リボンの騎士 1 by Osamu Tezuka
My rating: 4 of 5 stars Gender, Adventure, Romance, Suspense, and Humor in the First Modern Shojo Manga By mixing adventure and romance with a disguised female protagonist, Tezuka Osamu’s Ribbon No Kishi or Ribbon Knight or Princess Knight (1953-56) started the modern shojo (girls’) manga, leading to things like Sailor Moon. Tezuka also added some interesting elements regarding gender and identity, and through 700 pages told an exciting, humorous, unpredictable story with dynamic artwork and layouts. The story begins in heaven, when a mischievous pint-sized angel called Tink approaches the line of babies waiting to be born on earth and shoves a boy’s heart into a baby girl just before God inserts a girl’s heart in her, so she is born with both a boy’s and a girl’s heart. Tink’s punishment is to descend to earth until he’s able to get the girl to act feminine enough and or to remove her boy’s heart from her. His task is complicated by the fact that the girl, Sapphire, is born to the King and Queen of Silverland, and as only males may inherit the throne (shades of Japan) and as they have no other children, they announce that their baby is a boy. Thus, Sapphire grows up as Prince Sapphire, learning fencing and horse riding and acting masculine, apart from some private moments where she’s able to dress like a girl and enjoy flowers in a private palace garden. Meanwhile, the scheming Duke Duralumin and his nefarious minion Sir Nylon suspect the truth and try underhandedly to reveal that Sapphire is a girl. If they’re successful, Duralumin has an spoiled young son called Plastic ready to be a puppet on the throne. This situation provides Tezuka with plenty of gender material. Much of it is stereotypically disappointing: e.g., boys’ hearts in heaven are blue, girls’ red, and Sapphire is rather weak, passive, blushing, and “feminine” when her girl’s heart is dominant compared to her feisty self when her boy’s heart is dominant, while Plastic becomes independent and commanding after swallowing Sapphire’s boy’s heart. Despite Sapphire having been raised as a boy, she starts acting like a girl the second she has a chance to. At one point, the pirate Captain Blood gives her (disguised as a boy) a beautiful ball gown, and as soon as she’s alone she puts on the dress, becoming a swooning maiden daydream-dancing with the prince of Goldland, Franz Charming. She speaks feminine Japanese when alone and masculine Japanese around other people. The reader never forgets that Sapphire is always a girl, even when she refers to herself with the male pronoun “boku” and says to guys who see her in feminine costume and want to marry her, “Hah--I’m a boy!” The manga repeatedly indicates that because her body is female, Sapphire is female, regardless of the gender of her heart or hearts. Although Sapphire is a girl who can do most of the things a boy can, she’s often rather passive, getting captured and wounded and rescued more often than she does the capturing, wounding, and rescuing. A good fighter, she’s nonetheless often defeated when possessed only of her girl’s heart. After all, in many ways she’s a stereotypical traditional girl as seen from the 1950s. Tink at one point asks Sapphire, “Which do you want to be, a boy or a girl?” That the question is starkly binary reveals Tezuka’s 1950s era: there’s no question of Sapphire choosing both or neither. All that said, when the early 50s publication of the manga is accounted for, Tezuka does some cool things with gender, like criticizing the (Japanese style) line of succession through male heirs only. The women of Silverland are stronger than the men (husbands, soldiers, advisors, etc.), and make the men start doing “women’s” work to teach them a lesson and win a war between the genders. And the most powerful and compelling characters in the story are female. Metamorphosing people or turning herself into a dragon and summoning snakes etc., the formidable witch Madam Hell wants to take Sapphire’s girl’s heart and give it to her own wild daughter Hecate. The ponytailed Hecate, clad in modern slacks and turtleneck, doesn’t want Sapphire’s girl’s heart and constantly subverts her mother’s plans. The goddess Venus also transforms herself or others and becomes a potent foe of Sapphire’s. Finally, Furibe, a young lady who dons black armor (with hearts over her breasts), fights in tournaments and wants to marry Sapphire disguised as a boy. Into his episodic story Tezuka weaves disparate elements: Christianity, Greek mythology, the supernatural, chivalry, pirates, fairy tales, and exotic islands. He also does some social commentary (as when Plastic makes a law guaranteeing equal treatment for women and men), refers to other literature (as when Duralumin compares his suddenly independent and feminist-oriented son Plastic to King Lear’s wicked daughters), and plays postmodernist tricks (as when Duralumin tells Nylon to take a photo of Sapphire dressed as a girl only to have his minion say, “Unfortunately, cameras have not been invented in this era”). About Tezuka’s art, it often looks cartoonish