Interview with the Translator, Hills of Silver Ruins: The End...Perhaps

Kate: Hills of Silver Ruins ends on an “And far away, the thudding of the drums" Sassoon note. How does this ending compare to other Twelve Kingdoms’ novels? Is it in keeping with Ono’s overall approach?

Eugene: I can imagine Ono writing a short story addendum, but this kind of ending doesn't surprise me. She resolves the major personal conflicts in the story and then sums up the traditional plot points in the excerpt from the official court history. In Shadow of the Moon, for example, we learn that "the Empress quelled the Rebellion at the Close of the Seventh Month, and deposed the Pretender, Joei." And that's that. Things aren't really wrapped up until A Thousand Leagues of Wind.

The NHK anime tries to give Shadow of the Moon a more conventional ending that instead turns into a bunch of clunky cliches without being any more satisfactory. Though I have to admit that if I wrote the screenplay, I'd set up some sort of direct confrontation between Youko and Joei.

But compared to how both The Demon Child and The Shore in Twilight leave Taiki's fate unresolved, Hills of Silver Ruins concludes on a fairly firm note. Perhaps Taiki isn't a character Ono wants to send off into the sunset with every issue settled. As Rick says at the end of Casablanca (released in 1942), "I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship." The war had three more years to go.

Poseidon of the East and The Wings of Dreams also have tidy endings. For her magnum opus, I think Ono was more interested in exploring why people do what they do rather than what they do. By the end of book IV, she's answered those questions. Except perhaps for Rousan, though I can easily imagine that Rousan figured out what Asen was up to from the start, and knowing how smart he was, set things up so he would buy into his own downfall (like the youma).

Plus Rousan really was curious about how the divine scales of justice would balance. Once the ball got rolling, she had no qualms taking a big step back to observe what happened next.

Two decades elapsed between The Shore in Twilight and Hills of Silver Ruins. I would totally get it if Ono got to a point where she could hit the return key a couple of times and type "THE END" and be done with it. Works for me, especially considering all those other SF&F series that either never ended or ended so badly that everybody wishes they hadn't. Like Ghost in the Shell, she can now license the IP to producers with good track records and hope for the best.

Stay tuned for the next translation project by Eugene Woodbury: Big Gold Bullion by Ranpo Edogawa, a Boy Detectives Club novel.
 

Interview with the Translator: Hills of Silver Ruins, Karma

Kate: In Book IV, Chapter 38 of Hills of Silver Ruins, Taiki needs to return to Mount Hou to recover from taking blood. In several books, Taiki implies that he has to pay for what happened in Japan, even though it was legally not his fault (he had no knowledge of the crimes though his literal physical presence was responsible for them).

Karma--what goes around comes around (at its simplest)--is a basic human concept. How embedded would you say the idea is in Ono's work? Does the philosophy extend beyond how Westerners conceive it? Or use it?

For instance, many of the Asian shows I watch give a little more credence to the idea of words/concepts (what has gotten thrown out into the universe) being fulfilled. Where Westerners might have characters overcome such a (superstitious) worry or congratulate themselves for their entirely invisible forward thinking, the Asian shows imply that behavior on-screen might actually, ya know, come true. (There's a kind of unreality about Western name-calling, which is why bullying theorists can entirely divorce themselves from the outcomes of their behavior.)

The opening "this is fiction" caveats are subtly different: Western art says, "No, no, I didn't base this story on anyone real. Don't go and sue me." Asian art says, "This is fiction. The actions in this series are for entertainment. They are not intended to urge or promote any particular behavior. Really."

Watch out! Don't go wishing for monsters because, as in Supernatural, they will likely show up!

Eugene: I think publishers and broadcasters in Japan are more likely to pull an episode of a manga or television series if it echoes (even coincidentally) an alarming current event in the news. There's nothing wrong with fiction "based on actual events" as long as it isn't too close for comfort. The shogunate insisted that Edo period plays based on the Forty-Seven Ronin, for example, always be set at a historical remove.

Of course, that was more about the politics of the situation, but a similar sort of restraint is still expected.

Karma is a key element of Buddhist philosophy. Karma arises out of a very cool Buddhist concept, the "storehouseconsciousness." It is a cosmic database that stores a record of all your past personal actions. Not like a video recording, but rather the metadata, a set of attributes created from those events. This is what passes onto your next life, not a soul in the Christian or Hindu sense.

 As in Angel Beats, your soul is preserved if you get stuck in purgatory. Lord Enma, ruler of the underworld, can use his "Mirror of Judgment" to display a sinner's misdoings. But this record is wiped upon reincarnation. Only the store consciousness remains.

The feedback between the storehouse consciousness and the world around you creates a constantly updated decision tree expressed as karma. Especially in Shadow of the Moon and A Thousand Leagues of Wind, caught up in events beyond their control, none of the main characters "deserve" what happens to them. But as Clint Eastwood's William Munny says in Unforgiven, "Deserve's got nothing to do with it."

