I’ve seen Orwell comparisons frequently mentioned but unless I’m missing something really subtly woven in to the structure or prose, Murakami hasn’t gone down the homage or pastiche route here. Beyond a couple of passing references to the date in which the events take place, there isn’t much in this novel that’s Orwellian at all; although it’s been a number of years since I read Nineteen Eighty-Four this is just another Murakami novel as far as I can tell.

I’m not suggesting it’s necessarily overrated. ‘Just another Murakami novel’ is still a very special event, but this was given a build-up that had me wondering if it’s his magnum opus like some replacement for The Wind-up Bird Chronicle. Interestingly, the English language editions of book 1/2 and book 3 were released closer together than those of the Japanese ones so I was spared from waiting a whole year to read its conclusion (employing a different translators for each seemed like a bit of a strange decision to me though, and I still wonder why it happened that way).

The shift in pace and emphasis between the second and third volumes doesn’t really lend itself well to a long intermission anyway, so I reckon it would’ve been harder to pick the threads back up if I had to wait longer than I did. Book 3 tells the story from three viewpoints rather than just two but even so, there’s a lot of introspection and waiting around on the part of the characters.

Murakami’s writing style usually seems immune from feeling like a waste of time to me, but this was one of the rare occasions when I wished his editor had been a bit more firm and trimmed down certain segments. The meandering prose and painstaking attention to fleshing out even the incidental details normally enhances the experience but I have to admit that the later chapters started to try my patience. Murakami is a very ‘atmospheric’ writer who aims to immerse the reader in his worldview, and I think he intentionally places the storyline second in importance to his quirky characters and settings.

A stumbling block for me with 1Q84 was that the link holding the entire affair together – namely that of the bond between Aomame and Tengo – was so tenuous. When they do finally meet it’s perfectly convincing, but it’s a bit of a stretch when they’re completely separated for the majority of their lives. Their bond seems to be the result of the cold metaphysical mechanics of fate rather than something warmer and more sentimental that existed between them so there wasn’t really enough for me to work with.

The supporting characters on the other hand are excellent: even Ushikawa, who starts off being memorable for all the wrong reasons but by the end begs for sympathy. When a character is painted as ugly, shifty and repulsive on every level, it’s true talent as a writer that makes that character relateable and human…and in this case Murakami has done it.

One fascinating aspect of Murakami’s character building is the way he presents the female ones (as an aside, it’s worth noting that Aomame is, as far as I can recall, the first female protagonist in his full-length novels): the star of the show here is the original Air Chrysalis novella’s writer, Fuka-Eri. Murakami has a knack of dreaming up some very odd and oddly fascinating female supporting characters – I’ve admitted my weakeness for them before – but damn…he’s excelled himself.

I have to say that the maza and dohta technobabble was interesting (considering how they sound like romanji for mother and daughter, I could speculate for ages about the terminology and symbolism in 1Q84‘s universe) but I’m convinced – or is that hopeful? – that Fuka-Eri isn’t  strange for strangeness’ sake. Her peculiar mannerisms hint at a broken psyche but the scattering of clues throughout the novel made me want to believe that she’s a broken character who can be mended.

The main reason why I was glad to learn of the possibility that 1Q84 may someday be given a side-story or sequel is not just because a lot of the technobabble is unexplained – long-standing Murakami fans must be used to that by now! – but because someone as mesmerising as Fuka-Eri simply walks out of the picture to allow the resolution of the plot thread involving the two leads. Considering how not only Aomame and Tengo but Tengo’s father and poor old Ushikawa are given some sort of send-off, I actually felt a bit short-changed.

Maybe my sense of priorities or storytelling focus is off, but I felt quite disappointed that she was relegated to the status of mere plot device. I suppose you could argue that, because of the intervention of the Little People (if I understand the sequence of events correctly), she really is a character who is simply a vessel or channel but still…I suppose it’s a selfish wish on my part that the strange parallel world of 1Q84 had been a bit kinder to her.

When you’re dealing with a writer who is so unusual in how he or she conveys his or her ideas, perhaps it’s all too easy to get caught up in trivial aspects and miss the important ones. 1Q84 works on a number of levels I think: it’s a parallel universe-orientated mystery, social commentary (it delves deep into the issue of violence against women, and returns to the topic of religious cults of his non-fiction work Underground) and a romance…although the romantic aspect didn’t hit me as hard as it probably ought to have done.

Mindful of Murakami’s individual foibles and writing techniques, I still felt that 1Q84 contained more filler than was necessary and went a little too far in leaving loose plot threads unresolved. It’s a bit of a grey area in that I’m not sure whether it’s sloppy writing or my failure to grasp what it’s trying to say, but I do know that I’d appreciate a follow-up that rounds off or builds on the existing story. Until then, I’m feeling like I’ve been left hanging around in an unfamiliar place, feeling a little lost. Just like being in the Town of Cats.

Note: the original full-size version of the haunting Fuka-Eri fanart above is on Pixiv.

Macross is renowned for being a character-driven romance rather than a political space opera; for all the loving detail lavished on the hardware and military tactics Yukikaze still has plenty of time for humans and their relationships (even when the relationships are with machines!). The war is of course for the whole of humanity, but often for the combatants very personal issues are what matter.

Looking at the archives of my old blog, I described the approach of the Macross: Do You Remember Love? retelling as “innocent clumsiness”, which I think applies to the original TV show too: many of the tropes, character archetypes and plot devices that we take for granted now are still present there but in a more primitive form. A case in point is the slapstick and lighthearted way in which the Zentradi first encounter human culture, in the form of intercepted signals and a bunch of ill-prepared spies who infiltrate the Macross itself. Although they are mostly serving as comic relief, it’s not a bad way to highlight how strange our culture is from an outside perspective.

The first taste of Earth that extraterrestrial life will encounter is likely to be that of radio and TV signals; we can only speculate how their own civilisation might be set up but in terms popular media, fashion, human relationships and the like, what sort of conclusions would aliens, who have no grasp of such things, draw? At some points in Macross the misunderstandings are hilarious but at the same time this outsiders’ view casts our world in a refreshing, new light.

