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.

Lone Wolf and Cub, Vol. 10: Hostage Child by Kazuo Koike & Goseki Kojima

Lone Wolf and Cub is a twenty-eight volume series, collecting a serialized story that originally appeared in installments in the early '70s in the aptly titled Weekly Manga Action. Now, each installment is long: fifty pages, sometimes longer. But they often tend to be separate, each one an adventure or encounter of the main character, former imperial executioner Ogami Ittō.

But, sometimes, the stories in a particular collection - I think the English-language editions of this series actually are in tankōbon format, unlike most manga, which is closer to bunkoban or the US-specific "Tokyopop trim" - are more closely related, and form something like a story arc.

Lone Wolf and Cub, Vol. 10: Hostage Child is one of those. It starts with a massive battle, in "The Yagyū Letter," which is, if I recall correctly, the first big battle between Ittō and the forces of the evil ninja Yagyū clan. Since there's still several thousand pages of story to go, neither Ittō nor Yagyū Retsudō, his nemesis, are completely victorious, though they do get to cross swords in between Ittō killing just about everyone else in the scene. (Samurai stories, like cowboy stories, usually have a character who is vastly better at dealing out death than is plausible - it's just a trope of the genre, and we have to accept it.)

In the aftermath of "The Yagyū Letter," Ittō is separated from his son Daigorō, and the narrative hints that he might be dead. (Of course he isn't; that's the whole point of this series.) But we get two stories of Daigorō's adventures without his father, and then two more showing what they do separately as Ittō  follows the tracks of his son's path. Daigorō is saved by a former samurai, whose death - and that of his mentally disabled son - allows Daigorō to flee. In the second all-Daigorō story, various peasants are amazed and astonished at his shishōgan eyes and calm demeanor, while a temple priestess (I think) loudly insists they should send the kid away because he's bad luck.

She is correct, but that's kind of the point of every Lone Wolf and Cub story: crossing the paths of either Ogami is likely to shorten your life, often down to the next few minutes. 

The last story here sees a starving and nearly-dead Daigorō picked up and nursed back to health by a bandit as a "straw boy" - he and his two henchmen can travel more easily if they're not obviously a band of thugs, and a little boy helps sell that story. Since this means Daigorō is "working" - he's a look-out for the gang, among other things - the kid then allows himself to be fed and regains his strength. The authorities are close on the bandit's tail, though, and everyone but Daigorō dies in the end.

Daigorō has not reunited with his father Ittō yet; I assume that will happen in the next volume. And Yagyū Retsudō and his remaining forces are still nearby - I think; it can be difficult to follow the geography in this series - ready to attack once again. So danger still lurks, as always, but Ittō and his fancy sword will be slicing torsos for another eighteen volumes to come.

Captain Momo's Secret Base, Vol. 1 by Kenji Tsuruta

I discovered Kenji Tsuruta's work recently, with the atmospheric, Miyazaki-esque Wandering Island series - two volumes to date but incomplete - and thought I should see what else he'd done.

I think I went in the wrong direction. Wandering Island was a story with some fan-service elements - noticeable but forgivable. Tsuruta's more recent book, Captain Momo's Secret Base, Vol. 1, came out in 2024 in a Dana Lewis translation, and it's...

Well, not to be glib, but it's basically a fan-service with some story elements. This book is thin in multiple ways.

To start with the most obvious one: it collects a full-color intro and fourteen black-and-white chapters - there's less than a hundred and twenty pages of comics here. In some contexts, that's big - it's nearly as long as three French albums, for example. But, for a manga, it's on the short side.

The plot is similarly small: I've seen this described as "slice-of-life," which is not wrong, but is an odd way of describing a book about a single character all alone.

You see, it's about a thousand years in the future. Giant space freighters plow the spacelanes, carrying goods from one star to another. They are clearly traveling in the normal universe, and transit times are in the hundreds of days but not years, so my assumption is that they're relativistic and there's some time-dilation going on for the crews. Tsuruta says nothing about this, and implies that ship and their "ground" contacts are in the same frame of reference. So this may actually be a universe where the stars are substantially closer together, where there's One Neat Trick to make starships travel at some multiple of lightspeed, or a similar dodge away from actual relativistic physics.

Anyway, these ships used to have big crews, back in the early years of interstellar spaceflight, when pirates infested the skies. (Don't get your hopes up: that was a long time ago, and mentioned as deep backstory.) Now those ships are almost completely automated: each one has a single captain, for reasons that may be about crisis resolution, or just someone-to-take-the-fall-if-anything-goes-wrong. The captain has very little to do, most of the time.

Captain Moshi-Moshi Momo is the sole crew of the freighter Blue Chateau, currently on a 500-day trip from one unnamed port to another unnamed port. Momo has made this same run in the Chateau six times before, and done other trips up to a thousand days long, too. She's a seasoned, experienced captain who rarely if ever leaves her ship, even when it's in port.

She's also, apparently, a slim twenty-something Japanese young woman who prefers to spend all of her time naked, which gets me back to the fan-service. I'm assuming this fairly rich civilization has some kind of life-extension tech, which is why Momo has been captaining ships for what must be at least a couple of decades but looks like Tsuruta's favorite college-age hottie.

There are two other characters in Captain Momo. More important is Momo's cat, Grandpa John, her only companion on the Chateau. Tsuruta doesn't say that this unnamed shipping company encourages or requires its employees to have companion animals, but that could make sense. John is an absolutely normal cat, and does only cat things; his role in the book is largely to give Momo someone to talk at.

The third and final character is Momo's unnamed supervisor, who we know is at Proxima Centauri (and who we see in her underwear in a color frontispiece - did I mention this book is wall-to-wall fan-service?) and who talks to Momo a couple of times during the book. Alas, the Chateau is far enough from Proxima that there's a thirty-minute delay in their conversations, which makes them slow and not particularly useful.

Most of these dozen-plus episodes can be summarized as "Momo wanders about the ship, naked, talking to herself or John about various things." In her wanderings, she needs to do quite a bit of bending and stretching, squeezing through tight spaces, lying languidly reading or tossing restlessly while asleep, standing thinking with hands on hips or reaching over her head to get something. Did I mention she does all of those things naked? She does them naked. 

I may be a cynic, but I tend to think the bending and stretching are the real point of Captain Momo, and the dialogue and story are an excuse to get to them. Tsuruta has a scratchy, organic line, and he draws this character - she looks a lot like Mikura Amelia from Wandering Island, and, I understand, like most of Tsuruta's protagonists - attractively. So, if you want to see a lot of pages with a young woman who looks like that wandering about naked on her spaceship, with a cat kibitzing, you are in luck.

If you're interested in a slice-of-life story about a solo starship captain battling loneliness, and are less distracted by her attractive nakedness, though, you might not find very much in Secret Base at all.

Lone Wolf and Cub, Vol. 9: Echo of the Assassin by Kazuo Koike & Goseki Kojima

This is the ninth book of a twenty-eight book series; three hundred pages of stories that fall in the early-middle of a much longer arc. The premise was set up at the beginning: former imperial executioner Ogami Ittō is wandering through Edo-period Japan, taking various murderous jobs as he finds them, while he works on his longer-term goal of getting vengeance on the ninja Yagyū clan who killed his wife and ruined his life. Oh, and he has his toddler son in tow - hence the title.