and violates human anatomy. His animals look cuter and less natural even than Disney’s. His art is nothing like Hal Foster’s for Prince Valiant or Otomo’s for Akira. But Tezuka’s art is dynamic and vivid and boasts playful or compelling visual touches, as when Duralumin becomes so frustrated at not being able to execute Sapphire that he bites the bottom line of his panel frame and pulls it up with his teeth. Another remarkable page features a broad panel at the top showing Captain Blood bringing a life-restoring medicine to Silverland, sailing in a small boat on the sea set against the big full moon, beneath which panel a pair of broad ones combine to show a single scene, Silverland’s castle and surrounding town set against the same moon. The juxtaposed scenes impress with suspense and beauty. And Tezuka’s imaginative flights of fancy are neat, as when Tink dreams that he’s surrounded by an orchestra of crickets, their music swirling all around him. In Ribbon no Kishi, Tezuka created a compelling and immeasurably influential and amusing, exciting, surprising, and sometimes moving story. There is an English translation available… View all my reviews
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The Cruelest Month by Louise Penny
My rating: 3 of 5 stars Three Pines, Spiritualism, Murder, and Arnot Starting The Cruelest Month (2008), the third Inspector Gamache novel by Louise Penny, was like reclining in a familiar chair by a crackling fire while snacking on a maple syrup garnished brioche while sipping a creamy café au lait. Almost too comfortable. At first. To Penny’s credit, she’s soon working twisted shadows into even the most benign and healthy seeming of people and places, introducing an old haunted house, and channeling her inner wiccan/psychologist. “Was something more sinister at work behind the pleasant facade of Three Pines?” Oh, you betcha! In the first eight chapters Penny returns us to the main setting of her murder mystery series, Three Pines. The Quebec village (“where poets take walks with ducks and art falls from the sky”) is quirky and cozy without being trendy or edgey and, like Shangri La or Narnia, is only found accidentally by lost people who need it. Living in Three Pines is Penny’s recurring cast of eccentric and appealing people: the sensitive and sensible about-to-be-discovered artist Clara Morrow and her already successful but secretly jealous artist husband Peter, the prickly old foul-mouthed poet Ruth Zardo, the gay couple immaculate Olivier and disheveled Gabri who run the town B&B and bistro slash antique shop, and the large generous black former psychologist and current bookstore owner Myrna. Because none of those recurring characters could ever be guilty of murder (we assume), Penny introduces some new ones: luminous Madeleine and her generous friend Hazel, Hazel’s needy university student daughter Sophie, the widower town grocer Monsieur Beliveau, Odile (a bad poet who runs an organic shop) and her boyfriend Giles (an ex-lumberjack who crafts beautiful furniture from dead trees and talks to live ones), and the mousy wiccan Jeanne Chauvet. Jeanne, who is visiting Three Pines for the first time, quickly finds herself presiding over not one but two seances, the second of which takes place in the abandoned and cursed and or haunted old Hadley House and ends with someone apparently dying of fright. If it is another Three Pines murder, who better to find the killer than Chief Inspector Armand Gamache of the Surete du Quebec’s homicide department? In his fifties, he possesses a large, elegant figure, deep brown eyes, strong face, and laugh lines around his eyes. Though his native tongue is French, he speaks English with a British accent, having studied history in Cambridge U. He is incredibly intelligent and well-read, quoting at will from classics and contemporary poets. He is observant and patient (“I listen to everybody”), being especially interested in people’s homes and emotions (“The most important thing in a murder investigation is how people feel”). He trusts his intuitions. Unlike many of today’s detective heroes, he’s happily married and has successful children but no alcohol or demons poisoning his inside. He likes to recruit ostracized agents for his team. He is THE ideal father/teacher figure. But will Gamache be able to solve the present mystery while having to deal with a media assault on his character and career engineered without his knowledge by his best friend from childhood Superintendent Michel Brevbeuf who has for decades secretly hated Gamache’s ability to live happily despite adversity? It’s clear that the five or so years old Arnot case (in which righteous Gamache split the Surete in two by bringing down a corrupt Surete superintendent) is still hanging over Gamache’s head. On his murder investigation team, in fact, two young agents are spying on him and sabotaging the case, the ever-unpleasant Yvette Nicole and the ever-eager Robert Lemieux. (Luckily, he also has reliable agents Jean-Guy Beauvoir and Isabelle Lacoste) Will Gamache’s inveterate good faith and desire to rehabilitate