Buddy Greco: Talkin' Verve (2001)

I'm gonna just own the fact that until I decided I had to pick up this whole series, I had never heard of Buddy Greco.  Turns out he's a crooner-lounge singer type;  as the liner notes make clear, he sings like Frank Sinatra but tries to play piano and band-lead like Nat King Cole.

This disc is hardly representative of his career;  even I can tell that.  It draws from precisely four albums he made in the late '50s, three for Kapp Records and one for Coral.  Presumably somewhere along the way those two catalogs entered the Mercury/Verve/Universal morass, and that's why this disc.  So I have no idea if it's his best or not.  That's my caveat.

If Sinatra is the Chairman of the Board, then Buddy Greco works for the same company, but somewhere way down the food chain:  he's in Sales, probably travels, mostly lives out of midpriced hotels in midsize Midwestern cities, where he hangs out at the lounge bar hitting on middle-aged married women.  Or:  If Sinatra is Tony Soprano, Greco is Chris.

Sinatra has swagger, which may or may not be empty depending on whether you like that kind of thing.  But he also has enough restraint to make you feel like he loves the music, even if he mostly coasts through it.  Greco doesn't sound like he has any respect for these songs at all.  He mugs and vamps his way through "One For My Baby (And One More For The Road)" like it's nothing, like maybe it's so old and hackneyed that all you can do with it is joke around.  His singing on this record is all about him, never about the song, or what it's about.

Which is almost a shame, because he's got an agile, expressive voice, and plays a great piano.  Has a nifty band, and some rather okay arrangements - clever flutes and whatnot.

Sincerity, man.  It's such a drag.

Taniguchi Jirō and Kusumi Masayuki: Sanpomono (2003-2005)

Art by Taniguchi Jirō 谷口ジロー, script by Kusumi Masayuki 久住昌之.  It was serialized in Tsūshin seikatsu 通信生活 from 2003 to 2005, collected in book form in 2006, and issued in bunkobon 文庫本 format in 2009 by Fusō shuppan 扶桑出版, which is what I read.

This is a really interesting manga.  Perhaps the most junbungaku manga I've yet encountered.  It's about a typical salaryman who takes walks.  That's it, essentially.  He's out on an errand, or visiting a friend, misses his bus, and decides to walk home instead, or whereever he's going;  each episode details what he sees while he's walking, and involves some very minor daily-life epiphany.  The end result is the sort of apotheosis of the mundane that is one of the major themes of modern Japanese literature.  Finding meaning, beauty, delight, solace, in a small thing encountered by accident and seen in just the right light.

The art supports this marvelously;  it's probably no exaggeration to say that the whole point of this series was to give Taniguchi a chance to experiment visually, or maybe even to show off.  The art combines photorealistic backgrounds with pretty manga-esque humans;  just as the scenery of the strolls is the thematic point, the backgrounds are the artistic point.

Photorealistic doesn't quite cover it, because he's giving you more detail than you'd pick up from a photograph.  His unbelievably fine lines and exact geometry give you a sort of heightened realism, an almost surreal level of detail and volume:  the buildings and trees fairly leap out at you.  To this amazing line Taniguchi adds amazing facility with screentones, creating effects of light and shadow, texture and touch, that pretty much define the state of the manga art.  If you want to know what it feels like to walk through a Tokyo neighborhood, just read this manga.

The art is so wonderful, and the theme so deep, that it makes the two flaws I find in the project all the more glaring.  One is that Taniguchi's handling of human facial expressions, at least in this manga, isn't as subtle as his rendering of the scenery.  I came to this right after Billy Bat, and for all the adventure comix cartooniness of that manga, the way figures are rendered in it is incredibly expressive and well-observed.  You've seen people make that exact face, stand in just that way.  Taniguchi's people, on the other hand, are a little stiff, their expressions a little blunt, and for me that meant the art just barely failed to support the theme.

