Author: OKANO Reiko
Imprint: ----
Publisher: Heibonsha
ISBN4-582-28752-2
ISBN4-582-28753-0
ISBN4-582-28754-9
Reviewed by Jeanne
I like the Flow. The Flow been very very good to me. The Flow has been handing me ancient China and Taoist Immortals for nearly a year now- Karin, Konron no Tama, Twelve Kingdoms. The personal names will indeed make you bang your head on the keyboard, but otherwise Taoist Immortals are cool indeed. And here we have the Onmyouji mangaka taking a very Chinese-feeling stab at the theme.
'Night-time Tales of Fascinating Shape-shifting' is what I make of the title. More or less accurate- it's certainly fascinating (or 'charming' if you prefer) and there's a lot of shape-shifting included. Practically every chapter in fact. I did read it at night, and it goes rather well at that time. There's a pun in the title which would be tedious to explain because in fact I don't get it, any more than I get the odd western references she randomly tosses in (Mulholland Drive, Where Have All the Flowers Gone, and Zenobia of Palmyra to name three that share a chapter.) This series keeps taking odd turns where you don't expect them, which is occasionally unnerving (especially in vol 3) but certainly staves off readerly complacence and boredom.
It's advertised as a comedy and certainly starts out that way. Our hero Li Seitan, a young scholar, is on his way to the provincial capital to sit the imperial examinations. Seitan is a serious sober Confucianist who was born trailing 'auspicious clouds' that foretell a brilliant future for him. He also just happens to attract the attention of a whole bunch of erotically charged supernatural beings who then tag along after him as he makes his way into the imperial bureaucracy. But Seitan is a stuffy Confucianist: "The master never spoke of strange phenomena, inhuman feats of strength, disorders of nature, or spirits," as a well-known quote from the Analects puts it. Therefore last night's little adventure with the fox spirit was obviously a dream and didn't happen at all... (Okano renders dorky self-complacence very well. This is why I said the series feels very Chinese to me: sardonic in the Journey to the West and Dream of Red Chambers way.)
Yet, as the afterword points out, in this work Seitan encounters nothing *but* weird things, supernatural powers, the natural order turned upside down and spirits of all kinds and classifications. Some of the Confucianist starch gets knocked out of him and his innate nature takes over. His innate nature, no surprise, is sensually wanton: never met a pretty face that didn't make him go all goo-goo eyed, even when he knows the pretty face belongs to a flesh-eating goblin or a scaly dragon in human guise. Seitan is saved from being a lech only because he passively waits to be hit on instead of avidly pursuing, and when hit on yields with a sweet resignation to his fate that looks at times like brain damage.
Instrumental to this process is the post he finds himself assigned to when he passes the Imperial examinations. Seitan had assumed he'd be given some nice clerical niche or governorship. No way. He becomes the subordinate of one General Ryuu Gyoku- Dragon Gem- who heads a secret military service entrusted with the investigation of strange occurrences, in the hopes of finding a Taoist Immortal and sending him or her to the Emperor. The Emperor wants an Immortal, presumably to discover the secrets of immortality. Except... well, see below. To this end Seitan is always being dispatched to investigate odd happenings and mysterious disappearances, which put him in extreme peril, from which the General comes to save him at the last moment accompanied by two snarky kung-fu kid assistants. The monster or whatever gets sent off to the Emperor and the wibbling Seitan gets sent off to write his report, in duplicate if not triplicate.
Seitan may complain that this job is a waste of 'my beautiful face and fresh young flesh' (not one for false modesty, our Seitan) but his talents in these areas are definitely inferior to those of his superior. The General is... well, pretty damned stunning: high-handed, cool, sardonic and ambisexually gorgeous. ('Lasciviously immoral' is what the kid assistants call it.) 'Everyone loves Ryuu Gyoku-' and they occasionally strip their clothes off so as to do it better.
Ryuu Gyoku has a secret identity, as anyone introduced as 'nazo no...' ('the mysterious') must inevitably. Ryuu Gyoku's secret identity is a matter of some puzzlement in this corner, because innocent gaijin non-picture reading me found it a Stunning!! surprise when finally revealed... but no-one in the story batted an eyelash. Did I miss something? I went back and reread the first volumes. Well, yes, if you have a good memory for minor details (I don't) and *possibly* if you're up on T'ang dynasty customs (I'm not, and I bet most Japanese aren't either) then *maybe* it's something you could put together from the earlier action. But but but... there's a whole bunch of other mysteries that never get sorted out either, starting with the fact that the Emperor is none other than Genbu the black warrior of the north and the General's study is adorned with a white tigerskin rug. (Actually, quite a lot is made of that white tiger, for purposes that elude me completely.) Black warrior, white tiger- so there ought to be a blue dragon and a red phoenix here somewhere, right? Well, there's a phoenix certainly, but hardly a major player, and I don't think the dragon is blue at all.
The comedy gets tempered by some odd occurrences in book two. And then in the second half of book three the action alters suddenly and becomes utterly opaque. Who are all these people all of a sudden, that appear without any introduction or background? 'It's all my father's fault' the General muses, but Okano doesn't bother to tell us who the General's father *is* (let alone what the 'all' is that we're talking about.) What's with the changing kanji on the forehead of the white tigerskin rug, and why does it matter whether it's 'king' or 'jewel'? In despair I resorted to Japanese google to see what the intended audience was saying about it. Lots of praise and recs for vols 1 and 2- 'hilarious comedy', 'Seitan's cool boss', 'you know those beasts in vol 2 really *are* from Chinese legend? she did a lot of research' and then-- 'I don't like the direction this series is going in' 'butbutbut you mean (certain character) is.... how come???' 'wake no wakaranai koto bakari!!! ie nothing makes any sense at all!!! Uhh, yeah. I wish to associate myself with that last cri de coeur.
I've met books and films that do something like this. The Magus, Blow-up, Last Year at Marienbad. They irritated me extremely. 'You are *not* mysterious, you are *obscure*.' The mysteries of Youmi ought to irritate me as well, but they don't. They just seem ghostly and-- well, mysterious. I think it's partly the art style that does it. Okano normally draws in pen, but this whole series was painted with a watery brush in her trademark shades of grey. It gives a strange and shimmery effect, as of everything seen at night by the light of a misty moon. (She has a chapter set in the undersea palace of a dragon king. It's the first dragon palace that I will believe is underwater, because boy does it look it.) I could also mention the mental fuzziness engendered by the typeface, which is the equivalent of script typeface in English- it's meant to look elegant and handwritten, and succeeds, which is why I often had to use a magnifying glass to figure out just what kanji that one was. (Balloon-less thoughts use a normal print font and seem far clearer for that reason.)
And partly it's the nature of those Taoist Immortals, elusive and obscure and not following a daylight rationality. In Taoism what is, is; and here, what we see is what's there and no, there's no explanation for it, it just is. This is oddly satisfying. It must be said, all the other Immortals I've met this year have been just Folks Like Us- Karin's Western Queen Mother playing politics with the Emperor of Heaven, Konron's angsty shoujo hero who Always Hurts the One He Loves, and the wicked-stepmother type in Twelve Kingdoms. No strangeness there. Then suddenly I'm encountering a little boy painting the landscape he's standing in who tells the General 'I lose years the more you neglect me' and who indeed turns back into a young man as their conversation continues. Dreamlike, it makes no sense but it resonates beautifully.
The series appears to be over but not finished, if you follow. It's a pity- I'd like to see some more of these people and to find out where Seitan's new semi-maturity gets him and what happens to the General in the end and... all that. But I'm grateful to have at least this much