Ben Tou

Late in the evening, supermarkets across Japan reluctantly mark unsold bento down to half price. The moment that discount sticker goes on, an army of hungry, penniless students descends, battling fiercely for the glory of a cheap meal.
As the ludicrous premise suggests, Ben Tou is primarily a comedy, but I was pleasantly surprised to find it neatly avoided a lot of light novel comedy traps. The author's note suggested he'd never tried his hand at comedy writing before, so the more dramatic scenes have a nicely understated naturalism to them, a more effective yang to the comedy yin than the usual overwrought melodrama (see Kore wa Zombie desu ka, which shits itself to hell the moment they stop with the jokes.)
This is a book where the male lead is neither a sarcastic Kyon clone or a personality free stand in for the reader to project his fantasies on. He's certainly a wise ass, but always motivated by an excess of enthusiasm. He describes the onigiri he's eating as "A classic Yamato Nadesico, her black seaweed underwear peeping out from under her sexy cellophane clothing." He makes a reference another character misses, and comments, "Oh -- she'd never read Jojo's Bizarre Adventure. She was missing out on 30% of the joy in life." Every attempt at thinking hard results in lengthy tangents about his father's retro gaming hobby, horrible things he did to a classmate in junior high, or completely non sequitors like his impromptu desire to become a true jazzman.
The three other major characters are all girls, of course; and each of them initially seems like a standard light novel type. First impressions tend to be misleading here. I'm not sure the violent (possibly lesbian) student council president ever developed into anything believable, but the narrators inability to resist gleefully pushing her buttons was much more relatable than the standard "accidental" misunderstandings. The cover girl is introduced as a tsundere, but quickly sidesteps either half of the term and becomes an altogether more likable mentor figure. The third girl ended up being the most entertaining of the three; she initially seems like a standard doormat, shy, totally insecure, and stammering a lot. Then she approaches the bento battles by role playing as a macho cop. Then they find "Muscle Cop", the hard core yaoi rape novels she's writing based on each battle. And the reactions to that are just different enough from what I've come to expect that I wound up impressed despite myself.
Ben Tou stumbles a little in the final act -- in search of an ending, he winds up setting up a choice so obvious the main character's hesitation just makes him seem embarrassingly dense -- but I came away feeling like this is the next big thing. Hopefully it'll get an anime that understands the material.

Baccano 1710: Crack Flag

Baccano 1705: The Ironic Light Orchestra was one of the better books in the series; a tightly focused book with an unusually small cast for Narita: three characters, two we already knew, and one who clearly did not end up becoming immortal. Indeed, later books reveal that she died in 1710, so this book was always going to be the story of how she met her end.
Narita admits in the afterword that he found it incredibly difficult to kill her off, and declares that he will never do this again. It really sounds like he wrote himself into a corner he couldn't get out of. He doesn't seem to have had any actual story to go with what we already knew, so this book ends up like an insanely boring Cliff's Note retelling of something like two years of disconnected scenes that never add up to anything. It felt like the plot didn't actually gel till page 282, and it ended another twenty pages later. The embarrassing framing device involving this narrative retold by a poet drives home just how tedious and leaden the whole affair is, and the M. Night Shyamalan worthy series of bad idea shocking twists towards the end makes this the single worst thing Narita has ever written. Hopefully he knows it and will avoid ever forcing himself to write a book he has no interest in actually writing.

Dulalala!! x7

Naturally, Narita can't just do a short story collection. He's got to pull a Kadono, and have all the stories taking place at the same time. I wound up being pretty glad I read this right after the anime helpfully reminded me who some of the characters were; he clearly wanted to give some people who haven't played an active role in a while something to do.
On that note, the first story starts off with Namie and Mika having an epic bitch off; this eventually involves Namie dousing Mika with an immobilizing drug and attempting to pour acid on her face, while Mika cheerily reveals that she's got the entire cast's apartments bugged and their computers hacked and knows everything going on everywhere. Seiji eventually steps in and settles things as only he can.
Second story was probably my favorite, since it was cheerily out of Narita's comfort zone again; focusing on Akabayashi, one of the yakuza characters introduced in the last volume. He's such a monumental bad ass that he gets stabbed in the eye by Saika, rips his own eyeball out to stop the blade from infecting him, and falls in love with Anri's mom, who was wielding the sword at the time. All of which is a flashback woven through the story of how he uses his own Dollars membership to manipulate a bunch of low level drug dealing thugs into taking out a yakuza group that's trying to kill him.
Third story is probably the most typically Narita; as the rumors about Shizuo's activities in the last few volumes spiral dramatically out of control, a group of his victims somehow becomes convinced that Shizuo has a wife and kid, and tries to kidnap them...only to get the shit kicked out of them when the wife turns out to be the Russian assassin (now working with Toma and Shizuo) Izaya's crazy ass sisters, and yakuza kid Akane, who is still carrying around a stungun.
There's also a brief romantic interlude with Celty and Shinra, constantly interrupted by phone calls from characters in all the other stories, and a framing sequence in which Izaya, in the hospital, is visited by one of the suicidal girls he was toying with in the first volume (a bit they wound up not putting in the anime, since he drugged her and put her in a suitcase just to fuck with her head.)
And volume eight's out in June. And a new Baccano came out yesterday. It never ends!

