Restocking Time

I'm going to switch things up a bit today.

I typically get books in two different ways. First, I tend to order my specialty books through Acclimate Solution. It's pretty simple; I email them a list of titles and ISBNs, and they tell me what they can get and quote me a price. I've been making orders of 20-30 books every 1-2 months for the past three years or so, and I'm pretty happy with the results. It's good for tracking down things you wouldn't necessarily find in a bookstore and if a book is out of print, they'll offer to buy it from auctions or Amazon Marketplace sellers, who typically don't ship out of Japan.

The other way I get books is from the local Sanseido bookstore in San Diego, which is located within Mitsuwa Supermarket. I tend to think of it as like an airport bookstore. It doesn't have great selection but you can always count on it to have the latest One Piece, or Mitsuru Adachi book... things I wouldn't need to spend shipping on.

It just so happens that I got two hefty packages from Acclimate today, so I thought I'd share what I got. Feel free to leave a comment if there's anything you'd want to see me review sooner rather than later, or if you just want to make fun of my taste in books.


I typically get a mix of both recent releases of series I'm following, and a few complete series of an author or two whose library I'm trying to fill out. Today was a big Taiyo Matsumoto day. I've had all 8 volumes of Number Five for a while, and last order I got the recent one-volume omnibus edition of Tekkon Kinkreet (Black & White) that was released to tie in with the animated movie. This month I decided to splurge and picked up Blue Spring, Hanaotoko, and a very odd edition of Ping Pong. I highly approve of Shogakukan's habit of releasing Matsumoto's books in A5 formats and larger -- Hanaotoko and Blue Spring are both examples of this. My No. 5 and Tekkon books are B5, which is even larger, the size of the original magazines they were published in. Ping Pong has multiple editions in different sizes, so I went for broke and paid extra for the used out-of-print B5 edition that was released to coincide with the Ping Pong film. Oddly enough, though it's labeled as three volumes (A, B, C), each of these is just three very thin (100 pg.) books held together with an obi, making nine in total. I'm a bit disappointed in the flimsiness, but I can put up with it for the larger format. They also come with stickers!

The second big storyline (ooh, I do like to dramaticize my shopping habits) was a trio of Kotobuki Shiriagari books: Jacaranda, A*su, and Hinshi no Essayist. The hype from his recent Angouleme award and some intriguing descriptions from Adam Stephanides' blog caught my interest, and I'm looking forward to tearing into these. I also acquired two more artsy-fartsy books: Kan Takahama's Awabi (I haven't read her yet) and Usamaru Furuya's Donki Korin, which was recommended to me as a good follow-up to Palepoli.

Moving on to more entertainment-minded fare, I purchased the entire output of my latest man-crush, Kengo Hanazawa. Hanazawa's two series for Big Comic Spirits, Ressentiment (4 volumes) and Boys on the Run (5, ongoing) have had me totally spellbound for the past month, as I'm sure anyone within earshot can confirm. While ostensibly categorized as romantic comedies (which usually means stay away), Hanazawa's savagely funny sense of humor and hefty doses of pathos make these books read like cousins to Minoru Furuya's recent work (Ciguatera, Wanitokagegisu).

I also paid out the wazoo for used versions of Rurou Seinen Shishio, an out-of-print two-volume series from Shinkichi Kato that I mentioned in the Ranman review (the price I pay for my beloved favorites)... As well as these new volumes in the following series:

A Spirit of the Sun v.14 (Kaiji Kawaguchi)
Dorohedoro v.9 (Q Hayashida) - a secret favorite of mine
Freesia v.8 (Jiro Matsumoto)
Shojo Fight v.2 (Yoko Nihonbashi)
Hyougemono v.4 (Yoshihiro Yamada)
Biomega v.1-2 (Tsutomu Nihei) - the new Shueisha edition
Vinland Saga v.4 (Makoto Yukimura)


