 1990s, such as Piercing (1994) and Audition (1997).

The twenty-year-old protagonist of the novel, Kenji, is a high school graduate from Shizuoka Prefecture who makes his living by acting as a guide of Shinjuku’s Kabukichō neighborhood, which is internationally famous for its nightlife. Kenji specializes in sex tours for foreigners, who learn about his services through Tokyo Pink Guide, a publication helmed by a man named Yokoyama, who believes it is his calling in life to bring the people of the world together through something all human beings have in common. On the morning of December 29, Kenji is contacted by an American named Frank, who claims to be a distributer of Toyota car parts and meets Kenji while clutching a copy of Pink Guide in his meaty hands.

If you mention In the Miso Soup to anyone who’s read the novel, the conversation will instantly turn to how delightfully creepy Frank is. Frank is a pathological liar, for starters. If one of the bizarre things Frank says is challenged in any way, he becomes suddenly and irrationally furious, his expression transforming into a mask of rage that Kenji soon comes to refer to as “the face.” The skin on Frank’s neck and hands is loose and seems artificial, and a sex worker who services Frank at a peep show says that there is something inexplicably wrong with his penis as well. To make matters even more upsetting, the body of a high school junior named Takahashi Akiko had been found dismembered and distributed across Kabukichō early in the morning of the 27th; and, after Frank goes on a rant about killing homeless people during his first night out with Kenji, the charred corpse of a homeless man is found in Shinjuku Central Park the next morning. By the end of the first of the novel’s three chapters, both Kenji and the reader are supplied with ample evidence to suspect that there is something not quite right with Frank.

Although Kenji is understandably apprehensive about spending more time with Frank, he is even more worried about what Frank might do in retaliation if he were to break their agreement and stand him up. He thus goes out for a second night on the town with Frank, who now makes very little effort to appear normal. After an episode of highly concentrated weirdness at an underground shot bar, Kenji and Frank go to an omiai club, a bar where people hoping to hook up with a stranger can meet. The girls who enter the club are given numbers and chosen by the men, who must pay a cover charge to enter. If a girl is chosen, she will share a table and drinks with the man who selects her. If they hit it off, they can then proceed to a nearby love hotels, and it is understood that money will more than likely change hands after the encounter. It’s not quite prostitution, but the women do have a financial interest in convincing the men to leave the club with them, and they will put everything they have into flirting and appearing attractive. What could be a quirky comedy of errors in another novel becomes an absurdist drama in the bizarro realm of In the Miso Soup, and Frank puts an end to the staged and artificial interactions of the club’s patrons with a lengthy orgy of meticulously narrated ultraviolence. Although Kenji is clearly traumatized by this turn of events, he also takes tentative steps towards an acceptance of what has happened to the other people at the club, who have upset his fundamental faith in humanity with their superficiality:

They were like automatons programmed to portray certain stereotypes, these people. The truth is it bugged the hell out of me just to be around them, and I’d begun to wonder if they weren’t all filled with sawdust and scraps of vinyl, like stuffed animals, rather than flesh and blood. Even when I saw their throats slit and the gore oozing out, it hadn’t seemed real to me. I remembered thinking, as I watched the blood drip down from Lady #5’s throat, that it looked like soy sauce. Imitation human beings, that’s what they were.

Murakami therefore configures Frank’s dispassionate killing spree into a sort of social critique, a theme that comes to fore in the novel’s third chapter. After the bloodbath at the omiai club (which Kenji refers to as “The Great Omiai Pub Massacre,” as if it had happened years ago), Frank shanghaies Kenji into spending the night with him in the abandoned medical facility in which he has ensconced himself. While Kenji shivers in the darkness of the unheated building, Frank regales him with stories from his childhood in America. As might be imagined, Frank’s childhood is dysfunctional and disturbing enough to make Stephen King proud (Frank even grew up in Maine!), as it includes the creepiness of small towns, the killing of small animals, murder, institutionalization, and extreme body horror courtesy of American mental health practices. Frank is obviously a sociopath, and he has already been established as a pathological liar, so it’s not entirely certain that he’s telling the truth, but he does seem to be telling Kenji his life story for a reason. Frank is almost like an overweight Tyler Durden as he explains that society needs terror, discord, and disruption in order to evolve:

“I see myself as being like a virus. Did you know that only a tiny minority of viruses cause illness in humans? No one knows how many viruses there are, but their real role, when you get right down to it, is to aid in mutations, to create diversity among life forms. I’ve read a lot of books on the subject – when you don’t need much sleep you have a lot of time to read – and I can tell you that if it weren’t for viruses, mankind would never have evolved on this planet. Some viruses get right inside the DNA and change your genetic code, did you know that? And no one can say for sure that HIV, for example, won’t one day prove to have been re-writing our genetic code in a way that’s essential to our survival as a race. I’m a man who consciously commits murders and scares the hell out of people and makes them reconsider everything, so I’m definitely malignant, yet I think I play a necessary role in this world.

I won’t spoil what happens to Frank, Kenji, and Kenji’s girlfriend Jun at the end of the novel, as the suspense regarding the fate of the trio lends an air of immediacy to Frank’s metaphysical speculations and the moral decisions Kenji begins to make concerning Frank. Let it suffice to say that the shock horror of the first two-thirds of the novel are compounded by the social horror of its final chapter. In the Miso Soup is a short book and a blisteringly quick read, but it stays with the reader long after it draws to its conclusion on New Year’s Eve, at which point its seemingly nonsensical title takes on chilling connotations. In the Miso Soup is a sublime dose of nihilism and ultraviolence that illuminates the seedy side of Tokyo in its blindingly dark shadow that is sure to please fans of Japanese horror and readers of extreme literature.

From Five to Nine

Kathryn2 Comments

From Five to Nine 1

Title: From Five to Nine
Japanese Title: 5時から9時まで (Goji kara kuji made)
Author: Aihara Miki (相原 実貴)
Publication Year: 2010 (ongoing)
Publisher: Shōgakukan
Pages (per volume): 190

From Five to Nine is the current project of Aihara Miki, whose manga Hot Gimmick and Honey Hunt have been published in English translation by Viz Media. Like Aihara’s earlier titles, From Five to Nine is a drama-filled exposé of the love lives of gorgeous young people going about their business in the trendy districts on the southwest side of Tokyo. From Five to Nine is serialized in Monthly Cheese!, an unfortunately named magazine that serves as a bridge between a shōjo readership of tweens captivated by stories of pure love and a josei readership of young women interested in the more physical aspects of romantic relationships. In accordance with the magazine’s house style, all of the characters in the manga are well dressed and ridiculously attractive, emotional and sexual tensions always run high, and chapters end on cliffhangers more often than not. In other words, From Five to Nine is highly entertaining, addictive reading. It’s designed to be.

