The Shadow Of The Torturer - Gene Wolfe (1980)
I'm fascinated by generic delineation, the power of generic conventions, and, ultimately, their lack of any meaning. Often genres are hybrids as a matter of course. Star Trek, Legend Of The Galactic Heroes and Game Of Thrones are all historical epics reminiscent of our own world, yet set in fantastical settings that are both thrillingly alien and very much resemble what is familiar to us. It is of course a narrative conceit that the far future (and the distant past) will be parsable to us, based on our knowledge and understanding of our own world, at least in mainstream narratives. So, Star Trek's fashions are resemble 1960's fashions, and Star Trek's ideologies are based on utopian ideologies of 1960s America. This way of thinking, while providing fascinating and easily digestible narrative conceits, is of course naïve and simplistic. Were one to time travel, even as little as a century backwards or forwards, one would be an other, ostracised through wildly conflicting ideologies and unable to communicate effectively through rapidly changing linguistic elements. A far future would be utterly unintelligible, alien and frightening.
This is essentially the primary conceit of Wolfe's Book Of The New Sun quadrilogy, a high fantasy novel series that is set on our own earth, yet set many untold hundreds of thousands (or even millions!) of years in to the future. This information itself is not imparted, and is possibly a 'spoiler', though the term means little here. A restricted narrative from a cold and ultimately unreliable narrator, Shadow's audience is not the common yet inexplicable audience of people in the author wrote it, but the people inhabiting the world of the fictitious narrator. Therefore, proper nouns are unexplored. There are no sweeping descriptions of culture and customs or creatures or architecture beyond what is necessary to spin a yarn. This is less a science fantasy epic than a book taking the form of an artefact and a contemporaneous account that may or may not be typical of the time period it has been written.
It is not a book completely without precedent or comparison. It could be compared to the mutant cinema of Alejandro Jodorowsky, whose narratives such as El Topo and The Holy Mountain exist in a world so alien and so disarming they are both set in our world and in distant worlds we will never visit but in dreams. Torturer also shares Jodorowsky's woozy spirit quest structure, where cause and effect make both utterly no sense and the perfect sense that is only absolute in a waking dream. Many times the novel is similar of Bunuel's The Milky Way, itself an exploration of, and savage critique of biblical parables and dogmatic practices. It also, in practice, shares DNA with the much later Hard To Be A God. German's impeccable sci-fi epic transports us to a world so alien and so disarming that it doesn't even resemble a film, let alone a science fiction film, leaving it's mud bedraggled simpletons to gurn directly at the camera and eschew any sort of traditional dialogue. Yet while all three of these films by their very medium make absolute and explicit what the world looks like, Torturer does not.
The writing is both simultaneously clear and concise and yet occluded through its quasi-allegorical nature. It pulses and drips like a dream. Time and space seems to contort around the narrative itself. Due to the novel's conceit of an actual artefact from from far distant future, where proper nouns and customs are rarely explicated, it's best to read this in a woozy state just out of focus.
Much like the zany cyberpunk capers of Neuromancer or The Diamond Age, beneath the onslaught of the bizarre , there's essentially a race 'n' chase narrative of the most simplistic nature. A hero's journey that handily takes in the sights and sounds of a range of cool and exciting locales, with heroic battles, chivalrous deeds. And yet we consistently have our expectations subverted, and not only in the alarming and perfect coda that essentially flips our entire perception of the world that has been so precariously written out before our eyes. It's telegraphed enough that it should be obvious from the start, but Shadow is primarily a story about the power of words, and how quickly they betray us. It is also a tale that underlines exactly how enjoyable it can be to have information withheld from us, and to wallow joyfully in confusion throughout.
It's also ridiculously good fun.