What matters is how you react to events (random or otherwise) going forward. In narrative terms, it's all about the character arc that results. Every action and decision changes the attributes in the storehouse in an ongoing feedback loop, pushing behavioral outcomes in one direction or the other. As Fuyumi Ono puts it, "the small stones accumulated in the past one day produce a mountain of results."

Self-help psychologists say much the same about habit formation. The important difference in Asian societies is that this is not seen as an autonomous outcome. The "year zero" approach won't work for individuals or societies because karma is always there. Not just human nature now (which will never be defeated by legalistic means), but that metadata going back as far as human beings existed.

Buddhism takes literally the famous saying by William Faulkner: "The past is never dead. It's not even past."

 

Interview with the Translator, Hills of Silver Ruins: Taiki and Pacifism

Kate: Chapters 34 & 35 of Hills of Silver Ruins are very exciting! Chapter 34 specifically does a great job paying off Taiki's outsider status, namely Taiki does not behave as a Kirin is expected to behave. As Rousan states, "I don’t imagine there has ever been another kirin in the whole history of this world who inflicted such wounds with his own hand.”

Of course, from the beginning, even as a child, Taiki has demonstrated remarkable pragmatism—when he chose Gyousou, yet worried that his motives were entirely personal; when he forced himself to bow to Asen; and in Chapter 34, when he recognizes that his only hope is to fight his way to his emperor.

The Kirin is usually presented as pacifistic, abhorring violence and blood (quite literally). You address here why the Kirin is pacifistic (perhaps) in behavior but not necessarily in nature. (Or pacifistic in nature but not necessarily in behavior.)

Has Japan ever had peace movements dedicated to pacifism as in America? Flowers in rifles, that sort of thing? Was its isolationism connected to peace movements, as isolationism was in America and Britain (in some pockets)? Or is the Japanese attitude far more pragmatic: peace, to a point? (Leave us alone is not, after all, the same as We don't want to fight or pay for a fight.) 

Eugene: Japan's isolationism during the Edo period was enforced with a mailed fist. Tokugawa Ieyasu had observed how Oda Nobunaga armed himself with European weaponry to destroy the feared Takeda clan (Ieyasu took part in that battle). He subsequently wisely stayed out of Hideyoshi's ruinous invasion of Korea. And then in 1637, Ieyasu's grandson had to deal with the bloody (Christian) Shimabara Rebellion.

So while the Edo period is commonly described as "peaceful," that was the product of mostly effective rule and ruthless enforcement that did not shirk from punishing anybody who disturbed the peace (as all those samurai dramas make clear).

Today, the closest thing to flowers-in-rifles is the quasi-religious peace movement that grew out of the various post-war nuclear disarmament causes. In Japan, it punches way above its weight in PR terms because many politicians sign on for the photo ops and the favorable press coverage. They have little to lose. Japan will remain firmly ensconced beneath the "nuclear umbrella" provided by the United States.

Thanks to Article 9 of the Japanese Constitution (outlawing war as a means to settle international disputes), when it plays its cards right, Japan can have its peace cake and eat it too.

But Japan is not New Zealand and is located in a very dangerous neighborhood. Unlike Germany's Green party, the left in Japan, like the Tokugawa shoguns, have no illusions about what it takes to preserve the peace. So alongside the United States, Japan's SDF (self-defense forces) maintain the most powerful blue-water navy in the region. No serious Japanese politician contests that necessity.

Interview with the Translator: Hills of Silver Ruins, Shakespeare

Kate: From Chapter 33 of Book IV of Hills of Silver Ruins, Risai's attitude reminds me of Hamlet at the end of the play, when he finally accepts his fate: 

"Not a whit, we defy augury. There’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, ’tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come. The readiness is all."

Shakespeare is ubiquitous in manga and Asian live-action series/films! In a recent Thai live-action series, the two characters act out a scene from Romeo & Juliet. They begin to argue about which character is supposed to say, "Wherefore art thou...?" until one uses the line to get back at the other: "Wherefore art thou a jerk?"

I own a manga series in which an art gallery is titled “The Nutshell” as a deliberate reference to “though I am bound in a nutshell” from Hamlet. And when I was a teenager, I saw a fantastic version of Shogun MacBeth live!

Shakespeare strikes a cord of high romance, related to knights, chivalry, and King Arthur's court. Is Shakespeare somewhat more "translatable" than the very Western, if popular, King Arthur and his knights? After all, King Arthur got turned into Camelot while Shakespeare retains that medieval bite--alongside the War of the Roses mess.  

Eugene: Thanks to men like Thomas Blake Glover, the enterprising Scotsman who armed the burgeoning rebellion against the disintegrating Tokugawa regime in the mid-19th century, the Meiji government closely aligned itself with Great Britain. The strictures of Victorian society certainly would have struck a familiar note at the time.

