Nakamura Hikaru: St. Oniisan (2007-present)

A student of mine turned me on to this manga.  I turned my wife onto it, and she turned some friends onto it.  So we have a regular little St. Oniisan fan club here on the banks of the Willamette.  But I never got around to reading the whole series until a couple of weeks ago when I was sick and it was the only thing I felt like reading.

The author is Nakamura Hikaru 中村光.  The title in Japanese is Saint Oniisan 聖☆おにいさん, but it comes with its own author-specified English title, which shows up on the cover:  Saint Young Men.  I actually hate it when manga do this:  the pre-supplied English titles are almost always geared toward the Japanese audience, meaning they work for people with only a vague grasp of English (sometimes they work quite well from that perspective), but they're lousy when read by a native English speaker.  "Saint Young Men" is a lousy title.  Anything would be better.  How about "Holy Bros"?

But that's the only thing about this series that misses.  Everything else is pure comedy gold.

The gimmick is that, shortly after the millennium, Buddha and Jesus decide they need a vacation, so they come to earth - Tokyo, to be exact - and take an apartment together.  If that sounds like a variation on a classic joke set-up - "so Buddha and Jesus walk into a bar, and Buddha says..." - that's because it is.  It's a killer premise, legendary from the start - be honest, you smiled the second you read my explanation of it.  Already you're imagining the possibilities.

And it gets better, because he's imagined Jesus and Buddha not just as fish out of water, divine personages in modern Japan, but freeters - dudes in their early twenties, aimless and underemployed.  There's a wicked subtext about the superfluousness of religion in contemporary Japan, and the sheer numbers of young people falling through the cracks in the system, and oh yeah, the witty observation that Jesus, as traditionally depicted, kinda looks like a modern hipster - skinny, long-haired, with a wispy beard.  Buddha, too - looks surprisingly convincing in a puffy North Face coat.

What's amazing about this series is that it lives up to the premise.  Nakamura's six volumes in, and so far he's managed to keep coming up with new jokes.  A lot of them are of necessity variations on familiar themes, but still he's managed to introduce a new twist every time you think the well's about to go dry.  It helps that he's willing to introduce new characters - we get Jesus's homey Uriel and Buddha's boy Brahman, for example, each one of whom brings in train a whole new set of associations to exploit.

I guess what I'm admiring is the craftsmanship.  Nakamura had an inspired idea, but what's making it work is his mastery of all the comic techniques you could think of.  This series is like a textbook of comedy, everything from complicated visual puns to low comedy, character-driven humor and off-the-wall gags.

What it's missing is a hard edge, but I don't think that's a bad thing.  There's plenty of blasphemy in here, but it's all so good-natured and light-hearted that it's hard to imagine anybody getting too het up about it.  Maybe Rick Santorum, but nobody sane.  In fact, somewhat surprisingly given that it's about young men in their early twenties (well, not really), there's been no mention at all of sex.  Nakamura's keeping it family-friendly.  Which ends up giving the whole series this really benign glow.  I'm not saying it's exactly faith-promoting, but it's not trying to grind any axes either.  It's just fun.  Endlessly fun.

EDITED 11/26/11:  I refer to Nakamura Hikaru as a "he."  In fact Nakamura Hikaru is a "she."  Imagine my embarrassment.  Feel free to doubt anything I write about anything from here on out.

All the President's Men (1976)

Can't remember why I put All the President's Men (1976) in the Netflix queue, but at the same time I can't figure out why it took me so long to get around to seeing it.  I have a mild fascination with this period of American history, and films about it, on top of which one of my favorite cinematic tropes is the jaded, corroded Washington informant as embodied by Donald Sutherland in JFK and William B. Davis in The X-Files, and of course the granddaddy of them all is Hal Holbrook's Deep Throat. 

IOW, it's an important film politically, but also a satisfying film artistically.

But I think my favorite scene, at the moment, isn't one of Holbrook's, but Dustin Hoffman's conversation with Robert Walden, playing Donald Segretti, a low-level operative in Nixon's dirty tricks team.  From the Mouth-of-Sauron smile he flashes when he opens the door to the way he sits cross-legged in his lawn chair, Walden gives us a guy who's still half a college kid at heart, a naughty frat boy only partly grown up, just wise enough to know that what he's done is no prank, is serious shit, but just foolish enough to try to convince himself that it was all just fun and games, and just young enough that he probably half believes it.  Panic and cockiness, regret and disbelief and perverted pride in his own badness, all painfully evident.