What I think is interesting about this manga is the way it explores the conflicts between different gender roles and expectations of femininity through the love affairs of its main protagonist.

Sakuraba Junko, the leading lady, teaches during the evenings at an English language conversation school (Eikaiwa gakkō). Because of her friendly professionalism and almost native fluency, she’s considered to be one of the top instructors at her workplace, and her dream is to save up enough money to study abroad in America. Since Junko has passed through her early twenties without having settled down with a man, her grandmother has started to set her up on dates with potential marriage partners through a somewhat formalized process known as miai. To appease her grandmother, Junko spends her twenty-seventh birthday out on a miai date with a Buddhist monk named Hoshikawa Takane, who graduated from Tokyo University with a major in Indian philosophy. Junko is put off by what she sees as Hoshikawa’s snobbishness; but, thinking that their date is a one-time thing and that she’ll never see him again, Junko ends up sleeping with him on a lark. For Hoshikawa, however, that one night is the beginning of TRUE LOVE FOREVER.

Because this is a manga by Aihara Miki, Junko is fated to be the unfortunate object of nonconsensual manly persuasion concerning a relationship that she doesn’t particularly care for. Immediately after Junko gets back from her one night stand with Hoshikawa, she realizes that the deadline to move out of her apartment, whose building is slated for renewal, is fast approaching. When she goes to her grandmother for help, her grandmother suggests that she take temporary residence (geshuku) in a temple with connections to the family. Unfortunately, this temple is headed by Hoshikawa, who now wants to make Junko his temple wife (tera no yome). Being a temple wife is a full-time job, and a marriage to Hoshikawa would require Junko to give up her position at the English conversation school where she currently works, as well as her dream to study abroad. Essentially, if she were to marry Hoshikawa, Junko would have to give up the pleasures of her existence as an independent urbanite and spend her days cooking, cleaning, dressing herself in traditional clothing, setting out flower arrangements, and entertaining guests. Needless to say, she wants none of this. Hoshikawa won’t give up on her so easily, however, and he takes to stalking her, abducting her, and harassing her at both at home and at her workplace. One particularly unpleasant stunt Hoshikawa pulls is to lock Junko up in a small guesthouse separated from the main temple compound by an ornamental garden. In order to escape, Junko agrees to marry Hoshikawa; and, to keep him fooled regarding her true intentions, she makes a show of waking up early to devote herself to cleaning, all the while scheming of ways to get away from the temple.

Meanwhile, her college friend Mishima Satoshi, who has been assigned to his company’s branch office in America, shows up at Junko’s school in order to brush up on his English. Mishima has feelings for Junko and harbors a secret desire to take her to America with him; but, as Junko becomes more aware of Mishima’s intentions and her own reciprocal feelings for him, she surprises herself by becoming conflicted over leaving Hoshikawa and the life he’s offering her. Junko has also attracted the interest of one of her younger pupils, a wealthy student at an elite high school who cross dresses so effectively that only a small handful of his friends know that he’s actually male. This student, Satonaka Yuki, dislikes both Hoshikawa and Mishima and wants Junko to be able to stand on her own two feet outside of relationships with creepy stalker monks and alcoholic playboy salarymen.

This is high melodrama, of course, but what is interesting about Junko’s love life is how aptly it represents the push and pull between traditional and contemporary women’s roles. Should Junko give into social and sexual pressure and relinquish her independence and her dreams, or should she take advantage of a potential romantic partner’s kindness in order to break free of the constraints of living in Japan? Is it possible for her to somehow fend for herself without a social and economic safety net? Because of the romantic drama, the reader is able to experience the emotional attraction and anxiety of all of these possibilities. For example, when Hoshikawa does something ridiculous in order to (sometimes literally) lock Junko into a traditional gender role, the denial of agency that Junko suffers is viscerally upsetting to the reader. As it gradually becomes clear that Hoshikawa genuinely cares for Junko, however, it also becomes clear that Junko’s spirited resistance might be able change the way he sees the responsibilities and aspirations of the women of his generation. In this way, Hoshikawa serves as a representative of a society that is still primarily dominated by phallocentric interests. He’s scary, and his behavior is obviously psychologically unhealthy, but he can be persuaded to change by a woman smart enough and tough enough to take him on, even if she’s coming from a position of relative disadvantage. The sort of “he can change” mentality Junko comes to embrace is presented as being just as dangerous in the fictional world of the manga as it is in real life, but the alternative – “he will never change” – would be a bleak prognosis on the sort of patriarchal mentality Hoshikawa represents. The possibility that Hoshikawa can change himself as he learns that women are people too (gasp!) is an element of social optimism that serves as an emollient to the seemingly misogynistic sexual drama of the manga.

Two other female employees at Junko’s workplace, Yamabuchi Momoe and Mōri Masako, act as counterpoints to Junko’s situation by providing different attitudes towards employment, love, and marriage.

Along with Junko, Momoe is one of the most professional and sought after instructors at the conversation school, but she has a reputation for being standoffish and emotionally chilly. Although she’s all business in the office, she secretly loves yaoi manga. When Arthur Lange, a blond-haired foreign instructor from Britain, discovers Momoe’s hidden interests, he uses the threat of revealing her identity as a fujoshi to her boss to blackmail her into a relationship. Although Momoe enjoys fantasies of attractive, foreign-looking men being sexually aggressive and emotionally manipulative, the enactment of her fantasy is much more unpleasant in real life than it is in the pages of yaoi manga. Momoe is older than Arthur, but she has never had any romantic experience, and she constantly second-guesses her reactions to his teasing and bullying. She therefore often finds herself in the position of wondering how a woman her age should behave towards men, even though she wants nothing to do with them.

Masako, a receptionist at the English conversation school where Junko and Momoe teach, is a recent college graduate who, more than anything, wants to settle down with a boyfriend and become a housewife. Her coworkers tease her by calling her “Zexy,” a nickname taken from the title of a wedding and bridal magazine. Since Masako is attractive and intelligent, her standards for a partner are high, and she can’t find anyone her own age who meets them. Unfortunately, having cultivated an attitude of flirtatious approachability, she finds herself the constant target of unwanted male attention, especially in the form of sexual harassment from middle-aged men.

Junko’s English conversation school is thus a microcosm of Japanese society staffed by different women with different expectations, goals, and challenges concerning their futures. Although the manga focuses on its three main female characters, the male characters are also allowed enough interiority for the reader to see them working, talking to each other, and thinking about their own dreams and romantic problems. All of these characters work at cross purposes because of the artificial drama created by the manga artist, but their attitudes and emotional conflicts ring true to real social expectations and gender roles.

