It's a magical world

Urasawa Naoki with Tezuka Osamu. Pluto. 8 vols. Tokyo: Shogakkan, 2003-09.

I am not a particular follower of the God of Manga, for reasons that became clear to me all over again after I read the episode of Tetsuwan Atomu ("Chijô ni Saidai Robotto") on which this manga is based. Urasawa, however, is an unabashed Tezuka fan, to the point where the protagonist of his first megahit, Monster, is (one suspects) named after Atom's creator, Dr. Tenma. Pluto is an authorized retelling of that episode of Tetsuwan Atomu, begun in 2003 to coincide with the date of Atom's birth in-manga.

For those who don't know, Tetsuwan Atom | Astro Boy is the world's greatest robot, created by the world's greatest robot engineer after the death of Prof. Tenma's biological son Hibio. It being the 1960s, and Tezuka being a relentlessly saccharine storyteller, at least until the late 1960s, in Tetsuwan Atomu all of these developments are treated as being completely hunky-dory. In Urasawa's retelling, however, the beating heart of twisted love and grief and hatred that powers the story is sliced open and laid bare, and Pluto is an incomparably stronger manga for it.

The bare bones of the story are the same in both versions: one by one, the world's seven strongest robots are being murdered, for reasons that are revealed to have something to do with the fall of the dictator of a certain West Asian country that Urasawa calls Persia. Whereas Tezuka's protagonist is Atom, however, Urasawa's protagonist is the German Interpol inspector robot Gesicht, a crucial change that allows Urasawa to tell a far more complex story, though his Atom is much older and much less naïve and childish than Tezuka's too, for all that he looks like a human kid from the outside.

( Can a robot feel hatred? )

That said, Urasawa is a modern master of the medium, and I have to recommend this series extraordinarily highly, just like all his others.

CLAMP. Gate 7. 1 vol. Tokyo: Shueisha, 2011.

This is CLAMP's newest manga, which I've been translating, and it is the combination of so many things that I like separately and love in combination that I feel as though it were written just for me.

To wit, the manga is set in current Japan, and our viewpoint/sympathy character is one Takamoto Chikahito, a Tokyo-ite high schooler with a lifelong yen for Kyoto, which as the manga opens he is finally able to assuage by taking a solo trip to the old capital of flowers. ( Extremely mild spoilers )

There's something of a Sengoku boom going on in Japan right now; this is one of at least three current manga I can think of dealing with the period, though I think CLAMP's entry, in its reincarnating the Sengoku figures as bishônen, is the one calculated to appeal most to rekijo and other female history buffs. The manga is also an unmistakable love letter to Kyoto, where three of the four members of CLAMP grew up; they haven't used this many actual photos in a manga since X/1999, and all the locations and restaurants the characters visit are actual places in the city, most of them quite famous.

I would love it for all these things, but what I really am intrigued by thus far is the presentation of Hana, who unlike the other Urashichiken members Tachibana and Sakura, who are affiliated with the moon and the sun respectively, is affiliated with wu/mu/nothingness/the stars and is entirely gender-neutral. The manga has thus far frustrated Chikahito's attempts to place Hana somewhere along the gender binary, and I'm looking forward to see how things transpire further on this front, given various other personal entanglements among the characters. Honestly out of the whole cast I probably like Chikahito the least, though he's at least marginally more self-aware than similar CLAMP protagonists at the beginning, such as Watanuki or Kazahaya of Legal Drug,. I'll keep reading this manga and being reminded of Kyoto, my home away from home, with great pleasure. (For that purpose, I actually made a map of the city from the manga's perspective.)

Yoshinaga Fumi. Ôoku. 6 vols. Tokyo: Hakusensha, 2006-10.

Volumes 2-5 of this excellent, discomforting, pointedly skeevy manga back track from the time period of the first volume (the 1720s) to the 1630s, when the "red pox" first begins ravaging Japan and the retainers of the shogunate begin taking extraordinary measures to preserve what the first two generations of the Tokugawa have built. It ends with the future Yoshimune's only meeting with current shogun Tsunayoshi, in the early 1700s.