The JAM of the Yukikaze universe is/are even stranger than the Zentradi: in the first two Yukikaze novels the alien threat is very nebulous indeed. This even reaches the point at which it is suggested that the JAM are either hallucinations amongst the Faerie military or a fabrication to fuel someone’s own agenda; they are so alien that humanity has trouble believing they exist at all.

What really fascinates me about these two works is this: the JAM and, to a lesser extent because they are relatively easier to understand, the Zentradi are the antagonists of the story but also form a means by which the characters learn more about each other and indeed themselves.

Macross frequently highlights how the events of the Zentradi invasion have changed the characters’ lives forever. It’s possible that Minmay would’ve ended up as a professional entertainer but it’s far more likely that she would inherit the family’s restaurant or live some other normal life; confining her talent in the closed world of the exiled Macross, her true talents are plain for all to see and her career takes a different turn. Ichijyo is initially a civilian pilot with no direction in life either until he decides that the military is the best option for him.

In Good Luck, Yukikaze it’s frequently reiterated that the character of Rei Fukai has changed a lot since the opening chapter of the first novel. One of the major moments for that takes place during his leave on Earth, which gives him a sense of perspective that he never had before; I haven’t a clue what sort of life he had before his service fighting the JAM, but I suspect it would not have been a particularly fruitful one judging by the scant background info that Kanbayashi provides.

In his current situation, an A.I. is perhaps the only sentient being that Fukai feels comfortable with. There’s Major Booker of course but it’s fairly clear that Fukai is far more at home interacting with his plane than fellow humans, even those who are supposed to be friends and coworkers.

The JAM themselves are so shrouded in mystery that the characters question whether even waging war with them is the appropriate course of action. This does however mean that the results of the contact between two (or three, if you count the human computers!) sentient forms of life throw up many profound personal questions.

Macross tackles the alien threat with conventional tactics and intentions, the only concession to the alien-ness of the situation being the adoption of over-technology to enhance the Earth’s military force. The tale of Yukikaze on the other hand is set at a strange interface between Earth and something totally unknown and unrecognisable -  since it’s difficult to discern how to approach the JAM, humanity creates numerous high-performance computers and brings in very strange examples of human beings who would not work together (or function at all) under normal circumstances. Foss’s theory is that this unique environment has given rise to a new human/machine symbiosis to survive in this environment, in the form of Yukikaze’s A.I. and the airframe’s human pilot.

The idea that a human could love and trust an A.I. on a deep emotional level and place his life in its hands might sound preposterous (Foss says as much when she suggests it) but in the context of the story it’s actually quite believable. It’s something new and would never have come to pass had the JAM not invaded, A.I.s fitted to fighter jets and had one lonely misanthrope not taken the pilot’s seat of one of them.

Good Luck Yukikaze is more concerned with the military and psychological angles than cultural ones; Macross works on a broader canvas with human and Zentradi civilisations blending together as a result of their contact. Although the aliens’ advances are supposedly contained in terms of geographic conquest, there is a lot of change amongst both the humans and the aliens; there are a lot of lines and boundaries that get blurred, and ‘invasion’ as a concept encompasses more than just fighting an opposing military force for survival.

The alien invasion in Macross is that of the more tradition variety, highlighting to its characters the importance of those closest to them, and what are worth fighting and risking their lives for. There’s plenty of room within that premise for heroism, drama, angst and so much else but Good Luck Yukikaze is more experimental and, perhaps, a more introspective and world-weary take on the idea.

Fukai, Booker, Cooley, Foss and the others involved with the fight against the JAM are facing such an enigmatic adversary that they have to first stop to think why they’re fighting at all. There’s also less of a clear division between them and the enemy since the humans’ side is so reliant on A.I.s whose thought processes and even motives(!) are unknown. Wrestling with human conflicts and political red tape is par for the course even in the world of Macross, but the nature of the JAM further stretches the definition of war.

Ultimately the two stories are conveying slightly different messages: heroism and understanding can save the day and bring out the best and worst in us as humans in Macross. In Good Luck, Yukikaze it takes an enigmatic threat to push some very unusual people who lack humanity into defining what they’re fighting for – and against – before they can save the rest of us. It’s a distinction between remembering love and discovering who you are, but both are great.

Further reading

I’ve never done this before, but I’ve seen some other bloggers do this and I really appreciated it.

China Mieville’s Embassytown is an inventive and thought-provoking examination of how humans might interact with an alien civilisation, albeit in a more peaceful setting. It makes a lot of nods to classics of SF but also goes into the subtleties of language and culture.

Childhood’s End by Arthur C Clarke is an essential piece of classical alien visitation SF and one I feel I ought to include.

Lord of the Sands of Time and All You Need Is Kill (I wrote about the latter a while back) are both concerned with personal relationships amidst alien invasions and both are available through Viz in the same way the the Yukikaze novels are.

Finally, the whole alien invasion theme is absolutely enormous and covers the full gamut from genre-defining to deathly dull, so I’d love to hear your recommendations!

The upbeat vs. downbeat divide in SF is quite stark to me: many of the former are warnings that depict us as a species on a path to self-destruction. In our environmentally-conscious and cynical times I guess it’s not surprising that this is currently holding sway over the optimistic ‘inspirational’ type that speculates about how we could make our outlook brighter; I personally prefer a mix of both, but The Next Continent thrives on the latter.

The chapter titles hint that it’s a very technical work that explores the concept of building a human settlement on the moon at a nuts-and-bolts level; I should point out then that yes, a significant proportion of the novel is devoted to political machinations, boardroom discussions, statistical number-crunching and engineering porn. It’s extremely detailed, thoroughly researched and utterly convincing: Ogawa has done his homework on the practical aspects, and it shows.

I can’t say much more about this side of the novel apart from emphasise how it does such a thorough job of getting the mechanics of the project nailed down, from the planning overview to the technical hurdles that are likely to crop up. If Ogawa stopped there I suppose it would’ve been good enough as a ‘how to’ account, as one Goodreads member put it (the ‘alien life’ subplot was foreshadowed well but to me felt a bit of a tagged-on afterthought; it would make for a great sequel or side-story though).