lost causes cause his downfall? If this third book in the series follows the pattern of the first two, the murder case will be solved while the Arnot case is developed a little further without being resolved. We do learn here what the amoral Arnot was doing to merit being exposed, prosecuted, and imprisoned five years ago: destroying indigenous villages with agents provocateur, alcohol, and murder. Penny writes rotating every page or two or less among the points of view of her varied cast of characters. She excels at getting in the heads of different people. However, by narrating via so many point of view characters as she tells her story, she may at times cheat by hiding certain key information from the reader that the characters would surely think about, whether it’s who’s side they’re on in the Arnot Surete cold civil war or how they killed someone (though this last is probably a flaw of most detective genre stories). Penny writes interesting Quebecois cultural details (spring hailstorms, bear poop, French and English, hockey references, etc.). And food: creamy Brie or pate on crisp baguettes, eggs Benedict (with Canadian bacon!), pear and cranberry tart, maple laced brioches, frothy and steamy cups of rich and aromatic coffee, and more. And she writes vivid similes, like “She looked as if made up by a vindictive mortician,” “dark circles under her eyes, as if grief had physically struck her,” and “Emboldened by the light, as though what they held was swords, they moved deeper into the house.” And it’s a pleasure to eavesdrop on the witty Three Pines locals and on the wise Gamache and his agents. The characters talk about life and human nature, like the concept of the Near Enemy: unhealthy emotions masquerading as healthy ones (attachment as love, pity as compassion, indifference as equanimity). Gamache’s truism “It’s our secrets that make us sick” works perfectly in the story, as does the fact that some people can’t stand seeing other people (especially friends) happy. Although Penny is prime when setting people to talking, teasing, philosophizing, questioning, musing, and so on, so far her action scenes are unfortunate. Each of her first three Gamache novels features a climax involving violent action, and each time it feels contrived, unbelievable, and even absurd. Luckily, such scenes are short and rare and don’t detract much from the overall excellence of her stories. Ralph Cosham reads the audiobook with his appealing voice giving every moment in the novel the perfect pace and emphasis and mood without ever showing off. This novel was a page-turning, moving, and humorous read, and I’m looking forward to the fourth Gamache story. View all my reviews
A Boy and His Dog at the End of the World by C.A. Fletcher
My rating: 4 of 5 stars Brand had stolen my dog and I had to try Griz is a boy living with his father, mother, big brother, big sister, and two terriers Jess and Jip on a small island in the Outer Hebrides near Scotland. It’s been well over a century after a “soft apocalypse” they call “the Gelding” rendered humans sterile or infertile, reducing the number of people in the world to, they calculate, less than ten thousand. Griz’s family lives by farming and fishing, supplementing their needs and interests by “going Viking” (scavenging through abandoned houses etc. on other islands) and by “Frankensteining” (cobbling usable machines etc. from various sources). There is no more electricity, and most science has been lost, though Griz’ father continues to “Leibowitz,” trying to maintain some scientific and technological knowledge. Griz had another older sister, Joy, but she fell from a cliff into the sea, which loss led to his mother falling and damaging her brain so she cannot speak. The only other people they know is a family called the Lewises who live on another island. Early in his story, Griz goes farther from home than ever before because of the visit of a stranger. Brand is a man with red boat sails, icy blue eyes, fiery red hair, a flashing smile, and a gift for telling stories. He says he’s a trader and an adventurer. But he’s also a liar and a thief, stealing Griz’ dog Jess. And because dogs are at least as rare as people (perhaps because people sterilized or poisoned them during the Gelding), and especially because Griz’s dogs are family, he recklessly sets off with only his remaining dog Jip on a quest to retrieve Jess from the thief. The novel, then, recounts Griz’ adventures in a world with a vanishingly small number of people, a world nature is reclaiming from the impressive ruins of “your” civilization, roads, bridges, buildings, towns, etc., “The sheer relentless immensity of all that had been left behind by your people.” Griz is writing his story to “you,” the imaginary friend he has conjured from a scavenged pre-Gelding photograph of a boy jumping joyfully in the air on a beach with his younger sister and their dog. So Griz regularly addresses “you,” saying things like “The plastic your people made was strong stuff,” “With so many marvels around you, did you stop seeing them?” and “Was it always safer