When 2022 started I had set myself the personal goal of reading a book every two weeks until the end of the year, and while I had exceeded that rate in the first couple of months, there were enough disruptions and upheavals in my private life to very quickly derail any progress towards this target. Over the last month, though, I was finally able to find my footing enough to push through and complete a number of books, from Bram Stoker’s classic “Dracula” to Osamu Dazai’s harrowing tale “No Longer Human,” so I figured it might be appropriate to spend some time talking about some of those books here, since I just don’t have the capacity to review every single story individually. This post also will not contain every book I have read this month, just the ones I did have something substantial to say about while not feeling sufficiently motivated to write up an entire review of. Also I did generally try to avoid spoilers, but I do summarise and get into some details about the stories I read, so if you want to go into any of these stories perfectly blank, this probably isn’t where you want to be right now.
AYAKO – Osamu Tezuka
Ayako is a story set in and defined by the aftermath of the second world war and the social and cultural changes going on in Japan in that period of time. It follows a family that was once among the country’s nobility, but has found itself declining in power, wealth and prestige as the old values and structures of Japanese society are dismantled over the course of the story. Within that context, the titular character – a young girl named Ayako – becomes the focal point of the family’s conflict, and in many ways both the victim and culmination of all their evils. Trust me when I say this is one of those books that’s better in summary, the core premise is undoubtedly interesting but for a variety of reasons it just doesn’t hold up that well as an actual story. The primary area of deficiency for me was in its characters, some of them just had really unclear and inconsistent motivations that made it difficult to understand them or relate to their actions in any way. Shiro’s motivations for example were always whatever the plot needed them to be in any given scene, and that sort of thing just gets incredibly uninteresting. There’s also random plot threads that disappear as quickly and inexplicably as they appear, particularly in regards to the relationships between the characters.
I’m not sure what other editions of the manga might happen to be like, but the version I got (which was from Vertical Comics) also might’ve made it more difficult to get into the story. Anyone who knows me knows that I absolutely cannot stand phonetically transcribed accents, and since the Tenge family were mostly meant to be farmers the translation tried really hard to make them speak like country hicks or something, which made some of the dialogue either difficult to understand or comically out of place in some of the more serious scenes. “Why ya be dead” is an actual line of dialogue here, and it just instantly undercuts the situation it was said in. They also took the choice to mirror flip the entire manga so it reads from left to right, which took some getting used to but ultimately didn’t have too much of an effect on my enjoyment of it, and the art and paneling were still pretty consistently great.
So yeah, There’s a lot I could complain about with this one, but at the end of the day it was still a reasonably enjoyable reading experience thanks to the surprisingly good art and some of the stretches that weren’t as plagued by the issues I had with it, particularly towards the end. To Tezuka’s credit he was still able to weave together and tie up a fairly intricate plot, even if there were a couple of frayed threads. Random side note here, but there are precisely three panels in the entire manga that feature black (American) characters, and it still manages to feel like a kinda racist portrayal within that short frame. None of the women really have any motivations outside of motherhood or love either. So somewhat unsurprisingly this decades old manga perhaps isn’t the most socially progressive story out there, if that’s something you look for in stories you read. I can’t think of a score to give it, and I can’t recommend it because I wouldn’t want to read it again myself, but if the premise sounded interesting enough to you then maybe the positives will outweigh the negatives for you.
NO LONGER HUMAN – Osamu Dazai
This story is a little hard to describe, just by virtue of the context behind it and the nature of its content. It was absolutely an engaging read from start to end, but a very difficult one, especially with how much I happened to relate to some of the feelings expressed by the story’s main character. No Longer Human follows the life of a tortured mind, someone who was never truly able to understand or connect with other people and who watched as his entire life and the pillars of deceit he had used to hold it up began to unravel around him. I went into this knowing that the book was generally considered to be some form of suicide note/biography for the author, Osamu Dazai, who died shortly after it was fully published. But knowing that doesn’t really prepare you for how heavily some of this story will weigh on you in spite of how short it is. Yozo, the name given to the protagonist here, effectively journals much of his life, particularly in his early adulthood in and after university. You’re taken through his daily experiences, his fears, his regrets, you witness all of his shortcomings, including the ones he doesn’t seem to recognise himself, and you get a snapshot into human nature that keeps a lot of this book relevant even in 2022.
The thing I appreciated the most was this book’s honesty, its willingness to explore and discuss ideas around depression and social isolation, and its ability to do so without necessarily feeling melodramatic or at all insincere. You don’t need to have fallen into the vices of alcoholism and prostitution as Yozo did to relate to having self-destructive habits that you know you need to overcome but that you rely on to keep your mind away from despairs of everyday life, things you can do without having to put on a fake smile or a false persona. Reading through this book, if you happen to struggle with a lot of the same issues and experiences as this character, will make you reflect on your life in a way that might be deeply uncomfortable but entirely necessary, and that’s why I personally found it engaging. It helps that the prose is expertly crafted and that, this being somewhat based on a real person’s life, all the characters in it feel human in a way that’s hard to replicate – this being in spite of the fact they’re all presented from the ultimately narrow perspective of an individual who is retelling the events he experiences and conversations he had to the reader. It was a fantastic book, but one that it feels wrong to assign an arbitrary score to.