As well as the ‘how’ in terms of building a moon base, there’s also the ‘why’. The Next Continent makes a convincing case for an alternative background for such a grandiose project: Ogawa rightly points out that the first Moon landings were politically motivated thanks to the Cold War space race, and in all honesty I find the tales of humans conquering space out of conflict or necessity (be it environmental or as a result of alien invasion) a bit depressing when you’ve read a few of them. Perhaps humanity’s next Great Leap could, and perhaps should, be planned by the private sector.

A cursory glance at Virgin Galactic made me think “holy crap! It’s already happening!” We wouldn’t want to see the military up there so maybe the best candidate for this would be someone with not only the financial and political clout to see it through, but the shrewd judgement and desire to take risks…an entrepreneur with a grand vision, gumption and superficially more money than sense. Quite frankly the Sennosuke Toenjis and Richard Bransons of this world may be our best hope here.

The practicalities of such an undertaking also require people with a working knowledge of what needs to be done…hence the collaboration between Toenji the financial backer and the engineers of the Gotoba construction company. It’s at this point where we see a personal representation of this collaboration in the form of young Tae Toenji and Gotoba’s Sohya Aomine.

Their relationship is the novel’s narrative trump card, and I would personally have been happy to have seen the novel go even further in shifting its focus in that direction. Aomine is the lens we see most of the events through what with him being the up-and-coming Gotoba employee in placed in charge of the Moon base project but it turns out that Tae is the one at the centre of it all.

At the beginning of the story she’s a precocious teenager but the bond between her and Aomine becomes stronger as she becomes an adult…which means that their relationship doesn’t feel unnatural or inappropriate. It’s a bit convenient that she’s a prodigy who’s able to make all the right decisions as the project progresses, but I let that slide since it starts as a daydream of a teenage girl then takes the practical aspects into account meaning that, in many ways, the project grows up and matures with her.

The private enterprise angle might suggest that Tae is a spoilt little rich girl throwing her grandfather’s money around, but again Ogawa steers the narrative clear of this pitfall and makes a decent job of explaining her. She’s not going to the Moon purely because her family’s wealth allows her to or simply “because it’s there”, to quote George Leigh Mallory on his attempt at conquering Everest. Her aims are driven by her personal issues but she also has more altruistic and – I might as well say it now – romantic aims in mind.

If there’s one thing that sets this aside from similar novels of the genre, even the other members of the ‘upbeat SF’ group, it’s this. For all its thorough portrayal of humanity’s colonisation of the Moon from an engineer’s perspective, The Next Continent is also an unashamedly sentimental and most importantly human story. Again, it wouldn’t have hurt to rein in the technical details and give the characters even more room to breathe, but it still does more on the characterisation front than I’ve seen many do.

Whether it’s for the purposes of science or a private venture, it’s more rewarding to see this kind of project driven by the positive aspects of the human condition: curiosity, courage and a desire to make things better. The reasoning behind the Sixth Continent project is more pure and commendable than military strategy or cold, methodical research…and isn’t a downer sort like, say, Pale Cocoon or indeed the reasons behind the advances in Lord of the Sands of Time either.

As detached and enigmatic as her character often was, I must admit I was enchanted and enthralled by Tae and the way she pushed ahead with her dream. At first glance it’s the product of an idealistic kid whose lonely privileged lifestyle had made her look beyond her home planet, but one that came to fruition so convincingly and made a staggering amount of sense by the end. Her honesty and her reasons – it’s credit to Ogawa’s prose that we can sympathise with someone who seems to already have it all – made me genuinely want to see her and Aomine succeed…both on the professional and personal level.

The Next Continent deserves recognition for its vivid and true-to-life portrayal of our potential next step off Earth but also for stopping to recognise what makes science, whether it’s fact or fiction, relevant. It boils down to our humanity: our hopes, struggles, disappointments and dreams. Love and companionship might seem to be an overly sentimental reason to reach for the stars…but looking at the alternatives, what better reason is there?

Another reason is that cyberpunk is a ‘comfort food’ genre for me in that every now and then I feel the need to come back to the William Gibson- and Blade Runner-style neo-noir futuristic thrillers. With a few little quirks and cultural peculiarities aside, this is one of the most intelligent and gripping examples of the genre I’ve had the pleasure to read.

For the benefit of the lucky few who saw the anime of The First Compression, it’s very faithful to the novel…right down to that abrupt cliff-hanger at the end of the movie. At that point it was pure cyberpunk thriller territory: shady dealings between the neon lights of a futuristic cityscape and its seedy underbelly, a heroine equipped with cybernetic technology, high-tech crime, plot twists and double-crosses…all with a healthy dose of comic book violence.

The action-orientated first volume seems to pay homage to anime and manga from the Akira and Ghost in the Shell tradition but bubbling under the surface, and coming to the fore in what follows, is more ideas- and character-driven. To my mind however, it’s more intelligent and much more interesting: the novel turns out to be a personal journey as opposed to a simple action thriller and for that reason really stays with you.

I daresay that Rune-Balot is one of the most memorable and downright awesome literary heroines I’ve encountered in ages. Her introduction paints her as a passive victim of her pitiless world but watching her personality grow and strengthen is a masterful piece of character development; the emergence of someone you can really admire and become attached to.

I don’t mean ‘admire’ in a sexual sense – given the age and background of her character there’s no way I could think of her that way – but in a more general appreciation of how she goes in search of answers and how that development is handled by Ubukata’s writing. The world-building, especially the legal system, is impressive and he even finds time for some philosophical chin-scratching in between the gunfights.

Even so, the characters are I think the main reason why this is so extraordinary. It’s not so much Balot’s rescue that’s so affecting but her long and difficult road to overcoming the trauma that blighted her early life – it’s a case of “don’t get mad; get even.” In addition to this, the bond between her and Oefcoque is something that’s pretty special in that they end up teaching each other the value of life. She needs support and understanding; his legal status requires him to show practical usefulness (yes, it’s italicised in the novel too) but that spills over to his personal feelings. Assuming an A.I. that takes the form of a talking mouse that can turn into any weapon of his handler’s choice has feelings, obviously.