The other flaw is more interesting.  I mentioned that each episode culminates in a kind of daily-life epiphany, usually through an encounter with some object.  In classic modern J-lit this object would be a cherry tree in bloom, or a locket that belonged to a former lover - those are clichés, but you can see what I mean.  Here, almost all the objects are items for sale.  A particular kind of light bulb, lunch at a particular curry shop in Kichijōji.  And the kind of epiphanies the main character experiences - the lessons he takes from them - have to do with nostalgia for a better time, but that better time is basically the Tokyo of thirty to fifty years ago.  More mid-Shōwa nostalgia, in other words.

And this was, for me, pretty disappointing.  I like a good curry lunch, a good unchanged '50s neighborhood, as much as the next guy, I really do, but this manga was so aesthetically promising that it was a let-down to realize that the meaning-in-life it was finding was basically just a cool thing to buy, or a Tokyo with simply a slightly lower degree of commercial exploitation.  Like, that's the best you can imagine?  Really?

That's where I'm glad I read the paperback (which otherwise is a bad deal, because the art really deserves to be seen as large as it can be), because it has lots of prose in the back by Kusumi detailing the making of this series, and where each episode is set (they're all real neighborhoods).  And he comes right out and admits that it was the publisher's insistence that each episode involve a product.  This was serialized in a magazine that's half general-interest mag and half mail-order catalog.  Of course they want the comix to celebrate consumption.

So I can't make up my mind whether this is art compromised by commercial concerns, or a case of art sneaking in under the radar of commercial concerns.

Hatakenaka Megumi: Shabake (2001)

If you've been paying attention to Japanese pop culture over the last dozen or so years you know there's been a real vogue for yōkai 妖怪, traditional Japanese monsters.  Part of this has been the elevation of my boy Mizuki Shigeru to the status of manga saint.  Part of this has simply been the '90s and beyond "Edo boom," wherein there has been wave after wave of popular interest in one aspect or another of Edo-period culture, everything from hand-towel designs to comic storytelling.

In any case, part of the boom has been a renewed presence of yōkai and/or traditional-flava horror in Japanese popular fiction.  Seemingly the biggest figure in this is Kyōgoku Natsuhiko 京極夏彦, who has written a series of doorstop-sized mystery-horror novels set in the twentieth century but with yōkai motifs.  The first of them has been translated recently;  I read it in the original years ago, but it was in my pre-blogging days, and I don't seem to have written any notes on it for myself.  (Meaning, I might as well have not read it at all, for all I remember of it.  My memory is a sieve.  A broken sieve.)

Hatakenaka Megumi 畠中恵 is part of this trend as well.  She writes a series known as Shabake しゃばけ, after the title of the first book in the series, published in 2001.  Shabake (the kanji would be 娑婆気) is an archaic term;  she provides a definition as an epigraph; basically, it refers to a state of mental captivity to worldly desires such as for honor, advancement, profit.  How exactly the concept relates to the story is for the reader to figure out.

Unlike Kyōgoku, Hatakenaka's approach to this genre is to set her stories in the Edo period.  Her main character is Ichitarō of the Nagasakiya, the scion of a wealthy merchant house - they run a shipping business, and an apothecary shop on the side.  Ichitarō, 17, is in charge of the apothecary, but really he's not in charge of anything in his life.  He's frail - constantly getting sick - and since as the heir he's the future of the family business, his family pampers him in every respect.  In addition, they set two strapping young shopboys in charge of him, to take care of his every need and make sure he doesn't overexert himself.

These shopboys happen to be yōkai:  one's a Doggod and one's a Whitemarsh.  They can and usually do shape-shift to disguise themselves as humans, but when they're angry the camouflage slips...

Ichitarō can see, and hear, and communicate with, yōkai.  He knows his companions' true identity.  Exactly how much the rest of the family knows is part of the mystery - Ichitarō's abilities seem to be unique, although he takes them for granted, and why he has them isn't explained until the end.

