ITALICS MINE (10)

Sculpture of Genghis Khan at Marble Arch, London
(The Khan Mandeville writes about would have been
generations removed from Genghis.)

For truly under the firmament there is no lord so great nor so rich as the Great Khan of Tartary. Not even Prester John, Emperor of Greater and Lesser India, nor the Sultan of Babylon, nor the Emperor of Persia, nor anyone else can be compared to him. Truly, it is a great pity that he is not a Christian; nevertheless he will gladly hear men speak of God and allow Christian men to live in his empire. For in his land no man is forbidden to believe in whatever religion it pleases him to believe. And if some men perhaps will not believe me about what I will have said, and say it is all fable, what I say about the nobleness and the excellence and riches of the Great Khan and his court, and the multitude of men there that I told of, I do not really care. But let the man who will, believe it; and leave him alone who will not. I shall nevertheless say something of what I saw with my own eyes, whether they will believe it or not... Nevertheless I well know that if anyone had been there (or in the countries that border his land, if he had not been to his court), he would have heard so much of his nobility and his excellence that he would easily believe what I myself have said. So I am not going to stop telling you things that I know are true because of those that are ignorant of them or will not believe them.

The Travels of Sir John Mandeville

Translated by C.W. R. D Moseley

Penguin Edition.

(Click of Italics label for more annotated readings.)

MANGA MANIA: THE KUROSAGI CORPSE DELIVER SERVICE, VOLS. 7 & 8

Otaku culture takes center stage in the first story. "Otaku" are obsessive fans of anything ranging from manga to movie stars to the internet, an obsession that in its most extreme form keeps those obsessed confined largely to their rooms or certain sites that cater to their obsessions. The KCDS staff meet up with robotics enthusiasts who slip into arcane, for me at least, squabbles about the niceties of robot history. The scene shifts to The Broadband Center, a multi-story emporium catering to otaku needs. This is a thinly veiled version of a real shrine to otaku culture, the Nakano Broadway building. Various plot streams come together when a corpse-powered robot runs berserk. Then we are served up with a tale of plastic surgery designed to transform Japanese ladies into the image of an obscure star. (Apparently there was a period when Japanese women were actually undergoing surgeries to look like Audrey Hepburn.) Again, this being the KCDS, things are not what they seem with these surgeries. Participants become possessed by jimenso, scary little faces of the deceased star that appear behind their new pointy ears. When the source of the ears is discovered, readers are treated to one of Otsuka's most grotesque images to date.

The longest episode in Volume 7 finds the crew employed on a movie set. The elderly, senile director is a parody of the Japanese master filmmaker Kon Ichikawa, who died at the age of 92 a couple years after this was published. Kon made some of the bleakest anti-war films ever and produced Tokyo Olympiad on the 1964 games. This homage to Leni Riefenstahl made some people uncomfortable. His later films became more commercial, but why Otsuka singles him out for this cruel parody is unclear. The plot involves, of course, multiple murders, body parts showing up as props, and reanimated corpses.

Volume 8 tells three of Otsuka's best stories.

The first tale is ghost story with a gentler tone than this series is known for. But Otsuka is back in form for the next two tales. In both of these he follows his favorite theme of how history and folk traditions find their way into modern Japanese culture.

Kaneari, an obnoxious, wealthy, trendsetting wedding planner, is the malevolent force in the second story. He lives the ultimate playboy lifestyle, and the men of the KCDS meet him when they deliver at 40,000,000 yen refrigerator to his apartment. (Correct me if I am wrong, but there is no such thing as a refrigerator that costs around $500K.) Sasaki, the most entrepreneurial of the KCDS, takes an interest in Kaneari's new service, arranged marriages among the deceased. This was an actual practice in parts of Japan, where those who died before they were married could be married to one another for very Japanese reasons explained in the notes but that I will not try to explain here. Of course there proves to be something very fishy and supernatural going on. The drawings made for a shinto shrine to commemorate these events have to power to hasten the demise of the still living halves of the ceremony. The climax is one of the best revenge nightmares ever as Kaneari and his party animal friends receive surprise visits from dead but very angry young women, all dressed as traditional Japanese brides. Kinky and cool.

The final story introduces the disturbing Japanese tradition of the josanbu, midwives willing to kill unwanted babies at birth. The story also involves the introduction of "baby drops" at Tokyo hospitals. These are places where a person can anonymously leave unwanted children. (Similar experiments have taken place in the U.S. In one Kansas City incident, a single father brought all nine of his children to the hospital.) There is also a mysterious stand of unused lockers with magical properties and more information on how Japanese corpses are cleaned for burial than you might want to know. On the upside, it could be that Karatsu has met his true love.

MONDAY MORNING

SOME MONSTERS (2) : A JAPANESE DEMON

Not the demon from the story, but still a  pretty cool demon

As the man turned to look back, he could see the demon's face, vermillion in color and round like a sitting mat, and its single eye. It had three hands, with claws like knives five inches long. Its body was bluish-green in color, and its eye was amber. Its hair was a tangle, like a bramble bush, and just looking at it turned one's heart cold, an unspeakable horror. But because he kept praying to Kannon as he raced along, the young man was able to reach safety, in a place where other humans were about. At that time, the demon said, "Very well -- but sometime we'll meet again!" and with that vanished from sight.

From The Demon at the Agi Bridge and Other Japanese Tales

translated by Burton Watson

Columbia University Press

For more monsters, follow the Monsters label.