(click for fullsize version)
Top (L-R): Ping Pong, Hanaotoko, Blue Spring, Dorohedoro
Middle: Jacaranda, Awabi, Donki Korin, Hinshi no Essayist, A*su, Rurou Seinen Shishio, Biomega, Shojo Fight
Bottom: Ressentiment, Boys on the Run, Hyougemono, Vinland Saga, Freesia, A Spirit of the Sun

Disappearance Diary

Disappearance Diary (失踪日記)
by Hideo Azuma (吾妻ひでお)
published in various places (East Press)
1 volume (2005)
Amazon.jp

Hideo Azuma's award-winning, non-fiction, soon-to-be-English work. For those who haven't yet heard the premise, Azuma was a moderately successful manga artist in the 1970s and '80s who fell into alcoholism and escaped his work by running away from his responsibilities in 1989 and going homeless. After this experience and his eventual return to normal life, he repeated the cycle in 1992, this time finding work in a new town as a gas pipe layer. In 1997, his alcoholism was so bad that he was forced into a rehab clinic. These three experiences form the three different chapters of the book, which also includes a few descriptions of his career in general scattered throughout.

The most immediately striking feature of the book is the dichotomy between the serious, depressing content and the buouyancy of the cheerful cartoon art. Azuma claims that he removed all realism from the art because it would be "tiring and depressing" to depict it that way, but without any experience with Azuma's previous work, I can't say whether this means that he could have drawn with more detail, or if this is his only style. Certainly the images of characters from his older manga appear to be in the exact same style as the people in Disappearance Diary. His previous work appears to be a mixture of frivolous, tittilating romantic comedies and light sci-fi, a B-level output enough to give him a cultish weirdo following -- I have a feeling Yuzo Takada owes no small debt to his formula.

As for Disappearance Diary, it lives up to its moniker, consisting largely of minor anecdotes of daily happenings. The first account, of his stretch of solitary homelessness, is easily the most brutal. Azuma describes his daily struggle with starvation and the cold in heartbreaking detail: eating grass, drinking discarded bottles of tempura sauce, ransacking garbage cans. The pipelayer and rehab sections are similar in execution, except that Azuma's personal quirks take a backseat to the eccentricities of his fellow workers and patients. Throughout, Azuma continues his goofy slapstick framing, leeching the realism and pathos of his experiences out of the manga. His insistence on distancing himself from the reality of the situation in his depiction because it would be "too depressing" is somewhat disingenuous, however. At face value, as the slightly silly and undramatic life of a homeless man, Disappearance Diary is boring. What makes it interesting -- and I believe that Azuma recognizes this -- is the distance between his version of events and what we can imagine to be the reality of the situation, all of the things he's left out. What was most shocking to me was the offhand revelation, after we have seen Azuma trotting out the lowest periods of his life, that he had a wife during these entire travails! You'd never imagine he was a married man if he hadn't admitted to it, and their relationship, other than the fact that she does his assistant work when he draws, is left completely in the dark. This facet of his life I found to be much more interesting than what he actually does tell us.

It's possible that my mild dislike of Disappearance Diary as it stands stems from the art, which I will admit is not to my liking. As well, the many accolades and awards possibly had me expecting something different, and those expectations clashed with my lukewarm reception. It's certainly an intriguing book, and its concept is a rarity in the world of manga. But fittingly enough, these traits I only find myself admiring from a detached standpoint, much like Azuma's book, and the true core of enthusiasm I could have felt toward Disappearance Diary is as hidden as the real events obscured behind his creative veil.