( Warning for discussion of rape and of highly dub-con situations )

I'll need a unicorn chaser before I tackle the next two volumes, but this is a brilliant manga.

Arakawa Hiromu. Hagane no Renkinjutsushi | Fullmetal Alchemist. 27 vols. Tokyo: Square Enix, 2002-10.

This is, I think, the best manga I've read yet. If you're going to read one manga in your life, you could do much, much worse than this one. If you don't like manga, I urge you to give this manga a try; it's amazing, as a story and as manga. Arakawa is a master of what the medium can do, and she does it.

( Alchemy follows the law of equivalent exchange. )

The manga is also, just as a manga, stunning: it's funny and amazingly powerfully drawn and action-packed. I remain absolutely amazed that virtually the only thing Arakawa created before this manga was a 40-page one-shot that won her the 21st Century Shonen Gangan Award, because the pacing of the series has been pitch-perfect from the very first panel, and that doesn't relent here at the end. Deservedly, she won the Tezuka Prize in the New Artist category this year.

Yes, I have no shame, I know.

( Time never lies )

Obviously, Ginjô knows more than he's telling, and is playing more angles than one.

Takemiya Keiko. Terra e… | To Terra… vols. 2 & 3. Trans. Dawn T. Laabs. New York: Vertical, 2007. [1977-80]

I read the first volume of this classic sf epic in Japanese about two years ago, which, combined with the manga's frequent long time-jumps, made remembering exactly what was going on a bit difficult initially.

Oddly enough, I would bet money that this story ends on a way bleaker note than Andromeda Stories, but I have the feeling that in the end I'll like this one better. As soon as I actually finish Andromeda Stories, I'll report back on that.

The plot of the manga revolves around humanity, which in the far future has given over control of itself to a system of supercomputers in an attempt to a) re-terraform Earth (Terra) so as to make it eventually habitable again and b) keep humanity free of the corrupting influence of the Mu, a sub-species (?) of humanity that develops enormous psychic powers in latency, concomitant with a greatly lengthened lifespan and decreased physical strength. As part of this, humans are conceived in laboratories at the computers' direction and live segregated by age: some planets contain only children, while others are reserved for adults, and a rigorous educational process serves to separate out those who are Mu from 'normal' humans. Jomy Marcus Shin believes he's human like everyone else until he undergoes his maturity testing and finds out he's a Mu; eventually, at the behest of the Mu leader Soldier Blue, Jomy accepts his destiny as Blue's successor and leads the Mu in rebellion to the planet Nazca, where they make a temporary settlement and fall to bickering about whether to attempt to regain Terra, their promised land.

Volumes 2 and 3 cover the decision (not without cost) to abandon Nazca and press on to Terra, at the same time as the Mu and Jomy are pursued by the ruthless Terran elite soldier Keith Anyan, who like the Mu prophetess Physis was born entirely from the computers, using synthetic DNA. Keith's rise to power is shadowed by his aide Makka, a Mu who grew up too far out to be put through the educational system and whose loyalty is thus to humanity. For his part, Jomy (who by the end of volume 2 has stopped using his eyes, voice, or ears, instead communicating and perceiving the world entirely through telepathy) is aided and bedeviled by the Nazca Nine, Mu children who were born naturally on Nazca and whose powers are equaled only by Jomy's. The ending is…spectacular.

I liked this manga, though I was sort of shocked by the ending, and it's partly because Takemiya is really good at conveying emotionality, even as she keeps the plot moving at a blazing clip. The characters, and the impossible positions in which they find themselves, stay with you after you finish reading. I really want to watch the 2007 anime, too, since Wikipedia tells me the endings are slightly different. This is yet another nice Vertical release that sold horribly; if you're ever at an anime con with a Vertical booth, they will be more than happy to have you take copies off their hands.

Ohtsuka Eiji & Mori Yoshinatsu. Hokushin Denki vol. 1. Tokyo: Kadokawa, 2004. [1997]

I would bet money--not a lot, but, say, ¥500--that I'm the only person in the country to have read this manga. It's never been translated, which is a shame, because like all of Ohtsuka Eiji's manga it's quite interesting.