From Five to Nine is a fascinating exploration of contemporary Japan with enough intersecting plot lines, character development, and thematic subtlety to keep even the most demanding readers engaged. The obi bands around the manga covers tout the series as “a Tokyo version of Sex and the City,” and that should be recommendation enough for anyone seeking a fast-paced, hormone-fueled examination of gender roles in the twenty-first century.

From Five to Nine 2

Hatarake Kentauros

Kathryn8 Comments

Title: はたらけ、ケンタウロス！(Hatarake, kentaurosu!)
Artist: est em (えすとえむ)
Year Published: 2011
Publisher: Libre Shuppan
Pages: 160

Hatarake Kentauros is a one-shot manga by the BL author est em that contains eight stories and a kaki-oroshi (a short afterward section created especially for the tankōbon publication). The subjects of these stories are centaurs trying to make a living in contemporary Japan. The first four stories are about a salaryman centaur named Kentarō, the challenges he faces at work and while commuting, and his relationship with his human co-worker. The fifth story is about a centaur who wants to apprentice at a soba shop but can’t fit into the kitchen and is assigned delivery work instead. The sixth story is about a centaur craftsman who makes shoes even though he can never wear them, and the seventh story is about a centaur model who becomes depressed because his lower half is always replaced with human legs in Photoshop. The eighth story is about a young centaur graduate who is nervous about moving to Tokyo and beginning work at his first job.

The world created by est em in Hatarake Kentauros is largely homosocial; and, although nothing is ever expressly stated, the reader is encouraged to think of the male protagonists of the stories as gay. The salaryman Kentarō misses a day of work due to a cold and is visited by his male coworker, who prepares noodles while making observations on Kentarō’s kitchen, which was built to accommodate a centaur. The apprentice soba chef ends up bonding with an attractive apprentice ramen chef, and the two decide to open a portable street stall together. The centaur shoemaker rescues the son of his employer from an arranged marriage, and the two grow old together while operating their own business in a different city. The bonds between these male characters are gentle and subtle but no less powerful for not including overtly romantic or sexual elements.

What I like about the stories in Hatarake Kentauros is that they avoid a facile allegorical application of social justice by disallowing a one-on-one correspondence between “centaur” and “gay.” Although they’re just as “human” as anyone else, the centaurs created by est em are most definitely “other.” They’re too large to fit into crowded elevators. There are special lanes for them on the streets because they can’t ride in cars. They need to eat large quantities of food, and they have separate toilets. Centaurs aren’t just different from humans in terms of the shapes and sizes of their bodies; they also live for hundreds of years and take almost fifty years to mature into adults. It is therefore difficult to map categories of real-world otherness, such as gender, race, ethnicity, and nationality, onto est em’s centaurs. The reader is thus able to understand the characters in Hatarake Kentauros not just as platonic symbols but also as individuals.

At its core, Hatarake Kentauros is about the stories of individuals. It’s not about social justice or about men in love with other men. est em’s Equus (released at the same time as Hatarake Kentauros), on the other hand, is much more raw. In my opinion, it’s also more artistic. Some of the book’s stories have almost no dialog, and the impressionistic yet forceful lines with which the centaurs of Equus are drawn emphasize their muscularity and masculinity. These centaurs are sexy – especially when they’re having sex with each other. The stories of Equus do not limit themselves to contemporary Japan but look back to other times and places in which centaurs lived freely in the wilderness apart from human habitation or were inherited from father to son like slaves. Equus makes a clear connection between otherness, sexiness, sexualization, and discrimination, and it’s not afraid to hit the reader where it hurts.

I could write much more about Equus and Hatarake Kentauros, but, to make a long story short, these two manga are brilliant, genius-level works. If you can read Japanese – and even if you can’t read Japanese – it’s absolutely worth the ridiculous shipping rates of Amazon.co.jp to import these two books from Japan.

ETA: Hatarake Kentauros will also be available via JManga starting on Thursday, April 19.

A Treasure Hunter’s Guide to Dōjinshi

Kathryn8 Comments

Or, how to find dōjinshi in Tokyo. Here is what you need to know before you set out:

First, stores specializing in dōjinshi tend to fall into two categories, dansei-muke (for men) and josei-muke (for women). Dansei-muke dōjinshi are usually highly pornographic, and it is far from uncommon for them to feature the graphic rape of minors (or characters drawn to look like minors). The term josei-muke refers to the genre of boys love (BL), but the majority of the dōjinshi found in josei-muke stores aren’t BL at all but rather humor, parody, drama, or light heterosexual romance. You can usually tell what you’re getting from the cover, but every dōjinshi is enclosed in a plastic slipcase that you can’t (and shouldn’t try to) open until you actually buy the thing. Most general-audience dōjinshi are ¥210, and a good rule of thumb is that, the more expensive the dōjinshi, the more pornographic its content. There are exceptions to this – the dōjinshi in question may be particularly rare, or particularly good, or by a particularly well-known artist – but again, you can usually make an educated guess on the content based on the cover.

Second, you need to know how to read Japanese. It goes without saying that all dōjinshi are written in Japanese (regardless of whether English is used on the cover). More importantly, no English is used in any of the stores. Dōjinshi are organized in kana order by the title of whatever work they’re based on and grouped according to genre (ie, video games, shōnen manga, Western television shows, Korean boy bands, etc). Dōjinshi based on more popular series (such as Hetalia or Final Fantasy VII) are further organized by pairing or dōjin circle. You’re therefore going to need to be able to read Japanese in order to navigate the stores. The staff at these stores is generally happy to help you find what you’re looking for, but you need to tell them the title of the gensaku (original work on which the dōjinshi is based) in Japanese before they can help you. If you’re not confident about your Japanese, it might be useful to bring a friend to help you navigate and to visit the stores as soon as they open (so they won’t be crowded).

With that in mind, here we go!

Ikebukuro

Ikebukuro, and more specifically Otome Road, is the mecca for fujoshi. It should be the first and last place that any female dōjinshi hunter visits. If you’ve never been here before, let me promise you that it’s anything beyond your wildest dreams. Bring lots of money.

Ikebukuro Station is absolute chaos, and it’s very easy to get lost. In general, though, you want to head towards the Seibu side of the station. There are several exits out of the JR portions of the station; but, if you follow the yellow signs for “Sunshine” (which are referring to Sunshine City), you should be headed in the right direction. The specific exit you want to take out of the station is Exit 35.

