In Japanese, the terms honne (本音) and tatemae (建て前) refer to a person's true self versus their public image. It is a compelling subject in the field of social anthropology. The distinction is equally useful in fiction.

In my review of Spy x Family, I argue that in the universe of secret superheroes, the controlling half of the dual personality—Clark Kent or Superman, Bruce Wayne or Batman—ultimately determines the direction of the narrative.

As Kate points out, Lloyd and Yor in Spy x Family are "decent, family people who just happen to be a spy and assassin rather than a spy and assassin pretending to be decent people."

Spy x Family puts Yor in the same moral position as Arnold Schwarzenegger's Harry Tasker in True Lies, "Yeah, but they were all bad." The Yor-centered stories make clear that her targets are, by and large, reprehensible human beings.

Lloyd is more conflicted than Yor, but he is not an enemy of Ostania. He often ends up working tangentially toward the same goals as Yor and her brother, and does his level best to inflict as little collateral damage as possible.

The climactic ending of Code White being a case in point. Lloyd, Yor, and Anya end up saving the day for Ostania.

After all, his overall mission is to establish a diplomatic backchannel with Donovan Desmond. Killing him, he admits, would be easy, but would also not be in any of their interests (and certainly not Desmond's).

If the intelligence services in Westalis suspect that the Berlint Wall is about to collapse, then it would be in the self-interests of both sides for a moderate government to survive and steer the ship of state between the political extremes.

This is a far more politically and intellectually challenging task than saving the world on a weekly basis. Lloyd and Yor spend much of their undercover time picking off extremists on both sides.

The old James Bond was a spy who happened to be a suave English gentleman. Efforts to infuse the character with moral depth, especially during the Daniel Craig era, were never going to work. That's simply not who James Bond is.

When your job is preventing a world apocalypse on a regular basis, those kinds of qualms are bound to fall by the wayside. To start with, you're not going to have the time.

Lloyd's more real-world missions require that he keep his honne and tatemae in close alignment, even though they may seem as far apart as night and day. His ultimate struggle is to accept that he is a family man at heart.

Since the start of the series, his success as a spy and his success as a father have become inextricably intertwined.

The Forgers are a pair of eccentric but otherwise ordinary suburban parents (like Rob and Laura Petrie from The Dick Van Dyke Show or Mike and Vanessa Baxter from Last Man Standing) who happen to be a spy and an assassin.

The order matters. If you get the happens to be rule wrong, you may end up with the wrong audience tuning in. Nothing will doom a series faster than the feeling a bait and switch is going on.

The premise of Moonlight is right up my alley. But halfway through the first season, it turned into a melodrama about a vampire who happened to be a private detective rather than a police procedural about a private detective who happened to be a vampire.

I believe that is why Moonlight lasted only one season (despite everything else about the series being pretty spot on). The audience tuned in for a mystery show and got a contemporary gothic soap opera about vampires instead.

Not that there's anything wrong with that. But in a ratings-based world, the core values of the viewers (as expressed by tuning in to watch) must largely overlap with the values of the characters (as expressed by the writer and director).

The same things goes for message-based entertainment. If a show runner wants to preach a message, it had better be one the audience wants to hear or at least is able to ignore because everything else about the show is so good.

One of the great advantages of anime and especially manga is that quantity has a quality all of its own. You are all the more likely to find titles that match up the honne and tatemae of the characters in an order that matters to you.

Labels: anime, criticism, japanese, language, movies, thinking about writing

Back in 2020, the weekly Japanese women's lifestyle magazine Anan featured Major Motoko Kusanagi from Ghost in the Shell: SAC_2045 on the cover of its July 8 issue, with feature articles about directors Kenji Kamiyama and Shinji Aramaki and voice actress Atsuko Tanaka.

Atsuko Tanaka was the voice and soul of Motoko Kusanagi. Alas, the past tense is necessary here, as Atsuko Tanaka died on Tuesday at the age of 61. Her list of credits on ANN includes over four hundred video game and anime roles, including Harumi Kiyama in A Certain Scientific Railgun and Flamme in Frieren: Beyond Journey's End.

But she will be forever remembered as the Major, one of my favorite characters of all time in any medium and the one that truly ignited my interest in anime.

A fascinating cultural conundrum revealed by the advent of manga and anime in America is that traditional Japan is so much better at creating believable female action characters than progressive Hollywood. Motoko Kusanagi is a girl boss you never doubt deserves to be in charge.

Nor is there any mystery about why Aramaki has her back or why her mostly male team is so willing to follow her lead.

Although the movie directed by Mamoru Oshii made Motoko and Ghost in the Shell famous, it was Kenji Kamiyama's Stand Alone Complex series and Solid State Society that defined the canon, into which Kamiyama and Aramaki have done a good job retrofitting their latest installment.

The opening arc of the new series takes place in a post-apocalyptic Los Angeles. Yeah, a bit on the been-there-done-that Mad Max side. But the series returns to form and Kamayama's classic Stand Alone Complex cyberpolice procedural roots once we get the Scooby Gang together again and back in Japan.

I like Purin taking over from Batou as the Tachikoma wrangler. The only real mark against SAC_2045 is that the Post Human storyline falls too far down the AI-as-antagonist rabbit hole. Granted, this AI is more interesting than most and Purin is the driving force during the concluding arc.

I wouldn't mind an episodic spin-off series that focused on Purin and the Tachikoma solving odd problems and investigating street-level cases.

At its best, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex is a cyberpunk Blue Bloods, and I consider that high praise. I can easily imagine Section Chief Aramaki and Commissioner Reagan trading places or teams and soldiering on with barely a hitch.

The origins story Ghost in the Shell: Arise is on Crunchyroll (with a younger Motoko voiced by Maaya Sakamoto). Netflix has Ghost in the Shell: SAC_2045. Unfortunately, the rest of the installments in the Ghost in the Shell franchise are scattered all over the map.

Tubi has a dubbed version of the original movie. Many of the titles are on YouTube and Amazon Prime, though it might be more affordable to track down the DVD and Blu-ray editions. Anime News Network has an encyclopedic media review for the entire franchise.