There are two kinds of stories in Lone Wolf and Cub. We can call them mythology stories and episode-of-the-week stories, if we want. The mythology ones are part of the central spine, and see Ittō interacting - generally at the point of his sword - with the Yagyū. But they are a minority; most of the stories are about Ittō in this town, or wandering through this bit of countryside, and the people he meets (and often kills) along the way.

Echo of the Assassin is almost entirely episode-of-the week stories. It has four long, separate stories, all set somewhere fairly bucolic and rural, with Ittō passing through or doing something to further an assassination job. At the end, there's a shorter piece called "The Yagyū Letter: Prologue," which I gather leads right into the next volume. In it, we learn that the somewhat obscure actions Ittō took during the previous story were directly related to that central plot, and that the Yagyū will be retaliating, probably in massive force and with sneaky, weird ninja devices that artist Goseki Kojima will have fun drawing.

The joys of this series are still that odd mixture, partially the closely-observed, low-key depiction of life and nature in this now-long-gone era of Japan, with odd facts and quirky sidebar notes and lots of gorgeous panels of the world Ittō wanders through. And then the sudden explosions of violence, from Ittō and other men like him - mostly directed at each other, but not always.

The rules of the stories are always the same: Ittō will win in any contest of violence. Not necessarily easily, and not always against men (and rarely women) we want to see killed, but he will win. He will be more devoted to his mission than anyone else he meets is devoted to anything, and we could construct a ladder of righteousness based on that principle: Ittō at the top, of course, with the occasional nearly-as-driven characters slightly below, and then all of the ninjas and schemers and bullies and corrupt officials and crude rustics just trying to get through their days without being cut in half by a dōtanuki.

This book felt a bit more rural to me than most. I don't know Japanese geography, particularly that of several hundred years ago, but Ittō is traveling through small places in these four stories, far from big cities. He's been other places in the series, of course, and will travel more before it's done. But this one is mostly out in the countryside, leading to plenty of lovely scenery from Kojima. Pity about all the blood splattered all of it, I suppose.

Tomorrow the Birds by Osamu Tezuka

Osamu Tezuka made a lot of comics. According to Wikipedia, over 700 works, comprising more than 150,000 pages. I doubt even half of that has been translated into English. So the view any North American reader has of his work - unless that reader both is fluent in Japanese and has access to a library-worth of Tezuka - is going to be limited, tentative, and gatekept by other people.

I come back to Tezuka periodically, though I think I found the period and style I find most compelling first: Tezuka was inspired by the adult-oriented gekiga movement in the mid-60s, and changed up his style and concerns for at least one strand of his work going forward for the next twenty years. (Tezuka died of cancer, at only 60, in 1989.) Vertical published a lot of that Tezuka material, around fifteen years ago, including The Book of Human Insects, Ayako, Ode to Kirihito, Buddha, Dororo, Black Jack, MW, and Apollo's Song.

There's probably more in that style - to say it again, Tezuka was ridiculously prolific - but I haven't seen anything newly-published along those lines in years. So I've poked into other Tezuka styles and series - the well-regarded early adventure Princess Knight, for example, and more recently the anthology Shakespeare Manga Theater and the odd One Hundred Tales. But the seriousness and darkness of those core gekiga works hasn't come out in anything else I've seen.

But I keep looking. So this time I grabbed Tomorrow the Birds, from the time-frame that also saw those gekiga books. It was serialized in S-F Magazine between 1971 and 1975, collected in Japanese not long afterward, and translated into English for this 2024 edition by Iyasu Adair Nagata.

It's somewhat more serious than the '50s-era Tezuka books I've seen - it comes close to the doomy gekiga, especially early in the book - but still has some goofiness in it. And Tezuka seems to have leaned heavily into the serialized nature of this story to tell very different kinds of stories - to the point that the back half of the book feels a bit like "well, here's a Western set in this world, and now here's a fable, and then let's try a ghost story."

Tomorrow is basically a future history, spanning what seems to be at least a thousand years, told in nineteen mostly short chapters. In the near future, magpies (maybe corvids in general) have gotten smarter, learned to harness fire, and start attacking humanity. Very quickly, over the course of the first four or five stories, Japan surrenders to the birds and helps them destroy other human nations - I expect this was a political dig - and human civilization ends. The birds turn into anthropomorphic birdmen in a mechanism Tezuka wisely does not explain - though, as you can see from the cover, he does note that their heads get substantially larger to house more complex brains.

There's also a minor thread of an alien civilization monitoring Earth, and how they have interfered to create the rise of the birds. This is another bit of Tazuka's SFnal satire, and also gives him his ending - I saw it coming, but it's well done.

Each of the nineteen stories in Tomorrow is separate. The first few, during the war between humans and birds, take place in a short period of time - maybe one generation at most - but the rest of the book stretches down long centuries, as birdman civilization grows, changes, and is expressed differently in different places on earth. As I said, we get a very traditional Western - with a human in the Noble Savage role - and several other clearly genre exercises, as if Tezuka was working down a checklist of kinds of stories to tell in this milieu.

The stories are mostly in the downbeat, tragic, or SFnal if-this-goes-on mode: things go badly for the main-character humans in all of the stories, and often not much better for main-character birds. This becomes a bit obvious once the reader notices it - and any reader will definitely notice how the first few stories are all "birds attack humans, humans lose" - but each story is strongly told, and all of this material does have a similar tone and sweep and seriousness to his core gekiga works.

It is a goofy premise, but Tezuka sells it well, and gets through the "birds destroy human civilization by setting things on fire" bits quickly enough that most readers won't argue too much. We take it as allegorical, accept the WWII echoes and the core Japanese-ness of the idea, and see where the story takes us. Tomorrow the Birds is not quite as darkly uncompromising as something like MW or Ode to Kirihito, but it's from the same strain of Tezuka's work and has many of the same concerns and ideas.

The Neverending Book by Naoki Matatyoshi and Shinsuke Yoshitake

There are all kinds of book-lovers. Some read fanatically in a particular area - romances, or books about trains, or conspiracy theories. The ones who tend to self-identify as "book-lovers," though, are usually more general and waffly: they just love books, they say. Some of them seem to love the idea of books more than any specifics - they spend a lot of time acquiring and planning and arranging and talking about books, implying they like those things more than reading.

The Neverending Book is a fable about books, so it's for those self-described book lovers. It's by two Japanese men - writer Naoki Matayoshi is an author and comedian, and illustrator Shinsuke Yoshitake has created picture books and other things - but, luckily for its chances in the rest of the world, Neverending isn't really limited or defined by Japanese tastes in reading or popular genres in that country.

Maybe that means "book lovers" are the same kind of people around the world, no matter the language they read in? 

In any case, here's how it goes: there's an old king who loves reading, but his eyes have gotten too bad to read. So he hires two men to go out and scour the world to find the strangest books they can...and come back to tell him about those books.

And here's where I went huh? Why doesn't the king want to actually hear the stories from those books? Shouldn't the two guys come back with big rucksacks full of books, pull them out one by one, and just read them to the king?

But, no, they won't. This is a story about books in the abstract. Not books that were sweated over by a person, each word put down just right. Not books that were set in type carefully, re-read multiple times, and sent out into the world by a publishing team eager to see what the reaction would be. Not books that respond to earlier books, argue against previous understanding or say "the way to do this plot is this way."

(I like those kinds of books, as you might guess. Maybe because I worked in that industry for a long time, and lost the book lovers' sense of books as magical objects that just appear out of nowhere. Real books are contingent and particular and specific - from the real people that made them in that time and place, and all of those things are exciting and worth celebrating.)

