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More on Devices and Desires, Ode to Kirihito
Finished Ode to Kirihito. This is a manga by Osamu Tezuka, but boy... is it NOT for children; suffice to say it contains a great deal of shocking elements. Embarrassingly, I don't score too well on classic manga. I've read like Glass Mask (everyone, BTW, should read Glass Mask), but not much of the older stuff at all.
This reminded me a bit of Monster (hero is a doctor, a decent man whom terrible things happen to; it's a medical thriller, some of the humanistic tone), although here the main antagonist of the manga is not an insane serial killer(s), but an unscrupulously ambitious senior doctor. Basically, the protagonist, the eponymous Kirihito Osanai, is a young doctor studying Monmow disease, which causes sufferers to develop a doglike appearance, and eventually die. The disease occurs in an isolated village, confusingly translated "Doggoddale" (I am guessing it's something like Inugami-tani?), and Kirihito goes off to figure out whether the disease is caused by a pathogen, or by some environmental factor. His boss strongly advocates the former, because he believes making a breakthrough on this disease will help him win the election to become head of all of the doctors in Japan; so he hatches a plot to infect Kirihito with the disease. Kirihito does come down with it, but he catches on to the strange behavior of the villagers, and escapes, journeying around the world in miserable circumstances, while other characters also try to investigate the disease.
The story feels like everything happens very fast, compared to more recent seinen thrillers, which take a long time to develop the story, also.
Was also reading through the interview at the end of Devices and Desires. Some of the statements by the author were fairly thought-provoking, so I have transcribed excerpts here.
The author describes the Engineer Trilogy: "Basically, it's a love story, which is why tens of thousands die, cities are torched, nations overthrown, and everyone betrays everybody else at least once. It's also a story about a very ordinary man who's forced, through no real fault of his own, to do extraordinary things in order to achieve a very simple, everyday objective. Furthormore, it's an exploration of the nature of manufacture, artifice, and fabrication--the things we make, the reasons we make them, the ambivalence of everything we create, and the effects on other people of what we make. Ambitious, or what?"
My opinion: Ahahahaa, it's a love story? The thing is, Vaatzes is in love with his wife and his entire scheme is so that he can be reunited with her (I buy that he's in love with his wife because after all, why did he write all of that awful poetry?), but we get very little of what his relationship with her was actually like. I suppose you could say that the focus on the relationship between Valens and Viatriz also makes it a love story, but as for the work as a whole, when the expressed opinion of many of the characters is that love is a destructive force, well, that's an interesting definition of a love story. XD
The author on the protagonist: "Vaatzes couldn't be a traditional fantasy hero, because his motivation is completely mundane and unheroic; it's the lengths he has to go to in order to achieve it that both gives him extraordinary stature and rob him of his humanity."
My opinion: Indeed. At times it's almost unrealistic how lucky and how insightful and powerful Vaatzes is; how could a man with such talents be a semi-obscure factory foreman? Certainly, more absurd things have happened in fantasy, but
The interviewer asks for Parker's personal theory on why fantasy is so popular these days: "Because modern Western society is such a mess, we have a longing for simpler, better worlds--not necessarily places where everything is perfect, like in Tolkien's Shire, but places where the problems we have to confront in our daily lives are at least soluble by, for example, defeating an evil overlord or throwing a ring into a volcano. The solution may be horrendously dangerous and strenuous, but it's straightforward; we can at least understand it, whereas real life in the twenty-first century is largely incomprehensible, and we feel powerless to do anything about it. In fantasy, we can believe in good and evil, whereas in real life both those concepts are increasingly nebulous.
By these criteria, of course, I don't write fantasy... I prefer to create imaginary analogies to the bewildering, inescapable forces that govern real life, as a way of examining the ways in which we try and cope with them. Likewise I don't have heroes and villains for the same reason I don't have dragons and goblins; I believe that all four species are equally mythical. Which brings me kicking and screaming back to the question, I guess. Fantasy is popular because, since heroes and villains don't exist, it's absolutely necessary to our survival as a species to invent them."
Personally, I don't really agree with Parker's theory of fantasy much: IMHO a lot of acclaimed fantasy doesn't necessarily have heroes and villains (like say, China Mieville's stuff), and I don't think heroes and villains are a necessary element of fantasy. On the other hand, the author is on to something there about the problems being "soluble" in fantasy, but difficult to solve and incomprehensible in the real world: most fantasy doesn't posit a universe which is "largely incomprehensible" because by the rules of worldbuilding, the alternate world must be somewhat comprehensible to the reader if they are going to believe in it, right? Likewise, if the story deals with the "fate of the world," the mechanisms behind the world must be clarified, otherwise things will get too confusing for the reader. Perhaps the author is also onto something about (some) fans of fantasy disliking real-world complexibility and difficult-to-solve problems, also?