Labels: anime, anime lists, anime reviews, crunchyroll, ghost in the shell, japanese culture, streaming, technology, thinking about writing, tubi

The human species has been going places ever since our ancestors learned to walk upright. With our restless feet taking us to every corner of the planet, it was only a matter of time before we started telling stories about how we got there, who we met, what we saw, and the interesting stuff that happened along the way.

And thus was born the road trip genre.

Convergent literary evolution consequently produced epic road trips as far-flung as The Odyssey from the western tradition and Journey to the West from the eastern tradition. The theme established here and elsewhere is that getting there isn't so much half the fun as it is pretty much the entire point.

So it comes as no surprise that, at the end of the story, there is no there there, no end of the line, no actual destination in mind. Just the journey. Consider the rootless gunman from classic American westerns, epitomized by Shane and Clint Eastwood's Man with No Name in Sergio Leone's A Fistful of Dollars.

They're going someplace. We don't know where and they don't either. They'll know where they're going when they get there.

The Man with No Name was inspired by Akira Kurosawa's Yojimbo, a ronin wandering across Edo period Japan. He had plenty of company. In fact, at one point in the Zatoichi series, he crosses swords with the blind masseur, who is also always on the road in search of a good dice game and a righteous cause.

In the world of narrative fiction, the eternal road trip is a neat device to keep the writer from telling the same story in the same place.

Written in the 16th century, Journey to the West follows the legendary pilgrimage of the Buddhist monk Xuanzang, who traveled from China to Central Asia and India to obtain sacred Buddhist texts. The story and characters have inspired countless adaptations, Dragon Ball perhaps being the most famous.

More recent examples of the road trip include Kino's Journey and Spice and Wolf. The road trip can show up as an arc in a longer series, as when Yuuta bikes off to the northern tip of Hokkaido in Honey and Clover. And often turns into a heroic journey, as in Frieren: Beyond Journey's End.

But Girls' Last Tour may present us with the road trip in its purest form.

The story begins in medias res with no explanations, no backstory. Chito and Yuuri are driving a halftrack through a huge and desolate industrial complex, looking for a way out. They finally emerge into a gray winter day. The whole world is gray. All around them are the remains of an apocalyptic military conflict.

They are apparently the only survivors of an unnamed military organization that fell apart through sheer entropy. Their uniforms and helmets place them in the first half of the 20th century.

Chito's halftrack is based on the Kleines Kettenkraftrad HK 101. Yuuri carries a bolt-action rifle and has what appears to be a Balkenkreuz on her helmet. Early on, they stumble across a graveyard of military equipment, including the wreckage of a Cold War era Tupolev Tu-95.

The remnants of every war ever fought everywhere. From there they venture into a ruined and depopulated megalopolis built by a highly advanced civilization. They are wandering through the decline and fall of a 22nd century Roman Empire that has so far regressed to the early 20th century and will certainly fall further.

And maybe that's not such a bad thing. Rather than with a bang or a whimper (T.S. Eliot), or with fire or ice (Robert Frost), this is a world destined to simply fade away. Hopefully to be reborn again another day.

Related links

Girls' Last Tour
Frieren: Beyond Journey's End
Honey and Clover
Kino's Journey (2017)
Spice and Wolf (2024)

Labels: anime, anime lists, anime reviews, apocalyptic fiction, geography, history, japanese culture, manga, politics, thinking about writing

Perhaps the best known poems in anime are the tanka (or waka) recited during the Uta-garuta competitions in Chihayafuru. These poems are taken from the Hyakunin Isshu, an anthology of one hundred tanka compiled during the late Heian and early Kamakura periods by the scholar Fujiwara no Teika (1162–1241).

Tanka are also featured in the Utakai Hajime ("First poetry recital") held annually at the Imperial Palace on New Year's Day. Tanka are distinguishable by a 5-7-5-7-7 syllable pattern while haiku follow the more familiar 5-7-5 format.

Haiku are built upon a poetic framework that goes far deeper than just the syllable count. A well-formed haiku should demonstrate the appropriate use of kireji, words comparable to sounded-out punctuation marks that shape the pacing and prosody of the poem. And kigo, words that refer metaphorically to the specific season of the year.

In Words Bubble Up Like Soda Pop, haiku enthusiast Kouichi carries a saijiki (a kigo dictionary) around with him should the inspiration strike. Haiku is a serious enough literary subject to have its own dictionaries. And periodicals and associations and recitals and awards and, of course, school clubs.

What people outside Japan generally think of as haiku are often senryuu. The prosody of senryuu is the same as haiku but the use of kireji and kigo are not required. Moreover, senryuu takes human nature as its primary subject matter, with an emphasis on clever juxtapositions and comical turns of phrase that can resemble puns or aphorisms.

That makes senryuu popular in improvisational comedy shows like the long-running Shouten.

Along with Kouichi in In Words Bubble Up Like Soda Pop (and Komi in Komi Can't Communicate), Nanako in Senryu Girl would rather write than talk (this has become something of a trope of late). Senryuu is her preferred medium. Nanoko is a member of the high school literature club and attends the senryuu association at the local community center.

There Nanako meets classmate Eiji, a punk who got tired of being a punk and is reforming himself (another popular trope). He developed a love of senryuu along the way and hasn't shed his habit of reciting poems like a punk cruising for a bruising.

The Heike Story is a recent adaptation of the classic Heike Monogatari, about the decline and fall of the Taira clan. It is a historical drama and not about poetry per se. But the story is told from the perspective of Biwa. Traveling bards like Biwa are believed to have preserved the story until it was put down on paper.

Related anime

Chihayafuru
Komi Can't Communicate
Senryu Girl
The Heike Story
Words Bubble Up Like Soda Pop

Labels: anime, anime reviews, japan, japanese, japanese culture, literature, thinking about writing

In a previous post, I discussed what has become a perennial problem in the entertainment business: spending too much time on too little plot.

One example I offered for efficient scriptwriting is Three Star Bar in Nishi Ogikubo, that tells a satisfying tale in six half-hour largely standalone episodes.

Gamera Rebirth also does a good job in six forty-five minute episodes, integrating a backstory with the complexity of The X-Files without dragging the audience through all the nitty gritty details.

It then queues up a sequel (a single scene following the credit scroll) without resorting to a cliffhanger ending.