But, anyway, the king, I guess, has heard enough actual books. He now wants to hear stories that all begin "there was this one book..."

And so he does. The two men come back with a store of second-hand stories, and tell them to the king - verbally, apparently from memory, since Yoshitake doesn't draw them holding books. The two men alternate nights, and they seemed to me to be telling different kinds of stories.

The first man, drawn with long fuzzy hair, tells stories about books that are more active, like people or animals, for the first few days - books that bounce or eat other books, that choose their owners or tame monsters.

The second man, drawn as bald, tells stories about more grounded books - the one he hasn't read but is sure it will make his life better, the one everyone in a foreign country gets at birth, the one full of stories about regret and loss.

They change up somewhat as they go - the seventh day in particular is a very long, quite different story that is mostly not framed as "this is one book," and I won't spoil it. (It's the best part of the book, I think.)

I came to think of the first man as Yoshitake - that seventh day has a first-person narrator with a name that seems to be a variation of his - and the second man as Matayoshi, but I could easily be wrong. Maybe they each influenced or wrote those sections, maybe not. But they do seem to be slightly different in their focuses, in the stories they tell and what they're concerned about.

They tell stories for thirteen days, and then those stories are collected in this very book - of course. There is a bit of a twist at the end, which may surprise a few duller readers, but it's the way this book needed to end, and it's handled well.

The secret of The Neverending Book is that isn't not really about books. It's about life, and how you live your life, and the stories you tell yourself along the way. That's why none of the stories here are written by people, or attributed to anyone, and why so many of the books are more like people: they all are people, either the reader herself or people in her life. That may come across as a cheat for some folks who encounter this book - the kind who care deeply that a book is the product of another mind, one of the few ways we can really follow and understand another person's thinking processes, to see how they construct an argument or a sequence. For you, I say: I get it; I am one of you, and that was my reaction as well. This is a book for "book lovers," and all that implies.

I think The Neverending Book will be successful here in North America as well: we have the same kind of book lovers, the same sort of people who want to know that their lives have meaning and purpose, who want to hear "there was this one book" and learn things about themselves and the world, almost incidentally along the way. If you know people like that, grab this book to give them as a gift before they hear about it otherwise.

Wandering Island, Vol.2 by Kenji Tsuruta

Everything I said about the first volume of Wandering Island is still true for the second: it's a laconic, quiet story with a lot of Miyazaki influence, driven by images, with a thin plot and only one real character, the floatplane pilot Mikura Amelia. (Who, as you can see from the cover, spends a lot of her time in borderline fan-service-y poses either in that tiny bikini or, for a sequence here, entirely naked.)

Well, one thing is different, I suppose. I said I thought this would be a two-book series, that the plot was thin enough that I didn't see how it could run more than another couple of hundred pages. I was mistaken; a visually-driven series can keep going, I'm coming to see, as long as the creator has more images to put on the page.

Wandering Island, Vol. 2 is not the end. It needs at least one more volume, maybe more. According to an afterword by editor Carl Gustav Horn, the fifteen chapters here appeared in the Japanese  monthly Afternoon magazine between October 2012 and December 2017, with the Japanese tankōbon also copyright 2017, so probably appearing the same month as the last chapter it collected. This English translation, by Dana Lewis, arrived in January 2019.

On the other hand, I can't find any indication that creator Kenji Tsuruta has published any further chapters of Wandering Island in the past eight years, so this may be entirely abandoned. Caveat lector.

The first volume ended with Mikura flying off to find the mysterious, moving Electric Island - she'd tracked its movements, and was sure she could catch it on this go-round through the North Pacific. The first chapter here is mostly "where is that wandering island?" but she does get there, landing right next to it despite the locals firing cannon at her.

She has a package to deliver, after all. She needs to give it to "Miss Amelia."

Most of this book is Mikura wandering, mostly silently, around the semi-ruined town that takes up most or all of the island, trying to map it so that she can figure it out. It's made up of buildings jammed together, with narrow, winding streets rising and falling up and down the hills - very Mediterranean, very Miyazaki. She sees some locals: mostly semi-hostile old men (the ones who fired that cannon, we think), one old lady is who slightly more helpful, one kid near the end.

We don't learn any of their names. None of them get more than a few words of dialogue. None of them explain anything, talk about this island, or advance the plot at all. They mostly all just tell Mikura to get the hell out of there, that she's not wanted.

Oh, and "Miss Amelia" is dead. The place she lived is entirely a ruin; she may have died a century ago.

At the very end, as Mikura is running out of the food saved in her plane, and wondering what she can possibly do next, that kid just happens to mention that there's "a store" on the island, of course in what seems to be the highest point. Mikura goes there, sees the shopkeeper...and this volume ends.

We don't see the shopkeeper clearly - we see his body, but not his face. He seems to be familiar to Mikura. I'm going to guess that it's her dead father, since it's that kind of story, and because there are so few characters that's an plausible guess. If there are ever any further chapters, maybe I can find out if I'm right.

This is a lovely book, with great images. I can recommend it on that level. Anyone coming to it hoping for answers to the questions raised in the first volume, though, will be deeply disappointed, and need to be ready to continue waiting - perhaps forever - for those answers. Anyone deeply interested in plot will also want to stay far away.

Lone Wolf & Cub, Vol.8: Chains of Death by Kazuo Koike and Goseki Kojima

About a year and a half ago, I decided to re-read the Lone Wolf and Cub series, a masterpiece and towering achievement of gekiga manga, created by writer Kazuo Koike and artist Goseki Kojima in the 1970s. I figured I could get through the the twenty-eight volumes at least one a month, so it would take a couple of years.

Well, I'm now up to volume 8, so I think it will take a bit longer than that. And, as I keep saying for each book in turn, I doubt I'll have much to say: each book is very much like the one before; their strengths are their strengths; these are amazing works but what has to be said about them has been said, many times, over the past fifty years.

So I just read Chains of Death. It contains six stories. As throughout the series, they're all sequentially numbered - these are 39 through 44.

My sense is that this series went through phases or clusters - some groupings were more concerned with the central plot, some with one-off stories. They also take place in different parts of Japan, not that I'll be any good at explicating that. This book has a group of stories that take place during winter: snow and cold is important in several of them. It's also closer to the main plot; we see Yagyū Retsudō scheming in several stories, and get a flashback of his son's duel against our series hero, Ogami Ittō, for the position of the Shōgun's executioner.

The pleasures of this series, as always, is that odd mixture of the quiet moments of beauty - Kojima is masterful at depicting natural and everyday life - and the sudden interruptions of that life by extreme violence, which is what the audience, then as now, is here for. Otherwise, see what I - and many other commentators - have said about Lone Wolf and Cub earlier; it is what it is.

Wandering Island, Vol. 1 by Kenji Tsuruta

I think this is the first half of the story - there is one more volume out, and there's not a lot of plot in this one, so I find it hard to believe it runs much longer than that. Also, creator Kenji Tsuruta is only intermittently a maker of manga - he also works as a very in-demand SF illustrator - so his solo comics projects tend to be few and separated by years. Wikipedia says it ran in serialization in Japan from 2011-17, and the two collections were published in English - translated by Dana Lewis - in the fall of 2017, but does not say the story is complete or ended...but Wikipedia has also not been updated since then.

So this is definitely a beginning, but I can't say if there is an end. I guess I'll find out.