Boogiepop Darkly: The Scat Singing Cat

When a Towa agent -- the awesomely named Thelonious Monkey -- goes missing after a fight with a mysterious MPLS known only as Scatterbrain, Reset dispatches the infamous "strongest" -- Fortissimo.
Fortissimo is a bit like the Daleks in Doctor Who. He's inherently awesome, and cheapened by overuse. I know he isn't in every Boogiepop novel, but he's been in far too many of them, and been far too ineffective in most of them, so I was a bit disappointed to see him playing a major role this time around. But I'm guessing Kadono wanted to revamp the character a bit, because I honestly don't think he's been this fucking bad ass since his first fucking appearance. Walking on water, evaporating said water with a flick of the mind, ignoring crowds of zombies attacking from all sides as they bounce off him, making his own heart explode and reform so he can free himself from a mind-control spell with a bit of temporary death -- he's single-handedly Jojoing the shit out of this volume, and it was awesome to behold. I hope Kadono has the sense to keep him out of the spotlight so the next time he shows up his very entrance provides a thrill.
This is possibly the closest to outright horror the series has been in years. The section where Fortissimo reads Thelonious Monkey's cryptic journal, encountering puzzling references to a cat set randomly between accounts of people she knows not remembering her, and her not remembering people who clearly know her, is some genuinely chilling stuff.
The other story cross cut with Fortissimo's investigation involves the local junior high's photography club searching odd corners of the town in the hopes of finding evidence that Boogiepop exists. These four are archetypal Kadono characters, all presented as stock types before their interactions serve to knock each other off balance, their reactions never quite what we expect, so that they gradually take on a life of their own.
The structure here is classic Jojo's Bizarre Adventure -- a mysterious power is at work, and the bulk of the book is spent figuring out what it is and how it works, while being more than a bit afraid of it. For once Boogiepop is forced to play a fairly active role, even if that largely just means the climax of the book has more than it's fair share of cryptic riddle-speech. For better or for worse, Kadono is a man who never strays very far from his own set of foibles. But The Scat Singing Cat is definitely on his better side.

Maijo Otaro cubes meta

When 九十九十九 (Tsukumo Juku) came out in bunko, the covers happily described it as meta squared.
Tsukumo Juku himself is a character from Seiryoin Ryusui's meta/deconstructionist mystery novels (which are fascinating in theory but rather boring to actually read, sadly) and Maijo Otaro took the character and sprawled him into a horrifically long series of contradicting slices of his life, at one point declaring him so beautiful all who saw him fell in love, while also informing us that he has two heads and is disgusting. The character is regularly killed off throughout the stories, and at one point escapes into the real world and murders the editor working on the novel.
Maijo has been quiet for a few years; his last big project, The Disco Detective, has yet to come out in bunko (along with his second novel) but everything else kinda has. He did a thing on his website where he pitched a movie idea every week for a year, and each was more bizarre than the last. He seemed to be making a serious effort to move into film.
Apparently, he has. There's a movie out this summer called Neck (trailers appear to not be online yet), and he has a story credit. Plot appears to be standard boy meets girl, girl turns out to have a terrifying disembodied head in a tank in her laboratory. Never one to be satisfied with simplicity, he has also written a stage play on a similar theme.
Both productions feature a character who is a popular novelist name Echizen Mataro.
Echizen Mataro is launching a new series of books from BOTH Dengeki Bunko AND Kodansha Novels this April. One Pluto 0 novel from each in April, two each in June, and there's already one more scheduled for after that.
Echizen Mataro is giving interviews vehemently denying that he is from Fukui (Maijo Otaro is -- the fact that Maijo notoriously refuses to make public appearances is a small part of this whole stunt), declaring that Jojo's Bizarre Adventure is the greatest manga ever, that he is also an actor appearing in the movie Neck, and that he has the mysterious supernatural ability to divide himself into two people and write two novels simultaneously in his sleep.
Words fail me.
Edit: Apparently this awful thing is the Dengeki Bunko cover. I remember seeing that and thinking it was unspeakable. I trust Maijo enough to think he could make the wheelchair girl not the pandering moe cliche I assumed it was, but anyone wearing one pant leg pulled up like that is begging to have it chopped off.
Edit 2: Movie website. How could it not have Kuriyama Chiaki in it? Joe said much the same thing about Nicolas Cage when I sent around the trailer for Kick Ass, so I guess I've just proven that Kuriyama Chiaki is the Nicolas Cage of Japan.