You’ll emerge from chaos into chaos. There will be a huge Bic Camera to your left and an enormous throng of people directly in front of you. Follow the throng straight ahead and then to the left to a street crossing. On the other side of the street will be a Lotteria on the left and a Café Spazio on the right. Cross the street and pass in between these two restaurants to enter an enormous shopping street called Sunshine Plaza. Walk all the way down the street until you reach a highway overpass. Cross the road under the overpass on the right side and then turn right in front of the Toyota Auto Salon. Walk until you reach a Family Mart, and then take a hard left all the way around the corner building. You should see an Animate in front of you. Congratulations! You’ve reached Otome Road.

Otome Road begins at the Animate and ends at the three-story K-Books Dōjin-kan. This K-Books is probably the single best dōjinshi store in all of Tokyo. They have dōjinshi for every conceivable fandom, and they usually have the same dōjinshi for less money (¥210 as opposed to ¥420) than at the Mandarake you passed on the way. They also have tons of original dōjinshi and dōjinshi sets (all of the dōjinshi in a series, or a dōjinshi packaged with extras like fans or postcards). Keep in mind that all of the dōjinshi on the second floor are new and can usually be found for a fraction of the price on the third floor, where they sell used dōjinshi. What I like about this particular store is that they have a lot of general interest dōjinshi that have nothing to do with yaoi. The previously mentioned Mandarake has a much stronger focus on BL dōjinshi, and it’s a good place to find original dōjin artbooks as well.

There are two different branches of Café Swallowtail (a famous butler café) on Otome Road, one next to the Mandarake and one next to the K-Books. If you’d like to visit, make sure that you’re familiar with the process of attaining a reservation before you go. The two locations have two different reservation procedures, and you can only make a reservation for a thirty-minute time slot. Don’t be afraid of trying one out, even if your Japanese isn’t perfect, but it’s way more fun to go with a friend (especially since the cafés are geared towards parties of two).

On your way through Sunshine Plaza from the station to the highway overpass, you can turn right at any point to enter a maze of manga stores, maid cafés, and cat cafés. Also, if you’re really into Japanese youth culture and fashion, try entering Sunshine City (you’ll know it when you see it), which is the size of a small city – a small city filled with clothing and accessories for teenagers (and an aquarium). Finally, the cinemas lining Sunshine Plaza are the best places to go to see an animated movie, whether it’s the new Ghibli film or the latest feature-length spin-off of a popular franchise like K-ON. They’re also good places to pick up all the guidebooks and merchandise that accompany these movies. If you need to chill out and kill time before a show, you can always take advantage of one of the many many many kitschy love hotels (which are cheap and clean and more than likely have a nicer shower than your apartment or hotel) right off the main street.

Akihabara

Akihabara is where you go to get porn. The end.

Okay, seriously. Akihabara specializes in dansei-muke dōjinshi. There are tons of small dōjinshi stores located several floors up or several floors down from the narrow side streets that twist through the main electronics district. Many of these smaller stores cater to specific fetishes, and some of these fetishes might be extremely disturbing to some people. I will therefore leave the true exploration of this area to the truly adventurous. Thankfully, the Akihabara branches of K-Books and Mandarake are fairly mainstream (although still filled with porn).

Take the Akihabara Electric Town exit out of the JR station. Straight ahead you’ll be looking at several columns and a storefront, so head to your left to exit. Once outside the building, turn to your right. A few dozen feet down the left side of the street you’ll see the Radio Kaikan. There are several entrances into this building, but you want to take the escalator that goes directly from the storefront up to the second floor. (It’s right next to the display of electronic dictionaries. Incidentally, this is the single best place in Japan to get an electronic dictionary, as it has all the latest models at 40-60% off the list price.) Once off the escalator, go up the stairs to the third floor and then turn to your right to enter the K-Books dōjinshi store. Whatever fandom you’re interested in, from Evangelion to Azumanga Daioh, they have porn of it. They also have tons of fresh dōjinshi from the latest comic markets at reasonable prices, as well as other dōjin goods such as Vocaloid albums and body pillow covers.

[ETA: As of July 1, 2011, the Akihabara branch of K-Books has relocated to the “Akiba Cultures Zone” (AKIBAカルチャーズZONE). To get there, use the directions for Mandarake but turn to your left before the Sumitomo Fudōsan instead of after it. In other words, turn left at the Daikokuya electronics store (you should see the K-Books storefront reflected in the glass windows of the Sumitomo building). The first floor houses used manga, and the dōjinshi are on the second floor.]

The other big dōjinshi store in Akihabara is the Mandarake complex, which has separate floors for dansei-muke dōjinshi and josei-muke dōjinshi (as well as other floors for other things, like used manga and cosplay supplies). To get there, go straight past the Radio Kaikan until you reach a large street. This road is Chūō-dōri. Cross over to the other side of the street and turn to your right. Walk for about two blocks until you read the Sumitomo Fudōsan Building. Turn to your left after this building onto a small street, and you should see the Mandarake complex ahead on the right. The fourth floor has josei-muke dōjinshi, and the third floor had dansei-muke dōjinshi. The selection on both floors isn’t the best, but you can sometimes find stuff here that you can’t find anywhere else, such as the dōjinshi of a popular circle called CRIMSON, which publishes print versions of its dōjin visual novel games.

On the way to Mandarake, you will have seen the main branch of Tora no Ana on the other side of Shōwa-dōri. Tora no Ana publishes its own art books and dōjinshi (and a few mainstream manga like Fuku-Yomo), but its third floor is a fujoshi paradise of BL manga, manga magazines, and dōjinshi. Even if you’re not into porn, it’s worth visiting the Tora no Ana in Akihabara just to check out the culture.

Shibuya

The main attraction of Shibuya is the Mandarake, which specializes in used pornographic manga and figurines but has a sizeable josei-muke dōjinshi section with a unique selection. Since this Mandarake is somewhat removed from Otome Road, the dōjinshi in stock here aren’t the newest or the freshest that you can get your hands on, but this can work to your advantage if you’re looking for dōjinshi based on older titles like Sailor Moon, Revolutionary Girl Utena, Nodame Cantible, Hellsing, Wild Arms, Final Fantasy IV, or the next-to-latest incarnation of the Pokémon franchise. Also, if you’re looking for dōjinshi based on manga by CLAMP or the films of Studio Ghibli, this is the place to go. If you’re looking for original dōjinshi drawn by an artist like Ono Natsume or Yoshinaga Fumi, this is also the place to go. This particular store also has the friendliest and most helpful staff I’ve yet encountered.