Wandering Island, Vol. 1 is a very Miyazaki-influenced story, about a young woman, Mikura Amelia, who runs a floatplane package-delivery service down the sparsely populated Izu and Ogasawara archipelagoes, which stretch from just south of Tokyo harbor down hundreds of miles to the south. As the book opens, her partner in the business, her grandfather Brian, has just died - from that point, it's a one-woman operation. (Unlike Miyazaki, there is not a plucky mechanic character - Mikura seemingly does all of the maintenance herself.)

There are a few other characters in Wandering Island, but they've very secondary - people Mikura interacts with, people she delivers packages too, her parents glimpsed quickly once or twice. The pages focus on Mikura herself, her cat Endeavour, her classic Fairey Swordfish plane, and the landscape around them. I didn't make a count, but at least half of the pages are wordless - this is a largely a story of emotion and image, driven by Mikura's grief over her grandfather.

In her grandfather's papers, Mikura discovers references to Electric Island, a mysterious place she's never heard of before, and a sealed package to deliver there. This island moves - how is never explained in this book - following the North Pacific Gyre, and coming close to Japan every three years.

Soon after her grandfather's death, she sees the island, and tries to land near it, but her plane crashes. She wakes up on a rescue vessel, some time later, the island nowhere in sight. Tsuruta skips some amount of time - later in the book three years have passed, and Electric Island should be coming by again, but he doesn't give details of when those years passed, and Mikura looks no different at any point. Her plane also gets repaired somehow between scenes.

Mikura becomes obsessed with Electric Island - perhaps because her grandfather was, perhaps just because this is a book about an obsession, so one must develop. She neglects her business to the point where her electricity is cut off at least once - again, this is during the middle stretch of the book where three years pass somehow, so it's hard to tell if this was a week or a month or two years of mania and obsession.

At the end of this volume, Mikura has gotten some clues, and thinks she's mapped Electric Island's path this time. She sets out in her plane to find it again, to land and investigate, and, presumably, to deliver the package. That's where the volume ends - on her flight out to whatever.

Tsuraua puts Mikura in a bikini most of the time, which seemed reasonable for what seems to be mostly a hot climate and a woman mostly alone. I do see that his work has been criticized as male-gaze-y more than once - the skimpily clad girl and her cat seems to be a repeated motif - so it might not be quite as matter-of-fact as I gave it credit for. Other than that, he has a slightly scratchy line that I appreciate, and falls towards the detailed, even cluttered, side of manga, with lovingly-drawn airplanes and topographic maps and landscape seen from the sky.

This is a lovely book, but, as I said up top, it's not particularly plotty. It moves slowly, and most of what happens is in Mikura's head, as she pulls together clues and hints to figure out where this island has been and will be. The motifs may be Miyazakian - floatplanes, mysterious islands, plucky girls running their own businesses - but the tone is less so. 

Lone Wolf & Cub, Vol.7: Cloud Dragon, Wind Tiger by Kazuo Koike and Goseki Kojima

There are twenty-eight volumes collecting the whole Lone Wolf and Cub series by Kazuo Koike and Goseki Kojima, so this is the one-quarter mark. When it was published in English translation, back in 2001, we knew that. I don't know if the original Japanese book audience would have known that,  or how soon this book first appeared after the stories were originally published in a Japanese magazine in the 1970s.

In any case, it is largely middle - muscular middle, full of strong stories, but still middle - and writing about middle means either being vague or getting into great detail. I'm thinking, as I putter slowly through Lone Wolf and Cub this time, I'm going to be vague.

Cloud Dragon, Wind Tiger collects five stories - as is fairly typical, one of them is part of the overall larger story, with the Yagyu ninjas trying once again to kill former executioner and current ronin Ogami Ittō, and of course failing. The other four stories are standalone pieces, each a case where Ittō is either hired for an assassination or just happens to be somewhere when other violence is happening.

The stories are atmospheric and grounded, each one featuring specifics of life in this chaotic period of Japanese history - stories that only work because of those details, of the allowable punishments for children or how a dragnet for "undesirables" actually operated. I still wonder how strange and foreign this world seemed to the initial Japanese audience - they were separated from this phase of their history by a few hundred years and a lot of urbanization and other changes, but it still was their history, and that can resonate in a culture even when it's not current.

So this is still as good as the previous books - let me throw in links for the first volume and the previous one - and, although there is, to some degree, a longer overall story, that is a fairly thin thread most of the time. Nearly all of the books, aside from the first and the last, can be read as standalones. I don't know if I'd recommend that, but it is possible.

H.P. Lovecraft's The Call of Cthulhu by Gou Tanabe

Gou Tanabe is a manga-ka whose work has largely been adaptations of literary works - with a particular line in adapting H.P. Lovecraft stories. He's put out a fairly long shelf of work, but I can only speak to his two-volume version of Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness, which I read a few years ago.

Tanabe - in this edition, supported by Zack Davisson (translation), Steve Dutro (lettering and touchup) and Carl Gustav Horn (editor) - is, from what I've seen, a very faithful adaptor of the stories he chooses. He picks up large chunks of the original author's prose and runs those as large captions, floating over his pages, occasionally for several pages at a time. He also replicates the structure of those stories, at least in the Lovecraft works I've seen, which is particularly notable since Lovecraft tended to use a multi-section, fake-document style in his major works, and Tanabe closely follows that.

H.P. Lovecraft's The Call of Cthulhu - the Tanabe adaptation, I mean; the original short story is from 1928 - was published in Japan in book form in 2019, and this English translation followed in the fall of 2024. And it does adapt the underlying story very, very closely, turning a thirty-some page story into about two hundred and fifty pages of comics. The only thing I could think to complain about is that the main character, Francis, looks a lot more like Elric - very pale, thin face, stringy collar-length hair - than I think Lovecraft would have been comfortable with.

Tanabe's backgrounds and objects are hyper-detailed, especially the horrific visions - he's an artist who clearly delights in the monstrous and hideous, crafting his images of Cthulhu, cyclopean ruins, and the like with great care and to strong effect. His people are slightly less detailed, though still well into the realistic side of manga art styles - and he gives his people distinct faces here, something American readers don't always find the case with manga.

Do I need to describe the Lovecraft story? It's, like a lot of Lovecraft, one of the world's creepiest document reviews, as Francis gathers and annotates several statements by other people - all of whom, spoiler alert! - are dead because of the horrific things they witnessed, which slowly reveal to the reader the by-now well-known Lovecraft view of the universe: humans are small and unimportant; beings of far greater power and scope used to rule, and will come back "when the stars are right;" understanding humanity's very small and temporary place in the universe almost inevitably leads to a mental breakdown if not immediate death.

This story was one of the earliest crystallizations of that idea, the story where all of Lovecraft's ideas melded into the final form that he would work out in a series of stories over the next nearly twenty years. And Tanabe's adaptation of it does justice to Lovecraft's "unspeakable, unnamable" language - Tanabe is excellent at drawing gigantic, shadowed, horrific, bizarre creatures that both seem real on the page and yet are impossible. This is a fine adaptation of a major horror story; I'd recommend having a familiarity with the original story first, but anyone interested in a Lovecraft adaptation will have that arlready.

The City and Its Uncertain Walls by Haruki Murakami

Haruki Murakami has spent a lot of the last decade or so writing things that aren't fantasy. Well, let me back up: he never wrote genre fantasy, and I'm sure plenty of readers would violently disagree that his odd, drifting surrealist narratives are what they would call "fantasy" to begin with. But his most characteristic books feature strange dislocations, alternate worlds, inexplicable disappearances, places that correspond to mental states, and other clear elements of fantastika. If we describe a writer or work as "Murakamian," that's what we're talking about: a set of tropes that reflect a non-realistic world.