Well into the 20th century, many of Japan's political elites were full-blown Anglophiles, down to the clothes they wore. This may explain why the preferred formal western attire for Japanese men is the English morning coat.

It is not difficult to find events from the Sengoku period and the earlier Genpei War that match up with the kind of historical events that Shakespeare was mining for material. Akira Kurosawa adapted MacBeth in Throne of Blood and King Lear in Ran, both of which take place during the late Sengoku period.

The Heike Story, a recent adaptation of Heike Monogatari (the classic account of the Genpei War and the decline and fall of the Taira clan), has the feel of a grand Shakespearian tragedy.

Especially in Showa period dramas, it can seem that every girl's school in Japan has to put on a performance of Romeo and Juliet. In Hanako and Anne, an entire story arc is devoted to Hanako translating Romeo and Juliet for her BFF Renko to star in. (Though I've noticed of late that anime high school romcoms have taken a liking to fractured fairy tale versions of Cinderella.)

Interview with the Translator: Hills of Silver Ruins, Fatalism

Kate: In Book IV of Hills of Silver Ruins, several supporters of Gyousou determine to go down fighting. Better that option than the alternative.

The "go down fighting" trope appears quite often in action/fantasy stories. It does seem to have an undercurrent of fatalism here--less "no man left behind" and more "captain goes down with the ship." Taiki is fully prepared to die (and possibly pay for what he perceives to be his sins).

Is stoic fatalism a trope in Japanese art? Is there any cultural connection to kamikaze pilots? Or was that custom an outlier even by Japanese standards? 

Eugene: This stoic fatalism, to go down fighting against all odds, was once seen as the ideal expression of bushido, the Zen-inspired martial code that underpinned samurai culture. Hence the near deification of historical figures like Minamoto no Yoshitsune and the Forty-Seven Ronin. Both were immediately popularized in the historical dramas of the day. The latter so much so that the government found itself in a quandary.

To review, a young daimyo was provoked by a haughty court official into drawing his sword within Edo Castle, a very big no-no. As punishment, the daimyo was ordered to commit seppuku, his lands were confiscated, and his samurai disenfranchised. A year later, these forty-seven ronin (masterless samurai) carried out a carefully-planned revenge and then gave themselves up to the authorities.

The shogunate couldn't openly condone such actions. Like cowboys slinging guns, it was fine for samurai to carry swords as long as they didn't use them very often, if at all. Yet, they couldn't openly disparage such a spirited execution of bushido ideals. Similar political conflicts, arising out of this surfeit, not paucity, of martial "honor," did not end until the final devastation of WWII.

So the forty-seven were ordered to commit seppuku. And by complying, cut through the Gordian knot. The shogunate could celebrate the values of the ruling samurai class while warning that, take them too seriously and you may have to nobly die for them. This provided a politically tidy conclusion to the affair, and the general public with a satisfactory ending to a great 17th century reality show.

The government sponsored a two-part cinematic version in 1941 and the kamikaze grew out of that late-stage wartime fanaticism. The general public soured on the idea as soon as the war was over, leaving it to the far right and the yakuza to pick up the mantle, though the yakuza only symbolically committed seppuku by chopping off their pinky fingers.

 https://tubitv.com/movies/610633/the-47-ronin-part-1

https://tubitv.com/movies/610632/the-47-ronin-part-2

Interview with the Translator: Hills of Silver Ruins, Ukou's Death & War Crimes

Kate: Even though Asen is a bad guy, his disposal of Ukou is a relief. In saner times, the man would be held and tried for war crimes.

Do the Japanese have an opinion about war crimes, events like the Nuremberg Trials? Or is the preference to move on? After World War II, were any of the “old guard” left to put on trial or did they fade into the background?

Eugene: The Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal convened in 1946 and was intended to be a repeat of the Nuremberg Trials. It was a huge production, lasting twice as long as Nuremberg, but ultimately turned into little more than a show trial, with MacArthur leaning heavily on the scales to produce the outcomes he desired. The proposition that Tojo was analogous to Hitler was absurd, though if Tojo was guilty then so was Hirohito.

As John Dower notes, MacArthur's campaign to absolve Emperor Hirohito of responsibility "knew no bounds," rendering the whole business an exercise in selectively settling scores, not seeking justice.

As far as I'm concerned, Nuremberg is the exception that proves the rule that the whole concept of the "war crime" will inevitably succumb to "victor's justice." It falls into the same subjective witch hunt territory as "hate crimes," meaning all the stuff you did that I don't like. But taking the term at its face value, the purpose of a "trial" is to settle matters of justice and moral responsibility. So when the Tokyo Trials were over, the Japanese people by and large considered the matter resolved and put it behind them.

