Goodbye Eri - Tatsuki Fujimoto (2022)

I panicked slightly when I realised Fujimoto's new, free, 200 page one-shot was an apparently plaintive piece about dealing with the grief of losing a mother to illness, and a reconstitution involving a meet-cute with a strange and demanding girl. This premise has all the trappings of the ghastly, saccharine misery porn so beloved by Japanese creators. A good example would be the inexplicably popular Solanin by Isio Asano. But Asano used this kind of schmaltz as a stepping stone (surely?) , and later wrote such genuinely challenging and transcendental classics as Dead Demon's Dededede Destruction and Goodnight Punpun. Has Fujimoto 'matured' after the exquisitely horrible (and latterly insane) Fire Punch and the iconoclastic Chainsaw Man?

Thankfully, no. Goodbye Eri is mature,but not boring. It is emotionally manipulative, but in a way that seems fully aware of the limitations of the subgenre. It generally doesn't feel cloying, and it is in turn expressive and experimental.

First of all, it is important to note that the comic is free and only has been distributed digitally. You can, as of today, access it here. Fujimoto seems at home in the digital only/digital first sphere. Fire Punch was originally published digitally, which allowed it to escape the more strict restrictions normally implemented by Shonen Jump. And while Chainsaw Man's first eleven volumes were published in the more traditional weekly chapters then tankobon collected editions, Fujimoto has expressed a desire for the future (now confirmed!) arc of Chainsaw Man to be first released digitally. Goodbye Eri clearly uses a number of digitally augmented shortcuts and effects, including repeated backgrounds and a cool b&w chromatic aberration effect. Even moreso, aside from a couple of double page spreads, Fujimoto's eccentric paneling works extremely well in the wide portrait ratio remincent of mobile phones. Each page typically has four wide panels that flow downwards rather than the more typical left to right. Fujimoto has experimented before with the repetition of imagery, most notably in Fire Punch, but here Goodbye Eri takes it to it's extreme, with page after page of copypasted backgrounds. These digital shortcuts have also been embraced by artists as diverse as Inio Asano and Akira Hiramoto, and it's great to see younger Japanese artists taking care to circumvent the burnout inducing working practices that once seemed inherent to the manga industry.

Goodbye Eri makes use of what have already become staples of Fujimoto's manga. One is the use of mise-en-abyme, stories nestled within stories, which this uses to an often extreme yet pleasantly stylish manner. At least twice in the story (and perhaps more, depending on the interpretation of the audience), the 'camera' pulls back, revealing what we have witnessed to have been a film, a narrative, constructed by the protagonist. The story lampshades itself for being too meta and ridiculous, and its use is therefore playfully experimental, while still drawing attention to the qualities off the medium. Fujimoto is clearly obsessed with cinema, and Eri, the blunt schoolgirl vampire (maybe) is a cinephile much in the same vein as Fire Punch's Togata. In fact, right now, in my own headcannon, Eri is Togata, and I don't care if this doesn't work. Fujimoto himself is clearly a cinephile, whose comics often seem to focus on characters obsessively consuming and creating cinema, even though they exhibit outsider status. Yet tellingly, Fujimoto's comics have very little to do with actual cinematic convention. In fact, his comics often feel very little like comics. Where most comics, especially Japanese comics, and particularly the kind of comics found in Shonen Jump, utilise a range of sophisticated techniques to emphasise perpetual and hyperkinetic motion through panel layouts, Fujimoto uses repetitious and recycled imagery to achieve precisely the opposite: absolute stasis in comic book panels. This is not something especially new, and many, especially indie comic artists have utilised this, but this technique, coupled with his striking ability to construct strikingly attractive characters, makes for a particularly refreshing comic in a notably staid genre.

In fact, the work that I feel most resembles Goodbye Eri is Shunji Iwai's extraordinary film All About Lily Chou Chou, which uses an incendiary and alarming cinema vérité style to combine then cutting edge BBS board conversations, an augmented reality popstar, shot on cheap DV sections and lots of hyperexpressive, glorious lens flare to construct one of the most shockingly overlooked films of the last century. Goodbye Eri too uses unusual aspect ratios, digitally degraded imagery and an unreliable narrative structure, that, much like All About Lily Chou Chou, acts simultaneously as a hyperexpressive means of eliciting extreme empathy through melodrama, and an effective distancing technique. This extreme dichotomy feels just as fresh and exciting here.