Baccano! 1931 Another Junk Railroad

This is basically the source material for the DVD only bonus episodes that rounded out the Baccano anime; originally written for a CD drama not all that long after the original novels, Narita took this occasion to expand it into a full length book.
As such, there's a lot more in here than the anime actually covered; about half of it is dedicated to Chane's inner tumoil, and the other half devoted to retconning immortal characters created later on into the events on and around the Flying Pussyfoot incident. Apparently two of them were actually on the train, yet never interacted with the main cast.
Most of the additional flashbacks feel unnecessary -- almost like self-fanfiction -- so it is the core OAV story that proves the real attraction here. But I also have to give Katsumi Enami props here -- while the anime kept Rachel dressed in the clothes she wore on the train, Enami draws her in two different period outfits. This had the side effect of making her unrecognizable.
I also enjoyed the framing sequence, where Graham Specter makes the mistake of attempting to rob Carol and Gustav Saint-Germain.

Fragments of Grimm I -- Cinderella

Stop me if you've heard this one before -- normal boy stumbles onto something supernatural and the only one who can save him...is a tsundere.
I'm not sure how I expected Gakuto Coda to follow up Missing, but for the first twenty pages, I was genuinely worried he had actually taken the easy route and done a Shakugan no Shana clone. Only without writing so terrible it feels like the author is vomiting down your throat.
I'm pretty glad I soldiered on. The more he digs into his story the more interesting the characters become -- Coda never one for dramatic characterization, so it's all subtle touches like the male lead laughing at the tsundere when she tells him to drop dead -- and the more FUCKED UP the events unfolding became.
Like Missing, Jung's concept of the universal subconscious underpins the basic mythology; God sleeps deep in our collective minds. Sometimes he has nightmares. Since he is all knowing, his nightmares encompass all things feared by man. Since he is all powerful, he neatly removes the nightmares from his mind, and sends them drifting upwards in a bubble, a bubble that divides countless times before drifting upwards into individual minds, but remains so potent that few humans survive the experience. Those that do retain a fragment of God's Nightmare, and the effects of that fragment allow them to fight against the fragments, saving people from them, and destroying those corrupted by the madness. They usually fail spectacularly.
These powers are born from nightmares; the female lead slices her own arm open and shouts, "Let my pain burn the world" to summon forth nightmarish flames that burn those possessed by nightmares; their operations are protected by a girl who has insects that eat memories living in her brain; they pour out her ears and cause all witnesses to forget what happened, but also leave her with absolutely no short term memory -- she has to write things down in a notebook if she wants to remember them.
Particularly dangerous nightmares tend to follow archetypal motifs -- like Grimm's Fairy Tales.
Somehow Cinderella leads to hobbling around on the remains of your ruined foot, horrible doves tearing their way out of your blood vessels, and a particularly memorable bit where people pulling bones out of the ashes after a cremation proceed to start eating them.
Spectacularly nasty stuff.

Dulalala 6

Man, was this a long, intense churn. Narita is not the kind of author who generally goes for lengthy, character-arc focused writing, but in between all the sword fights and car kicking and parkour, Dulalala 6 boils down to a slow burn effort to shift Mikado's character from a passive to a proactive role in the series. Honestly, for a while there I wasn't sure he was ever going to pay it off. It's not until the last few pages of the book that the other shoe finally drops...and we have to wait till Dulalala 8 to find out where he's going with THAT. (Dulalala 7, out early 2010, is supposedly random side stories.)
While I think I tend to prefer Narita in his less ambitious crazy good time mode, I definitely dig it when he reaches a bit higher, and pulls it off.

