(Youto Chinkon no Uta) Tokyo Requiem 2

Author: IMAI Shuuhou
Artist: KASAI Ayumi
Imprint: Asuka Comics DX
Publisher: Kadokawa Shoten
ISBN4-04-853443-2

Reviewed by Jeanne

Mibu now takes requests from people in need of help. In a cross between the old Mission: Impossible and the old Hissatsu Shigotonin (Edo commoners by day, assassins by night), Mibu is informed of his next assignment by going into a photo booth and getting his client's name on the screen, backgrounded by the frontispiece of the Malleus Maleficarum (The Hammer of Witches, a piece of nastiness produced by two hysteric Germans in the late 15th century oh well.) In rather more a Hissatsu spirit, his first client is a homeless man who lives in one of Shinjuku's parks and who's worried about what happened to an old friend of his, recently deceased under a railway bridge. What happened to him after he died, that is. The second story, rather more upscale, happens in the art section of an advertising agency. I have hopes of a certain character who appears therein, a cameraman with an unusual interest in the occult history of Tokyo. He seems a good bet for a sidekick should the series ever continue. (He also mentions that one of my usual tromping grounds in Ikebukuro was a crossroads in Edo time where people were often murdered by samurai going out to test their new swords. Things you never knew.)

This time, opposed to Mibu, we have a police inspector with the Shinjuku department, Mikuriya Reiji. (Am I supposed to worry about the fact that his last name means Honourable Kitchen? Probably not. There are odder names about.) Mikuriya is a rationalist, a profiler, who believes that criminals always manifest the same psychic pattern in their crimes. He looks, for the record, like a less bulky and rather more constipated version of Kizuna's Masa, for those that like the type. And in amongst these strange events and serial murders that have been happening with odd frequency in Shinjuku, witnesses always report the same young man in a black coat hmmm...

There are lots of demons in modern Tokyo, because traditional Japanese demons are a little different from the maleficent servants of our own Prince of Darkness. Half of them are, and have always been, psychological in origin. Emotions let loose in their primal form. Repressed anger, personal shame, fear of death, even natural outrage at the wrongs done to others- all these beget demons in a Buddhist world. That's the other basic difference. In Buddhism all that we think of as real is an illusion. Attachment to this unreal world is an error. Demons are born from this mistaken attachment, the strong feelings we have about things that don't really exist. Like pairing fan wars, for instance. Think of the hatred, ridicule and contempt that gets directed at people who favour the wrong pairing in X- the huge amount of emotional energy that originates in people's feelings about something that's totally imaginary. In Buddhism, when you realize the unreality of the physical world, and of X, the demons have no hold on you. They go back to being drawings on paper, both in this manga and in fandom. (Why do they go back to being drawings in the manga? I think it's because a certain Edo artist drew a book of these bogles and so the bogles 'exist' in the book, and can be returned to it.)

And I must say, you have to like Imai-sensei, the author of this work. You really do. On one page he's giving you an explanation of abstruse Buddhist doctrine on the structure of the world, three pages later he's talking about the structure of birds' wings, complete with technical terms. I'm a suck for things that teach me stuff. The Tokyo Requiem series could serve as a reference work at need, for those of us wandering through occult manga comics with no Buddhist signposts of our own to steer by.