Ultimately, Goodbye Eri is a very straightforward, if convoluted story about stories. It takes a range of tearjerking cliches (terminal illness, suicide, tragic love, a manic pixie dream girl), and compartmentalises these narratives in box after box of mise-en-abyme. Given that we are repeatedly told throughout that what we are seeing is a fabrication, and each character has been constructed through judicious editing, we are left to question why we fall in love with and feel emotion for and despise fictitious characters in the first place. Fujimoto may present himself as a rank amateur, whose works merely ape those around him, but this virtuoso utilisation of avant garde techniques feature in fun and exciting comics that people actually want to read. It's an amazing strength. I can't wait to see what he does next.

Frisk - Dennis Cooper (1991)

I started my Dennis Cooper odyssey with three of his more recent books, before snaking back to his earlier stuff, continuing with Closer, his first novel, then Wrong, an early short story collection. Closer is raw and fascinating, but still formative and unpolished. Wrong was hard going and meandering, often lacking Cooper's later surgically concise style. Frisk, thankfully, is fantastic. It feels like Coopers first excellent book.

Often technically audacious without being cloying, Frisk bounces between narrator and style. Evolving from a single image, a photograph of a dead boy that becomes a fetishistic object of obsession for the narrator ('Dennis'), Frisk solidifies a theme that echoes throughout Cooper's subsequent work.

Some of the literary techniques employed are superb, for example bouncing between 3rd person omniscient narration to 1st person restricted narration and back in the same scene. In a particularly harrowing move remerciement of roman a clef novels, Cooper's self-insert (or is it???) in to the narrative as an increasingly obsessive death fetishist is, if anything, a wonderful distancing technique. Cooper situates himself as the author, the protagonist, and also through his apparent omniscience, a cruel and manipulative god.

Frisk is terse and precise. It is also utterly ghastly. One scene in particular left my head spinning at its ferocious, nihilistic transgression. Despite the clarity of the prose, this is clearly not a book for a general readership. I don't really like the thought of it on my shelf. The novel makes an about-face. The ghastly events: a fiction. We breathe a sigh of relief. Yet of course, it was always a fiction. Why should we care of fictional autonomy at all? The last few pages muse on obsessional copies of copies of copies.

Frisk is a story about stories, a fantasy about fantasies. It forces us to confront something that is, for better or for worse, traumatic and upsetting. It also bravely and somewhat insouciantly informs us that not only have these things never actually happened, but that narratives hold more raw power than realities, so they may as well have happened. This riff on the concept of the unreliable narrator has been later explored by Cooper in his much more successful The Sluts, a genuinely original and alarming work that explores the value of narratives. Frisk is excellent, yet, once more, it is still ultimately formative.

Otaku: Japan's Database Animals - Hiroki Azuma (2009)

There are many books that purport to explore the thorny nature of Japanese nerd culture, and Otaku: Japan's Database Animals is seemingly one of the first serious works of this type published in Japan. On any book on subculture, there is a balance to be struck between raw textual analysis and hardcore audience theory. Otaku does both, in a straightforward, accessible, yet far from condescending manner.

The introductions, a brief one by the author and a more substantial one by the translators, are fascinating in their own rights. Situating this book within the context of Japanese critical theory, they elaborate on the state of Japanese academic books and an apparent boom of accessible critical theory in the 80's, of which Azuma is apparently a successor to. It is interesting and problematic that most of the books referenced have not been translated. While we can freely access Deleuze and Derrida, it would be great to explore Akira Asada and Eiji Otsuda also.

Otaku is contemporaneous to another excellent work of Japanese subcultural analysis, Saito Tamaki's Beautiful Fighting Girl. I believe that Azuma and Saito even had a bit of a public rivalry going on regarding their difference of opinion. Saito is a Lacanian, and explored the idea that the otaku's fetishistic obsession with powerful anime girls derived from their combination of cutesy femininity and phallic power. Their consumption, therefore, is a classic libidinal and masturbatory act. Azuma, conversely, is a postmodernist who argues that otaku animalistically consume media, choosing surface meaning and taxonomic categorisation of generic paradigms; more like the classical train spotter than a thinking being. Broadly, Azuma argues that under the challenging conditions of postmodern existence, otaku use the minutiae of nerd culture as a meta narrative to make sense of a confusing and difficult world.

