upon a deck chair, reclining

gracefully, in the rainforest

weather on a June afternoon.

I am the Emperor, I proclaim

from my royal throne. I

live in a house with a pool

in the woods and no living

creature of four feet or

two can perceive my

heart-employing

soul-destroying

majesty.

But there is a tennis ball in the pool

and I want it

so I can never

be happy

again

[Written as part of Codex Rime, Adam's Senior Project]

RahXephon is about Ayato Kamina, a kid who lives with his mother in Tokyo. He has lived what seems to have been a normal life for many years, but the situation takes a severe turn into strangeness from the first episode and soon Ayato finds himself embroiled in a sea of mysteries. Who is the mysterious girl in the yellow dress? What job does his mother really have? Is Tokyo really the only city left on Earth? What is a RahXephon, anyway? All these questions are answered by the end of the series, but unfortunately these are the easy questions. The hard ones, which deal with the massive backstory going on behind the scenes and with Ayato’s massive and convoluted family tree, are much more difficult to answer.

It helps that the cast of characters are pretty likable, and that individual episodes at times reach a kind of abstract brilliance. The series suffers a bit of a drop in quality after the first few episodes, but around episode 11, the series takes off into some absolutely surreal material. Episode 19 stands out in particular for having perhaps one of the most bizzarely touching death scenes in any piece of Japanese animation. This isn’t even mentioning the final episodes, which delve into madcap apocalypse without losing the thread of the plot.

Finally: it is true that RahXephon takes a lot of cues from Neon Genesis Evangelion. Both feature troubled teenagers using enormous god-like monstrosities to fight abstract evils at the edge of Armageddon. The difference is that while Evangelion is an enormous (but glorious) mess, RahXephon is tight and focused, almost to its detriment. One gets the sense that the people behind RahXephon were trying to better Evangelion, putting their stamp on the material and giving it a more thematically cohesive ending. I can’t necessarily say that the former is any better than the latter, but at any rate RahXephon is at the very least a very entertaining riff on past material, and at the best a work that transcends its own source to become a new entity.

Kind of a neat music video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P38ZVmYNkmg
Hint: When interpreting the material, it helps if you realize that despite the convoluted plot, RahXephon is actually a love story. One more thing to consider!

http://www.kiwisbybeat.com/minus.html

minus is the story of a girl who also happens to be a god. She has few friends but for the ghosts of the world, but this eventually changes. Although she can literally do and create whatever she wants she is in many ways a very typical little girl. She uses her powers for things like extra ice cream and roller coaster rides. She isn’t entirely aware of the consequences of her abilities, either. In an early strip she turns a balloon salesman who annoys her into a balloon. In another strip she is approached by a couple with aspirations towards engineering world peace, but minus’s reaction to their plans are to fold them into paper airplanes and throw them around. Nether the less, she’s a sweet kid.

There are three things that distinguish minus from the rest of the pack. The first is that the art is basically perfect. It isn’t especially detailed, but the flow of the images is almost hypnotic. Some sequences, like an extended comic depicting a woman made out of clouds, don’t even need words, and the author is smart enough not to use them.

The second thing is that minus exudes sheer childlike wonder from every pore in its being. Tensions between a hunter and a lion are resolved by a fistfight between the two. A falling meteor is dealt with by being hit by a baseball bat. Besides these fantasy sequences, the comic is just as alive when minus is doing mundane things, like drawing on the pavement with an older girl. Its grasp of exactly what it is like to be a kid is a little reminiscent of Calvin and Hobbes, but while Calvin and Hobbes is more sophisticated minus is distilled to its purest essence.

The third thing—and this is the clincher—is that running under the veneer of child-like wonder that suffuses the comic is a deep river of bitter-sweetness. minus is just as capable of breaking your heart as it is warming it, and although these moments are spread out across the 130 so strips, when they do come around they hit hard (two words: time travel). The end is one of the saddest I have ever read, which is made even more remarkable by the fact that minus doesn’t really have a continuing plot.

Other comics exceed this one in artistic expression. But the fact remains that I was moved on a deep level by this comic, and have not yet found its equal. No webcomic is perfect, but of any webcomic I’ve read, minus comes the closest.

P.S. You can also read it in an even higher resolution here:

http://www.kiwisbybeat.com/minusb1.html

P.P.S. I am fairly sure that minus is blocked in China. China is missing out.