Dulalala 5

If you're like me, you squinted at the shitty scan of this cover and wondered why Mikado was carrying a dagger; I assure you, the actual cover has him holding a ballpoint pen. Like a dagger.
So...the plan was to read this one and then go read another, but then this one ended on as many cliffhangers as possible, and I guess I'm going to have to read Dulalala 6 immediately.
For a book that seemed absolutely packed with events, it was someone surprising to realize the entire thing had just been set-up; in hindsight, it seems obvious, but there was too much going on to actually register that things weren't actually going to resolve.
Despite all the stuff happening I'm weirdly not sure how to describe it -- partly because each strand of the plot is driven by someone or several people manipulating shit behind the scenes, and a lot of them have yet to have the other shoe drop.
The most dramatic end of things is probably the attempted assassination of Shizo Heiwajima by a ten year old girl. Then a yakuza group hires the Headless Rider to protect the kid while also hiring a crazy Russian assassin to kidnap the kid and kill Celty. All of this while the remnants of the Blue Squares are picking a fight with a gang from Saitama using the Dollars name. I think the general plan is to force Mikado out of his passive observer stance and into a more active role, while also making Heiwajima into something more than violence relief. Both of these are good things. I definitely could have used more of Izaya's sisters, but hopefully they'll come into play in the second half.

5656 Knights' Strange Night

The one Ryohgo Narita series that never did much for me was the Etsusa Oohashi series -- set on a man made island in the middle of a huge bridge, abandoned shortly before creation. The place subsequently became a land without law, and would seem to have been an ideal setting for Narita's unique brand of madness...and certainly, there are great bits and characters in all the volumes. But he never quite balanced the fun with a desire to work in darker themes than his books set in civilization, and never quite managed to figure out how to make the darker themes fun instead of sort of upsetting.
5656 is a bit of a reboot, then; the original series finished several years ago, and this volume returns to the setting with an actual, consistent series title. Albeit a meaningless one. (If you pronounce it Goro Goro, it sort of sounds like the animal noises of the earlier volumes.)
Narita grabs a page from Kadono's playbook and tries a unique structure -- three chapters depict an ongoing battle to the death between two men that conveniently takes out a group making snuff films on the island in the process -- while the other two chapters branch off from this chaos to tell other stories happening in the same time frame.
A dead body that crashes to the ground between them, soaking the bullets they'd fired at each other leads to a long story that not only explains how this guy wound up getting thrown off a roof, but also filling in the back story on Li-Lei (麗蕾, I'm sort of guessing here, actual Chinese speakers feel free to correct) a yandere who spends all her time sleeping, hugging things she deems cute, and beating people to death with a iron pipe. A childhood spent blindfolded in captivity, iron pipe of death skills learned entirely on her own as a way of fighting her nightmares -- dark stuff, but gleefully fun. The story cross cut with this, an unreliable first person narration of a man obsessed with her, works less successfully, but there was a certain amount of entertainment when the other shoe dropped and he finally got around to admitting the full extent of his own 'good deeds.' Needless to say, they lead to him getting beaten half to death and thrown off a roof.
The other inset story is, apparently, Narita's idea of a romantic comedy. The fact that the participants are a serial killer, a sword wielding hit woman, a chainsaw wielding maniac, and one of the two guys involved in the volume long gunfight...is just what makes it HIS.
The snuff film element itself is the sort of thing that would have dragged the earlier volumes down, but here he handles it better, almost immediately giving way to the two gunmen both showing up to rescue the snuff crew's latest capture and blowing their own cover by shooting at each other, and the crew's latest capture turning out to be Li-Lei, undercover. More importantly, it allows him to have Li-Lei pluck out their eyeballs and juggle them without it seeming remotely excessive.
I was quite relieved to find myself really enjoying this volume; it make have taken a few tries, but it feels like Narita's finally got his thumb on what makes this series and these characters work, and I'm looking forward to it continuing. Once they let him write anything but Dulalala!! again.