 In a 2006 survey conducted in Japan, "70 percent of those who were questioned were unaware of the details of the Tokyo Trials, a figure that rose to 90 percent among those who were in the 20–29 age group."

The "truth commission" approach is far superior. It is preferable in these circumstances to find out what happened and why than to affix blame. In a war, after all, every single person involved is "to blame."

An actual "war criminal" would be prosecuted according to the laws that governed his actions. A guy like Ukou would fall under the jurisdiction of the Imperial Army's Uniform Code of Military Justice and be court martialed accordingly. The problem is rarely a lack of laws on the books. Turkey's building codes aren't very different from Japan's. The difference in Japan is that they are enforced.

Interview with the Translator: Hills of Silver Ruins, Battle Tactics II

Kate: In Hills of Silver Ruins, Book IV, "disguised as civilians, [the land gangs would] mingle among them in the cities and the fields, attacking the Imperial Army at times and in places of their choosing.”

Americans make a big deal out of colonialists ducking behind trees and shrubbery to shoot at those dumb Britishers in their bright red coats. The maneuver didn’t happen as much as I was led to believe as a child (and disciplined formations have their upsides) but it did happen.

How about in Japanese history?

Eugene: Historical battles in Japan often involved open battlefield maneuvers where the opposing sides amassed and positioned their forces before commencing hostilities or staging breakouts from sieges.

Both came into play at the Battle of Nagashino in 1575. Oda Nobunaga (backed up by Tokugawa Ieyasu) wiped out the once feared Takeda army (that had on a previous occasion clobbered Ieyasu) with concentrated musket fire and then broke the Takeda siege of Nagashino castle.

It was one of the first "modern" battles in world history and proved the futility of charging entrenched soldiers with firearms, a lesson that wouldn't be learned for another 350 years.

Of the three Great Unifiers, Ieyasu was the least skilled as a battlefield tactician. But when it came to politics and the art of the deal, he was the grand master. At the pivotal Battle of Sekigahara in 1600, he won the day largely by convincing many of the opposing generals to sit on their hands or switch sides.

There is one famous naval engagement. The Battle of Dan-no-Ura in 1185 sealed the fate of the Taira clan and ushered in the age of the shoguns. It figures prominently in the equally famous historical account, The Tale of the Heike, and the recent anime series based on it, The Heike Story.

Leading up to Dan-no-Ura, the Minamoto defeated the Taira in several major battles, often employing what today would be called "psyops." At the Battle of Kurikara, Minamoto no Yoshinaka tied torches to the horns of a herd of oxen and drove them through the Taira camp in the middle of the night. Panicked Taira soldiers ran into ambushes and fell to their deaths in the rocky terrain.

The first Tensho Iga war in 1578 was a showcase for unconventional warfare. Nobunaga's son Nobukatsu invaded Iga territory without the go-ahead from his father and was soundly defeated. Dividing their smaller forces and employing hit and run tactics, the "Iga troops made heavy use of their knowledge of the terrain and guerrilla tactics to surprise and confuse Nobukatsu's army."

A thoroughly exasperated Nobunaga invaded Iga in 1581 with a much larger army and carried out a scorched earth campaign that brought the province to heel in less than a month. The Iga region, the local tourist industry will happily tell you, is where the legends of the ninja arose. Also see episode 7 of What's Hot in Japan.

https://tubitv.com/tv-shows/463950/s01-e07-shiga-ninja-and-sky-walker

Interview with the Translator: Hills of Silver Ruins, Battle Tactics I

Kate: Some of the battle tactics by the land gangs described in Hills of Silver Ruins remind me of the assault by Saruman on Helm’s Deep: ladders against the wall.

How do battles/confrontations in The Twelve Kingdoms reflect Japanese and Chinese history?

Eugene: One important factor that sets the Twelve Kingdoms apart in the fantasy genre when it comes to military matters is that one kingdom cannot invade another. It's only happened once and ended badly for the invader (despite the invader possessing the moral high ground). Even providing "aid and comfort" gets tricky.

Thus military conflicts arise because of a civil uprising or coup d'etat or struggles for power during periods of an empty throne. All three come into play in Hills of Silver Ruins, with the land gangs taking advantage of the breakdown in political order after a coup d'etat to carve out their own spheres of influence. Analogies can be found throughout Japanese history.

Such as during the 16th century, when the fall of the Ashikaga shogunate led to the Warring States period. And in the middle of the 19th century, when an enervated Tokugawa shogunate attempted to discipline the fractious Choshu province and failed when the powerful Satsuma clan stopped pretending to be a loyal ally and aligned itself with Choshu instead.

In the case of the former, it took half a century for the "Three Great Unifiers" (Nobunaga, Hideyoshi, Ieyasu) to unify the country under a single national government. In the latter, Satsuma and Choshu swept aside the Tokugawa shogunate in less than a year, after which they moved the emperor to Tokyo and declared the "restoration" of the imperial government.