It is the (mostly) thoroughly ordinary story of Makoto Konno, an athletic high-school student with a good heart but not much direction. Early in the movie, she gains the ability to leap through time from a strange walnut-shaped thing that she finds in the upstairs science lab, but rather than use this power to Save the Planet or correct a Grievous Wrong she uses it to do other, better things. Things like repeating a single karaoke session for ten hours straight, redoing failed tests and going back in time to a day when you liked what your family was serving for dinner. This is all well and good, but when she begins tampering with the love lives of her friends in order to make them and her happy, she risks being alone for the rest of her high-school experience, among other, worse things.

Then everything goes to hell in the last one third of the movie, as a sudden twist comes out of nowhere and the story becomes incredibly tragic. It’s a polar shift that almost drives the film into the ground, but the grief expressed by the characters is incredibly genuine, and on top of this the film actually manages to totally redeem itself in the last ten or fifteen minutes. The last scene is genuinely stirring.

Did I mention that the movie is also genuinely funny? Did I mention that it is possibly one of the most genuine evocations of human emotion I have seen in Japanese animation? Did I mention that on top of all this, the movie looks incredibly good? This is all icing on the cake. See this movie. It is only a handful of degrees shy of Spirited Away and perhaps Wall-E, and yes it is that good.

If none of that convinced you, watch this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qa4kmY7e6lQ

One or two years ago while on vacation in Europe, I read a novel by Agatha Christie called And Then There Were None. In case you haven’t heard about it, it’s essentially the quintessential Island Mystery, featuring a dozen or so people trapped on an island, and being murdered one by one by a mysterious adversary. Having looked it up on Wikipedia a while ago, I already knew how it ended, but after reading it through I was surprised by how well-crafted the thing was. Of course I don’t mean stylistically, as Agatha Christie wasn’t a great prose stylist. But every sentence, every planted clue and red herring, felt totally deliberate, as if the entire book was a well-crafted and very carefully calibrated machine made out of incredibly delicate parts. Sort of like a book by Gene Wolfe, except accessible to anyone and accomplished in half the amount of pages.

I mention And Then There Were None because Umineko no Naku Koro Ni is also an Island mystery, where eighteen people are trapped on an island and are murdered one by one by a mysterious adversary. The difference between the two is thatAnd Then There Were None is noticeably more restrained. If the former is a perfectly formed vase, the latter takes the former and SMASHES IT WITH A HAMMER. The result is the common man’s nightmare: a gaudy mishmash of Japanese anime tropes, mystery novels and postmodern meta-fiction that also happens to be a video game. Perhaps this might be anathema to any sane person, but after playing the first three “episodes” I will have to count myself among one of the insane. Like And Then There Were None, Umineko wins no awards for writing chops, but the sheer unadulterated exuberance of the experience distinguishes it as one of the most interesting games I’ve played in a while.

A brief summary: every year, the Ushiromiya family, a wealthy clan of Japanese businessman, come to the island of Rokkenjima. For the kids, it is a time of celebration, when they can stay up as late as they want and eat delicious food. For the adults, it’s a nightmare, because the bulk of their time on the island will be spent debating how to distribute their family’s wealth.To make things worse, the head of the family, Grandfather Kinzo Ushiromiya is only months away from death, and this meeting could be the last. The issue of the head’s inheritance will have to be discussed, and the adults are circling the head like sharks circling a dead man. Kinzo, who by now is rather insane, considers all his relatives to either be disappointments or money-grubbers (he isn’t necessarily far off from the truth, either) and decides to play a little game with the rest of his family. This game involves Beatrice, the legendary Witch of the Forest who is said to have given Kinzo his gold. Consumed by a desire to see her one last time, Kinzo uses the occult practices that he has spent years obsessing over to engineer a ritual supposedly meant to bring Beatrice back to life. Then people start turning up dead, and everything goes to hell.

By the end of the first episode of Umineko, everyone on the island has died, having become casualties of the witch’s magic. Or have they? Battler Ushiromiya, Pheonix Wright look-a-like and grandson of Kinzo, refuses to believe that magic was the cause. This is because, he claims, magic does not exist! This is very troublesome for Beatrice the witch, as she claims that only by convincing all the family of her existence can she revive.Thus begins a game that will pit reason against chaos and Fantasy against Anti-Fantasy. Beatrice must force Battler to accept that witches exist, while Battler must prove to Beatrice that witches don’t exist, to her face. To facilitate the game, time begins to repeat, and the Ushiromiyas arrive once more on the island on a rainy day in October. Events occur differently each time, and it isn’t long before Beatrice begins to screw with Battler’s mind: the murders become even more gruesome, the closed room mysteries they create become even more impenetrable, and elements that previously seemed ambiguously supernatural intensify by several degrees. Can Battler continue to deny magic when members of the family begin to manifest previously unheard of supernatural powers right in front of his eyes? Does Beatrice really exist? Will the Ushiromiya family ever manage to break out of the time loop in one piece?