I still haven't read his last big novel, Killing Commendatore, so I can't speak to that. But, in the past decade, he's had a couple of collections of mostly-literary short stories, Men Without Women and First Person Singular. He's done some odd little non-fiction things, Murakami T and Novelist As a Vocation. And, possibly relevant to this book, the even-quirkier-than-usual novella The Strange Library.

The City and Its Uncertain Walls is his most recent novel; he was writing it during the pandemic. It was published in Japanese in 2023 and in English, translated by Philip Gabriel, in November of 2024. It is an expansion or alternate version of an early Murakami novella of almost the same title - the novella has a comma after "City" - and somewhat related to the early Murakami novel Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, which was a different reworking of that novella.

And it's a disappointing book. Inherently so, since it sets off telling one story, and abandons that entirely. I don't want to completely spoil the ending, but the ending does not answer any of the major questions raised by the opening or resolve the major relationship detailed there. Some books circle, some spiral - this one wanders, sometimes seeming aimless as it goes over here for a while, then back over there again, then off to another place.

It also made me very salty about a fantasy trope I've seen several times before, turning me super-literal as I read. You see, there are people in this book who do not have shadows. All very quirky and mysterious, yes. But how does that work? Does light just not illuminate the fronts of these people? Are their faces always dark, because the light wraps around them to shine just as brightly behind them?

It annoyed me because a shadow is not, despite fantasy thinking, a thing. A shadow is an absence, a place where a light doesn't shine because something is in its way. For a shadow not to be there, the thing that casts the shadow has to also not be there, or otherwise be made transparent to light.

Yes, I know it's a metaphor - a tedious, dull, obvious one, which we've all seen a thousand times - but it's a stupid metaphor that doesn't match anything about how the world actually works, and it physically pains me to see it running out at length in fine prose by a writer I otherwise respect.

Anyway, The City opens archly, with an unnamed boy and an unnamed girl in an unnamed region of Japan in an unnamed time some time in the past few decades. They meet as winners of a a school contest, date for about a year without getting physical, and then the girl stops responding to the boy's letters.

Spoiler alert: the actual, live girl never shows up again in the novel. Not once. Not at all. We never learn what she did, where she lived, what happened to her. The boy is obsessed with her for the rest of his life, but that's entirely about him, in that very Murakamian male-narrator way.

The girl explains a fantasy idea she has, and that she believes. She is not a real person; she is the shadow of someone else. The real her lives in an unnamed town surrounded by an ancient, unbreakable wall, somewhere not directly reachable from the normal physical world. Everyone in that town lacks shadows.

The boy comes to believe in this town, too. The title calls it a "city," but the book always refers to it as a "town." I don't know if that is meant to be significant. It also seems like a small town, one contracting and dying slowly over time, partially since it, by definition, has no connection to any other place. I also don't think Murakami meant the fact that this town is slowly dying to be meaningful; I'm not sure he realized he described it as dying, frankly.

Most of the people in the town do things the narrator doesn't care about, presumably agriculture or something, though people in this town also don't eat very much. But the girl - or the real version of the girl - works as the librarian there. And the boy somehow, many years later, finds himself at the gates of this town. He has his shadow cut away by the Gatekeeper, and moves into the town to work as the Dream Reader in that library.

To explain a bit more: the girl in the town is the same age as she was when the boy met her, as if she never changed. It's possibly no one in the town changes, but Murakami doesn't make that clear - and he does make it clear that the town has been shrinking in scope and population for a long time. So maybe people stay the same age, but sometimes suddenly die or disappear? The girl doesn't know the boy; she's the other version - even less does she know the middle-aged man he grew into. But her job is to keep the library, a big building filled with egg-like objects. And his job is to fondle those objects, which are Dreams, and then describe the dreams they embody, so they work together for an unspecified time.

But his severed shadow, which is living in what sounds like a paddock just outside the town, is dying, in a very slow, vague Ali MacGraw-kind of way. And it pushes the narrator to reconnect the two of them - which is supposedly impossible, a breach of the agreement he made when he came to the town - so they can return to the real world.

The narrator eventually agrees, and the two go to a deep dark and very symbolic pool in a disused corner of the town, where the narrator then suddenly balks at leaving. But the rules change yet again, and the shadow can now leave on its own and the narrator will stay behind.

But instead the narrator - or a version of him; it's not clear how he or we could be sure he's the only one - finds himself back in his old life in the real world, with a shadow that doesn't talk back or have an independent existence.

By the way, at this point we're only about halfway through the novel; there's a lot of semi-aimless Murakamian conversations full of people repeating phrases back to each other and vaguely philosophical Thoughts About Stuff both before and after here.

The narrator decides to find a job in a random library somewhere in the countryside, because he liked the Dream Reader gig. Because this is a Murakami novel, that random change of career for no particular reason does actually work, and he finds himself the new head librarian of the town of Z*, somewhere very rural and mountainous. The previous head librarian, who he does not realize for quite some time is already dead, gives him advice and guidance.

We get a lot of day-to-day life in Z* and day-to-day running of a small library and day-to-day chatting with a dead guy, and some day-to-day maybe-sorta flirtation of the narrator with a café owner who could become a love interest, for quite a long time, while what we thought was our plot disappears over the horizon. Eventually, a teen everyone calls Yellow Submarine Boy, after a "parka" he always wears - it sounds more like a sweatshirt or hoodie, since it's worn under a coat and needs to be washed semi-regularly, but anyway - rises up in the narrative, with a sheaf of vaguely autist behaviors, and, after even longer, learns about the walled town from our narrator.

Yellow Submarine Boy declares that he and the narrator are the same person, and that they need to merge and go back to the walled town so they can be the Dream Reader. Because this is a Murakami novel, this is actually true, and happens.

In the short last section, Yellow Submarine Boy and the narrator do live in the town again, do perform brilliantly at dream reading, which still seems as pointless and unconnected to anything else as it ever did, and then, very quickly, separate once again at the very end of the book.

At the very end, either Yellow Submarine Boy kicks the narrator out of his own life and purpose and the narrator dies, or the narrator goes back to the real world yet again for another period of tedious living that Murakami will not describe for us, or maybe something transcendent happens that Murakami will also not describe. Then we get an afterword, with Murakami explaining the various lives of this story, and how he wrote this one. Since he is a Big Name Bestselling Author, he doesn't mention anyone pointing out that this novel doesn't actually resolve the situation it sets up at the beginning, or answer any questions about the girl, which the narrator spends the entire book thinking about and obsessing on.

The City, like a lot of Murakami's work, runs largely on vibes. If those vibes connect with you, you will enjoy it. If, like me, they seem arbitrary and capricious where they actually make sense in the first place, you will be annoyed by the plot and ending even if you enjoy the language and writing. Keep that in mind if you consider reading it.

Lone Wolf and Cub, Vol. 6: Lanterns for the Dead by Kazuo Koike and Goseki Kojima

This is the sixth collection of the 1970s Lone Wolf and Cub manga series, originally serialized in a magazine for adult men, or seinen - manga then, and (as I understand it) still now, have and had a mania for categorizing their audience as tightly as possible. There are five long stories here, like most of the volumes. Those stories are separate, with usually only minor elements flowing from one into the next (though this book has its last story based on the consequences for our hero from the previous story), and a larger overall plot that doesn't come up much at all in this volume but does occasionally surface in some of the stories.