To get there, take the Hachikō exit out of the JR station and orient yourself so that you’re facing the Tsutaya building with the Starbucks café. Head down the left side of the big road passing to the right of this building (the 109 Men building will be on the other side of the road). In about a block the Seibu department store will be on your left. Turn left to pass in between the two Seibu buildings (there will be bridges above you). Go straight on that street until it splits at a kōban (police box) and take the right fork. The Mandarake will be a block down on the left side of the street, directly across from a Choco Cro café. You’ll need to go down several flights of stairs to reach the actual store. (For the record, there is another entrance into the store, but this is the one that leads directly to its dōjinshi section.)

While we’re on the topic of Shibuya, I should also mention the Tsutaya I referred to in the directions. In my opinion, this particular branch of the chain is the single best place to buy new manga in Japan. They have multiple copies of all the volumes of all of the latest manga in stock, and they have really cute displays created by the staff to highlight interesting and notable titles. This is the place to go to find out what is popular in Japan right now, and you can take to elevator down to the basement to do the same trick with video games before progressively working your way up through music, movies, and literature.

If you find yourself spending a lot of money, go ahead and apply for a T-Point card, which also works at Book-Off (and Family Mart convenience stores and Excelsior coffee shops, for what it’s worth). Book-Off is a chain of used book stores known for its ridiculously low prices and the excellent condition of its used merchandise. In essence, after using your point card for the first two or three volumes of a manga at Tsutaya, you can get enough points to get a used copy of the next volume for free at Book-Off. And speaking of Book-Off, the one across the street from the Shibuya Tokyu Hands is a manga lover’s paradise. They also have tons of used light novels, art books, and video game strategy guides that you won’t even find in Akihabara.

Nakano

Nakano is a bustling, working-class shopping area a few stops out of the Yamanote loop on the JR Chuo line. The area is a bit out of the way of just about everything, but it’s home to Nakano Broadway, a rundown warren of manga stores and hobby shops. The top three stories of this indoor shopping complex are a hive of Mandarakes. If you have any sort of hobby related to anime or manga or video games, whether it’s cel collecting (fourth floor), cosplay (third floor), or researching Taishō-era children’s magazines (second floor), Nakano Broadway is where you go to spend all of your money. There are also tiny stores specializing in Ninja Turtles action figures from the nineties, old Japanese coins, and prayer beads and power crystals. There is even a Mandarake store called Hen-ya that, as its name implies, is a treasure hoard of the weird, baffling arcana of postwar Japanese pop culture.

From the JR Nakano station, take the north exit for Sun Plaza. Head around to your right past the turnstiles to exit the station, where you’ll see an open-air bus station in front of you. Beyond the bus station and to the right is the entrance to a shopping arcade called the Nakano Sun Mall, which is marked by yellow arches. Enter the shopping arcade and walk straight back all the way to the end to reach Nakano Broadway.

There’s nothing to see on the first floor, but you can take the escalator up to the third floor to reach the most awesome used manga store ever (run by Mandarake, of course). Whether you’re looking for editions of manga like Rose of Versailles from the eighties or the whole back catalog of a manga magazine like Monthly Cheese, they’ve more than likely got it stashed away somewhere. If you want to go straight to the dōjinshi stores, skip the escalator and take the stairs to the right of the escalator up to the second floor. Turn left from the stairs and then left again around the corner, and you should reach a dansei-muke store and a josei-muke store right across from each other a bit down the corridor.

Since Nakano is so out of the way, and since Mandarake keeps a lot of its excess stock up on the fourth floor, you can find old dōjinshi at these stores that have disappeared from just about everywhere else (such as those based on Harry Potter). The josei-muke store in particular specializes in anthologies, and you can strike real gold here if you don’t mind paying significantly more than the usual ¥210 – dōjinshi anthologies are huge and beautiful but can cost up to ¥5,000 (although ¥1,050 is more common). It takes a bit of work to get out to Nakano, and you’ll probably get seriously lost in Nakano Broadway, but it’s definitely worth the trip for a true treasure hunter.

***

All of the directions I have given take it for granted that you’re using one of the JR lines (such as the Yamanote-sen). Be aware that these directions may not apply if you’re using one of the Tokyo Metro lines (or another private line like the Keio-sen).

K-Books, Tora no Ana, and Animate all have point cards. These cards are free and allow you to accumulate points with each purchase. You can use these points to either take a discount off future purchases or to get limited edition goods that can only be bought with points. If you’re going to be spending a long time in Japan or are planning on spending a lot of money during a short visit, it might be worth your while to ask for one of these cards. (In the case of K-Books, you might want to just get one anyway, since they give you a choice of really cute, collectible cards.) You can just ask your cashier for a card at K-Books and Tora no Ana, but you’ll need to fill out an application form with your address in Japan at Animate.

All of the stores I have mentioned by name accept Visa and Mastercard. The only caveat about using a credit or debit card is that you may not be able to get points on your point card for that purchase. The policy on accumulating points for credit purchases differs from store to store (especially in Akihabara), but you shouldn’t have a problem anywhere in Ikebukuro.

Finally, if this guide has made you giddy with excitement, please consider investing in the book Cruising the Anime City. It’s a bit dated (just as this guide is probably going to be in a year or two), and it betrays a strong masculine bias, but it’s still awesome.

The Lake

Kathryn7 Comments

Title: The Lake
Japanese Title: みずうみ (Mizuumi)
Author: Banana Yoshimoto (吉本 ばなな)
Translator: Michael Emmerich
Publication Year: 2011 (America); 2005 (Japan)
Publisher: Melville House
Pages:188

I have been waiting for this book to come out for months. When it finally did, I read it in one sitting. As with many of Yoshimoto’s novels, it was occasionally frustrating, but I liked it. I guess one could say that The Lake is typical Yoshimoto. Allow me to explain.

The novel’s protagonist and first-person narrator, Chihiro, comes from a non-traditional family, works in a non-traditional profession, never worries about material things like money or the future even though she’s almost thirty, and seems to float through life, although she has hidden depths:

It’s like when you decide to build a house: some people want to go and find the land first, then hire an architect to help them draw up plans, and then choose the materials for the walls and everything on their own. I’m not like that. I prefer to wander around until I stumble across something, then I do the best I can with it, scrutinizing this thing I’ve discovered, getting to know it for what it is.

The heroine meets her love interest in an offbeat and untraditional way – in this case, he lives across the street from her, and they wave to each other from their respective windows until he talks to her on the street and casually starts showing up in her apartment. This love interest, Nakajima, is a grad student (first warning sign) and a stereotypical herbivore male:

I got the sense that he wasn’t really into sex, and he was shockingly thin, and although there were days when he would consume an astonishing amount, ordinarily he ate almost nothing, so overall he didn’t seem very energetic.

