utterly charming
30 Aug 2010 06:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kaigouA few months ago I was reading an article on Gegege no Kitaro, or more precisely an article on the first live-action film adaptation of the classic, and I figured, this is a classic. I should see this. All I can say is: it's so endearingly charming, with just enough kookiness. Scary enough to frighten the under-four-foot crowd, but never sustaining that scariness long enough to do more than give them a slight jump, and almost always followed up with either humor or similar to make it clear the good guys are still good and in one piece... but with enough Shinto-elements that the bad guys don't get their comeuppance in the Western tradition, but are forgiven and given a chance to start over. (I'd say the resolution is a deus ex machina, but more like a deus ex vulpina.)
Okay, okay, so there's a good-sized dose of overacting, but hey, this is a kid's feature -- but it's also got what has to be one of the largest budgets for CGI that I've seen in a Japanese film. Really, it's up there with Pixar/Hollywood levels, spare no expense, even if that meant purchasing extra sets just for some of the actors to chew with wild abandon. And chew, they did! But still, so much fun. No, the acting is not Oscar-level, but -- kid's film! -- and enough of the actors are clearly having fun along the way, and there are enough nods here and there to classic yokai that it's almost like spot-the-cameo.
(My personal favorite was the Tengu King and his guards -- and when the tengu police come for Kitaro is an awesome scene.)
After that, I tracked down the sequel -- Gegege no Kitaro and the Millennium Curse -- which is a slightly darker storyline that also tried to cram in as many yokai as possible (past the point where the budget could CGI all of it, it seems), but hey. Again, kid's movie, and one point in its favor is that the female characters hold their own better than I'd expected; even Sunakake Baba takes out her share of the bad guys.
Then we get to the last quarter of the movie, and suddenly, it's... I have no idea. Some bald guy with a head like, well, not unlike Schlitizie (one of the stars of Freaks, if you know your truly classic cult films). Though the Kitaro-version is more like the other end of the spectrum: a permanent 90-year-old instead of a permanent 3-year-old, with a well-rubbed head. Or, not:
And per this site, the character in question is:
Gegege no Kitaro is crammed full of such creatures, from Old Crybaby to Wanudo (who's also a regular in Jigoku Shoujo), and the second movie has cameos from Tanuki... who are played as mischievous and up-to-no-good as the stories. (Good thing the chief Tanuki has his wife to keep him in line with a series of swift kicks.)
The other note about Nurarihyon in the movie is that, well... let's face it. Most of the actors are either lightweight -- like Wentz, who's quite pretty but most of his acting chops seem to consist of, well, being pretty -- or they're heavyweights who are clearly enjoying the chance to overact like all-get-out. Like Toshiyuki Nishida, who plays the wheel-carrying Wanudo -- that actor's been nominated for the Japanese equivalent of an Oscar. Ten times. And he's won twice!
But, for the most part, it's a lot of fun, if you don't expect any really heavy performance skills. Then you get to the second movie, about halfway through, and suddenly you have this guy.
Me: Look, it's the one actor with some serious chops.
CP: How can you tell?
Me: He's the only one who's not eating the scenery.
Despite all the makeup and prosthetics and the formal dress, the scenes with Nurarihyon gave the same feel as, say, having Patrick Steward make a cameo in a movie like, oh, one of the Home Alone travesties -- and play his part seriously. It lends a sudden credence and dignity to a movie that had, for the most part, not had much of either up to that point.
Well, it's Ken Ogata in his very last motion-picture role. No wonder.
(I should note that they did the same in the first movie, having Nakamura Shidō II -- another Oscar-winner and a renowned kabuki actor as well -- playing the Tengu king. And it's true that Shidō does have a definite gravity that he brings to the role, unperturbed by the frenetic displays from everyone else on the screen, the Tengu king still doesn't get enough of a role to truly affect the movie the way Nurarihyon's character does.)
Anyway, it's entirely because of Gegege no Kitaro that I even thought to check out a new series, Nurarihyon no Mago (a name that is truly a tongue-twister for a non-speaker, so I've begun using NuraMago instead, sheesh, that ra+ri combination is harsh on the non-rolling tongue), a manga by Hiroshi Shiibashi. And in that coincidental way that happens, the voice actor who plays Nurarihyon the Elder -- Chikao Ohtsuka -- was also the voice of Nezumi Otoko in the original Gegege no Kitaro animated series, in '68 and '71. (Seriously, the man was born in '29. He's been voice acting since Tokyo was in knee-pants.)