The Princess Of The Never Ending Castle - Shintaro Kago (2020)
Kago is a comic writer and artist whose style broadly fits in to the eroguro, or erotic grotesque genre. This genre has it's roots in Japanese ukio-e woodcuts, a kind of deliberately transgressive smut that was among the first mass produced media. I discovered Kago in the early 00's after being given unmonitored access to the Internet for the first time. For whatever reason, this meant sourcing torrents and ftp downloads of vile Japanese comics, which I frankly found traumatic. These included the no-nonsense fetishism of Juan Goto, the utter misanthropy of Jun Hayami, the gorgeous and ultra-stylish early 20th Century chic of Suehiro Maruo and the tongue-in-cheek hyperviolence of Waita Uziga. The extremity contained in these fan translated comics was beyond anything that would be tolerated in any other form of media, and in a hypersaturated media environment represented a sort of blood soaked punctum, a hate drenched antithesis to the banality of mainstream media. It's every edgy teenagers dream, frankly.
But it was Kago who interested me more than the others. He was just about as disgusting as his contemporaries. His art was rather more perfunctory than Maruo's swooning chiariscuro designs. Instead, Kago's brand of extremity was emphasised by the fascinating descent in to absurdist metaphysics. Shintaro Kago narratives tend to work as such: first, a bizarre world will be established. Then the initial idea is taken to to a ludicrous level. Then this ludicrous endpoint is subverted bizarrely, often with the very collapse of the world and everything around it. Usually they end in a stupid, forehead slapping joke.
Princess is classic Kago. Taking the classic historical narrative of Nobunoga Oda, the characters and the setting seem somewhat normal. Yet quickly things get strange. The titular castle is not just a physical construct, but the world in totality, constantly growing upwards, and diverging at important historical intersections. Along the ways there's lots of graphic, dehumanising sex and violence, though nothing at the same level of his early works such as Closed Hospital, Drafting A Water Goddess or Olympics Under The Stadium.
Kago's ideas are fantastic. There's a point in Princess where the two divergent time lines, physically manifested as two vast, unending castles, perform an exchange of goods and weapons with one another in order to solve their respective problems. It's headmelting and bizarre. Unfortunately, Kago's execution has never been exemplary, and sustained across a full length book, the cracks begin to show. Kago has cheerfully referred to his style as being "shit" in interviews, and his trashy, punky, bizzaro ideas frankly work better as disgusting and thought provoking 16 page one-shots. But it's good to see him ploughing on, with more disgusting yet thought provoking tales.
Maison Ikkoku vol 3 - Rumiko Takahashi (1983/2021)
I watched all 110 episodes of the animated adaptation of Maison Ikkoku at a particularly awful and difficult part of my life. I never truly understood the concept of escapism until this experience. It makes sense to escape in to a fantasy world. But Maison Ikkoku, unlike Takahashi's earlier, seismically career defining Urusei Yatsura, is very much grounded in reality. A drifting young man in his early 20s living in a barely standing flop house falls in love with the young widower manager of his shared house. Surrounded with a cast of lovable, down on their luck characters who simultaneously denigrate and pick him up, the narrative spans many years, from his first unsuccessful attempts to get in to university, to his eventual falling in to the perfect vocation.
There's lots that makes Maison Ikkoku iconoclastic and genuinely challenging, not least the representation of the lovesick Kyoko, desperate to move on with her life despite a conservative sense of duty to her departed husband. But even more fascinating was the representation of genuinely working class characters. Japanese media is particularly guilty of symbolically annihilating the working class, at least traditionally so. Just think of how many comics and cartoons and videogames focus on wealthy, private school and private university students. This tendency is certainly not unique to Japanese media, but it can grate. Maison Ikkoku however represents dirt-poor characters right from the off. Their lives are not marked by shame or cliché. This is not a comic about being poor. They are a rag-tag bunch of characters who love and laugh and have adventures. The fact they all share a bathroom and their house is literally falling down rarely seems to factor in to things much. Seeing such a delightful, nuanced and positive representation of the working class in what is effectively a sweet and silly romantic comedy comic helps to push this up several rungs of notability.
But beyond this, Ikkoku is impeccable. The characters are exceptionally well designed, their arcs clear and profound. Their situations are both mundane and ridiculous. The linework and crosshatching is utterly gorgeous. The 80s knitwear is sublime. So what if the story is essentially a series of misunderstandings compounding each other over and over?
Viz's new reprint is gorgeous and worth every penny.