I've been re-reading the series for about the past year: I thought I would be going through it more quickly, but a volume about every two months seems to be my pace. I warned up front that I thought what I had to say about individual volumes or stories could dwindle quickly; these stories are brilliantly told and masterpieces of their kind, but they are all very much of a kind.

So I'm afraid the thing that was most striking about Lone Wolf and Cub, Vol. 6: Lanterns for the Dead is that the title story's name was translated two different ways here. For the book title, and the table of contents, it's "Lanterns for the Dead." But the half-title for the story itself, which leads off this collection, is "Floating Spirits," which I suspect is a more precise translation of the original Japanese term. It's about floating lanterns, toro nagashi, which mark the end of the Obon festival, and, traditionally, light the way back to the otherworld for spirits that visit their families during that festival.

As I understand it, the lanterns are inscribed with the name of a specific dead person, usually a beloved ancestor (parents, grandparents, etc.). But the two lanterns in question here are the ones our hero, former executioner and current ronin Ogami Ittō, commissioned for himself and his young son Daigorō. That connects to one of the core ideas of the series: that Ittō and Daigorō are as good as dead already, on their path of vengeance - not "cursed" or "doomed," exactly, but on a path that leads inevitably to the otherworld.

The whole series is steeped in the mindset of Edo-period Japan like that, told from the point of view of characters who absolutely believe in the way of the samurai, who have lived their lives and will die following very specific precepts and enforcing the narrow boundaries of that world, for themselves and for everyone else, all of whom must fit into very tight boxes of allowed actions.

It's an alien world for American readers in the 21st century. But I think even for the original 1970s Japanese audience it was strange: hugely old-fashioned in every detail, and focused on the concerns of what was a small segment of society to begin with - for Americans, if the Founding Fathers were also a knightly order who believed intensely in chivalry, it might be something similar.

That's the central joy of Lone Wolf and Cub: being immersed in a long-ago, long-past world, dropping into the concerns and obsessions of those people, all organized into action-packed plots of violence and vengeance and treachery. This volume does that well; they all do.

Shakespeare Manga Theater by Osamu Tezuka

Osamu Tezuka was a busy, popular, energetic creator for a long time - credited with over 700 books, plus animation projects and other things - and even the most expansive translation projects have only brought disconnected chunks of that oeuvre into English. I think I have a decent idea of the Tezuka work I've liked best, and has seemed strongest to me: his adult-aimed gekiga works, mostly from the early 1970s. Although, with several hundred other things I've never had a chance to read, that's a very tentative opinion.

But I keep reinforcing it when I find works from the mainstream of Tezuka's work - like Princess Knight a decade ago, or One Hundred Tales last year. They have mostly been in madcap-verging-on-goofy mode, with often-grotesque characters emoting at top volume and rampaging around the pages, seemingly to entertain an audience of easily-distractible hellions. On the positive side, his art is always clean and crisp and his stories move swiftly, though often in arbitrary directions, the better to keep the audience on board.

Shakespeare Manga Theater is a collection of stories, or chapters of stories, with Shakespeare connections, from about twenty-five years of Tezuka's career. Other than their inspiration, there's nothing to unify them. Well, they are all in that audience-pleasing Tezuka style: all big and flashy and in-your-face, like a three-card monte dealer laying down a line of patter for an easy mark.

I'll be blunt: I find Tezuka in this mode to be a purveyor of disposable entertainment for young boys. There's some glimpses of depth, or more nuanced thought, but the morals tend to be obvious and the action tends to be frenetic. I gather his iconic work in this mode - things like Astro Boy and Black Jack - were beloved by a couple of generations of Japanese boys, and slightly less so by their compatriots in other countries, but I didn't read Tezuka at that critical age, and that work has never struck me as more than adequate as an adult.

We start off with a fairly straight adaptation of Merchant of Venice from 1959 - entirely Tezuka-ized, but the same plot, and the whole play. Then a story called "Robio and Robiette" from Astro Boy a few years later - a looser adaptation but with the essential bones of the original still entirely visible.

There are two chapters from a project called Vampires, which the editors claim to be inspired by Macbeth. I will grant them that there are three witches who a major character consults, and their dialogue is Macbeth-adjacent, but none of the rest of the plot, as much of it as we see in this excerpt, seems to have anything to do with Shakespeare. We instead have a boy lycanthrope, a dastardly villain hiding as the trusted aide of the great man he's trying to ruin, and the gorgeously fragile girl love interest who just gets to cry and be kidnapped in these pages.

The back half of the book has three stories from an '80s series called Rainbow Parakeet, in which a master of disguise takes last-minute parts in plays so he can use that access to do major thefts of the rich people attending the opening nights of those plays. Well, that's the set-up in the first story - in the second he's on vacation and the third just randomly traveling. There's also a nemesis/potential love-interest female detective who is central in the first two stories and entirely missing in the third.

In the first Rainbow Parakeet story, the play he's dropping into - the star was just arrested by the FBI on drug-smuggling charges, and the understudy was humorously injured by the director at the last dress rehearsal - is Hamlet. I think this may actually be the actual first story about Rainbow Parakeet, since he explains his deal, and we get a lot of background on the female detective, too.

The second story is supposedly an adaptation of The Taming of the Shrew, but much more loosely. Parakeet and the detective (Senri) land at a horse farm out somewhere in rural Japan, and investigate the mysterious disappearance of a once-famous racehorse and his apparent reappearance every night to cheer up his "wife." (This story does not accord to anything I know about horse breeding, even granted that I know very little.) Senri is also dodging a potential suitor, who turns out to be the owner of the farm. It is a much vaguer adaptation of that play; I suspect every Rainbow Parakeet story was given the title of some other famous story, and used elements of that without directly adapting it as such.

And the last story sees Parakeet in another remote rural location, this time in Polynesia. There lives a world-famous dancer, Boroguirre, and Parakeet plans to "steal" his dancing style. But he instead gets caught up in a villain's plan to actually steal the secret mixture of forty plants that Boroguirre's tribe uses to create a unique mind-expanding potion. Boroguirre is black, and has a white wife, so this is all supposedly an adaptation of Othello, and as such, Boroguirre does get unreasonably jealous out of nowhere when the plot requires him to do so.

These are all sturdy, audience-pleasing manga stories, full of action and humor. None of them have anything you would hesitate to hand to a relatively bright seven-year-old, or a particularly dull twenty-year-old. They don't make particularly interesting use of their Shakespeare references, but it is true that all of them have Shakespeare references.

Lone Wolf and Cub, Vol. 5: Black Wind by Kazuo Koike & Goseki Kojima

In a long-running series, it can be easy to forget that some things weren't there from the beginning. Lone Wolf and Cub ran for twenty-eight volumes, but this is the one where that famous baby-cart first gets guns. (It's also armored on the bottom at a significant moment here, which might have been shown earlier - I don't remember.)

The guns get more baroque later on, as I recall, but here we see our hero, former imperial executioner Ogami Ittō, meet a master gunsmith, learn a few things about that man's craft, and get plans that he can incorporate in his own death-dealing. We see him and his son working on the cart, but not the full murderous effect of those modifications - creators Kazuo Koike and Goseki Kojima have to save something for later.