Story-wise, Rikuo Nura (the grandson of the eponymous Nurarihyon) is definitely one of the quasi-descendants of Kitaro: not entirely yokai, not entirely human. Both have an assortment of yokai and human friends; both seem to struggle with a disconnect to the human world by virtue of their respective yokai heritages; both have genuine affection for humans despite human prejudice and fear of the unknown/yokai world; both exert themselves to protect the weak or helpless. A major difference is that Rikuo has the potential for an 'out' that Kitaro lacks; Shiibashi's world-building includes the notion that one may only inherit a part of yokai heritage (in Rikuo's case, he's only one-quarter yokai), but that an active choice may effectively cause one to become full yokai.
Ultimately, Kitaro's story sits more in the storytelling tradition of the crossroads character, the mystical half-of-both, full-of-neither character who lends a helping hand to either party, as needed. Rikuo's story is more modern, being superficially in the category of what I call shoebox-stories: the character begins the story determined to live free of the shoebox, but eventually accepts (and usually comes to feel pride in) that shoebox.
Slight tangent, but important to note: the shoebox is presented as a less-damaging shoebox when it's a young male cisgendered protagonist, whose conflict seems to mostly revolve around whether he'll accept his inheritance -- one that invariably denotes some kind of power of rulership, if of a sort unwelcome by the adolescent male. The more you move away from the heterosexual, dominant-culture, cisgender, able-bodied male, the more constrictive the shoebox becomes and the more damaging the story, in terms of what it tells readers: the girl who defies her family and declares she can do it herself does, in the end, fall in love, get married, and talk about babies. The boy who cross-dresses eventually accepts that he must put away the dresses (as though they're toys of childhood or 'just a phase') and Become An Adult, living in that shoebox.
The shoebox is the heteronormative social expectation. To generalize really broadly (but still, I think, with some grain of truth) Asian societies hold significant filial pressures, such that the Asian shoebox isn't necessarily social expectation but is predominantly familial expectation. In Her Majesty's Dog, society says Amane (the family heir) should act and be a certain way, but her family's expectations outweigh society's. The same goes for Rikuo: society, even within the text, would expect him to want to be a (human) salaryman with family and household, but his familial expectations -- to accept his role/existence as yokai -- unquestionably trumps society's.
I'm frequently struck by the fact that in Western books/shows/movies, the family expectations are synonymous with social, or perhaps it's that in the absence of significant familial rules, social expectations suffice. In Asian stories, a character may potentially go completely against social expectations -- becoming celibate, refusing promotions, accepting unknown fiance, leaving school -- but it's justified if the familial expectations are fulfilled. Society's shoebox is breakable; the family shoebox is not. (I wonder: if we looked at Western stories, would we find the opposite: that characters can break the family shoebox easily but pay the greatest price in breaking the social shoebox?)
Okay, end tangent. Here's what I've been thinking in the wake of Gegege no Kitaro and now while watching/reading Nurarihyon no Mago: that the former is coming from a base of folklore-history into the present, while the latter uses the present as the basis for the credentials of the past.
Kitaro is, in the end, squarely on the side of yokai culture (even as he ostensibly has one foot in human culture by dint of his mother). Rikuo has a more balanced point between the two, but generally he's far more involved on a daily level in human culture; he attends school, has classmate-friends, goes on trips with his friends, hangs out with them, worries about exams, and makes every attempt (at least at story's start) to suppress his yokai heritage/aspects. If Kitaro is the historical character -- at 350 years old, mind you, even if he looks like a prepubescent boy -- who wants a connection with the modern world, Rikuo is the modern character struggling with ties that link him to a historical world.
