The History Of Hentai Manga - Kimi Rito (2021)
Rito's book is certainly an enthusiast tome, and he writes particularly enthusiastically. This was initially a bit of a drawback, especially after reading the more academic Beautiful Fighting Girl and Otaku: The Struggle For Imagination In Japan. However, it's easy to warm to Rito's effusive style, even if a dry academic volume with proper citations would certainly get the genres featured here more serious appraisal.
In keeping with it's enthusiast nature, The History Of Hentai Manga is not a history, per se, but instead a somewhat taxonomic categorisation of certain paradigmatic features of pornographic comics from Japan. This is entirely in keeping with the nature of pornography. The first chapter covers breasts, which seems somewhat logical. Chapter two is an extremely detailed exploration of a very particular technique where nipples are blurred to insinuate vigorous movement. It goes on for more than 30 pages, and is indeed pretty fascinating. Elsewhere, we have the obligatory tentacle chapter, a revealing chapter on the use of pseudo anatomical cross sections, and my favourite from a media studies perspective, a chapter on the various forms of circumventing and working with the extremely strict censorship characteristic of Japanese media.
Much of the work featured here is presumably difficult to obtain legally, from a copywrite and regulatory perspective. Therefore while Rito considers this an academic study, and it certainly should be read as one, it reminds me a lot of those compendiums that describe weird, gross films (to name a few, Eros In Hell, Killing For Culture, Extremely Strange Movies, Spinegrinder, DVD Delirium, Cinema Sewer, etc). This book will certainly keep them good company.
Castle Faggot - Derek McCormack (2020)
Castle Faggot is a snarling, vulgar novella, a work both clearly erudite and very, very stupid indeed. It reads like a Sadean or Battaillian catalogue of atrocities, except the shit, blood and bodily destruction is replaced with... well even more shit. And lots of chocolate cereal.
Castle Faggot begins with a pamphlet of sorts that shrieks about the shit filled theme park Doodyland, in which visitors can find Faggotland, home of Count Choc-O-Log, the French chocolate cereal vampire, who resides in the titular Castle Faggot. Within pages upon sparsely covered pages of empty boxes and repeated homophobic slurs and endless scatological references I felt my brain tumbling out of my ears. Castle Faggot is like an exercise in neurolinguistic reprogramming, an extremely childish MK Ultra, a torrent of abuse that breaks down the reader.
It settles on a narrative, and a fairly clear and lucid one at that, though it is less important than the topography of the castle. And, of course, the fact that absolutely everything is covered in shit and perhaps made of shit. There are some genuinely funny and extremely stupid jokes straddle extreme high culture and extreme low culture. Hidden in the filth and the shit are themes of suicide, of queer appropriation, of trauma and identity. Or maybe it's just a load of shit. Either way it really doesn't matter.
Castle Faggot feels genuinely dangerous and unhinged. It is not particularly transgressive in terms of content, though the title alone classifies it as a forbidden object of sorts. Reading it made me feel guilty, like it was something I should hide, something I shouldn't admit to reading. That's a rarity now. Do check it out.
The Enchanter - Vladimir Nabakov (1986)
Published in 1986 after the author's death yet written in 1939, before the author's long overdue fame and adoration, The Enchanter is a slight, beautiful and harrowing novella. It's plot, of course, is very similar to his later, more celebrated (and reviled) Lolita. A stiflingly poetic, stream of consciousness voice, a middle-aged, middle class man, a prepubescent object of fascination, and a plan involving first wedding, and later murdering the girl's mother to get closer to her. Both Lolita and The Enchanter follow the same plot, but their narrative is significantly different in practice.
While Lolita is expansive, ambitious and thrilling, The Enchanter is significantly smaller in scope and in page number, totalling not even 70 pages. It is therefore more concise, more fleeting, and significantly more upsetting. Gone is the gradual and terrifying building of sympathy for the protagonist. Here, the cast have no names, the setting is not explicated (though it may well be Paris), and the prose, while characteristically beautiful, is perhaps comparatively prosaic.
In many ways, The Enchanter is the superior telling of the story. While the narrative is still highly restricted, the third person perspective, along with the lack of names, both for place and person serves to distance the reader, who are constantly kept at bay by the gloriously polysemic prose and the giddy revulsion of the subject material. It is at once more digestible and more savage, both more beautiful and more ugly.
The various distancing techniques work wonderfully. Whereas for Lolita, the hotel scene marks the start of the second act, for the Enchanter, its analogue marks the finale. And it's a horrible, tense, even nightmarish finale, as we negotiate the eroticism of the prose and the vileness of the deed. It's conclusion is brutally violent and brutally moral, and as "the film of life [bursts]", so too do the barely elaborated or explicated cast of characters. It's perhaps reminiscent in its brevity and violence of a florid yet surgically precise predecessor of the pulp psychosexual thrillers of Ryu Murakami, though its voice is of course resolutely Nabokovian.
In the wonderful postscript, translator and son Dimitri Nabokov offers a detailed and perhaps definitive analysis of the often alarming polysemy that his father's wordplay can achieve. Yet he also confirms that the novella is indeed a horror story, and a nasty one at that. While Nabokov has frequently explored existential dread, through the phantasmal confusion of The Eye or the bureaucratic surrealism of Invitation To A Beheading, The Enchanter depicts his most explicit example of a monster, and a hideously believable one at that.