March 26, 2012
Selling the sizzle (not the mistakes)
Maohden (my current project) is the first in the "Demon City Blues" series, published before Yashakiden. It's half the length and moves a brisker clip than the latter, which clocks in at about half a million words. Yashakiden is Kikuchi's Moby Dick, and like Melville he writes a Wikipedia entry for every parenthetical and plot tangent.
(That world building is a fantastic accomplishment, but I wish that instead of a gory, erotic vampire thriller, he'd written a novel focusing on the Chicago-style politics of Demon City's mayor.)
Once you get past the info-dumps, Kikuchi rewards the reader of his adult novels (Demon City Shinjuku is safely Y/A) with plenty of BDSM kink and rape porn. These novels were originally serialized, and in Maohden, I could swear Kikuchi's editor gave him a list of fetishes and a quota.
It's not exactly my cup of tea, so I have to wonder about the market. Because it's sure there. This is hardly unique to Japan. Consider a far more successful literary import. From Steve Sailer's review of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo:
But what really caught my attention is the romance trilogy Fifty Shades (that started out as Twilight fan fiction). It's gotten gushy write-ups in the New York Post and the requisite handwringing from David Goldman in the Asia Times. To be clear, the sex scenes are garnering all this attention, certainly not the writing.
And yet if the sizzle was all that selling the steak required, then Hideyuki Kikuchi and E.L. James could have saved themselves a whole lot of work (and words). Not to mention all the competition from the near-infinite number of free offerings when it comes to sizzle-only entertainment.
I encourage everybody to go to Amazon and download the sample chapters for the first book. There's no sex in the sample. There is a by-the-numbers hypergamous romance formula on full display, "fifty cringingly cheesy pages of exposition before getting to the explicit sex scenes," as Chiara Atik describes it.
To be sure, I've got no beef with by-the-numbers (or, for that matter, sex scenes). Do a monomyth actioner right and I don't care how many times it's been done before. Scanning the sample chapters for books two and three, the plot of Fifty Shades apparently boils down to our alpha male corporate wonderboy having "issues."
Nobody in Kikuchi's novels has "issues." Or, rather, everybody's got issues, just of the zombie apocalypse sort, usually solved Buffy-style, with a stake through the heart.
But just as the readers of Fifty Shades-type fiction must want the kink cluttered up with "issues" and angst, so Kikuchi's readers want it couched in geeky science fiction and blood & gore action (with a hint of yaoi). This raises interesting questions about the necessary and sufficient conditions required for popular story creation.
Life in the real world is about aspiring to perfection but compromising with reality. We constantly negotiate how much of X we're willing to put up with to get Y. But I think something more subtle is involved with our entertainment choices. It's a threshold effect. Up to a certain point, it's not that we "put up with" X, we don't even notice it.
Given a good story, for example, I can forgive a lot of bad science in my science fiction. However, if I don't buy into the premise, it doesn't matter how golden the prose, high-minded the philosophy, or pristine the cinematography. Nor are these static standards, but shift from genre to genre and book to book, even chapter to chapter.
As Orson Scott Card puts it, "The stories and characters that endure do so for reasons having almost nothing to do with the talent of the writer."
Which is why the quality argument constantly thrown at fan fiction and self-publishing in particular misses the point. And why criticizing the literary quality of (and political and economic plot holes in) Harry Potter and The Hunger Games arouses such ire among their fans. You're messing with those thresholds.
Seth Roberts provides a good personal example. Wondering why he enjoyed reading The Hunger Games when Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings bored him silly, he concludes that
Says Philip Pullman, "We need stories so much that we're willing to read bad books to get them, if the good books won't supply them." At the end of the day, writing a "good" book won't satisfy your readers if what they really want is in the "bad" ones. In other words, if you want to get read a lot, write what a lot of people want to read.
Easy to say. A lot harder to actually do. I'm still working on it. But I'm sure it begins with disentangling what we wish about an audience's tastes from what they are actually looking for (which, of course, doesn't preclude providing a little something more on the side).