But perhaps the epitome of a tightly written teledrama is Monsters: 103 Mercies Dragon Damnation. In all of twenty-five minutes, we get a beginning, middle, and end, a (somewhat predictable) twist halfway through, and a conclusion that provides the promised payoff with another clever (and foreshadowed) twist.

Followed by a brief coda that ties it back to the One Piece universe.

This may be a bit of a spoiler, but Monsters takes a cue from the "management by walking around" governing style on display in samurai action classics such as Abarenbo Shogun and Mito Komon, that has a high government official mingling among the common folk into order to ferret out the bad guys.

It's an approach favored as well by Emperor Shouryuu in the Twelve Kingdoms.

This little gem was penned by One Piece mangaka Eiichiro Oda. Granted, if you're not familiar with One Piece, you may wonder what a French swordsman, a samurai, and a dragon are doing in a town straight out of the American West. But you quickly stop wondering because the narrative can carry that weight.

I don't follow One Piece closely and wasn't aware of the connection before watching the show. And yet despite the odd anachronisms, it was still one of the most entertaining movies I've seen in quite a while.

Monsters: 103 Mercies Dragon Damnation is streaming on Netflix.

Labels: anime, anime lists, anime reviews, jdrama, netflix, thinking about writing, viki

Why do western audiences like anime? One reason is precisely because anime doesn't pander to western audiences. Or rather, anime in general does not make a concerted effort to appeal to modern audiences outside Japan.

The Critical Drinker deserves the credit for turning that expression into a pejorative. To be sure, any trending social and political movement will inevitably show up in Japanese popular culture (often using the same English terminology). But in almost every case, it is an ephemeral surf that leaves the deeper societal currents undisturbed.

Dating back at least 2500 years, Confucianism is the common cultural cornerstone of the Sinosphere. In particular, China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam share a worldview with deep roots in Confucianism. Especially in South Korea, that worldview "shapes the moral system, the way of life, social relations between old and young, high culture, and much of the legal system."

It's easy to spot an almost identical postmodern veneer around the developed world and assume that all such societies are essentially the same. But no matter how contemporary a society may appear on the surface, the bedrock culture remains. If only for the sake of verisimilitude, it must constitute an inextricable part of any story being told in that context.

The payoff is that understanding and respecting the immutable nature of the culture makes for a reliable source of tension and conflict and narrative depth.

Challenging traditional values is one thing. Eliminating them entirely is quite another. That's what China did during the Cultural Revolution. The result was the wholesale destruction of an entire generation. It comes as no surprise that those very same communists are now hawking the ancient cultural heritage and Confucian teachings they once vilified.

China learned the hard way the value of Chesterton's Fence.

Granted, aside from a handful of trending topics and popular political slogans, most people would have a hard time identifying what those cultural values are. But they do recognize their absence. Like a living organism deprived of a necessary nutrient, though its absence may go unnoticed at first, its loss will inevitably exact a toll.

Regardless of the genre, anime is deeply rooted in Japanese culture. Even when seemingly lost in translation, it shores up the story being told. From the hierarchal language to the education system, to food, fashion, architecture, and a myriad of other customs that are centuries old and very much alive.

A great example of this is Dragon Pilot, that starts at a modern JSDF air force base, and then tosses dragons, miko (Shinto shrine maidens), and ancient religious rites into the mix. Dragon Pilot introduces the shrine maidens in the last third of the story, while Otaku Elf takes place entirely in the shrine maiden genre.

The Japanese title for the latter is Edomae Elf and Elda has been hanging around Takamimi Shrine since the dawn of the Edo period. More recently in the early twentieth century, the Taisho period has become the go-to setting for Japan's fantasy steam punk era, as in My Happy Marriage and Demon Slayer.
In an interview posted on Anime News Network, My Happy Marriage director Takehiro Kubota was asked if he was concerned about how viewers outside Japan would enjoy and interpret the anime.

"Not really," was his reassuring answer.

In fact, I never imagined that it would be seen so widely in so many different countries, so I was grateful when I heard that it had been watched by so many people overseas and had such a positive response. Perhaps due to Miyo's uniquely Japanese character? It's somewhat hard to express the nuance, but Miyo is a quite modest person who clearly doesn't wear her heart on her sleeve. I found it very interesting that her character was accepted in other cultures where being able to assert one's own opinion is a highly valued character trait.

A big part of what draws western audiences to anime is precisely because it is not made for western audiences. The aesthetics of anime create an additional level of remove that paradoxically makes reality all the more real. So as it turns out, then, I do like the isekai genre very much, because watching anime takes me on a voyage to another world.

Related posts

Anime reassessed (pacing matters)
Anime reassessed (culture matters)
Anime reassessed (numbers matter)

Labels: anime lists, anime reviews, culture, japanese culture, japanese tv, jdrama, politics, streaming, thinking about writing

Thinking about slice-of-life anime, I believe the genre often has an clear-cut narrative structure, what I call the outsider-to-insider learning curve.

In Super Cub, Koguma starts out as a novice. Learning the ropes first from her mechanic and then from Reiko, a Super Cub aficionado, Koguma goes from outsider to insider over the first half of the series. But neither of them have ridden their motorcycles in the winter, so a whole arc is devoted them learning how to adapt their Super Cubs (and themselves) to the cold, again going from outsiders to insiders.

In the last episode, their friend Shii buys a Super Cub and so she as well is on her journey from outsider to insider.

Non Non Biyori begins with Hotaru moving from Tokyo and attending her first day of school. The quintessential outsider. Laid-Back Camp has Nadeshiko biking to a scenic overlook for a view of Mt. Fuji. There she meets Rin and gets interested in camping. As in Super Cub, the first season follows Nadeshiko as she learns about camping from Rin and the school's camping club. As the POV character, what she learns, the audience learns.

In the food genre, Solitary Gourmet features Yutaka Matsushige eating at a different (real) restaurant every episode (being the proprietor of a one-man import-export business is the pretext for him traveling all over the place). Every episode begins with him as an outsider at that particular restaurant and ends with him an insider, having observed the cooks and clientele and eaten practically everything on the menu.

Samurai Gourmet and Wakako Zake follow a similar formula. The latter even includes details about the restaurants visited at the end of each episode.

What makes Akebi in Akebi's Sailor Uniform more of a Mary Sue (though an entertaining one) is that she goes from outsider to insider in one episode. By contrast, in Snow White with the Red Hair, earning her insider status takes Shirayuki most of the first cour.