Black Wind is the fifth of those twenty-eight collections of the Lone Wolf and Cub series, which originally ran in a Japanese magazine in the early '70s and was translated about twenty-five years ago by Dana Lewis for this American reprinting, with the iconic covers by Frank Miller with Lynn Varley.

Like most of the books, it collects mostly independent stories - there was a long, loose plot to the whole of Lone Wolf and Cub, but that was "Ittō wanders around Japan, working as an assassin-for-hire, to gather up enough money to force an investigation of the Yagyu clan who betrayed him, destroyed his family honor, and killed his wife. Meanwhile, the Yagyu intermittently search for Ittō and try to kill him, with no luck." Most of the stories were about a specific assassination contract, or - as in the case of the title story here - the aftermath of one of those.

The five stories here do have a bit of Yagyu intrigue - "Decapitator Asaemon" is about a man manipulated into chasing Ittō because the Yagyu will be happy whichever one of them kills the other - but they're mostly separate. Well, the last story here, "The Guns of Sakai," I've already alluded to - it's somewhat important later because it shows another way Ittō has added to his formidable armament. But, more importantly, it showcases one of the core themes of the series: violent people are divided into two groups, those driven by expedience and greed, and those driven by a purer love for the work itself. The greedy ones are evil, and will die badly. Those who care deeply about doing their jobs well may come in conflict with Ittō - the gunsmith certainly does - but are seen to be noble and get good deaths. (Normal people, those who are no good at violence to begin with, get to keep their heads down and hope they make it out the other end, just like real life.)

I've written about the previous books in this series; I'm in the middle of what I think will be a re-read of the whole series over two or three years. I'm trying not to repeat myself, and trying not to do the book-report thing: in the first story, Ittō kills this guy for that guy, and it is sad because reasons. So I think this is what I want to say about this book: maybe not completely finished, but neither is the series, is it? This is a bit of middle, of a series that had a very long middle. These stories are much like the ones that came before and after them: evocative, muscular, steeped in a worldview that was outdated and alien, even in Japan fifty years ago, told precisely and  well, each long enough to be a mini-epic of its own.

Hanami: You, Me, & 200 Sq Ft in Japan by Julia Cejas

I've always been a fan of complication - especially if it's complicated mostly in my own head. So a book about a Spanish couple moving to live in Japan for an extended period, originally published in France and translated into English for American publication by a mostly French company headquartered in Hollywood...well, that's the kind of complication I love. I figured it probably wouldn't even affect the book itself much, and I was right.

Julia Cejas is a Spanish illustrator and maker of comics; her partner (I think they're married now; I also think they got married in large part because it would make the bureaucracy of this trip to Japan easier) Marc was an engineer and is now trying to work as a composer, primarily for video games. They realized that they had a moment in their lives - no strong ties, children or animals; work that could be done anywhere; funding from Marc's severance from the job he didn't want and Julia's recent grant - where they could actually live their dream. They could move to Japan and live there for at least months - maybe indefinitely, if things worked out.

Hanami is Cejas's first graphic novel, the story of that time, wrapped up in a little context to show their lives before and after. (Holly Atchison translated it for this US edition.) Cejas has a designer's eye: her panels are each precise and specific, often zooming in closer than the reader expects to This One Particular Thing. She uses a two-color palette, with various intensities of a red and a blue that are both fairly quiet, earthy, and grounded.

They possibly did not do as much planning as they might have - Cejas was a vegetarian and Marc had a gluten intolerance, which made finding food to eat somewhat difficult to begin with. (Not just figuring out what foods they can eat, but reading labels in a foreign language, in a foreign alphabet, and looking for all the words that could mean "meat" or "bread.")

But it was an experience, the kind of thing most of us can only dream of - and that we can live, vicariously, though a well-observed and thoughtfully executed book like this one. They did have a life in Japan for a while, doing many of the things they wanted to do - and they also found some things surprises, or did other things they didn't expect. That's a life, and the joy in reading about other people's lives is seeing those moments depicted clearly and honestly. Hanami has a lot of those joys, made up of Cejas's careful choices in picking moments to depict and her designer's eye in turning those moments into vibrant, interesting pages filled with compelling images.

Lone Wolf and Cub, Vol. 4: The Bell Warden by Kazuo Koike and Goseki Kojima

There is nothing particularly special about this fourth volume of the Lone Wolf and Cub series: no new revelations about our hero, Ogami Ittō, or his enemies the Yagyū clan, no flashbacks, nothing unexpected. There are four long stories here - each one seventy or eighty pages - in which our hero meets someone and then kills them, often with some Buddhist philosophizing along the way.

I expect most of the volumes of Lone Wolf and Cub will be like this: fine storytelling; intricate, dynamic art; deep psychological insight; inventive fighting implements used in interesting ways; glimpses into a distinct, particular historical world seen clearly and unsentimentally; stories of sudden violence about a man seeking vengeance in a dark and corrupt world. Those are all excellent things; the series is known as a masterpiece for a reason. But they won't be new things.

In the first, title story of Lone Wolf and Cub, Vol 4: The Bell Warden, Ogami Ittō is hired to "test" the three sons of the current bell warden of Edo - the man responsible for the network of towers that toll the hours and tell everyone what time it is. In typical fashion for this era and this people - or maybe just in this series; I don't have a separate deep knowledge of 18th-century Japan - the warden takes his role very, very seriously. (In this series, there are the good people, who think that what they do is the most important thing on earth and are willing, even happy, to die in the commission of their duties, and the bad people, who do absolutely anything and are driven by their desires.) So he is basically making a bet: at least one of my sons will be skilled enough to beat and kill one of the premier swordsmen in the entire country, and thus be worthy to continue the family line.

Spoiler! He loses that bet. Of course. The premise of the series is that Ogami Ittō wins. Every time, one way or another, up until the final battle with his ultimate enemy. And "winning" in this context always means killing the other guy. A samurai adventure series could hardly operate differently.

The three other stories have similar depth, and are similarly entangled in that Edo-era conception of propriety and right action and inevitable glorious death. It is, of course, a very dark, gloomy series at its core, set among men who dedicated their lives to slaughtering each other mostly for the benefit of a few feudal leaders. I'm finding reading one of these books about every six weeks to be about right: going much faster than that would be too much, a flood of stories too similar in tone to stand out from each other at that pace.

Haruki Murakami Manga Stories 2 by Jean-Christophe Deveney & PMGL

The book I have in front of me doesn't have a "2" on it anywhere I can see. There are several library stickers on the spine, though - maybe it's there.

But, as far as I can tell, the things that differentiate this Haruki Murakami Manga Stories from the Haruki Murakami Manga Stories I read a few months ago are the colors on the cover (pinks before, greens now), the illustration (frog before, monkeys now), and the list of stories adapted. Well, the insides are different, of course. 

This one adapts three stories, as the first volume adapted four. I see there's already a third volume, adapting two stories, which implies the fourth volume will adapt one long story and the fifth volume will have none. Such are the limits of three datapoints.

See my post on the first book for questions of manga-ness, as much as I know about the adaptors (not much), and some related thoughts. This book is the same project by the same creators, very much the continuation of the same sort of thing.

First up here is "The Second Bakery Attack," a 1985 Murakami story translated in 1992, first appearing in English in Playboy and then in his collection The Elephant Vanishes the next year. A youngish married couple wakes, ravenously hungry, in the middle of the night, and the husband explains it's due to a curse - he and a friend went to rob a bakery about a decade before, as young students, stealing enough bread to eat for two days but taking no money - and were stymied by the baker, who instead made them listen to Wagner for their bread. This made things in the husband's life subtly wrong - the curse - and now it extends to his new wife as well. The answer is clear to her: they must attack another bakery, that night, and do it right: stealing only food. They don't find any traditional bakeries open in the middle of the night, but there is a McDonald's - which they then proceed to attack.