Even after the Meiji emperor was formally installed, regional revolts broke out across the country, culminating in the Satsuma Rebellion of 1877. The conflict never moved off the island of Kyushu but was costly in terms of men and material, and triggered a series of revenge assassinations.

The other big difference in the Twelve Kingdoms is that imperial succession is determined by literal divine will. Any caretaker government will end at some point. Only by keeping Taiki and Gyousou alive can Asen remain in power. A pretender's claim to the throne is always on a precarious footing.

That is why every rebellion in the Twelve Kingdom either overthrows the government, overthrows a pretender, or at some point turns into a siege.

More to follow on battle tactics that appear throughout Hills of Silver Ruins!

Interview with the Translator, Hills of Silver Ruins: Westerns

Kate: Gyousou’s taming of Ragou in Book IV of Hills of Silver Ruins reminds me of bucking bronchos.

I've been watching lots of Don Matteo lately, starring Terence Hill. Terence Hill and his buddy Bud Spencer (both adopted American names) did a ton of spaghetti westerns throughout their careers. They would often have their voices dubbed by Americans because Terence Hill speaks Italian, German, and English with a slight German accent, and Spencer had an Italian accent. It got me thinking, 

Why is this genre so beloved that a couple of Italian dudes would make these movies--and be beloved for those movies?

Do Japanese enjoy American Westerns? Spaghetti Westerns?

Eugene: Akira Kurosawa took inspiration from John Ford and classic Hollywood westerns when he made Seven Samurai. Then Sergio Leone perfectly captured the essence of Kurosawa's Yojimbo in A Fistful of Dollars. That launched the spaghetti western, in which Terence Hill played a big part. Trinity Is Still My Name is the highest grossing Italian film to date.

Clint Eastwood was offered the role by Leone while he was appearing in Rawhide. The television series was a big hit in Japan at the time and Eastwood visited Japan in 1962 on a publicity tour. But Hollywood imports like Rawhide quickly gave way to Japan's own home-grown variety.

Sam Peckinpah purportedly once said, "I want to make Westerns the way Kurosawa makes Westerns." Though the western has largely vanished from broadcast television in the United States, the Japanese equivalent is alive and well in the Edo period samurai actioner, with NHK running a historical drama and at least one genre samurai series every year.

In manga and anime, Rurouni Kenshin remains one of the most popular of all time, and was recently made into a five-part live action movies series released between 2012 and 2021.

To be sure, not as alive and well as it once was. From the 1960s through the turn of the century, Abarenbo Shogun ran 831 episodes and Mito Komon lasted an astounding 1,227 epiodes on commercial television. Uzumasa Limelight is about an aging stuntman in shows like Mito Komon who increasingly finds roles hard to come by as the genre fades in popularity.

Interview with the Translator: Hills of Silver Ruins, Soldiers & Shakespeare

Kate: Based on the conflicting belief systems of Asen’s good retainers in Hills of Silver Ruins, how do you think they would respond to Henry V’s speech the eve of the Battle of Agincourt?

Retainer’s Argument: Now, if these men do not die well [with their personal lives in order], it will be a black matter for the king that led them to it, who to disobey were against all proportion of subjection.

King Henry: So, if a son that is by his father sent about merchandise do sinfully miscarry upon the sea, the imputation of his wickedness, by your rule, should be imposed upon his father that sent him. Or if a servant, under his master’s command transporting a sum of money, be assailed by robbers and die in many irreconciled iniquities, you may call the business of the master the author of the servant’s damnation. But this is not so. The King is not bound to answer the particular endings of his soldiers, the father of his son, nor the master of his servant, for they purpose not their death when they purpose their services...Then, if they die unprovided, no more is the King guilty of their damnation than he was before guilty of those impieties for the which they are now visited. Every subject’s duty is the King’s, but every subject’s soul is his own.

Eugene: Henry V’s debate with one of his own soldiers on the eve of the Battle of Agincourt almost perfectly sums up the moral foundations, not just of a UCMJ (Uniform Code of Military Justice), but of the ideal code of conduct in any large organization. "Every subject's duty is the King's (or the CEO's), but every subject's soul is his own."

One realistic aspect of the Ono's world building in the Twelve Kingdoms is that guys like Rakushun are rare. Even high-ranking officials are not always clear about how the whole system works. The vast majority will have never met the emperor or the kirin. In that situation, situational rationalizations make the most sense: my guy is the right guy, especially if he's the guy in power.

The irony is that Shakespeare's Henry V is pretty much in the same position. In retrospect, it's hard to categorize the Hundred Year's War as a "good cause." It was ultimately one of those interminably stupid conflicts about where to draw the property lines. Likewise, Japan's Warring States period can be treated as a long Shakespearean drama because it didn't matter who won.