Who knows if this accurately represents the real-life Segretti, but as a character in a narrative, as a work of art, it rings true:  I've known people like this.  Young Republicans so sure of their own smartness and their savvy about the System, and so confident that they're serving the side that secretly controls everything, that they feel they can get away with anything, but still young enough to worry that maybe they can't, or that they might actually care that you think they're serpents.  They're usually right about the first, and they usually get over the second.  But not always.

Ikeido Jun: Shitamachi Rocket (2010)

Ikeido Jun 池井戸潤's the author; Shitamachi Rocket 下町ロケット (literalishly "Downtown Rocket", although Seidensticker is probably right that "Low City" is better) is the title.  It was published in book form in late 2010 (after having been serialized in Shūkan Post 週刊ポスト, a general-interest newsweekly) and won the Naoki Prize in summer 2011.  There was no A-Prize awarded this summer, so I picked this up instead.  Thought I'd have a go at a Naoki Prizewinner for a change.  I've read a few over the years, but accidentally:  despite my interest in the A-Prize, and in popular fiction of some varieties, I've never taken on the Naoki challenge.

This one is a keizai shōsetsu 経済小説, what's usually called in English a "business novel": a good description, if an inexact translation.  I freely admit (this is me, freely admitting it) that I don't know much about this genre.  Think a novel set in the business world, then imagine what genre conventions might arise?  I.e., not a mystery or a thriller or a love story that just happens to involve people with jobs, or a backdrop of high finance, but a novel in which the ups and downs of business deals are meant to provide the main narrative interest?  At least, that's what's happening in this one.

It was interesting to notice my reactions to it, because I went into it having intentionally read nothing about it.  All I knew was the title, and some vague recommendations I'd seen in an ad on a train:  I wasn't expecting it to be a "business novel."  I had no expectations at all, other than (this being ostensibly popular fiction) readability and an interesting plot.  And some kind of excellence somewhere, this being a Naoki winner and all.

So I'm going along, reading through it, and it's following all the ins and outs, ups and downs, of a small-to-midsize manufacturing company in an unfashionable district of Tokyo, and it's going into such details about their deals - a patent-infringement lawsuit, a countersuit, a negotiation over licensing, a subcontracting proposal, all dealing with valves and other engine parts - and there's not much else going on, and I was about halfway through before I remembered, oh yeah, there's a genre for this.  That's when I stopped expecting anything more to happen.  And sure enough, nothing more happened:  we just kept following Tsukuda Manufacturing's efforts to convince the behemoth rocket-engine maker Empire Heavy Industries to let them supply them with a particular valve, when Empire would rather just license the technology.  That's the story:  little company convincing big company that it can do the job.  In the end, the rocket launches with Tsukuda's valves aboard, and everybody's happy.

Knowing nothing about the genre it supposedly so excellently represents, I can't say anything about how it does or doesn't deal with its conventions.  What it felt like to me from the very beginning was a Japanese TV drama series - keeping in mind that, like HBO series or most British series, Japanese dramas begin with an end in mind.  Also keeping in mind that I love a good TV drama, in this case I don't mean it as a compliment.  It felt formulaic - odd how you can feel that even if you've never encountered the formula - and shallow.

Formula:  the Little Company that Could.  Again and again we have scenes and encounters designed to remind us that Tsukuda is an old-fashioned, familiy-oriented, craftsmanship-rich company that's trying to do business in a world increasingly filled with financial and legal predators, and still dominated by snooty Big Firms who disrespect the Little Guy.  And of course the Little Guy comes out on top.  There's even a scene where reps from the Big Firm are inspecting the Little Guy's manufacturing setup, and we learn that Tsukuda Inc. sometimes makes their precision high-tech rocket valves by hand, by feel, rather than with machines calibrated to the micrometer.  (Maybe that's how it really works, but to me the scene was as risible as the one in the third Matrix movie where we see our future tribal people making high-tech machine bombs with mortar and pestle.  The Old Ways...)