"Samsa in Love" is a reversal of Kafka's The Metamorphosis, a 2013 story that appeared in English translation in The New Yorker the same year and in the Murakami themed collection Men Without Women a few years later. In it, a creature - we're never told what, or who, he was before the story began - wakes up as Gregor Samsa, in an otherwise uninhabited house, in a Prague with some kind of tumult going on outside. He knows nothing, and needs to learn to stand and walk and speak and dress himself and everything else. He meets a hunchbacked woman, who has come to fix a lock in the house, and decides in the end that being human is worth it.

Last here is "Thailand," a story from the (1999 in Japan, 2002 in English) after the quake collection, all the stories of which were somehow about the 1995 Kobe earthquake. Satsuki is a middle-aged Japanese woman, just starting menopause and starting to feel old. She's a doctor, specializing in thyroid research, and lived in the US for a long time with her now-ex-husband. She attends a conference in Bangkok, and spends most of the next week on a vacation at a Thai resort, where she is driven by a man named Nimit. He, and a fortune-teller he takes her to, tell her that her failure to forgive that ex-husband, and to move on, has created a rock within her that will be the only thing left after she is cremated unless she takes actions now to break it up. There is a specific prophetic dream she must wait for, which will destroy the stone.

Murkami's stories are quirky, elusive things, and Deveney again adapts those qualities well into comics - these feel like the same kind of stories, even with only minimal Murakamian prose for the captions and dialogue. As usual with Murakami, the plots don't seem to make much logical sense when detailed - they operate on emotional connections and various kinds of dream-logic. And the art - by something credited as PMGL, which could be a studio or a person or an alien living secretly among us - is subtly grotesque in just the right ways for the materials, with faces that are easy to look at but never pretty and lush, detailed backgrounds.

Lone Wolf and Cub, Vol. 3: The Flute of the Fallen Tiger by Kazuo Koike & Goseki Kojima

There's a difference between formula and genre. I don't know if I can explain it, clearly enough, but it's real. A formula is a cheap shortcut, a template for a kind of story to make it easier to knock off, while a genre is a territory, with clear boundaries and sometimes required landmarks, which a story is free to navigate in its own way.

The Lone Wolf and Cub stories, written by Kazuo Koike and drawn by Goseki Kojima (and translated by Dana Lewis with some production work to make them read left-to-right by Digital Chameleon for the English-language edition I'm reading), are deeply enmeshed in their genre, but they do not run to formula.

This third volume, The Flute of the Fallen Tiger, collects five more stories from the long-running series - there are twenty-eight books collecting Lone Wolf and Cub, each about three hundred pages long - and, as I often think happens with third volumes of long-running stories, is the point where a good work settles in, gets comfortable with its genre boundaries, and starts running some variations.

Lone Wolf and Cub is not just a genre work; it's a work that both defined a subgenre (the "Lone Wolf and Cub" story, in which a warrior travels with and protects a weaker, smaller person) and set the standard for its larger genre (the historical samurai tale). And, though there may be Americans who are deeply knowledgeable about that larger genre, I am definitely not one of them. (It's a very large genre, in a language I don't read, deeply connected with that nation's vision of itself and its history - I assume there are lots of subtleties and currents there.)

These are energetic but melancholy stories: our hero (Ogami Ittō) is declaredly on the road to hell, and just wants to get vengeance before the end. The stories all have that as background, though the central conflict only pops up here and there - in this volume, one of the stories is a flashback to the ambush and betrayal that killed his wife, while the other four are just things that happen to him on the road, times when he gets caught up in other people's troubles or one-off assassin jobs he's taking to make money.

The series is episodic by nature. I think the larger genre is largely episodic to begin with, but Lone Wolf and Cub leans strongly into the episode, with each story a separate bead on a long string, sitting next to the others and commenting each on each, in an ascending arc that will eventually culminate in that final battle.

I've rambled enough here, and I'm not going to detail the plots of the five stories collected in Flute. They're all good, all doom-laden, all full of sudden violence and intriguing details of a culture that is far removed from me (and that I think was at best a matter of historical interest even for contemporary Japanese readers in the 1970s), all full of gorgeous precise moments and psychological depth. If you have any interest in samurai stories at all, this is the series to read.

Lone Wolf and Cub, Vol. 2: The Gateless Barrier by Kazuo Koike and Goseki Kojima

Just to set expectations: I expect to read all twenty-eight volumes of Lone Wolf and Cub, which will probably take more than two years at the current pace. (Not promising that, though: so much can derail plans over that stretch of time.) And I will write posts about them here as I read them, since I do that for everything I read and I am a creature of habit.

But I also expect those posts get shorter and more desultory as I go along, because I don't think I'm going to have a lot of say about "here's three hundred more pages of pulse-pounding samurai action in the '70s style, as you like it!" But I'm still in early days here, so we'll see how it actually goes.

Lone Wolf and Cub, Vol. 2: The Gateless Barrier collects five more stories about the vengeance-driven former imperial executioner Ogami Ittō and his toddler son Daigorō, written by Kazuo Koike and drawn by Goseki Kojima. At this point, Koike and Kojima are still exploring this world, still setting up.

The title story here is the most important: Ogami is hired to kill a "living Buddha," the elderly leader of a religious community, who is pushing the local samurai leadership to cut taxes for a few years to spare the people. The samurai, though, know that failing to pay their crushing debts - here, unlike many stories, mostly reasonable debts; this is a very poor community, not a mismanaged one - will ruin their reputations, and reputation is vastly more important than anyone's life...particularly the lives of peasants. Ogami can't just kill such a saintly man: all of his training is in meeting violence with violence. So, on the one hand, this is the story of how Ogami can transform his thinking, to turn himself into an almost inhuman spirit of destruction - very specifically in a Buddhist way, very particularly in the way the living Buddha tells him to - so that he can finish this job, and, by extension, continue on the road for his final revenge.

But the other side of the story is also central. Ogami is hired mostly by samurai to solve samurai problems throughout the series: he is a sword, and they are the users of swords; they have the money, and he is paid in money. His employers here are a complex mixture of high-minded and hide-bound, honorable and treacherous, understandable and foreign. At the core of Lone Wolf and Cub is a complex view of this society and the role of the ronin: not that any of this is "good" or "bad," but a deeper understanding of the religious and social underpinnings of the world, the places where those are weak or undermined or ignored or broken, and the ways that this world is an engine that systematically destroys people.

As all societies do, in their own ways. But Lone Wolf and Cub will focus on how this society works, by threading its hero through various situations in that world and seeing what's left when his sudden violence shattered them.

And, along the way, the storytelling will be measured and careful, in that seemingly-slow pace that was a revelation to so many Western readers when we first saw it. Lone Wolf and Cub has the luxury of space, and takes advantage of that at all times: not just in the length of the whole series, since no one knew at the time it would run that long. More important is the length of each story: they run around sixty pages here, and, as I recall, can get even longer than that later in the series. Each story has enough space not just for the action, but for a quiet frame around the action, a view of what else is going on in the world at the time, a wider experience of this world so that we can see what is shattered when Ogami Ittō comes to town.