Faust 7

Or, the problem with Faust. Japanese edition.
This sucker is 1800 yen, and well over 1200 pages.
I read two stories in it.
Nisioisin's Risuka finally resolved a cliffhanger set up three fucking years ago, when Faust 6 came out. It did so in characteristically disturbing fashion, and was well worth the wait.
Kadono Kouhei's short story is a beautiful piece of fan service, spinning of a minor character from Jagdtiger into a thin story of her own that mostly exists as an excuse to include a series of flashbacks - an encounter with Eugene, who has pretty much only shown up in Boogiepop in the Mirror: Pandora, but who I have long wanted to see reappear; a bit involving the origins of Spooky Electric; the moment Pearl first left the Towa Organization; and concludes with an appearance by Asukai Jin, now apparently working with the Towa Organization. The end title reveals that this story is VS Imaginator Part V. While I appreciated the fanservice immensely, the fucking thing is utterly incomprehensible without having read all of Boogiepop, and the actual story involved is largely opaque - hell, I didn't even cotton on that Katyusha was from Jagdtiger until the last fucking sentence. There's pretty much no meaningful resolution of anything contained here, and it winds up demonstrating both the weaknesses and strengths of Kadano's penchant for interlocking narratives through all his books. Which is probably why his strongest books are the ones that have the least to do with the others.

But two stories is uh, a very small percentage of this book. While I've spoken glowingly of the five really great writers involved with Faust, three of them are missing in action (seriously, they couldn't get Maijo Otaro to do anything?) and beyond those five, Faust's line up is pretty thin. I initially started reading Faust to find more writers like those five, and instead I've mostly found writers who wannabe like those five, but fucking suck. There's actually several new writers in this volume, some of whom might well be reasonably readable, but I've been burned enough by Faust that at this point I'm probably not going to actually take the time to read a bit of their stories and see. I'm just reading the bits I know to be good, and bunging the rest on the shelf. Which suggests Faust has failed it's function as an anthology; perhaps it's time to lay the thing to rest and let Risuka finish up in a reasonable god damn time frame.
Which might be my real point. With Faust unable to maintain even an annual schedule, Risuka's gradually building tension just becomes a stutter.

Why Faust is worth calling "cutting edge"

There's an immense gulf between how Japanese is spoken, and how it's written.
While I'm not going to go write a thesis on it, it often feels like each major literary revolution in Japan has been accompanied by a group of writers who have taken their writing one step closer to the colloquial speech they and their peers use.
Haruki Murakami owes the bulk of his success to this; his writing cut through the calcified formalism of Noble Prize winning pretense with stories that evaded literary importance by not really being about fucking anything in particular, written in a jazzy conversational tone that felt and still feels like a breath of fresh air to anyone who's struggled through a recognized literary masterpiece. (Not to knock those masterpieces unduly; some of them are genuinely worth the slog.)
But Murakami is an old man. He's my parents' age. He stays relevant, but there is a generation gap there, and he doesn't sound like people my age talk.
Light novels are more colloquial, yeah, but often with an artificial anime filter; the gap between anime voice acting and actual acting, if you will.
It often felt like the writers in Faust were the only people writing in modern voices, in the language as it was lived and used. There may have been others, but I never found them, and these guys banded together and put out a magazine that effectively is the voice of their generation. It may lack the literary pretensions of two generations ago, and it may not have the polite disdain to be about nothing at all, but to these writers, genre writing feels more relevant.
Full House probably didn't turn every Japanese man into a pedophile the way Nisioisin claims, but he's also admitted Eva single handedly ruined him for life, and there are probably a dozen other writers and manga artists who bear equal responsibility. He's a writer who reaches through truth by exaggerating it, the magnifying glass of his ornate writing style, bizarre plots, and deranged characters letting him capture something about the collective imagination of his generation that is fucking important. The instinctive grasp of character nuance in Kadono Kouhei's character-study-as-action-horror body of work; the incisive way Otsu Ichi reaches out and places his finger right on an emotional tremor; Tatsuhiko Takimoto's desperate attempts to keep himself from going insane on page; and Maijo Otaro, sadly left out of Faust 2, whose single-minded pursuit of reckless rage-fueled surrealism makes him a literary movement in himself...
Each approaches their work in a different fashion, each reads and feeds off the others voices, and without them, Japanese literature would be dead in the water.

Faust, volume 1

First, it should be noted that our very own Andrew Cunningham translated a good chunk of this book. Feel free to interpret that as indicative of a deep-seated editorial bias. Hopefully he can provide some insight into the behind-the-scenes production process.

With a bright, vibrant cover, Faust collects a number of very divergent short stories (and excerpts from longer works) into one volume. Names like CLAMP and Takeshi Obata draw some attention and recognition while the reader is introduced to wonderful gems from Nisioisin and Otsuichi. In addition to short stories, it also includes a handful of brief manga stories. It's mission statement is to collect "the best in cutting-edge Japanese fiction" and, for the most part, it succeeds.

In many ways, Faust is a collection of "anime short stories," carrying both the good and bad connotations one would expect. "Drill Hole in My Brain" by Otaro Maijo explodes with manic energy, its incredible sexual symbolism only barely contained by a surreal Moebius strip of a story. "Outlandos d'Amour" by Kouhei Kadano (Boogiepop) is all that one would expect of the author, delivering a story of weird creatures and magical powers hidden in the shadows of the world, with hints of some larger conspiracy looming over everything.

For all the good stories, however, the are others that fall a bit flat or, in the translation from a visual anime medium to prose on the page, reveal in stark relief the tired cliches near-endemic to the hobby. The excerpt from the xxxHOLIC: ANOTHERHOLIC novel is somewhat interesting as a counterpoint to the anime and manga, but carries too many of the same affectations to really be compelling. Some of the other stories (like "The Garden of Sinners") read like a typical, generic anime concept.

In addition to the short stories, there are also a few rather dry essays and a handful of manga, most of which are printed both in color and grey-scale. All the included manga are brief and self-contained, almost impressionistic. It is an interesting glimpse at kinds of manga that are rarely brought over to the US.

Ultimately, Faust would be worth the price of admission for "Drill Hole in My Brain" alone, but the collection as a whole provides a sampling of Japanese pop and genre fiction that is more than the sum of its parts. While each story might not be amazing, they constitute a slice of the fiction and "light novels" that anime fans hear about in relation to some of their favorite anime but rarely get to actually see for themselves. For that reason alone, it is highly recommended to everyone.

based on one volume : Wikipedia : Amazon