So yeah, the premise is pretty bizarre. The thing is, Umineko knows this, and moreover, it revels in it. Each murder is even more violent and implausible than the last; debates between Battler and Beatrice become more and more melodramatic, punctuated by Battler’s epic finger pointing and Beatrice’s progressively more insane-looking facial expressions; the situation on the island becomes more and more tense as everyone either freaks out, collapses from the strain or, every once in a while, goes out in a freakish blaze of glory. Despite being a mystery story where helpless citizens are stalked by a killer, there is a surprisingly large proportion of badassery in Umineko: whiny housewife Natsuhi challenging the witch for the honor of the Ushiromiya family, screwed-up mother Rosa defending her nine-year-old daughter Maria from cannibalistic goat-men, and servant Kanon protecting Ushiromiya granddaughter Jessica from evil in a magical knife fight. There’s an awful lot of tragedy as well: almost every member of the Ushiromiya family is flawed in some way, but they become people you care about nevertheless; people who, despite their problems, are capable of love, and do not deserve death.

Of all the mind games going on in Umineko, the biggest mind game of all is the one between the game and the player. Like Battler, the player is from the very beginning convinced that the witch, in all her sadistic glory, must be wrong, and that magic, used from the beginning to commit horrible murders, must not exist. But as more and more supernatural incidents begin to occur, the line between what is real and what is not real is irrevocably blurred. Can the mystery be fully solved without magic? If magic doesn’t exist, then why do the events of the story seem to be repeating over and over again, and why is Battler, who was apparently killed in the first episode, still able to argue with a fictional being?

Umineko no Naku Koro Ni is fundamentally a romantic story: it is about eighteen people who try to fight against fate, and prove that life is more than madness. But even this is belief in magic, because if witches truly do not exist, then it is likely that at least one of the people who seem so likable at first sight are not what they seem. Umineko is not only a duel between Battler and Beatrice for the soul of the story, but a battle between the game and the reader for the Truth, no matter how truly unsettling the Truth might be. It is this interplay that establishes Umineko as not only the most convoluted mystery ever made, but as a metafictional narrative with actual substance.

P.S. The other candidate for Most Convoluted Mystery of All Time is probably The Quincunx by Charles Palliser. But that’s just based on word of mouth.

P.P.S. The game is the only way to go with this one. Though this note focused mainly on the plot, rest assured that Umineko, despite its amateurish graphics, has some of the best atmosphere of perhaps any game since Shadow of the Colossus. Or maybe Silent Hill 2, if that’s more your thing. Just don’t watch the anime.

P.P.S. “What madness have I gotten myself into it? It’s useless, it’s useless, it’s all useless!”

The Angyo Onshi of the title are government agents who work for the great kingdom of Juushin in the East. By sneaking into corrupt fiefdoms, they are able to discover acts of corruption, which they use as an excuse to summon phantom soldiers Return-of-the-King style and take over the government. Unfortunately, at the beginning of the story Juushin has been leveled to the ground by a mysterious incident, and the Angyo Onshi have been disbanded. The one exception is Munsu, a gunslinger afflicted with a strange curse. Although wily and sometimes arrogant, he is also indisputably a great man, and the series is both his story and character study. Assisting him on his travels are Chun Hyang, his “sando” (or bodyguard), whose shy demeanor and skimpy clothing belie the fact that she is by several orders of magnitude stronger than Munsu; and Bang Jaa, who is both almost totally useless and frighteningly loyal. Together they travel the land in search of a mysterious man who played a key role in the fall of Juushin. Along the way they have a ton of awesome fights and encounter several of Munsu’s previous associates on the way. The significance of these meetings does not fall into place until much later, when everything is revealed and the story opens up like a flaming umbrella in a typhoon (that is the last terrible simile of the day, I promise).

But what is most interesting about Shin Angyo Onshi is how incredibly satisfying it is. Any other author might have turned the story into a grand tragedy, which it admittedly is at some points. Munsu’s enemies are strong, and the man he hunts is one of the nastiest villains I’ve read in a long time. But while evil is indisputably a fact of life in Shin Angyo Onshi, good is also a force to be reckoned with. Despite the odds, the overwhelming carnage and the sheer power of the enemy, Munsu stays strong and so does the rest of humankind. In its best moments, the story reaches moments of transcendent power and moments of personal victory so visceral that they reach right into the gut.

In short, if you like this kind of thing, you should probably check this series out. It isn’t translated in the United States, so you might have to use the Power of the Internet in order to find it (Google is a good place to start).

