The Devil Asks 100 Questions

Virtually all of Kadono Kouhei's books have had a healthy dose of philosophical meandering buried somewhere between the supernatural stuff. It was only natural he'd eventually find the time to explore that side of his writing in a little more depth, but I'm a little bit shocked how well the book turned out.
Kuzuha Momiji becomes internet famous for basically no reason -- her corrupt businesswoman mother is being hounded by the press after a particularly splashy failure, and Momiji happens to snap at the reports on live television. Shortly after, her mother comes to her with an offer -- they've got the best fixer in the business ready to bail her out, but only if Momiji agrees to talk to him. A man they all call The Devil -- Shaman Simpleheart. Who never once speaks to Momiji, or even seems aware that she is there. All interactions she has with The Devil are through a marionette named Hazure-kun -- a marionette who it is increasingly hard to believe is really being controlled by the man.
Hazure-kun insists he doesn't want to talk to her at all. He's being forced to do so by his masters. He doesn't expect much out of her, really; he just wants her to be stupid, to be the kind of useful idiot who can ask a simple question that inadvertently leads a genius like him to a breakthrough that can change the course of human history. For the rest of the book, he peppers her with questions -- one hundred in all, helpfully laid out for us in the table of contents -- and she tries to answer some of them, is utterly baffled by others, and angrily ignores even more. Sure, occasionally buildings catch fire, drug dealers are beaten half to death, and Momiji accidentally stops a madman from turning a wedding into a bloodbath, catapulting herself from internet famous to actually appearing on TV regularly, and a few guest characters from other Kadono series pop in to make the ending totally batshit for anyone who read this book first, but the core of the book is two people attempting to discuss the nature of the universe, and more often than not failing to understand a thing the other says. Yet this is somehow fascinating.
It's easy to talk about the slightly off-kilter sensibilities that make Kadono such a unique writer; occasionally it's nice to be reminded that there's quite a bit of craft supporting that.

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.

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.

Repent Walpurgis 2

I managed to avoid retaining anything from the first book, so it was quite a relief that this volume consisted almost entirely of over the top action. You don't need to remember a great deal about the Ice Witch to get a kick out of her fighting with the one eyed samurai in a crowded airport as he opens chasms in the floor beneath her and she has to catch hold of the staff she immobilized when he tried to hit her with it. You don't have to remember any of the character backstories to cringe as Nagi gets stabbed through the heart by a stake made from the body of her own mother. You do probably have to have read virtually everything Kadano has ever written to make much sense out of the last chapter, in which virtually every mysterious faction that has been kicking around the outskirts of the Boogiepop series assemble, shuffle themselves and decide to start fucking shit up. Akemi starred in her own Boogiepop novel, Heartless Red -- her unique talent for bullshit has allowed her to have a successful career in the Towa Organization without actually having any of the powers she claims to have. Introduced to Asukai Jin by a character from his fucking Faust short stories, she decides to make him the next head of the Towa Organization, and uh, I guess that plot will happen next time. There's a lot of set up for it. Meanwhile, the doctor from the Shizuru-san novels betrays Nagi, and Akemi sends her to see Beat Pete, at which point the novel ends, having finally caught up to the teaser cliffhanger at the end of Beat's Discipline. Oh, and Nagi is turning into an evil witch doomed to fight through all eternity with another witch, both of which move from host body to host body throughout time. The other witch has quite a lot of plans carefully laid over the last few centuries, having sent Nagi's mother THROUGH TIME. I strongly suspect they are a parallel universe manifestation of the dueling witches seen in the Jiken series. Meanwhile, Riki Tiki Tavi possessed Aya, giving her superpowers but ultimately placing her against Nagi and the other witch in a battle she cannot hope to win.
In other words, great fun, but it is no longer possible to read anything Kadono writes without first reading everything else he has ever written, preferably in chronological order, including stuff that only ran in magazines and they've never been nice enough to collect in book form, ha ha ha ha ha.