This reminded me a bit of Monster (hero is a doctor, a decent man whom terrible things happen to; it's a medical thriller, some of the humanistic tone), although here the main antagonist of the manga is not an insane serial killer(s), but an unscrupulously ambitious senior doctor. Basically, the protagonist, the eponymous Kirihito Osanai, is a young doctor studying Monmow disease, which causes sufferers to develop a doglike appearance, and eventually die. The disease occurs in an isolated village, confusingly translated "Doggoddale" (I am guessing it's something like Inugami-tani?), and Kirihito goes off to figure out whether the disease is caused by a pathogen, or by some environmental factor. His boss strongly advocates the former, because he believes making a breakthrough on this disease will help him win the election to become head of all of the doctors in Japan; so he hatches a plot to infect Kirihito with the disease. Kirihito does come down with it, but he catches on to the strange behavior of the villagers, and escapes, journeying around the world in miserable circumstances, while other characters also try to investigate the disease.
The story feels like everything happens very fast, compared to more recent seinen thrillers, which take a long time to develop the story, also.
Was also reading through the interview at the end of Devices and Desires. Some of the statements by the author were fairly thought-provoking, so I have transcribed excerpts here.
The author describes the Engineer Trilogy: "Basically, it's a love story, which is why tens of thousands die, cities are torched, nations overthrown, and everyone betrays everybody else at least once. It's also a story about a very ordinary man who's forced, through no real fault of his own, to do extraordinary things in order to achieve a very simple, everyday objective. Furthormore, it's an exploration of the nature of manufacture, artifice, and fabrication--the things we make, the reasons we make them, the ambivalence of everything we create, and the effects on other people of what we make. Ambitious, or what?"
My opinion: Ahahahaa, it's a love story? The thing is, Vaatzes is in love with his wife and his entire scheme is so that he can be reunited with her (I buy that he's in love with his wife because after all, why did he write all of that awful poetry?), but we get very little of what his relationship with her was actually like. I suppose you could say that the focus on the relationship between Valens and Viatriz also makes it a love story, but as for the work as a whole, when the expressed opinion of many of the characters is that love is a destructive force, well, that's an interesting definition of a love story. XD
The author on the protagonist: "Vaatzes couldn't be a traditional fantasy hero, because his motivation is completely mundane and unheroic; it's the lengths he has to go to in order to achieve it that both gives him extraordinary stature and rob him of his humanity."
My opinion: Indeed. At times it's almost unrealistic how lucky and how insightful and powerful Vaatzes is; how could a man with such talents be a semi-obscure factory foreman? Certainly, more absurd things have happened in fantasy, but
The interviewer asks for Parker's personal theory on why fantasy is so popular these days: "Because modern Western society is such a mess, we have a longing for simpler, better worlds--not necessarily places where everything is perfect, like in Tolkien's Shire, but places where the problems we have to confront in our daily lives are at least soluble by, for example, defeating an evil overlord or throwing a ring into a volcano. The solution may be horrendously dangerous and strenuous, but it's straightforward; we can at least understand it, whereas real life in the twenty-first century is largely incomprehensible, and we feel powerless to do anything about it. In fantasy, we can believe in good and evil, whereas in real life both those concepts are increasingly nebulous.
By these criteria, of course, I don't write fantasy... I prefer to create imaginary analogies to the bewildering, inescapable forces that govern real life, as a way of examining the ways in which we try and cope with them. Likewise I don't have heroes and villains for the same reason I don't have dragons and goblins; I believe that all four species are equally mythical. Which brings me kicking and screaming back to the question, I guess. Fantasy is popular because, since heroes and villains don't exist, it's absolutely necessary to our survival as a species to invent them."
Personally, I don't really agree with Parker's theory of fantasy much: IMHO a lot of acclaimed fantasy doesn't necessarily have heroes and villains (like say, China Mieville's stuff), and I don't think heroes and villains are a necessary element of fantasy. On the other hand, the author is on to something there about the problems being "soluble" in fantasy, but difficult to solve and incomprehensible in the real world: most fantasy doesn't posit a universe which is "largely incomprehensible" because by the rules of worldbuilding, the alternate world must be somewhat comprehensible to the reader if they are going to believe in it, right? Likewise, if the story deals with the "fate of the world," the mechanisms behind the world must be clarified, otherwise things will get too confusing for the reader. Perhaps the author is also onto something about (some) fans of fantasy disliking real-world complexibility and difficult-to-solve problems, also?