(That world building is a fantastic accomplishment, but I wish that instead of a gory, erotic vampire thriller, he'd written a novel focusing on the Chicago-style politics of Demon City's mayor.)
Once you get past the info-dumps, Kikuchi rewards the reader of his adult novels (Demon City Shinjuku is safely Y/A) with plenty of BDSM kink and rape porn. These novels were originally serialized, and in Maohden, I could swear Kikuchi's editor gave him a list of fetishes and a quota.
It's not exactly my cup of tea, so I have to wonder about the market. Because it's sure there. This is hardly unique to Japan. Consider a far more successful literary import. From Steve Sailer's review of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo:
I was at the local art-house cinema in 2010 when the third thriller [of the original Swedish trilogy] debuted, and it looked like Twilight for the elderly. The lobby was jammed with shuffling octogenarians. The restroom lines were moving so slowly that I fear many Larsson fans may have missed their favorite sexual-torture and sadistic-revenge scenes.
But what really caught my attention is the romance trilogy Fifty Shades (that started out as Twilight fan fiction). It's gotten gushy write-ups in the New York Post and the requisite handwringing from David Goldman in the Asia Times. To be clear, the sex scenes are garnering all this attention, certainly not the writing.
And yet if the sizzle was all that selling the steak required, then Hideyuki Kikuchi and E.L. James could have saved themselves a whole lot of work (and words). Not to mention all the competition from the near-infinite number of free offerings when it comes to sizzle-only entertainment.
I encourage everybody to go to Amazon and download the sample chapters for the first book. There's no sex in the sample. There is a by-the-numbers hypergamous romance formula on full display, "fifty cringingly cheesy pages of exposition before getting to the explicit sex scenes," as Chiara Atik describes it.
To be sure, I've got no beef with by-the-numbers (or, for that matter, sex scenes). Do a monomyth actioner right and I don't care how many times it's been done before. Scanning the sample chapters for books two and three, the plot of Fifty Shades apparently boils down to our alpha male corporate wonderboy having "issues."
Nobody in Kikuchi's novels has "issues." Or, rather, everybody's got issues, just of the zombie apocalypse sort, usually solved Buffy-style, with a stake through the heart.
But just as the readers of Fifty Shades-type fiction must want the kink cluttered up with "issues" and angst, so Kikuchi's readers want it couched in geeky science fiction and blood & gore action (with a hint of yaoi). This raises interesting questions about the necessary and sufficient conditions required for popular story creation.
Life in the real world is about aspiring to perfection but compromising with reality. We constantly negotiate how much of X we're willing to put up with to get Y. But I think something more subtle is involved with our entertainment choices. It's a threshold effect. Up to a certain point, it's not that we "put up with" X, we don't even notice it.
Given a good story, for example, I can forgive a lot of bad science in my science fiction. However, if I don't buy into the premise, it doesn't matter how golden the prose, high-minded the philosophy, or pristine the cinematography. Nor are these static standards, but shift from genre to genre and book to book, even chapter to chapter.
As Orson Scott Card puts it, "The stories and characters that endure do so for reasons having almost nothing to do with the talent of the writer."
Which is why the quality argument constantly thrown at fan fiction and self-publishing in particular misses the point. And why criticizing the literary quality of (and political and economic plot holes in) Harry Potter and The Hunger Games arouses such ire among their fans. You're messing with those thresholds.
Seth Roberts provides a good personal example. Wondering why he enjoyed reading The Hunger Games when Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings bored him silly, he concludes that
Sentence by sentence, even scene by scene, The Hunger Games is mediocre. It is not quotable. There is no vivid writing. The characters are barely interesting. It is not Jonathan Franzen, much less Vladimir Nabokov. But it does a wonderful job of supplying the four basic elements of a good story: a hero, a villain, making you care about the hero, and putting the hero in jeopardy.