As a general rule, the romance genre always benefits from a learning curve unrelated to the romantic relationship, such as Sawako in Kimi ni Todoke using her nickname as an impetus to study up on Japanese folklore, which pays off brilliantly at the end of the second season.

And in Insomniacs After School, given the task of revitalizing the astronomy club, Ganta takes up the hobby of astrophotography and finally learns how to use the expensive digital camera his father gave him.

In the last third of the season, Ganta and Isaki travel around the Noto Peninsula searching for shooting locations, a narrative arc now made all the more poignant in the aftermath of the 2024 Noto earthquake. A realistic learning curve can't help but touch upon the real world.

Related posts

Mary Sue to the rescue
Non Non Biyori

Labels: anime, anime lists, anime reviews, japanese culture, thinking about writing

I've ranted about this before, but the mainframe-as-antagonist (commanding an army of dumb terminal minions) was a well-worn meme sixty years ago when Captain Kirk was outwitting IBM System/360 lookalikes on a regular basis. It's so overdone by now you can't stick a fork in it. It's mush.

And yet Hollywood keeps serving it up. Because we keep chomping it down.

Conquering the galaxy since the 1950s.

Even the ending of Edge of Tomorrow (without a computer network in sight) is straight out of The Phantom Menace. And straight out of Oblivion, the previous Tom Cruise SF post-apocalyptic, blow-up-the-alien-mainframe actioner.

Making it an organic mainframe is a slight improvement but just as dumb. The whole "hive mind" thing needs to go too.

Speaking of organic mainframes, Star Wars fell back on the Evil Emperor trope, a linchpin apparently holding the whole universe together by his lonesome. How is never explained, but all the good guys have to do is knock out this one bad guy and peace and prosperity is restored to the galaxy.

Well, after they deal with the truly killer mainframe that is the Death Star. The whole Star Wars franchise ended up being about destroying Death Stars, each one a more ludicrous violation of the laws of physics than the last. Again, what long term problems this solves is never made clear.

Does the mail start arriving on time now? Does the tax code suddenly become more comprehensible? And what happens to the unemployment rate when all those Death Star jobs get instantaneously terminated? Imagine the size of the catering contract for just one of those behemoths.

Of course, destroying a single machine in a single place and winning the war everywhere makes for easy denouements. But if the Earth is ever attacked by malevolent aliens who know how to implement autonomous distributed network technology, we are so screwed.

That aside, though, what do the aliens hope to accomplish by attacking Earth? Or attacking any inhabited planet? (Besides giving the director an excuse to restage the Battle of Britain or the Invasion of Normandy.)

If they wanted to wipe out the humans along with the infrastructure—the whole objective of the Independence Day aliens—there'd be no need to get anywhere near the planet's surface, as Heinlein pointed out back in 1966 with The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. An asteroid makes for a handy ICBM.

There are lots of big asteroids out there.

Another reason is, they want our water. But there is plenty water elsewhere, that is not at the bottom of a deep gravity well. Europa, for starters.

Then there's the "To Serve Man" plot device. But homo sapiens is a lousy food and energy source (The Matrix is dumber than dirt in this regard). That's why so few people get eaten by sharks (surprisingly few!).

Besides, a blown-up country is a huge resource sink. Hence the Marshall Plan. By 1950, SCAP was already regretting Article 9 in the 1947 Japanese Constitution (forbidding war) and was revving up Japanese industry to support the Korean War, which was just what the economy needed.

In The Phantom Menace, Lucas tosses the politics of trade into the picture, but without explaining what is being traded, why, or how. The result is a blur of handwaving when it comes to the story because there are no underlying rational reasons for anything that happens.

The economic model of the Star Wars universe makes no more sense than the socialist utopianism of Star Trek, which finally gave us the robber baron Ferengi to make things interesting.

Still, Lucas was onto something. The unequal treaties imposed on Japan and China by the U.S. and European powers in the mid-19th century led to the Boxer Rebellion in China and propelled Japan into a regional arms race in order to even the scales. Lots of dramatic conflict there.

The thing is, China and Japan had stuff the foreign powers wanted, stuff as trivial (to our modern eyes) as tea. But like spice in Dune, there were underlying economic causes behind the conflicts. And at the time, a bad trade deal was a better deal for both sides than smash and grab.

And so we're back to the Lebensraum ("living space") ideology promulgated by Germany in the 1930s. (The Nazi bad guy connection certainly doesn't hurt.) The Japanese equivalent was used to justify the annexation of Korea and Manchuria.

Both Germany and Japan were doing rather well at expanding their territories (employing their own "unequal treaty" tactics) before they started actually invading their neighbors, after which everything went downhill fast.

So we'll assume our invading aliens are smart enough not to turn the whole thing into a scorched-earth shooting war. The problem is how to make that interesting.

A good place to start is Ryomaden, which describes the opening of Japan in the mid-19th century, the shock to the system, the unequal treaties, the escalating civil strife, finally resolved by a quickly-concluded civil war that launched Japan on a burning quest to surpass the west.

If gunboat melodrama is what you want, (bad) diplomacy seems pretty good at supplying the necessary Sturm und Drang motivations. Kudos to Guardians of the Galaxy on this score.

The problem is the time frame required by real politics. Summing up two decades of geopolitics in two hours would be tough. I suppose it really is simpler to just have Tom Cruise blow up the mainframe.

Labels: computers, mainframe, movies, robots, science fiction, star wars, tech history, technology, thinking about writing

In a previous discussion about the Mary Sue trope, I suggested the "cozy romance" as a companion to the "cozy mystery." Well, a series that qualifies as a cozy mystery, a cozy romance, and a Mary Sue that mostly works is Holmes of Kyoto.

Aoi Mashiro is a boy-crazed ditz when we first meet her. But her encounter with Kiyotaka Yagashira at the Yagashira Antique Shop turns her into a cool-headed antiques appraiser.

Eventually. Kiyotaka hires her to dust and sweep and make tea. But she's a fast study. A really fast study. Nevertheless, we see her put in the work. And she's got a great tutor. So she earns it.

Kiyotaka is, of course, young and handsome, the smartest appraiser in Kyoto. He claims that "Holmes" is merely a play on the kanji for "home" in his name, but he and Aoi end up solving a lot of crimes and mysteries.