Nakajima is a little weird. Besides not having any friends and never wanting to sleep with our protagonist, he also exhibits behavioral quirks, such as his insistence on keeping detailed tallies of the money he owes Chihiro for using water and electricity when he stays over at her place. But Chihiro is still in love with him:

Whenever Nakajima said my name, every single time, it sparkled like a treasure. I had no idea why. Wow – did you see how that flashed? Say it again for me, please!

Chihiro gradually comes to realize that there is something seriously wrong with Nakajima; but, since she’s become attached to him, she decides to take it slow. As she ever so articulately explains to a friend:

“Anyway, he’s not like other people at all, it’s like, I don’t know how to describe it, like he’s living in the clouds, maybe. Like when people talk about someone having transcended it all – he’s like that, I guess. So part of me thinks it’s just in his makeup, and he would have been this way even if nothing had happened. For the time being I’ll just keep watching, I won’t rush it.”

Finally, Nakajima asks Chihiro to go with him to visit two old acquaintances who live in a cottage by a lake. Chihiro has been worried that Nakajima will leave her, either physically (by suddenly disappearing from her apartment) or psychically (by entering a long-term catatonic trance). She’s also bothered by his plans to leave Japan and study in Paris, which don’t seem to include her at all. She thinks about her anxieties as she walks around the lake with a trembling and profusely sweating Nakajima, but she still supports him, because:

He was an adult, perhaps thirty-five or so, and yet he was extremely small, like a child. His face seemed kind of shrunken, giving him the look of a bulldog. His eyes were sparkling, though, and there was something noble in the way he carried himself.

Do you feel like you’re reading a shōjo manga yet?

The narrative is driven forward by a twinned pair of mysteries: who are the people who live on the lake, and what is Nakajima’s damage? Both mysteries are solved when Chihiro returns to the lake on her own around thirty pages before the book ends; and, to give the author credit, they are resolved quite nicely and sufficiently satisfied my morbid, look-at-the-car-wreck curiosity. Still, I wasn’t too terribly invested in figuring out what was going on (the blurb on the book jacket sort of spoils it with its overt mention of religious cults), and I didn’t really care about the relationship between Chihiro and Nakajima, which was more hurt/comfort than actual romance.

What was interesting to me were the descriptions of small-town politics. The majority of the story is set in Tokyo, but Chihiro comes from a small town where her father wasn’t allowed to marry her mother, who worked as the mama-san of a small bar. Chihiro’s assessment of her father’s family, the patrons of her mother’s bar, and the atmosphere of the town in general are acerbic and insightful. Also, Chihiro works as a muralist, and one of her friends commissions her to create a mural on one of the walls of a run-down community center in a small neighborhood in Tokyo in an effort to save the structure from being demolished. The interplay between Chihiro, the community center, the local government, and a potential sponsor of the project is dramatic in a quiet sort of way, and Chihiro’s explanations of her creative process as she interacts with the people who watch her work are also interesting.

If you like Banana Yoshimoto for her quirky characters, fragmented yet loving families, and universes almost like our own but one step closer to the supernatural, then you’ll like The Lake. If you dislike Banana Yoshimoto for the lack of adult judgment in her characters and her rambling, juvenile prose (which is tight like a handful of squirming hamsters), then you probably won’t like The Lake. For the record, I like the book, and I also think Michael Emmerich did an excellent job of translating it.

Getting Wet

Kathryn4 Comments

Title: Getting Wet: Adventures in the Japanese Bath
Author: Eric Talmadge
Publication Year: 2006
Publisher: Kodansha International
Pages: 255

For the past two weeks, the internet has been deluged with people talking about how Tokyopop is going out of business. Somehow, in all the confusion, it seems that it’s slipped everyone’s mind that Kodansha International is closing its doors as well. At least, it’s ceasing all operations at the end of April. Which was yesterday, I realized a few hours ago – to my considerable dismay.

In my startled panic, I thought about writing a brief retrospective highlighting the excellent work the publisher has done with regards to promoting Japanese literature in America. I thought about how the company has put out the early novels of Murakami Ryū (such as Coin Locker Babies and Almost Transparent Blue) and the murder mystery novels of Miyabe Miyuki (such as The Devil’s Whisper and Shadow Family). I thought about how the company has published offbeat classics like Natsume Sōseki’s Botchan and Kawabata Yasunari’s House of the Sleeping Beauties. I thought about how the company has taken financial risks to publish niche-interest period dramas such as Ariyoshi Sawako’s The River Ki and Fujisawa Shūhei’s The Bamboo Sword, and then I thought about how the company has taken on even greater financial burdens to collect contemporary avant-garde short fiction in anthologies like Monkey Brain Sushi and Inside.

But really, I think what I’m going to miss the most are Kodansha International’s intelligent and beautifully published books about Japanese culture, like Diane Durston’s Old Kyoto, Kiyoko Morita’s The Book of Incense, and Jay Rubin’s Making Sense of Japanese. And of course Eric Talmadge’s Getting Wet, which is probably my favorite “foreigner writing about Japan” book ever.

As its title suggests, Getting Wet is about baths in Japan. Private baths, public baths, bathing resorts, and bathing theme parks. And of course you can’t talk about baths in Japan without talking about onsen, or hot spring baths. Talmadge covers onsen in Hokkaido, onsen in Nagano, onsen right in Tokyo, and onsen in the Izu Islands south of Tokyo. There are onsen with mineral water, onsen with radioactive water, onsen with electrified water, onsen on the lips of volcano craters, onsen so acidic that your eyes hurt for days afterward, and onsen with snow monkeys.

There are plenty of books on Japanese baths floating around, but what I like about Getting Wet is that it’s not a traveler’s resource like A Guide to Japanese Hot Springs or a coffee table design book like The Japanese Bath. It is instead a collection of eleven journalistic essays unified by the theme of bathing. These essays aren’t travel literature, per se, but rather memoirs (if such a stodgy word is actually appropriate) of life in Japan cradling a core of interesting contextual information. For example, the fourth chapter, “Under the Bridge,” is about a trip to the Oedo Onsen Monogatari theme park in Odaiba. Talmadge begins by admitting his reluctance to don a yukata (he claims that they always flip open at the front at inopportune moments – which they do) and then walks his readers through the park before comfortably sliding into an essay about the Arima springs in Kobe, where emperors and the Heian nobility used to bathe. Talmadge then compares the Japanese history of bathing to that of the West, storied as it is with the opulence of the Greeks and Romans and Moors. Elsewhere, when Talmadge talks about mineral springs, for instance, he explains how our skin works and how our bodies retain water. When he talks about the onsen in the north of Japan, he writes about economic depression and the drive towards international and regional tourism (and why these initiatives never work). All of this writing, both travelogue and journalism, flows together smoothly, as if it were a feature in National Geographic.