This novel can be thought of as combining a number of different genres.  First is the yōkai story;  it's not quite horror - it's not scary - but it involves some of the trappings of horror.  Second is the jidaigeki:  it makes use of a lot of the tropes of pop lit and TV shows set in the Edo period.  The way it depicts townsmen and samurai, the kinds of stock characters and situations, are part of the jidaigeki repertoire.  Third is the mystery:  halfway through, Ichitarō is forced to turn (armchair) detective, in order to save his life.  Someone starts killing apothecaries, searching for the right medicine;  Ichitarō has to figure out what the medicine is and why the killer wants it, before he becomes the next victim (dot dot dot)

All of this is fine and dandy, and the story is reasonably well constructed and entertaining.  But what mainly holds the book together is its cuteness.  Japanese Wikipedia says the series is mostly popular with young women, and I can see why (if I can engage that stereotype at face value):  Ichitarō is cute.  His yōkai minders are cute.  The other characters  - Ichitarō's parents and his best friend Eikichi are cute.

I don't mean visually cute.  That's part of it, of course;  the book includes some adorable illustrations by Shibata Yū 柴田ゆう.  But mainly it's that the ways Hatakenaka imagines these characters - the situations she puts them in and their reactions to them - tend to make you smile indulgently and affectionately at the character, or roll your eyes in mock exasperation.  Or just laugh.

Ichitarō himself:  he's both a stereotype and a reversal of a stereotype.  As a lazy scion of a wealthy Edo merchant, he's a centuries-old stock character;  the trick here is that his parents lovingly force him into laziness.  They don't want him to lift a finger.  His parents dote on him to a ridiculous degree, and since Ichitarō himself doesn't act like a spoiled brat, the whole situation becomes adorably comic.  Ichitarō chafes against his inactivity - but mildly, with a sort of wan grace that would make him a tragic figure if this were a more serious book.  But it's not, so he's just kind of a pale, wry figure at the center of his own story.

His best friend Eikichi:  he's also the scion of a merchant family, but his house is as poor as Ichitarō's is rich.  Eikichi's family are confectioners, and Eikichi's problem is that for all his best efforts he sucks as a candy-maker.  He burns the an.  His dango come out different sizes.  He's kind of a sad sack, but he's also a loyal friend.  So:  cute.

And then there are the yōkai.  Mizuki uses yōkai as a sort of exposé of Japan's collective unconscious, I think:  there are creepy-crawlies in there, and denying that will get us nowhere.  Kyōgoku, from what I can tell from one novel, uses them as motifs, metaphors, to explain contemporary human behavior.  Hatakenaka's yōkai are more down-to-earth;  in their haplessness, they have a lot in common with Mizuki's, but without the palpable aura of creepiness that his have even at their most comixy.  Hatakenaka's really are cute.  Even when they're capable of murder.

Kokurikozaka kara (manga version)

This summer's Ghibli release, Kokurikozaka kara コクリコ坂から, was based on a manga by the same name.  It was drawn by Takahashi Chizuru 高橋千鶴 with a story by Sayama Tetsurō 佐山哲郎, and it was serialized in the girls' comix mag Nakayoshi なかよし in 1980.  It's currently available complete in one volume, in stacks next to all the movie paraphernalia in the bookstores.

Taken on its own terms, it's an utterly typical shōjo manga.  Average.  I guess I mean that as both a pejorative and a mere descriptor.  That is, I don't find the manga really remarkable in any way;  but there's a certain value in reading unremarkable works, too, because they help you appreciate the excellent ones. 

The art:  it's undistinguished.  Very few compositions struck me as being memorable or arresting.  At the same time it's obviously using the visual vocabulary of girls' comix circa 1980 in typical way:  the flowers, the floating-in-space emotional moments, the dizzy-angle closeups of eyes, mouths, etc.  It's kind of a primer on the genre.

The story:  same.  Puppy love presented with an accent on beautiful boys just out of reach, and the endless internal sufferings of a girl in love.  Just enough complications to keep the plot going, and a resolution just in time to bring tears to your eyes.  (Theoretically.)