The series has a Moriarty as well, though he's closer to the "Fiend with Twenty Faces" created by Ranpo Edogawa. Ensho is a defrocked Buddhist priest and frustrated forger who seems mostly obsessed with fooling Kiyotaka.

Along the way, of course, Aoi and Kiyotaka develop feelings for each other. But by externalizing the conflicts and taking the usual "complications" out of the relationship, the "cozy" romance can mature at a slow slow burn.

Aoi is still in high school, to start with. In any case, I'm not interested in a Mary Sue who is forever torn between cowboy Billy and billionaire Bob. Nobody plucks petals off a daisy while intoning, "She loves me, she loves me not."

The art and animation isn't as polished as Snow White with the Red Hair. But if you're looking for cozy mysteries and a very gently simmering romance, this dive into the world of Kyoto antiquing nicely fits the bill.

Holmes of Kyoto is streaming on Crunchyroll.

Labels: anime, anime reviews, crunchyroll, edogawa, mystery, thinking about writing

The eponymous character, originally named Lieutenant Mary Sue, was created by Paula Smith in her short 1973 parody of Star Trek fan fiction. Editing a Star Trek fanzine, Smith had noticed the predominance of stories that featured

the adventures of the youngest and smartest person ever to graduate from Star Fleet Academy and ever get a commission. Usually characterized by unprecedented skill in everything from art to zoology, including karate and arm wrestling, this character can be found burrowing her way into the good graces of Kirk, Spock, or McCoy, if not all three at once. She saves the day by her wit and ability, and, if we are lucky, has the good grace to die at the end, being grieved by the entire ship.

The Mary Sue can be simply summed up as a character who is too good to be true, having acquired more skills and talents and positive personality traits than our most generous expectations suggest is realistically possible.

Put the Mary Sue shortcut down to the rush of wish fulfillment or to impatient writers who want to fast forward to the "interesting" scenes. Or who think they are giving the audience what it wants to see. You know, because practicing to get good at something is for chumps.

Meeting all these criteria, a recent Mary Sue par excellence is Rey in The Force Awakens.

Yoda himself can't keep Luke Skywalker from getting badly beaten by Darth Vader in the second movie. Forget about crossing swords with anybody in the first. But Rey is an expert the first time she touches a lightsaber. She's as good a pilot as Han Solo the first time she sits in the cockpit of the Millenium Falcon.

Now, Luke does have a Mary Sue moment at the end of A New Hope, when he pilots an X-wing starfighter to victory. No, logging a couple hundred hours in a Cessna 172 does not mean you can hop into an F-35 Lightning and out-fly the Top Guns who've been at it for years.

We give Luke a pass here thanks to the narrative trick of making the audience a participant in the trials, travails, and eventual triumphs of the protagonist. As the help wanted ads put it, having proved his mettle, we'll let the good guy skate by on "equivalent experience" in lieu of a resume.

The problem with Rey is that's she's perfect from the moment she appears on the screen. We never see her resume. We never see her burning the midnight oil. Making it all the more annoying, as I outlined in my review, is that it would not have been difficult to give her one.

The big irony of the Mary Sue and its Star Trek origins is that The Next Generation wrote one right into the cast. Pandering to the fan base, I suppose. But perhaps any trope worth being singled out and savagely critiqued is one that connects at a deep level with a significant portion of the audience.

In that light, it deserves a defense. And so now I rise not to bury Mary Sue but to praise her.

To be sure, I cannot bring myself to defend Wesley Crusher. He is exactly the kind of annoying Mary Sue that Paula Smith snarked about back in 1973. Any reasonable appeal to verisimilitude could not tolerate his presence on the bridge of the Enterprise.

But a Mary Sue story can be done right. Komichi Akebi in Akebi's Sailor Uniform is a more recent and perfectly adorable example. But Snow White with the Red Hair really sets the standard.


Based on the manga by Sorata Akizuki, the anime ran two cours (the manga is still being serialized). As befitting the title, the story takes place in a spick and span medieval Disneyland (the setting itself qualifies as a Mary Sue).

When we first meet her, Shirayuki (白雪), whose name translates as "Snow White," is a conscientious herbalist who owns a small pharmacy. That is, until the lecherous Prince Raj, entranced by her brilliant red hair, decides to make Shirayuki his mistress. And won't take no for an answer.

Figuring that caution is the better part of valor, Shirayuki's answer is to pack up and scamper across the border, where she promptly runs into Prince Zen of Clarines and his retainers. It's "like" at first sight.

No mooning around. No one gets serenaded beneath a window. Shirayuki and Zen are preternaturally practical and competent people. Shirayuki has principles and no hesitation in standing up for them. And one of those principles is to own only what she's earned.

Although ostensibly a "European" kingdom, Clarines appears to be run by a ranked bureaucracy of mandarins appointed through an imperial examination system. Determined to stay close to Zen but refusing any handouts, Shirayuki applies for a job as an assistant court herbalist. And passes the tests.

But, again, the backstory has established that she works hard and is good at it, and shows us (doesn't just tell us) that she is deserving of the position. Zen as well works for a living. Being a prince in Clarines comes with a portfolio. Besides going on inspection tours, he has to sit at a desk and push paper around.

These jobs not only make them more interesting but also generate compelling plot material.

(Seriously, what do Disney's Cinderella, Snow White, and Sleeping Beauty actually do? Well, Cinderella is good at housekeeping. What does Elsa do? Anna at least has the important job of keeping Elsa from going nuts and destroying the kingdom.)

There's no need to pretend Shirayuki and Zen aren't Mary Sues. They are too good to be true. Here we have a pair of protagonists who couldn't be any nicer without getting saccharin. Even Prince Raj can't resist becoming a better person when he's around them (a character arc that pays off well in the second cour).

Yet they both possess a depth of character that makes their stories compelling. Yes, nice people can be interesting and do interesting things. I would describe the resulting genre as a "cozy" romance, the equivalent of the "cozy" mystery.

Dispensed with are the angst, the sturm und drang, the love triangles, the miscommunication, all the melodramatic conventions of the genre. Another way of describing this romance sub-genre might be "You and me (and our friends) against the world."