Shizuru-san, and Kadono's baffling failure

Kouhei Kadono is the man behind no less than five series, and a number of one off novels. The Boogiepop series is his action horror meal ticket; the Jiken series are a fascinating mix of fantasy and mystery, the Night Watch series is far future virtual reality sci-fi, the Soul Drop series are laid back modern mysteries, and the Shizuru-san series is completely boring shit.
I can't work out why this series exists at all. It feels like someone at Fujimi Mystery bunko called him up and hired him specifically to write a moe mystery series (which is all the published before going belly up when no one liked any of them except Gosick (which had the grace to actually be good as well)) and he and an editor basically brainstormed things until something turned the guy on.
Shizuru-san is very sick. She is in a hospital...and not just any hospital, the crazy hospital from the Boogiepop novels, the same one that made the robot detective in the Soul Drop novels. A place no normal human should ever be. You'd think this would be a mystery or something, but it isn't. It's just there, like someone thought a bedridden detective would be moe, and Kadono dutifully wrote it in and forgot about it.
Her one friend is Yo-chan, who has no personality at all. Not that Shizuru-san does, but at least she has an illness to define her. Yo-chan has fuck all. I read the first book years ago and hated it, so I read the first story in the second book today to confirm that he wasn't going to figure out a way to make me give a fuck between volumes, and then pitched it and the third book (pictured above) on my garbage pile. I will not be buying the reboot attempt he did a few months ago, telling the story of how these boring fuckers met.
So, since Kadono is not the least bit interested in his moe hook, or in the two characters, exactly what is he interested in? Some sort of meta-anti-mystery. Each chapter starts with something that sounds quite intriguing -- the story I read today had a mummified body found under a thick tangle of white Sweet William Catchflies...six hours after being seen alive. Then each of these intriguing set ups turns out to have such an incredibly prosaic and bland explanation that you're left actively annoyed with him for having briefly captured your imagination. Obviously, the rational explanation for this is that the dude sold his identity to a foreign gangster and randomly starved to death, and his body just wound up like that in time, but that is no fun at all.
Even with the inherent anti-climax of this structure, the Shizuru-san stories are singularly dull affairs, with meandering conversations that tell us nothing about the characters, and provide no momentum to the mystery solving itself. I couldn't bring myself to read another word.

Why do I do this shit to myself?

I have a love-hate relationship with Suzumiya Haruhi; when the series is good, it manages to provide substance that belies its moe trappings, genuinely interesting ideas and plots, characters that grow beyond the stereotypes they represent, and Kyon's narration undercuts everything with a constant stream of sarcastic humor. When it is bad -- which is more than half the time -- it is none of those things.
Way back when I was still in Japan, I grabbed the first volume of one of his other series -- this was back when Tanigawa actually wrote things, instead of spending two years with writer's block/sulking about money -- just to see what it was like. I'd even seen someone claim Escape from the School was better than Haruhi. I failed to realize this person was an imbecile.
Honestly, this thing just had so many red flags I did not get around to reading chapter 1. The 35 page intro was more pain than I can handle. This was like some third rate hack trying to imitate one of the bad Haruhi novels -- not even up to that low standard.
Not-Kyon is haunted by the ghost of his dead sister, and because of that he has to attend a school for EMP, which he hates. He has the same sarcastic narration, only without any jokes, and with no effort made to actually get the readers to care about him or identify with him. His sister manages to be... well, she and her twin are on the cover, and that's pretty much all you need to fucking know, but she also appears to spend all her time throwing things at people and terrorizing everyone around him for no discernible reason -- certainly not comic relief, you'd have to be fucking retarded to think shit like being woken up by someone throwing an alarm clock at your head is still funny in 2003, when this relic from an age of hackery was written. Sadly, these two failures were the more successful half of the cast. The other two characters in the prologue were an overbearing idiot prone to pompous speeches, and a classic rich girl snob. By classic, I mean both of these people were so forced it made me physically ill to read their dialogue.
I just don't know. Was Haruhi an accident, which is why he has so much trouble living up to it? If I'd forced myself to keep reading, would he eventually have managed to make it worth my while? I certainly don't have the time or the inclination to find out.
Why even have a god damn prologue, if it isn't to provide an early hook that the natural start of your story would normally miss? I keep coming across this mistake -- if you can't make the start of your book interesting, do not be upset when no one sticks around to find out what else happens. Don't fuck around establishing what is 'normal' in your world -- give me the reason why I'm going to keep reading, then you can step back and lay a few ground rules.

