January reading

[flemmings]

Clearly feeling a manga deficiency because I haven't read any since last summer.

Japanese:

Wild Adapter 6

-- man, that one was dark. Kubota shoots to kill, anyone, including quite innocent people whose only crime consists of being in the wrong place. Tokitoh shoots to wound. This cannot end well, especially as the narratorial voice is on the side of the innocents. Will Kubo-chan turn into a full-fledged creepy controller? (Well no, not when he tells Koh 'If it turns out he left because he wanted to, you don't have to check out where he is.') Tune in next time.

I'm a bit puzzled by the time frame. It's all flashback, presumably: cf black borders; it's a month or so after the end of vol 1 (see the invite to Komiya's 49th day service), but someone says it's been a couple of years since Kubota left and it's kind of news that the fur on Tokitoh's hand is growing.


白龍十六夜伝/ Hakuryuu Izayoiden (Kamitani Yuu)
闇を継ぐもの/ Yami wo Tsugu mono (Kamitani Yuu)
吉祥ゲ淵 /Kisshou-ga-buchi (Kamitani Yuu)

-- Five years ago I read White Dragon and evidently got nowhere with it because I retained nothing, including the Oushin War setting. Tried another and found it so WTFy that I gave up. This time I grabbed a couple and read them and they made perfect sense, and none were the WTF school story one. Then I looked at the others and looked at the flyleaf and realized that WTF was the first in a loosely connected series, and I'd started this time with the last (a possible AU) and read backwards, so I already knew who the mysterious What-is-he was.

Narcissus Black
-- This a 'cleaning up the shelves of stuff that's been there unread since 1998. Ah nostalgia. Uchida Kazuna in her early days, back when I was actually there.

Kono Mazushiki Chijou ni/ この貧しき地上に (Sato Shio)
-- gotta say, it does resonate. Internal states made external and no resolution provided.

Hana_akari/ 花明かり (Nagaoka Yoshiko)
-- love and social entanglements among the Taishou wealthy. Also resonates in its early shoujo style. I see points where Nagaoka's pure-hearted art starts seguing into early Motohashi Keiko who is not pure at all.

Bakumatsu Mahoujin (Kobe Keiko)
-- Bookoff potluck. Fun WTFery.

Translations

Mushishi 2
--lovely manga still, slightly headbangy translation still. English doesn't fit well into so very Japanese a work.

Otougizoushi 1&2
Ai no Kusabi 3&4

English
Ink and Steel
--not my Marlowe, not really my Shakespeare, and not sure what most of the book was doing there in the first place. The plot is WE PLOT, and we screw a lot, and no one seems entirely flesh and blood.

The Magic World, E. Nesbit
--collection of short stories, and well enough

Jane and the Wandering Eye

Comments

[feliciter.livejournal.com]

You're reading Mushishi! What do you think of it so far?

[flemmings.livejournal.com]

I love it. It has the kind of resonance that some Miyazaki does, as though he'd picked chunks of the Japanese unconscious-- the ones marked 'traditional'- and drawn them. It's easily done, because even commercials can show the main ones. Sun disappearing behind deep forests in the mountains, snow falling on cedars; thatched farmhouses backed by low hills, rice fields, the sound of semi; on and on and on.

But Mushishi hits the social archetypes as well as the nature ones, the old 'village life' ones. Half the setting of his stories could be any folk tale that starts Mukashi mukashi, and the odd thing is that his cigarette smoking mushishi isn't out of place there because that emotional Japan still exists in, as I say, the Japanese unconscious. (Pick a period for this and of course one says 'Taishou', which in the Japanese mind is a legendary period all by itself; or possibly late Meiji, which is also a strange time when everything existed side by side with no particular problem. Railways and kimono and free love movements and 殉死 and western style painters and Japanese style painters, all with their place in the scheme of things.)

What's odder is that this emotional landscape exists in my mind too: a mental and emotional construct woven out of the scraps of it I encountered here and there (schlock historical dramas, Kirin commercials, b&w cinema masterpieces, department store exhibits) that make somehow a compelling whole.

The mushi themselves are still something I haven't quite got a grasp on, probably because I'm reading in English. (The Japanese of vol 1 read-- strange to me. I couldn't pull sense from it. No reason, it just remained opaque.) They're much less domestic everyday than the trad bogles, even when they live inside people's ears. I don't know how to describe it; maybe it's because they aren't bogles at all, just... things.

Short: it's brilliant and resonant, but difficult to capture. For all I know I might find the anime simpler to grasp.

[feliciter.livejournal.com]

it's brilliant and resonant, but difficult to capture

Yes, exactly. I started with the anime, which wonderfully translates (in all senses of the word) the concepts and stories, so I had the framework, so to speak, before reading (a few volumes) of the manga.

Meiji is my favourite setting, for all the reasons you mentioned (Sengoku's second, for all dramas taiga and Kurosawa and everything in between)