In fact, the only real hint of romantic tension arises among their friends, principally Mitsuhide, Kiki, and Obi, who are Zen's retainers, though Zen assigns Obi to Shirayuki. Later in the series, Mitsuhide seems to have a thing for Kiki, and Obi definitely has unrequited affection for Shirayuki.

But being loyal to Zen and having earned his trust, Obi never does anything stupid or inappropriate. Aside from Mitsuhide getting goofy in one episode in which he goes looking for Shirayuki in the pharmacy and accidentally ingests an elixir, nobody embarrasses, betrays, or compromises anybody.

Even for the day or so that Mitsuhide is under the effect of the elixir, he acts like a stereotypical gallant knight and drives everybody batty. It's a clever way of stating what the show is not about.

In the second cour, more high adventure comes their way, what with pirates and outlaws and damsels in distress and long lost family members showing up in unexpected places. But Shirayuki keeps her head on her shoulders (literally and figuratively) and the relationship never falters. Neither does her career.

In the end, nobody rides off into the sunset. There are no impending nuptials. We don't need to be told that Shirayuki and Zen will live "happily ever after." They only need to live their lives as best they can. From what we have learned about them, that will suffice. Real life is tough enough already.

Labels: anime, anime reviews, crunchyroll, movie reviews, romance, star trek, star wars, streaming, thinking about writing

Being less constrained by the budgetary boundaries of Hollywood productions, and often based on material originally created by a production team of one or two, anime ends up throwing a lot more ideas against the wall to see what sticks.

As depicted in Bakuman, manga artists constantly compete to come up with a unique cast on the same-old same-old. The survival of the fictional fittest yields new tropes and formulas that are refined, exploited, and exhausted. Then the whole process starts all over again.

This Darwinistic struggle can also yield bursts of surprising creativity. Genres from opposite ends of the story spectrum intersect in ways that can only be described using multidimensional Venn diagrams.

A recent break-out genre is commonly referred to as "Cute girls doing cute things." It arose out of the primordial soup of moe, which can be defined as "the ideal of youthful and innocent femininity." In narrative terms, it means using cuteness both as a theme and a character trait.

Writers were soon populating their stories with casts of cute girls. This resulted in slice-of-life comedies about cute girls attending school, having fun, and hanging out together, less concerned with plot than the warm fuzzies. It's a life-affirming approach that defines the iyashikei or "healing" genre.

Representative series include Non-Non Biyori, Azumanga Daioh, and Strawberry Marshmallow.

Also drawing on the noteworthy insight that a sure way to create an interesting character is to give her a job or hobby, the focus was further refined to highlight cute girls engaged in specific activities. This evolved in a genre best described as "cute girls doing interesting things in a cute way."


The genre-making hit in this regard was probably the K-On! franchise, about five high school girls who form a rock band. But to illustrate how heterodox such a simple concept can become, an earlier hallmark series was Aria, about cute girls working as gondoliers on Mars.


And then there is Girls und Panzer, in which a group of cute girls operate a platoon of vintage tanks in unrealistically realistic high school war games. On a less exotic note, cute girls form a mountain hiking club in Encouragement of Climb and a camping club in Laid-Back Camp.

Diary of Our Days at the Breakwater plunges into the activities of an all-girl high school fishing club, with each episode focusing on a different species of fish and the techniques used to catch it. Super Cub celebrates Honda's hugely popular (throughout Asia) line of utility scooters.

Sakura Quest tackles the intractable problems of rural depopulation. Five cute girls (they're mostly adults this time around) are recruited by the tourist board to help revitalize a small town. The comic premise notwithstanding, they come up with real-world, practical solutions.

Seriously, you could use Sakura Quest as the text in a college course on the subject.


The Japanese obsession with technical precision is on full display. Actual equipment and techniques are depicted in Encouragement of Climb and Laid-Back Camp. The tanks in Girls und Panzer are operated according to the historical specs. Honda consulted on Super Cub.

As with the ever-popular cooking shows, the goal is to geek out on a subject while keeping it interesting. And one sure way to make it interesting (to boys in particular) is to keep it cute!

Related videos

Azumanga Daioh
Aria
Diary of Our Days at the Breakwater
Encouragement of Climb
Girls und Panzer
Kiyo in Kyoto
K-On!
Laid-Back Camp
Non-Non Biyori
Sakura Quest
Strawberry Marshmallow
Super Cub

Labels: anime, anime lists, japanese culture, social studies, thinking about writing, tubi

Girls und Panzer is a textbook example of how to launch a story in medias res without any title cards or opening crawls or expository dialogue to establish and explain the crazy backstory. You either suspend disbelief from the get-go or you don't.

Director Tsutomu Mizushima and veteran screenwriter and manga artist Reiko Yoshida throw so much insanity onto the screen in the first episode, while treating it all as "normal," that you find yourself scratching your head and nodding and saying to yourself, "Hmm, you know, I guess it kinda sorta makes sense."

NO, IT DOESN'T! IT DOESN'T MAKE ANY SENSE AT ALL!

The premise here is that high schools engage in war games as an extramural sport, with national championships and everything. Not in a virtual world (that'd be somewhat plausible), but with fully operational platoons of vintage WWII tanks, adding up to more rolling armor than most of the world's militaries.

All the caveats about "safety measures" notwithstanding, even if the shells were blanks (they're not), accidents alone would rack up a serious body count. The "sport" is not without some risks—Miho had previously quit after one such accident—but supposedly "risky" the same way that American football is "risky."

Yeah, no. I mean, there's suspending disbelief and then there's disbelieving the most rudimentary laws of physics.


Nor did I get a satisfactory explanation—aside from a single line of dialogue when a character poses the same question—of why entire towns are built atop gigantic aircraft carriers. Because, that's why.

Yet I couldn't stop watching. It absolutely shouldn't, but the whole thing simply works at every level. Girls und Panzer is a rollicking good time from beginning to end, and the movie sequels are just as much goofy fun.

At the story level, this shouldn't be all that surprising. The sports genre has been a reliable mainstay of manga and anime for half a century, and Girls und Panzer constitutes a solid entry in the canon. As such, the almost entirely plot-driven narrative makes it easier to look past the inherent craziness.


It's also a classic underdog story, as Miho has to figure out how to defeat larger and better equipped teams with her oddball tanks and crews. (Like "oddball," the series is peppered with references to Kelly's Heroes.)

