All posts for Books in July 2012
Books: Pro Bono (Seicho Matsumoto)
It all starts when near-penniless Kiriko makes the trip to Tokyo to enlist the help of lawyer Kinzo Otsuka. Kiriko is a hapless woman trying to scrape together a legal defense for her brother; he stands accused of a murder...
By Serdar Yegulalp on 2012-07-16 10:00:00-04:00 No comments
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It all starts when near-penniless Kiriko makes the trip to Tokyo to enlist the help of lawyer Kinzo Otsuka. Kiriko is a hapless woman trying to scrape together a legal defense for her brother; he stands accused of a murder for which there seems a preponderance of solid evidence to send him to the gallows. Otsuka, on the other hand, is everything she’s not: well-heeled, surrounded by peers who appreciate his hard work, enjoying the affection of a woman who runs a classy French restaurant.
Kiriko presents herself in Otsuka’s office, minutes before he’s about to run off and enjoy a tryst with his ladyfriend, and he finds himself having to give her one piece of bad news after another. It’s not just that she can’t afford him, but that he’s also convinced she wouldn’t be getting significantly more robust legal representation by paying for a “name” lawyer. And no, he won’t take her case on pro bono. She tries to change his mind, and her single-mindedness instead leaves a impression with a journalist who’s been sniffing around for a story that might look good in the issues-and-controversy magazine he writes for. But even he has to admit the deck is stacked heavily against Kiriko’s brother—and the whole thing seems to end with a thud when the brother is convicted and dies in prison before his execution.
Books: Sakuran: Blossoms Wild (Moyoco Anno)
The anti-"Memoirs of a Geisha". Moyoco Anno's manga, source for the film of the same name, is a brassy and sassy tribute to a milieu that often only gets the sleeve-wringing weepie treatment.
By Serdar Yegulalp on 2012-07-14 10:00:00-04:00 No comments
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A while back I reviewed Sakuran, the motion picture, and I called it “the antidote to Memoirs of a Geisha”: funny, sassy, bold, and bitter, where Geisha was just wistful, sodden, and romanticized in all the wrong ways. The same good things could be said for the manga that was the source for Sakuran, now out in English thanks to—who else?—Vertical Inc., who are increasingly becoming to manga what Criterion or perhaps Kino International have been to film.
Books: A Guru Is Born (Takeshi Kitano)
"Beat" Takeshi Kitano's novel about religion and hypocrisy is a quiet little masterwork that invites multiple readings and interpretations.
By Serdar Yegulalp on 2012-07-07 10:00:00-04:00 No comments
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Takeshi Kitano (or Beat Takeshi to his legion of fans) nominally gets notice as a filmmaker, but he's written a bevy of books — some fiction, some non- — slowly finding their way into English. Boy was a good taste of his talent; A Guru Is Born is even more ambitious and rewarding.
Books: The Flowers of Evil, Vol. 2 (Shuzo Oshimi)
Further adventures in antisocial dating, in this sharp little psych-thriller series.
By Serdar Yegulalp on 2012-07-06 10:00:00-04:00 No comments
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The second volume of this mix of antisocial-kid thriller and outsider-kid romance ratchets tension further as bookworm Kasuga is pulled all the more violently between the innocent girl he's had a crush on (Saeki) and the sociopath girl who's yanking his puppet strings (Nakamura). Against all odds, Kasuga manages to take Saeki out on something resembling a normal date ... even while the whole time the poor kid's wearing Saeki's gym clothes under his own, as part of his contract with Nakamura. In the end he collapses all the more definitively on the side of the devils, although how he does this or to what end I won't ruin here — seeing how it unfolds is a major part of the book's substance. Further proof that psychological torment is far more effective (and affecting) than the physical kind, although one wonders if in the end Oshimi's going to be best known for introducing a new subgenre of manga for American readers: mental-torture-porn. But his yarn-spinning is tight and deft enough to make concerns like that secondary.