This is one of those suspension-of-disbelief things that you simply have to just accept in order to get on with the business of appreciating the novel overall. Oefcoque comes across as a mixture of Stuart Little and T-1000 from Terminator 2…and if that wasn’t weird enough, the names of many of the characters are based on wordplays or references to certain recurring themes. Such as eggs.

There’s the initial idea that Balot’s mentally distressing background made her retreat into a metaphorical ‘shell’ and the egg puns take off from there. Ubukata is apparently a ‘polymath’ according to the commentary from the translator Edwin Hawkes so there’s a lot of eclectic elements that crop up here and there. He really does like his egg references though.

Along the same lines the narrative itself is a bit experimental: the second half of the second volume and the first half of the third are set in a casino and take a storytelling approach that’s very unusual to Western readers. In retrospect it’s easy to see how the slow and heavy-going nature of this portion of the story is so significant but after the straightforward and faster-paced opening act the shift in tone is quite jarring; it’s concerned with tactics and the psychology of the characters involved rather than any kinetic action or Cool Stuff Happening.

I initially thought that Ubukata was indulging in a personal appreciation of the mechanics of gambling and that his editor hadn’t made a sufficient effort to rein his enthusiasm in to streamline the progression of the storyline. The fact that it’s so drawn-out is apparently intentional though, so as to evoke the tedium and tension that the characters were feeling by making the reader feel similarly tired, impatient and a little disorientated. It’s a clever trick on the author’s part but readers who are impatient to find out where all this is leading may not thank him for it.

In fairness, Hawkes went to great lengths to make the English language experience as readable as possible, in the hope of keeping the spirit of the prose intact so we’d appreciate the author’s intent without losing interest. I’m confident in Ubukata’s knowledge of the games involved, but since I don’t have a head for figures nor the rules of, say, blackjack or roulette I skimmed over the numbers and concentrated on the human element instead.

My best explanation for this part of the novel is comparing it to Gambling Apocalypse Kaiji, in which the protagonist attempts to change the course of his life through increasingly tense and convoluted gambling matches. Understanding the rules of the games is helpful but ultimately the way in which the characters face the challenges, and how these events in turn affect them, are what matter.

Sure enough, the casino segment contains some important personal moments amongst the repetition and implied zawa zawas but my problem with it stemmed more from the fact that it’s so wildly different from the earlier portion with its grotesque comic book villains and edge-of-your seat moments of a very different nature. I can only recommend sticking with it and trusting the author’s judgement on where it’s going because the payoff is well worthwhile.

As a parting shot I feel like making some pun about revenge being best served cold while I prefer cyberpunk hard-boiled but quite frankly it’s best to leave Ubukata to that. I’d rather urge you all to read the damn thing and let it speak for itself, because I enjoyed it one hell of a lot.

I foolishly chose to read it in a crowded room full of other people talking, which gave me that annoying experience of repeatedly losing your place and reading the same line(s) over and over. The problem with Loups-Garous is that it isn’t very accommodating towards the reader in terms of making its food-for-thought easy to digest so that was probably the worst way for me to approach it.

I actually have a fair amount of respect for Natsuhiko Kyogoku and have done ever since I watched the anime adaptation of Mouryou no Hako: he clearly has a lot of affection for the traditional murder-mystery type of novel but as well as paying homage to the usual tropes and plot devices, he’s damned good at recurring metaphors, unexpected twists and weaving together supposedly unrelated plot points.

Loups-Garous combines the murder-mystery element with the police state dystopia, which is another commonly-used scenario, albeit in the SF genre which isn’t usually a place where you’d expect youkai or other supernatural phenomena as plot devices. It does make for a refreshingly different atmosphere but the peculiar way in which Kyogoku uses folklore to drive the story isn’t something we western readers are likely to be familiar with.

You could be forgiven for wondering why it’s called Loups-Garous in the first place when werewolves don’t make any obvious appearances (I don’t even feel like I’m spoiling much for you in pointing this out either). This is I think a fair warning that it’s the kind of story that you need to think over on several levels – a crime thriller, a piece of social commentary and/or a philosophical head-scratcher. It’s certainly not just a tale of murdered schoolgirls in a near-future borderline-cyberpunk setting. I daresay anyone who does approach it from that angle would feel cheated and more than a little bemused.

Reading up on Kyogoku’s biography he’s a fascinating guy: it seems he exerts a lot of creative control over the physical presentation of his novels and goes to great lengths to make the peculiarities of his prose readable. I’m sorry to say that carrying this over into an English language edition is well nigh impossible no matter how hard your try, which may explain why my experience of this novel was such an uphill struggle.

This is a shame because as both a morality study and a futuristic fable, it works very well; Kyogoku finds plenty of ways to tie these two aspects together and make them complement one another. What I found particularly fascinating is how the characters’ reliance on technology (specifically their handheld electronic ‘monitors’) shapes interactions with one another and the world around them. I personally felt he’s saying something about our addiction to multi-purpose mobile/cell phone technology (I ought to point out that the novel was written before the arrival of the current generation of smartphones…well predicted sir!) in that the flow of conversation and understanding between characters is so awkward and stilted.

Although it’s a convincing portrayal of the way our society could be heading from a social and technological standpoint, the trade-off is that it’s quite an alien worldview: because the characters are socially maladjusted, they come across as aloof and difficult to relate to and their topics of conversation feel ill-suited to how we expect people of their ages and backgrounds to speak. It’s a similar experience to watching a Mamoru Oshii movie in that the characters appear to be merely vessels for conveying the writer’s own philosophies rather than voicing their own thoughts.

The end result is a novel that apparently wants to be studied rather than enjoyed in order to be a appreciated…which I’m personally okay with but I can imagine a few people picked this up with the expectation of a pulpy mash-up of supernatural horror and SF. I detected a significant number of common themes and plot devices between this and Mouryou no Hako too and really liked how they played out, so I suppose I can now call myself a fan of Kyogoku’s style now. I’m glad I bought it and I’m also glad it was translated and published, but I suspect it was marketed in a very different way to that of its Japanese edition. It may be a bit of a hard sell to international audiences in any case, since it’s quite different from even other futuristic SF pieces, so I don’t really have any suggestions to remedy that. I just hope Ubume doesn’t disappoint.