Shallowness:  The main character is Tsukuda himself, son of the guy who founded the company, an ex-academic rocket scientist who took over the family business when his dad died.  Also Tsukuda had been associated with a failed rocket launch and hounded out of academia.  So of course he's having to adjust to the business world, and also redeem himself by being associated with a successful rocket launch.  Fine.  He has a family - a mother who was once pretty involved in the business herself, an ex-wife who stayed in academics and divorced him because he didn't (wtf?), and a teenage daughter in a rebellious phase.

Here's what I mean about shallow.  Tsukuda's back story exists entirely so that we can see him discover that there's meaning and satisfaction to be found in running a company well - people always suspect, half accurately, that he secretly misses the hallowed halls of etc., but in reality he's finding that helping his company succeed, his employees take pride in their work, etc., is a good life for him.  Has intrinsic dignity.  And I don't disagree, but jeez, how hackneyed is that?  Especially in a business novel - it's like having your detective in a mystery novel learn by the end that, "gee, I really like solving mysteries."

And the women in his life exist entirely to forward his story.  His mother exists solely to reassure Tsukuda that he's not neglecting his teenage daughter by spending so much time at work.  His ex-wife exists solely to get us to feel sorry for the lonely, misunderstood middle-aged salaryman.  And his daughter exists solely so that at the end she can give him a bouquet and say, "well done, Dad."  Sniffle.

I want to say it's a novel resolutely devoid of subtext, but that's not quite right.  It's just that the subtext is so incredibly (a) obvious and (b) old-fashioned.  In 2011 we're still celebrating the Little Company that Could?  Still celebrating the sad-sack salaryman as the repository of all that's good and holy in modern Japan?  Especially in light of the trenchant critiques of the work world that have appeared in recent A-Prize winners (by women, significantly), this seems either incredibly reactionary or almost poignantly naïve, like the antidote to companies wrecking the economy is just celebrating the idea of a company that doesn't...

On the other hand, it really was readable.  Ikeido's prose is chock-full o' clichés, but at least they make the writing go down easy.  And the plot really did move right along, hitting the right emotional notes at every turn. That bouquet...

I'm not surprised to learn that it actually was made into a TV show.

Asano Inio: Oyasumi Punpun (2007- )

The other Asano Inio title I've read is Oyasumi Punpun おやすみプンプン, which started in 2007 and is still going on, up to 11 volumes at the moment.  I read the first three volumes back when that's all there was, and never went any farther.  Reading Nijigahara makes me want to go back to Punpun to see if it got better.

Here's what I wrote in my pre-blogging days:
Punpun is a fifth-grader in an abusive home.  His father gets sent to prison for beating his mother almost to death, then they get divorced;  his mother’s not too nice either;  her slacker brother Yuichi moves in and sort of takes care of Punpun.  Meanwhile he has a crush on a girl at school, Aiko, who’s also in a scary family—her mother’s a cultist, and drags her around proselyting.  Aiko wants to run away, and makes Punpun promise to come with her, but he has to stand her up when his mother attempts suicide.  Then we skip to two years later, Punpun’s a seventh-grader, Aiko hasn’t talked to him for two years, but he still has a crush on her.  She, however, is going out with the captain of the badminton team, who Punpun is kind of friends with.  Meanwhile, we start to follow Yuichi more, as he meets a cute ex-nurse who likes him;  he starts to tell her about a traumatic event in his past, when a sixteen-year-old hottie from an abusive household made a pass at him…  And that’s where Vol. 3 ends. It’s a well-told story so far, with just the right number of minor characters, and a lot of dysfunctional-family stuff that’s handled with an appropriate dull ache.  By the end of the third volume, though, it’s starting to lose focus—the whole Yuichi bit feels like we’re moving sideways rather than forward.  Maybe Asano doesn’t know where he’s going with this after all.