Except Getting Wet is a lot more interesting than National Geographic. The way its author writes reminds me of the way my favorite grad student drinking buddy tells stories. His vocabulary is colorful but not ostentatious, he’s done his research and knows his facts, and he’s not afraid to laugh at something that’s ridiculous or unpleasant. Talmadge’s language is crisp and clean and for the most part professional, but every once in awhile he’ll let a colloquialism slip in (“The bath was – excuse me – fucking hot. It was really fucking hot.”), which adds both spice and warmth to his narrative. To put it simply, Getting Wet is a pleasure to read. Even if you don’t care about hot springs or bathing. Even if you don’t care about Japan. In terms of interesting and enjoyable essays, Eric Talmadge is right up there with John McPhee and Annie Dillard.

The book is a pleasure for other reasons as well. What I have always loved about Kodansha International is the attention and care they put into each publication, from the font to the page layout to the beautiful cover and binding. Most of these small touches are up to the reader to discover, but I should mention, in the case of Getting Wet, that the photographic illustrations are especially stunning. I don’t mean “stunning” in the sense of “created by a professional photographer with professional software,” but rather that the pictures are unusually sharp, printed in soft yet high-contrast greyscale, and perfectly positioned beside the text. In other words, the high quality of the images is something that you don’t find often even in art books published by specialty presses.

Kodansha International’s Japanese parent company has recently invested quite a great deal of money in Vertical, so I think that perhaps it’s not unreasonable to assume that their fiction licenses will change hands at some point. I’m not so sure what will happen to their non-fiction, though. Kodansha International put out beautiful books, and it will be a shame to see publications like Getting Wet disappear. I have loved Kodansha International and its books for many years, and I’m going to miss them now that they’re gone. Thankfully, the international arm of the company is resurrecting itself as a high-profile manga publisher, so this story may just have a happy ending after all.

The Summer of the Ubume

Kathryn1 Comment

Title: The Summer of the Ubume
Japanese Title: 姑獲鳥の夏 (Ubume no natsu)
Author: Kyōgoku Natsuhiko (京極夏彦)
Translator: Alexander O. Smith and Elye J. Alexander
Publication Year: 1994 (Japan); 2009 (America)
Publisher: Vertical
Pages: 320

Reading The Summer of the Ubume was like being in a trance. Honestly, it feels weird to not be reading the book right now, but I imagine that I’m going to be reading it again soon. I haven’t been this engrossed in a book since I read Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows…

Which is not to say that Summer of the Ubume is in any way like the Harry Potter series, aside from its sheer literary addiction quotient. On the surface, the book presents a simple “sealed room” murder mystery. Underneath, however, is mystery upon mystery upon mystery. Running through these mysteries is a current of Japanese folklore, especially folklore concerning spirit possession. The “ubume” of the title is the ghost of a woman who died in childbirth and carries out her grudge against still-living mothers by stealing their infant children. This trope is connected to the household of a family that is just about as gothic as they come, with frail maidens and hereditary curses and hidden murders set on the stage of an almost abandoned hospital, which was designed by an insane architect and almost destroyed during the wartime firebombing of Tokyo.

The Summer of the Ubume is set in 1952 in the Nakano area, which used to be a residential district on the northwest periphery of Tokyo, a stone’s throw away from the prisons, insane asylums, and black markets of Ikebukuro. Its narrator is a man in his early thirties named Sekiguchi, a freelance writer who specializes in essays on supernatural incidents. Sekiguchi is friends with the brilliant yet antisocial proprietor of the Kyōgokudō used bookstore (which is the name his friends use to refer to him). Sekiguchi is the Watson to Kyōgokudō’s Holmes, and a great deal of the book is devoted to their conversations concerning metaphysical matters, which end up having a great deal to do with the mystery at hand.

In the course of his work (which borders on yellow journalism), Sekiguchi has stumbled upon a rumor of a woman who, having been mysteriously deserted by her husband, has been pregnant for eighteen months. After asking several magazine editors about the source of the rumor, Sekiguchi becomes more intrigued. Due to a strange series of coincidences, the writer has the opportunity to meet the woman’s family, which is deeply dysfunctional in every possible way. As Sekiguchi learns more about these people, it turns out that his ties to them are deeper than he initially suspected.

The first chapter of the novel is a forty-page discussion of the supernatural between Kyōgokudō and Sekiguchi. Each page is dense with ideas and metaphysical language (not to mention text – the book’s margins are practically nonexistent), and neither Sekiguchi nor Kyōgokudō is presented in a particularly sympathetic light – Sekiguchi comes off as rather dense while Kyōgokudō is supremely abrasive. If the reader can weather this initial chapter, however, he or she will be rewarded with a deliciously convoluted mystery populated by a genuinely fascinating cast of characters. The action of the story reaches its climax 230 pages into the novel, which leaves 90 pages for the explanation of the mystery. Although this may seem like poor pacing, the explication is well-plotted, engrossing, and bizarre, reaching its own climax at the end of the novel.

The Summer of Ubume is Kyōgoku’s debut novel, and at times it does feel unpolished. The momentum of the story more than makes up for any flaws in the narrative’s structure, however. The occasional clichés implicit in the mystery (such as the uncertainty that is inevitably created when there are two almost identical sisters in a fictional family) are balanced by the writer’s unique take on the gothic genre. The novel’s setting in 1950’s Tokyo is fully taken advantage of by Kyōgoku, who skillfully renders the city as a sinister gothic landscape.

Although, as I mentioned, there is a greater emphasis on talking heads in this novel than is strictly necessary, the characters and setting are superbly handled, and the mystery is just about as addictive as they come. I can only hope that more of Kyōgoku’s work is translated into English as soon as possible.

Dōjinshi (Part One)

Kathryn4 Comments

In a short series of essays, I would like to discuss Japanese dōjinshi (hereafter unitalicized) based on the work of Japanese director Miyazaki Hayao. I would also like to examine the relationship between fan works and the concept of auteurship. First I will give a brief explanation of what dōjinshi are and the place they occupy in Japanese subculture. Second, I will provide examples of several dōjinshi based on Spirited Away (千と千尋の神隠し), Howl’s Moving Castle (ハウルの動く城), and Ponyo on a Cliff by the Sea (崖の上のポニョ). Finally, I will explore the hermeneutical relationship between these dōjinshi and the original texts on which they are based, as well as the relationship between auteurs and fan creators.