Vamp! 4

Three years went by between Vamp! 3 and Vamp! 4 -- Vamp! 4 was originally supposed to be a short story collection, but the sheer amount of time made him go for something larger in scope. It's a transitional novel in a lot of ways; the primary thrust of the narratives is to make the villains of the first three novels into good guys while introducing new villains. While the old villains were notoriously wacky, the new ones are Pure Blood vampires, who are living, breathing stereotypes...well, not literally, being undead, but they're the sort of one note dicks that wind up with the heroes teasing them for not knowing who Christopher Lee is. They're little more than opportunists anyway...the real villain in this book is mankind. Collectively.
A small village in the mountains is completely wiped out. One girl survives -- a girl with two small scabs on her neck. Rumors spread -- first that the village was attacked by vampires, and second that the girl herself is a vampire. She and her guardian soon find themselves fleeing an angry mob, only to be rescued...by vampires. "Don't worry, I'm a vampire," is not a line many books would contain.
This is ambitiously cross cut with flashbacks into the past of several major characters, and a number of extra twists laid on top of the big twists from the previous couple of novels. It takes a while to get everything moving, but it definitely moves when it gets there.
I will, however, admit that the primary appeal of the Vamp! series is the crazy fucking shit he pulls. The previous volumes brought us the flower growing under a guillotine that was soaked in blood till it became a vampire, and the vampire watermelon. This volume brings us a vampire spider (who wears punk/goth fashions in case he forgets and flings an extra leg out one of the handy holes), a vampire Chihuahua who insists he's a wolf, a vampire wolf who can't convince anyone he's not a werewolf, a girl gamer vampire with a collection of magic swords and move names based on Atari gaming classics, and, best of all, a vampire T-Rex.

Nisemonogatari kicks off with a bang

"What's wrong?" Hachikuji asked. "You look like someone who made a lot of self-deprecating jokes about how his work would never be animated and then discovers that, by some freak accident, a deal has actually been made. But don't worry, it's not like you're being forced to write a sequel to an already completed work just because it's being animated. Personally, I'm looking forward to it. I wonder what kind of dance we'll be doing over the end credits."

Baccano 2002

Jesus Christ, this could not have been worse if he had been actively trying to torpedo his career.
The basic idea - Firo and Ennis on their honeymoon aboard a ship with the great grandkids of Jacuzzi Splot and Vino, while Elmer and the other surviving immortals are on a different ship going the other way as terrorists take over both ships - sounds awesome. Indeed, the first volume, Bullet Garden, is a blast - the movie loving chatty mask wearing villains, the Banderas style bad ass gunman, the hilarious goth-loli with a worryingly dark backstory...all great additions, and the the leader of the kids from the original novels framing sequence getting retconned as Jacuzzi's descendant while Vino and Chane are handily replaced by their own great-grandkids, a psychotic child star and her nearly mute stunt actor brother...not really all the far off the original characters, but still promising.
Blood Sabbath, however, is a nightmare.
The leader of the masked men is bad enough - a kid magician, he's Hughie and Monica's descendant, and trying to get revenge on Hughie who he believes killed Monica. Narita never once manages to make it remotely convincing that this is actually what happened, and without us buying that, his character is just obnoxious and emo. He's somewhat balanced by the awesome muscle bound crazy woman who talks like a dirty old man.
The book runs into serious trouble when it tries to bring the religion Elmer was rescued from out of a footnote in his back history and into a role as the central villains of the book. The idea of a religion that worships the pain of abused children and hauls around a group of blindfolded, handcuffed children chanting the writs of their order as they listen to the sounds of their own screams is a BIT too fucking dark for ANY book, and spending the first THREE HUNDRED FUCKING PAGES almost entirely on exhaustively explaining this shit to the hapless undercover woman they've brainwashed and 'married' to the cult leader basically is simply unfathomable. Why did he think this shit would work? Why didn't any of his editors stop him?
Possible scheduling. These two volumes came out just as the anime was ending, and by his own admission the second volume was originally supposed to be TWO volumes, which probably explains why three of the four hundred pages are devoted to meandering unfocused set up and then it abruptly lurches into a cliffnotes clipshow version of the climax, completely destroying the effect of any and all twists and neutering all the new characters added to the first volume, who now get only token, unsatisfying pay offs that entirely get lost in the horrible shuffle.
AS IF THIS WAS NOT BAD ENOUGH, the mother fucking epilogue tries to pull some sort of fucking M. Night twist and resurrect the motherfucker who tortured Chez all those years and who Chez supposedly ATE...but who Szilard ALSO apparently ate, and who is all through this book working for the masked men AND the cult AND fucking orchestrating the entire thing like a fucking puppet master JUST TO FUCKING WITH PEOPLE.
He clearly has ambitious plans to spin this plotline out into several other epoch hopping novels, and I suddenly have absolutely no faith in his ability to do so.

Recycled Youth Part 2: Loop-de-Loop

I got kind of blindsided by this one; I knew Viz was launching a new prose imprint, but the minimal buzz since the initial announcement meant I just randomly bumped into this one day in the bookstore. Interestingly, Viz's own branding is nowhere to be seen on the covers; perhaps this is to keep it out of the manga section and racked in the science fiction where I found it.