What makes it special, though, is the art.  Everything is in a super-realistic style except for Punpun, his parents, and his uncle, who are drawn in thick, childish lines, and who in fact don’t look human at all:  they’re drawn like lumpy birds, or stick figures with sheets on and pointy noses.  Like something a kindergartner would draw.  Nobody else interacts with them any differently because of this, so clearly what we’re dealing with here is an expressionistic way of depicting Punpun’s (everybody else has normal names, by the way) sense of alienation.  A striking visual metaphor, and it creates any number of interesting and suggestive situations. There’s a whole overlay of God stuff, too, as Punpun, in his adolescent gawkiness and horniness, thinks he can see God—who looks like a grinning hipster.  We’re not sure yet quite what this means—make of it what we will, I guess—but it’s part of a consistent metaphysical questioning by the characters.  It’s a serious manga, about serious themes.  That’s why it disappointed me when in the third volume it began to feel like the author was just spinning it out, creating saleable variations on the basic situation, rather than leading us through a story he’d planned out.  Abuse and depression are not really the stuff of episodic manga—I want to know he has an idea to resolve things, not necessarily with a happy ending, but with something other than “This week on the Suicidal Depression Show!”

Asano Inio: Nijigahara horogurafu (2006)

The author is Asano Inio 浅野いにお. The title is Nijigahara horografu 虹ヶ原ホログラフ (translatable as Nijigahara holograph, Nijigahara being the name of the town where it's set). It was serialized in the "subculture magazine" (trendspotter central) QuickJapan between 2003 and 2005 before being published in one volume in 2006.

The title is never explained.  It's that kind of book.  If I had to guess I'd say it that (a) the word "holograph" is being used as it sometimes seems to be in Japanese, as a mistake for "hologram", and that (b) Asano's trying to suggest a parallel between the way holograms create the illusion of three dimensions in two, i.e. seem to rotate as your perspective shifts, and his narrative technique here, which involves gradually and piecemeal revealing the identities and relationships between characters, on two timelines ten years apart, so that your understanding and sympathy changes with each chapter.  It's that kind of book.  (I'd also entertain the idea that he's using the word "holograph" according to its proper meaning:  I don't suspect that this manga is autobiographical [I sure hope not], but it may be told, arguably, in the first person, something that isn't always and immediately apparent.  It's that kind of book.)

I've read one other title by Asano (I'll blog it soon), and was impressed by his art and his serious themes, but not by his storytelling.  Here it all comes together.  This is a masterpiece.  As a narrative it's as fragmented, multiperspectival, and time-ruptured a story as any postmodernist could wish for, and yet despite its refusal to resolve itself into any final form, it's curiously satisfying anyway.  It's not about teasing you.  It's about fragmentation as a way to emotional truth, about the possibility that the only possible response to existential horror is myth and wonder.

The plot, as you might guess, can't easily be summarized, partly because you can't be exactly sure what it is.  But it concerns a group of people in the small town of Nijigahara (Rainbow Meadow).  One timeline follows them when they're all in the same 5th-grade class, and another timeline follows them all 11 years later.  We meet some of their parents, teachers, and some of their families.  But the narration is cagey about names - only gradually do we become aware that all the characters we're following in one timeline match up with those in the other timeline, and how.

But by the time the book ends, not only have we made all the connections (we think), but we've also learned how grotesquely they're all linked by horrible things:  suicide, murder, child abuse, rape, stalking, bullying, assault with deadly weapons.  We see a scar, then learn how it was administered, then realize we've been sympathizing with the administerer.

Thematically, then, I guess you could loosely say it's working the rich seam of anxiety about Kids These Days, with their bullying and their tempers and their shut-in tendencies.  But it goes so deep, and is so determined to invest all this melodrama with metaphysical significance, that it hardly reminds you of the typical social-issue story.  As this very perceptive (and much more coherent than mine) pair of blog posts on Manga Bookshelf Transmissions suggests, it's really trying to make its own myth about familial love and redemption, about where it all went wrong and how it might have turned out if it hadn't.

Yeah, I won't say any more than that.

(Hey.  I wasn't the first to blog in English about this.)

Cal Tjader: Talkin' Verve (1996)

Taken from albums Tjader recorded for Verve between 1961 and 1967, produced by Creed Taylor.

Read that Wikipedia article.  What Bert Gambini says about CTI is something:  "It's that temporal stamp that I interpret as an asset, not a liability."  That's something I think I've been trying to get at, without achieving quite that conciseness.  But that's it.  I don't often cringe when I see something that's outré in its epitomization of a past era.  I may laugh, but usually it's a sympathetic laugh, and if you can make me laugh you've mostly won me over already.  In other words, maybe I believe that if it's worth doing, it's worth overdoing.