Shiibashi has clearly done his homework on the traditional yokai, though here and there he throws in a few new ones (and a volume or two into the series, even invited readers to come up with modern yokai for him to include in the story). But what's particularly intriguing to me is that Shiibashi occasionally incorporates a much older style of illustrations sometimes, which hark back to the original bestiaries for yokai. It's that, and that for emphasis, he'll use a style reminiscent of brushwork. Like this:
...or this:
I included more than just the brushwork-style frames in question, to show that the rest of the time the illustration-work is solidly modern comic-style. Shiibashi does decent backgrounds, with an eye for perspective, a bit of shading here and there, but the human faces are mostly variations on each other. He (she?) isn't quite at the point of varying every single face, but there's enough to get by, and the line-work is usually pretty clean, not too fussy or busy... and then whammo, ink-brush work that borders on sloppy and energetic. Well, if you didn't know how brush-work can look, I suppose.
Or we just go with the most explicit example of all, when Shiibashi makes an obvious connection to this:
with this, which is the style of Shiibashi's coverwork, and is also part of the opening segment of every episode:
(click to see larger version)
When I say NuraMago "uses the present as the basis for the credentials of the past", I mean that on several levels, and not just in the sense of Rikuo's positioning or of the use of yokai. I mean in terms of manga itself, however pretentious that may sound. This is not a tangent, by the way. There is a point buried in here. Somewhere.
One of the major points of contention in Japanese animanga is the issue of US influence. Even pre-WWII, animated shorts like Disney films were already making headway in early-modern Japan; after the war, animation and manga exploded in popularity. The oft-repeated debate about "whether or not they look white" (in animanga styles) has partial roots in the fact that many of the earliest mangaka were tapping into, and adapting, US comics-styles. I won't go into the details here (but I can tell you the names of several books to read that do, if you're interested) so we'll just leave it at this: there is a clear and overwhelming influence, in the first half of the 20th century, of movement from a US-dominated animation/comics industry and into Japan.
Now, set against that importation of US-style animation/comics, the other half of the argument in Japan is that in fact, the US-led style was not the root nor the biggest influence of Japanese animanga, but that it in fact was home-grown. Outside of the yokai bestiaries (per the image above), there are also a handful of illustrated texts like the Chōjū-jinbutsu-giga or Emakimono. We'll set aside the counter-arguments about whether it makes a difference as to the text's actual audience (temple-only or general public), and give equal weight to this argument.
Many mangaka (and fans) have used the pro-Japanese side of the argument as a way to gain extra "cultural points", as it were, by declaiming a Japanese-only origin before, above, and beyond any external-created import. Humanity does this all over the place, from what I've seen: point to Something Old, and say that you're inheriting or continuing that object, style, or approach, and your right-now can take on a veneer of credibility due to age. Longest-running festival in the country! Established c1889! Oldest tailor-shop in the city! Family-owned for three hundred years! (I know I'm not the only one who'll scoff at signage that says "Established..." and has a date only three years ago.) Same concept as saying that it must be true, because you read it in a Really Old Book.
(Although now we have the flipside: it must be true, you read it On The Internet. So, either very old, or brand-new just-posted hot-off-the-pixels. No inbetweens, human culture!)
To get back on target, if you think of the argument as going like this: "there are old ur-manga scrolls" leads to "so modern-manga is a continuation of that", then the right-brained/visual version would be that the ur-manga is the foundation and the modern-manga is the upper story.
What tickles me about NuraMago is that it's almost like Shiibashi flips that visual on its head. I don't know whether it's intentional -- though I do wonder if perhaps that argument (and the resultant exposure to the common person of these archaic story-scrolls and yokai bestiaries) may've been part of the germination process for Rikuo's story -- but maybe it doesn't matter, anyway. Maybe it's enough to see the flip and be enchanted by it, that instead of using "ur-manga scrolls" as basis for the story, instead Shiibachi is using modern-manga as the foundation for the ur-manga.
Hrm, perhaps I should put it this way: where some mangaka-arguments I've seen use the ur-manga as justification for Japanese modern-animanga development (old --> gives credence to --> new), Shiibashi does the reverse: new --> gives credence to --> old. Moving the entirety of the yokai bestiary-like tradition into the modern age, and especially with a main character who (unlike Kitaro) wants to be part of the modern age, Shiibashi is dragging the that-was-then into the this-is-now.
Repetitions of folklore superstitions often contain the unspoken attitude that "maybe once there were oni, ayakashi -- or pixies and ogres and trolls, depending on the culture -- but not in this 'enlightened' modern age." Either this is because such creatures are extinct, or because we modern people aren't so foolish as to believe in things that go bump-in-the-dark. Incidentally, there's an irony in the term 'enlightened' when speaking of things like yokai, and Shiibashi doesn't miss the fact that as Japan becomes modernized -- 'enlightened' -- that the result is that the nights are less dark, even literally. As creatures of the dark, this lessening of the night's darkness is effectively a reduction in those creatures' ecological habitat.