Anyway, KILL is a pretty good read, and an interesting contrast to Sky Crawlers' version of expendable soldiery. Whereas Oshii's Kannami only seems to be repeating the same day, Sakurazaka's Kiriya is in a more literal rerun.

I hesitate to say too much about the plot, because frankly, it's not that original. It wears its influences on its sleeve, and if you have even a passing interest in SF lit you'll probably share a bit of Kiriya's deja vu (in fact, this book's power-armored infantry and Western-named, green-eyed ethnic Japanese made me realize how much the generic anime future owes to Heinlein).

Where it shines is in the execution. This book is meticulously well-crafted, in an Alan Moore kinda way-- Sakurazaka has a knack for introducing an idea, wringing just the right amount of juice out of it, then kicking it loose and changing the game with another one. Kiriya is also a very easy guy to like, which is much appreciated if I'm going to be reading almost 200 pages of his internal monologue. Of course, part of the credit must go to the translator, the mighty Alexander O. Smith (and an apparently uncredited Joseph Reeder), once again showing why he's one of the best in the biz.

Bottom line, it's good breezy pulp, vividly written and engrossing. I had a great time.

Baccano! 1705 The Ironic Light Orchestra

Echoes of Baccano 2002 here; definitely a Baccano novel but far removed from the main thrust of the series in time and tone.
And like Baccano 2002, that makes it all the stronger. The story of Hughie and Elmer's first encounter, back when they were both around fourteen or fifteen, The Ironic Light Orchestra quickly spirals outwards into a really fucked up mystery novel. While unpredictability has always been one of Narita's strong suits, he really topped himself here. With Elmer and Hughie's personalities not yet fully formed, their energies still raw from their horrible, horrible creation...myths, almost -- the focus initially seems to be on them, and the supporting cast just foils to illustrate that. But Narita's characters have a way of exploding in ways you don't see coming. One character here makes such an impact I'm seriously thinking about reading back through the series to see if she's been mentioned before.
Along the sidelines, the infamous samurai, Denkuro, mentioned in passing in any number of novels but never actually a main cast member, finally shows up; a few other major characters make brief appearances or are mentioned in passing, indications of the network that will eventually draw together and summon a demon. Although perhaps the most astonishing twist in this sucker was the minor bad ass who abruptly -- in the epilogue! -- turns out to be Maizer...which is apparently intended as an aural pun on Miser. Argh.
I sort of trapped myself here by not wanting to actually talk about the plot -- it was a bit too good to spoil even if the chances of many people other than me reading the series any time soon are super slim. So this ended up more incoherent than usual.

Hariyama-san, Center of the World

Far and away Narita Ryohgo's best series, the Hariyama-san series -- of which there are exactly two books, so far -- effectively consists of short stories in whatever genre he damn well feels like. Hariyama-san himself is an eternal supporting character -- never integral to the action, he is often simply mentioned in passing. He's just in all the stories.
Each volume also has a fourth story that ties all the previous stories together into one big mash-up climax.
The first volume kicked off with a girl spying an axe murdered under her boyfriend's bed and trying gently to ease him out of the place, while he desperately tries to keep her there because he just saw a man running around with an axe outside his apartment. That man had actually being trying to kill the girl, but snuck into a yakuza's apartment across the way by mistake.
Then we get an INSANE magical girl -- she's from the kingdom of magic, but has watched too much anime and is constantly breaking the law and going to Japan to fight evil. But when she attempts to take down some yakuza, they take pity on her, promise her she'll never be made to fight for anyone again, and adopt her.
And then fuck up the magic police who come chasing after her.
Meanwhile, on a distant island, a boy discovers that he's actually the evil overlord, and everyone else on the island is a hero destined to kill him.
Even his girlfriend.

Hariyama-san, Center of the World 2, which I just read, is even more awesome.
Kicks off with a horror story about a taxi driver who picks up the ghost of a murdered girl; she's just about to kill him when she realizes his taxi is from another dimension.

Then we get the tragedy of No. 37564, an ordinary minion in an evil organization...for the fifth time running. Every single time he gets captured and mad scientists finish altering his body, the organization winds up getting destroyed by heroes. Before he gets brainwashed. Consequently he has become the strongest man in the history of time. Fortunately, he has absolutely no ambition, and is content to serve the twelve year old boy who runs the evil organization just like evil organizations are run on TV because he's suicidal and wants to be killed by the heroes. Who No. 37564 keeps fucking terrorizing.