Heibon Ponch

Heibon Ponch (平凡ポンチ)
by George Asakura (ジョージ朝倉)
published in Ikki (Shogakukan)
4 volumes (2003-2005)
Amazon.jp

Don't be misled by that pen name; George Asakura is, in fact, a woman. For a manga magazine, Ikki has, I'm sure, an interesting readership cross-section. While every magazine naturally has some combination of readers from both genders, in general the target audience is solidly in one camp. Even Weekly Shonen Jump, which has a surprisingly large female readership (though this could be simply because of the mainstream visibility of it), has very clear male values at the core of its philosophy: competition, effort, victory. Ikki, however, seems to aim for as many demographics as possible. In addition to literary and character-drama authors that aren't confined by a gender-specific genre (Daisuke Igarashi, Iou Kuroda, Taiyo Matsumoto, Yoko Nihonbashi, Natsume Ono), the more target-specific output runs the gamut from manly violent/sci-fi fare (Dorohedoro, Jiro Matsumoto's Freesia, Mohiro Kitoh's Bokurano) to female-created and/or oriented series (Hisae Iwaoka, Sakumi Yoshino's Period, and the brand-new BL comic Seishun Sobat). George Asakura's Heibon Ponch seems to find itself right at home in this environment by combining elements of several different styles into a highly unorthodox pastiche.

While I haven't read any of Asakura's other works, a quick browsing of the covers and summaries on her official site would suggest that she's done her share of shojo material. One glance at Heibon Punch is enough to dispel any notion of it being a typical girl-meets-prince fantasy, however. Aki Mashima is an overweight 30-year-old movie director with acne, who also happens to be a borderline lolicon with an irrational fear of large breasts. Mika Wanibuchi is an aggressively ambitious actress with an acute shortcoming in the mammary area, and an obsession with getting a pair of jugs that would make Pamela Anderson jealous. Shortly after their first meeting, Mika murders a famous busty idol, and Mashima decides to go on the run with her, filming their life on the lam. As if this set-up wasn't bizarre enough, Asakura adds more twists. Mashima is attracted to Mika's prepubescent figure, a figure which she despises. She is attracted to his fat, pimply look, but whenever Mashima grows too fond of her, his looks change overnight to a handsome, svelte version of himself, a transformation which is barely questioned by the characters and explained away as "the power of love." This good-looking version, of course, repels Mika. In addition to this "magical" transformation, a large part of the story revolves around the mythical "Village of Big Breasts," a sort of combination between an El Dorado of the male libido and a casino bus tour for senior citizens.

As you can see, Asakura is truly working with fire here. The manga walks a razor-thin line between the viciously funny and surreal gag context and the incendiary, violent romance between the two main characters. Any and every possible concept to complicate the relationship is implemented with abandon. Mashima is torn between heightening the brilliance of his road movie with Mika and thus regaining his prestige as a director, and his romantic feelings for her, and she too must balance her relationship with him with the sole-encompassing act of playing her "role" in his movie, a step on her stairway to fame. Whenever the sparks get too close, the fact that each of them desires to be what the other despises pushes them apart. Asakura has an expert grasp of the high-level adult romance at play in this love/hate relationship, and she utilizes this expertise with the velocity of a rocket. As fascinating as it can be, the extremely unpredictable and complex romance is often bewildering and incomprehensible to me, though it seems clear that in the hyper-stylized, extreme relationship setting Asakura depicts, reader identification with the characters is perhaps not the number one priority.

In addition to unorthodox setting, Asakura's art seems to fall inbetween the stereotypes for gender-specified genres. Her characters have an unmistakable shoujo/josei cast to them, but the use of tone-as-background and the general practice of ignoring background settings altogether, so prevalent in mundane shoujo series, is entirely absent here. There is plenty of emphasis on the relationship of character to background within her composition, and enough detail is paid to the locations to make their presence felt. This, in conjunction with several content topics more weighted on the male end of the gender spectrum -- an abundance of large, exposed breasts, murder scenes -- makes for a finished product that contains elements of both male- and female-oriented manga styles.

Little Forest

Little Forest (リトル・フォレスト)
by Daisuke Igarashi (五十嵐大介)
published in Afternoon (Kodansha)
2 volumes (2002-2005)
Amazon.jp

I'll follow up my post last week about one hotshot artist's "fans only" book with another one.