Read in terms of the movie, however, it's fascinating, precisely because Ghibli was able to make such a deeply resonant movie out of such average source material.  They kept the basic outlines of the story (Mer and Kazama's relationship, the boarding house, the school), but changed the setting from "contemporary" (in 1980 the manga was set in 1980) to "past," and thus the tone from up-to-the-minute (in the manga the boys all have Shaun Cassidy long hair) to nostalgic.  Furthermore they drew out the emotional, almost mythic power of the dad-lost-at-sea motif.

Here's an example of what they did.  High-school-student protest is a theme in both.  In the manga, it's a gag:  Kazama manufactures a student uprising against school uniforms, as a way of selling more papers (he's on the school newspaper).  It's mildly funny, but mostly a shockingly cynical parody of the student protests that had swept the country just ten years before.  Takahashi and Sayama's youngest readers may or may not have had any memory of them, but older readers would have, and it's some kind of sign of the new decade that student unrest in 1980 could only be thought of in terms of this kind of ridiculous parody.

In the movie they keep the theme, but transform it into a crusade to save the Latin Quarter dorm.  Notably, this too neutralizes the student-protest theme - what in the late '60s would have potent political significance is recast in the film as pure-hearted young people trying to save their community.  But at least it's taken seriously by the filmmakers - commitment to something other than puppy-love and hairbrushes is held up as a real thing.

Kusaka Riki: Kumarajiva (2009-present)

The title of this shows up as "Kumara jiva" (from the original Sanskrit), クマーラジーヴァ (a Japanese phonetic rendering of same), and 羅什 (the Chinese equivalent of same);  often two or three of these elements appear together, and in seemingly miscellaneous order.  Anyway, the point is clear: this is a manga bio of Kumārajīva, the Indian monk who went to China and translated the Lotus Sutra into Chinese, thus making it available ever after to the entire East Asian tradition.  It's by Kusaka Riki くさか里樹 (there's a nice pun in her name), and it's been serialized in the weekly newsmagazine Ushio 潮 since 2009, although there was a long lag between the start of serialization and the appearance of the comic in book form.  The first volume came out in July of this year, and it's all that's out so far, and it's all I've read.

It's probably worth mentioning that Ushio is put out by the publishing arm of the Soka Gakkai.  I don't think that necessarily means that this comic is going to be mere hagiography;  not only is Ushio a seemingly fairly mainstream publication, but they're the same publisher that did Tezuka's Buddha, although it ran in a different magazine.  The pedigree doesn't seem to have prevented that work from being taken seriously.  So I'll take this seriously.

Tezuka's life of the Buddha is the obvious precedent for this, and the thing I couldn't help but compare it to even before I noticed that they were from the same publisher.  After only one volume it's not going to be possible to say much, but we can start with the art.  This is a lot less distinguished, artistically:  I doubt anybody would disagree.  But visually, I like it a lot more.

Here's what I mean by that.  Tezuka famously never managed to leave behind his Disney-influenced art style.  His characters always had that roundness;  they always looked like they were rubber bendy-toys.  And his backgrounds, his things, weren't much different - they could boast a high degree of detail, and he could do atmosphere, but they always looked cartoony.  I've written about how for me that ruins some of his more ambitious work.  That's more or less my take on his Buddha.  In it he takes his cartoony style about as far as it can possibly go - I can recognize that he's really pushing himself there, and he does achieve some marvelous effects.  But in the end it's still rubbery, and it's off-putting to me.  I just can't get around this.  I don't love Buddha.

I find myself much more at home in Kusaka's art.  But the thing is, objectively I would probably rate it lower than Tezuka's.  She's drawing in a quite typical contemporary seinen-manga style:  utterly typical.  I'd be hard pressed to cite anything at all about the art in this volume that sets it apart from any other average manga aimed at your average late teen or adult.  It's reasonably well executed, but artistically unambitious.  Undistinguished.  As opposed to the great ambition, care, and skill evident in Tezuka's work.