You see, when Oarai Girls High School previously shut down the program for lack of interest and funds and sold off the equipment, the only tanks left were the ones nobody else wanted.

Although the focus of the series is on the tanks and the competitions, human drama is not absent. An interesting dynamic plays out between Miho, Maho (her older sister), and their mother. Naturally, the national championship comes down to a battle between the two tanks personally commanded by Miho and Maho.

I think we have a winner in the sibling rivalry metaphor department.

In fact, it is so easy to get caught up in the competitions and Miho's ingenious solutions to one impossible predicament after the next that you can easily overlook the the most compelling thing about Girls und Panzer. The girls.

These are all-girl teams in an all-girl competition in what is (as far as I can tell) an all-girl sport.

They're teenagers, of course, so the subject of boys comes up. But not a speck of drama or plot development revolves around a boy. I don't think a teenage boy appears on screen. Men pop up here and there in peripheral supporting roles. But from beginning to end, every major character is female.

And yet we don't hear one speck of political or social commentary about this obvious fact either.

Miho's recruiting campaign (Oarai High is desperately short of tank crews) argues that tankery as a martial art is a great way to improve a girl's feminine attributes.

Historically, this argument is not that big of a reach. It was common practice in medieval Japan for the daughters of noblemen and samurai to study the naginata (halberd). Today, high school girls regularly participate in the traditional martial arts of judo, kendo (fencing), and kyudo (archery).

Hana Isuzu, Miho's gunner, comes from a family famous for its skill at kado (ikebana or flower arrangement). Hana's mother is initially opposed to her daughter's participation in tankery, but will later concede that it has improved Hana's artistic skill and expressiveness at flower arrangement.

Nobody at any point questions the ability of girls (as a sex) to operate tanks and command tank platoons. There's an important lesson here. The complete absence of "messaging" about the female composition of this heavily armored Herland makes the inherent message that much more appealing to boys.

The manga and light novels were serialized in seinen magazines (aimed at young adult males). And yet, aside from the standard short skirts and an obligatory hot springs scene, there's barely any fan service. Again, this is first and foremost a sports anime. It's all about winning the tank battles.

Tank battles fought by girls. In their Panzers.

Related videos

Girls und Panzer (CR) (HD) (NF)
Girls und Panzer OVA
Girls und Panzer Anzio
Girls und Panzer der Film (HD) (NF)

Labels: anime, anime reviews, hidive, japanese culture, kate, netflix, pop culture, social studies, thinking about writing

Nippon published a concise and informative retrospective of Ranpo Edogawa's literary career by Kimie Itakura, featuring an interview with Takumi Ishikawa, professor of modern literature and culture at Rikkyo University. My translation of The Bronze Devil gets a brief mention.

Labels: bronze devil, edogawa, japanese, mystery, thinking about writing, translations

A common criticism of Hollywood is that it cares more about what sells in China than what sells in middle America. That Hollywood can sell its wares in China at all is a testament to the universality of storytelling and the structured approach to the craft that Hollywood has polished to a shine.

At the same time, what makes universality equally interesting are the exceptions that are not so universal. Here I'm thinking about a unique interplay between subject matter and genre, quite apart from cultural specificity, that has no real equivalent in Hollywood when it comes to narrative fiction.

Call this one the "how-to" genre.

In the non-fiction space, there is no lack of DIY and "how-to" programming in the North American market. PBS Create does nothing else 24/7. But while there is often an element of DIY in scripted television shows coming out of Hollywood, it's hard to think of an example where it is the single defining element.

The setting of any series will dictates a certain amount of expository material, as will the occupations of the characters. At the very least, in the name of verisimilitude, a show that, for example, takes place in a radio station (NewsRadio, WKRP in Cincinnati, Frasier) must necessary provide some insights into broadcasting.

In Home Improvement and Last Man Standing, Tim Allen comes close, epitomizing a "how-to" man working in "how-to" businesses.

On Japanese television, and specifically anime, "how to" is not only a defining element but often the entire point. The hugely popular "gourmet drama" pays the kind of attention to the nuts and bolts of cooking otherwise only found in reality shows and the occasional feature-length Hollywood production.

It is certainly a defining element in the ever-popular sports genre, appealing to its audience with a focus how to play the game better.

Thus the protagonist in a mainstream sports drama commonly starts off with a great deal of promise but an Achilles heel that must be overcome. Tsurune begins with our protagonist suffering from a bad case of the yips in the form of target panic. Big Windup features a pitcher with incredible control but no speed.

Especially in baseball series, multiple episodes can be devoted to a single game, with the granularity of the narrative resolving to a pitch-by-pitch analysis.

Then there is the "oddball sports" category, which features sports or games the audience may be familiar with but probably doesn't know a lot about. Again, an excuse to work a great deal of exposition into the narrative.

Examples include Chihayafuru (karuta), Saki (mahjong ), Hikaru no Go (go), Tsurune (archery), and March Comes in like a Lion (shogi). The latter gained particular resonance when real-life Sota Fujii turned professional at the age of 14 (youngest ever). These sports-related series do also generate a great deal of melodrama.

And finally we come to the "how-to" genre distilled down to its essence.

The Japanese fascination with "how-to" is fully on display in what I call the "Cute girls doing interesting things in a cute way" genre. The typical approach is to have the protagonist get interested in a somewhat obscure activity, discover that her friends are interested in it too (or recruits them), and plunges in.

The result are slice-of-life stories, often with little actual drama and only the rudimentary scaffolding of a plot, but with great attention given to the specific details of the activity. Recent examples include Encouragement of Climb (hiking), Laid-Back Camp (camping), and Long Riders (bicycle touring).

Even the shamelessly silly and purposely low-brow Bakuon!! explores the world of motorcycling in considerable technical detail.

The result is part how-to guide and part promotional video in a surprisingly entertaining format. And who knows? Maybe viewers here and there will be convinced to put down their phones and venture into the great outdoors. (Along with a great many DIY aficionados, I'll settle for watching the great outdoors on television.)