Speaking of disappointments, my piece on the Loups-Garous anime will probably be up next. Trust me on this: if you plan to watch that, do yourself a favour and read the book first.

As a matter of fact it’s a fast-paced, immersive and highly readable account of a futuristic battle waged by humanity against an alien invader, and on that alone I recommend it. The nature of the narrative – that of a soldier trapped in a time loop of his last day on the front line, and his attempts to understand and hopefully escape from that situation – makes it a challenge for the writer to keep the repetitive proceedings engaging, but Sakurazaka succeeds admirably. In that sense it feels a lot like some unholy combination of Groundhog Day and Starship Troopers.

Even so, any humour of AYNiK stems from the profanity-riddled soldier banter (the translation of which into English is very smooth and natural). The main business of the novel is that of portraying the reality of its warfare environment down to the tiniest gritty, dirty details of the combat itself and what goes through the combatants’ minds. It’s unflinching, occasionally gruesome but, for a reader casually sitting in the safe and peaceful Real World, it’s wholly convincing.

The thing is, I’d initially decided I was satisfied with it being just that: a down-and-dirty and entertaining military thriller first, and a thought-provoking SF piece second. I wasn’t writing it off exactly, but I was trying not to criticise it for failing to be something it wasn’t trying to be in the first place. As an action-fest it’s great and in terms of character development it offers some pleasant surprises, but it wasn’t until I’d let my final impressions settle that I gave it more credit.

My only criticism of Haikasoru’s English language edition is that it needed moar ABe, as in the original Japanese version, but you can’t have everything

The hard-boiled language and lack of sentimentality – of the clearly-spoken nature, anyway – make the character-driven moments all the more poignant for me. Rather than a shallow one night stand or sappy outpouring of emotion, the bond between Kiriya and Rita is made of mutual respect and understanding. I wish more of his background were explained, but the exposition surrounding Rita’s early life offers a neat foreshadowing: the queen of the battlefield found her way there almost by accident, starting life as an ordinary farmer’s daughter, and Kiriya’s humble beginnings begin to take the same course.

I guess I’m expected to be fascinated by the mechanics behind the aliens, the Mimics, and their greater purpose. It IS explained, and in sufficient detail too, but I was never really interested; part of me probably assumed that the reader’s attention isn’t supposed to directed towards them. Perhaps a re-read would make me appreciate this more, but again, I viewed it as a military thriller rather than a SF piece.

The afterword by the author likens the creative process of writing the novel to that of his experiences with video games, in that the supposed success of the player/protagonist is due to the repeated ‘replays’ of the mission rather than any noteworthy ‘heroic’ qualities. At the beginning of the novel Kiriya is just another piece of cannon-fodder for the war machine to chew up and spit out; by the end his prowess on the battlefield is seen as superhuman…but as in a videogame in which the player is congratulated upon completing it after numerous abortive failed attempts, only he is aware of the less-than-glamorous slog that gave him the ability to do so.

This setup offers some interesting parallels with real-world situations. What about those people in the emergency and military services who make the headlines for their courage and skill, yet in interviews reply with no hint of false modesty “the training kicked in…” or “I was just doing my job…”? To us, they are heroes and heroines; to them, the feats are less remarkable because it is part of their, not our, life experience. In the end, I suppose both views are right: to them it’s part and parcel of what they do, but it would be foolish to trivialise the effort they put into it.

Furthermore, the nature of the warfare in AYNiK is on one hand futuristic with the mechanised armour suits and weapons, but on the other it’s a portrayal of warfare that is just as slow, messy and hard on the people on the front line as, say, the war of attrition in the trenches of WWI’s Western Front. For all the high tech gear and SF trappings, Kiriya’s war would be recognisable to any hapless grunt of our past and present.

From their point of view, the meaning and the Bigger Picture of the conflict is of considerably less significance next to the welfare of their comrades and the very act of personal survival. A lot of Kiriya’s narration is dealt with a large helping of cynical wit, with the underlying insinuation that a non-combatant would never fully understand what his job entails (harking back to that infamous Vietnam war quote “you weren’t there, man!”). To quote another old observation of the nature of warfare, it’s hours of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror.

As warfare-orientated video games become more and more realistic, it’s easy to blur our perceptions of the two and play down the unpleasantness of the real thing. I doubt Sakurazaka was trying to make any particular statement about violence in entertainment, but I certainly got a distinct feeling that he wanted the reader to think about what wartime heroism really means (speaking of video games, Nasu had a thing or two to say about heroism too).

In a similar vein, I felt that the 1997 film of Starship Troopers was a tongue-in-cheek satire of war movies and the motives behind military campaigns, and in between the comedic moments Groundhog Day was fundamentally instrospective and focused on the plight of the individual (SPOILER ALERT so much so, the reasoning behind the repetition is never actually explained END SPOILER). Because it’s so damned good at being a straightforward story I’m reluctant to pin too much meaning onto it, but after putting the book down and letting my feelings of “that kicked so much ass!” subside, All You Need is Kill left me with a lot to think about.

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An extreme example of the importance of context that I stumbled on is William Gibson’s Neuromancer. It’s an enjoyable enough cyberpunk novel but not as enjoyable for me as I expected: I’m finding it tedious in places but when I remind myself that it was written before any of that stuff related to the internet, VR and even the cyberpunk genre itself were commonplace, I admire it more. Not that it makes the book itself more fun, but it makes its limitations at least understandable.

Yukikaze is a pretty old novel in its genre too (the same age as Neuromancer, coincidentally). It also deals with issues concerning A.I. and the interface between humans and machines…again back in the mid 80s before such things were regular themes in either scientific research or science fiction. It too was ahead of its time, but time doesn’t stand still.

In some ways then the real world has caught up with the technology of Yukikaze, which takes the futuristic edge off things like fly-by-wire control systems, on-board computers and the general performance of the planes depicted in the novel. On the flipside, it’s a little easier to visualise how they would look and behave IRL because there are now some pretty cool pieces of hardware in service today that aren’t far from Kambayashi’s vision.