To tell a story that posits that there are dark-creatures living in the modern-day world is -- like a lot of urban fantasy -- to create some kind of continuity between the superstitious, darker-world, and the modern artificially-light world. That's pretty obvious, once you get to know the genres (in any culture) that play with the concept of the non-religious supernatural. But in the case of work like Shiibashi's, it seems to me there's also a quiet nod (possibly even amusement) to the circular effect of basing a new manga on some of the texts that are argued to be the basis of, well, new manga.
The last few paragraphs aren't neatly argued, are even more disjointed than usual, because I kept interrupting the writing to go do woodwork... so I guess I'll either revise later or we can all do the happier usual and discuss it in comments. Besides, this is actually just a stop on the way to where I eventually ended up while pondering this, but I'll save that for the next post.
Okay, okay, so there's a good-sized dose of overacting, but hey, this is a kid's feature -- but it's also got what has to be one of the largest budgets for CGI that I've seen in a Japanese film. Really, it's up there with Pixar/Hollywood levels, spare no expense, even if that meant purchasing extra sets just for some of the actors to chew with wild abandon. And chew, they did! But still, so much fun. No, the acting is not Oscar-level, but -- kid's film! -- and enough of the actors are clearly having fun along the way, and there are enough nods here and there to classic yokai that it's almost like spot-the-cameo.
(My personal favorite was the Tengu King and his guards -- and when the tengu police come for Kitaro is an awesome scene.)
After that, I tracked down the sequel -- Gegege no Kitaro and the Millennium Curse -- which is a slightly darker storyline that also tried to cram in as many yokai as possible (past the point where the budget could CGI all of it, it seems), but hey. Again, kid's movie, and one point in its favor is that the female characters hold their own better than I'd expected; even Sunakake Baba takes out her share of the bad guys.
Then we get to the last quarter of the movie, and suddenly, it's... I have no idea. Some bald guy with a head like, well, not unlike Schlitizie (one of the stars of Freaks, if you know your truly classic cult films). Though the Kitaro-version is more like the other end of the spectrum: a permanent 90-year-old instead of a permanent 3-year-old, with a well-rubbed head. Or, not:
And per this site, the character in question is:
...Nurarihyon, pictured here as as a well-dressed old man with an elongated bald head. Ancient Okayama prefecture legends describe Nurarihyon (lit. "slippery strange") as a marine creature found in the Seto Inland Sea, often seen bobbing around on the surface of the water like some sort of giant jellyfish or octopus. Nurarihyon eludes capture by diving underwater when people approach to investigate.
In the Edo period, Nurarihyon came to be known as a mysterious old man with the uncanny ability to sneak into homes and "take over." When the residents of a home encounter him sitting around drinking tea, they are unable throw him out and cannot help but treat him as the head of the household. Nurarihyon is said to be a highly respected figure in the world of yokai.
Gegege no Kitaro is crammed full of such creatures, from Old Crybaby to Wanudo (who's also a regular in Jigoku Shoujo), and the second movie has cameos from Tanuki... who are played as mischievous and up-to-no-good as the stories. (Good thing the chief Tanuki has his wife to keep him in line with a series of swift kicks.)
The other note about Nurarihyon in the movie is that, well... let's face it. Most of the actors are either lightweight -- like Wentz, who's quite pretty but most of his acting chops seem to consist of, well, being pretty -- or they're heavyweights who are clearly enjoying the chance to overact like all-get-out. Like Toshiyuki Nishida, who plays the wheel-carrying Wanudo -- that actor's been nominated for the Japanese equivalent of an Oscar. Ten times. And he's won twice!
But, for the most part, it's a lot of fun, if you don't expect any really heavy performance skills. Then you get to the second movie, about halfway through, and suddenly you have this guy.
Me: Look, it's the one actor with some serious chops.
CP: How can you tell?
Me: He's the only one who's not eating the scenery.