On top of all this, Giant Robo takes Chinese warriors, smartly attired businessmen, secret agents and various large robots and mashes them together into a balls-to-the-wall martial arts epic that seems to owe as much thematically to Wagnerian opera as it does to Sunday cartoons. The result is hardly perfect, but the sheer energy and direction of the piece, coupled with the amazing musical score and the obvious love everyone on board has for the project, elevates the material into the stratosphere.

What is Giant Robo actually about? It is about fathers and sons, and whether or not it is possible to find happiness without sacrifice. It is about despair, and hope. It is also about absurd action sequences featuring characters that can light cigars with their minds, or characters who can turn themselves into power generators. It is about giant robots the size of aircraft carriers punching the crap out of each other. It is probably the best superhero “movie” ever created but does not actually feature any real superheroes in it. It is totally, irrevocably insane. But it is genius.

Highly recommended.

For context: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nAwUfqSFGJE

Warbreaker is a noticable improvement over the Mistborn Trilogy for three reasons. First of all, the writing is better. Ellipses are much rarer, and characters no longer “shiver” whenever they feel slightly upset. Secondly, the characters become interesting much quicker in Warbreaker. It took an entire book for the cast of Mistborn to transcend cardboard and become entertaining if not well-rounded, while the cast of Warbreaker take a far shorter time to jump from the page. Finally, Warbreaker thematically ups the ante. While Mistborn was all about love, survival and fighting the power, Warbreaker is about first impressions, double-crosses and second chances. This naturally plays to Sanderson’s strengths as a plotting genius: part of the fun of the novel is how almost everything, from the characters to the society they live in, aren’t what they seem. Not to mention that the novel, being a Brandon Sanderson book, has a multitude of clever twists as well as a real doozy of an ending. It doesn’t quite top the madness of Mistborn finale The Hero of Ages (which I will not begin to spoil) but few other fantasy books have conclusions that are more satisfying.

Not to mention that Warbreaker is free. You can read it here:

http://www.brandonsanderson.com/book/Warbreaker

Speak is a short novel by Laurie Halse Anderson that was published ten or so years ago. It covers the first year of high school of a girl named Melinda, who at the story’s beginning seems to be hated by the entire high school, has been rejected by her best friend and has somehow whittled away all of her self-esteem after a mysterious incident that I will not spoil. In the hands of a lesser author this could be potentially cringe-inducing material, but in this case Melinda’s situation is truly nightmarish, the emotions captured are REAL and RAW and the author refuses to cut her character any slack. There are no easy breaks, and any victories that Melinda wins are hard-earned.

On top of this, the narrative of Speak is so entwined in the neuroses of its protagonist that they literally cannot be separated. This is a literary ventriloquism act that is practically on the order of Holden Caulfield from Cather in the Rye, although Melinda is actually a much more likable character. It’s an intense and sometimes emotionally difficult read, but the spirit of Speak rises above its spiritual canker to higher things and deeper meaning like a phoenix struggling out of ashes and taking to the skies. You should read this book.

Note: If you are reading the 10th Anniversary Edition, skip the opening introduction and poem and go right to the story. The proceeding material spoils the big twist and something tells me that Speak might read even better with the opening tragedy hidden in the shadows.

The center of “Happiness of the Katakuris” is the family of the same name, a plucky ensemble of hard-luck quirks who try to strike it big by founding a guest house in the mountains right next to a road that is to be built. Beside certain family tensions–the son is a good-for-nothing on the run, the daughter is easily misled by able-bodied men, the grandfather is in a foul mood most of the time–the Katakuris are very happy and burst out in song about as often as the Von Trapps from The Sound of Music.Unfortunately, their visitors tend to die about a day into their stay, for a variety of tragic and incredibly silly reasons. One becomes depressed and impales himself on his keychain. So it goes.

There are two very nifty things about “Happiness of the Katakuris.” The first is that despite its black humor and undercurrent of horror, it is actually incredibly inspiring. Throughout everything that happens, the Katakuris never give up, and by the end of the movie every member of the family has become incredibly endearing, especially the grandfather. The second is that the movie is incredibly bizzare, and never once bothers to take itself seriously. Special effects are done in claymation, the laws of reality are frequently thrown out the window to make a thematic point and the story is proceeded by a disturbing short about an imp, a bowl of soup and somebody’s tonsils that has nothing to do with the rest of the movie. Also, the father and mother of the Katakuri family have a karaoke number about half-way through the movie for no apparent reason.

Granted, the music itself isn’t very good. But on the other hand: “The Happiness of the Katakuris” is probably the best feel-good Japanese musical comedy about death ever made. Check it out!

[You can find it on Netflix as well]