Says Philip Pullman, "We need stories so much that we're willing to read bad books to get them, if the good books won't supply them." At the end of the day, writing a "good" book won't satisfy your readers if what they really want is in the "bad" ones. In other words, if you want to get read a lot, write what a lot of people want to read.
Easy to say. A lot harder to actually do. I'm still working on it. But I'm sure it begins with disentangling what we wish about an audience's tastes from what they are actually looking for (which, of course, doesn't preclude providing a little something more on the side).
Related posts
Abstinence porn
Demon City libertarianism
The Business Rusch: Quality
Labels: books, movies, publishing, pullman, sex, writing, yashakiden
March 19, 2012
Superbad is superboring
Kate recently discussed the problem of the omniscient enemy in regards to The Mentalist. She concluded that "I will keeping watching The Mentalist, only keeping in mind that Red John is an amorphous force rather than a flesh and blood enemy."
I'm less forgiving. For me, the "omniscient enemy" eventually wrecked the logical foundations of the show such that I couldn't watch it anymore.
(Besides, other than Tim Kang as Cho, the rest of the regulars are horribly miscast. There's zero chemistry between Tunney and Baker. And what are rank rookies doing on this super-special task force?)
The omnipotent enemy is my biggest gripe with Yashakiden. "Princess" as a villain is so unstoppable that everything connected to her narrative moves forward according to her whims. Whimsy as a motivation drains the drama of any real tension when she's on stage.
As Kate puts it, "Characters held to the laws of probability are far more interesting than an omniscient enemy could possibly be."
The more interesting characters are Princess's subordinates, especially Kikiou, who can't take over the world without her help. And she doesn't really care about taking over the world. That's an interesting conflict. As I discuss here, the politics is where the action is.
Politics is what makes The X-Files different as well. The fundamental conflict is not between Mulder and the aliens. Or even Mulder and the Cigarette Smoking Man. It's between the aliens and the government (and then between those aliens and a second set of aliens).
So reasons can always be found for keeping Mulder around. Okay, they do get a bit tortured at times, but "eliminate Mulder" or even "give Mulder a hard time for no good reason" is not the motivation of any running character.
The omnipotent villain is the refuge of writers not smart enough to make them as smart as they're supposed to be. Randomness becomes an excuse for intelligence. But as Kate illustrates with Agatha Christie, a brilliant detective can find plenty of challenges solving ordinary crimes.
Both Lie to Me and currently Person of Interest also do a better job at getting the balance right. Most of the stories are about fairly average people burdened with fairly average problems that have gotten way out of hand and so have to be solved in interesting ways.
In fact, the premise of Person of Interest explicitly states that they won't get cases that involve the world ending as we know it.
On the other hand, a recent episode maneuvered the good guys into a no-win moral dilemma, which I consider equally problematic. Pretty much all of The Dark Knight consists of this manufactured "depth." Reproducing the vagaries of real life doesn't make fiction "better."
Spider-Man and Batman and the rest of the superheros would be a lot more interesting if the bad guys were a lot less bad and were a lot more predictable.
I'm less forgiving. For me, the "omniscient enemy" eventually wrecked the logical foundations of the show such that I couldn't watch it anymore.
(Besides, other than Tim Kang as Cho, the rest of the regulars are horribly miscast. There's zero chemistry between Tunney and Baker. And what are rank rookies doing on this super-special task force?)
The omnipotent enemy is my biggest gripe with Yashakiden. "Princess" as a villain is so unstoppable that everything connected to her narrative moves forward according to her whims. Whimsy as a motivation drains the drama of any real tension when she's on stage.
As Kate puts it, "Characters held to the laws of probability are far more interesting than an omniscient enemy could possibly be."
The more interesting characters are Princess's subordinates, especially Kikiou, who can't take over the world without her help. And she doesn't really care about taking over the world. That's an interesting conflict. As I discuss here, the politics is where the action is.