ALL YOU NEED IS KILL – Hiroshi Sakurazaka
This one is a light novel I picked up out of curiosity, having seen “Edge of Tomorrow” many years ago, which was a Tom Cruise movie loosely based on it. The story follows Keiji Kiriya, a military recruit about to experience his first battle in what seems like an endless war against an alien species referred to as Mimics. Suffice it to say, the battle doesn’t go well for the humans, and Keiji dies alongside his entire squad – at which point the story truly begins. Our protagonist finds out that his death effectively rewinds time, with him reliving the day of the battle over and over as he tries to find a way to overcome the Mimic swarm and survive his first battle no matter how many tries it takes. I’m a bit of a Re:Zero fan, so the time loop premise was more than enough to get my attention at the start, and this book held my attention by using that premise in honestly quite fun and creative ways. And in spite of how dark a story like this could theoretically get, fun is the word I would use to describe the majority of All You Need Is Kill. Keiji might come across as a bit too much of an edgy teenager for some people, but there was a lot of humour in his internal monologue and some of his lines, and since the entire thing is just shy of 200 pages you don’t really stay with him long enough for him to get too annoying, even if some of his angst feels a little hollow.
With how short it is, my expectations around it were also somewhat different, because it obviously couldn’t explore too much around the background of the war, the politics of the world post-invasion, and the real background of the Mimics. That worked to its benefit in some respects, since it generally didn’t try to bite off more than it could chew, and it kept the stakes personal rather than existential, centring around Keiji and Rita (another major character) and their newly forged bond in the midst of the chaos of war. It paid lip service to the idea that Keiji felt terribly isolated by his experiences and not being able to tell anyone what he had seen, what he had been through, and what he had lost, but we don’t spend enough time with him for any of it to have much impact. We skip the vast majority of his loops, and we don’t really get much of his interactions or relationship with the other soldiers in his squad. Then there’s the fact Rita is introduced early enough that their relationship then undercuts any feeling that he’s really cut off from the world for much of the story, because their bond (which honestly also could’ve been better developed) was a constant.
In any case, the thing that really put me off about this book was its ending. The end to any story is something that always forms a big part of my perspective on it, the ending can be the difference between a good story and a great story, between something I enjoyed and something I never want to think about again. Unfortunately enough All You Need Is Kill ended up closer to that last group than I expected it would when I had started reading it. Time travel obviously gets pretty difficult to handle in just about any story, so the fact that it was the core of this book always meant there was a decent chance I wouldn’t be sold on the resolution it offered to the protagonist’s death loop. What makes the unsatisfying end that much worse for me though is that it feels like part of a trope I’m just beyond tired of at this point. Stories that have an edgy badass male lead with a Strong Woman™ at his side, except that as soon as they get together she has to come out second best so she doesn’t threaten or undermine his role. Sword Art Online did this with Kirito and Asuna, even early Berserk did this to Casca to an extent, and seeing it here right at the end just left a sour taste in my mouth. If I had to score it overall, maybe it’s a 6 out of 10, but part of me feels like that’s either too low or too high.
THE BOOK OF HUMAN INSECTS – Osamu Tezuka
This one will be more negative, because I don’t have much to express beyond disappointment. You might be able to argue that that disappointment might be partially self-inflicted though, because I went into this expecting a story like Kasane but hopefully better executed. Both stories follow a sociopathic woman using people as stepping stones that she ultimately casts aside in her journey to the top, stealing what makes those people special in the process and even going so far as to drive them to suicide or outright murder them. Whereas the titular character in Kasane began from a place of relative insecurity, fixated on a model of beauty and success she felt was out of reach for her before gaining the ability to attain both, The Book of Human Insects starts with its main character already at the endpoint of that arc. Toshiko Tomura has no misgivings about what she does, she does not battle over the morality of her actions or show much sign of insecurity or fear, she has no arc to speak of. And while that’s not inherently bad or uninteresting for any given story, it just doesn’t land well because of how flat and honestly cartoonish her motivations and the story at large felt.
The mechanism by which the main character here “steals” from other people is literally just intellectual property theft or mimicry (or both). It’s initially framed as though it might be something more interesting than that, we get the idea that she takes something from these people beyond just their work, that she undergoes a metamorphosis and evolves with each new victim, but it’s not written in a compelling enough way to really sell that idea because she doesn’t really change at all between the first chapter and the last. So in the most critical area, The Book of Human Insects just felt painfully ordinary and mundane. Maybe that’s the entire point, that she’s only doing what the men she takes from would otherwise do to her if she had no power, that the exploitation and manipulation are the defining traits she copies from her victims and society at large. I would be much more appreciative of that sort of message if the package it was delivered in looked better though, because at the end of the day the primary function of a book (in my opinion) isn’t necessarily to impart particular ideas or morals, but to first and foremost tell a good story, and this book fails at that. And that’s before getting to the fact most of the cast were also really just cartoonishly evil, doing or saying the worst possible thing in any given situation at all times, which lent itself to extremely casual depictions of rape and sexual assault.
All in all, this made me feel more appreciative of Kasane, because even though it wasn’t necessarily a perfect execution of this kind of story either and I found its core premise to be unengaging at the time, it at least tried to do a bit more with its main character. This manga was boring enough to make me wanna take another break from reading for a while, I literally cannot be bothered to give it a score
This roundup was originally going to include a couple more stories, but it’s already over 2500 words at this point, so if you read through the whole thing I don’t even know what to say other than Sorry for putting you through that. Do let me know though, whether on Twitter or Anilist or even in the comments here if you would want to see longer form posts like this or if I should stick to short posts and individual reviews instead of compilations like this one.
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