Despite all the makeup and prosthetics and the formal dress, the scenes with Nurarihyon gave the same feel as, say, having Patrick Steward make a cameo in a movie like, oh, one of the Home Alone travesties -- and play his part seriously. It lends a sudden credence and dignity to a movie that had, for the most part, not had much of either up to that point.
Well, it's Ken Ogata in his very last motion-picture role. No wonder.
(I should note that they did the same in the first movie, having Nakamura Shidō II -- another Oscar-winner and a renowned kabuki actor as well -- playing the Tengu king. And it's true that Shidō does have a definite gravity that he brings to the role, unperturbed by the frenetic displays from everyone else on the screen, the Tengu king still doesn't get enough of a role to truly affect the movie the way Nurarihyon's character does.)
Anyway, it's entirely because of Gegege no Kitaro that I even thought to check out a new series, Nurarihyon no Mago (a name that is truly a tongue-twister for a non-speaker, so I've begun using NuraMago instead, sheesh, that ra+ri combination is harsh on the non-rolling tongue), a manga by Hiroshi Shiibashi. And in that coincidental way that happens, the voice actor who plays Nurarihyon the Elder -- Chikao Ohtsuka -- was also the voice of Nezumi Otoko in the original Gegege no Kitaro animated series, in '68 and '71. (Seriously, the man was born in '29. He's been voice acting since Tokyo was in knee-pants.)
Story-wise, Rikuo Nura (the grandson of the eponymous Nurarihyon) is definitely one of the quasi-descendants of Kitaro: not entirely yokai, not entirely human. Both have an assortment of yokai and human friends; both seem to struggle with a disconnect to the human world by virtue of their respective yokai heritages; both have genuine affection for humans despite human prejudice and fear of the unknown/yokai world; both exert themselves to protect the weak or helpless. A major difference is that Rikuo has the potential for an 'out' that Kitaro lacks; Shiibashi's world-building includes the notion that one may only inherit a part of yokai heritage (in Rikuo's case, he's only one-quarter yokai), but that an active choice may effectively cause one to become full yokai.
Ultimately, Kitaro's story sits more in the storytelling tradition of the crossroads character, the mystical half-of-both, full-of-neither character who lends a helping hand to either party, as needed. Rikuo's story is more modern, being superficially in the category of what I call shoebox-stories: the character begins the story determined to live free of the shoebox, but eventually accepts (and usually comes to feel pride in) that shoebox.
Slight tangent, but important to note: the shoebox is presented as a less-damaging shoebox when it's a young male cisgendered protagonist, whose conflict seems to mostly revolve around whether he'll accept his inheritance -- one that invariably denotes some kind of power of rulership, if of a sort unwelcome by the adolescent male. The more you move away from the heterosexual, dominant-culture, cisgender, able-bodied male, the more constrictive the shoebox becomes and the more damaging the story, in terms of what it tells readers: the girl who defies her family and declares she can do it herself does, in the end, fall in love, get married, and talk about babies. The boy who cross-dresses eventually accepts that he must put away the dresses (as though they're toys of childhood or 'just a phase') and Become An Adult, living in that shoebox.
The shoebox is the heteronormative social expectation. To generalize really broadly (but still, I think, with some grain of truth) Asian societies hold significant filial pressures, such that the Asian shoebox isn't necessarily social expectation but is predominantly familial expectation. In Her Majesty's Dog, society says Amane (the family heir) should act and be a certain way, but her family's expectations outweigh society's. The same goes for Rikuo: society, even within the text, would expect him to want to be a (human) salaryman with family and household, but his familial expectations -- to accept his role/existence as yokai -- unquestionably trumps society's.
I'm frequently struck by the fact that in Western books/shows/movies, the family expectations are synonymous with social, or perhaps it's that in the absence of significant familial rules, social expectations suffice. In Asian stories, a character may potentially go completely against social expectations -- becoming celibate, refusing promotions, accepting unknown fiance, leaving school -- but it's justified if the familial expectations are fulfilled. Society's shoebox is breakable; the family shoebox is not. (I wonder: if we looked at Western stories, would we find the opposite: that characters can break the family shoebox easily but pay the greatest price in breaking the social shoebox?)
Okay, end tangent. Here's what I've been thinking in the wake of Gegege no Kitaro and now while watching/reading Nurarihyon no Mago: that the former is coming from a base of folklore-history into the present, while the latter uses the present as the basis for the credentials of the past.