Politics is what makes The X-Files different as well. The fundamental conflict is not between Mulder and the aliens. Or even Mulder and the Cigarette Smoking Man. It's between the aliens and the government (and then between those aliens and a second set of aliens).
So reasons can always be found for keeping Mulder around. Okay, they do get a bit tortured at times, but "eliminate Mulder" or even "give Mulder a hard time for no good reason" is not the motivation of any running character.
The omnipotent villain is the refuge of writers not smart enough to make them as smart as they're supposed to be. Randomness becomes an excuse for intelligence. But as Kate illustrates with Agatha Christie, a brilliant detective can find plenty of challenges solving ordinary crimes.
Both Lie to Me and currently Person of Interest also do a better job at getting the balance right. Most of the stories are about fairly average people burdened with fairly average problems that have gotten way out of hand and so have to be solved in interesting ways.
In fact, the premise of Person of Interest explicitly states that they won't get cases that involve the world ending as we know it.
On the other hand, a recent episode maneuvered the good guys into a no-win moral dilemma, which I consider equally problematic. Pretty much all of The Dark Knight consists of this manufactured "depth." Reproducing the vagaries of real life doesn't make fiction "better."
Spider-Man and Batman and the rest of the superheros would be a lot more interesting if the bad guys were a lot less bad and were a lot more predictable.
Related posts
The Big Bad
Lying to The Mentalist
Demon City libertarianism
The Problem of the Omniscient Enemy
Labels: books, movies, person of interest, superhero, television, writing, yashakiden
June 02, 2011
Demon City Shinjuku
Demon City Shinjuku is an omnibus volume. The second novel features as its villain: King Nebuchadnezzar II! And his awful wife, Semiramis (a prototype for Princess). Has anybody cast them in that role lately?
First published in 1982, Demon City Shinjuku was Hideyuki Kikuchi's debut novel. The bulk of his work since has been based in the Demon City Shinjuku universe. The massive Yashakiden series (I'm working on the final volume now) revises and extends the themes he introduces here.
Kikuchi writes near-future fantasy and urban horror (Yashakiden moves from YA into hard-core, Joe Konrath/Stephen King territory), always risky in the prediction department. He generally sticks to monsters and magic, but in a few places the anachronisms start to show up.
I still remember a passage in an Isaac Asimov novel I read as a kid that describes "miniaturized vacuum tubes," even though the field-effect transistor was first prototyped in the 1920s. The most informed science writers can fail to anticipate how some technologies will take off (and others won't).
On the other hand, I don't know if Kikuchi picked the year out of a hat, but there is this paragraph:
Since 2010, the entire world had been gripped in a dark curse. In the face of economic recession, growing regional conflicts, and rising crime rates, President Rama was as resolute in his actions as he was charitable in his words. And changed the world as a result.
To pick nits, crime rates have fallen in developed nations (if anything, the correlation between economic recession and crime seems consistently negative). Places like Mexico and the Middle East, though, are a very different story. And Kikuchi nailed the world recession business exactly.
Related posts
A Google Maps moment
Demon City libertarianism
Indispensable
Labels: demon city, dmp, light novel, magic, translations, yashakiden
December 23, 2010
Demon City libertarianism
The most interesting things about Yashakiden arise out of the nature of the city itself. Two of them include a supporting character and an innovative riff on an old political philosophy--more popular in movies than in real life (watching The Road Warrior is one thing; living it quite another)--that sneaks in the back door through the setting.
Hideyuki Kikuchi's Demon City Blues series posits that the "Demon Quake" physically and metaphysically severed Shinjuku from the rest of Japan. The only access is via bridges and gates (Dance in the Vampire Bund owes a lot to Kikuchi for this conceit). As a result, Shinjuku exists as a semi-autonomous city-state within greater Tokyo.
Now, manga and anime writers riff on this theme a lot, whenever they need an excuse to disrupt the social order, and stipulate, for example, that everybody runs around Tokyo packing serious heat. Two good representative anime series are Burst Angel and Witchblade.