No Oxygen, Not to be Mirrored

No Point, Not to be Read.
So Kadono Kouhei writes the Boogiepop series, and everything he writes is set in the same world -- even the things that aren't are linked in clever ways. The Boogiepop novels feature a sort of formless menace known as the Towa Kikou, or just The System. As the Boogiepop series entered double digits, the head of the Towa Kikou was revealed to be a soft spoken man with so little personality people frequently failed to notice him until he spoke -- and when he spoke, he spoke in riddles. His name was Oxygen, and he could see the strings of fate. But Oxygen was dying, and searching for his replacement. This was an immensely tedious subplot for several volumes -- only one time was it ever the focus, and that novel is the single worst book in the series -- and it had an annoying habit of showing up in Faust short stories, even providing a key driving force to Beat's Discipline.
Oxygen himself was, by nature, a cryptic cipher -- a man who spoke only in the half-baked, deliberately obfuscated philoso-shit Kadono previously had the sense to keep confined to the writings of a fictional author that other characters occasionally attempted to understand. Plots caused by him or involving him never seemed to add up to much, and the Boogiepop novels were noticeably better when Kadono stopped trickling in half-assed arc plots and wrapped that storyline up.
In this book. Written for a completely different publisher. For a completely different audience. And in a way that would make absolutely no fucking sense to anyone not already a huge fan.
I dunno, maybe it's just me, but given a shot at doing a big hardcover prestige volume that's also supposed to be a fucking children's novel, I'd probably try to do something with as little continuity as possible, with a big, meaty hook, and interesting characters. I'm not sure the book is actually all that continuity heavy -- Oxygen is just a crazy dude in the part, Teratsuki is just a dude that died and left secrets behind, the armed robbers may vaguely mention how they used to work for Diamonds but it doesn't matter if you don't get it...but Kaleidoscopes brief appearance is pretty inexplicable, and the epilogue -- where fucking Suema Kazuko takes over the god damn Towa Kikou -- is utterly baffling even though (or especially because?) he doesn't mention her name.
But even ignoring the continuity heavy shit, the novel is simply BAD.
The entire front half of the book is loaded with fucking endless baffling conversations with Oxygen, and even when there are armed robbers and treasure and halls filled with mirrors and shit later on, every fucking decision a character makes winds up flashing back to yet more fucking Oxygen prattle he mercifully failed to dole out the first time around. None of which adds up to anything worth a damn, because all the characters are completely uninteresting, something I didn't actually think could ever happen in a Kadono novel -- even the truly appalling Zankokugo Jiken had some decent character moments, where this has fucking none.
As if the relentlessly uninviting slog of a main text wasn't bad enough, he's randomly decided to preface each chapter with a bit of summary taken from a shitty tokusatsu TV show one of the characters once starred it. Not only is this clearly the most mind-bogglingly cliched piece of shit ever put to fucking film, not only do the brief plot excepts often fucking end on cliffhangers ("only to discover...") that are never resolved, but the fucking things don't even have the courtesy to provide some sort of meta-allegorical parallel to the actual events. I was literally unable to perceive any mother fucking reason for them to be there at all, except to prove that Kadono is capable of some of the worst prose ever turned out by mortal man.
I was really looking forward to digging into the three Mystery Land novels I bought years and years ago -- I wanted to read them all in a row, and I'd even planned on making a feature on the old wiki version of Eastern Standard. But after two of the worst books ever written by truly great writers, I don't know if I have the stomach to see if Otsu Ichi fucked his up this god damn hard too.

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.

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.

Let sleeping dogs lie.

Years ago, waaaaay before Boogiepop, Kadono Kouhei wrote a novel. It was rejected. He wrote it three more times, failing each time.
Then came Boogiepop, and thirty other novels, including the Jiken series...and he decided that old failure would fit in nicely. He started sowing the seeds, and then announced the next book would be The Cruel Tale of Zankoku-go.
Took him four years. Severe writer's block? Problems making it work?
He probably should have abandoned the idea.
Because this is the single worst thing he's ever written.
I have literally been reading this fucking book for two months. I polished off the second half today, but that first half was an interminable slog that took a whole hell of a lot of stubborn persistence to get through. I'm really not sure why I bothered.
Story generating from characters or from high concepts is a running theme on this blog lately, and it's been partly because I've had this book on my mind. Kadono is a writer who has built his entire career on his fascinating, elusive, unique characters.
This book is all about fucking plot. Endless god damn dreary exposition, no god damn reason to give a flying fuck.
Sure, it has moments; one supporting character even manages to be sort of awesome, and she'll hopefully show up in a good book some day.
But large chunks of it are just BAD. Even when people are actually doing something they have a tendency to spout ghastly cliches like, "Let's finish this!"
The change in artists doesn't help. The cover is awesome, the character I liked has a particularly cool design that shows how much the artist tried to capture the berserk aesthetic the original one brought to the series, but ultimately he wants to be fucking illustrating an eighties sci-fi books, and there is some embarrassing battle jump suit and cape combos that totally take the books some place way blander than the first four novels. Which goes along with the relentlessly large scale plot.
Zankoku-go worked in Some Tragedies of No Tear Land because he was a small cog in the book - a gigantic monster fight that flitted through a much more ground level, personal, intense drama. Here he's an utterly bland force of nature in a plot that is all world on the brink of destruction massive shit. Avoid.

Dude

Boogiepop: The Phantom Menace

Not in the mood for a polemic tonight, so you're getting the nice version, not the FACTS version.
Boogiepop and Others has a flashy, gimmicky structure that exists because it serves the story Kadano Kouhei wanted to tell. The particular mood he wanted to capture was served equally well by the horror elements - and neither structure stunts nor horror elements play a significant role in the other 14 novels.
Kadano essentially writes whatever kind of narrative he damn well pleases; while there are some themes that unify the novels, they're pretty much young adult fiction's greatest hits, and I find it hard to claim they define the appeal of the series.
Boogiepop Phantom - which, as I keep strenuously reminding people, refers only to the anime - commits three major errors in adapting the source material.
1. It's a horror series. And one heavily reliant on the tropes of J-horror, which have not aged well. Boogiepop is not a horror series. There are moments of personal horror within the stories, but I ultimately feel the genre is closer to whatever-the-fuck we're claiming Jojo's Bizarre Adventure is.
2. It lifts the structural stunts and themes from Kadano without lifting any of what he actually did. I mean, I respect the idea of doing your own thing, but it's pretty rare that this actually works. And in this case it seems pretty clear that they did this because they utterly missed the point; it makes the series about the structure, and about the mystery of what the hell is going on.
3. There are no characters. Every single one of them is a one-note, one-dimensional cardboard cutout designed entirely to communicate the theme as clearly and as boringly as possible. Compared with Kadano's own characters, who are maddeningly complex and prone to unexpected behavior just as you think you understand them...it feels all the more sad.

I suppose Boogiepop Phantom is probably still a perfectly decent series - I mean, I did like it enough to pick up the first novel a few years later - but we're talking an entertaining Sci-Fi channel adaption of a novel series that LITERALLY changed publishing history - 'light novels' only exist because it sold a shit load and dragged the label out of RPG novelization hell.
It deserves better.

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