Dōjinshi (同人誌), a word that might be glossed as “fan works,” or “fan manga,” are self-published, small-scale publications written by fans and for fans of a particular work (be it a movie, a book, a television series, or a video game) or of a particular romantic pairing possible within that work. For example, there are many dōjinshi based on J.K. Rowling’s young adult fantasy series Harry Potter, and many of these Harry Potter dōjinshi focus on a specific romantic couple, such as that formed by Harry’s two friends Ron and Hermione. As in the realm of American fan fiction, many dōjinshi explore the possibility of an alternate outcome of the events in the story of the original work. This leads, for example, to dōjinshi dealing with the formation of a romantic relationship between Harry and Hermione, or perhaps between Harry and his male rival Draco. Unlike American fan fiction, however, the vast majority of Japanese dōjinshi employ both the form and the conventions of manga. In the rare case that fan fiction is published as a dōjinshi, it is often accompanied by illustrations that are either drawn by the writer or by an artist commissioned by the writer.

Since the production of manga is a labor-intensive process, most dōjinshi artists operate within what are called “circles” (サークル), or groups. Although there are a number of “individual (個人) circles” consisting of only one person, most circles are made up of two or more people. The division of labor takes different forms within different circles. In some cases, the work of two or more artists operating separately from each other will appear in the same publication, while in some cases, secondary artists will help the primary artist with things like background detail and the application of screen tone. In many other cases, different teams of artists will publish different dōjinshi under the same circle name. In any case, a dōjinshi is just as likely to be attributed to a circle as it is to be attributed to a specific artist. On the back cover of this dōjinshi, we can see both the circle name and the names of the two artists who contributed to this particular work.

One of the main reasons why artists who create dōjinshi continue to operate within the circle system despite the prevalence of labor-saving digital artistic tools like Photoshop and individual-centered communication networks like deviantART is the continuing popularity of conventions like Comiket (コミケット), short for “comic market,” a three day event held biannually at Tokyo Big Sight. The first Comiket was held in 1975; and, since then, attendance at each event has risen from several thousand to several hundred thousand. Comiket is primarily an event for the purchase and selling of dōjinshi. Since there is a limited amount of space for dealers, many fledgling artists participate in events like Comiket as members of a circle, which gives them a greater chance of acquiring a dealer’s table. Although Comiket is the largest convention of its kind, numerous dōjinshi conventions occur throughout the year all over Japan. A notable example is the Comic City convention in Osaka.

Aside from these conventions, dōjinshi may be acquired year-round at chain stores specializing in used manga (such as Mandarake) and dōjinshi specialty stores, which tend to be located in major urban shopping districts, like Ikebukuro and Akihabara in Tokyo and Den Den Town in Osaka.

Dōjinshi specialty stores like K-Books tend to fall into two divisions, which reflect the preferences of the two main demographic groups of dōjinshi consumers. These two divisions are “meant for boys” (男性向け) and “meant for girls” (女性向け). Dōjinshi meant for boys are typically heavily pornographic in nature, and dōjinshi meant for girls generally focus on homosexual romantic relationships between male characters. This genre of dōjinshi (and, increasingly, mass market manga) is known as “B.L.,” which is an acronym for “boys’ love.” The line dividing “meant for boys” and “meant for girls” is not sharply drawn, however, are there does exist a large category of general audience dōjinshi that does not expressly cater to the conventions of either category.

Part Two
Part Three

The Makioka Sisters

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Title: The Makioka Sisters
Japanese Title: 細雪 (Sasameyuki)
Author: Tanizaki Jun’ichirō (谷崎潤一郎)
Translator: Edward G. Seidensticker
Publication Year: 1948 (Japan); 1957 (America)
Publisher: Vintage International
Pages: 530

In his introduction to Shimazaki Tōson’s The Broken Commandment (破壊), translator Kenneth Strong lists Tanizaki’s The Makioka Sisters as one of the five most famous works of Japanese literature in the West (along with Kawabata’s Snow Country, Sōseki’s Kokoro, Abe’s Woman of the Dunes, and Mishima’s Temple of the Golden Pavilion). Strong wrote this essay in 1972, and, since then, I would say that Naomi has replaced The Makioka Sisters as the Tanizaki text that is most frequently taught. The formation of national identity in the pre-war period is a hot topic in Japan-focused scholarship these days, especially when the evils of modernity are represented by a sexy young woman. Regardless, The Makioka Sisters is still an excellent novel.

As the English title suggests, the novel is about four sisters who live in a suburb of Osaka. Tsuruko and Sachiko, the two older sisters, are married, but the two younger sisters, Yukiko and Taeko, are not, and therein lies the main conflict of the novel. Eldest sister Tsuruko moves to Tokyo after her husband gets transferred, so the task of marrying off third sister Yukiko falls to second sister Sachiko and her (Tanizaki stand-in) husband Teinosuke, who remain in Osaka. The problem is that they can’t find a suitable husband for the shy traditional beauty, who has entered her thirties under the shadow of rebellious youngest sister Taeko, who cares nothing for the family’s reputation.

After Tsuruko and her family move to Tokyo, they all but disappear from the story, which is fine, since the author has more than enough material to work with concerning the three sisters who stay behind. Each of the three is an interesting and fully developed personality in her own right, and they have plenty of floods, illnesses, and secret love affairs to keep them busy. Taeko especially falls into the role of Tanizaki’s trademark femme fatale, with her modern clothing, flirtatious attitude, lies, ridiculous expenditures, and so on. Although the reader can’t help but share her sisters’ attitude of frustration towards her, Taeko adds spice to the novel and generally drives the plot forward.

Not that the novel has much of a plot. Nothing grand happens, no one important dies, no major secrets are revealed, and all conflicts are eventually resolved to everyone’s satisfaction. Instead of focusing on dramatic action, Tanizaki has instead created a world within his novel and invited the reader to visit it for five hundred pages. Although I wasn’t able to read the book for long stretches at a time, I was happy with its length and would have even been happy if it were longer. Even though the story takes place during the opening years of the Pacific War, the characters occupy a comfortable environment rich with detail, culture, and tradition. In other words, this is a novel not to be enjoyed for its forward impetus but rather for its description of a family outing to Kyoto to see the cherry blossoms. Any fan of traditional Japanese culture, and especially the tension between tradition and the modern lifestyle, should enjoy this novel – there’s a reason why an earlier generation of Japan scholars considered The Makioka Sisters to be one the defining works of modern Japanese literature.