Masaki Yamada

While recovering from surgery, I took the time finally watch the most recent incarnation of the anime franchise Ghost in the Shell, Arise, as well as the new movie it leads into, the creatively titled Ghost in the Shell: The New Movie. When I realized The New Movie's final scene echoed the opening scene of the original Ghost in the Shell film, I rewatched that, and that caused me to finally pick up this novel, which bridges the original Ghost in the Shell with its sequel, Innocence.

It was odd reading Masaki Yamada's After The Long Goodbye. Normally my rubric for character in tie-in novels is the extent to which I can imagine the actors speaking the dialogue, but I watch Ghost in the Shell subtitled, which means it's difficult for me to imagine Akio Ōtsuka as Batou speaking any of the translated-into-English lines here. That said, I think Yamada captured Batou's essence: Batou is usually silent and competent, but here we get access to his internal monologue, and it turns out that silence and competence is backed by intelligence and rumination and an increasing need to feel love. Mostly this book is about Batou trying to get his kidnapped basset hound back; like almost all incarnations of Ghost in the Shell, I didn't entirely understand the conspiracy aspects of the plot but I enjoyed it regardless for the characters and the concepts. (The reason the dogs are kidnapped is a really neat sci-fi idea.) This prose extension of Ghost in the Shell fits perfectly into the universe of the anime, and has me looking forward to rewatching Innocence with this new background in mind to complete my Ghost in the Shell journey.

(The insight provided by the afterword, a conversation between Yamada and Mamoru Oshii, writer/director of the first two Ghost in the Shell films, was a nice bonus.)… (más)

My reaction to reading the fiction and introduction to this collection after reading it in 2007.

“Introduction: Rush Hour of the Old Ones”, Robert M. Price -- Price, who has edited several Lovecraft inspired anthologies and who has a degree in theology, purports to find some similarity in the broad mythology of the Cthulhu Mythos and Aum Shinrikyo: humanity must be purged from Earth to make way for supernatural beings who will be worshiped by the worthy members of the cult. Price also provides some interesting material on how the group’s theology evolved. he also looks at similarities between Budhhism and August Derleth’s corrupted interpretations of the Cthulhu Mythos. (Nov. 13, 2007)

“The Plague of St. James Infirmary”, Asamatsu Ken, trans. R. Keith Roeller -- This story shows what I’m told is a characteristic Japanese love of icon -- kami -- in their extreme form. This is sort of interesting melange of American icons fixed in the Japanese mind, specifically Chicago and its gangsters. Taro, the Japanese bodyguard, turns out to be Kaitaro Hasegawa (I assume a real Japanese writer) who created a beloved fictional one-armed, one-eyed samurai (which Taro temporarily is, due to injuries, in this story.) Price’s notes reveal Michael Leigh, the occultist character, to be a borrowing from Henry Kuttner’s foray into the Cthulhu Mythos. There is a certain unintended humor here -- besides the improbable assertion that Michael Leigh’s implied ancestor, Judge Leigh of the Salem Witch Trials, moved to Chicago (my research says the first whites arrived in the 1770s there) with it being noted that the Japanese “have an exceptionally keen spiritual sensitivity”.

“The Import of Terrors”, Yamada Masaki, trans. Kathleen Taji -- This story effectively combines the firebombing of Kobe -- and less obviously its devastating earthquake fifty years later -- with some of the elements of H. P. Lovecraft’s “The Whisperer in the Darkness” and “At the Mountains of Madness”. Two Japanese boys, fleeing the firebombing and starved, enter the mysterious house of a Russian immigrant. They encounter a strange creature who urges the boys to eat it. But they also see the maimed body of the Russian. Still living, he tells them not to eat the alien, that to do so will let a parasite live in their bodies for fifty years, and, when it emerges, catastrophe will result. He even kills one of the boys to stop him from eating the alien but then dies. The narrator, the surviving boy, tells at story’s end how he feels strange impulses and must return to Kobe. Price's brief introduction actually helps appreciate the story. He reminds us that Lovecraft’s tale linked the aliens in the Vermont woods with Indian myths and the Mi-Go of the Himalayas and that they feared other aliens. That enemy they feared is implied, believes Price, to be the parasite infecting the alien (seemingly one of the Old Ones from “At the Mountains of Madness”). Price also points out the timing of the narrator’s return to Kobe and the portent of disaster would have been understood by a Japanese audience to mean the Kobe earthquake. Price also compares the state of the boys to the “hungry ghosts” of Buddhism and Hindu reincarnation, a state two notches below being reincarnated as human. However, I don’t quite buy all of Price’s implications. Yes, the Mi-Go are linked to the Himalayas but they aren’t in this story though, admittedly, the parasite may be one they feared. (Russian Nikolai’s maiming seems to reveal a man, and not a Mi-Go, horribly injured by the parasite bursting from his body -- though how it got to be the size and shape of an Old One is really explained). Nevertheless, it’s an effective story. There’s no reason why a Lovecraftian tale has to slavishly and precisely link itself to the details of the Cthulhu Mythos to work.