In general I dislike the term "slice-of-life," mostly because it gets overused when people confuse it with the simply mundane. I don't think that the lack of tournaments, murders or slapstick romance automatically means that a story is "slice-of-life," as in, nothing happens. In order to get a truly accurate portrayal of a bit of ordinary life, you need constant reminders of the things we do day in and day out. Eating, for instance. If I were to describe a manga that is truly "slice-of-life," it would need plenty of copious descriptions of cooking. Hmmm, a gourmet thing, like Oishinbo? Nahh. Let's say it would be set out in the country, in a farming town. Throw in some descriptions of local flora and fauna, give it some area background. Now we're getting somewhere. Give it an extra kick and pack it with all sorts of DIY tips and tricks, elaborations on the pitfalls of living on your own in the sticks, a real primer on rural Japan. Now drain out any hints of character, plot, or sentimentality, until it's just you out there, gathering fruit and harvesting vegetables. Welcome to Little Forest.

I exaggerated a bit for dramatic effect there. There are characters in Little Forest, though you would be forgiven for not realizing it. Of course, there's no missing Ichiko, the protagonist, who occupies at least 95% of the screen time. Bits and fragments of her background are revealed through anecdotes (all relating to food), but these are provided offhandedly, without a clear dramatic purpose. There are many things you could call Little Forest: a cookbook, a journal, a handbook. But it is not a "story."

The aesthetic effect is complex, particularly on a non-Japanese mind. The entire point of the series appears to be self-sufficiency, so each installment features a dish or meal scavenged or harvested from Ichiko's surroundings in rural Komori ("little forest"). Country food, where the people truly live off the land, is nearly unrecognizable from the prepared and packaged food of the city, and this holds true in Japan as well as America. Though Igarashi does provide some descriptions of flavors and textures through the narration for the benefit of his metropolitan countrymen, there is absolutely nothing but the imagination for ignorant Westerners such as myself to rely upon. The utilitarian almanac material that makes up most of the book is occasionally mouth-watering but unlikely to be of practical use to any but the most adventurous of souls. So if it primarily consists of a dizzying amount of natural information that is useless to 99% of its readers, what is the point of Little Forest anyway? It lies in the effect this information has on the reader as it passes through the brain. If the prospect of going to the supermarket and buying ingredients and produce for a recipe is daunting, imagine having to spend weeks and months growing that produce, or hiking into the mountains looking for those leafy herbs to use for flavor. The sheer amount of labor necessary to create the dishes depicted in the manga is mind-boggling to those living in the lap of luxury, a reminder of both the value of food and the merits of hard effort.

The art is, as with all of Igarashi's works, gorgeous. All of his manga contain such love for the imagination and the natural world (and total disinterest in "normal" city life) that it's hard to imagine him not coming up with something like this at some point in his career. While there are no wild flights of fancy as in Witches or Hanashippanashi, the organic linework and majesty of nature featured within tap into that same source of magic. Little Forest is a very acquired taste on its own, but just another piece of the stunning tapestry Daisuke Igarashi continues to weave today.

Eiga ni Ke ga Sanbon!

Eiga ni Ke ga Sanbon (映画に毛が3本!)
by Iou Kuroda (黒田硫黄)
published in Young Magazine Uppers (Kodansha)
1 volume (1998-2003)
Amazon.jp

A peculiarly unique oddity among Iou Kuroda's distinguished library. While Kuroda has tackled longer, serialized stories (Japan Tengu Party Illustrated), short story collections (Daioh, Kurofune), melting-pot concept pieces (Nasu) and episodic adventures (Sexy Voice and Robo), Eiga ni Ke ga Sanbon! (Three Hairs on a Movie) is possibly unique among all of manga: a collection of one-page manga movie reviews. (Let me parse that out: Each page is a self-contained manga that is a review of a movie.)