being a boy than a girl when you were alive?” Griz likes writing (needs to write) because he likes reading: “I lose myself in stories and find myself.” Reading, he says, is another way to survive; it helps us know how we got here. And opening a new book is like opening a door and traveling far away. He often alludes to books he’s read, like The Hobbit, the Narnia books, The Count of Monte Cristo, and Asterix. His favorite genre is post-apocalypse, so he’s read novels like A Canticle for Leibowitz, The Road, The Death of Grass, and The Day of the Triffids. Griz reads such books “sideways” to find out about life when they were written. Griz is a good storyteller. He likes to drop suspense bombs into his narrative like, “That's how I ended up here alone with no one but you to talk to,” and “I did not know that one day I would feel exactly what the tree had felt like, riven in half by bolt from out of a clear sky,” and “We were just going to get some honey. Not everything sweet is good for you.” Griz also has a knack for concise and telling description, as when he sees bramble-overgrown houses like shells out of which tall trees are growing, or as when he describes what it’s like for the first time to walk in a green forest or to climb a dilapidated roller coaster track or to eat a fresh peach or to listen to violin music or to see an impossible bridge (a breathtaking arch, light and joyous, a leap made from stone). Griz’ story does what the best science fiction does: defamiliarizes our everyday world. He makes us see newly things that we take for granted like cars, music, bridges, marmalade, squirrels, songbirds, zoos, and statues. At one point, he says something like, “Having been in the ruins of your world made me feel strongly the fragility and glory of life.” That is just what Fletcher’s novel does. At times it is a little unbelievable that Griz could read SO many books. When he sees some partially submerged giant windmills, he references Don Quixote tilting at them, and I can’t imagine a boy reading that long, difficult, strange novel (especially given how hard his family has to work to survive). At times Griz seems a little too aware of how things were before the Gelding, as when he asks, “Do you think the animals [in zoos] felt like they were in prison?” In such times Fletcher the author yanks me out of an otherwise deep immersion in Griz’ world and voice and thrusts me into the here and now. Despite such authorial intrusions, Griz is a compelling character. He’s ethical. He dislikes violence. Though he does kill deer and rabbits for food, when hunting he always makes them suffer as little and as shortly as possible. Despite his tendency to do rash things (like setting off on his boat alone with Jip to pursue a man who might be dangerous), Griz is also thoughtful and sensitive. He says things like, “My once bigger now forever smaller sister” (because Joy was older than he when she died, after which he’s continued growing). And “Better a brain than a fist. A brain can hold the whole universe. A fist only what it can grab or hit what it can't.” It’s a tight, powerful, suspenseful, beautiful book. In addition to Griz, there are other memorable characters, especially Brand, Jeanne d’Arc, and Jip. And author Fletcher reads the audiobook version perfectly. The novel is a paean to dogs (alas, nary a member of the cat family is mentioned). Griz relates many great instances of canine behavior, like chasing rabbits, being affronted by squirrels, seeing or hearing or smelling things Griz can’t, and acting like Griz should be able to solve problems or be in charge. “’Things could be worse,’ I told Jip, who thumped his tail and went back to licking the rabbit.” View all my reviews
A Heart Divided by Jin Yong
My rating: 5 of 5 stars "Being a hero can't save your life" Yay! I finally got to finish Jin Yong’s influential and wonderful Legends of the Condor Heroes (1957-59), as the fourth and final volume of the classic wuxia epic, A Heart Divided, capably translated into English for the first time by Gigi Chang and Shelly Bryant (2020), recently became available on Audible. The last volume starts where the third left off: the young soulmates Guo Jing and Lotus Huang are escaping from the Iron Palm Gang, when Guo Jing carries his terribly wounded lover into a black swamp, desperate to find help for her. There they find a bizarre woman, Madam Ying the Supreme Reckoner, prematurely aged after ten years in the swamp spent mastering her own Weatherfish Slip kung fu technique and trying to solve abstruse mathematical problems, all in her effort to get revenge. “For more than a decade, Madame Yang had been curdling in shattered dreams of lost love, growing ever more bitter and spiteful.” Thus, when she sees the earnest young lovers, she wavers between helping them and relishing their plight. How should Guo Jing and Lotus interpret her recited poem about love prematurely turning the hair white like the white plumes on mandarin ducks who mate for life? Or her saying things like, “It’s human nature to stand by and do nothing. Any fool can beg.” Should