’27 May 1945”, Kamino Okina, trans. Steven P. Venti -- An interesting mythos story set during the midst of the Battle for Okinawa. A priestess of the island’s Cthulhu cult undertakes a mission to release, seemingly, some nascent Deep One forms from beneath Shuri Castle. There is a nice bit at the end of the story tying the destruction, that day, of the castle by an American battleship, the secret nuclear testing two years later on a South Pacific island, and the reluctance of American to have a G8 summit in 1992 at the restored castle to the events of the story.

“Night Voices, Night Journeys”, Inoue Masahiko, trans. Edward Lipsett -- Forgettable story that invokes the old sex-death link to little effect. The story explicitly mentions Yog-Sothoth.

“Sacrifice”, Murata Motoi, trans Nora Stevens Heath -- An odd story with a happy ending. A lot of stock horror elements are there: an unfriendly village with a strange ritual/cult, an urbanite retreating to said village to heal an ill (bad skin), and the village has unusually large and prize vegetables due to their special soil. The protagonist fears his sick wife may be being prepared as some sort of human sacrifice to the Soil God who produces a soil so good that it may be eaten. Said soil may be the product of human sacrifice or, editor Price speculates, the excrement of the Soil God. Because of this speculation and because ingesting such large quantities of soil makes the protagonist’s wife youthful and beautiful and cures her dermatitis, I was reminded of the Japanese sexual fetish (not widespread) of eating human excrement.

“Necrophallus”, Makino Asamu, trans Chun Jin -- A sado-masochist tale that has a certain emotional believability and consistency. A sadist who likes to beat women encounters a mysterious alien, figured like a woman, who may have been born on Yuggoth, her mother disfigured by her grandfather wielding the alien dagger Necrophallus, which maims the narrator and gives him ecstasy at the same time.

“Love for Who Speaks”, Shibata Yoshiki, trans Stephen A. Carter -- A reworking of H. P. Lovecraft’s “The Shadow Over Innsmouth”. Both stories feature “people” who find that they are really hybrids of humans and Great Old Ones, heredity calling them back to the ocean and an acquatic existence in the deep. But, whereas Lovecraft’s story is a horrifying revelation, genes pulling the hero to a repulsive fate (his cousin, after all, shoots himself rather than go to the ocean with the inhabitants of Innsmouth), the protagonist here finds freedom in not only realizing her biological destiny but escaping from the control of her unloving husband. It is the character of the husband -- a gnostic like figure, editor Robert Price notes, who has become enamored with the pleasures of the surface world rather than attending to his calling of finding “women” who are daughters of the Great Old Ones --that has no comparable analog in the Lovecraft story.… (más)

Set up as sort of a prequel to the film, the book is one part philosophical musing, one part cyberpunk, one part detective story but at its heart the story is about a lost dog. The dogs owner Batou, who is a cyborg thinks that his dog left him after his electronic brain was reformatted because he is incapable of feeling and lacks any form of humanity. It might sound silly that this is a lost dog story but the author does a good job of using it as a vehicle to explore other themes such as: what are emotions and how do he know they are real, as humans augment themselves with technology do they lose their soul, what is a soul, and in a world where things can be easily faked what is reality. Another consent that is explored is that of Innocence. Humans in this philosophical musing (or at least how I viewed it) are not innocent we fluctuate are violent and greedy, we have desires and are selfish but can do acts of kindness or acts of cruelty. So we create things in this case androids who are not cluttered by human weaknesses and can remain "innocent." yet the more we try to attain this, the more we make them human, which scares us as we ourselves are constantly becoming less human. Or we put our energy into caring for pet who are also not tainted by being human and this innocent. I'm probably not doing the concept justice as it is kind of hard to wrap your head around but is thought provoking to say the least. The author throws in some action to break up the philosophy and by the end has come full circle with Batou finding his answer. Overall it was an interesting read although some of the philosophy might have you rereading passages. I'd say give it a shot as you can read it without much prior knowledge of Ghost in the Shell and I recommend watching the movie Innocence as it explores a lot of the same issues. Furthermore if you like cyberpunk themes you will feel right at home here.… (más)

In summary, Night Journeys, Nights Voices, subtitled Lairs of the Hidden Gods volume one, is urgently recommended to all serious mythos aficionados.