Azuma identifies otaku culture and the media which fuels it as evolving from American media as opposed to being something intrinsically Japanese. This approach is refreshing, as it eschews the idea often presented in the west of Japanese nerd media being defined by its (to utilise a Barthesian term) 'Japanicity'. In fact, Azuma goes further to argue that all Japanese media comprises of "imitations and distortions" of US media. In doing so, Japanese nerd media constructs a hyperreal simulacrum, rooted in the doomed optimism of the 1980s bubble economy, which has remained steadfast and even calcified through the economic and societal decline of Japan in the 1990s.

Azuma draws a distinction between a modern, traditional, analytical model and a postmodern 'database' model, that provides and supersedes the audiences own interpretation and desires. This model is not dissimilar in nature to Barthe's famous death of the author theory or even Gauntlet's much later 'pick and mix' model of active audience interpretation and identity. However, Azuma's model, which piggybacks off existing Japanese critical theory, is somewhat more complex, and is perhaps more in line with the British encoding/decoding model. Azuma critiques simulacra theory implemented by Benjamin and Baudrillard by arguing that instead, modern otaku works and cultural products by extension are both a simulacra on their surface level and on their deeper 'nonnarrative' level. This challenges Benjamin's notion that the mechanically reproduced art functions at all because it is imbued with a vestigial ghost of authorial authenticity from the concept of an 'original'. Azuma once more presents an excellent set of examples to differentiate between the modern and postmodern tastes of otaku. Whereas fans of the original Gundam series sought to understand and memorise the metanarrative presented by its fastidious set of serial numbers and alternative world events, the then much younger fans of Evangelion conversely sought to implement both derivative works and fan theories and interpretations from the off. Azuma correctly states that this is even engendered by the creators of the show, most notably through the famous and celebrated alternate world scene in the final episode, and the theatrical films Death And Rebirth and End Of Evangelion, which present alternative viewpoints of the series as opposed to adding to an existing grand/overarching narrative. Now reading this book in 2022, we can of course add the startling and radical Rebuild series and the only recently completed manga to Evangelion's fascinating approach to postmodern narrative (un)conventions.

Azuma points to the hyper fragmentation of generic iconographic elements of characters not as a simple collection of fetish objects per se, but rather a means of satisfying the desire to form databases that in turn fulfil the role of missing metanarratives. He draws attention to hyperspecific 90s Japanese search engines that allow users to search for moe iconography that have been ripped wholeheartedly from other sources. This information in particular is like gold dust for a mono-glottal Western audience, and the notion of such engineered simulacra is utterly fascinating and wonderful.

Azuma's investigation of visual novels is similarly erudite and largely convincing. He argues that they are in face the ur example of his database model, by themselves existing as a set of extremely basic data, chiefly including a foreground layer, background layer and text box/crawl. This allows visual novels by their very and fundamental nature to present their rhizome/database structure, with the same image freely and nakedly substituted in a variety of backgrounds. This is convincing insofar as I have often marvelled at the blunt and almost fetishistic nature of visual novels and their blatantly open and naked programming. This concept itself has been gloriously toyed with by the exceptional visual novels You And Me And Her and Doki Doki Literature Club. However, I believe this substitution of elements is, under the hood, apparent in all videogame genres, and videogame otaku often pay special interest to matters such as the engine and assets and the machinations of programming. Admittedly, visual novels do not hide their nature as game at all, but then, neither do films, which are also understood by cinephiles and even rank and file audiences as a combinatory collection of the elements of cinematography, soundtrack, mise en scene and so on. Azuma outlines how easily fans can break down visual novels in to their constituent elements by decompiling and decompressing the accumulated assets which they comprise of, though once more, from a functional standpoint, I see little difference between this, constructing anime music videos and other derivative works, and applying critical theory to a film in a manifestation of cinephillia*.

Fascinatingly, Azuma even considers the ramifications and implications of multiple routes in visual novels, here explained once more of a symptom of a move to a postmodern, database based subculture that eschews grand narratives in favour of databases and surface meaning. In much the same way as the constitutive repertoire of elements that construct characters are repeated across media, so too within visual novels do we not only have interchangeable characters, but narrative strands, characteristics and endings, none of which contradict each other. This notion was later exquisitely drawn attention to in the aforementioned You And Me And Her, in which one character in particular is aware of her interchangeability, and her status as a collection of moe character traits that can and will be metaphysically reconstructed in future visual novels that the player will read.