Kitaro is, in the end, squarely on the side of yokai culture (even as he ostensibly has one foot in human culture by dint of his mother). Rikuo has a more balanced point between the two, but generally he's far more involved on a daily level in human culture; he attends school, has classmate-friends, goes on trips with his friends, hangs out with them, worries about exams, and makes every attempt (at least at story's start) to suppress his yokai heritage/aspects. If Kitaro is the historical character -- at 350 years old, mind you, even if he looks like a prepubescent boy -- who wants a connection with the modern world, Rikuo is the modern character struggling with ties that link him to a historical world.
Shiibashi has clearly done his homework on the traditional yokai, though here and there he throws in a few new ones (and a volume or two into the series, even invited readers to come up with modern yokai for him to include in the story). But what's particularly intriguing to me is that Shiibashi occasionally incorporates a much older style of illustrations sometimes, which hark back to the original bestiaries for yokai. It's that, and that for emphasis, he'll use a style reminiscent of brushwork. Like this:
...or this:
I included more than just the brushwork-style frames in question, to show that the rest of the time the illustration-work is solidly modern comic-style. Shiibashi does decent backgrounds, with an eye for perspective, a bit of shading here and there, but the human faces are mostly variations on each other. He (she?) isn't quite at the point of varying every single face, but there's enough to get by, and the line-work is usually pretty clean, not too fussy or busy... and then whammo, ink-brush work that borders on sloppy and energetic. Well, if you didn't know how brush-work can look, I suppose.
Or we just go with the most explicit example of all, when Shiibashi makes an obvious connection to this:
with this, which is the style of Shiibashi's coverwork, and is also part of the opening segment of every episode:
(click to see larger version)
When I say NuraMago "uses the present as the basis for the credentials of the past", I mean that on several levels, and not just in the sense of Rikuo's positioning or of the use of yokai. I mean in terms of manga itself, however pretentious that may sound. This is not a tangent, by the way. There is a point buried in here. Somewhere.
One of the major points of contention in Japanese animanga is the issue of US influence. Even pre-WWII, animated shorts like Disney films were already making headway in early-modern Japan; after the war, animation and manga exploded in popularity. The oft-repeated debate about "whether or not they look white" (in animanga styles) has partial roots in the fact that many of the earliest mangaka were tapping into, and adapting, US comics-styles. I won't go into the details here (but I can tell you the names of several books to read that do, if you're interested) so we'll just leave it at this: there is a clear and overwhelming influence, in the first half of the 20th century, of movement from a US-dominated animation/comics industry and into Japan.
Now, set against that importation of US-style animation/comics, the other half of the argument in Japan is that in fact, the US-led style was not the root nor the biggest influence of Japanese animanga, but that it in fact was home-grown. Outside of the yokai bestiaries (per the image above), there are also a handful of illustrated texts like the Chōjū-jinbutsu-giga or Emakimono. We'll set aside the counter-arguments about whether it makes a difference as to the text's actual audience (temple-only or general public), and give equal weight to this argument.
Many mangaka (and fans) have used the pro-Japanese side of the argument as a way to gain extra "cultural points", as it were, by declaiming a Japanese-only origin before, above, and beyond any external-created import. Humanity does this all over the place, from what I've seen: point to Something Old, and say that you're inheriting or continuing that object, style, or approach, and your right-now can take on a veneer of credibility due to age. Longest-running festival in the country! Established c1889! Oldest tailor-shop in the city! Family-owned for three hundred years! (I know I'm not the only one who'll scoff at signage that says "Established..." and has a date only three years ago.) Same concept as saying that it must be true, because you read it in a Really Old Book.
(Although now we have the flipside: it must be true, you read it On The Internet. So, either very old, or brand-new just-posted hot-off-the-pixels. No inbetweens, human culture!)
To get back on target, if you think of the argument as going like this: "there are old ur-manga scrolls" leads to "so modern-manga is a continuation of that", then the right-brained/visual version would be that the ur-manga is the foundation and the modern-manga is the upper story.
What tickles me about NuraMago is that it's almost like Shiibashi flips that visual on its head. I don't know whether it's intentional -- though I do wonder if perhaps that argument (and the resultant exposure to the common person of these archaic story-scrolls and yokai bestiaries) may've been part of the germination process for Rikuo's story -- but maybe it doesn't matter, anyway. Maybe it's enough to see the flip and be enchanted by it, that instead of using "ur-manga scrolls" as basis for the story, instead Shiibachi is using modern-manga as the foundation for the ur-manga.