So. This manga is set in Japan and Manchukuo in the fraught, fascistic 1930s and follows one Hyoudou Hokushin, a former disciple of the folklorist Yanagita Kunio and a self-proclaimed "heresiologist"--he's been excommunicated by Yanagita for his interest in what he calls "hidden ethnology," to which Yanagita retorts that there is neither back nor front to ethnology.

( The legend of the heresiologist; the price of nationalism )

Awesome '70s Shoujo Week continues! marshtide has served up Gender, Sexuality and 70s Shojo Part Two: Psycopathic Lesbian Sorority Girls. [I totally have to read Oniisama E, seriously.]

Hagio Moto. A, A'. San Francisco: VIZ, 1996. [1981]

In these four interlinked stories Hagio explores a future solar system in which "unicorns," a rare subspecies of humanity genetically engineered for great computational and technical prowess and a minimum of external affect, mingle in isolate with the rest of their fellow humans, misunderstood and frequently vulnerable due to their difference.

I think I liked the first story, "A, A'," the best; it tells of a young unicorn researcher whose "original" is killed while posted to a remote research station and who according to company policy is cloned from genetic samples taken three years earlier, before her dispatch to the station, and sent out to replace herself. Naturally Adelaide has trouble reintegrating into the life of a group that remembers her old, three-years-their-comrade self; she particularly has trouble with her lover on staff, who can't accept that she's not who she was. The ending is weirdly hopeful and hopeless at the same time.

The other three stories, "4/4" and the two halves of "X/Y," follow the teenage and then young adult teek Mori, whose control over his psionic abilities is precarious--unless he's in the presence of a unicorn, as he learns when he meets the girl Trill at the space station where he lives. Trill, however, has a difficult relationship with her scientist father, and with the outside world, and Mori finds himself drawn into a fraught relationship with all three of them.

In "X/Y" Mori is living on Mars, where he meets a unicorn named Tacto, who is on Mars as part of a team from Earth proposing a revolutionary method to terraform the red planet. Mori finds himself drawn to Tacto, despite the fact that they're the same gender. Or are they? And does it matter?

I'm not entirely comfortable with the way Hagio handles transgender characters and stories about them--"X/Y" needs a warning for a trans character's suicide--and there's something a little off-kilter about her portrayal of gay characters, too. But I think on some level most of her protagonists aren't entirely comfortable in their own skin, or at least with the way society describes that skin, and on that level I imagine they have something in common with their creator and her fellow Shôwa 24 manga-ka. Which is another way of saying Hagio's reach sometimes exceeds her grasp--or the visual structures and language of her manga can't keep pace with her ideas--and reading her work is a fascinating exercise in trying to tease out all the implications of what she does and doesn't do. And it bears repeating that Hagio and the Shôwa 24 exploring these concerns at all in shoujo manga was revolutionary, and path-breaking; there'd be no Ôoku, or a host of other contemporary shoujo and josei manga, without Hagio Moto and Ikeda Riyoko, that's for sure.

Takemiya Keiko (story by Mitsuse Ryuu). Andromeda Stories vol. 1. New York: Vertical, Inc., 2007. [1982.]

In the wake of the wildly successful sci-fi classic Terra E…, Takemiya Keiko teamed up with popular SF novelist Mitsuse Ryuu to create Andromeda Stories, which tells the story of a certain planet in the Andromeda galaxy and its tribulations in the face of an insidious force of machinic invaders: the reign of Prince Ithaca and his bride Princess Lilia begins auspiciously, but by the time their son Jimsa is born, things have taken a precipitous slide.