Azuma finally fully engages in what he has been prodding for the entire book thus far, that the postmodern (1995+) otaku represents an animalistic counterpoint to the modernist analysis model that relies on established meta narratives. At this stage in the book, Azuma makes several broad and largely unsubstantiated claims. He echoes Saito's spurious claim that otaku are neither 'perverted or homosexual', which not only is a problematic statement ethically, but also broadly improvable. Additionally, his argument that online and in person otaku relationships can be differentiated from the common or garden 'kinship' of standard communities is another scattershot statement with no operational definitions or analyses to back them up. These two points in particular, and those on sex, sexuality and socialisation would be greatly improved by being significantly expanded. However, by and large, the concept of animalistic, postmodern peruser of nerd databases is convincing, and can be ascribed to many aspects of Western culture in 2022 with very few mental adjustments.

The final, short chapter focuses on examples of what this theory looks like in practice. Azuma picks out some excellent examples. Firstly, he looks at the internet, which he argues can only be decoded fully and satisfactorily through knowledge of its database level, as in its HTML, and even below that, its hexadecimal code. Since the Internet comprises of a series of tangentially connected hyperlinks, this constructs a postmodern series of texts which dissolve traditional meta narratives. This reading is very much in keeping with contemporary, turn of the century media theory surrounding the internet. And, of course, much of it is now somewhat obsolete, though it makes for fascinating reading from an historical perspective. The second example is the PC-98 adventure game YU-NO, which just so happens to be a particular favourite and object of fascination of mine. YU-NO very quickly diegetically situates it's labyrinth of choices as a 'map' that can be somewhat freely navigated and exploited by the player. In this sense, YU-NO not only encourages, but actually insists on a deconstructed, database reading of the text in order to successfully consume and interpret it. In girl games, it is an expectation that the player will play the game multiple times to view sexual relationships with each and every character. This is true in YU-NO. However, as previously mentioned, YU-NO diegetically situates this completionist play style, and necessitates as a narrative prerequisite. At this point, Azuma considers the allegorical implications of YU-NO being a search for the father figure, who is ultimately never discovered, and instead is replaced by a series of intense, introspective sexual encounters with family members. The author's analysis is interesting, though I myself prefer to read YU-NO as a comment and critique of the narrative structure of videogames, rather than a reflection of the postmodern condition. However, these viewpoints are hardly contradictory.

Perhaps one of Otaku's greatest strengths is its tone. While resolutely an academic book, it is pitched in such a way than a general readership can also enjoy and understand it. Much like in Tamaki's Beautiful Fighting Girl, which actually offered a concise and satisfying precis of Lacanian theory, Azuma here, with no hint of cloying condescension outlines and clarifies key theoretical concepts. When he casually points out a functional differentiation exists between postmodernism and postmodernity, I genuinely struggled to think of a western analogue that wouldn't just assume this knowledge from the reader. In truth, even being aware of this distinction, it is clearly extremely helpful to outline such fundamental functional definitions. The book's use of examples, of course from anime and manga, are also not something that can be taken for granted in so-called critical theory. The frustration of boring through Zizek for even a scrap of what the title purports to actually analyse is a common one, but not repeated here. It is an approachable work of critical theory that actually seeks to provoke and to teach its audience.

Yet the greatest element of Otaku is Azuma's undoubted love of anime and related nerd culture. His analyses of what by many would be considered to be disposable trash here elevate them to exceptional and fascinating texts, not through some kind of 'so bad it's good' mental gymnastics, but instead through their honest and inherent qualities. When, early on he refers to Martian Successor Nedesico as a "superb work", with no irony or caveat, we know we are in good hands. And he cements this knowledge and his love of subculture with analyses of texts as disparate as Di-Gi-Charat and YU-NO. Otaku is therefore that rarest of things: an in-depth and uncompromising analysis, presented in a reasonably straightforward and parsable manner, from an individual who is clearly passionate about nerd culture.

*Additionally, I believe that the ludic nature of videogames is massively overplayed (!) from a critical standpoint, and there is little fundamental difference between a visual novel with few narrative choices, a more conventional action game and even other forms of media such as films and books, given the extent and proliferation of active audience models and the verify able lack of fundamental 'interactivity' inherent in all games. This is an idea I hope to explore in more detail later on.