MANGA MANIA: ONWARDS TOWARDS OUR NOBLE DEATHS by Shigeru Musiki

Shigeru Mizuki (b. 1922) is something of a national treasure in Japan. His innovative manga titles place him the same league as Osamu Tezuki, the artist referred to as the God of Manga. Mizuki made his name with manga involving Yokai, the sometimes playful, sometimes malevolent demons of Japanese folklore. In 1973 he published this magnificent anti-war tale. I have read several manga that are billed as "adult" in content, but this usually means the stories are more sexual or grotesquely violent than other, more mainstream offerings. Onwards Towards Our Noble Deaths is the first manga I have read where the adult label applies to material that is morally complex and emotionally devastating. It deserves a place with such Japanese anti-war classics as Kon Ichikawa's film Fires on the Plain(1959). And western readers should not look on this tale of moral depravity among the Imperial Army's officer class with too much smug superiority. It is a story of soldiers forced in to a suicide mission, a mission that initially fails and therefore must be repeated because the glorious sacrifice of the soldiers has already been reported. The twisted logic and gross disregard for human life is apalling, but remember that Stanley Kubrick's Paths of Glory (1957) involves the execution of French soldiers for cowardice after their refusal to follow a clearly suicidal order. That setting is World War One.

Mizuki's was assigned to the battalion described in his story, and would have died had he not lost an arm in a previous fight some weeks before the final orders came through. Mizuki depicts the New Guinea setting as a combination of tropical paradise and absolute hell hole. Soldiers are starving, dying of malaria, and lining up seventy-men deep for the attention of the handful of comfort women their officers have provided them. Important work on camp construction can be delayed for days while soldiers search for the remains of a comrade almost certainly eaten by a crocodile. But the officers insist that remains must be returned for proper burial. A severely wounded soldier has his finger cut off by a shovel so the body part can be returned to his family. As his friends leave with the grisly trophy, the soldier, who is mortally wounded, is still alive and suffering.

Japan has lost the war at this point. Fire bombings of major cities has begun and Hiroshima is not far in the future. The insane logic of the suicide mission is the outcome of the rigid training of an officer class who treat their soldiers as fodder. The criminal insanity of forcing the men to return after they survive the first assault will leave readers enraged.

MONDAY MORNING

SOME MONSTERS (4): A LOATHSOME CREATURE

In this province live huge snakes and serpents of such a size that no one could help being amazed even to hear of them. They are loathsome creatures to behold. Let me tell you just how big they are. You may take it for a fact that there are some of them ten paces in length that are as thick as a stout cask: for their girth runs to about ten palms. These are the biggest. They have two squat legs in front near the head, which have no feet but simply three claws, two smaller and one bigger, like the claws of a falcon or a lion. They have enormous heads and eyes so bulging that they are bigger than loaves. Their mouth is big enough to swallow a man at one gulp. Their teeth are huge. All in all, the monsters are of such inordinate bulk and ferocity that there is neither man nor beast but goes in fear of them. There are also smaller ones, not exceeding eight paces in length, or six or it may be five.

Let me tell you how these monsters are trapped...They are so bulky and heavy and of such great girth that when they pass though the sand on their nightly search for food and drink they scoop out a furrow that looks as though a butt  full of wine had been rolled that way. Now the hunters that set out to catch them lay traps at various places in the trails...These are made by embedding in the earth a stout wooden stake to which is fixed a sharp steel tip like a razor blade or lance head, projecting about a palm's breath beyond the stake and slanting in the direction from which the serpents approach. This is covered with sand so nothing of the stake is visible...When the snake, or rather the serpent, comes down the trail to drink, he runs full tilt into the steel , so that it pierces his chest and rips his belly right to the navel and he dies on the spot. The hunter knows that the serpent is dead by the cries of the birds, and then he ventures to approach his prey. Otherwise he dare not draw near.

From The Travels of Marco Polo

Edited by R.E. Latham

Penguin Edition

WHO WRITES THIS STUFF: ROBERT SILVERBERG

Robert Silverberg was the only chid of a solidly middle-class Jewish family in Brooklyn. He was born in 1935, and his CPA father and school teacher mother both encouraged and indulged his precocious intellect. But he could, at times, be a trying child. His interest in ichthyology charmed a local fishmonger into securing for him a live eel. He kept it in the family bathtub only until his mother returned home from her daily teaching stint. Silverberg saw for himself a future in science, but then, at the age of fourteen, he discovered his first science fiction magazine at the local drugstore. These opened to him new visions of future worlds and changed his life. In writing Other Spaces Other Times he has a clear sense of his audience. 

You understand. You've had the same experience or you wouldn't be reading this book.

The book he is talking about is not Other Spaces Other Times., the book where I encountered the quote. The quote is dated 1987. and the compilation of autobiographical essays is copywright 2009. Silverberg says it is not his intention to write a formal autobiography, and he doesn't. This compilation of introductions to reprints of his work, columns he wrote for Galaxy magazine, and stray autobiographical fragments can be repetitive, but it gives an excellent and entertaining insight into how this successful and innovative science fiction author made a career as a freelance writer from the time he was 19 years old until the seventh decade of his life when he composed this anthology.