Hrm, perhaps I should put it this way: where some mangaka-arguments I've seen use the ur-manga as justification for Japanese modern-animanga development (old --> gives credence to --> new), Shiibashi does the reverse: new --> gives credence to --> old. Moving the entirety of the yokai bestiary-like tradition into the modern age, and especially with a main character who (unlike Kitaro) wants to be part of the modern age, Shiibashi is dragging the that-was-then into the this-is-now.
Repetitions of folklore superstitions often contain the unspoken attitude that "maybe once there were oni, ayakashi -- or pixies and ogres and trolls, depending on the culture -- but not in this 'enlightened' modern age." Either this is because such creatures are extinct, or because we modern people aren't so foolish as to believe in things that go bump-in-the-dark. Incidentally, there's an irony in the term 'enlightened' when speaking of things like yokai, and Shiibashi doesn't miss the fact that as Japan becomes modernized -- 'enlightened' -- that the result is that the nights are less dark, even literally. As creatures of the dark, this lessening of the night's darkness is effectively a reduction in those creatures' ecological habitat.
To tell a story that posits that there are dark-creatures living in the modern-day world is -- like a lot of urban fantasy -- to create some kind of continuity between the superstitious, darker-world, and the modern artificially-light world. That's pretty obvious, once you get to know the genres (in any culture) that play with the concept of the non-religious supernatural. But in the case of work like Shiibashi's, it seems to me there's also a quiet nod (possibly even amusement) to the circular effect of basing a new manga on some of the texts that are argued to be the basis of, well, new manga.
The last few paragraphs aren't neatly argued, are even more disjointed than usual, because I kept interrupting the writing to go do woodwork... so I guess I'll either revise later or we can all do the happier usual and discuss it in comments. Besides, this is actually just a stop on the way to where I eventually ended up while pondering this, but I'll save that for the next post.
no subject
Date: 31 Aug 2010 02:09 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 8 Sep 2010 03:50 pm (UTC)(Also, both movies do take deus ex machina to its absolute extreme, so if that bugs you...)
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Date: 2 Sep 2010 12:00 am (UTC)I haven't seen the Gegege movies yet, but I was watching the kids TV show when it came out about two years ago. Raw..since no one at the time was really translating them. Thankfully since it was for smaller kids it was easy enough to fallow the basics of whats going on. But it still had a decently darker side to it, like a lot of japanese ghost stories, fables and the like seem to have.
Now onto Mago, when my friend first started talking about it I was "A Youkai series in Weekly Jump...and its good?!" I ate it up. I love it. While it has a lot of typical shounen things going on, I did like that it wasn't completely (or at times at all) focused on a potential love interest, as well as lack of scantily clad girls running about. Its focused on the mythos and Rikuo's journey.
With the demise of One manga I now need to find a good place to read Mago as I do find my self really missing it.
Since I have tried my best to read as many Japanese fairy tales and ghost stories as I can get my grubby little hands on, watching gegege and reading Mago is like doing an eye-spy of Youkai.
God I wish we where closer, I don't have enough people around that like these two series, and I really do adore them. I just love my ghost stories far too much.
-Gina
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Date: 8 Sep 2010 03:55 pm (UTC)I guess I've been reading different shonen series, because I was startled to find there's any love interest at all (other than a vague pre-adolescent crush that's almost always a three-way). While the quasi-love interest is low-key, what I do find interesting is that Rikuo's journey is echoed again by the telling of his grandfather's story, which I thought was a great way to show the outcome/existence of romance without overburdening the existing story (plus it also underscores the message that yokai-human relations aren't just possible, but can be very loving and long-lasting).
I get my NuraMago through Mangatraders, though that does require downloading, or you can just do a search for it on baka-updates. There are two groups scanning it, and both have forums where they post the latest.
The amusing thing is that the eventual result of reading NuraMago has led me into reading manhwa, partly out of frustration at not finding more stories like NuraMago, and partly out of curiosity in terms of the cultural contrasts. But still, not quite the same cheerful zest as NuraMago, at least from what I've found so far.