Related links

Bakuon!! (CR HD)
Big Windup (CR Fun)
Chihayafuru (CR HD)
Encouragement of Climb
Laid-Back Camp
Long Riders (CR HD)
March Comes in like a Lion
Saki
Tsurune (CR HD)

Food fiction
Cute girls doing interesting things

Labels: anime, anime lists, chihayafuru, economics, food, japanese culture, television, thinking about writing

Kate observed a while back that the dialogue in a drama communicates more than the raw semantics, such that technically incomprehensible dialogue need not impede comprehension (citing a scene from the classic police procedural Kojak).

To be sure, "dialogue can't be all connotation and jargon." But when

the dialogue carries weight with the characters, it carries weight with the audience. Meaning is determined as much by context, reaction, intonation, and individual word choice as by any insider knowledge.

I'm going to try approaching this idea from a slightly different angle.

As a general rule, while the audience doesn't have to understand everything a fictional character is saying, we do have to believe that the writer understands what he is making his characters say and why. We make a leap of faith and implicitly trust the source of the information we are getting.

Which is why the audience is so easily fooled by an unreliable narrator.

For example, few people outside the uniformed services comprehend all the intricacies of military rank and hierarchy ("captain" and "sergeant" are particularly problematic). But the screenwriter of a war movie had better know what he's talking about. Or else the actors had better sell it.

And once we are sold, as in any given episode of Star Trek, it is surprising how much meaningless technobabble a story can tolerate. As long as we grasp the key points of the story, our brains are adept at filtering out the blah-blah-blah from the elements driving the plot along.

In the anime series Hyouka, Hotaro even begins to wonder if his "powers of deduction" are due to his ability to spin the facts of a case into a compelling tale. In one episode, he has Eru present him with a randomly-chosen incident, from which he invents a convincing "proof."

The comical payoff is that he inadvertently solves an actual crime in the process.

But Hotaro has a point. The power of the human brain to filter the randomness out of random events also gives it the power to create cause and effect out of whole cloth. Hence conspiracy theories.

But when that blah-blah-blah filter doesn't work at all, we can be equally left in the dark. True fluency in a foreign language comes down to the blah-blah-blah filter.

I understand news and NOVA-type science shows in Japanese pretty well. But when watching Japanese medical dramas and police procedurals (without subtitles), I often have difficulty grasping what technobabble matters and what doesn't and in the process lose track of the plot.

Jargon and slang and mumbled lines and people talking over each other make things even murkier.

Of course, the former and the latter are working at cross-purposes. The point of a documentary is to explain technically complicated concepts to a lay audience, while the information presented to the viewer in a crime drama has the initial intent of obfuscating the existence of a simple explanation.

Practically every mystery drama ends likes a game of Clue. It's the narrative equivalent of Occam's Razor, a simple enough explanation that everybody in the audience will comprehend in the end. Clouding the waters is the whole point.

Observe how quickly a one-hour drama proceeds from climax to denouement. I recently happened across the last ten minutes of an episode of Elementary and had little difficulty figuring out what had happened in the previous fifty. But, of course, that is not why we watch.

Columbo was a highly influential series in Japan. Yutaka Mizutani's detective in the hugely popular Aibo series is a clever combination of Jeremy Brett's Sherlock Holmes and Peter Falk's Columbo. He's a lot of fun to watch even when I only understand about a quarter of what he's saying.

But after stumbling all the way through a crime drama in Japanese, I can often work backwards through the episode and figure out what was going on earlier. This suggests that the Japanese version of Columbo would be easier to follow. Aibo follows a more traditional mystery plot structure.

Telling the story backwards doesn't always work with medical dramas unless I can identify the particular issue at the core of the conflict. Though common plots like "cute kid waiting for a transplant" are easy enough.

Labels: television, thinking about writing, writing

Given a title like Beautiful Bones, you might jump to the conclusion that this light novel and anime series shares much in common with Bones, the police procedural starring Emily Deschanel and David Boreanaz.

And you'd be right.

Those obvious assumptions are obviously intended. This a good example of "localizing" an anime or light novel title rather than literally translating the original. The actual title of the light novel series is "A Corpse is Buried Under Sakurako's Feet" (「櫻子さんの足下には死体が埋まっている」).

Long light novel titles have become trendy of late, which can give overseas publishers fits.

Like Deschanel's Temperance "Bones" Brennan, Sakurako Kujo is a socially maladroit osteologist with a penchant for stumbling across dead bodies. She isn't a famous author but comes from old money and lives in the (Gothic) family mansion with an elderly housekeeper and the menagerie of animal skeletons she reconstructs as her hobby.

She's more eccentric than Temperance Brennan, closer in personality to House and Holmes on the brilliant antisocial obsessive detective scale. Her Watson (or Wilson) is Shotaro Tatewaki, a high school student who does his best to keep her more manic proclivities in check.

Being a kid ("shonen"), he can only do so much. I can't help wondering how the series would play out if Sakurako were paired with Boreanaz's Agent Booth, someone with the strong personality and physical presence to root her more firmly in the real world.

But there's nothing wrong with this version either. Shotaro is a competent kid. Well, he has to be, given who he hangs out with. The result is, like House, Sakurako ends up with more room to be her own brilliantly semi-unbalanced self.

As voiced by Shizuka Ito, Sakurako often reminds me of Jolene Blalock's T'Pol on Enterprise, constantly having to put up with humans and their annoying illogical emotions.

Of course, when you create a smart detective, you have to create smart crimes for her to solve. That means the detective has to be smarter than the criminal, and the screenwriter has to be smarter than them both.

Making the smart detective a scientist gives them (the detective and the writer) access to a pool of deductible facts that is both technically complex and accessible through research (or hire a consultant). Shiori Ota, author of the novels, has clearly done one or the other or both.

The result is a well-structured set of mysteries that mostly play fair—we are privy to the same information as Shotaro. Each mystery concludes in one or two episodes. An unresolved arc involving a Moriarty-type figure runs through the series, but never overwhelms the individual episodes.

The anime ran for only one cour, so the unresolved arc remains unresolved, though the villain's identity and motives are revealed in the penultimate episode. But it does not end on a cliffhanger, and the light novels series is still active, with fourteen volumes now in print. So a second cour may be in the offing.

One other unique thing about Beautiful Bones is that the series takes place in Hokkaido, where the author grew up. It makes for a nice change of setting and provides for the kind of wide-open spaces (and much more driving) than you'll experience in Tokyo.

Labels: anime, anime reviews, language, mystery, thinking about writing, translations