Night Voices, Night Journeys is a publication of Kurodahan Press, and is, I believe, POD. One way to order it is from Amazon, where it is $20 plus shipping. The page count is a VERY generous 363. However, 14 pages are taken up by introductions by Asamatsu Ken and Robert Price, and each story has its own title page and brief introduction, also by Robert Price. And from page 289 onward the material is factual discussion of mythos manga and Lovecraftian fiction in Japan, with brief notes about the authors and translators at the end of the book. Production qualities are good. My copy had one printing error on page 301 where a crease led to a flaw in the typesetting, but the print was still readable. The cover has a lovely painting by Yamada Akihiro of a Japanese sea demon hidden amidst flowering plants. This is really quite different than the art style I am used to seeing on mythos books from the western world. I found it quite striking; most mythos novels illustrations do not depict horror concealed in exquisite beauty. This book was written a number of years previously for the Japanese horror market and I guess the success (or perhaps the quality) was sufficient to prompt an English language version. Hence the anthology was edited by Asamatsu Ken, a Japanese author and HPL fan rather than one of the usual mythos crew here in the west. For such a book to succeed in the west it is extraordinarily important to have an excellent translation, one that can not just change the words into English but can also portray the atmosphere the author was trying to convey, that can appropriately bring off the rhythm of the dialogue and use of slang, puns or other word play. In many ways the translation is an expression of the interpretation of these intangibles by the interpreter, and the work in some ways becomes their own. I know from reading The Iliad that two translators can derive entirely different language out of the same source work. I confess I have only ever read a few works of fiction written by Japanese authors before (one book Miyamoto Musashi was from my days taking karate), so I don't have a great deal of experience in this forum. The success of this book in the US will stand or fall with the quality of the translation as much as with the stories themselves. Happily these seem to be superb translations. The stories read seamlessly, naturally, allowing us to readily enter the author's worlds. For once I have no complaints about the introductions by Price, which were thoughtful, well written and informative. I would follow his advice, however, and not read the individual story introductions until after you have read the work in question, to avoid spoilers.

In some ways this book is both frustrating and tantalizing. These are new stories, written specifically for this anthology, much like with Horrors Beyond or Dead But Dreaming. This means there are other works already extant in Japan that we know nothing about. Here is an untapped mythos resource that I will only ever see as it is translated. In a way that means I'll probably only see the cream of the crop, but I can't help wondering about jewels known only to Japanese fans. And it makes me wonder about mythos fiction from other countries. We have many stories from the US and the UK, and now we are seeing some Australian fiction. What about India or China, or any African nations? Heck what about Russia or non English speaking Europe?? One thing HPL fans do is write their own mythos contributions. This has kept the mythos alive and squirming over the years. The tradition dates back to the days HPL first ever wrote a story and his friends leaped over themselves creating new entities and tomes. As we only see fiction written by English speakers we are missing out!! And this cuts both ways. I would imagine very little mythos fiction beyond the hoary classics is translated into Japanese so the revisionist view of Derleth is not extant in Japan. In fact it is HPL, the Lovecraft circle and Derleth, with of course whatever mythos heritage is native to Japan, that forms the basis of the Japanese mythos fiction here. I wonder what Asamatsu Ken would think of the stories in Eldritch Blue or Dead But Dreaming.

Fortunately for us English speaking fans this is the first volume of a projected 4 volume series. I fervently hope that they sell well so we do, in fact, get to see all 4 volumes.

