Emanon, Vol. 1 by Shinji Kajio & Kenji Tsuruta

One of the core tensions in science fiction is between the pull of a neat idea and the need to actually do something with that idea. It was most stark in the early days, when many SF writers were fumbling fans who could iterate on each other's thoughts but not necessarily turn them into actual compelling stories. But you do still see fans and writers talk about "sensawunda" or arguing that just having a cool new take on some standard trope is good enough.

I think the Emanon series, originally prose stories by Japanese writer Shinji Kajio, might suffer a bit from that syndrome. I've just read the manga adaptation of the first of those stories, "Memories of Emanon," by illustrator Kenji Tsuruta; there are at least three more volumes, so I gather more implications or complications are worked out later.

I'm going to give some spoilers - first general ones that the back-cover copy mentions, and that you'd be hard-pressed to avoid in any case, but later I'm most interested in one particular implication. I thought of it before it came up in the book; I think most SF readers will get there fairly quickly. But I'll warn the more spoiler-averse of you before I mention it.

Emanon, Vol.1: Memories of Emanon is a 2008 manga volume based on the original 1983 story of the same name by Kajio - I've seen references to that story both as a "novel" and as a "short story," so I suspect it's a shortish novella that might have been published standalone at least once - which was translated by Dana Lewis for 2019 English-language publication.

The main character is a young man (explicitly a SF fan, reading a bunch of classic mostly-American SF novels on this trip), traveling on a long-distance ferry in Japan on February 24, 1967. He meets a young woman, somewhat rescuing her from an overbearing drunk, and they start talking - they end up spending most of the day-long journey together. He doesn't get a name in the story; she tells him to call her "Emanon," which means "No Name."

And then she tells him her big secret: she's the once-in-a-generation repository of a vaguely Jungian collective memory. She remembers, absolutely perfectly, the lives of all of her ancestors - it seems to be only direct female-line ancestors, but explicitly back to single-celled creatures that don't have memory to begin with.

The rest of the book is vague philosophizing about that, combined with our unnamed dude yearning for this hot "hippie chick" who is several billions of years older than him. The plot, such as it is, is these two characters talking on this boat over the course of eighteen hours or so.

More spoilers might come in from here, since I'll be talking about how this "immortality" works. Feel free to drop out if you're allergic.

Emanon basically has the memories of being young millions of times, and none of being old [1]: the accumulated memories "transfer" to each woman's firstborn (always female) child. Anyone who has looked at historical records will find such an unbroken strand incredibly unlikely, to put it mildly. (Perhaps there used to be more people like Emanon, but the female lines were all severed? That might come up in later stories.)

Also, what memories do the "former" Emanons have? Do they remember that they used to be able to remember? Surely they don't become amnesiacs at the moment they give birth. Do they never talk about this overwhelming, unique thing with their own daughters and mothers? 

(I suspect Kajio is more interested in what his main character thinks of the hot girl with memories of eternity, not what it's like to be that girl.)

All in all, Emanon comes across as that very hoary SF thing, the "check out this cool idea" story. It's a moody, ruminative piece, focused tightly on this one male gaze at the title character.

I don't blame her for ghosting him when the boat approaches port.

Personally, I find the idea oddly flawed in multiple ways: I don't believe in this one singular unbroken line, I expect there would be a much stronger mother-daughter connection Kajio completely ignores, and the "I remember being a paramecium" stuff is utter bunk. But it does have an interesting idea, and engages it with seriously, which makes it solidly SFnal and worth thinking through. I would not agree with reviewers that call it unique or particularly deep - it's that standard SF thing, a sophomore bull-session put onto the page - but it has an idea and explores that idea with at least some pretense of rigor.

[1] If I were being cruel, I'd point out this is clearly what attracted Tsuruta to the material: a woman he can draw, in any era or place, as exactly his thin freckle-faced model, because she is always young and slim and hot, or else she's not Emanon anymore. He can even draw her half-naked in some ancillary material, even if that doesn't fit into the story at all. Good thing I'm not cruel.