The series appears not to have been created as a primer for Kuroda's favorites, or significant movies, but simply, as with any typical published critic, reviews of the latest movies to be shown in theaters. Therefore the Japanese release dates for these selections start in 1998 and proceed at about a month at a time until 2003, when the book was published. The movies encompass a wide range of sources, from Hollywood blockbusters (Saving Private Ryan, Deep Impact, American Pie) and more sophisticated fare (Eyes Wide Shut, Magnolia, Road to Perdition) to European (Dancer in the Dark, Life Is Beautiful, Bandits) to Asian (Shaolin Soccer, Shuri, Flowers of Shanghai) and of course, Japanese (Ping Pong, Battle Royale, Spirited Away, Samurai Fiction). The formatting is set up so that one page has the title and main credits, a short blurb, then a quick description of the movie and written comment by Kuroda, including a "moral learned," with the manga itself on the facing page.

I've found that Kuroda's voice within his dialogue requires an acclimation period. I wasn't able to fully follow his nuanced, fill-in-the-blanks flow the very first time I read Nasu, and the novel format he uses in Eiga has several more hurdles to overcome. First of all, there's only so much you can get out of them if you haven't seen the movie, and being a poor excuse for a movie buff, I've only seen a handful of the 60-something reviews in the book. Second, with just a single page to craft a review, Kuroda naturally channels his thoughts as succinctly and vividly as possible, so if you don't really get what his point is, there's no time to let it sink in. Either you see where he's coming from, or you don't. Occasionally he will make a point that is funny or memorable that can be appreciated apart from the movie itself, but for the most part a lot of the reviews blew past me without sticking in my head. Of course, being Kuroda, he wastes little time on formalities and gets straight to the point, so many of these read like thoughts and impressions told directly in person, with a fresh frankness that is befitting the odd medium and quite unlike a stuffy newspaper review. It makes for good bathroom reading, at the very least.

Kuroda stopped his reviews for a few years but has apparently picked them back lately, according to his blog, so one only assumes there will be another "Eiga" book sometime in the distant future.

The World Is Mine

The World Is Mine
by Hideki Arai
Published in Young Sunday (Shogakukan)
14 volumes (1997-2001)
5 volume reprint (2006) [Enterbrain]
Amazon.jp

Hideki Arai's end-of-the-century cult classic, for years out of print, was reissued last year in 5 massive bricks weighing in at over 600 pages each. A controversial masterpiece that defined an era in Young Sunday alongside Koroshiya Ichi, this title has not achieved the worldwide infamy that its cousin has, for the lack of a movie adaptation (though the late Kinji Fukasaku was considering it before his death). However, it commanded an even higher rate of critical praise in comparison to its relative obscurity. Indeed, the catch copy advertisements wrapped around these books come with blaring accolades from beloved figures in contemporary Japanese entertainment: hip writers like Kotaro Isaka and Kazushige Abe, Shigeru Kishida of the rock band Quruli (who even named an album "The World Is Mine") and rap group Rip Slyme adorn TWIM with glowing quotes, a practice that does exist in Japanese publishing, but with nowhere near the frequency of North America. Even actor/director/writer Suzuki Matsuo and Evangelion director Hideaki Anno are counted as fans.

TWIM has alternately been described as the bible to a new millennium and an absolute disaster in the wrong hands. On the surface, it is a blindingly intense and violent action/suspense story about two criminals, the bestial, ferocious Mon and his partner Toshi, a malevolent bomb fanatic. As Toshi-mon (as they are called by the media) orchestrate a campaign of terror across Japan's mainland, they cross paths with the equally violent Higumadon, a creature that seems to resemble an enormous, dinosaur-sized bear. Toshi-mon continue to murder civilians and evade capture by the authorities, striking fear into the heart of the Japanese establishment and destabilizing the very society of their country. As the unexplainable phenomenon of Higumadon grows more and more connected to the unstoppable fugitives, the story begins to take on a religious tone to the psyche of the entire nation. When the series reaches its final story arc, the scope expands exponentially, blasting what began as a crime spree beyond the very history of mankind itself.