Guo Jing and Lotus believe her assertion that Lotus has but three days to live and that the only person who can save her is three days’ distance? Many other questions are raised in this last volume of the epic: What will Guo Jing and Lotus do about his dilemma, knowing that they are soulmates but that he promised to marry Genghis Kahn’s daughter Khojin? What will happen when Genghis Kahn sets his sights on Guo Jing’s Song Empire in the south? Which martial master will win the twenty-year reunion competition on Mount Hua? Will everyone’s worst nemesis Viper Ouyang ever get his just deserts? Will the love triangle between Soul Light, the Hoary Urchin, and Madam Ying get resolved? Will Guo Jing return his scheming and lying blood brother Yang Kang back to “the path of righteousness”? Will he finally get revenge on the slimy Jin prince Wanyang Honlie for the murder of his parents or reunite with his first martial mentors, the Six Freaks of the South? Will he find a way to live in the world with kung fu when fearing that his pursuit of martial excellence has only brought harm to other people? The way such questions are answered is satisfying but sad, and the tone of this last volume is darker than that of the first three, because the entire epic depicts the maturing of Guo Jing and Lotus Huang from innocent teenagers full of the joy of life into more seasoned twenty-year-olds who have experienced soul damaging personal loss and hardship as well as the suffering that war wreaks on common people. Though it is a darker book than the previous three, it still contains plenty of pleasures. For example, the love between the good, optimistic, and blockheaded Guo Jing and the reckless, brilliant, and scheming Lotus is, as ever, sweet and moving (“I’d rather know no kung fu than see you hurt again”), though it does turn sad (“The more adventures we have together the more memories we'll have to share when we're apart”) and even becomes a little scary (“He wondered at the havoc that love could wreak on the heart”). There are many colorful kung fu repertoires (e.g., Dog Beating Cane, Dragon Subduing Palm, Cascading Peach Blossom Palms, Exploding Toad) and moves (e.g., Crunch Frost as Ice Freezes, Strike Grass Startle Snake, Flip the Mangey Dog Away). Many lines like, “He then let fly with a Dragon in the Field,” “He aimed at the Great Sun pressure point at the temple,” and “He launched a Hearty Laughter, hooking a finger in the corner of Viper’s mouth.” A panoply of weapons, from the expected (hands, feet, swords, spears etc.) to the exotic (metal fans, iron flutes, scribe brushes, exorcist staffs, martial phlegm, etc.). Needless to say, there’s a lot of imaginative, varied, and suspenseful action, from one-on-one kung fu duels to sieges of great cities. There are many beautiful and vivid descriptions, like “it [a finger] was as lithe and agile as a dragonfly dipping its tail into water,” and “Perched on the very brink above the jagged rocks below, she resembled a white camellia shivering in a storm.” There are many memorable aphorisms, such as “Emperors and generals are the bane of the people,” “It is in the nature of cruel and evil men to hate anyone who is their opposite,” “Virtue, loyalty, and integrity are more important than martial or literary prowess,” and “In victory or defeat, to earth we return.” There is plenty of Jin Yong’s entertainingly outrageous “sheer coincidence,” impossible chance meetings that feel perfectly inevitable. The audiobook reader Daniel York Loh reads the lines of the large and varied cast of characters with enthusiasm and distinctive personalities and moods and agendas without over-dramatizing and reads the base narration with perfect understanding, pacing, and emphasizing. His readings of all four volumes enhance and unify the texts of their three different translators. An Appendix: Notes on the Text closes the audiobook, concisely explaining things like lyric poetry, the kingdom of Dali, “rice” paper, jade, a famous translator from Sanskrit into Chinese, spirits in Hinduism and Buddhism, Genghis Kahn, Samarkand, the Confucian canon, and the author Jin Yong (1924-2018) and his works (300 million in legal sales, 1 billion in pirated). A Heart Divided is a complex novel of many genres: bildungsroman, love story, murder mystery, martial arts novel, historical novel, military novel. Perhaps most affectingly it’s an anti-war novel. The romance of Genghis Kahn unifying the Mongols and conquering a vast empire in the first volume is here starkly revealed to be a vast atrocity, as Guo Jing and Lotus travel past abandoned villages on roads lined with human skeletons. Lotus says, “I know what soldiers are like. You feast on common people.” A Heart Divided concludes Legends of the Condor Heroes (which has been called the Chinese Lord of the Rings but which is a very different classic) with a somber poem: Embers in the flames of war, Few homes left in villages poor. No rush to cross the river at dawn, The flawed moon sinks into cold sand. View all my reviews |
Jefferson Peters
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