There’s also an element of the ‘knights of the sky’ ideal that’s lasted right from WWI to the present day in perpetuating the notion that fighter pilots are a breed apart. Kambayashi has married that mystique of the elite magnificent men in their flying machines and added a SF twist by giving the machine a mind of its own. To its credit, that element of the novel still holds quite a lot of its magic.

The portrayal of Yukikaze is full of tantalising contradictions: a poetic name painted on the fusalage in stylised calligraphy that was nevertheless chosen at random and borrowed from a WWII warship; a machine designed for death and destruction, yet Kambiyashi’s prose paints it as awe-inspiring and beautiful with a mind and will of its own. As a military hardware geek, I consider it to be beautiful in its own way, at any rate.

One curious thing about Yukikaze’s A.I. is that it’s hard to work out what, if anything, it’s really thinking. Similarly, the novel doesn’t even answer the question about whether the JAM are more interested in the planes than the people piloting them; introducing the idea of the aliens being more interested in our tech than us as a species is neat in itself and only adds to the cool, detached ambiguity of everything that’s going on.

The story demands a hero of few words; the fact that this character trait is pivotal to the story doesn’t make the reading or viewing experience more fun however. For what it’s worth, I don’t think Fukai’s humanity is ever in danger of being lost altogether because the devotion and care he would have otherwise lavished on the humans in his life are directed at his plane. I suppose he’s an aeronautical dori-kei, to steal the term from Eve no Jikan.

Such things as Fukai’s feelings towards his plane and the people around him come across better in print because in the cinematic or animated format everything has to be either spoken outwardly or implied with imagery as opposed to internal monologues (see what I mean by ‘glaringly obvious’?). A hero who rarely speaks would either require infodump-style exposition or text overlays, which may not sit well with the target audience of a production that sells itself on air-to-air combat with aliens.

That’s not to say that Kambayashi can’t write a good action scene; hell, the combat in Yukikaze leaves the likes of Tom Clancy standing. One of my favourite scenes is when the flight envelope protection limiter switches off and the plane does a missile launch maneuvre backwards that makes Fukai black out and takes the JAM by surprise – it’s true edge-of-your-seat stuff and the OAV captures that sort of moment very well.

I guess the crux of this post is that some of these aspects work better in print than on screen, and vice-versa. Yukikaze the OAV is a companion to the novel – if I were to rewatch it I’d probably enjoy it more than I did the first time around. It’s not however a replacement for the novel: the combat looks awesome but there’s a lot more going on at a thematic and characterisation level that the OAV either leaves out or is unable to address. Long story short, if you want to see Yukikaze dance in the skies of Faery, buy the DVDs. For everything else, read the novel. Or just read the novel because it’s an excellent and thought-provoking read.

Which leads me to Unlimited Blade Works. Like the OAV of Yukikaze it’s a shortened retelling of a story that was originally comprised mostly of words rather than moving pictures, which at least partly explains why certain things didn’t come over as well as they did in their original format. If I observed it correctly, the writers wisely opted to use CGs from the VN in the movie so if I were to recommend the UBW movie purely on the combat and the general approach to animating the characters on a feature film budget, I would. So I do.

Even so, UBW suffers the same problem as the much-maligned Tsukihime anime; that is, there’s too much quality content squeezed into too little time. Simply put, the film was too short. There, I said it. There’s no escaping the cold hard fact that the editing was choppy and the plot jumped uncertainly from scene to scene rather than progressing smoothly. The opening scenes, bringing the story up to the point where the plot diverges between the Fate and UBW route, feels like a last episode recap. Which, appropriately enough, is I think what it is.

I asked myself who would bother with this movie unless they had played the VN or at the very least watched the TV show. I haven’t had chance to check for interviews with cast and crew, but I wouldn’t be at all surprised if it was deliberately aimed at people who were already familiar with the franchise. Half of the viewers in its theatrical run probably knew exactly what would happen…but just wanted to see it animated.

As far as I can tell the movie doesn’t do or say anything the VN didn’t, but if it’s merely an act of animating Takeuchi’s artwork and Nasu’s strings of text, is that actually a flaw? The jerky editing is something I think the movie should be criticised for, but failing to stray from the source material is a perfectly acceptable aim.

That said, if cinema tickets and DVDs of the two-hour cinematic adaptations of Paradox Spiral and Murder Speculation Part 2 can sell like hot cakes on a cold day, I don’t know what the excuse was to keep the running time to a mere ninety minutes here. If the Industry is having trouble finding audiences outside the ‘safe’ minority of existing fans, surely it’s disadvantageous to exclude casual viewers with such an insular narrative approach?

What I will say in this film’s defence is that it only needs to place emphasis on the aspects that work better in the animated format to avoid failing altogether. But yeah, it could’ve done more than that without betraying its source material, even when doing the tricky transition from prose to cinema. Part of me is wishing that Heaven’s Feel is left well alone after all now.

If it makes you feel any better (it certainly did for me), the sequel to Yukikaze will be out sometime next year. Yay.

To his credit, Project Itoh has given these subgenres a thoroughly modern kick up the backside by updating the tech to reflect recent advances and drawing inspiration from contemporary issues that weren’t around back then. Some are of course still relevant but there are other, more recent, ones that are worth addressing and Itoh goes out of his way to bring these new ideas to the table.

As is often the case in stories like this, the worldview of Harmony is one in which humanity is controlled by an authoritative body and in state of fear. The monitoring of our health and social status are outsourced to centralised databases, making the concept of personal privacy so alien it’s become a dirty word; because of the diminished population it has been decided that life is too precious to be left in the hands of individuals. Instead, responsibility is held by everyone and no one at the same time, by ‘admedistrations’ that transcend national borders.

The near-apocalypse, or Maelstrom, that precedes the events of the novel was society’s brush with death and the after-effects extrapolate our contemporary cynicism and nanny-state policies to such a degree that humanity has lost faith in even itself. Simply put, we don’t trust ourselves with ourselves any more. Towards the end Brave New World is even mentioned by name, so perhaps the people of this world have made a conscious decision to neither repeat the mistakes of history nor fulfil the prophecies of literature? Interestingly, this dystopia sees humanity being ironically suffocated by love, not greed or desire for power by a political elite.