So why do I prefer Kusaka's?  Idiom.  It's simply that the seinen style, even when executed in an uninspiring way, feels more appropriate to this story, this kind of story.  It's somehow more effective at conveying adult emotions, adult thoughts, than the cartoony style of Tezuka, no matter how well executed.  At least, that's my impression.  This story, even though the characters are shallow, begins to move me, reflexively, in ways that Tezuka's didn't.

Maybe the best way to get at what I'm trying to say is this.  I tend to think of the art in manga as being equivalent, in some ways, to the words that it's replacing:  and artistic style can be likened to prose style.  In that metaphor, Tezuka's art in Buddha is the visual equivalent of:  a story in short words! aimed at a boy with a fifth-grade reading level!  with lots of exclamation points!  There's a lot you can do with that! kind of writing! sure! but it still has! lots! of! exclamation points!

Whereas Kusaka's art is the visual equivalent of adult prose, aimed at adults.  Certainly not the most eloquent prose, but at least it only has a few! exclamation points.

I feel like such a heretic now.

Urasawa Naoki/Nagasaki Takashi: Billy Bat (2008-present)

Here's an entertaining take on the opening of the first volume of this manga.  Complete with affectionate hardboiled-pastiche prose.

So:  Billy Bat ビリーバット, by Urasawa Naoki 浦沢直樹 and Nagasaki Takashi 長崎尚志.  It's been serialized in Morning モーニング since 2008, and the book version is up to Volume 7.  It's the first thing I've read by Urasawa, but it won't be the last.  For at least the first couple of volumes, I was convinced this might be the greatest comic ever written.  It loses a little intensity when it decides to spend a full volume on a ninja story, but it's still pretty cool.

For the first couple of volumes it's following a Japanese-American comic-book author named Kevin Yamagata who, in immediate postwar LA, has a hit series called Billy Bat.  Billy Bat, the comic-with-a-comic, is a furry story with a bat as a hardboiled detective.  It's black-bat noir.  Kevin's proud of his creation, but a visiting cop makes an offhand remark that he saw a similar comic as an Occupation soldier in Japan.  This gives Kevin the Anxiety of Influence, since he himself is an Occupation Vet;  he rushes back to Japan to find out whether he has unconsciously plagiarized someone or something.  Once in Japan he gets caught up in a conspiracy to subvert the democratization of Japan by assassinating an industrial leader.  And, oh yeah, Billy the Bat starts talking to him...

It's a wacky story, when you put the elements of it down like that.  And it just gets wackier:  it jumps back centuries to follow the fortunes of ninja clans in Iga, ahead decades to encompass the moon landing and the JFK assassination, way back to Jerusalem in Jesus' day;  and I think they're going to work their way up to 9/11, too.  In addition to Kevin we get a host of other characters, from cops to other comics artists to cowboys to Lee Harvey Oswald.  We also get excerpts from episodes of Billy Bat, both Kevin's version and that of his successor (his assistant, who usurped the series)  And then, of course, there's the bat:  it pops out of the page from time to drop cryptic clues about good'n'evil and the destiny of man...

So the series is, among other things:  an occult alternate history of the world in which comix artists (cave painters, picture-scroll makers) are the oracles of a Manichaean struggle between good and evil, light and darkness, creation and destruction, the avatar(s) of which are bats;  a commentary on the uneasy relationship between American comics and Japanese manga in the postwar period;  an elegy to the betrayed postwar promise of both America and Japan;  a meditation on Disney;  and a hell of an adventure story, presented in art and writing that manages to have all the dynamism it needs to keep you turning the pages swiftly and an almost gratuitous subtlety that makes you want to linger over every composition, every facial expression.

This guy's a genius, and I can't wait to see where the story goes from here.

Norwegian Wood (film) (2010)

I expected this to suck.