There are two great appeals to TWIM: the shockingly vivid violence and the extraordinarily-portrayed characters. The violence can be problematic, as mentioned above. When a truly intense action or emotional scene occurs in TWIM, there is really nothing else like it in the world of manga. Arai has no qualms about pushing the limit for what he will portray. In an extended interview broken up and printed throughout all 5 volumes, he describes his position toward violence as inspired by that of Beat Takeshi's gangster movies. Violence, he says, must not be portrayed as cool or stylish, lest it lose its potency. In order for it to be effective and have meaning, it has to hurt. There are a multitude of simple shootings within the manga, but it is the close-quarters murders, such as when Toshi first takes a life by clumsily stabbing and slashing a young woman as she screams and wails, that are most haunting. As Toshi and Mon come to dominate the national attention, crass, disenchanted youths across Japan flock to them in hero-worship, a jeering mass of cultish followers. In a way, these are a representation of the TWIM readers who see and admire nothing but the endless depravity of the Toshi-mon killing spree. Arai wishes us to weigh the cruelty and immorality of his main duo, while challenging us with the sheer, arresting spectacle of their actions.

The other quality that Arai uses to great effect in TWIM is his characters. Nearly every character is impeccably developed, starting with the dichotomy of the two leads. Mon is a modern-day Mowgli, raised in the wild. He is rash, violent and base, yet also holds an innocent and serene softer side. He is Early Man and childhood. Toshi is a postal worker living a relatively normal life who finds an interest in the internet and explosives. He is cruel, vindictive, petty and cowardly, a Modern Man and the product of a filthy, unjust society. The heroine Maria is unsurprisingly a Mary figure full of empathy and compassion for others, who must balance her strong beliefs with her surging hatred for Toshi-mon's deeds when she is kidnapped and dragged along on their spree. Arai's secondary characters make up for the smaller screen time with vivid eccentricity: A lewd, cherubic prime minister of strong mind who does not play by the politician's book; a newspaper writer who constantly scribbles penises in his notebook as he follows his leads; a catatonic police commander with slack facial muscles, causing him to slobber and spit uncontrollably when he speaks; a wizened, wily bear hunter from Hokkaido who comes to the mainland to hunt down Higumadon and forms a fragile friendship with the newswriter.

Beyond the action and characters, TWIM also received recognition for the frequency and accuracy of the portrayal of regional Japanese dialects. Much of the story takes place on the north end of the main island of Honshu, in the prefectures of Aomori and Akita, northeast of Tokyo, and Arai took special care to recreate the accents and speech patterns of the local people, despite the fact that he himself was raised in the big city, where there is no accent. This feeling of geography is very important to the manga, which uses an almost ludicrous amount of Godard-esque (or would that be Anno-esque?) subtitles, announcing the time and place at every scene change. In this way, the events of the story are given a strong documentary-like realism, a grounding that helps further reinforce the sheer scale of what is portrayed. It is often difficult to follow the dialogue, for a variety of reasons. The regional dialects of Aomori and Akita can be quite unfamiliar compared to standard Tokyo Japanese, and require an acclimation period before the patterns sink in. As well, Arai's voice as an author carries some peculiarities. In moments of quick action or extreme emotion, his characters will often break down from full sentences to choppy, blurted interjections. It's hard for me to tell if these are simply attributable to the idiosyncracy of the writer, or are perhaps a depiction of the slowing of time during sequences Arai wishes to emphasize (thus breaking the comic Golden Rule that you have all the time in the world to give your speech before the next panel advances the sequence). In addition to these more fundamental language issues, Arai also bogs down some of the pacing in the middle of the story with extended technical discussions about things like the military chain of command, political maneuvering and manipulating public perceptions, things that he himself admits he did not understand before drawing the manga, but were necessary to give it the serious portrayal his subject deserved.