The Huxley connection is an interesting one. In a marked reversal of concepts, there is no physical drug like Huxley’s soma; recreational chemicals are actually discouraged in favour of nanotech medical treatments, and congnitive therapy helps individuals conform. A gradual shift in public opinion concerning an unhealthy practice precedes it becoming law, reflecting current examples such as the UK’s recent ban on tobacco smoking in public places. Using the more innocuous example of caffeine Harmony asks, where does health awareness end and government meddling begin?

Itoh seems to be suggesting that, although the methods are so much more deliberately gentle and compassionate than those employed in the dystopian fiction of yore, the end result of control over the populace and the loss of personal freedom are the same. The threat that appears late on in the novel is not caused by terrorists or anarchists; Harmony itself was thought up because certain people had a genuine concern for our welfare. As the old saying goes, the way to Hell is paved with good intentions. By which I mean certain things about life we cherish, such as privacy and free will, are in this novel threatened by those who mean us the opposite of harm and who believe the greater good is worth the cost.

Tragically Itoh was on his deathbed while finalising the manuscript to Harmony, creating another grim parallel with Orwell’s infamous view of the future. I find it hard to believe that Itoh’s imminent passing, and the thoughts that such a situation must have created, hadn’t bled into the novel (as I felt they did in 1984 with its sense of utter hopelessness). Whether the ending is happy is a matter for some interesting discussion, but it’s not necessarily morbid and obsessed with death either. The narrative does seem to have a broader interest in mortality than most but there are some subtle bits of dry satirical humour I really appreciated too.

A bit of speculation on my part while I was reading this novel centred on the fact that the chapters are named (or, in the case of the first one, paraphrased) after Nine Inch Nails song titles. The Year Zero LP is a concept album of sorts based around a near-future political dystopia but Itoh draws from earlier albums too. Taking the chapters in order, they are: Miss Self-Destruct (from The Downward Spiral), A Warm Place (ditto), Me, I’m Not (Year Zero), The Day The World Went Away (The Fragile) and In This Twilight (Year Zero again).

Trent Reznor’s lyrics do feature a lot of personal angst and nihilism but there’s no common theme running through all these albums that I could see Itoh picking up on. I suppose he was just a fan picking titles that were appropriate names for the chapters, but as a fellow NIN listener I thought it was a nice touch.

Thematically I’m not saying Harmony is truly original; in general concept it isn’t, but in execution it certainly has enough of its own ideas (rendering segments of text in the style of some futuristic HTML is in fact more than a gimmick, for instance). There are a lot of similarly-themed films and books out there such as 1984, BNW, Minority Report, Gattaca and Equilibrium but dismissing it as just another pessimistic future by a cynical writer faced with his own death would be selling Harmony short.

There are small stumbles, of course: the background to one of the characters stretches its credibility a bit, I hoped the political ramifications would’ve been explored more fully and the mechanics of how some of this new technology *works* in practice were glossed over. Part of the fun of SF for me is the opportunity to actually make use of my scientific education for entertainment purposes, but sometimes I’m fine with scientific ideas used to merely make a pertinent point, as opposed to recreating concepts and theories to the smallest detail.

Itoh’s masterstroke for me is in the way Harmony takes things in the real world, then makes leaps into fiction that are unsettlingly small. Even though I’ve been exposed to many similar tales in the past this one still managed to do the trick of conveying the fact that the reader is afraid to admit: it could actually happen. Once again, this is SF done right…an admirable epitaph for a writer I wish I’d discovered sooner.

This isn’t a family-friendly blockbuster adventure movie of course: as a piece of thought-provoking futuristic SF though, Ibis is one of the best books I’ve read in months. Part of its premise hinges on the nameless protagonist, a wandering storyteller and amateur historian, and his problematic search for the facts – or the truth? – behind historical events that chart humanity’s downfall at the hands of robots and A.I.. Enter Ibis, a beautiful android who wants to do nothing more than tell him stories.

The background is a commonly-used one but Yamamoto turns this to his advantage by using classic sci-fi literature and movies as a launchpad for his own ideas and in turn the worldview of the novel. I, Robot, the Matrix trilogy, The Day The Earth Stood Still, Jules Verne’s De la Terre à la Lune…the list of references and names dropped is impressive. This is all in aid of hammering home the status quo of humanity as being on the brink of a robotic apocalypse in the style of the well-known pieces of science fiction. The reality of Ibis’, and the Storyteller’s, world is however far more fascinating than either the old stories or the clichéd version of history the Storyteller is familiar with.

Much of the novel is comprised of several of Yamamoto’s earlier short stories (although the last two are previously unpublished and long enough to be stand-alone novellas), presented as tales Ibis tells to the Storyteller. She wants to reveal the reality of history to him but he refuses to hear anything but fictional stories because of his suspicions regarding her motives and those of other machines; as a result Ibis attempts to make him reconsider his opinions and break down his prejudices through her telling of these fictitious tales instead.

I’ve encountered stories-within-stories before, but it’s a clever idea to work existing pieces into a new one and present them as knowingly fictitious to enrich the new plot and throw in some philosophy about the power of fiction along the way. Philip Pullman’s The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ is another interesting example of how a writer takes documentation of supposedly real events to illustrate how stories can be even more meaningful and significant than the history that inspires them, but I digress.

Getting back to the distinction between facts and truth: Ibis knows the Storyteller will not accept the facts at face value for fear of being told misleading robot propaganda, so she offers to present the truths behind them as fictional stories and allow him to make up his own mind. This is one of several levels of meaning that Yamamoto’s prose works on, which is what left me so impressed; another level is the analogy of the relative merits of reality and fiction in general.

Fictional stories may not present cold, hard facts but they still convey meaningful truths that are equally valuable and worth remembering: several of the stories Ibis selects for her reluctant one-man audience deal with experiences of virtual reality environments, A.I., escaping from reality and other non-natural life forms and concioussnesses. For example, are online friendships as valid as real life ones? Is a happy virtual world preferable to an unhappy reality? Can a robotic companion feel compassion?