But Kikuchi doesn't simply present an anarchic, libertarian society and move on. Through the character of the Mayor Kajiwara, he presents the pragmatic politics underpinning it. Not anything-goes alone, but with checks and balances that make a dangerous life worth the dare. I would seriously like to see Kajiwara in his own series, a kind of Demon City West Wing.
Here are a few illustrative excerpts:
Hideyuki Kikuchi's Demon City Blues series posits that the "Demon Quake" physically and metaphysically severed Shinjuku from the rest of Japan. The only access is via bridges and gates (Dance in the Vampire Bund owes a lot to Kikuchi for this conceit). As a result, Shinjuku exists as a semi-autonomous city-state within greater Tokyo.
Now, manga and anime writers riff on this theme a lot, whenever they need an excuse to disrupt the social order, and stipulate, for example, that everybody runs around Tokyo packing serious heat. Two good representative anime series are Burst Angel and Witchblade.
But Kikuchi doesn't simply present an anarchic, libertarian society and move on. Through the character of the Mayor Kajiwara, he presents the pragmatic politics underpinning it. Not anything-goes alone, but with checks and balances that make a dangerous life worth the dare. I would seriously like to see Kajiwara in his own series, a kind of Demon City West Wing.
Here are a few illustrative excerpts:
Volume 1
In the beginning, when the whole vampire "issue" first arose, a petition was delivered to the ward government by two thousand signers. It read: "We defend the right of every kind of being (including the supernatural) to live in this city to the best of his or her abilities."
The decisive judgment of the ward authorities to let them in and sell this abandoned city block to the vampires as a "special housing project" would long be remembered by its inhabitants.
But if the vampires ever came to threaten the "normal" lives of the city's other's residents, they were also allowed to take retaliatory measures "to the best of their abilities." If the truce was ever broken, two hundred wooden stakes pounded into two hundred chests at noon would ring down the curtain in half an hour.
A city where life was lived and death was dealt without regrets--that was Demon City.
Volume 2
Kajiwara answered without even the twitch of an eyebrow. His chair was his throne. And he was the mayor of Demon City.
"I don't know what your superiors are thinking, but Demon City is home to living human beings, living in whatever manner they see fit. I'd be the last one to deny that we might have a few oddballs among us. But as long as they reside here, we count them as residents. Let me hasten to say that I'm not drawing lines in the sand here. There are plenty of individuals here without papers, valid ID cards, or passports. Perhaps even more of them than us. Those who acknowledge the rights of people like them--no, let's call them living beings--to be here are none other than their fellow burghers. I rather take pride in that."
Volume 3
A long moment of silence followed. The Welfare Minister said, "Mr. Mayor--you do know there are vampires--"
"I know, I know." Kajiwara nodded his head emphatically. "Everybody in this city knows. I would like to tell you I know all about their characters, their abilities, all aspects of their lives. But that would be a lie. This government collects no such information."
"How irresponsible!" The Cabinet Secretary thumped his fist on the table. "I cannot believe what I am hearing! You are the highest executive in this city. Isn't it your job to find out what these monsters are made of, and where they're headed next? Should that ignorance lead to the death of one innocent citizen, it would be unforgivable."
"Excuse me, but in the ward where you live, are there not murderers living among the citizenry? Do the mayor and the authorities comprehend the personalities and the predilections of the victims and the perpetrators with anything approaching absolute certainty?"
"They're human beings."
"I am taking about the citizenry," Kajiwara said crisply. "I don't know about anybody else, but here in Shinjuku, a citizen can be something other than a human being. Well, that's this foul and accursed place for you. Submit a change-of-residence registration, and with the consent of the ward council any living thing may call himself a citizen. To tell the truth, the consent of the ward council is not technically required. We don't assert the authority to refuse entry. Aside from a mailing address and the census information, it's none of the ward's business anyway."