Of course, it mattered to them. But not like "City on the Edge of Forever" from the original Trek.

Given such a murky ethical environment, it's impressive that Keitou, for example, at last declares that his soul is indeed his own and allies himself with Taiki. Growing increasingly uncomfortable with being paired up with a nihilist like Ukou, Yuushou is headed in that direction too. Then again, Ukou even creeps out the Macbethian Asen.

Interview with the Translator: Hills of Silver Ruins, Star Wars II

Kate: As discussed in the prior post, Star Wars indirectly furthered classic archetypes in the science-fiction community. Did 1977 Star Wars accomplish anything else behind the scenes?

Eugene: Star Wars also helped to win mainstream acceptance for science fiction in general.

Hayao Miyazaki's first feature film was The Castle of Cagliostro in 1979. Now considered a minor classic, it barely broke even at the box office. Observing that science fiction was all the rage, his producer, Toshio Suzuki, suggested that he try his hand at the genre. Miyazaki's next film was the post-apocalyptic Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind in 1984. Its success financed the founding of Studio Ghibli a year later.

Miyazaki would later turn to science fiction and fantasy tropes more specific to Japan in films such as Spirited Away and Princess Monoke. While Hollywood has its own versions of what I call "spirit world warriors," starting with Van Helsing and epitomized by Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Constantine, Shinto (along with the Chinese wuxia genre), provides a rich menagerie of monsters and otherworldly beings.

Demon Slayer and Jujutsu Kaisen demonstrate that a mix of Shinto and Buddhist pop theology has no problem finding an international audience. And this leads to my theory about why Japanese science fiction does cyberpunk so much better than Hollywood, despite the US actually being more "wired" than Japan.

In Shinto, the "ghost in the machine" is a "real" ghost. Just as tsukumogami are not inherently good or bad, the same holds for technology and AI in all its forms. That's why Purin in Ghost in the Shell: SAC_2045 getting resurrected as a sentient android is not an "Oh, no!" moment. It's just the same old Purin in a different container.

This is what Hollywood constantly gets wrong and why the Hollywood version of Ghost in the Shell completely misses the point. While manga and anime have done their fair share of mainframe-as-antagonist stories (Appleseed: Ex Machina), they have managed to not turn every production into The Matrix or The Terminator, the unfortunate fate of the otherwise excellent Person of Interest.

Interview with the Translator, Hills of Silver Ruins: Star Wars I

Kate: Gyousou’s storyline in Hills of Silver Ruins has an Obi Wan Kenobi in Star Wars IV aura about it, the shadowy master Jedi who is still alive and eventually reveals himself to others.

Star Wars has many of the elements of manga, including the ongoing networks of various characters. Comments on Literature Devil indicate that people who know their Star Wars universe really know their Star Wars universe. Japanese manga/anime fans can definitely relate!

How do the Japanese feel about Star Wars?

Eugene: I don't think that Star Wars ever embedded itself in the popular zeitgeist. Rather it was the Japanese interpretations that subsequently took hold. Though to give home-grown originality credit where it's due, the enormously influential Space Battleship Yamato premiered in 1974. So while not conflating correlation with causation, 1977 does seem to have been an important science fiction pop-culture turning point in Japan too.

Leiji Matsumoto followed up Space Battleship Yamato (whose latest installment came in 2021) with Galaxy Express 999 and Space Pirate Captain Harlock in 1977. The Gundam franchise launched in 1979 and is still a going concern, with The Witch from Mercury debuting last year. Much like Star Trek, Gundam was supported during its original run by a devoted fan base and later skyrocketed in popularity.

Netflix has the original Gundam compilation films and several of the sequels. Crunchyroll has The Witch from Mercury and the 2012 remake of Space Battleship Yamato, along with Galaxy Express 999, Captain Harlock, and two of the Captain Harlock sequels.

Gundam wasn't the first, but it pretty much defined the mecha giant robot genre (and all the merchandizing that goes with it). It also showcased one of the most enduring and ubiquitous tropes in the contemporary fantasy and science fiction genres, namely the ordinary kid who discovers he has great nascent powers. With grueling effort and sacrifice (and a mentor), he masters those powers in time to save the day.

Yeah, pretty much Luke Skywalker. Though similar character arcs can be found in Buffy and Harry Potter, the Japanese version is closer to Karate Kid, with an emphasis on the grueling effort. Like Harry Potter, Tanjiro in Demon Slayer is orphaned (along with his sister) by a demon in need of slaying. But he goes through a training regimen that kills most of the people who attempt it. Even at that point, he's still a novice.

Luke Skywalker, again. Except that archetype is sure looking like a rare species in Hollywood these days. Demon Slayer was followed by the enormous success of Jujutsu Kaisen in 2022, which took the same basic story and moved it from the early 20th century to the early 21st century. Okay, Peter Parker has a growth arc, but he powers up pretty fast and he got his superpowers from an external source.