In my view at least, facts are the realm of the head and fiction is the realm of the heart. So then, why is a heartless machine concerned with telling stories to a human who has been brought up to despise her? Ibis shows an uncanny understanding of humans by selecting someone whose interests allow him to grasp the importance of storytelling, and also a shrewd understanding of how to earn the trust of that person, someone who has been brought up to be suspicious of her kind.

I strongly recommend you read each of the stories and accompanying intermission segments (the intermissions are usually comprised of Ibis and the Storyteller discussing what she has just recounted to him) and try to identify key concepts and themes before moving onto the next, because Yamamoto has selected them carefully for their relevance in the bigger picture. The first four were originally intended to be conventional stand-alone short stories, and they can be appreciated as such outside the context of this novel – I’m writing short Tumblr articles on them to that effect – but the way they enhance and guide the course of the novel is also fiendishly clever.

It has a wonderful twist towards the end so, as with what connects the component stories, I’m not going to spoil it for you. Mainly because you need to read it if you’re another one of those people who appreciate SF and dig writing that works on several levels at once. Telling a story about how androids were invented and how this relates to humanity’s declines has been done so many times, so it’s refreshing to read one that’s instead a critique our views on the subject and one that extrapolates those rather than just another author’s own vision of the future.

There are one or two dark moments but the overall tone is often optimistic, so it examines both the positive and negative effects of advances in A.I. and how those advances may affect us. Finishing this so soon after the feature-length incarnation of Eve no Jikan was a happy accident really, because both pieces touch on the everyday details associated with robots and related issues. It’s the kind of movie that Ibis would enjoy too I think.

The way it’s put together as a novel is unusual and clever but the content is ultimately what really makes a novel great. In this case the individual stories are of a generally high standard: one or two are a little derivative but Yamamoto has a knack for drawing out the emotional element to make them moving and memorable as romance or drama, as opposed to being original as speculative fiction. Another welcome feature that Eve no Jikan shares, incidentally.

The display of Yamamoto’s extensive knowledge of the genre makes this a celebration of SF in the written medium but it’s fundamentally an instrospective and often sentimental take on humanity surviving in a seemingly inhuman world. Not only that, it throws up a lot of philosophy, but since it presents that in the form of short fables, the Big Ideas are easy to digest. It’s also a celebration of the power of stories in general – and I love good SF stories. Because of this I loved this novel. Go read it, internet.

Needless to say, this could be the best (or worst, when the time comes to move into a new place) thing to happen to my bookcase in months. To kick things off I picked up Usurper of the Sun by Housuke Nojiri, which went by the tagline “Arthur C Clarke meets Haruki Murakami”, presumably because there aren’t many other Japanese novelists who are familiar to English-speaking readers. Call me cynical, but I’m always wary of advert-speak that promises anything that good.

It doesn’t have much Murakami flavour as far as I can tell but Nojiri’s storytelling is VERY Clarke-ian, and the influence shines clearly through the concepts of the novel and the approach taken in portraying them. In his afterword Nojiri admits that the ‘first contact’ theme is a crowded area of SF so it’s credit to his imagination that the narrative is able to keep surprising the reader and prevents the disappointment you experience when you guess what’s coming up before it happens.

The classic Rendezvous with Rama is one of my favourite novels of this type and Nojiri has made a nice job of updating the idea for an early 21st Century audience, assuming that was his intent. We see the usual descriptions of nuclear-powered spaceships traversing the Solar System – which is nothing unusual in itself – but Usurper of the Sun comes into its own with the attention paid to the way the First Contact pans out.

I won’t toss in spoilers regarding the details, but it’s refreshingly different and convincing, and takes advantage of scientific advances and cultural changes to update the scenario. This is where your mileage may vary: Nojiri sure as hell knows his science and technology so goes into psychology, nanotechnology, planetary dynamics and computer A.I. in great depth.

Even with my own background, I found it hard to follow at points and had to re-read certain passages occasionally. Still, I’d rather my intelligence were challenged than insulted so if you enjoy your science hard, heavy and solid, this is the book for you. Because its terminology is a bit dry and tough to digest, I recommend a strong coffee or two to wash it down though.

The heavy-going and businesslike approach to the storytelling means that the emotional side is left out in the cold a little. The Love Interest Lost In Space is one plot point where Nojiri’s originality momentarily runs dry; hell, even Gunbuster did a wonderful job of a similar thing. Personal lives are mentioned in passing, but it’s all kept at arm’s length.

The choice of Aki Shiraishi as the lead character is I think part of the reason for this. She may not be appropriate from a dramatic standpoint because of this emotional detachment she shows throughout, but that aspect of her is advantageous in other ways. For instance it comes across as a demonstration of what she herself loses during the story’s course, and later draws parallels between her outlook and how sentient life forms in a more general sense interact with the universe around them.

As the one who discovers the first signs of the encounter, she finds a focus and as a result her entire life is consumed by wanting to learn more and meet the aliens face-to-face. Isn’t that, after all, what happens to most of the scientists who change history? Her development from curious schoolkid to potential saviour of humanity doesn’t throw up much of what goes on inside her head, but I think that is the point: even when the reader is kept at a distance from her heart, it’s plain to see what makes Aki tick and how lonely she has become. Okay, maybe there’s a little Murakami creeping in there after all…

I felt more of a sentimental attachment to Aki’s character than I expected but this is helpful when the real stars of the show – the aliens – are by their nature mysterious and for the most part elusive. I suppose it was Aki’s pure intentions and dogged persistence that endeared her to me, but a little warmth would’ve given her an appeal broader than…well, people whose tastes are as odd as mine.

I do wonder if the human element was deliberately underplayed or if it was overshadowed by a desire to put the Big Ideas across. The main reason why I kept reading through the muted feelings and head-scratching jargon however is simply because, like Aki, I wanted to know what would happen next. It certainly succeeds in being a page-turner.

Ultimately, I call it a good read when I come off my lunch break several minutes late because I don’t want to stop. Usurper of the Sun did that (fortunately nobody seemed to notice. Heh). What effect the Haikasoru line as a whole will have on box lifting-related injuries during my next house move however remains to be seen…a new bookcase at the very least is beginning to look certain. I’m very interested in what they plan to bring out next, at any rate.