Labels: demon city, politics, yashakiden
December 20, 2010
The static hero
The story structure of Yashakiden (I'm finishing the translation of volume 3) reminds me of The Hidden Fortress, the Kurosawa samurai actioner that helped to inspire Star Wars.
The Hidden Fortress was for Kurosawa a commercial effort (movie studios do have to turn a profit). He would reportedly arrive at work every morning, present his protagonists with a seemingly intractable situation, and charge his writing staff with getting them out of it.
The result is quite enjoyable, but believe it or not, Lucas actually improved on it (the last time that would ever happen) by giving Han Solo a compelling character arc.
In The Hidden Fortress, General Makabe (the great Toshiro Mifune) is pretty much cool, smart and heroic, like a 1950's superhero who is ultimately unaffected by the consequences of his daring-do, and who might catch a bad case of cooties hanging around girls too much.
Series television used to avoid character arcs, with the protagonist resetting at the end of each episode. Think of the original Star Trek and even TNG. And while too much character arc produces soppy melodrama, none results in plots summed up as, "And then a bunch of stuff happens."
Which is fine for a ninety-minute actioner. But what the hero does should affect him, hence the tried and true rule of fiction writing that the main character is the person who changes the most. (In Star Wars, this means the main characters are Darth Vader and Han Solo.)
Actually, I'd argue that Star Trek has what I'd call a "steady state" character spiral, a relationship between the three leads that grows and matures as the actors and writers settle into their roles. So might the Setsura/Mephisto pairing in Yashakiden, but at this point I can't tell.
For now, Setsura is an impassive superhero of the old school, a kind of aloof and detached Peter Parker taking arms against an uninvited sea of troubles. As in The Hidden Fortress, these conflicts present themselves as an obstacle course, which he will eventually and inevitably overcome.
At the end of volume 3, he does dispatch a vampire in a very clever way. But most of the fun for me is generated by the supporting characters.
To start with, the sidekicks, including the wily mayor of Shinjuku, an animatronic doll with a soul, a wisecracking crow (a direct descendant of Poe's raven), and a fat witch who will only save you if it pays well.
Then the victims, some of whom have very compelling mini-arcs of their own before getting bumped off like the red-shirts on Star Trek (don't get too attached to them). Lastly, the villains. Hideyuki Kikuchi has done an excellent job making the bad guys as fascinating as they are bad.
Through Kikuchi's best character of all is the setting itself, Demon City Shinjuku. More about that later.
The Hidden Fortress was for Kurosawa a commercial effort (movie studios do have to turn a profit). He would reportedly arrive at work every morning, present his protagonists with a seemingly intractable situation, and charge his writing staff with getting them out of it.
The result is quite enjoyable, but believe it or not, Lucas actually improved on it (the last time that would ever happen) by giving Han Solo a compelling character arc.
In The Hidden Fortress, General Makabe (the great Toshiro Mifune) is pretty much cool, smart and heroic, like a 1950's superhero who is ultimately unaffected by the consequences of his daring-do, and who might catch a bad case of cooties hanging around girls too much.
Series television used to avoid character arcs, with the protagonist resetting at the end of each episode. Think of the original Star Trek and even TNG. And while too much character arc produces soppy melodrama, none results in plots summed up as, "And then a bunch of stuff happens."
Which is fine for a ninety-minute actioner. But what the hero does should affect him, hence the tried and true rule of fiction writing that the main character is the person who changes the most. (In Star Wars, this means the main characters are Darth Vader and Han Solo.)
Actually, I'd argue that Star Trek has what I'd call a "steady state" character spiral, a relationship between the three leads that grows and matures as the actors and writers settle into their roles. So might the Setsura/Mephisto pairing in Yashakiden, but at this point I can't tell.
For now, Setsura is an impassive superhero of the old school, a kind of aloof and detached Peter Parker taking arms against an uninvited sea of troubles. As in The Hidden Fortress, these conflicts present themselves as an obstacle course, which he will eventually and inevitably overcome.