SELECTED ENDNOTES (5) : Rene Daumal

2. Jagadish Chandra Bose (1858 - 1937) was a Bengali polymath, whose discoveries in plant physiology were but a fraction of his contributions to science.

6.  Macula lutea: small yellowish area of the retina near the optic disk that provides central vision.

13.  Dinothere: any elephantlike mammal of the extinct genus Dinotherium, from the later Tertiary period of Europe and Asia, having large, outwardly curving tusks.

14.  No doubt related to "pagne," "loincloth."

17. "Yes, yes, yes, very well, not only, but also."

26. The reader is encouraged to sing these words to the tune of "Il est ne le divin enfant."

28. Daumal is perhaps humorously refering to Saint Gudula (in French, Sainte Gudule), an eleventh-century Belgian saint.

32. Carl Oluf Jensen (1864 - 1934), a Danish veterinary scientist best remembered for his discovery that mouse mammary tumors are malignant and transplantable; he would die a few months after Daumal was writing this.

40. In 1934, a woman in Pirano, Italy, is reported to have been witnessed emitting a glow of light from her chest as she slept. She was examined by Dr. Protti.

62. Daumal is most likely referring to Peter Bender, a German World War I pilot who introduced the theory of the hollow globe of Cyrus Reed Teed into Germany; Benders Hohlweltlehre (hollow earth theory) indeed grew popular in the 1930's, and in 1933, Rudolf Nebel, a member of the Nazi party, received funding to carry out the Magdeburg Project: to send a powerful rocket straight up from Magdeburg in order to hit south New Zealand. Funds ran out after eight attempts. Bender himself would meet his demise after the failure of another Nazi initiative, in which a German naval expedition was sent to Rugen Island in order to detect British ships by means of powerful telescopes pointed skyward. The disastrous outcome resulted in Bender and his wife being sent to a death camp.

74. "The Metamorphosis of King Louis-Philippe into a Pear," a famous satirical series of drawings showing the gradual change of the head of the King into a pear (a "fathead"), was executed by Charles Philipon and later by Honore Daumier, both in the nineteenth century.

81. Presumably the Goose Lake Meteorite, which fell in Modoc County in 1938 and was removed from the site in 1939.

Selected from the endnotes to

Pataphysical Essays by Rene Daumal

Translated by Thomas Vosteen

Wakefield Press, 2012

MONDAY MORNING

PHILIP K DICKATHON (22): THE ZAP GUN

I was about fifty pages into The Zap Gun when it hit me. This PKD novel is a sustained satire on a focused topic. Each chapter did not introduce new characters with no discernible link to those I had already met. The plot had not yet splintered into blind alleys and drug-induced hallucinations. And PKD's writing seemed relaxed. It lacked the driven quality that can inform both his best and worst books. He was having fun with this one.

The object of his satire is the Cold War arms race. The novel, written in 1965, is set in 2004. Lars Powderdry, known as Mr. Lars to his adoring fans, is a fashion weapons designer, the best in West-bloc. (West-bloc is us, the good guys. The enemy is a Soviet controlled Peep-east.) Lars designs while in a drug-induced trance. His sketches are whisked off to labs for fabrication and testing. His Peep-east counterpart is a young woman named Lily Topchev.

There is a dirty secret behind all this high tech militarism. None of the weapons work, nor are they needed. Agreements between West-bloc and Peep-east have made such weaponry obsolete. Films of the weapons in use are simulations using robots and special effects. The sketches are "plowshared." They become the basis for household gadgets and toys. The masquerade is necessary to keep the masses, the "pursaps," happy. They want both the threat of annihilation and the comfort afforded by weapons to avoid it. But then alien satellites appear in Earth's skies and begin abducting entire cities to serve as slave labor in the Sirius galaxy. Lars and Lily need to make a real weapon but fast.

PKD outdoes himself with neologisms and acronyms in The Zap Gun. The concept of plowsharing has real poetry to it. The society is divided between an elite group of "cogs" and a mass of "pursaps." Lars is a cog, and he hopes the term derives from cognoscenti. I thought he was worried it might imply he was merely a "cog in a wheel," but he goes back to a an early English usage where "to cog" was to cheat a dice. I was pronouncing "pursap" in a way that suggested "poor saps," but Dick makes it clear he means "pure saps." Surly G. Febbs embodies Dick's jaundiced view of the masses. He is a self-important, deluded pursap angered because an alien invasion is delaying his appointment to what he imagines is an important government post. Febbs is a master of neologisms, hyphenated nouns, and acronyms, and he looks with disdain on those pursaps who cannot stay abreast of the lingo. That will likely include the reader, who might have trouble remembering what MACH stands for or just what a concomody does. Acronym fever reaches new heights with the creation of the BOCFDUTCRBASEBFIN. Who knows what it stands for? Just say it with confidence.

How earth repels the invaders is handled cleverly and dispatched with quickly. There is always the sense that PKD might not care much about his own plots. Of any of the PKD novels I have known almost nothing of before opening it to page one, The Zap Gun is among the most enjoyable. I read that PKD wrote it because a publisher requested a story with Zap Gun as the title. That could be true. He once expanded a novella into a novel because the publisher had cover art he really liked. But PKD does well by his arbitrary title. In one scene the weapons designers are discussing their basic uselessness, and Lars says of the pursaps, "All they really want is a Zap Gun." That throwaway line sums up the book's satire and the underlying anger.