Another commonality with Luke, Buffy, and Harry Potter is that many Japanese superheroes inherited their powers. Natsume in Natsume's Book of Friends traces his gifts to his grandmother. In Mob Psycho 100, Mob's brother also has psychic powers. Shinjiro becomes the next Ultraman after his father. For key members of the Demon Slayer Corps, it is the "family business."

Family businesses in Japan (especially in the crafts) proudly announce how many generations they have been in business. (This is where adult adoption comes in handy.) The administration of Buddhist and Shinto temples has long been passed down along family lines. As in My Master Has No Tail, the master of a traditional Japanese art (rakugo, in this case) passes his stage name down to his senior apprentice.

Kabuki actor Hiroyuki Yamamoto performs as Kataoka Ainosuke VI, meaning that stage name has been passed down for six generations.

An interesting variation on this theme can be found in Mob Psycho 100 and One Punch Man (both written by One), where we meet the already empowered protagonists in medias res. The imperative in these cases is to get with the program. For Saitama, that means joining the superhero guild. The scrawny Mob joins the school's body building club as the junior-most member (and often ends up coming to their rescue).

Interview with the Translator, Hills of Silver Hills: Bureaucrats II

Kate: An interesting point made in Hills of Silver Ruins and elsewhere, including the short stories, is that the worst thing a new emperor—or usurping emperor—can do is to get rid of the current bureaucracy. Certain programs still have to run. The people who know how to do stuff still have to work. Even Asen, for all his faults, doesn’t wipe out all the bureaucrats though he does leave them to their own dog-eat-dog devices and "youma that feed on human souls." And he does allow the infrastructures for his citizens to fall apart, leaving a vacuum that the gangs try to fill. 

The emperor in "Dreaming of Paradise" attempts to literally wipe out the bureaucrats, and his Kirin suffers as a result. In the short story "Weather Vane," the geeks keep doing their geeky jobs because, quite literally, someone has to do them.

A historical tie-in here? How did MacArthur handle the “old guard” in the Japanese government?

Eugene: In the early days of the Occupation, almost three-quarters of a million individuals were flagged as candidates for exclusion from government service because of their participation in the war effort. In the end, only two hundred thousand actually were. By the end of the Occupation, most of them had been "de-purged." After the Occupation, remaining charges against the rest were vacated.

SCAP ended up functioning as a thin governing layer on top of an existing political infrastructure. I like to think of MacArthur as Japan's last shogun. And like Japan's shoguns of old, despite possessing the powers of a dictator, everything he did had to be literally translated through layers and layers of bureaucracy that had remained almost entirely intact.

The "Reverse Course" that commenced in 1947 shifted Occupation policies back toward a more conservative economic and political footing. The "Red Purge" took precedence, and in 1949, the "Dodge Line" (named for banker Joseph Dodge) saw the implementation of a series of draconian fiscal and monetary policies to bring inflation under control.

Shigeru Yoshida served as prime minister from 1946 to 1947 and from 1948 to 1954. He was deemed acceptable because he'd been opposed to the war. But in British terms, he was a Tory down to his bones. So whatever the New Deal reformers in the early Occupation set out to do (they did succeed in pushing through the new constitution), Yoshida's vision would ultimately prevail.

The stuff the old guard were against, they eventually co-opted. They were against the constitution until it became popular, and then they were all for it and always had been. MacArthur was equally popular, so it made sense to ride his coattails right until the end.

Interview with the Translator, Hills of Silver Ruins: Bureaucrats I

Kate: Ono captures chillingly well the infighting, Screwtape Letters, dog-eat-dog nature of bureaucrats. In many fantasy books, the hero's return is the end of all strife. With Hills of Silver Ruins, Taiki's calculated return throws the Screwtapes into a flurry of frustrated, enraged, and (increasingly useless) countermoves. His outsider status and his outsider mentality appear to serve him well here.

Are Ono's descriptions true to bureaucrats everywhere (there is Screwtape!) or is she drawing on Japanese business and/or political life specifically?

Eugene: An interesting twist in the political universe of the Twelve Kingdoms is that if you rise high enough in the provincial or imperial government, you get to live forever. Or at least until you get tired of living forever. Gyousou has a mid-eternal-life crisis where he quits government service and hangs out in the Yellow Sea while learning how to wrangle youjuu (which comes in useful later on).

I think Ono is combining the rigorous meritocracy of the Chinese civil service with what became a hereditary civil service among the samurai of the Edo period. As a samurai, you were guaranteed a stipend, but it didn't amount to much unless you rose up the ranks. That meant knowing the right people or being good at your job. Probably both. Being born into the right clan in the right province helped too.