At the end of volume 3, he does dispatch a vampire in a very clever way. But most of the fun for me is generated by the supporting characters.
To start with, the sidekicks, including the wily mayor of Shinjuku, an animatronic doll with a soul, a wisecracking crow (a direct descendant of Poe's raven), and a fat witch who will only save you if it pays well.
Then the victims, some of whom have very compelling mini-arcs of their own before getting bumped off like the red-shirts on Star Trek (don't get too attached to them). Lastly, the villains. Hideyuki Kikuchi has done an excellent job making the bad guys as fascinating as they are bad.
Through Kikuchi's best character of all is the setting itself, Demon City Shinjuku. More about that later.
Labels: criticism, demon city, superhero, thinking about writing, yashakiden
January 11, 2010
Blame it on the woman!
The bad girl in Yashakiden is a four-thousand year old vampire from China. "Princess" was the favorite concubine of Emperor Zhou (the "Chinese Caligula"), the last, doomed ruler of the Shang (or Yin) Dynasty. Her wanton ways led to the destruction of dynasty.
Kikuchi based this depraved lust-bunny on an historical character named Daji. The Wikipedia entry covers the material cited in the book. The Wikipedia writers (Japanese and English) and Kikuchi were clearly working from similar source material (the novel predates Wikipedia).
Pretty disgusting stuff. Curiously (or not), the fall of the Hsia (Xia), Shang and Zhou dynasties, covering a period spanning over 1500 years, are all blamed on amorous she-devils (Moxi, Daji and Baosi) seducing the emperor, who was supposedly a stand-up guy until she showed up!
Kikuchi makes them all the same person, and weaves into the mix an Indian crown prince and the story of Tamamo no Mae and the nine-tailed fox. (In Japanese folklore, the fox is usually a wily trickster, a slick Dean Martin often paired with a Jerry Lewis tanuki for comic relief.)
And speaking of blaming the woman, the best Sunday school lesson ever.
Kikuchi based this depraved lust-bunny on an historical character named Daji. The Wikipedia entry covers the material cited in the book. The Wikipedia writers (Japanese and English) and Kikuchi were clearly working from similar source material (the novel predates Wikipedia).
Pretty disgusting stuff. Curiously (or not), the fall of the Hsia (Xia), Shang and Zhou dynasties, covering a period spanning over 1500 years, are all blamed on amorous she-devils (Moxi, Daji and Baosi) seducing the emperor, who was supposedly a stand-up guy until she showed up!
Kikuchi makes them all the same person, and weaves into the mix an Indian crown prince and the story of Tamamo no Mae and the nine-tailed fox. (In Japanese folklore, the fox is usually a wily trickster, a slick Dean Martin often paired with a Jerry Lewis tanuki for comic relief.)
And speaking of blaming the woman, the best Sunday school lesson ever.
Labels: china, history, japan, yashakiden
April 08, 2009
"Yashakiden" publication date
Digital Manga has announced a publication date for the first volume of Yashakiden: "The Demon Princess," by SF/horror maven Hideyuki Kikuchi.Alas, it won't be out until December 2009. But if you're a fan of Kikuchi's other novels and anime adaptations, such as Vampire Hunter D, Wicked City and Demon City Shinjuku, or if your tastes slant towards epic-length supernatural actioners, then it will be well worth the wait.
Imagine Angel with an irredeemably nasty and perverse Darla.
Thanks to the fascinating world creation, creepily creative horror gore, and a couple of explicit sex scenes, I'm seriously enjoying translating it. Like other popular authors in the genre, Hideyuki Kikuchi possesses a natural sense of pacing that keeps the narrative zipping along and the cliff hangers hanging.
I'll be posting more updates as the publication date draws closer. In the meantime, you can read more about Yashakiden here, here and see a sneak preview here.
Labels: demon city, dmp, light novel, translations, yashakiden