The 5-volume reprint was also advertised as having many extra pages added by Arai to flesh out the story. For fun, I found scans of the original 14-volume run and compared them as I read. Ignoring the few niggling typos in the supposedly superior version, the additions to the story (mostly at the end of the last volume) are actually not quite as illuminating as you might expect. There is very little added content; Arai simply stretched out sections that were either cramped or lacked the impact he wanted, taking single expository paragraphs from the original and cutting them up to cover several panels and make the manga read easier.

All in all, The World Is Mine is as grandiose a statement as the title would suggest. It's at once a lurid spectacle, a thrilling adventure, a heady and difficult statement, and a take on some of the most basic questions of humanity and life. Highly recommended.

Palepoli

Palepoli (パレポリ)
by Usamaru Furuya (古屋兎丸)
Published in Garo (Seirindo)
1 volume (1994-1996)
Amazon.jp

Clearly the work of a recent art school graduate. Palepoli has achieved minor recognition for its excerpts reprinted in Secret Comics Japan (it also provided the cover art), so it might look familiar to some readers of this blog. Furuya has really charted a bizarre course with his career: probably the last big successful artist to spring from the pages of venerable old Garo, he went from this book, a veritable bible of clashing art styles, artistic deconstruction/experimentation and subculture attitude, to Short Cuts, a snarky, sarcastic take on mainstream Japanese pop culture and sexual fetishes, to Pi (Pai), a headfirst dive into and acceptance of those same values packaged as the search for "the perfect breasts." But enough about falls from intellectual grace; let's indulge in the past.

Palepoli is a real joy to behold. It employs a 4-panel gag structure that differs from the linear vertical style of typical newspaper strips, rather having the four panels arranged into a square and progressing from UR to UL to LR to LL. The artistic methods Furuya uses often differ wildly from page to page. His most common tool is the use of heavy tones that are cut in crosshatch patterns to emulate elaborate texture and shading, but he also tackles a variety of other styles such as pointillism, European woodcuts, early 20th century cartoons, ubersimple Japanese pop art, as well as individual takes on artists such as Picasso, Michelangelo, Tezuka and Fujiko Fujio's Doraemon. Much like the presentation, the content varies immensely, from simple slapstick gags and wordplay to surrealist humor to serious conceptual pieces. Furuya establishes several recurring skits and situations which he revisits from time to time. One of my favorites is a series combining Furuya's humor and structural experimentation called the "Rejection Ghost." Each entry features Furuya sitting at his desk finishing up the page we are presumably reading. A comical-looking ghost comes out of the wall and dismisses the manga by sabotaging it in some way (doodling on it, crumpling it up, slapping an inky handprint on it, etc.), much to Furuya's horror. The kicker is that since this is the very page we are reading in the book, the signs of the ghost's mischief appear directly on the page, thus, the installment in which the ghost crumples the page appears to have been crumpled up and hastily smoothed out again. Such playfulness can be seen throughout Palepoli.

Another one of the more striking series in the book are the double-image portraits, where Furuya draws four scenes that also form famous faces when seen in a different light. He depicts the four Beatles singing Let It Be out of people contemplating by the waterside, then does up four central characters of Doraemon as people having sex, accompanied by the lyrics of the theme song, which now carry a much more sensual meaning. Heaviest of all is a take on the well-known Japanese saying, "Are there no Gods or Buddhas?" The four pictures are of scenes of suffering (a hung man, two men burned at the stake, a dinosaur weeping for its dead child, and an atomic bomb explosion) all lamenting the question at hand, while their images also form recognizable depictions of Jesus, Buddha, etc, the title of the piece being "Gods and Buddhas Are There."

The melding of all these disparate elements and styles is dizzying at first glance, but the high level of execution and polish makes each pleasing to take in on its own, and despite what the entire package might suggest, there is really a minimum of avant-garde difficulty for difficulty's sake, though a general knowledge of the various artists and comics being parodied will undoubtedly lead to a more rewarding experience. It's a book that chooses its readers, but is very worthwhile for those chosen few.