I liked Terra E… a lot, and this manga is interesting too, even after thirty years. The art is very much of its time, but that's not necessarily a bad thing (though I do wonder why everyone looks like they walked out of concept sketches for CLAMP's R.G. Veda, i.e., classically Indian). Beyond the plot, which is actually interesting, the single most awesome thing about this story so far is Il, the surly swordswoman in vaguely Japanese (Chinese?) clothing who comes to the planet in an attempt to save it from the invaders and who has no interest in cooperating with anyone ("I'm not your friend; I'm their enemy."). She is a swordswoman! She is stoic! She appears and disappears at random and knows way more than she lets on! These are character traits that are right up my alley.

Andromeda Stories sold horribly in English, but if you're interested in classic shoujo manga, you have to read Takemiya Keiko. I have some quibbles with the translation (principally, WTF are the sound effects not translated, and secondarily, why do translators not realize that when people address someone as 王 or 王妃, a more natural translation than "King" or "Queen" is "Your Majesty"? Argh), but Vertical puts out probably the nicest English-language manga on the market, and overall it's well worth the read, and very readable.

merin_chan went to an alien maid cafe in Akiba this summer. Very interesting.

---

Yoshinaga Fumi. Ôoku. 5 vols. Tokyo: Hakusensha, 2005-10. [English translation: 5 vols. San Francisco: VIZ, 2009-10.]

I first heard about this manga as part of an exhibition at the Kyoto International Manga Museum in 2008 on worlds of shoujo manga. The premise (in an alternate Edo Japan, a plague kills 75% of men, forcing women to take power in society) was enough to get me to Book-Off immediately. Yeah, it did take me two years to actually finish volume 1.

In the interim, of course, the manga has been translated (clumsily) into English, and the first two volumes of that translation co-won the 2009 Tiptree Award, the first time a manga or graphic novel has taken the prize. I heard Alexis Lothian discuss the translation and the jury's reasons for selecting it at Wiscon 34, and one of the things I really liked about her remarks was that in them she situated the manga in a long global tradition of feminist science fiction and fantasy. Before the manga won the award I would have approached the manga primarily from the fact that it is a josei (women's) manga, a genre that is by far the least popular in Japan and the most infrequently translated into English.

To give a really brief introduction to a complicated concept, shoujo and josei manga since the 1970s have been coping with what has been called "the love trap"--essentially, the unequal power dynamics of heterosexual relationships in a sexist and/or patriarchal society mean that for a heroine a "successful" romantic relationship necessitates her relinquishing her agency and independence. One way to spring the love trap is to invent yaoi and write BL ad infinitum, which a number of 1970s manga-ka did and which continues to be a hugely popular genre with women in Japan (similar dynamics clearly underlie media fandom's origins in the 1960s outside of Japan, I suspect).

Another way to spring the love trap is to do what Yoshinaga does here, namely to remove men's actual political and social capital and give all of that to women. Crucially, however, the symbolic capital and the symbolic regime of social power in this alternate Edo retains its masculinist trappings, so that all women of rank assume "male" names upon their accession to their offices, to take one example. Yoshinaga also introduces us to the world and to the oooku, the inner chambers of the shogun's castle in Edo, through the eyes of its newest male member, Mizuno Yuunoshin, though by the end of volume 1 the manga is mostly following the new shogun Yoshimune, eighth of the Tokugawa line and the first to accede from a branch family, Ieyasu's direct descendants having died out.

I really want to know whether Yoshinaga expects her readership to sympathize with the male or the female characters. The men in this manga read like women, not in some gender essentialist "mannerism" crap kind of way but in that they have the limited power and circumscribed social roles of women in the historical Edo period and in contemporary Japan (though the situation of women in contemporary Japan is, very slowly, improving). And for the same reasons, the women read like men, except that they have to deal with the burden not only of power but also of history; less than a hundred years before society was the complete opposite of what it is in the manga's present, and no one can quite forget it, even if most people know better than to talk about it.

Yoshinaga hews fairly close to history; the historical Yoshimune was a noted fiscal reformer, and in the manga Yoshimune is portrayed as almost comically stingy--it's her intention that the oooku and the bakufu (shogunate bureaucracy) will bend to her will, and not the other way around. I like her and her right-arm retainer Hisamichi a lot. We'll see what Yoshimune's curiosity about the foundation of the women's political system reveals in volume 2.