Silverberg was a self-professed writing machine for the SF magazine trade of the late 1950's. He began publishing shortly before getting his degree from Columbia University, and his partnership with the older, alcoholic Randall Garrett got him into the most lucrative magazine markets of the 1950's. With Garrety he would start a story in the morning and have Garrett finish it that afternoon. The could do a 40,000 word novel in two days. Garrett established them as contract writers whose work was guaranteed to appear in publications under either their own or a stock list of pseudonyms. As a teenager, one of Silverberg's favorite writers for Imaginative Tales was Alexander Blade, an author he did not realize until he wrote for the magazine himself a decade later was a fiction. His final story forImaginative Tales appeared under the Blade name, bringing to an end both Silverberg's involvement with such publication and coinciding with the death of the publications as well.

In 1958, the SF magazine market imploded, victim to over-saturation and the rise of paperback books. Silverberg took his first retirement from the field and started writing successful nonfiction for the young adult trade. It was Fredrick Pohl, an SF writer now editor of Galaxy magazine, who brought Silverberg back into the SF fold. From the mid 1960's until 1975. Silverberg wrote some of his best novels, but by his own account the literary ambitions of writers from this period alienated their readership. Star Warsand Tolkien influenced science fantasy dominated. It attempted to suffocate the field for the next decade. It's not surprising that old hands like Silverberg began to look elsewhere. He specialized in nonfiction on exotic topics for the YA market. When he returned to SF, it seems that he had absorbed the Star Wars/Tolkien lesson. He wrote the mammoth Majippoornovels and anthologies, creating a future world with all the accoutrements of a kind of fantasy he had previously abjured. (I confess I am offering this opinion without having actually read any of these novels, but the have what look like knights on the over and they can be 600 pages long.)

Other Spaces Other Time ends with Silverberg reminsicing about past WorldComs and other good times. This is not a high note, and ranks with the publishers packaging of the book as its least desirable traits. Non Stop Press has chosen an PLC presentation. This is a slick pictorial binding that makes the book look like a stray volume from a 1970's children's science encyclopedia. The interest here lies in what Silverberg has to offer as insights into what it meant to be a freelance SF writer for five last five decades of the 20th century.

MONDAY MORNING

THE HORROR! THE HORROR!: KATHE KOJA

If I found a hole into another dimension in the utility closet of my dingy apartment building I like to think I would contact either MIT or the Institute of Advanced Studies at Princeton. On the other hand, if I was either of the characters from Kathe Koja's The Cipher (1992), no, I would keep the discovery as the special plaything for myself and my really pretty awful girlfriend. Then all sorts of horrible and unfortunate things could happen, one of the worst being the appearance of a similar hole in the palm of my hand.

This is the set up for Kathe Koja's debut novel The Cipher, one of the three horror novels she wrote in the early 1990's before turning to YA fiction. I haven't read the YA novels, but given the content of the three horror novels I have read, she had to make a serious turn to produce YA material. But the switch could do her good, possibly trimming some of the lugubrious fat from the prose of these earlier works. The Cipher, Bad Blood (1992), and Skin (1994) are overripe with grungy, sex-drenched prose, but they work. This is horror that infests a social setting where young people are making bad decisions that push their curiosity for all things dark and weird toward grotesque and tragic consequences.

Koja needs very little of the supernatural for her horror tales. The Cipher concerns what must be a scientific phenomenon that none of the wastrel art students who are dragged into the tale see any need to investigate beyond the fact that it is way cool and weird. In Bad Blood the hero suffers a blow to the head that leaves him with frontal lobe seizures and visions of a malevolent mass of the color silver. I knew that was going to sound ridiculous when I wrote it, but this mass of silver, which any reader is going to write off as a residual hallucination left over from the accident, is really bad news. Running around the country, drunk and stoned and hanging out with strippers, is probably not the best way to deal with it. When the story moves to the derelict home of a brujo in Michigan, the tragedy could be either purely psychological or the result of occult forces. And there is other weirdness that beggars logical explanation. The hero here is an artist, as are most of Koja's characters. As he travels the northern midwest, he gets reports from his dealer back home that the paintings he left in his charge are suddenly selling, but their new owners complain that images begin to change after they get them on the wall.

Skin is Koja's best novel and the one with the fewest traditional horror trappings. Koja never states a locale for her stores, but she is from Detroit, and a rundown Motorcity, with brutal winters and sweltering summers, seems a likely choice. Everyone is an artist of some sort. I don't know anything about what the Detroit art scene might have been like in 1990, but none of her artists make anything that seems like it would be taken seriously as art. There is lots of fantasy painting and metal sculpture. But Skin brings in the world of transgressive performance that was an important presence at that time. Koja even credits Survival Research Laboratories and books published by ReSearch in her forward to this novel. Skin is a tale of young people pushing their bodies to ever greater extremes, staging illegal performances with battling machines, real blood, and moments of masochistic ecstasy. Unfortunately, people also die. Koja is not an outsider judging this scene. She chronicles her central character's slide into madness with unflinching objectivity. The young artists in The Cipher play naively with forces they do not understand and bad things happen. In Skin the artists pursue a vision they will not relinquish even if it destroys them.

Koja's horror novels are now out of print, but they did not go unnoticed when they first appeared. The Cipher was nominated for the Philip K. Dick Award and Skin was nominated for the World Fantasy Award. Her latest novel, Under the Poppy, is a sexy story set in a 19th century Belgian brothel. Reviews are good, it has won a couple of awards, and it is being adapted for the stage.

My reviews of individual Koja novels are on Worlds Without End and Goodreads

The Cipher
Skin
Bad Brains

MONDAY MORNING