The Don't of the Dead
A hitwoman with a pathological aversion to human body temperature has her dream come true when she finds herself mixed up in a war between Science Zombies and Magic Zombies. The two children controlling the armies turn out be zombies themselves, and totally running the whole thing as a game because they plan to kill her and turn her into a zombie slave. She sort of turns the tables on them, has them make her into a zombie, and adopts them.

The Red Death of Kashiwagi Cross
Opens with a hero No. 37564 beat up cheerily explaining how great heroes are to a totally unimpressed policeman, who eventually points out that this really isn't going to help him plead insanity. Fortunately, Hariyama-san doesn't press charges. (When No. 37564 punched him, he landed on the roof of Hariyama-san's car.)
The heroic chant he constantly repeats turns out to be a product of his brainwashing; the awesomely named Genociders turn out to be working for a mad scientist who betrayed the evil organization No. 37564 worked for (they briefly had a giant robot named Big Massacre, but No. 37564 kicked it. Once.) and when he tries to rejoin them they kill him.
And then he gets turned into a zombie.
And then he gets possessed by the little dead girl from the first story.
And then everyone has a barbeque at Hariyama-san's house.

Phantasm Phenomenon of Memoria-Noise

Somewhat unnoticed beneath the sheer popularity of Boogiepop and the flashy fantasy trappings of the Jiken series, Kouhei Kadano has been quietly working on the Soul Drop series, producing volumes at a significantly faster rate than either of his other ongoing works.
It's not a series that draws attention to itself; published by Non Magazine's novel line (Non is a women's magazine, I think) it boasts bland illustrations (that, to their credit, capture the personalities well) and stock cover dress, and back cover copy that somehow fails to mention what I'd consider the fucking hook.
The covers do vaguely mention that it involves two insurance agents chasing a mysterious man known only as Papercut - a man who steals seemingly insignificant items that are, unbeknownst to the owners, of equal value to their lives.
What the covers fail to mention is that one of the agents IS A ROBOT.
How you can have a god damn robot detective in your book and not god damn mention it is fucking beyond me. I suppose they wish to avoid distorting expectations - this is a book that thrives on ensemble casts, with an intangible villain who never actually meets the supposed main characters, and whose actual motives remain something of a mystery to everyone but himself.
Hell, this volume, the second one, complicates describing things dramatically by adding a new character into the mix, one who manages to be instantly so compelling he effectively feels like the actual main character of the series, one who simply was too busy to show up for the first volume.
I think there was a mystery in here, and it worked reasonably well, without ever getting bogged down in tedious deduction; but Kadano has the sense to make his mystery play thematically into what we're learning about the central characters.
I've written often about Kadano's unique grasp of character, and the refreshingly subdued narrative neatly puts this skill out front, allowing it to carry the book. At least, carry it up until the robot starts punching grenades back at people.
Nothing ever works on only one level, and nothing is ever spelled out for us completely; a scene where one character describes her brother ostensibly exists to sketch in their relationship, but the responses of the characters around her tell us something about each of them, her own response tells us something about her brother, and the brief description of her behavior: '"I hate him," she said, quickly. Too quickly,' is a glancing blow that tells you a lot without ever really giving you the truth.
The first two books here have effectively crystallized what I like about Kouhei Kadano; they may well be his best work.

Not really missing out on Missing

I've written a good deal about Missing, going so far as to translate four volumes of the series for Tokyopop's ill fated novel line.
The first two volumes - the only two ever published in English - are nice stand alone volumes that skillfully blend J-horror tropes with actual research into folklore and the occult.
Then an arc plot enters the picture, and volumes three through eight are absolutely fantastic stuff.
I finally finished the series a few minutes ago, and I regret to inform you it ends with a limp flop.
After volume eight he clearly makes a conscious decision to head for an ending. Instead of being carried along by a wave of good ideas, he methodically attempts to manipulate his already dangerously immobile characters into the positions he has decided they should be.
One of the more obviously flaws throughout the series was the somewhat shallow characterization, and the obvious inertia all these characters present when attempting to give them arcs, or get the plot moving; each of them is essentially complete and has nothing built into their being that makes them actually do anything proactively.
It takes him five volumes to force them into place. The result is simply tedious. And the places he forces them into are frequently simply not that interesting or satisfying; he gives you a plot element you knew was coming, and zero payoff on it, so you're left wishing he hadn't bothered.