Ginkyuushin (God with the Silver Bow)

Author: BELNE
Imprint: Asuka Comics DX
Publisher: Kadokawa Shoten
ISBN04-852315-5

Reviewed by Jeanne

Here we have the Reign of Terror as seen by Belne. This is all very complicated, since it involves both Belne and St. Juste. OK, let's do the Cliff Notes rundown on them both.

Belne the mangaka was born in 1955 which means yes she was actually alive during those musically heady days of the 60's and 70's she writes about- the Stones, the Beatles, the Doors, Led Zeppelin and David Bowie. Her main series, Belne's Love, is set in London during that period. In it we have a dark and enigmatic figure, a French singer called Souvenir d'Alexandria Belne, whose voice fails him. He intends to give his stage name, Belne, to his friend and we assume lover, the popular French singer Gardlud Réamont. (I am not responsible for that Romanization: the mangaka is. The last name is clearly Léamont and the first name I think is her misinterpretation of Gertrude. She knows it's a woman's name; she doesn't care.) Gardlud- Gardie for short thank god- began singing in Montmartre but had his greatest success in London. What's to be remembered about him is that he's inspired by David Bowie. Got that? OK.

One day Souvenir shows up to say he's found someone else to pass the name on to, sorry. A young Englishman called Henry, who much prefers to be called Belne. Gardie eventually runs across Belne himself, realizes he's indeed a musical genius, and introduces him in the course of his own act. Belne is 6'8, has waves of golden hair past his shoulders, and is Led Zeppelin's Robert Plant by any other name. Gardie/Bowie and Belne/Plant become lovers. The 80's were a more reticent decade than ours. When people wanted to do RPS they changed the names.

Spanner in the works: Belne spends a night at a male brothel called Flat Luscious, in the bed but not the arms of a prostitute called Aldow, who charges 2000 pounds a night. Evidently people think Aldow is worth it. I won't tell you the very complicated reasons why Aldow ends up as a prostitute, but it involves stealing the role of Salome in an underground production from the young actress who was going to play her. If you have no trouble with that you'll have no trouble with whores who charge something like $5,000 a night in today's currency. Belne sees some of Aldow's sketches, realizes he's an artistic genius, and rescues him from his life of sin, well-paid though it is. All the money goes to buy flowers for the actress' grave anyway.

Aldow, who lives to angst- he has a wobbly mouth- falls in love with Belne but Belne is in love with Gardie, and vice versa. Souvenir is in love with Gardie too. It takes a superior mind to make David Bowie the lust object over Robert Plant, but Belne-the-mangaka has a superior mind.

She also likes to put her characters into A/Us such as Zapateado de Negro. In God of the Silver Bow she sets them in the French Revolution and makes Belne into the Angel of Death, Louis Antoine Léon de Saint-Just. Uhh- and she writes that name in full a *lot*, even though French phonics and Japanese have nothing to say to each other and it makes for a lot of katakana.

St. Just was Robespierre's right-hand man in inciting and carrying out the Reign of Terror. He was probably some sort of psychopath, but what really matters for our and the Japanese's purposes was that he was bee-yoo-di-ful. Everyone said he was bee-yoo-di-ful, though you can't prove it to me by the surviving portraits like the one over there. No matter. He was called the Angel of Death, he was gorgeous, he died young-- guillotined, yes, along with Robespierre. The famous canard that Japanese culture cannot resist a pretty boy who dies young is alas not a canard. Mishima Yukio was a symptom, not an aberration. In fact, so deeply-seated is the aesthetic, that any young man who dies young is ipso facto considered beautiful. (Have you seen that photograph of Okita Soushi? No bishie he.)

Aldow the painter appears in the title work of the manga, an artist who works in the atelier of the famous Revolutionary painter David. Aldow sees a beautiful boy standing in the crowd by the guillotine and draws him as Hyakinthos, the lover of the god Apollo who was accidentally slain by him (and whose blood became the hyacinth flower.) Aldow's dilemma is to find a model for the god, and he does: Belne/ Plant/ Saint-Just. But this is a different Apollo: not the god of light and literature but the other, older aspect of Apollo, the one who shoots arrows of pestilence and ruin in order to cleanse what is corrupt and filthy.

The rest of the volume is about St.Just and Robespierre. Robespierre is played by Gardie/Bowie, which is rather more than that ugly little demagogue deserves. He is seduced, literally, by St.Just into implementing the organized massacre that was the Reign of Terror. (For some perspective here: the Reign of Terror lasted a little over ten months and killed about 8,000 people. The Rwandan massacres lasted about 100 days and killed 800,000. One might argue that Robespierre wasn't even trying.) But Saint-Just in turn is the puppet of a dark mysterious and apparently immortal stranger (played by Souvenir d'Alexandria.) He has some mythic mystic plan whereby Saint-Just is identified as John the Baptist making ready the world for the advent of Christ who is Robespierre, except that Robespierre's Lamb of God then becomes Death on his pale horse from the Apocalypse and then morphs into Christ with his crown of thorns. I'm enchanted when the Japanese get their hands on the resonant images of Catholic symbolism: with no notion of their underlying system (and I strongly suspect, with no idea that religious symbolism has or can have an underlying system) they throw everything together into a Pythonesque mish-mash that's as visually powerful as it is theologically reprehensible. (I return the favour when I write about Buddhism. It all comes out in the wash.)

And anyway I suspect the whole Saint-Just = John the Baptist equation ultimately rests on the fact that both John and Saint-Just were beheaded. I'm also morally certain that Belne imprinted on Beardsley's illustrations for Wilde's Salome, cause man does she like drawing severed heads and man does she have a thing about Salome. Probably Beardsley is what's behind this whole book, in fact. The image is what matters in Japan, always, not the substance: or rather, image is substance and what a thing looks like is what it is. So Robert Plant is John the Baptist because, well, he looks good as John the Baptist.