So anyway, I don't know CTI records yet, and though I lived through that era I was too young to be aware of its jazz, but I think I know what it sounds like, and it makes sense as a natural progression from what Taylor was producing at Verve in the '60s.  Basically he was doing stuff that hit what he considered to be the sweet spot between jazz and pop.  That is, music with the virtues of pop - accessibility, tunefulness, emotional directness - and the instrumental richness of jazz.

If today that sounds like a formula for elevator music, that's because two or more decades of smooth jazz have ruined the concept.  (It may surprise you, if you've read all my Talkin' Verve reviews, to learn that I take a back seat to no one, except maybe Pat Metheny, in my hatred of Kenny G.)  But I don't think the idea of a jazzy pop, or a pop-inflected jazz, is intrinsically a bad one.  It certainly could never replace challenging, avant-garde jazz, but they could coexist.

Anyway, that's kind of what Verve was about from the beginning, and certainly during the '60s under Creed Taylor.  And Cal Tjader, as exemplified on this disc, is a perfect example of just how pleasant a thing that could be.

So there's Latin underpinnings on basically everything here - bossas, afro-cubano, mambos.  It's not hot'n'greasy like Willie Bobo's stuff, though;  it's cool.  Like a caipirinha.  I guess that's inevitable, being as how Cal's instrument is the vibes, but it's not just the sound:  Willie's all about the groove, and the instrumental lines tend to be almost tight enough to qualify for the Commitments' definition of soul vs. jazz.  Cal's records are full of improvising:  they're all about the solo, the instrumental interplay.  This loosens them up, and if it lowers the temperature, it also deepens the groove.  There's some seriously soulful stuff on here.

What, as they say, 's not to love?

Dizzy Gillespie: Talkin' Verve (1997)

I've been listening to a lot of Miles lately, specifically early '50s Miles;  I've been trying to start filling in the (huge) gaps in my Miles collection, and I started by looking at the sort of fallow period between the Birth of the Cool sides and the Coltrane quintet.  Anyway, then I pulled this out and listened to it.

Man, it's refreshing to come to Dizzy after Miles.  I love Miles - I always come back to him - but I can't listen to him too much, and hearing Dizzy this morning made me realize why.  Miles is all psychodrama.  At its most basic his technical - well, sometimes they're physical limitations, sometimes they're a by-product of his style, but anyway, there's always the question of, will he hit the note?  What note was he trying to hit?  But it's not just that, of course:  there's an emotional pinchedness, a mental tension, to his playing.  That's the essence of his style, of course, and at his best he mined it for a complexity, an abstraction, that brought his music to the highest pitch of art.  But it can be tiring, too, and sometimes frankly a little constricting.

Dizzy's always good for your soul.  There's a generosity in his playing, an ebullience, that somehow seems all the more striking because of his incredible technical virtuosity.  Like, he can do all that, effortlessly, and he will do all that for the pleasure of his listeners.  I understand why that stance might have seemed unsatisfying to some listeners at one time;  I think it's easy to hear some of Louis Armstrong's hokum side in Dizzy's Caribbean scatting, and certainly some of Louis's basic stance toward audiences in Dizzy's openness to entertainment.  I understand why that might have dismayed listeners looking for a more brazenly ambitious artist.  And for them there's always Miles - and for me too.  But damn if I don't enjoy Dizzy. 

This is a good disc, too.  It draws on records he made for Verve, Limelight, and Philips between 1957 and 1966 - and he was pretty prolific in that timespan - and it concentrates on the funky and exotic sides of his work.  We get his original studio version of "Swing Low Sweet Cadillac," for example (and here he is later doing it with Muppets), and the even more jungley "Jambo."  But there's also the deeply bluesy "Theme From Cool World," which out Horace Silvers Horace Silver.  And we get some of his excellent, out of time big band work:  a long meaty track from Gillespiana, and another movement from Lalo Schifrin's The New Continent.  It's really groovy Dizzy, in other words, while never being anything less than total jazz.