So in a functioning regime in the Twelve Kingdoms, once the slots get filled, the job board shuts down. The only way in is to wait until someone retires or push them out (using devious means, as in Chou'un's case). Or in the case of Rakushun, have Enki create a position because there's no sense letting all that talent go to waste.

In medieval China, executing a successful coup was ipso facto proof of the Mandate of Heaven, so Asen would be sitting pretty. During the Edo period, the next shogun was chosen from among the three main houses of the Tokugawa clan by the elder statesmen of the regime. By the mid-19th century, guys like Ii Naosuke (a far more ruthless version of Chou'un) were picking shoguns that were easy to manipulate.

To give him credit, Ii Naosuke really was the smartest guy in the room. But the brutal Ansei purge he initiated to remove or sideline anybody opposed to his policies seriously destabilized the shogunate and in the end got himself assassinated (not by outsiders; one of the targets of the purge was Tokugawa Nariaki, governor of Mito, and his retainers were not happy with how he was treated).

In the Twelve Kingdoms, however, the emperor and the kirin are literally appointed by Heaven. The dilemma facing Asen and Chou'un is that if you get rid of the emperor or kirin, unlike Ii Naosuke, you have no control over who will show up next. Youko is an outsider, while Keiki is the insider. Gyousou is the insider, while Taiki started on the inside and ended up the quintessential outsider.

At the beginning of A Thousand Leagues of Wind, the bureaucrats take the Ii Naosuke approach and try to turn Youko into a puppet. By the end, she's pulled off the equivalent of her own palace coup and cleaned house.

Thus periods of regime change become particularly precarious for the civil service, as you can end up with rulers who have no loyalty to "established precedent." This will inevitably result in political infighting as all the permanent undersecretaries vie to maintain their permanence. The exchanges between Ansaku and Chou'un in chapters 7 and 33 (book 3) of Hills of Silver Ruins remind me of Yes, Minister.

Interview with the Translator, Hills of Silver Ruins: Romance

Emperor/king and vassal: old-fashioned romance

Kate: The refocus on Taiki in Hills of Silver Ruins raises a question I had at the end of the prior book, after Taiki’s retrieval. On paper, in terms of romance, it would seem that Ono would put Taiki and Youko together—both newish arrivals from our world who are also contemporaries. But they barely see each other. They both have jobs to do!

The lack of romance in the series is somewhat unexpected. Is this lack specific to the author? Or does Japanese literature in general stay away from throwing romance into genres as western literature customarily does (mystery-romance, suspense-romance, action-romance, fantasy-romance).

That is, shojo and yaoi have definite mandates, but those mandates seem specific to the genres. Is the lack of romance typical of Japanese fantasy or specific to Ono? (In this case, I’m referring to a specific romantic/intimate relationship—the series is suffuse with “romance” in the older sense of the word and in the sense of ongoing, intense relationships.)

Eugene: I think that Fuyumi Ono decided from the start that the Twelve Kingdoms was going to be a romance only in the classical sense. If anything, the underlying message is that "romance goeth before a fall."

From the first couple of episodes, you might conclude that Fruits Basket is setting up a traditional love triangle with Tohru, Kyo and Yuki. Thankfully, it doesn't go there. Other characters fall in and out of relationships, and Kyo develops strong feelings for Tohru (especially after she saves his soul). But for Tohru, he-love-me-he-loves-me-not is the furthest thing from her mind.

Which is quite refreshing, especially after it becomes clear that Fruits Basket is as much psychological horror as romantic fantasy, sort of as if Stephen King wrote every other chapter in Anne of Green Gables.

The ginormous hit Demon Slayer also mostly eschews romance. Although Inosuke pines after Nezuko to an annoying degree, it's comic relief only. The only important relationship is between Nezuko and her brother Tanjiro, the aforementioned demon slayer. That relationship works so well that any attempt at romance would get in the way.

Nevertheless, romantic fantasy is its own genre in Japanese fiction, along with every other genre combination.

A few of my favorite pairings in contemporary fantasy are Akihito and Mirai in Beyond the Boundary, Yuzuru and Kanade in Angel Beats, Sakuta and Mai in Rascal Does Not Dream of Bunny Girl Senpai. Along more traditional (medieval European) lines are Shirayuki and Zen in Snow White with the Red Hair.

And then straying from the traditional as far as possible (in a Romeo and Juliet sort of way), Legoshi (the wolf) and Haru (the rabbit) in Beastars make for a compelling pair even if you ignore all the obvious symbolism. Speaking of Beastars, Juno (also a wolf) quickly achieves Cordelia status, and then can't stand that Legoshi cares more about Haru than her.

Although not a romance in the conventional sense, the relationship between Reg and Riko in Made in Abyss is as deep and abiding as any in the genre. Reminiscent of Laura and Howie in The Goats, though Reg and Riko are on a dangerous journey to the middle of the Earth and Reg is an android.