The Tanuki loves Murakami Haruki 村上春樹.  That won't really be apparent from this blog, because this blog only covers the last three years of the Tanuki's engagement with cultural production, and it just so happens that the Tanuki hasn't been reading a lot of Haruki in the last three years.  That's because the Tanuki damn near OD'd on Haruki in the previous sixteen years since first encountering him.  Murakami's works hold a deep and abiding importance for the Tanuki, for more reasons than can be discussed in this post (so I won't try). And the novel on which this film is based, 1987's Norway no mori ノルウェイの森 (Norwegian Wood), happens to be my favorite Murakami novel.  The one that turned me on to him. The one that pretty much decided my career path.  And so I expected this to suck (=to fail to satisfy the Tanuki's very personal requirements for a treatment of Murakami's work).

And:  I know Tran Anh Hung's pedigree - I saw and loved The Scent of Green Papaya - but that still didn't give me much hope that he'd get this right (=please me, selfish git that I am).  Not necessarily through any fault of his own.  Murakami somewhat famously has refused permission to film his novels, but a few years ago he made his first exception, for Ichikawa Jun 市川準's Tony Takitani トニー滝谷;  the result merely confirmed for me that Murakami's first impulse, to keep his novels on the page and in his readers' minds, was the right one.  I don't know that Murakami's novels are any more difficult to adapt to the screen than most;  I just know that in his case, I don't want to sit through any more failures.  I expected this to suck.

Mostly it doesn't.  Mostly, in fact, it's a great movie.  It might even be all the way a great movie, but you'd have to get that opinion from someone with a little more distance on the source than me.  But even for me:  it gets the novel about three-quarters right.

That, of course, is not all it does.  The visuals are, as one would expect from Tran, amazing, and they're amazing in a way that largely captures the wide-eyed romanticism of the novel.  The contrast between the natural settings and the cityscapes, the period detail in costume and interiors, the thoughtful, unblinking camera work all contribute to a film that's gorgeous to look at, simply intoxicating.  The score, by the Radiohead guy, is equally impressive, with bold dissonance that reaches verges on noise, but in a very romantic-tragic way.  (I have my quibbles, inevitably, with the songs interpolated into the soundtrack:  Can, with their Japanese lead singer, has a certain metafictional appropriateness, but there were any number of Japanese psychedelic/early prog bands that could have been used, too: couldn't they have found room for somebody like the Mops?  The Flower Traveling Band/The Flowers?  The Tempters?)

And it gets two of the main characters right.  Matsuyama Ken'ichi as Watanabe-kun is pitch perfect:  his delivery of "mochiron" is just how it should be, a wary rapprochement with the world that just happens to be cool to the point of near-arrogance.  And Kikuchi Rinko realizes Naoko with all the ethereal, waifish beauty the role requires:  the character needs to be barely there, and yet emotionally dominant, and that's how she is here.  The parts of the movie that focus on this relationship are fine.

In the novel, however, Naoko's character is perfectly balanced by Midori, who is Life to Naoko's Thanatos, earth to Naoko's otherworldliness, Body to Naoko's Spirit;  and Mizuhara Kiko doesn't quite bring it.  Maybe she's just too physically insubstantial, or maybe she just can't shake the passive flirtatiousness that is required of so many Japanese starlets, but her Midori fails to provide a counterbalance to Naoko, which means the movie ultimately fails to spell out the crossroads that Watanabe finds himself at. 

The film also fails with the all-important secondary character of Reiko.  Her dazzling monologue about her piano student is eliminated, meaning we really have no idea of her past, why she's hospitalized, or even what kind of person she is;  and although her sex scene with Watanabe at the end is preserved, in the film she comes across as a weak older woman begging for the young phallus.  Which is not what she is in the book at all.  I'm not really sure why they kept this scene in the film, actually.

All of which means, I suppose, that I think this film really does fail, ultimately;  it just fails in a very seductive way, I guess.