Here are the contents:

ASAMATSU Ken - Foreword: "Recollections of Tentacles"
ASAMATSU Ken "The Plague of St. James Infirmary" translated by R. Keith
ROELLER
HISADOME Kenji "The Cthulhu Mythos in Japan" translated by Edward
LIPSETT HOSHINO Satoshi "Cthulhu Mythos Manga List" translated by Ryan
MORRIS
INOUE Masahiko "Night Voices, Night Journeys" translated by Edward
LIPSETT
KAMINO Okina "27 May 1945" translated by Steven P. VENTI
MAKINO Osamu "Necrophallus" translated by CHUN Jin
MURATA Motoi "Sacrifice" translated by Nora Stevens HEATH
SHIBATA Yoshiki "Love for Who Speaks" translated by Stephen CARTER
YAMADA Masaki "The Import of Tremors" translated by Kathleen TAJI
YONEZAWA Yoshihiro "Four Decades of H.P. Lovecraft and Manga"
translated by Ryan MORRIS

I will briefly discuss the stories below, but not the nonfiction. As usual spoilers, small or large, may follow. When I relate my impressions of a story I like to place it in context with other related stories I have read. For reasons alluded to above I cannot do that here; all my very old Derleth paperbacks and books by other Lovecraft Circle authors are hidden away in boxes somewhere. I relied on Price's introductions to place each story in context, but only after I read it. I must also say that the tenor of the anthology was intangibly different than other anthologies I have read recently, perhaps relating to the Japanese approach? There was a sort of surreal, almost dreamy feel to many of the stories, even when they were graphic. In some ways the horror was more detached. And many of them were about love and had distinct, sometimes graphic, sexual overtone.

ASAMATSU Ken "The Plague of St. James Infirmary" - This is actually a lengthy novella, setting fire servants of Cthuga against water servant of Cthaat in gangland Chicago (an interesting setting for a Japanese author in a Japanese anthology!). Mr. Asamatsu uses a Japanese word "yoki" to good effect here; I doubt it translates well but it is rendered as gruesome feeling. Yoki suffuses the pages, no doubt as the
author intended. Dreamlike, ghastly and compelling come to mind when reflecting on this story. This is the one work where I did detect a bit of lecturing to Americans. I mean the few paragraphs on the bottom of page 62-63, where American hypocrisy and lack of insight is paraded into the narrative. This is, of course, old hat. It was the only time I ever discerned anything like that, and I only bring it up for the sake of even handedness.

*********spoiler follows!!!***********

One very cool thing about this story was weaving into it some true historical figures and a venerable mythos fiction character of Henry Kuttner. I never would have known about the latter except for Mr. Price's introduction as it has been ages since I read the Book of Iod. Now we know the truth about Elliott Ness and Al Capone. I wonder if the Japanese character Hasegawa Kaitaro is similarly a real person adapted for this novella.

YAMADA Masaki "The Import of Tremors" - Oh what a good yarn this was, about some unspeakable entity trying to acquire a new host in the twilight of WWII. I knew some of the history without prompting, like the Kobe earthquake, but I did not realize that Kobe was fire bombed like Tokyo was.

KAMINO Okina "27 May 1945" translated by Steven P. VENTI - I would gather that the time of the military collapse in Japan in mid 1945 is used to good effect by horror writers in Japan. This time is related to the American assault on Okinawa, and uses it as a smokescreen to a confrontation between Hastur and Cthulhu, very Derlethian!! Also very well written!

INOUE Masahiko "Night Voices, Night Journeys" - Surreal, beautifully written, this story gives the anthology its name. Some night journeys are eternal.

MURATA Motoi "Sacrifice" - In this story a yuppie-type's wife gets caught up in a cult that may use her as a sacrifice to a soil god. Robert Price was right on the money when he compared it to the movie (and novel) The Wicker Man. I was a bit bemused because that is what I came up with myself before I read his remarks. Any way, this was perhaps the weakest story here, not bad just not as powerful as the others were for me.

MAKINO Osamu "Necrophallus" - Oh my, wonderful! For me this is the best story contained in the anthology. And Horror Between the Sheets purports to be about mythos sex. Hah! Makino's work was visionary! "Necrophallus" probably outdoes anything in Eldritch Blue for combining sex and true mythosian horror.

SHIBATA Yoshiki "Love for Who Speaks" - This is a marvelous tale of what are essentially The Deep Ones. They call to their own. A superb close to the superb fiction in Night Voices, Night Journeys.

The rest of the book is nonfiction.

Need I say that I thought this was a masterful collection? Congratulations to Mr. Asamatsu and his authors. And thank you to Mr. Lipsett for bringing it to us. Really, everyone should read it.… (más)